Civil War in Barbados - 1648–1652

Topic: Gullah History
The end of hostilities in the English Civil War in 1647 did not bring peace.  Parliament still was divided between supporters of Charles I, Presbyterians, and Puritans. [1]  The fleet mutinied in May, because men had not been paid. [2]  Charles’ younger son, James, was given command of the rebel fleet when it reached Holland.  Francis Willoughby was named its vice-admiral. [3]

Meanwhile, Charles had concluded a secret treaty with the Scots.  They agreed to invade England, if Charles established Presbyterianism. [4]  The invasion began in summer of 1648.  Willoughby returned to command a unit. [5]  The uprising was put down in August, and leaders were treated as traitors. [6]  Most of the fleet returned to Parliament. [7]

Six ships remained with Willoughby when he returned to Holland. [8]  The son of Charles’ sister Elizabeth took charge of them. [9]  Rupert planned to turn them into pirates attacking English ships to raise money for his uncle. [10]  The cost of maritime insurance increased. [11]  Dutch ships were able to offer lower prices to planters in Barbados.

The New Model Army became alarmed when Presbyterian members of Parliament began negotiating terms for Charles to be restored.  Thomas Fairfax, mentioned in the post for 10 April 2022, enabled a coup led by Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton.  Ireton then prevented the full House of Commons from meeting. [12]

The members deemed safe by Ireton tried Charles I for treason and hanged him in January 1649. [13]  The Scots declared his son, also Charles, their king in early February. [14]  When news reached Bermuda, it declared Charles Stuart king on July 5. [15]  Virginia, whose governor commanded the Royal army in Exeter, also supported Charles II of Scotland. [16]  The governor of Barbados, Philip Bell, kept the island neutral.

The Rump Parliament organized a Council of State to replace the king and his court. [17]  The navy was reorganized in February, and, in March, Parliament ordered new ships be built to combat piracy. Thereafter, it continued to add to the fleet. [18]

Parliament acted against Willoughby in December 1649, when it seized his estates. [19]  He left for Holland to get Charles Stuart to confirm his rights to Barbados. [20]  Stuart’s counselors saw the island as an important ally and recommended he appoint Willoughby governor, [21] on the condition he move there. [22]

Most news reached Barbados by merchant ships.  Since travel times could be two months or longer, reports from England always were obsolete.

Henry Walrond arrived on Barbados sometime in 1649, with his brother Edward. [23]  As mentioned in the post for 3 April 2022, his family’s land was in western Somerset.  He had connections with a more noble family in Devon, but his great-great-great-grandfather had been a younger son. [24]

Little has been written about Walrond on the island, until he began working to take control in 1650.  He probably did not arrive with the resources of Thomas Modyford.  This means he probably was not aware of land prices on the first landing in the Caribbean, nor that land was available on other islands.  Modyford’s original instructions had been to go to Antigua.  Only the yellow fever epidemic kept him on Barbados. [25]

Whether Walrond heard that Willoughby intended to take over the island for Charles Stuart, [26] or if he was driven by other forces is not known.  Apart from being unable to buy land, he may have been angry at men who had prospered while he was in jail. [27]  He also may have had a feudal view that only the gentry should become wealthy: the men he attacked were all self-made men who rose through talent and an ability to invent new ways of doing things.

In 1650, he engineered the removal of the treasurer appointed by the General Assembly, which gave him control of the arsenal. [28]  James Drax blunted his attempts to join Bermuda. [29]  In April, Walrond began organizing other young immigrants against Drax and others seen as supporting Parliament. [30]

Willoughby’s ship arrived on April 29, [31] but did not make its presence official until May 7. [32]  When Willoughby announced himself, he informed Bell that he now held the legitimate commission to be governor. [33]  Walrond convinced Willoughby to visit other islands in James Hay’s grant. [34]  They’d heard rumors Rupert was coming, and he might arrive anytime. [35]

With Willoughby gone, Walrond had the Assembly named Drax, Constant Silvester, and Thomas Middleton as disturbers of the peace. [36]  On May 11, he ordered all dissenters leave the island by July 2, a date before Willoughby’s planned return.  He reordered men out on May 23, [37]  and set up a commission to handle their estates. [38]  On June 13, he place Drax under house arrest. [39]  Drax left for London. [40]

Stuart landed in Scotland on June 23. [41]  Rupert finally headed for the Caribbean, but was foiled by a September storm near the Azores that sank one of his ships. [42]

Willoughby returned to Barbados on July 29, [43] and removed Walrond.  He then repealed the acts of sequestration, [44] and made peace with Modyford who had tried to negotiate earlier with Walrond. [45]  Willoughby also sent John Colleton to visit London merchants as his emissary. [46]

When Parliament heard news from Barbados, it passed as an act of October 3 forbidding trade with the island. [47]  It also ordered part of its new fleet to head to the island. [48]  The Dutch told the island about the fleet in February 1650, and Willoughby began strengthening the island’s defenses. [49]  He also reinstated the sequestering of estates and destroyed their livestock. [50]

Back in England, the New Model Army moved toward Perth, which allowed Stuart to invade England. [51]  A fleet, under George Ayscue, finally set sail for Barbados on August 5, with Drax on board. [ 52]

Cromwell defeated Stuart at Worcester on September 3, [53] but news reached Barbados in October that Stuart had been victorious and retaken London. [54]  Soon after, Ayscue sailed into Carlisle Bay and seized 14 ships from Dutch merchants. [55]  He took their provisions, and dispatched them to other islands to obtain water. [56]

Willoughby responded by stationing armed men around the island’s perimeter. [57]  Ayscue decide to blockade the island and starve it into submission. [58]

News reached Ayscue on November 12 that Stuart had been defeated.  He began sending messages to Willoughby, who still believed Stuart had won. [59]  When things remained stalled, Ayscue began trying to reach Modyford, who had learned the true state of affairs in England. [60]

Finally, on 3 January 1652, Modyford acted.  He and his regiment changed sides. [61]  Willoughby refused to negotiate until January 9. [62]  Finally, a treaty was signed on January 11 that restored everyone’s land to them, including Willoughby’s in England. [63]  Planters gained everything they had been demanding since the beginning of the war.  Daniel Seale became the governor. [64]

In March, the General Assembly banished Willoughby and Walrond for a year. [65]  Later the banishments were extended.  Willoughby probably went to the coast of Guiana where he had established a colony in what is now Surinam. [66]

Parliament was forced to accept that new status of the island on 18 August 1652. [67]  Soon after, Willoughby returned to England to resume ownership of his estate. [68]

Less is known about Walrond after his banishment.  On 5 August 1653, Philip IV granted him a Spanish title.  It is assumed he must have entered Philip’s service, perhaps in the Caribbean. [69]  A family genealogists notes these “‘vizcondados previos’ titles were created with fiscal purposes, as the beneficiaries had to pay a fairly large amount of money in order to obtain them.” [70]

Rupert finally made it to the Caribbean in March 1652, only to sail past Barbados.  Another hurricane struck his fleet, this one killing his brother Maurice on September 13. [71]  Rupert returned with the remains of his ships to France.  When he sold the ships and booty [72] in March 1653, his Stuart cousin took half the profits.  Charles saw it as his right as the oldest son of a king to take the earnings of an entrepreneur.  In a way, the war was fought to assert the superiority of the Stuarts and Walronds over self-made men like Drax and Silvester.

