Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 39) 9781783276233, 9781800102163, 1783276231

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Lost in Translation? Tracking Robinson Crusoe across the Eighteenth Century
2 Vernon’s Nemesis: The Caribbean Expeditions of 1741-42
3 War, Race and Labour in Caribbean Waters, 1740-50
4 Piracy and Slavery Aboard the Black Prince, 1760-77
5 Rebellion, War and the Jamaican Conspiracy of 1776
6 War, Race and Marginality: The Mosquito Coast in the Eighteenth Century
7 Eighteenth-century Warfare in the Tropics: The Nicaraguan Expedition of 1780
8 The Carbet and the Plantation: The Black Caribs of Saint Vincent
Epilogue: The Caribbean Crucible at the Turn of the Century
Appendix: Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773-80
Bibliography
Index
List of Previous Volumes

Citation preview

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 39

BLOOD WATERS

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107

Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

BLOOD WATERS WAR, DISEASE AND RACE IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CARIBBEAN

Nicholas Rogers

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Nicholas Rogers 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation ‎no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, ‎published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, ‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Nicholas Rogers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–623–3 hardback ISBN 978–1–80010–216–3 ePDF The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ‎PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. ‎668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA ‎website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Lost in Translation? Tracking Robinson Crusoe across the Eighteenth Century 11 2 Vernon’s Nemesis: The Caribbean Expeditions of 1741–42

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3 War, Race and Labour in Caribbean Waters, 1740–50

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4 Piracy and Slavery aboard the Black Prince, 1760–77 84 5 Rebellion, War and the Jamaican Conspiracy of 1776

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6 War, Race and Marginality: The Mosquito Coast in the Eighteenth Century 124 7 Eighteenth-century Warfare in the Tropics: The Nicaraguan Expedition of 1780

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8 The Carbet and the Plantation: The Black Caribs of Saint Vincent

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Epilogue: The Caribbean Crucible at the Turn of the Century

191

Appendix: Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773–80 203 Bibliography 206 Index 224

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Illustrations 1 Abraham James, The Torrid Zone, or, Blessings of Jamaica, 1800 (Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, W 383630 1)

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2 Statue in memory of Alexander Selkirk, the ‘original’ Robinson Crusoe, on the island of Juan Fernández, 1885 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs)

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3 Richard Parr, Army Proceedings, or the Conjunct Expedition, 1741 (British Museum 1868 0808 3660, British Museums Collections: Satires 2493) 45 4 Samuel Thornton, A Draft of the Harbour of Port Royall and of all the Kees [cays], 1707 (New York Public Library digital collections)

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5 Map of the Hanover Slave Plot, Jamaica, 1776 (Michael Craton, Testing the Chains (Ithaca, NY, 1982), map 12)

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6 The four districts of the Miskito Kingdom, c. 1760 (Based on Karl Offen’s map in Ethnohistory, 49/2 (2002), figure 4)

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7 Map of St Vincent, 1763–97 (Michael Craton, Testing the Chains (Ithaca, NY, 1982), map 10)

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8 The 1773 Treaty with the Black Caribs (engraving of a painting by Agostino Brunias, reprinted in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 5th edn, 1818–19), 1:529)

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Acknowledgements This book was written during the pandemic of 2020–21 although it has been years in the making. My interest in the Caribbean was sharpened when I organised a conference with my York colleague Paul Lovejoy on ‘Unfree labour in the Development of the Atlantic World’ in April 1993. This resulted in a special edition of Slavery and Abolition 15/2 (August 1994) and a book with Frank Cass in the same year. While on a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Canberra, Australia in 2001, I spent some time researching the Mosquito Coast, partly because the then director, Iain McCalman, more or less conscripted all visitors to offer papers on the Exotic in the Enlightenment. This endeavour resulted in several papers that year and ultimately led to an article in Eighteenth-Century Studies 26/3 (October 2002), 117–38 and to chapter 6 in this book. A subsequent conference on ‘Slavery, Culture and Religion’ at Cahuita, Costa Rica, in February 2006, organized by Paul Lovejoy and Rina Cánceres, provided the framework for chapter 7 on the San Juan expedition of 1780 and the crucial role of the Miskito Indians in that venture. Chapter 1 on Robinson Crusoe began as a research seminar paper at York University in November 2004. Chapter 2 emerged out of a paper I gave on the Cartagena expedition of 1741 at a conference on Disease and Global Environmental History at York University in March 2007, which was recently published in Spanish as ‘Patógenos y política. La vision británica del desastre’, Desparta Ferro. Historia Moderna, no. 48 (2020), 52–6. Chapter 3 was first delivered at a conference at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, in November 1999, and to the Department of History, University of Adelaide, in 2001. It was subsequently published as ‘Archipelagic Encounters: War, Race and Labor in American-Caribbean waters,’ in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003), 211–25. I thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint large sections from this essay. Chapters 4, 5 and 8 were all written from scratch, although the archival groundwork for them was conducted in the Bristol and National Archives in London long before Covid closed their doors. So, if this book was written in some sort of lockdown it was not written in intellectual quarantine. Conversations with friends and academics over the years kept me on my toes. In particular I should like to acknowledge Ed Andrew, Vincent Carretta, the late Greg Dening, Jim Epstein, Gad Heuman, Tom Keymer, Philippa Levine, David Trotman and Glyndwr Williams for their encouragement and helpful insights. More recently I owe a special debt to Elaine Stavro for our many conversations on Black Lives Matter and its historical constructions. I am indebted to the British Museum, the Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, Yale University, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library for permission to reproduce prints and photographs in vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

their collections. I also thank Cornell University Press for allowing me to reprint two maps from the late Michael Craton’s Testing the Chains (Ithaca, 1982) and to Professor Karl Offen of Oberlin College for letting me use his map of the Miskito Kingdom, first published in Ethnohistory, 49/2 (2002), 339. I thank my daughter Kate Greenslade for producing another magnificent cover design for this book and advising me on the images. Once again, the staff at Boydell and Brewer have been very helpful in getting this book to press, especially Megan Milan, who responded quickly to my submission, and Nick Bingham, who oversaw the production. I also thank the anonymous reader for seeing some virtue in this book and gently pushing me towards a fuller introduction.

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Fig. 1. Abraham James, The Torrid Zone, or, Blessings of Jamaica, 1800.

We start with an image inscribed with a sign of the zodiac, the tropic of Cancer. Entitled ‘The Torrid Zone’, a delirious fallen archangel, fuelled with opium, clambers over the arc of the picture to reveal two scenarios. They are ironically captioned as the ‘Blessings of Jamaica’. On the top is a languorous siesta of white folk. They are lazing away their afternoon, reclining on sofas, reading the newspaper, shielding themselves from the burning sun, or embarking on what seems to be some form of foreplay, for the lady with the fan is revealing more than propriety would have allowed. These are the decadent beneficiaries of the island, the genteel creoles, the lethargic planters and their kin or agents who watched sugarcane turn into gold. Below them are the fulminant dangers of living on the tropical island. First and foremost, the deadly viral yellow fever, 1

BLOOD WATERS

here depicted as a cadaverous creature, a grim reaper with hourglass in hand, mouth raging with fever. To its right is a scorpion bitten corpse; to its left is a dying man who tries to contain the West Indian gripes in his bowels with his clawed hand. And behind them, as a backdrop, are hieroglyphical figures, insects and skulls that reinforce how deadly a place Jamaica really was. A hallucinatory bestiary; a veritable hellhole of mortality. The water-coloured print was created by Abraham James and published by William Holland in London in October 1800. It came in the wake of revelations about the huge mortality rate among soldiers sent out to contain black insurrection in St Domingue (Haiti) and to defend Jamaica, the principal sugar island of the British West Indies. Indeed, Abraham James was himself a participant in that campaign, an ensign in the 67th South Hampshire Regiment of Foot, evacuated from the French island to Jamaica in 1798 and staying there until his regiment left in 1801.1 In his spare time he lampooned the social mores of creole society whose pretensions to gentility he found derisory, and whose hauteur and brittle sense of honour often clashed with the regimental bucks of the British army who were garrisoned there. Although his work was published by a printer sympathetic to the abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century, James did not depict the violent exploitation of African labour that was the mainstay of the sugar economy. Perhaps he did not get much of a chance to see it first hand, or to witness its more brutal features, for judging from the minutes of the inquiries into the slave trade during the 1790s, military officers were often given guided tours of the estates that simply presented their best features. The only blacks James depicted in his watercolours, in ‘The Grand Jamaican Ball’ or ‘Segar Smoking in Jamaica’, were the motionless household servants, silent spectators of the decadence of the plantocracy. James’ paintings are therefore noteworthy for their absences: of the slave sales, the brutal plantation regimes and grisly punishments. There is not even an attempt, as in Agostino Brunias’ portraits of black society in the Windward Islands, to fashion an Afro-Caribbean picturesque.2 James’ ‘Torrid Zone’ would nonetheless have struck a pungent note, for at the turn of the century the first wave of abolition had crashed on the rocks of war and bloody revolution. His print posed the problem that Jamaica, the jewel in the imperial crown but resplendent in its decadence, was still worth defending. The fact that the British government poured thousands of troops into Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands underscored their importance to the Atlantic and national economies. For two centuries, England, or Britain after 1707, had been involved in colonizing projects in the Atlantic. Beginning in Virginia on the North American mainland, the country had by the 1620s established 1 Roger N. Buckley, ‘The Frontier in the Jamaican Caricatures of Abraham James’, Yale University Library Gazette, 58/3 and 4 (1984), 152–62. 2 See, for example, Lennox Honychurch, ‘Chatoyer’s Artist: Agostino Brunias and the Depiction of St Vincent’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 50 (2004), 104–28.