Rupert retired to the continent. [73]

End Notes
1.  “English Civil War.”  Wikipedia website.

2.  Ben Coates.  “The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642-1650.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Leicester, June 1997.  152.

3.  Charles Harding Firth.  “Willoughby, Francis.”  62:31– 35 in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee.  London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1900.  62:33.  Willoughby is introduced in post for 10 April 2022.

4.  N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  3.

5.  “Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.”  Wikipedia website.
6.  “English Civil War.”
7.  “Prince Rupert of the Rhine.”  Wikipedia website.
8.  Robert H. Schomburgk.  The History of Barbados.  London: Longman, 1848.  269.

9.  David Plant.  “Biography of Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham.”  British Civil Wars Project website; last updated 19 January 2010.  The older sister of Charles I, Elizabeth, married Frederick V, Elector Palatine. [74]  The couple had thirteen children.  Rupert was the third son; Maurice was the fourth. [75]  Since they were not in the line of succession, they became mercenary soldiers during the Thirty Years War in Europe. [76]

10.  “Prince Rupert.”
11.  Coates.  36.
12.  “Rump Parliament.”  Wikipedia website.
13.  “English Civil War.”
14.  “Timeline of the English Civil War.”  Wikipedia website.
15.  “English Civil War.”

16.  Davis.  4-5.  The governor of Virginia was William Berkeley.  The commander at Exeter had been his brother, John Berkeley. [77]

17.  “Timeline of the English Civil War.”

18.  Rif Winfield.  British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1603–1714.  Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Seaforth Publishing, 2009.  1652.

19.  Firth.  62:33.

20.  The transfer of Hay’s grant for Barbados to Willoughby is mentioned in the posts for 23 January 2022 and 10 April 2022.

21.  Schomburgk.  270.

22.  Antigua and the Antiguans: a Full Account of the Colony and Its Inhabitants.  London: Saunders and Otley, 1844.  2:350.  The author is assumed to be Mrs. Lanaghan, possibly Francis T. Lanaghan. [78]

23.  “Humphrey Walrond.”  Wikipedia website.

24.  Bernard Burke.  A Genealogical and Herlardic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland.  London: Harrison, 1862.  1625.

25.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  21.  “Our intention at first was not to stay long there, but only to sell our goods, cattle, and horses, and so away to Antigua where we intended to plant: but the ships being for the most part infected with this disease and ourselves being unprovided of hands for a new plantation by reafon of the miscarrying of a fhip, which set out before us from Plymouth a month before, with men victuals, and all utensils fitted for a plantation we were compelled to stay longer in the island.”  He arrived during the yellow fever epidemic mentioned in the post for 27 March 2022.  The original is:

“Our intention at firft: was not to ftay long there, but onely to fell our Goods, Cattle, and Horfes, and fo away to Antigoa: where we intended to plant: but the fhips being for the moft part infected with this difeafe and our felves bting unprovided of hands for a new Plantation by reafon of the mifcarrying of a fhip, which fet out before us from Plimonth a month before, with men victuals, and all utenfils fitted for a Plantation we were compelled to ftay longer in the
Ifland.”

26.  Davis believes the news probably had reached Barbados by then. [79]
27.  This is mentioned in the post for 10 April 2022.
28.  Davis, 140, and Schomburgk, 270.

29.  Davis, 141, and Schomburgk, 270.  Drax is introduced in the post for 17 January 2022.

30.  Davis.  138, 140, 141.
31.  Davis.  160.
32.  Davis, 161, and Schomburgk, 270.
33.  Schomburgk.  271.
34.  Davis.  161, 163.
35.  Davis.  138.
36.  Davis.  164.  Silvester and Middleton are discussed in the post for 27 March 2022.
37.  Davis.  166.
38.  Davis.  168.
39.  Davis.  171–172.
40.  Davis.  173.
41.  “English Civil War.”
42.  Davis.  195.
43.  Davis.  173.
44.  Davis.  174.
45.  Davis.  173.
46.  Davis.  175.
47.  Davis.  186–187, 189.
48.  Davis.  189.
49.  Davis.  196.
50.  Davis.  200.
51.  “English Civil War.”
52.  Davis.  193.
53.  “English Civil War.”
54.  Davis.  208.
55.  Davis.  210, 212.
56.  Davis.  214.
57.  Davis.  212.
58.  Davis.  215.
59.  Davis.  220.
60.  Davis.  233–234.
61.  Davis.  239–240.
62.  Davis.  243.
63.  Davis.  249–250.
64.  Davis.  255.
65.  Davis.  256.
66.  Davis, 203, and “Francis Willoughby.”
67.  Davis.  250.
68.  “Francis Willoughby.”
69.  “Humphrey Walrond.”

70.  Paige Miller.  “Humphrey Walrond (abt. 1602 - bef. 1693).”  Wiki Tree website, 15 December 2019; last updated 29 Nov 2021.  Miller also notes that “a primary source for this title is yet to be located.”

71.  Davis.  258.
72.  Davis.  259.
73.  “Prince Rupert.”
74.  “James VI and I.”  Wikipedia website.
75.  “Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.”  Wikipedia website.
76.  “Prince Rupert.”

77.  Eugene A. Andriette.  Devon and Exeter in the Civil War.  Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1971.

78.  Gregory Frohnsdorff.  “‘Before the Public’: Some Early Libraries of Antigua.” Libraries and Culture 38(1):1–23:Winter 2003.

79.  Davis.  137–138.

Civil War in Barbados - 1645–1647

Topic: Gullah History
Politics on Barbados during the Civil War in England was driven by attempts of the proprietor, the younger James Hay, to gain control of the island from its trustees and creditors.  These were countered by the planters, who resisted his attempts to raise the money he needed.

In June 1643, the governor, Philip Bell, offered to yield his share of rents collected on the island if the assembly would pay him a salary.  This made him their representative, not Hay’s.  In April of the following year, the trustees agreed to stop demanding past-due taxes and confirm titles, if the Barbados assembly would accept a new rent schedule. [1]

The tides of the war began changing in England in the summer of 1645, when Parliament formed the New Model Army. [2]  Francis Willoughby had raised a regiment in 1643 that was stationed in Lincolnshire, [3] where Richard Ligon had lost his money. [C4]  He was typical of the nobility who found it hard to take orders from others.  Oliver Cromwell complained about the behavior of his men.  As a member of the House of Lords, he opposed the formation of the army and became a leader of the Presbyterians, [5] who were suspected of covertly supporting Charles I. [6]

1645 was the year Brazilians rebelled against the Dutch, and the price of sugar soared. [7]  This also was when John Winthrop and Constant Silvester became active in supplying the island with necessities. [8]

In July, the newly organized army took back Bridgewater.  Humphrey Walrond was one of the men the general, Thomas Fairfax, demanded be ceded.  His property was sequestered, and by October he was in jail. [9]

By July, the planters on Barbados were saying they would not pay rents until Hay came to island and negotiated with them directly. [10]  Charles heard a rumor that Hay was planning an alliance with Robert Rich, commander of Parliament’s navy, and regranted the Caribbean islands to John Ley. [11]  Bell persuaded the Barbados assembly to assert its neutrality. [12]  Ligon was later told “some of them of the better sort” vowed not to use the words “Roundhead or Cavalier” in public. [13]

Ley arrived in Barbados in August to assert his position, then moved on to the Leeward Islands also owned by Hay.  Parliament responded by abandoning Rich’s claim on behalf of the heirs of William Courteen in favor of Hay. [14]

Things remained at an impasse on Barbados.  In England, Fairfax moved towards Exeter in October 1645, but rain stopped his advance. [15]  He settled to the east and blocked the supply of goods to the city from that direction. [16]  George Goring’s royalist troops were pillaging to the west. [17]

Things were looking grim for Charles by the end of the year.  He ordered his son to leave Exeter; he had sent the fifteen-year boy there in September as symbolic commander of his troops. [18]

Fairfax finally prevailed in April 1646, when Exeter surrendered.  Everyone was allowed to leave the garrison and city if they took an oath not to fight again.  In addition, those who actively supported Charles had to send a plea to Parliament.  The usual fine was the value of two years’ income from their properties. [19]

Charles was captured in Nottinghamshire in May, [20] and Parliament was able to address the petitions from men whose property had been seized.  Thomas Modyford filed his appeal in May 1646, and received his fine that August. [21]  In June, Walrond was free and his fine was accessed. [22]

Hay’s problems became more severe in January 1647, when Parliament issued a demand for a loan.  He was too far in debt to contribute.  On the 23rd, he sold his lease to Willoughby.  [23]  In July, Willoughby was elected speaker of the House of Lords in July.  Two months later, the New Model Army arrived in London and arrested him. [24]  When he was released in December, he fled to the Netherlands. [25]

By then, Modyford was in Barbados as an agent for Thomas Kendall.  The latter was born in Cornwall in 1609, [26] and had married Modyford’s sister by 1636 when their oldest son was born. [27]  In 1639, Kendall was elected bailiff in 1939, when his father-in-law’s father-in-law, Robert Walker, was mayor. [28]  In the interim, he had been in Lisbon where he was involved in trade with Brazil. [29]  He apparently spent the war years in London, where he was associated with the London Merchant Adventurers, who sold unfinished cloth to the Netherlands. [30]

Kendall probably saw the profits being made in trade with the Caribbean, but did not quite trust Modyford’s commercial instincts.  He sent Ligon and another partner with him [31] when Modyford set said in June. [32]

End Notes
1.  J. H. Bennett.  “The English Caribbees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642-1646.”  The William and Mary Quarterly 24(3):359–377:July1967.  371.

2.  “New Model Army.”  Wikipedia website.  The ordinance establishing the army was passed on 6 January 1645, but it took time to get units organized.

3.  “Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.”  Wikipedia website.

4.  The drainage program is mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.  Ligon’s loss is mentioned in the post for 3 April 2022.

5.  “Francis Willoughby.”  Depredations committed by armies on both sides until the New Model Army. [33]

6.  “New Model Army.”
7.  This is discussed in the post for 17 January 2022.
8.  They are discussed in the post for 27 March 2022.
9.  “Humphrey Walrond.”  Wikipedia website.
10.  Bennett.  372.

11.  Bennett.  373.  Ley was the Earl of Marlborough.  As mentioned in the post for 3 April 2022, Rich also was head of the Commission of Plantations.

12.  Bennett.  373.

13.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  57.

14.  Bennett.  373.

15.  Eugene A. Andriette.  Devon and Exeter in the Civil War.  Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1971.  155.  Exeter is shown on the map with the post for 3 April 2022.

16.  Andriette.  131.
17.  Andriette.  136.  Goring is mentioned in the post for 3 April 2022.
18.  Andriette.  134.
19.  Andriette.  166.
20.  “Timeline of the English Civil War.”  Wikipedia website.

21.  Jane Stevenson.  “Richard Ligon and the Theatre of Empire.”  285–309 in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603 - 1714: The Atlantic Connection, edited by Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson.  Leiden: Brill, 2006.  289.

22.  “Francis Willoughby.”

23.  Bennett.  377.  Robert H. Schomburgk says the imprisoned Charles agreed to the transfer. [34]

24.  “Francis Willoughby.”  Schomburgk says Willoughby was “suspected of being connected with the intrigues of the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Hundesden, Lord Maynard, the Earl of Lincoln, Lord Barkley, and the Earl of Middlesex.” [35]

25.  Willoughby escaped to Holland in March 1647. [36]

26.  John. P. Ferris.  “Kendall, Thomas (1609-66), of Chiswick, Mdx.”  In The House of Commons, 1660-1690, edited by Basil Duke Henning.  London: Secker and Warburg for the History of Parliament Trust, 1983.

27.  “Grace Modyford.”  Ancestry website.

28.  Richard Izacke.  Antiquities of the City of Exeter.  London: E. Tyler and R. Holt for Richard Marriot, 1677.  See the post for 3 April 2022 for more on Walker, and the importance of these offices.

29.  Bennett.  81.

30.  “Company of Merchant Adventurers of London.”  Marine Lives website.  They specialized in the “export of English cloth, especially undyed, white, broadcloth.”

31.  Ligon.  22.  “Upon this Plantation I lived with these two partners a while, but with Colonel Modyford three years: for the other went for England, and left Colonel Modyford to manage the employment alone: and I to give what assistance I could for the benefit of both: which I did partly at their requests and partly at the instance of Mr. Thomas Kendall who reposed much confidence in me, in case Colonel Modyford should miscarry in the voyage.”

The original is: “Upon this Plantation I lived with thefe two partners a while, But with Colonel Modiford three years: for the other went for England, and left Colonel Modiford to manage the imployment alone: and I to give what affiftance I could for the benefit of both: which I did partly
at their requefts and partly at the inftance of Mr. Thomas Kendal who repofed much confidence in me, in cafe Colonel Modiford thould mif-carry in the Voyage.”