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INTRODUCTION

settlements in Bermuda and in the lesser Antilles, which were situated on the eastern margins of the Caribbean and were easily accessible to transatlantic vessels due to the wind patterns. Tobacco was the first crop that was harvested on these modest settlements, along with cotton and indigo, which was a valuable dye for the New Draperies, the British countryside ventures in textiles which drew on the expertise of Protestant exiles from Europe. Tobacco grew quite easily in the tropics and required little capital investment. Farmed by a combination of African and white indentured labour, it was sold to inns, taverns and relatively small retailers in Europe, who spent perhaps £200,000 a year on this exotic, soft-core drug in the early seventeenth century. England’s early colonies were also sites for privateering raids upon Spain’s sprawling pre-emptive empire, attracting fortune-hunters from the gentry and aristocracy as well as small-scale producers. Indeed, the lure of plundering the Spanish Main, fuelled by Henry Morgan’s successful pillage of Panama in 1671, became a lingering dream for more than a century. More permanent fortunes were to be found in another tropical staple, namely sugar. Sugar had been grown on Spain and Portugal’s Mediterranean islands from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, employing a mixed labour force involving foreign-paid workers and slaves from Africa or the Canary Islands. But by the end of the sixteenth century some sugar mill owners from São Tomé had transferred their operations to Brazil, using a combination of indigenous and African labour to farm their product. By 1615, Brazilian production surpassed that of São Tomé, the Canaries and the Mediterranean islands combined, and set the scene for the cultivation of sugar in Barbados some fifteen or so years later. Here white indentured labourers predominated. As a result of a long seventeenth-century depression in the British Isles and the mass migration of around 200,000 to 225,000 emigrants to the New World, they were cheaper than African labour.3 But from the 1660s onwards, partly because of white out-migration and the heavy mortality of indentured servants, partly because indentured labour became more expensive as the British demand for workers in the domestic textile industries grew, African labour became cheaper. On Barbadian sugar estates blacks surpassed whites by a ratio of three to two or higher. Once Jamaica joined the English colonial complex in 1655 the blackening of the Caribbean became even more dramatic. Blacks outnumbered whites in turn-of-the-century Jamaica by four to one, by six to one in 1710 and ten to one in 1740.4 By the time of the Hanover revolt of 1776, which is discussed in chapter 5, approximately 200,000 slaves lived in this dense British slave society. This was roughly a quarter of all blacks who lived in British America, the vast 3

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London, 1997), 228, 241. Philip D. Morgan, ‘British Encounters with Africans and African–Americans circa 1600–1780’, in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill and London, 1991), 174; Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica, 1997), 182. 4

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majority living in the Caribbean or the southern colonies of Virginia, Carolina and Georgia where tropical staples were grown. Sugar cultivation was extremely labour intensive, particularly at the harvesting stage. Because slaves were worked so hard, the fertility of female field hands was extremely low, which meant that the industry was dependent on a continuous supply of African labour. Michael Craton has calculated that in the early years of Jamaican expansion, planters needed an annual importation of nine per cent of their work force to sustain production, a figure that declined to six per cent by 1700 and perhaps four per cent by 1775.5 Even so, it was rare for any sugar estate to be self-sustaining during the eighteenth century, with the result that planters preferred young adult male workers to females, by a ratio of six to four, and worked them into the ground. As one millwright confessed before the slave trade inquiry in 1789, overseers ‘work slaves out and trust for African supplies than work them moderately and keep up for breeding’ .6 If an enslaved African survived the Middle Passage and the traumatic introduction to plantation toil, and much depended on his or her mental and physical condition on arrival, then a field hand might live until his or her forties.7 Planters had lower expectations. They cynically calculated that they could turn a profit on a slave after eight years’ labour, until your typical slave was around thirty. Between 1676 and 1800 Britain transported 2.7 million Africans to the Caribbean and beyond, approximately one in every two slaves that made the transatlantic crossing.8 It was a massive operation, an exercise in biopower for the production of tropical staples, especially sugar, for which demand became virtually insatiable to slake sweet taste, most notably in tea and confectionaries. British sugar exports reached 25,000 tons by 1700, and within seventy years some 97,000 tons, ninety per cent of which was retained on the island itself. Sugar propelled the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century. Between 1768 and 1772 sugar imports from the West Indies were worth twice as much as the total commodity imports from North America and four times as much as tobacco, which was North America’s leading commodity.9 The ‘king of 5 Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom, 176–7. Cf. Blackburn, New World Slavery, 340, whose figures are lower. 6 Sheila Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 175 vols (Wilmington, DE, 1975), 82:90. 7 Richard Dunn, ‘“Dreadful Idlers” in the Cane Fields: The Slave Labor Pattern on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, 1762–1831’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/4 (1987), 812. On the Mesopotamia estate in Westmorland county, Jamaica, the mean age of slaves at death was forty-two. James Ramsay thought only a third of all slaves survived to ‘seasoning’ to plantation labour on account of their poor condition. James Ramsay, Objections to the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1788), 71. 8 David Eltis, ‘The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58/1 (2001), table 1. 9 Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Economy’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, 2002), 57–8; James Walvin, Sugar. The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity (New York, 2018), 40–1.

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INTRODUCTION

sweets’ became Britain’s principal import in 1750, and a crucial re-export for its economy. And because sugar was umbilically linked to slavery and the slave trade, it helped generate an export trade to Africa in Indian and British cotton textiles and other manufacturing wares; not to mention the financial services required to build and provide insurance for transatlantic vessels, and to facilitate the sale of slaves, who were normally sold on commission, and to fund the short-term debts of planters. For a century and a half, sugar, the slave trade and slavery became crucial components of Britain’s industrial build-up, power and wealth.10 The Atlantic network of trade delivered industrial goods from Britain and India to Africa to purchase slaves and provided investors with expanding opportunities in shipping and insurance. Millions of enslaved Africans produced tropical staples for British industries and consumers, stimulating home and colonial demand for an ‘empire of goods’ and providing the government with a buoyant source of taxable revenue. Slavery was certainly not alone in stimulating the first Industrial Revolution, or even its principal driving force.11 There were internal factors – the long arc of agrarian capitalism, proto-industrialisation, and a felicitous mix of population growth and natural resources that had helped shape it as well. But a strong case can be made that tropical staples and slavery were defining features of the first British empire and critical auxiliaries to industrial growth. They spectacularly shaped its migration patterns, for close to three million Africans were forcibly transported to the New World in British and colonial ships, vastly outnumbering the white indentured labourers and free men and women who also ventured there. Economically, too, the tropical colonies boosted British capitalist advance. While the northern American colonies played a very significant role stimulating British industrial growth, principally as markets when their population boomed after 1740, the Caribbean trades were more important in the long term. Today it is hard to imagine that Jamaica towered above every North American colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The centrality of the American War of Independence to US history, an imperial enterprise in itself, tends to obscure it. This book features eight essays on the eighteenth-century British Caribbean, including one that focusses on the Caribbean rimland, on the coasts of 10

See Gavin Wright, ‘Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited’, Economic History Review 73/2 (2020), 353–83. 11 For strong linkages, see Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Development (Cambridge, 2002), and Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London and New York, 2013), 99–120. For a more cautious view, see David Richardson, ‘The Slave Trade, Sugar and British Economic Growth, 1748–1776’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/4 (1978), 736–69. For a view that seeks to downplay the significance of slavery and the slave trade to British industrialization, see David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Economic History, 60/1 (2000), 123–44.

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present-day Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua. The essays could stand as discrete studies, but together they address some of the salient themes of the era and ones that have continued to engage scholars. I begin with two that address the allure of empire, the imaginaries that attracted Britons to ponder the Caribbean as a site of adventure and potential wealth despite the environmental hazards of venturing there. One of the distinctive characteristics of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and more generally the Atlantic world, was that it was inscribed in print as never before; in travel literature, newspapers and even novels. As Ian Steele noted many years ago, the growth of literacy and new communicative practices meant that the Atlantic was never remote from middle-class households.12 It was there to be savoured, to astonish, even to be feared as news of slave rebellions entered the columns of ‘plantation news’ and made readers wonder about the fate of armies, ships and their investments. Chapter 1 looks at what proved to be an urtext that had real staying power into the high noon of empire: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It was the quintessential survivor narrative that span into a colonial one once it was linked to fragments of the sequel Farther Adventures; a commonplace suture in abridged versions of the story. What fascinated me about this story is the degree to which it became a mobile text, capable of being read in different ways by different audiences. Many of the key elements of the Caribbean encounter are there: slavery; plantations; contact with the ‘other’, in this case the Carib, whose cannibalism repels as it fascinates; a seamen’s mutiny; learning to survive in a hostile environment; taming the ‘savage’ and mastering one’s self in the process. The sequel even touches on the problem of reproducing colonies in an era of demographically lop-sided migration; how far one should promote mixed-race marriages to sustain populations at risk from tropical diseases and natural hazards. Robinson Crusoe touches lightly on the environmental hazards of living in the tropics, although they are there in the shape of storms and fevers. Other chapters in this book address the problem more precisely, emphasizing how critical timing and healthy ‘seasoned’ troops were to a successful Caribbean expedition. Chapter 2 is written as an antidote to the derring-do genre of maritime history that attracted eighteenth-century readers and continues to prosper in Ramage and Hornblower novels and not a few biographies of Horatio Nelson. Admiral Vernon was a real Georgian hero, celebrated in rhyme and festive toast, later the inspiration for London’s Portobello market. Yet after two successful raids on Spanish treasure ports, his amphibian expeditions to Cartagena and Santiago de Cuba were signal failures, victim to malarial swamps, torrid temperatures and unfamiliar terrain in which redcoats and irregulars went down like ninepins. Vernon’s problem was how he was able to explain this to a bewildered audience at home, habituated to hearing of victory not defeat, and this introduces us to a recurrent feature of Caribbean campaigns, the attribution of responsibility for 12 Ian

K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986).

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INTRODUCTION

military failure, which could range from on-site incompetence, to dangerous mosquito domains, and to poor preparations that could spiral into accusations of political or administrative corruption. In effect, there was a politics of catastrophe that encased Vernon’s later career, just as there was to Governor Dalling’s bungled expedition to Nicaragua in which Horatio Nelson participated and nearly died. The San Juan expedition of 1780, the subject of chapter 7, reminds us of how resilient the myth of the buccaneering past proved to be, and that well into the eighteenthcentury politicians and military officers still dreamed of emulating the feats of Sir Henry Morgan, the charismatic pirate-cum-politician whose irregular activities were tolerated in an age when plunder was the real name of the game. That expedition was also noteworthy for its use of indigenous warriors, men attuned to fighting in the tropics, to provide an advance guard for European armies. The deployment of Caribs or hired Africans to reconnoitre rivers and wooded defiles was very much a feature of Caribbean warfare, visible in the expeditions of the 1740s and beyond. It eventuated into the formal enlistment of blacks by Generals Dunmore and Clinton in the American war and again in the 1790s, although in the earlier decades in particular, blacks were generally used as drudges, careening vessels or cutting paths through mangrove and thicket for more regular troops. This was never the case with the Miskito of the Mosquito Shore, who were ethnic soldiers of empire, helping to keep the Spanish presence on the Atlantic shores of Spanish Central America to a minimum, and as a consequence opening up the maritime ‘pathways’ for the shipment of hardwoods for the British textile and furniture industries. Tough, resilient and independent, the Miskito were an asset to British encounters of that Atlantic coast, but they threatened to become a bane when they would not heed European conventions of war, and their willingness to enslave and exact tributes from subordinate tribes along the coast often proved an international embarrassment to the British. Indeed, once the British decided that it was propitious to develop Belize as a hardwood settlement and abandon the 400-mile Mosquito Shore, the Miskito became expendable. They were abandoned to the Spanish after the American war, pawns that could be sacrificed to British interests in the Mediterranean in the treaty of 1783. The treatment of indigenous people in the eighteenth century usually focusses upon the American mainland, where the British and French competed for the allegiance of indigenous nations who remained a formidable presence until the 1770s, when the pressures of settler colonialism and western expansionism put them on the defensive. It is often thought that the Carib nations, or Kalinago, had been eliminated from the Caribbean by the late seventeenth century, decimated by a combination of European pathogens and political skulduggery.13 In fact, the Miskito Indians remained a formidable force in 13

For a book that seeks to redress this view, see L. H. Roper, ed., The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Colonial Interaction in the Long Eighteenth Century (Columbia, SC, 2018).