32.  Ligon.  1.
33.  “New Model Army.”
34.  Robert H. Schomburgk.  The History of Barbados.  London: Longman, 1848.  269.
35.  Schomburgk.  269.
36.  Schomburgk.  269.

Civil War in Barbados: 1642–1644

Topic: Gullah History
Civil War was brewing in England long before it broke out on 22 August 1642.  Few were ready to take sides, and most who did had personal reasons.  For instance, during the summer of 1642 individuals in the Fen district of eastern England rebelled against drainage schemes promoted by Charles I.  They became supporters of Parliament, [1] and Richard Ligon, who had been an investor, became a Royalist. [2]

On Barbados, cotton and tobacco still were the main crops.  James Hay was still trying to pay off the debts of his father, the first James Hay, so he could inherit Barbados and the other Caribbean islands claimed by his father. When the planters heard rumors of Parliament’s activities in January 1642, they refused to pay their rents to Hay until they got approval from Parliament. [3]

When Charles learned Barbados had not sprung to his support in January 1643, he ordered Hay to replace the governor, Philip Bell, with a man selected by himself.  The trustees of Hay’s estate, who had their own interests in maintaining trade on the island, intervened. [4]

In March 1643, Parliament passed the Sequestration Ordinance, which allowed it to collect the rents of people who were actively supporting Charles. [5]  This was aimed at men who owned land, [6] but merchants in London saw potential dangers in Parliament’s attempts to raise funds to support its army.  This is when they began investing their movable income in land on Barbados. [7]

Meantime, as armies were formed in England, people were forced to take sides.  In the west country, shown in the map above, Cornwall, at the far left, supported Charles.  The peninsula was in an area where the western Amorica and eastern Avalonia plates joined to close an ocean basin many millennia ago.  Since the area west of the river flowing to Exeter was lifted, the granite area had been mined for tin. [8]  It enjoyed royal protection and became a safe haven for his troops. [9]

The central part of Devon, the county east of Cornwall generally supported Charles, and provided a roadway for armies going to and from Cornwall.  Much of the inland east of the river flowing from the north through Exeter was devoted to sheep, while the ports on both the north and south coasts supported fishermen.  Exeter was the exception.  It became the center for merchants who collected woven goods from the interior and shipped them to the Netherlands for finishing. [10]  Landowners, who held obligations to the king that dated back centuries, supported Charles, while merchants supported free trade promoted by Parliament. [11]

Since the port of London was controlled by Parliament, Charles’ armies secured all the west country ports, except Plymouth, to maintain supply lines with Ireland and France.  Garrisons were maintained in the cities, but citizens were expected to provide housing and food for the soldiers.  Groups raided the countryside for food, animals, firewood, and other supplies.  Nearly all could be vicious, but those of George Goring were the worst. [12]

Henry Walrond’s lands were in Somerset, the county to the northeast of Devon.  Ilminster is in the south where armies marched.  He joined one of the bands of citizens that formed to protect themselves from marauders.  When Bridgewater, the port on the river flowing into Bristol Channel, was taken in June of 1643, he claimed “he was robbed by the king’s soldiers and driven into the garrison at Bridgewater.” [13]

Charles established his headquarters in Exeter after the city surrendered in September 1643.  John Berkeley, brother of Virginia’s governor, was appointed governor. [14]  Thomas Modyford was made a county commissioner for Devon. [15]

Little has been written about Modyford’s background.  The family lands were in Halberton. [16]  This is in eastern Exeter in the little arc south of Taunton.  It is thought they had come from Somerset. [17]  One would guess, his father, John Modyford, became a middleman who purchased woolen goods in the country and sold them to export merchants in Exeter.  This placed him somewhere in the middle of the social structure in the port.

Before the Royal takeover, Exeter was governed by a council of twenty-four controlled by the merchant guild.  Each year a man was elected mayor and four were made bailiffs.  The latter actually were tax collectors. [18]

His father’s rise began in 1602 when he was elected bailiff in Exeter in 1602.  He was bailiff again in 1612, [19] when he bought land within Saint Mary Arches, [20] the Puritan-leaning merchant parish. [21]  The next year he was elected sheriff, [22] which was a county, [23] not city office.  His father-in-law, Thomas Walker, [24] was mayor in 1614.  Modyford held the office in 1622, and Walker again in 1625. [25]  When he died in 1628, John had half the wealth of Walker. [26]

Modyford was eight-years-old when his father died, and could not inherit money until 1642.  He apparently was raised to be the landowner, but did not gain his property until his mother died. [28]  His brother James was apprenticed to a merchant company in the Levant. [29]  His sister Grace married Thomas Kendall, who became a merchant in London. [30]

1643 was the year James Drax made his fortune in selling sugar. [31]  In November, Parliament asserted oversight of foreign colonies, and appointed Robert Rich head of the Commission on Plantations. [32]  Back in 1638, when Hay began demanding his then governor, Henry Hawley, forward monies owed the estate, Hawley began supporting Rich’s scheme to take over Barbados for the heirs of William Courteen. [33]  When Hay fired Hawley, he returned to Barbados and claimed the island now belonged to Rich. [34]

While Hay was finessing demands from Rich and Charles, Bell was investing in his plantation.  He had been granted 200 acres as his right, and gradually added to the land. [35]  He bought slaves from the Guinea Company, and, as mentioned in the post for 30 January 2022, was given slaves by a sea captain wishing to ingratiated himself in late July of 1644.

The Guinea Company, formally known as the Company of Adventurers of London had been granted a monopoly for trade with Africa by James I in 1618.  Nicholas Crispe had a controlling interest by 1628. [36]  In 1643, Parliament sequestered his property for debts he owed as farmer of the customs. [37]  The attempt to recover the funds led to the collapse of the Guinea Company in 1644.  When the records were audited, it was found Bell was the largest debtor. [37]

Graphics
Kelisi.  “A Map of England’s West Country.”  Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 5 January 2008; last updated by Carlog3 on 17 June 2009.

End Notes
1.  Ann Hughes.  The Causes of the English Civil War.  London: Macmillan, 1991.  127.  Cited by “English Civil War.”  Wikipedia website.

2.  Susan Scott Parrish.  “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths.”  The William and Mary Quarterly 67(2):209–248:April 2010.  210.  Ligon published a survey of Barbados in 1673 that has been cited in previous posts.

3.  J. H. Bennett.  “The English Caribbees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642-1646.”  The William and Mary Quarterly 24(3):359–377:July1967.  368.  The senior Hay is introduced in the post for 7 November 2021.  He was the Earl of Carlisle.