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Central America, just as the Caribs did in a few of the Windward Islands, principally in St Vincent. There a hybridized group of Caribs and runaway slaves, known as the ‘free Negroes’ or ‘Black Caribs’, defended their lands on the windward side of the island and greatly inhibited efforts to advance the plantation zone after the British acquisition of the island from the French in 1763. Unwilling to recognize British sovereignty over their lands, the Black Caribs fought three wars against the British, two in association with the French. It took a massive military effort to defeat them in the years 1795–97, in effect to starve them into submission, and ultimately deport their sickly depleted ranks to the Bay of Honduras, where they intermarried with the Miskito and reconstituted themselves as the Garifuna. The Black Carib episode is an ugly chapter in British colonial relations, carried out at the behest of local white planters and London speculators anxious to profit from the sale of Carib lands and float the prospect of new sugar plantations to other islanders whose estates had been worked out. It should be set alongside other late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deportations: the Cromwellian settlement of 1652 and the forfeitures of Irish land in the 1690s; the ‘pacification’ of the Scottish Highlands after Culloden; the removal of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755; the expulsion of the Jamaican Maroons to Nova Scotia in 1797. Some of these were strategic removals dictated by national security, but the evacuation of the Black Caribs was also intended to transform seemingly ‘unproductive’ lands into thriving new sugar plantations, at a quite appalling human cost. The Black Carib struggle takes us to the heart of the empire, to the sugar plantations worked by thousands of enslaved Africans. Chapter 5 takes us to some of the most exploited estates in Jamaica where there was a slave rebellion in the first year of the War of American Independence. The timing of the insurrection prompts questions about the possible transmission of libertarian ideas from the American mainland to the island and whether the pattern of rebellion saw any radical departure from the conventional African insurrectionary impulses that characterized other slave revolts. It also highlights the chronic instability of sugar estates where enslaved Africans outnumbered whites by significant ratios and made the powerhouse of British sugar such a volatile place. Chapter 4 tracks the voyages of a Bristol slave-ship over a decade or more, depicting the difficulties an experienced captain faced in transporting hundreds of Africans across the Atlantic, including incipient rebellion from the holds and the prospect of collective food strikes. The chapter concludes with an account of a mutiny aboard the ship, and the problems the rebels encountered in raising the black flag and roving in an age when piracy was subject to closer international policing. It reminds us that if the eighteenth century was characterized by violence, coercion and skulduggery, there were also legal agreements among the great powers that strove to bring it to some order.14 Indeed, as the plantation 14

On this issue, see Eliga H. Gould, ‘Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772’, William and Mary Quarterly, 60/3 (2003), 471–510.

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INTRODUCTION

zone matured, and metropolitan governments reined in colonial authorities, international co-operation became possible, even in the division of prizes after war. Some of that order was observed in the breach when nations engaged in war, and that happened with remarkable regularity in the period 1738–1815 when the European powers mobilized ships and armies two years in every three, in part to protect maritime trade and possessions. Wartime conditions were particularly treacherous for free people of colour, whose entitlements to freedom were often not respected. For unfree blacks, war was a vicarious place, offering the prospect of freedom through flight and maritime anonymity, but at the same time subjecting them to the rapacity of privateers anxious to profit from the windfalls of combat. As I argue in chapter 3, the wartime Caribbean was a ‘marchlands’ in which violence was a way of life, and where inter-ethnic solidarities were transitory, volatile and rarely conducive to the forging of more capacious alliances.15 While there was resistance to the trafficking of African men and women and their enforced labour, while sailors resented their impressment at the hands of navy vessels perilously short of hands, there were few chains of equivalence around which subaltern groups could form broader alliances. In the mayhem of the Caribbean, there are real dangers of romancing the Main.16 War, disease, race and slavery constitute the main themes of the book. All of the chapters address two of these themes and some of them all four. In zoning in on particular episodes in the eighteenth-century Caribbean I have tried to capture the manifold factors that made it a violent marchlands, working at the interface between social and political history and heeding the environmental hazards that sometimes altered the balance of forces that confronted the strangers who ventured there. Throughout this book, I am less interested in policy formation than in the way imperial ventures eventuated on the ground, focussing on those environmental, logistical and indigenous factors that warped and compromised metropolitan intentions.17 Race, disease, slavery, war: a set of essays for our embattled times. British history, certainly in its most popular mode, is currently at a crossroads. As the country recoils from Europe and in many respects becomes increasingly insular and defensive in its attitude to others, so there is a debate 15

For the concept of ‘marchlands’, a ‘typically disordered border country’ where ‘violence was a way of life’, see Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (New York, 1986), 112–13. 16 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). 17 Cf. Steve Pincus and Amy Watson, ‘Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession’, in The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, ed. Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. MacInnes (Woodbridge, 2019), 136–54; Steve Pincus, ‘Reconfiguring the British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69/1 (2012), 63–70; see also Steve Pincus, ‘Patriot Fever: Imperial Political Economy and the Causes of the War of Jenkins Ear’, unpublished paper on www.academia. edu, presented as a talk at Lincoln College Oxford, May 2017.

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as to what histories should be part of the national narrative. Efforts to incorporate a more diverse citizenry into its history have encountered resistance from those who take pride in Britain’s imperial achievements and its former place in the world. For some, talk of racial division, slavery, and the profits it accrued constitutes a betrayal of British achievement and the elegant edifices of its high culture. This is not a perspective this author shares. At the same time the culture war over British heritage sometimes throws up unhelpful and misleading stereotypes, often taking their cue from the American version of Black Lives Matter. Whatever the merits of BLM as a political project for racial justice, and they are considerable, its historical claims are too often suffused with identity politics and racial reductionism. This is also a perspective this author does not share. No-one has a privileged voice to the eighteenth century, to which we are all strangers. And race cannot be divorced from class and the complexities of global capitalism and colonialism. This is hardly news, but perhaps it needs to be restated in what seems to be an evangelical phase of BLM in which cancel culture negates genuine debate and anachronistic formulations hold sway. In this book I have tried to explore the contraries of class and race in a world of ‘marchlands’, to track the hard choices people had to make in a very violent environment. It is a dispassionate, possibly dystopic view of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, but a necessary antidote to the racial binaries and stereotypes that currently pervade contemporary discourse.

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1 Lost in Translation? Tracking Robinson Crusoe across the Eighteenth Century Robinson Crusoe was never simply a book. From the beginning it was something of a cultural event. Published in April 1719, this tale of a Caribbean castaway was an instant success. The first edition of 1,000 copies sold out within a month; two further editions came out within six. And by that time its author, Daniel Defoe, a journalist and pamphleteer whose patron had been politically destroyed four years earlier during the Hanoverian accession crisis, had brought out a sequel. Entitled The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, it was very much part of the story in the eighteenth century, cruising through four editions by 1722. The success of Robinson Crusoe, volumes 1 and 2, did not bring the impecunious Defoe a lot of money. It is doubtful if he made more than £150 from the venture. For the printer, William Taylor, it brought substantial returns, reputedly 1,000 guineas. It also brought him headaches. In an age of piracy and imperfect copyright, Robinson Crusoe was ripe for picking. Taylor took one interloper to Chancery court in an attempt to prevent a haemorrhage of his anticipated assets, but bleeding was inevitable. An unofficial edition from Dublin appeared in 1719; French, Dutch and German editions quickly followed. And by the 1720s, abridgements of the novel flowed from the presses. In 1731 a German author even coined the term ‘Robinsonade’ to describe the adaptations that were proceeding apace in the wake of the novel’s popularity.1 Popular it undoubtedly was. In the course of the eighteenth century, 129 productions of Crusoe appeared in print, from the double- or triple-volumed classic, if you include the afterthought Serious Reflections, to translations, abridgements and adaptations such as the New Robinson Crusoe by the German schoolmaster, Johann Heinrich Campe. Henry Baker of the Universal Spectator declared as early as 1737 that Robinson Crusoe had ‘been read over the Whole Kingdom, and pass’d as many Editions as perhaps any Book now extant’. Sixty years later, Thomas Percival could still agree, marvelling at the popularity of ‘the best and most entertaining moral romance now extant’.2 One London 1 The author was Johann Gottfried Schnabel. See Spiro Peterson, Writings about Daniel Defoe 1731–1924 (Boston, MA, 1987), 2. 2 Thomas Percival, A Father’s Instructions: Consisting of Moral Tales, Fables and Reflections (London, J. Johnson, 8th edn, 1793), 322–36; Universal Spectator, 10 Sept. 1737.

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merchant, troubled by the booming readership of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man among artisans on the frontiers of political literacy, feared that this seditious book would be ‘made as much a standard book in this country, as Robinson Crusoe & the Pilgrims Progress’. The implication was that Defoe’s first novel not only struck a chord among the middling classes who formed the genre’s most stable reading public; it reached down to a plebeian public. Poor artisans and mechanics, even female servants, could savour Crusoe’s adventures in cheap abridgements that were a sixth of the original price of three shillings per volume, not to mention the chapbook versions that could be bought from itinerant pedlars. As Charles Lamb remarked a little later, Robinson Crusoe was ‘delightful to all ranks and classes’. Its style was ‘peculiarly adapted to the lower condition of readers’, he thought, making it ‘an especial favourite with sea-faring men, poor boys, servant maids’.3 If Robinson Crusoe appears to have embedded itself in eighteenth-century popular culture, how exactly was it read? And how was it read among different publics? This is a tricky problem for which there is no easy answer. Literary critics have long pondered the meaning of Robinson Crusoe. There is a whole cottage industry out there decoding and deciphering its manifold meanings. Indeed, reading for the right Crusoe is part of the calisthenics of English literary criticism for which there are a bewildering set of answers. There is a religious neo-Puritan Crusoe; a do-it-yourself Crusoe; an entrepreneurial Crusoe; and a stolid, middle-class Crusoe whose ‘epic of the stiff upper lip’ is either admirable or derisory, depending on your point of view.4 There is also a Crusoe whose orderliness is uncanny and neurotically anal; an imperial Crusoe; a slaving Crusoe; and a roving adventurous Crusoe who just cannot settle down into the ‘middle state’ in which his family placed him. The list goes on. The effort to find a satisfactory interpretation of Crusoe by cross-referencing some of Defoe’s other productions is also complicated by the anonymity and prolix character of Defoe’s writings, whose literary canon moves in and out like a concertina. Just how many works did this enormously prolific, but often invisible man write? The 100 or so that George Chalmers attributed to him in the first biography; the 500 that John Robert Moore dredged up in the 1950s; or the more circumspect 250 that modern scholars still dispute? Even if one decides that this intertextual sport is an idle quest in a world of literary effects rather than intentions, one is still left with the nagging problem of what texts literary critics use. Despite the new tendency to think less about what Defoe intended and more about the discursive and cultural terrain in which he moved – how in a sense Crusoe wrote itself, with all its elisions, contradictions, alterities and un-probed possibilities – literary scholars still have a tendency to centre their analysis on the 3 Charles Lamb to Walter Wilson, December 1822, quoted in Walter Wilson, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (London, 1830), cited in Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York, 1975), 269. TNA, HO 42/22 f. 623. 4 James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, Buffalo Studies 1/1 (1964), cited in Robinson Crusoe, ed. Shinagel (London, 1975), 320–3.

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first volume, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, to give it its official title. This is a legacy of nineteenth-century criticism that dismissed Farther Adventures as trivial and derided Serious Reflections as a desperate intervention to recover a narrative that had deviated from its original moral goals. In effect, even the most anti-canonical of Defoe scholars sometimes harbour a residual canonicity in wanting to focus upon the volume that posterity has declared to have literary merit. Yet the fact remains that fragments of Farther Adventures were regularly read in the eighteenth century. Most abridgements, at least three in every four, featured elements from it, unsettling aspects of the first volume and promoting some sub-narratives to new heights of cultural significance. What further complicates an analysis of how Robinson Crusoe was understood in the long eighteenth century is that it was an easily navigable book that allowed for discontinuous readings.5 Dr John Sharpe annotated the book in 1759, accenting bits he thought valuable for the moral instruction of youth. Joachim Heinrich Campe was more interventionist, splitting the story into twenty-five segments and framing each segment as an evening’s reading in which fictive parents discussed the book with their inquisitive children. In this way Campe was able to foreground what he saw as the educative elements of the book, to push Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the book as a corrective to the amour-propre and artificial luxury of eighteenth-century life in more explicitly bourgeois directions. He wanted middle-class children to disown slavery, love animals, develop a keener knowledge of world geography, and hone their practical skills and knowledge. He used the Crusoe story to embolden his little readers to encounter danger ‘with coolness and presence of mind’; to fortify their bodies with ‘sobriety, regularity, and exercise’ and preserve their minds from the vices of the world ‘by a steady and enlightened piety’.6 Richard Brinsley Sheridan had less serious intentions. In 1781 he converted the story into a pantomime entitled Robinson Crusoe or Harlequin Friday. It was an instant hit, ‘received by a numerous and brilliant Audience’, according to the Public Advertiser, ‘with such universal and uncommon applause’.7 It was staged fifty-seven times in its first year, usually as a theatrical afterpiece, and became a Christmas favourite in London and the provinces. An inveterate gambler and crony of Charles James Fox, Sheridan had a canny eye for the market when he wrote his pantomime against the wonderful backdrops of the fashionable painter, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. Sheridan understood that Crusoe, decked out in his hirsute goatskin clothing and umbrella, was well on his way to becoming a cultural avatar. And so Sheridan featured Crusoe as an action hero, whose ‘silent solitary life’ is quickly disrupted by all too familiar escapades: saving Friday, dispatching ‘savages’, rescuing a white European, 5 Jennifer Andersen, Books and Readers in 18th Century England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, 2002), 43. 6 Joachim. H. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe: An Instructive and Entertaining History for the Use of Children of Both Sexes. Translated from the French (Boston, 1790) 141. 7 Public Advertiser, 31 Jan. 1781.

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mediating among mutineers, and, with an apt conformity to the conventions of pantomime, orchestrating a romance between Harlequin Friday and Columbine, although not before Friday is captured by the Spanish Inquisition and subjected to an auto-da-fé. In this uproarious adaptation, Friday finally regains his Columbine in a ‘terrestrial Elysium’ – a real interracial union might have been too close to the bone – and the pantomime ends happily with sailors raising their jars to their sweethearts. In a finale quite out of character with the book, which continually strives to subvert national prejudice, Old Spain is reminded that Britain is still mistress of the sea. From shore to shore, While cannons roar, Our Tars shall shew, The haughty foe, Britannia rules the main.8

As the Morning Chronicle noted, the second and third acts of the pantomime bore no relation to the Crusoe story at all. They could have been adapted for any patriotic afterpiece. Yet the pantomime was an instant hit with a public that was all too familiar with a novel which few had not read at some point in their lives.9 Indeed, in this respect, Sheridan was simply amplifying a literary convention in which writers colluded with their audiences in making passing, but knowing, references to Crusoe the castaway. In the plays of the early eighteenth century there were jokes at Defoe’s expense about the fantastical adventure he has hatched. In Charles Speedwell’s Roderick O’Connor, or the Distressed Princess (1720), for example, Colonel Allen ironically asks What need you for a Tale so high to go, … have you not Robinson Crusoe, There Incidents in full Perfection flow. Such a Dramatick is the fam’d De Foe. …Diverting Cannibals. Men-eating Men, Who fight to eat, and eat to fight again.

There are also jokes about Defoe having framed a ‘history in Patches’, and about suitors offering improbable settlements in Robinson Crusoe shares, a reference to the precarious return on the novel in a vicious publication market. But as the decades passed, Crusoe became increasingly a signifier of enforced solitude, of deep soul-searching, occasionally of execrable journal writing, and more frequently of idle riches, a reference to Crusoe’s discovery of gold moidores aboard the shipwreck off his island and his inability to use them. In the epistolary novel Emily Montague (1769) there are also references to Canadians visiting each other on New Year’s Day ‘like so many bears in their open carioles 8

A Short Account of the Situations and Incidents Exhibited in the Pantomime of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1781), 22. 9 Morning Chronicle, 30 Jan. 1781.

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[cabriolets]’. They had ‘entire coats of beaver skin’, it was said, ‘exactly like Robinson Crusoe’.10 The spin on Crusoe seems endless, both now and in its own century. How is one to rein it all in, to at least sketch out the possible reasons for its popularity? One tactic, I suggest, would be to look at the manner in which some of the popular adaptations consciously frame the narrative and gauge its reception. Another would be to look at the ways in which the more popular versions of the story predispose the reader to regard it: what abridgements choose to emphasize and omit; what is lost and retained when a novel of some 700 octavo pages is reduced to a mere twenty-two in a chapbook. It will also be important to look at the illustrations to the book, which increased both in quantity and quality as the century progressed and helped either to elaborate the ambience and message of the novel or, more ambiguously, to set up dissonant images to it. In this way it might be possible to track the cultural production of the text amid changing attitudes to domesticity, work, masculinity, commerce, slavery and empire. Charles Dickens once remarked that Robinson Crusoe was ‘the only instance of a universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry’. He was astonished at the dispassionate manner in which Crusoe narrated the death of Friday, and speculated that Defoe, like Crusoe, was ‘a precious dry disagreeable article’.11 Yet Defoe does seem to have had two things in common with Dickens. Both adhered to Dr Johnson’s view that only fools would not write for money. And both tended to write serially. For Dickens this is well known, but it is important to recognize that Robinson Crusoe was also serialized when it first came out, in the Original London Post or Heathcot’s Intelligencer. In fact, Jane Barker’s ironic remark about histories in patches in her Patch-Work Screen of 1723 touched on the sprawling, uneven character of Defoe’s first novelistic venture despite protests to the contrary.12 The open, poorly sutured nature of Defoe’s text is especially evident at the end of volume 1. Much of that volume is taken up with the moral parable of a wayward son, running along an axis of disobedience, punishment, repentance and deliverance. Crusoe is the third son of a German-born immigrant from Bremen, named Kreutznaer. Having lost two sons, one fighting for the English and the other mysteriously, Kreutznaer wants Robinson to settle down and prosper quietly in the ‘middle state of life’. But Crusoe defies his father, embarks on a series of overseas adventures, and on one of them is shipwrecked off the Venezuelan coast near the Orinoco delta. The bulk of the volume is taken up with Crusoe’s survival on a deserted island for twenty-eight years 10

Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 4 vols (London, 1769), 1:218. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (Philadelphia, 1874), 3:135n, cited in Shinagel, ed., Robinson Crusoe, 274. 12 Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (London, 1723), 51. 11

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Fig. 2. Statue in memory of Alexander Selkirk, the ‘original’ Robinson Crusoe, on the island of Juan Fernández, 1885.

LOST IN TRANSLATION? TRACKING ROBINSON CRUSOE

and with his coming to terms with his fate, both spiritually and materially. Spiritually, Crusoe learns the lesson of repentance and God’s providential grace in keeping him alive and fortifying his survival skills. Materially, Crusoe avails himself of the tools of Western technology from two shipwrecks and fashions a methodical, highly routinized life to counteract his solitude, developing an array of skills as a builder, baker, brewer and farmer that ironically enhance his love of industry in a manner that his father would have admired. Crusoe measures his fortunes like an eighteenth-century bookkeeper. He keeps a journal to record his thoughts, activities, achievements and desires, to buttress his psychological and spiritual welfare. He learns to live without sex and to master himself. In this fake autobiography, he rarely shows signs of losing it. When he first scrambles to the shore of his island, his initial relief, even ecstasy at being alive quickly turns into a ‘dreadful Deliverance’ and his limited provisions throw him ‘into terrible Agonies of Mind’.13 But his despair does not prevent him from building a raft and salvaging what he can from the wreck of a ship the following day. And he quickly begins, ‘like Debtor and Creditor’, to weigh his comforts against his miseries, writing a journal to order his thoughts and survival strategies.14 Storms and fevers throw him into dejection once more, but the ‘prospect of living’ and his abiding sense of providential wisdom pull him through.15 As happened with Alexander Selkirk, the seafaring castaway on whom the Crusoe story was popularly thought to have been based, reason, routine and the scriptures ensure his survival.16 Indeed, unlike Selkirk, he never loses the power of speech.17 Having rescued the captain of a visiting ship from a mutiny, Crusoe is handed his deliverance, his escape route from the island. ‘I told him’, Crusoe recounts, ‘I look’d upon him as a Man sent from Heaven to deliver me, that the whole transaction seemed to be a Chain of Wonders; that such things as these were the 13

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 3 vols (Oxford: Shakespeare Head edition, 1927), 1:52–3. (Henceforth RC.) I have used this older edition because it is the only one that features the three volumes of the story in one edition. 14 RC 1:74–6, 79–103. 15 RC 1:102–4. 16 ‘He grew dejected, languid, and melancholy, scarce able to refrain from doing himself Violence, till by degrees, by the Force of Reason, and frequent reading of the Scriptures … he grew thoroughly reconciled to his Condition.’ Richard Steele, The Englishman, no. 26 (3 Dec. 1713). See also Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage round the World (London, 2nd edn, 1718), 126. Of Selkirk, Rogers remarks, ‘he employ’d himself in reading, singing Psalms, and praying; so that he said he was a better Christian while in his Solitude than ever he was before’. 17 Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage,129, and Providence Displayed, or a Very Surprising Account of One Alexander Selkirk (London, 1712), 8. ‘At his first coming on board us, he had so much forgot his Language for want of Use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves.’ See also the account of a man marooned on an island in the gulf of Nicaragua in 1638, ‘who looked at first very strangely, and was not able at first Conference to speak and answer’. Cited in Isaac James, Providence Displayed (London, 1800), 179.