4.  J. H. Bennett.  370.

5.  Charlotte Young.  “‘His Lands as well as Goods / Sequestred ought to be’: The Introduction of Sequestration, 1642-3.”  British History in the 17th Century seminar group, Institute of Historical Research, 9 June 2016.

6.  Ben Coates.  “The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–1650.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Leicester, June 1997.  81, 157.

7.  Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  127–128.

8.  Arjan H. Dijkstra and Callum Hatch.  “Mapping a Hidden Terrane Boundary in the Mantle Lithosphere with Lamprophyres.”  Nature Communications 9:3770:2018.

9.  Mark Stoyle.  Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War.  Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1994.  16–17.

10.  Eugene A. Andriette.  Devon and Exeter in the Civil War.  Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1971. 16–17.

11.  Stoyle identified 137 who were known to support Charles.  15% were gentlemen or squires, 13% were involved with producing cloth (fullers, weaver, combers), 12% were innkeepers, and 12% were merchants.  Many of the others were skilled tradesmen.  He found 57 who actively supported Parliament.  3.5% were gentlemen, 25% were cloth workers, and 21% were merchants.  Instead of innkeepers, 14% were shopkeepers. [39]

12.  Andriette.  77, 104.
13.  “Humphrey Walrond.”  Wikipedia website.
14.  Stoyle.  45.

15.  Jane Stevenson.  “Richard Ligon and the Theatre of Empire.”  285–309 in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603 - 1714: The Atlantic Connection, edited by Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson.  Leiden: Brill, 2006.  289.

16.  “John Modiford Will.”  Marine Lives website, 12 April 2011.

17.  William Henry Hamilton Rogers.  Archaeological Papers Relating to the Counties of Somerset, Wilts, Hants, and Devon.  Taunton, Somerset: 1902.

18.  Richard Izacke.  Antiquities of the City of Exeter.  London: E. Tyler and R. Holt for Richard Marriot, 1677.

19.  Izacke.

20.  “Feoffment.”  Devon Archives and Local Studies Service (South West Heritage Trust), Document 332A/PF 16.  National Archives website.

21.  David Cornforth.  “Exeter during the Civil War.”  Exeter Memories website, 2007; last updated 22 April 2009.

22.  Izacke.
23.  Andriette.  19.
 
24.  John Knox Laughton.  “Modyford, Sir Thomas.”  38:94–95 in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee.  London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1894.

25.  Izacke.
26.  “John Modiford Will.”
27.  “John Modiford Will.”

8.  “Sir James Modyford.”  Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery, University College London website.

29.  John. P. Ferris.  “Kendall, Thomas (1609-66), of Chiswick, Mdx.”  In The House of Commons, 1660-1690, edited by Basil Duke Henning.  London: Secker and Warburg for the History of Parliament Trust, 1983.

30.  “Grace Modyford.”  Ancestry website.

31.  For more on the introduction of sugar in Barbados, see the post for 17 January 2022.
32.  J. H. Bennett.  370.

33.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  39  Rich was the Earl of Warwick.  He and Hawley are mentioned in the post for 30 January 2022.  Courteen is introduced in the post for 31 October 2021.

34.  Gragg.  40.

35.  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.  317.

36.  “Guinea Company (London).”  Wikipedia website.
37.  Coates.  83.
38.  See the post for 30 January 2022.
39.  Stoyle.  105–106.

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.

Barbados Early Slaves

Topic: Gullah History
Richard Ligon claimed slaves did not rebel on Barbados because “they are fetch’d from several parts of Africa, who speak several languages, and by that means, one of them understands not another.” [1]  He added, in the late 1640s, Africans arrived “from Guinny and Binny, some from Cutchew, some from Angola, and some from the river of Gambia.” [2]  If Cutchew was Cacheu in modern day Guinea-Bissau, [3] then Africans indeed were coming from every post where Portugal had established trade. [4]

One suspects Ligon was referring to communication between plantations. It is hard to believe that slaves, indentured servants, owners, and possibly overseers did not converse in some way.  However, the fragmented nature of the slave trade, described in the post for 30 January 2022, reinforced the class system on the island.  Those planters who bought one or two slaves at a time would have had more diverse groups and different linguistic challenges than those who bought a number of individuals from a single shipment. [5]

Among the large growers, Ligon mentions two ethnic groups.  He describes James Drax’s slaves as “these Portugal Negroes.” [6]  If they, or their leaders, spoke Portuguese, then they may have come from Angola or any of the colonies with Luso-African populations where Portuguese was spoken by some.

Henry Walrond had slaves on his plantation who hung themselves.  Ligon had been told they “believe in resurrection, and that they shall go into their own country again, and have their youth renewed.” [7]  He added, Walrond stuck one of the heads on a pole and told them the body had not returned home, but still was in Barbados. [8]

Ligon did not mention a tribe, but, more than likely, they were Igbo.  Michael Gomez says that, in “sixteenth-century Mexico, the Igbo were described as ‘difficult to manage and disposed to committing suicide when subjected to the slightest punishment or ridicule’.” [9]  Something this well known would be lore passed on by sailors in ports as well as among planters.

Igbo are native to what Ligon called Binny, the area east of the Niger river in modern-day Nigeria.  However, slaves from that area also were shipped to other areas that supplied slaves to the New World.  The Portuguese sent them to São Tomé’s sugar plantations. [10]  When they proved to be poor workers, they were reshipped to the Gold Coast. [11]  When the Dutch took São Tomé in 1641, they destroyed the sugar mills and exported the slaves. [12]  They would have been in the market just as Barbados was beginning to buy slaves.

Ligon, himself, was living on a plantation Thomas Modyford purchased from William Hilliard.  It came with 96 slaves, 28 indentured servants, and 3 Indian women and their children. [13]  Hilliard, as mentioned in the post for 30 January 2022, had acquired his land through a number of real estate transactions.  In 1645, he joined a partnership with Samuel French to establish a sugar plantation.  Hilliard supplied the land and French was required to send ninety slaves. [14]  Where the Bristol merchant acquired them is not known.  The slave community on the plantation probably was no more than three-years old when Ligon arrived, if the slaves included the ones Hilliard purchased in 1644.