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Testimonies we had of a secret Hand of Providence governing the World.’18 But once off his island, Defoe doesn’t know quite what to do with Crusoe, or perhaps, more accurately, he is reluctant to conclude his adventure. Crusoe’s parents have died during his thirty-five-year sojourn, so there can be no denouement in the manner of a prodigal son. Defoe could, of course, have framed Crusoe as a reformed, chastened and successful man, the returned castaway made good, and to an extent he does set him up that way. Despite the fact that his long absence deprives him of a family inheritance, Crusoe is fortuitously fortunate. Almost miraculously, he finds that his investments in his Brazilian sugar plantation have matured enough to produce him a more than modest fortune and to allow him to set up as a gentleman farmer. Yet Crusoe’s homecoming is oddly matter of fact and offers no closure to the novel whatsoever. Rather, Defoe adds fillers from the contemporary newspapers to draw out the adventure – wolves in the Pyrenees,19 an encounter with a bear – and unashamedly offers a preview of his next volume, in which he alerts his readers to Crusoe’s wanderlust, and gestures to the prospect of further adventures in South America, Africa and the East. In this respect, at least, Defoe anticipated Hollywood. He hoped to cash in on his project with a well-timed sequel. Literary critics cannot agree whether Crusoe survives by recognizing his limitations before God or whether his religious convictions are secondary to his economic individualism. But all recognize that his deliverance from the island is at least partially dependent upon others; upon ships, sailors and indigenous peoples. It is by harnessing the local knowledge of Carib Indians that Defoe hopes to get off his island, and it is by saving an English captain from a mutiny that he ultimately does so. If Defoe devotes much of his novel to the psychological and material challenges of Crusoe’s forced solitude on the island, he also situates that island within the context of overseas commerce and empire. Written at a time when Britain had just concluded a treaty with Spain that granted her an Asiento, a licence to deliver slaves to Spain’s Atlantic empire, Crusoe’s business opportunities are determined by the developing plantation economy and the quest for coerced labour. Captured by Barbary pirates on a slaving trip, Crusoe escapes and recovers his fortunes by selling a fellow fugitive and then by setting up a small plantation in Brazil, in which he employs both enslaved Africans and white indentured labourers. Anxious to profit from more African labour, and Defoe was clearly au courant with the trend in tropical production, Crusoe agrees to venture once again to the Guinea coast to buy more slaves for his own estate and for those of neighbouring planters. On the journey he is shipwrecked on a desolate island, a sole survivor in what he regards as a ‘dreadful deliverance’.20 Crusoe’s story is drawn in part from the narratives 18

RC 2:68. Mist’s Weekly Journal, 4 Jan. 1718, and Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post, 8 March 1718. 20 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719), 53. 19 See

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of Woodes Rogers and William Dampier who recalled a castaway on the island of Juan Fernández off the Chilean coast. Defoe adapted some of the topography of this island for his novel of survival, but he transposed it to the Outer Antilles, to the chain of islands that ran down to Trinidad and the Venezuelan coast.21 Certainly, one can regard Crusoe’s island allegorically, as a site of exile and a commentary on the religious and punitive policies of James II. On rescuing the Spaniard and Friday’s father from the clutches of Carib cannibals, Defoe muses that his island was now ‘very rich in subjects’ over which he was ‘absolute Lord and Lawgiver’ in a dominion that allowed ‘freedom of conscience’,22 a veiled reference to James II’s brief reign, in which Defoe, as a survivor of the Monmouth rebellion, had an enormous stake. As Tom Keymer has persuasively argued, Robinson Crusoe is in some respects a ‘displaced autobiography’. Only five years before the appearance of his first novel Defoe openly reflected that in the aftermath of the 1685 uprising, the punishments inflicted on the rebels exceeded the law and ‘were carry’d on with such Barbarity as is shocking to human nature’.23 Crusoe’s exile, in fact, is redolent of Monmouth supporters like Henry Pitman, who also found himself marooned on a Caribbean island and became very fearful of aboriginal predators.24 Yet these autobiographical referents, which certainly suggest that the events of the 1680s pried on Defoe’s mind as he was constructing his narrative, do not detract from the fact that the novel is also centrally an Atlantic story, linking the metropole with the Guinea coast and with the emergent plantation slavery of the New World. It is also an encounter with the unknown, and with the unknown other, the purported ‘cannibals’ of the Caribbean littoral, whose ‘savagery’ had transfixed the European imagination since Hans Staden’s encounter with the Tupinambá of Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century. Shipwrecked on a deserted island as a result of his slaving ventures, Crusoe finds he must defend his turf from savage interlopers and rescue some of their victims from their sacrifices. From these victims, principally from the Carib servant-cum-slave Friday, Crusoe is able to extract vital geographical knowledge that might facilitate his escape. In the event, this proves unnecessary, but Crusoe’s civilizing mission, first directed at Friday, culminates in the creation of a small, interracial colony of settlers on his hitherto deserted island. The conclusion of this second narrative, of New World commerce and colonization, occurs at the beginning of the second book, Farther Adventures. 21

Defoe’s island had a mountainous and more fertile side, the latter discovered after he set down his first settlement. As on Juan Fernández, goats inhabited the mountainous terrain. See Tim Severin, In Search of Robinson Crusoe (New York, 2002), 45–9. 22 RC 2:30. 23 Daniel Defoe, Account of the Proceedings against the Rebels (1715), xxvi, cited in Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe (Baltimore and London, 1989), 41; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, intro. Thomas Keymer (Oxford World Classics, 2007), xxix. 24 Henry Pitman, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, Chyrurgion to the late Duke of Monmouth (London, 1689).

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Instead of managing the colony in which he often expressed a proprietary interest full time, Crusoe spends only twenty-five days there. His brief sojourn is really a pretext for playing out the story of colonial settlement, which is shaped more by the prejudices and activities of the settlers than it is by Crusoe’s governing hand. When Crusoe reaches the island for the second time, he learns that the Spanish and British settlers had fallen out over slaving, and had only reconciled their differences when the prospect of a large Carib invasion made it imperative they do so. Crusoe’s only contribution to the stability of his colony is his decision to legitimize the union of British settlers with Carib women and to distribute land. It is a subversive one, since the developing racial codes of British colonies took a very dim view of miscegenation and would have deplored the sight of a Catholic priest presiding over an interracial union. Here Defoe’s ‘entangled worlds’ stretch the public imagination.25 Thereafter, Crusoe 2 degenerates into a whimsical travelogue or badly framed picaresque. Crusoe embarks on a series of overseas adventures in the Indian Ocean and the Far East, eventually traversing the Russian steppes as part of a commercial caravan from Peking. Arriving back in London in 1705 after an absence of more than ten years, Crusoe finally curbs his roving spirit at the ripe old age of seventy-two. Much of Farther Adventures is pulp fiction, as many nineteenth-century critics understood. It is full of denunciations about the barbarism of the East, the despicable idolatry of Tartars, the perfidy of sailors. It makes no pretence at being an informed travel narrative or an informed commentary on the possibilities of trade in the East despite the fact that chinoiserie was becoming fashionable and the British taste for bohea tea was growing apace. It is a story of underdeveloped commerce, paganism and idolatry that hardly squares with Crusoe’s relative tolerance of other cultures and religions in other parts of the work. Whereas Crusoe is happy to have people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds form his Caribbean colony, he applauds the attack upon a Tartar village and the burning of their idol Cham Chi-Thaungu ‘to vindicate the honour of God, which is insulted by this devil-worship’.26 The message that emanates from such episodes is clear: Europe is commercial and civilized; the East underdeveloped and barbaric; the West pregnant with possibility. Farther Adventures is Defoe at his most sensational, capitalizing on the contemporary fascination with exotic travel and piracy, spinning out a story that is already exhausted. It is only significant in illustrating the eclecticism of Defoe’s writing, and in underlining the fact that Robinson Crusoe was from the very first plugged as an adventure story. It is a story of ‘Strange, Surprizing Adventures’ after all, of storms, shipwrecks and pirates, who were very much in the news 25 On

the concept of ‘entangled worlds’, see Eliga H. Gould, ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery’, American Historical Review, 112/13 (2007), 764–86. 26 RC 3:183.

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in the decade after Utrecht (1713) when many demobilized sailors ‘turned to account’ on the open seas and created an epidemic in piracy that lasted until the mid-1720s. Farther Adventures loops back to the fantastical episodes of volume 1, where Crusoe survives hurricanes, tropical fevers, hunts big game on the African coast, and is attacked by packs of wolves in the Pyrenees. Farther Adventures reminds us that Defoe worked not only in the tradition of spiritual autobiography but harnessed his knowledge as a journalist to create picaresque adventure stories. In this respect Defoe popularized a genre of imperial adventure that would flourish in the era of British high imperialism with Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad. It was a genre that could be made theatrical, one that could reach out to a wide audience, especially to those young men who were impatient of the strictures of rank and place in eighteenth-century society and anxious to see a little of the world. With an expanding merchant marine and denser imperial networks, this was more possible in the eighteenth century than it had been before. Farther Adventures never achieved the popularity of the first volume. What was retained in the numerous abridgements that followed was the colonizing narrative and the colonial encounter with natives in Madagascar, where Crusoe fell out with his sailing crew over the burning and massacre of a village in response to the death of a seaman who had raped a local girl. These two narratives are retained in virtually every modestly sized abridgement, sometimes with illustrations, testimony to their appeal with a broad-ranging public who, from the mid-century onwards, were captivated by Britain’s growing investment in territorial, not simply maritime empire. The rest of Crusoe 2 was radically cut, or dramatically reduced to an ‘I was there’ format. The linking of Robinson Crusoe and its sequel nonetheless posed problems for readers who wished to expiate upon the virtues of Defoe’s castaway hero. If one wished to applaud Crusoe’s capacity to survive his solitude and to prosper both materially and spiritually in a way that his father would have ironically applauded, then one would have to explain his refusal to fulfil his destiny by setting down roots in his mature years. Crusoe’s subsequent conduct, his wandering impulses at the expense of family and fortune, seemingly contradict those bourgeois values of industry, self-discipline and fortitude on which his original survival depended. In a phrase, the Crusoe of the sequel does not live up to the promise of the original book. Moreover, the inclusion of the colonizing scheme in the central narrative raised the stakes of how one might typify Crusoe’s imperial ventures. This applies not only to Crusoe’s ‘colonization’ of Friday, but also to the use of slave labour and the introduction of female concubines into the colony. These issues might seem inconsequential at the time when Defoe first penned the story, for in 1720 the criticism of the slave trade was relatively muted. Indeed, because the British were still paying ransoms to the Barbary pirates for the recovery of white slaves, it was possible to see slavery as a plight of all nations. As Linda Colley writes, ‘Before 1730 at least, the face of slavery – as far as Britons and 21