Communication on the plantation seems to have been through men who acted as translators.  Ligon identified Sambo as “The Orator” [15] and was able to explain some of the workings of the compass to him. [16]  Gomez says the name is Fulani for “second son.”  It was perhaps more significant than Ligon realized that Sambo, who had a Moslem name, [17] wished to be baptized. [18]

The other slave with whom Ligon could communicate was Macow. [19]  He probably was an Igbo.  When his wife gave birth to twins, he wanted to kill her for adultery. [20]  Since Igbo believe the chi (roughly translated as soul) [21] of a dead individual enters a new born, [22] they have a particular aversion to twins. [23]

Ligon describes Macow as the “chief musician” and the keeper of the plantain grove [24] where food was grown by and for the African-born.  One day, Macow came upon Ligon while he was playing a lute-like theorbo.  Ligon recalled:

“he hearkened very attentively and when I had done, he took the Theorbo in his hand, and struck one string, stopping it by degrees upon every fret, and finding the notes to vary, till it came to the body of the instrument; and that nearer the body of the instrument he stopped, the smaller or higher the sound was which he found was by the shortening of the string.” [25]

The next day, Ligon found Macow constructing a marimba-like instrument in the plantain grove.  “I took the stick out of his hand, and tried the sound, finding the six billets to have six distinct notes, one above another, which put me in a wonder, how he of himself, should without teaching do so much.  I then showed him the difference between flats and sharps, which he presently apprehended, as between Fa and Mi.” [26]

Communication between two intelligent men with a shared interest [27] was conducted through demonstration supplemented by words in English.  This probably is how workers learned their tasks and were given assignments.

When someone like Sambo or Macow was not able or was not willing to discuss something, then Ligon remained uninformed.  He said the slaves played music and danced on Sundays, and after an hour or so “the men fall to wrestle.” [28]  He later described their physical games, before admitting he could learn nothing of their games “because they wanted language to teach me.” [29]

The translators may have gained their skills while they were in Africa.  Erich Nunn thinks the instrument Macow was constructing was a balafon. [30]  That instrument is native to the Mandinka of western Africa. [31]  None of the websites with information on Igbo music, mention anything like a marimba. [32]  This suggests Macow saw one before he left Africa, perhaps at some Portuguese post like El Mina.

If that were true, Macow may have become bilingual within the context of a Portuguese slave colony in Africa, a milieu that was being destroyed by the Dutch, and was not recreated when the Portuguese regained their territories. [33]  The use of language on Barbados in the 1640s, then, may be no indicator of how slaves and planters communicated in the early years in South Carolina, beyond the obvious fact that translators were used.

What may have been transferred were beliefs about Igbo.  In the 1760s, a slave trader in Charleston, South Carolina, asked a partner not to send any Igbo.  However, he admitted that they “were easily transferable to the markets of Virginia.” [34]

The fact Igbo apparently did not commit suicide in Virginia, but were unreliable in South Carolina, suggests more than beliefs about Igbo was transferred from Barbados. [35]  Ligon warned planters not to threaten slaves, lest they “go and hang” themselves. [36]  Poor treatment was more important than Igbo psychology, and poor treatment of laborers had become a hallmark of the way Barbados treated its white indentured servants, as mentioned in the post for 23 January 2022.  This method of management may be what was transferred from whites to Africans, and from Barbados to South Carolina.

End Notes
1.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  46.

2.  Ligon.  46.
3.  “Cacheu and Cape Verde Company” and “Cacheu.”  Wikipedia website.
4.  See the post for 30 January 2022 for more on the early slave trade in Barbados.

5.  This may be analogous to the differences in slave life on large and small plantations in the United States before the Civil War.  The ratio of whites to slaves may define patterns of communication, with separate languages only able to develop on large plantations.  For more information, see Salikoko S. Mufwene.  “The Emergence of African American English.”  57–84 in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language, edited by Sonja L. Lanehart.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

6.  Ligon.  52.  The original is: “these Portugal Negroes.”  Russell Menard wonders if they “were perhaps Afro-Brazilians who had worked in the fields and mills at Pernambuco or Bahia” and Drax had deliberately purchased “workers who knew its ‘secrets’ and ‘mystery’.” [37]  He provides no evidence and may have been thinking of Thomas Spalding, who did this when he brought Bilali from the Bahamas to start his Sapelo Island, Georgia, cotton plantation in 1802, [38] or the South Carolina planters, who preferred slaves from rice-growing areas of western Africa. [39]

7.  Ligon.  51.  The original is: “believe in Refurrection, and that they fhall go into their own Countrey again, and have their youth renewed.”

8.  Ligon.  51.  Ligon seemed to think they stopped committing suicide because they recognized the error of their thinking. [40]  In fact, Walrond had violated a more serious taboo, because he maimed the bodies and prevented them from having a proper burial.  Igbo believed such individuals were condemned to wander the earth, unable to enter the body of a newborn. [41]
 
9.  Michael A. Gomez.  “A Quality of Anguish: The Igbo Response to Enslavement in the Americas.”  82–95 in Repercussions of the African Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, edited by Carolyn A. Brown and Paul E. Lovejoy.  Trenton, New Jersey:  Africa World Press, 2010.  85.  His source may have been Gonzalo Aguirré Beltrán.  La población negra de México: estudio ethnohistórico.  Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1972 edition.  186–187.

10.  Hugh Thomas.  The Slave Trade.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.  80.
11.  Thomas.  107.
12.  “History of São Tomé and Príncipe.”  Wikipedia website.
13.  Ligon.  22.

14.  Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  198–199.

15.  Ligon.  54.
16.  Ligon.  49.
 
17.  Michael A. Gomez.  Exchanging Our Country Marks.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.  69.  It is possible “Sambo” was used as a common word and had no relevance to this individual.  However, he does not seem to have been part of the community, since he was the one who betrayed plans for a rebellion. [42]

18.  Ligon.  49–50.

19.  Macaws are colorful parrots found in Peru.  I have no idea if this was the origin of his name.

20.  Ligon.  47.
21.  The concept of chi is mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019.

22.  Divining the origin of an infant is mentioned briefly in the post for 11 November 2020 on religious rites in Sumter County, Alabama.

23.  Arthur Glyn Leonard.  “The Destruction of Twins.”  458–461 in The Lower Niger and its Tribes.  London: Macmillian and Company, 1906.  He says: “although two energies are requisite to produce a unit, the production of two such units is out of the common groove, therefore unnatural, because it implies at once a spirit duality, or enforced possession by some intruding and malignant demon. [43]  More recently, Stuart Edelson said the belief had become entwined with children with sickle cell anemia who torture their parents because they die young. [44]

24.  Ligon. 47.

25.  Ligon.  48–49.  The original is: “he hearkened very attentively to: and when I had done, he took the Theorbo in his hand, and ftrook one ftring, ftopping it by degrees upon every fret, and finding the notes to varie, till it came to the body of the instrument; and that nearer the body of the inftrunlenthe ftopt, the fmaller or higher the found was which he found was by the fhortning of the ftring”

26.  Ligon.  49.  The original is: “I took the ftick out of his hand, and tryed the found, finding the fix billets to have fix diftinct notes, one above another, which put me in a wonder, how he of himfelf, fhould without teaching do fo much. I then fhewed him the difference between flats and fharps, which he prefently apprehended, as between Fa, and Mi.”

27.  Their shared interest in music appears to extend to sharing the same notions of pitch.

28.  Lignon.  50.

29.  Lignon.  54.  The original is: “And this is all I can remember concerning the Negroes except: of their games, which I could never learn, becaufe they wanted language to teach me.”

30.  Erich Nunn.  “‘A Great Addition to Their Harmony’: Plantation Slavery and Musical Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.”  The Global South 10(2):27–47:Fall 2016.  36.

31.  “Balafon.”  Wikipedia website.

32.  George Ibenegbu.  “Igbo Musical Instruments and Their Names.”  Legit, a Nigerian website, 22 September 2017.

“Igbo Traditional Music Instruments.”  Music Africa Awake Media website, 9 August 2016.

33.  William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Gerhard Seibert.  “History of Sao Tome and Principe.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website.

34.  Henry Laurens.  The Papers of Henry Laurens: Sept. 1, 1763-Aug. 31, 1765, edited by George C. Rogers, Jr.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974.  558.  Quotation from Gomez, Anguish, 84.  Citation from Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  65.  Daniel Littlefield has quoted more of Laurens’ letters with more detailed citations from the 1750s. [45]  Laurens is discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

35.  Elizabeth Donnan was the first to note this view of Igbo in 1928.  She was using Laurens’ papers and advertisements for slave sales in Charleston’s newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette. [46]  Philip Curtin’s attempts to quantify slave imports used her data to show 37.7% of Virginia’s slaves came from the Bight of Biafra, but only 2.1% of South Carolina’s. [47]

36.  Ligon.  50.

37.  Russell R. Menard.  Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.   17.

38.  Ray Crook. “Bilali—The Old Man of Sapelo Island: Between Africa and Georgia.”  Wadabagei 10(2):40–55:Spring/Summer 2007.  For more on Spalding and Bilali, see the post for 9 June 2019.

39.  For more on the use of slaves from rice-growing areas, see the post for 13 January 2019.

40.  The original is: “Being convinc’d by this fad, yet lively fpectacle, they changed their opinions: and after that, no more hanged themfelves.”

41.  Leonard.  142.  “All Ibo place great faith in the due and proper observance of the funeral ceremony for they are of opinion that it enables the soul to go to God, and to its final destination, and that without this sacred rite the soul is prevented by the other spirits from eating, or in any way associating with them, and, in this manner, from entering into the Creator’s presence.  So in this way it becomes an outcast and a wanderer on the face of the earth, haunting houses and frequenting burial-grounds, or is forced perhaps to return to this world in the form or body of some animal.  Among the souls who are obliged to return to this world are those belonging to men who have died unnatural or violent deaths, and whose bodies have not therefore received the funeral obsequies.”

42.  Ligon.  54.
43.  Leonard.  458.

44.  Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell: From Myth to Molecules.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986.  13.

45.  Daniel C. Littlefield.  Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave trade in Colonial South Carolina.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.  Chapter 1, especially 8–10.

46.  Elizabeth Donnan.  “The Slave Trade into South Carolina Before the Revolution.”  The American Historical Review 33(4):804–828:July 1928.  817, 821.

47.  Philip D. Curtin.  The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census.  Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.  157.

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.

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.

Barbados Sugar~

Topic: Gullah History
The decline in cotton prices in Barbados, mentioned in the post for 9 January 2022, sent some planters looking for other commercial crops.  Ginger and indigo were tried, but the only important result of the latter was the introduction of the idea that a planter had to become a processor as well as grower. [1]  The market was too small to justify the expense. [2]

Our knowledge of the introduction of sugar is sketchy.  What began as simple statements in early reports became legends as actions and motives were ascribed to actors.

The earliest report was made by Richard Ligon, who lived on the island from 1647 to 1650.  He heard unnamed men acquired plants from Pernambuco, an area where the Portuguese introduced sugar cane in Brazil.  He simply mentioned their most important attribute: there were industrious. [3]

John Scott arrived in Barbados in 1665 [4] and wrote an account of the island in 1667.  He denied human agency, and believed cane was “brought from Brazil ‘by an accident’ a few years before” 1641. [5]  Richard Dutton, the governor of the island between 1680 and 1685, made a note in Scott’s manuscript that Pieter Brower introduced the first canes in 1637. [6]

A couple generations later, legend filled in the missing details.  William Duke [7] believed James Holdip “obtained some canes from a Dutch slave ship.”  Once he succeeded, he “helped his neighbors to start cane fields of their own.” [8]

The differences between Scott and Duke, on the one hand, and Ligon are more than views of the ideal behavior of heroes.  The one represents the theologically ordained Medieval world where individuals in the hierarchy incurred obligations in return for being granted wealth. [9]  The other was part of the emerging modern world that reward effort, often based on understanding the ways of the natural world.

As mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021, the names of the pioneers only interest historians.  The important person is the innovator who succeeds with a crop.  There is no debate that person was James Drax.  He arrived with Henry Powell in 1627, [10] and accumulated capital growing tobacco and cotton.  When prices fell in 1639, he would have had the resources to experiment with an alternative crop. [11]

The critical date seems to be 1643 when a representative of James Hay’s son informed him one man on Barbados had shipped seventy chests of sugar. [12]  From that, one can construct a preliminary chronology based on the growth cycle of the crop.

Sugar cane is grown from buried stem pieces, [13] so Drax had to have obtained cane plants, not seeds.  Saccharum officinarum has the photosynthesis pattern typical of tropical grasses, rather than the one used by the majority of plants. [14]  The length to maturity depends on the closeness to the equator.  Thus, on Madeira it takes nearly two years for canes to produce, but only fourteen to eighteen months in Brazil. [15]  Ligon said planters first treated sugar plants as annuals and cut the canes after twelve months.  They learned from observation, and probably some trial and error, to wait until cane sprouts were fifteen months old. [16]

If Drax first shipped year-old sugar in October 1643, he began planting by 1642.  If he could not ship until he discovered the optimal time for harvest, and if that only took one iteration, he had to have begun planting cane by 1640.

As it grows, sugar molecules accumulate in water in the stems.  Producing a shippable product involves crushing the stems, then heating the extract for several days.  Periodically, impurities are removed, which allows the chemical processes to accelerate until the sugar molecules begin to crystalize.  Then they are put into clay containers to allow the remaining liquid to escape. [17]  This crystallization phase requires laborers who learn from experience to judge when to act.