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other Europeans were concerned – was sometimes white.’27 Yet as the abolition movement gathered steam and race lines hardened, the narrative of Crusoe’s relationship with the colonial Other became more problematic. How these two sub-narratives were negotiated must now be addressed. With the emergence of post-colonial theory there has been a renewed interest in writing the empire back into the literary canon in ways that challenge if not subvert the manner in which Commonwealth literature exuded Enlightenment values and sidelined subaltern peoples. The process is most visible in novels such as Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre where the colonial context is pushed to the margins. This is hardly the case with Robinson Crusoe where the imperial theme is front and centre. Crusoe escapes patriarchal authority by venturing on slaving expeditions and setting himself up as a ‘Guinea trader’. Captured by Moors and enslaved himself, he escapes by selling his companion, the Maresco Xury, and sets up a small plantation in Brazil with a combination of indentured and slave labour. Although his business prospers, he is persuaded to act as a supercargo for local planters to trade for more slaves on the Guinea coast, the supply of slaves being officially restricted by royal edict and the Asiento. It is on this interloping voyage that he is shipwrecked on a Caribbean island off the Orinoco, 100 miles from Trinidad and Tobago, and three times that distance to the Grenadines and Barbados. There, after twenty-five years solitude, he rescues a Carib from sacrificial death and ‘civilizes’ him. When Friday is saved by Crusoe, he prostrates himself at his feet and vows, or so it seemed to Crusoe, to be his ‘slave for ever’.28 And Friday is true to his promise. When Crusoe and Friday construct a large pirogue to sail to the mainland some forty miles away, Crusoe fears Friday will forsake him. But Friday passionately declares in his pidgin English: ‘You do great deal much … you teach wild man’s be good sober tame Mans: you tell them know God, pray God, and live new Life.’29 In effect, Friday has been thoroughly colonized. He is too deferential to be true. There is no effort on Defoe’s part to probe the complexities of the cross-cultural encounter and the ‘middle ground’ that was sometimes sought by confronting strangers.30 Aside from a few early reservations for his own safety, Crusoe enthuses about his colonizing project with his ‘faithful, loving, sincere Servant’. 31 Having weaned Friday from cannibalism, more or less down the barrel of a gun,32 Crusoe proceeds to clothe and ‘educate’ Friday, first by 27

Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London, 2002), 51–2, 56–8, 64. 28 RC 1:236. 29 RC 2:13. 30 On the concept of the middle ground, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). 31 RC 2:242. 32 RC 1:241. Crusoe said Friday still had a ‘hankering Stomach’ for human flesh, but ‘I had

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teaching him English and then the rudiments of the Protestant religion. This is in conformity with contemporary definitions of ‘savagery’ which was defined by cannibalism, paganism and nakedness.33 In the novel, Friday is not quite tabula rasa. He does offer some thoughts on his own religious belief, and explains the rudiments of his exo-cannibalism, which is essentially directed at prisoners of war. ‘They no eat Mans but when makes the War fight’,34 he tells Crusoe. But there is hardly an ounce of resistance in him. It is no wonder that many modern authors excoriate the novel as white and racist, indicative of the expansionist imperialist tendencies at work in many novels, which imaginatively possess the Caribbean as it is being forcibly colonized and peopled with coerced labour. Actually, things are not quite so simple. It is true that slavery is taken for granted in the novel. This would have been unexceptional for its time, even though there were some contemporary critics who took Defoe to task for it. Charles Gildon, for example, wondered why Crusoe never found ‘any check of Conscience in that infamous Trade of buying and selling of Men for Slaves’.35 Yet it is worth remembering that the novel was set in the mid- to late seventeenth century when slavery was not as explicitly racialized as it would be later when the plantation economy was at full throttle. Defoe is enslaved, a Maresco is enslaved, Caribs are enslaved, and Spaniards too. Everyone was vulnerable to slavery in the seventeenth century and indeed the white slave trade was far from being over when Defoe actually wrote his novel. Deputations were still being launched to buy back British subjects from their Moorish captors. Moreover, Defoe reveals some ambivalence in his attitudes to slavery, just as he did in other publications. In 1710 he described the slave trade as ‘the most profitable, honourable and most useful … of any branch of commerce, proportionate to its size’, and defended the monopoly of the Royal Africa company on the grounds that such joint-stock ventures guaranteed a steady supply of slaves in dangerous and often volatile conditions.36 On the other hand, Defoe was attentive at least to the barbarity of the slave trade even if he had a respect for its risk-taking ventures. In the Reformation of Manners Defoe wrote how Others seek out Africk’s Torrid Zone And search the burning Shores of Serralone; There in insufferable Heats they fry, And run vast Risques to see the Gold, and die: The harmless Natives basely they trepan And barter Baubles for the souls of men37 by some Means let him know, that I would kill him if he offer’d it’. 33 Roxanne Wheeler, ‘“My Savage”, “My Man”: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe’, ELH, 62/4 (1995), 835. 34 RC 2:9; on Friday’s religious belief, RC 2:1–2. 35 Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr D— de F—of London, Hosier (London, 1719), 18. 36 The Review, 27 June 1710, 15 March 1711. 37 Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, a Satyr ([London,] 1702), 17.

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The ambiguities of Defoe’s position on these ‘promiscuous plunders’, as he calls them, can be seen in his account of Xury, the Maresco with whom he escapes from the slavery of a Moroccan rover. Crusoe and Xury are runaway companions, but that does not stop Crusoe ruthlessly selling his Islamic mate to a Portuguese captain when opportunity knocks, with the promise of freedom if Xury converts to Christianity after ten years. It is not much of a promise, and hardly one that Crusoe could in any way enforce. But Xury is sold for 60 pieces of silver, a symbolic sum, twice the price that Judas paid for turning in Jesus Christ. It is as if Defoe disapproved of Crusoe’s opportunism and callous disregard for his fellow captive. Robinson Crusoe is also ambivalent about the relationship of Crusoe to Friday, which does not conform to the dominant master–slave relationship that typified the early eighteenth-century Caribbean. Defoe prepares the reader for this singular relationship by dwelling on the physiognomy of Friday, a Carib whose skin was ‘not quite black, but very tawny, and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians, and other Natives of America are’. He is, Crusoe reflects, ‘a comely handsome fellow who had the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance’.38 ‘Not quite black’ here means not quite African, and there is absolutely no condemnation, covert or otherwise, of African slavery in the book. At the same time Crusoe’s description of Friday distances him somewhat from other Amerindian groups, and makes him almost white, like Europeans. This view accords with some of Defoe’s contemporaries, such as Richard Bradley, who in his racial typology talked of the indigenous people of the Americas as ‘a sort of White-Men (as I am told) who only differ from us in having no Beards’.39 Although the relationship between Crusoe and Friday was later recast in racial binaries determined by skin colour, and although some commentators have seen Friday as a displaced African, Defoe actually ponders the racial multiplicities of the early eighteenth century with care, and mobilizes the axes of Christianity/paganism, civilization/savagery in defining them.40 Defoe was doubtless aware of the strong national prejudice against enslaving Carib Indians, which was seen as a deplorable legacy of Spanish colonialism and one enshrined in the well-known History of the Indies by Bartholomew Las Casas, first translated into English in 1583, and reprinted in at least three subsequent editions in the seventeenth century. This may explain why Friday’s servitude is seemingly self-imposed. However implausible it might seem, Friday appears to enslave himself by kneeling at Crusoe’s feet once Crusoe has dispatched his pursuers. ‘I beckon’d him again to come to me’, Crusoe narrates, 38

RC 1:238. Richard Bradley, A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (London, 2nd edn, 1739), 231. The first edition was in 1721, two years after the publication of RC. 40 This argument is indebted to Roxanne Wheeler, ‘Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe’, 821–61.

39

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and he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every Ten or Twelve steps in token acknowledgement for my saving his Life: I smil’d at him, and look’d pleasantly, and beckon’d to him to come still nearer; at length he came close to me, and then he kneel’d down again, kiss’d the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my Slave for ever. 41

Later on, the Carib repeats the ritual, setting Crusoe’s other foot on his head, ‘and after this, made all the Signs to me of Subjection, Servitude, and Submission imaginable’.42 It has been speculated that Defoe drew on William Dampier for these Carib rituals of submission, for the latter recalled a meeting between two Miskito Indians, one marooned for many years on Juan Fernández, in terms of face-down prostrations.43 Yet Friday’s rite of submission is more explicit than these tokens of friendship, and it is repeated. Crusoe has a few hesitations that the Carib’s body language might be disingenuous; he does guard himself against an untoward visit from his newly acquired ‘savage’; but he relates, ‘I needed none of all of this Precaution; for never Man had a more faithful, loving, sincere Servant than Friday was for me.’44 The use of the term servant is instructive here, for prior to finding Friday, he does muse about the desirability of managing ‘One, nay, Two or Three Savages, if I had them, so as to make them entirely Slaves to me’.45 The switch from ‘slave’ to ‘servant’ might not seem significant here, for in the late seventeenth century, when the novel was set, the terms were almost interchangeable. ‘Servant’ in the late seventeenth-century colonial context carried with it the obligation of indentured labour, servitude for a specified term of years, and indeed indentured servants worked alongside African slaves on many plantations of that era, as they did on Crusoe’s small lot in Brazil.46 But by 1719, when the novel was published and more African labour was being used on the plantations of the Caribbean and Carolina, the two terms were becoming more distinguishable. The term ‘servant’, then, Defoe’s favourite term for his adopted Carib, addresses the ambiguities of Crusoe’s relationship with Friday; softer than ‘slave’ it still carried with it very clear indications of cultural and social inferiority. In the end Friday is cast, quite improbably, as the perfect servant, rendered civilized, self-effacing, pliable enough to even satisfy Crusoe’s need for sociability. Crusoe’s early hope that the fleeing Carib would