The quality of the raw sugar varied.  In the early years, the high molasses content may not have mattered.  The early 1640s were a period of uncertainty in the sugar industry.  It had been stable in 1550 when Brazil, a colony of Portugal, began growing sugar cane. [18]  The raw sugar was shipped on Dutch ships [19] to Antwerp for refining. [20]

Chaos was introduced by Philip II of Spain.  First, as part of his attempt to put down the Protestant rebellion in the north, he destroyed Antwerp in 1576.  Amsterdam built its first sugar refinery in 1577. [21]  Then, through rules of succession, Philip gained control of the Portuguese throne in 1580.  To protect its refining interests from the Spanish, the Dutch took control of the sugar growing region in Brazil in 1630. [22]

The Portuguese revolt against Spain in 1640 lead to war that lasted until 1668. [23]  Dutch merchants no doubt recognized they no longer were useful to the Portuguese in Brazil and may have begun looking for other sources of sugar. [24]  Duke believed Drax “brought the model of a sugar-mill and some coppers from Holland” in the early 1640s. [25]

In 1645, the Portuguese rebelled against the Dutch in Brazil.  Matthew Parker says that led to “widespread destruction of cane-fields and mills” and production “was stopped for a year.” [26] This is the year Drax was “adjudged to have made a fortune.” [27]

At that point, Amsterdam refineries would have made more demands upon the planters in Barbados. Scott recalled the Dutch managed the trade and supplied the more sober residents with Negroes, “coppers, stills and all other things” needed to produce sugar. [28]  Dutton added sugar production “came to no considerable perfection till the year 1645, and so forward to the year 1652 at which time the Dutch by the great credit they gave the planters brought the island to its utmost perfection.” [29]

Once Drax proved he could produce raw sugar that brought premium prices, the introduction of the crop on Barbados entered the third phase when men imitate success.  In this case, Michael Bennett says London merchants began investing in plantations.  Between 1640 and 1650 they purchased interests in 5,739 acres.  They wanted more than high returns that came from the temporary disruption in the supply of sugar from Brazil.  They were looking for security while Civil War was raging in England.  84% of the land purchases were made between 1643 and 1648. [30]

End Notes
1.  The post for 13 January 2019 describes the difficulties Eliza Lucas encountered learning to process indigo in South Carolina in the 1740s.

2.  As mentioned in the post for 19 May 2019, demand for indigo did not develop in England until the 1730s.

3.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  85.  The original is: “Some of the moft induftrious men, having gotten Plants from Fernambock, a place in Brafil, and made tryal of them at the Barbadoes, and finding them to grow, they planted more and more.”

4.  “Captain John Scott.”  Wikipedia website.  Scott is mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021.

5.  John Scott.  “Descriptions of Guiana, Tobago, and Barbados.”  British Museum, Sloane mss 3662.  Quotation from N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  69.

6.  Davis.  69.  “The Description of Barbados in this manuscript is by John Scott. There is a supplementary notice of the Island, apparently by Sir William Dutton, at one time Governor
there.” [31]  George Edmundson speculated that Brower left Barbados when Parliament, under Oliver Cromwell, proscribed products from the island because it was controlled by followers of the deposed Stuarts.  A place name in Guyana, Browershoek, suggested he moved to the Wild Coast. [32]

7.  William Duke.  Some Memoirs of the First Settlement of the Island of Barbados.  Barbados: Wm. Beeby, 1741.  His sources are William Arnold, who came for William Courteen in 1627; [33] and Samuel Bulkly and John Summers, who arrived for Hay in 1628. [34]  Courteen is introduced in the post for 31 October 2021.  Hay is introduced in the post for 7 November 2021.

8.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  62.  Quotations are from Dunn.  Robert Schomburgk has “Captain James Holdip planted the first sugar-canes in Barbados, which he got from a ship from Guinea.”  He indicates the information appeared in the appendix of Duke’s collection of memoirs. [35]  Dunn combines two accounts, and his notes only identify Duke.  The original is not available online or through the usual online used-book sellers.

9.  This was alluded to in the post for 7 November 2021, which mentioned William I made temporary land grants in exchange for military service.

10.  Matthew Parker.  The Sugar Barons.  New York: Walker and Company, 2011.  15.  Powell is mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021.

11.  David Watts.  The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.  182.

12.  Thomas Robinson at St Christophers.  Letter to Thomas Chappell, secretary to James, Earl of Carlisle, 24 October 1643.  Cited by Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  113.  The original is: “this shippe is laden with 70tie cheists of sugar all of one mans p[ro]duce.”

13.  Elizabeth Vaughan.  “Louisiana Sugar: A Geohistorical Perspective.”  PhD dissertation.  Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, May 2003.  60.  Ligon describes the process on page 88.

14.  Vaughan.  48.  Normal C3 photosynthesis fixes carbon in three molecules, while tropical C4 used four to reduce evaporation in hot climates. [36]

15.  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.  374.

16.  Ligon.  85.
17.  Vaughan.  Chapter 3, “Sugar and Sugar Cane.”

18.  Matthew Edel.  “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition.”  Caribbean Studies 9:24–44:April 1969.  27.

19.  Hugh Thomas.  The Slave Trade.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.  159.
20.  Edel.  27.
21.  Edel.  27.
22.  Dunn.  61.

23.  “Portuguese Restoration War.”  Wikipedia website.  Spain then was ruled by Phillip IV, grandson of Phillip II.

24.  Edel applies modern economic models to explain “why the Dutch would have had incentive to introduce sugar to Barbados, even during the period of their secure control of Pernambuco.”  Russell Menard believes the Dutch East India Company began promoting sugar crops in Asia, and that the harvests were beginning to arrive in Amsterdam. [37]

25.  Duke.  Cited by Robert H. Schomburgk.  The History of Barbados.  London: Longman, 1848.  143.

26.  Porter.  34.

27.  Edel 1.  30.  He noted sugar exports from Pernambuco dropped more than 60% between 1645 and 1646.

28.  Scott.  Quoted by Watts.  188.  Bennett notes historians have not found much evidence to support Dutch involvement after 1645. [38]  Christian Koot believes planters stressed the role of the Dutch after Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 to limit shipping to  English carriers. [39]

29.  Dutton.  Quoted by George Edmundson.  “The Dutch in Western Guiana.”  English Historical Review 16:640–675:1901.  656.  The original is: “but came to no considerable perfection till the year 1645, and so forward to the year 1652 at which time the Dutch by the great credit they gave the planters brought the island to its utmost perfection.”

30.  Bennett.  127.
31.  Davis.  17.
32.  Edmundson.  656–657.
33.  Schomburgk.  259–260.
34.  Schomburgk.  221.
35.  Schomburgk.  143.
36.  “C4 Carbon Fixation.”  Wikipedia website.

37.  Russell R. Menard.  Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.  51.  His source is Neils Steensgaard.  “The Growth and Composition of the Long Distance Trade.”  102–152 in The Rise of Merchant Empires, edited by James D. Tracy.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1990.  I could not find any corroboration for this.

38.  Bennett.  3.

39.  Christian J. Koot.  “Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733.”  72–99 in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800, edited by Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman.  Leiden: Brill, 2014.  85–86.