41

RC 1:236. RC 1:239. 43 William Dampier, A New Voyage round the World (London, 5th edn, 1703), 86; see also Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage, 130. For the comment see Thomas Keymer, ed. Robinson Crusoe, intro. 44 RC 1:242. 45 RC 1:232. 46 See Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville, TN, 1989) and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York and London, 1991). 42

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be not only a servant but ‘perhaps a Companion, or Assistant’47 is fulfilled, although never as explicitly as in the French adaptation of the story on the screen, where the pleasures of sociability and the imperative to rule put Crusoe on a contradictory path.48 In the novel, Friday always remains a ‘trusty servant’ never a friend.49 At best Crusoe’s desire for sociability simply complicates a taken-for-granted cultural superiority. The issue of how one might situate compliant Caribs emerges once again in the second volume of RC where the English settlers travel to the mainland to trade for some slaves, bringing back three men and five women. The women are intended as concubines, a term Defoe never uses; indeed, Defoe fudges the issue of sexual exploitation altogether. The women quickly settle down as meek but faithful helpmates; they help domesticate the roughly hewn colonists who had been former mutineers and troublemakers; and they fight by their masters’ side when the cannibals once more invade the island. By the time Crusoe returns to his island, all that remains is for Governor Robinson to legitimize the union between the settlers and the female Caribs. This he does with the help of a French Catholic priest, musing at the same time about the freedom of religion on his island. Crusoe also distributes land, giving the settlers severally a right to the possession and inheritance of their estates, and to their heirs. By implication, then, Crusoe sets up a multi-racial colony with freedom of worship and potentially mixed lines of descent; a quite radical formula for an English colony of the late seventeenth century, although perhaps not inconsistent with the informal settlements that dotted the Yucatan and Mosquito shores, where there was considerable interracial marriage and little formal governance. The issue of whether the Caribs should be enslaved emerges once more in Farther Adventures when Crusoe debates what is to be done with the few savages who have been corralled in the south-west corner of the island without canoes so that they could not mobilize another invasion force from the mainland. Although they had been given tools by the white settlers, they showed little interest in tillage and, in Crusoe’s view, expressed a troubling, vagrant independence. Crusoe recommends they either begin their own plantations or be incorporated into existing ones as servants, ‘to be maintain’d for their Labour, but without being absolute Slaves’ he said, ‘for I would not admit them to make them Slaves by Force, by any Means, because they had their Liberty given them by Capitulation, and as it were, Articles of Surrender, which they ought not to break’.50 The implication here, and it is a telling one for an understanding of Crusoe’s colonizing enterprises, is that labour, and European styles of labour, were important markers of entitlement, a line of argument advanced by John Locke, one of Defoe’s early contemporaries. Hunters and gatherers had 47

RC 1:235. Robinson Crusoé (2003), directed by Thierry Chabert. 49 At Friday’s untoward death, Crusoe describes him as ‘my old Servant, the Companion of all my Sorrows and Solitudes’. See RC 3:73. 50 RC 3:59. 48

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no claim to the land, whose ownership was defined by systematic possession and cultivation. In fact, they were a nuisance, an impediment to the smooth development of settler colonies. It was the sort of argument that shaped colonization in Australia, Canada and the Cape, and it surfaces in our story of St Vincent. In Crusoe’s world, Carib slavery was permissible only if the Caribs were beyond the pale of civilization, and irredeemable. For Africans, this was a given. One of the problems of reading Robinson Crusoe in the eighteenth century was that the racial peculiarities of the novel were no longer present in the Caribbean, or barely. By 1720 the Carib threat was minimal, confined largely to the Windward Islands where maroon communities of Black Caribs, groups made up of Carib Amerindians and runaway African slaves, sought to protect themselves from the encroaching planter settlements. Unlike 1650, the Atlantic world was solidly black, as coerced migration from Africa reached new highs. In the British West Indies the ratio of whites to blacks was 1:4, and significantly higher in Jamaica and some of the Leeward Islands. Consequently there was a temptation to collapse the racial multiplicities of Robinson Crusoe into starker binaries. The tendency to do this is there in Charles Speedwell’s 1720 play, where the burlesque account of Crusoe refers to the Carib concubines as ‘five plump Black girls’ even though Crusoe comments that at least two of them could have passed as white. It is also there in some of the cruder woodcuts that accompanied the novel, where there is considerable ambiguity as to whether the savages who venture on his island are really Carib or African. This is the case in the 1782 Edinburgh edition of the Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, where the image of the kneeling Carib looks remarkably like the supplicant African slave on the abolitionist pottery of Josiah Wedgwood.51 The tendency to blur the distinction between Carib and African became a problem for the abolitionists of the 1780s, who had no wish to denounce Robinson Crusoe as a flagrantly pro-slavery, racist text. Particularly troubling was the symbol of Friday prostrating himself before Crusoe by placing his foot on his neck, one that could easily connote the compliant servitude of blacks. One solution was to change the body language, to have Friday kneel or stand up, and even to have Crusoe offer him a bunch of grapes as a gesture of amity not mastery. Another, promoted by the illustrator Thomas Stothard, was to romanticize Friday as a noble savage and to transform the relationship between Crusoe and Friday as benevolent, radiating enlightenment. In Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe the hero and his Carib even become business partners in Britain, and ‘during their whole lives remained faithful friends and inseparable companions’.52 51

Roxanne Wheeler suggests this is true of the frontispiece to Defoe’s third volume, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), but in my view the print is simply too crude to distinguish the ethnicity of the native people. See Roxanne Wheeler, ‘Racial Multiplicity’, 821–61. 52 J. H. Campe, New Robinson Crusoe, 2 vols (London, 1811) 2:308.

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Concordant with these changes in the relationship between Crusoe and Friday was the condemnation or marginalization of slavery in the original story. One abridgement from Philadelphia, an important centre of the abolition movement, quite consciously toned down Friday’s subservient relationship to Crusoe, excising the suggestion that Friday might be a ‘slave for ever’.53 In other adaptations of the novel, the condemnation of slavery is explicit. Mr Billingsley tells his children in the New Robinson Crusoe, first translated into English in 1787 as the abolition movement was gathering steam, that slavery was very unjust and expresses the hope that ‘this iniquitous traffic in slaves will be abolished’. In Sheridan’s pantomime of 1781, slavery is altogether omitted. Here Friday is turned into an ethnic sidekick rather than a servant. Among some of the songs added in the 1790s was one called the ‘Desponding Negro’, which recalls the adventures of an enslaved black, who was tossed overboard but picked up by a British bark, or small ship. The expelled slave subsequently treads ‘freedom’s ground’ in Britain, as did some ex-slaves and American loyalists after 1775, but torn from family and home, he is reduced to begging in London. In the final lines of the song this ‘blackbird’, as fugitive blacks in London were known, predicts that God will not recognize differences of colour at the Day of Judgment. In his eyes, ‘The European’s deep dye may out-rival the sloe, /And the soul of an Ethiop prove white as the snow.’54 Changing the image of Friday was one strategy that abolitionists used to tone down the taken-for-granted existence of slavery in the book. Another was to cast the five Carib women as Europeans, portraying them as humble, industrious settlers in a colony that scarcely looked tropical at all. There were some, of course, who continued to portray the women as coloured and indeed, burlesqued the manner in which they were partnered, which in the novel was by lot; something that might have been drawn from a joke-book or anecdote about the precipitous marriages of seafarers. But if the question of concubinage remained a contested one, there was no disposition on the part of editors to excise the colonial theme from the novel. Far from it. This came through loud and clear. Indeed in some chapbook editions of Crusoe, such as the one produced at Congleton in Cheshire in 1785, the more nefarious episodes of slavery are extracted from the story but the theme of rescuing the island from Carib savagery remains paramount, in the most militant of images. This type of production anticipated the depictions of the treatment of natives in the era of high imperialism, at least on those occasions when their aggression impeded the progress of the civilizing mission. In fact, some of the illustrations of

53

The Wonderful Life and Surprising Adventures of that Renowned Hero Robinson Crusoe (London, reprinted in Philadelphia, 1787), 93–4. For an American text where ‘slave for ever’ is retained, see The Most Surprising Adventures and Wonderful Life of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (Worcester, MA, 1795), 64. 54 ‘O let me in this wee night’. To which are added [five songs] (Sterling, 1795). A sloe is a small bluish-black wild plum.

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nineteenth-century editions of Robinson Crusoe anticipate those of the Illustrated London News during the Zulu wars. Editors and illustrators of Robinson Crusoe were not prepared to marginalize the colonial theme in the eighteenth century, however wayward and capricious Crusoe’s own attitude to his colonizing project might have been. That remained, even if the racial relations surrounding it were sometimes re-organized. But some commentators were more interested in the themes that dominated the first volume of the book and continued in the second. Very short abridgements of the novel, those specifically designed for the ‘common sort of People’, tended to abbreviate, even eliminate the psychological trials that Crusoe faced on his desolate island. Those at the very end of the century also eliminated any reference to Crusoe being engaged in the slave trade. In one chapbook version of 1800, Crusoe is enslaved, but his shipwreck occurs soon after his escape with Xury, who disappears with the ship rather than being sold into slavery.55 Equally important, chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe accented the story as one of wonderment and astonishment; they made it an action story, or one of fortitude in the face of fate or fortune. In a way Defoe’s novel was reminiscent of the prodigious histories of the past, particularly in the cheap, abbreviated editions that were hawked around the country. To young men who had a yearning to see a little of the world, to those who were recruited into Britain’s vast maritime enterprises, and there were over half a million of them in the course of the long eighteenth century who did venture to sea, the novel had an immediate appeal as a simple adventure story, without much consideration for its moral complexities. ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over’, recalled John Nicol, the son of an Edinburgh cooper, ‘and longed to be at sea’.56 Samuel Bamford remembered reading it in its chapbook version along with a friend also called Sam, the son of a workhouse schoolmaster. ‘For a long time both Sam’s ideas and mine were awed and fascinated by the descriptions of sea-dangers, shipwrecks, and lone islands with savages, and far-off countries teeming with riches and plenty’, recalled Bamford, and in a nearby field and brook, close to a reservoir, they acted out their own Crusoe story. ‘We had savages’, Bamford reminisced, ‘whose “foot-prints” made us pause and look around; those savages being the men from the brewery, who sometimes discovering us when they came up to let off the water, gave us chase and made us carry our heels quickly towards the wood. Nor were we without our perils and “shipwrecks”; for getting some old planks and a split board or two, we made a raft, on which whenever we found it necessary to “go on a voyage”, we paddled at length or breadth of this our “ocean”.’57 In the opinion of George Borrow, Robinson Crusoe awakened

55

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Brentford, c. 1800). John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, ed. Tim Flannery (New York, 1997), 23. 57 The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford, 2 vols, ed. W. H. Chaloner (London, 1967), 1:94–5. 56

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‘the spirit of strange and romantic enterprise’ from which England owed ‘many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land’.58 If Robinson Crusoe was a manual for the adventurous youths of the labouring class, some of whom, like Bamford himself, spent a little time at sea, it also served a more educative purpose in survivorship and its associated skills. The French versions of the book focussed on this aspect in particular, inspired by Rousseau’s comment that Robinson Crusoe was the only book which afforded any insight into the practicalities of a ‘natural education’; shorn of its rubbish that is, its pre- and post-island scenarios.59 In Emile, Rousseau recommended that his charge ‘impersonate the hero of the tale … and make himself minutely acquainted, not from books but circumstances, with everything requisite for the man in such a situation’.60 In Rousseau’s view, Crusoe offered both amusement and instruction to the problem of valorizing those aspects of civilization worth preserving and developing. Through ‘industry and the mechanic arts’, it taught people the importance of use-value, self-help and reliance. It also taught people to beware the frivolities of fashion and amour-propre that were corroding European society. ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Rousseau observed, ‘would have set a great value on the stock in trade of a petty ironmonger than that of the most magnificent and best furnished toy-shop in Europe.’61 It was better to have children learn about human nature by centring on the material utility of things than imbibe the false values of luxury. Not everyone thought the back-to-nature scenario as wholesome as Rousseau, or that solitude was so morally and intellectually bracing. These qualities tended to be emphasized, in particular, in continental adaptations of Crusoe. Such was the case with Swiss Family Robinson, a re-working of Defoe’s story in an immigrant setting in Australia, in which the crushing burden of a Calvinist conscience is replaced by a more secular, upbeat account of how practical knowledge could foster a sense of new world accomplishment. This quintessentially enlightenment tract was translated into English by Mary Jane Clairmont, William Godwin’s second wife, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. As part of a series of emancipatory projects in children’s literature pioneered by the Godwin family, it was designed to regain the market from counterrevolutionaries such as Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, whose emphasis upon institutional religion and divinely endowed social hierarchies was perceived to be profoundly anti-democratic and conservative.62 Not everyone was enamoured of wilderness tips, however, and some critics drew different lessons from Defoe’s first novel. Joachim Heinrich Campe had 58

George Borrow, Lavengro (London, 1851), 55. See also Martin Green, Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (University Park, 1991), 65–6. 59 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’Éducation, 4 vols (Frankfurt, 1762), 2:41–8. 60 Taken from the English translation of J.-J. Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education, 2 vols (London, 1762), 2:61. 61 Ibid., 2:65–6. 62 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London, 1984), 289–90, 296.

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his remodelled Crusoe deprived of the shipwreck’s tools and provisions in order to stress the hardships of solitude and society’s blessings. Similarly, William Cowper, a powerful figure in progressive middling circles, wrote a poem in 1782 which cast doubt on the educational stimulus of solitude and the futility of desert-island ‘castles’ and ‘country houses’: I am the Monarch of all I survey My Right there is none to dispute, From the Centre all round to the Sea I am the Lord of the Fowl and the Brute Oh Solitude! Where are thy Charms That Sages have seen in thy Face? Better dwell in the midst of Alarms Than reign in this horrible Place.63

In British circles Cowper’s view was a compelling antidote to Rousseau’s endorsement of the solitary Crusoe as an educational resource. If commentators continued to emphasize the strategies of survival that Crusoe deployed to keep himself alive, they were less interested in the challenges of the wilderness for building character. If Crusoe’s island was something of a prison or penitentiary, it also bore some important lessons for society at large. Thomas Percival thought the novel displayed ‘the advantage of being inured to manual exertions; the value of skill in the mechanic arts; the numberless benefits we derive from the division of labour; and above all, it enables us to perceive, in their full extent, the intellectual, moral and religious aids we derive from society’.64 In other words, he accepted Rousseau’s belief in the utility of self-preservation and resourcefulness, but reiterated Cowper’s stress on the benefits of sociability. The lessons Percival drew derived from a critique of Crusoe’s strengths and limitations, of his fortitude and arrogance. These kinds of commentaries were quite common. They laid stress on the dignity and morality of work, though not necessarily the capitalist ethic, upon fortitude, patience and thrift. In the nineteenth-century context, these values were seen to foster working-class independence, and Robinson Crusoe was sometimes seen as a sort of primer in this regard. The utilitarian side of Crusoe could also appeal to the small businessman and artisan in much the same way as it would Samuel Smiles, who made heroes of the patient and persevering men of industry. Indeed, some writers would herald Robinson Crusoe as an explicitly middle-class text. John Forster in the Edinburgh Review thought Defoe, the author of ‘masterpieces’ like Robinson Crusoe, represented ‘in its inflexible constancy, sturdy dogged resolution, unwearied perseverance, and obstinate contempt of danger and of tyranny, the great Middle-class English Character’.65 63

William Cowper, Poems, 2 vols (London, 2nd edn, 1786), 1:305. A Father’s Instructions, 324. 65 John Forster, in a review of the two most comprehensive editions of Defoe’s works, Edinburgh Review, 82, no. 166 (Oct. 1845), 480–532. 64 Percival,

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Such a perspective ignored much of the ambivalence with which Defoe talked of the ‘middle condition’ in Robinson Crusoe, and of the deep irony with which he talked of his ‘castles’ and ‘country estate’; ironies that Cowper, one of the earlier spokesmen for the middle class, ignored.66 That line of argument also ignored the social critique that Defoe added to the novel and his persistent ambivalence about the consequences of material success. Farther Adventures, in particular, contains some bitter off-the-cuff remarks about the rapacity of the rich and the grinding poverty of the poor. ‘I saw the World busy around me’, observes Crusoe, one Part labouring for Bread, and the other part squandering in vile Excesses or empty Pleasures, equally miserable, because the End they propos’d still fled from them; for the Man of Pleasure every Day surfeited of his Vice, and heaped up Sorrow and Repentance; and the Men of Labour spent their strength in daily Strugglings for Bread to maintain the vital strength they labour’d with, so living in a daily Circulation of Sorrow, living but to work and working but to live.67

That sort of radical perception, which periodically surfaced in this rambling novel, the product, no doubt, of Defoe’s own commonwealth heritage, did not fit the didactic Crusoe. The only author who attempted to buck the trend of transforming Robinson Crusoe into a middle-class manifesto of industry, utility and social advancement was Thomas Spence, the radical schoolmaster of Newcastle upon Tyne. Deeply embedded in the radical political culture of the north-east which was invigorated by the American war of independence, Spence appropriated Robinson Crusoe to propound his ideas on land reform. These had been shaped in part by the attempt to enclose the Newcastle Town Moor in open violation of the customary rights of the town freemen, an episode in local politics which made a deep impression on Spence.68 Entitled A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (often printed phonetically), Spence belittled the ‘stale description of courses and storms, manner of landing &c’69 that formed the staple fare of the adventure story. Instead, he launched into a radical reconstruction of Crusoe’s colony, the subject of the opening sections of Farther Adventures. In contrast to Crusoe’s proprietary colony, in which land is leased to the settlers, Spence had his settlers establish an archipelago of decentralized democratic republics called the united parishes of Crusonia or Kruzonea. These parish republics had free schools, free elections by secret ballot, liberal naturalization laws, interracial marriages, and land held in common. Although Spence was not averse to some small differences in wealth obtained by merit, he insisted on the natural right of 66

On Cowper’s place in the emergent middle-class culture of the nineteenth century, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987), 160–6. 67 RC 2:117–18. 68 The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Newcastle, 1982), ix. 69 Ibid., 5.

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LOST IN TRANSLATION? TRACKING ROBINSON CRUSOE

subsistence for all and ready access to land. His plan, which had each democratically organized parish act as tax-collector and landlord, was an antidote to the agrarian capitalist order that prevailed in Britain which Spence believed held tenants in economic thralldom and political dependence. It was also a counterpoint to the sort of colonial order anticipated in Robinson Crusoe. Our hero was not present at its making; in fact it was Crusoe’s directions for colonization that prompted a land shortage, a hierarchy of wealth and eventually a popular revolution; but his hirsute holiness was on every standard, ensign and flag to be seen, ‘just as represented on the Frontispiece of his History’.70 Spence’s radical supplement to Crusoe scarcely touched the mainstream, although it was likely read in radical circles and made an impression on alienated workers who strove for some political and economic independence from a society firmly dominated by the landed gentry and its financial allies. It did, nonetheless, point to the secret of Crusoe’s enduring popularity. Defoe’s picaresque rambling narrative, his inherent eclecticism, created spaces that others could fill, opportunities others could appropriate. Essentially, I have argued that Defoe’s novel contained within it three principal narratives: a survival narrative, a colonizing narrative, and a picaresque, travel adventure. All three centred on the Caribbean, the powerhouse of the British imperial economy in the eighteenth century, and all three were adapted and changed in the eighteenth century to address different problems and different audiences. They all survived into the late nineteenth century, when Robinson Crusoe became an imperial adventure story without slavery, and Crusoe, the plodding, methodical, practical survivor, shorn of his peripatetic habits and restlessness, of course, became the prototypical British colonist. ‘The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe’, James Joyce mischievously remarked: ‘the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity. Whoever rereads this simple moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot help but fall under its prophetic spell.’71

70 Thomas Spence, A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, being a History of Kruzonea or Robinson Crusoe’s Island [in phonetic print] (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1782), 40. 71 James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, Buffalo Studies 1/1 (1964), 24–5, translated from the Italian by Joseph Prescott.

33

2 Vernon’s Nemesis: The Caribbean Expeditions of 1741–42 On 22 July 1742 there was a hell of a row after dinner at the governor’s house in Spanish Town. It occurred after a council of war between the principal military commanders and the governor of Jamaica, when the affairs of state would normally have given way to a relaxed conviviality. The governor, Edward Trelawny, had received a complaint from an American merchant about the impressment of ‘his best and only good hand’ by the royal navy. The governor raised the issue after dinner, once the army commanders had left. The commander of the Jamaica station, Admiral Edward Vernon, dismissed the complaint. He had already fallen out with the army officers over manning his ships, and he was clearly irritated that so much had been made of this particular incident, and of pressing in general. He told the governor that the incident was little more than a ‘chimera’. He was especially annoyed by the antics of one member of the Jamaican council, Samuel Dicker,1 a merchant connected to the Devonshire woollen trade and a protégé of Trelawny, who had stirred up passions against pressing by organizing a petition against the lieutenant of the Lichfield for aggressively taking men off merchant vessels. Vernon knew Dicker personally. Earlier in the year, when Trelawny was suffering from a bout of malaria, Dicker’s house had been used for a council of war.2 In Vernon’s opinion Dicker was a ‘peevish malicious Fellow… a Scoundrel and a Rascal’. Sir Chaloner Ogle, Vernon’s second-in-command, concurred, whereupon Trelawny aggressively defended Dicker. According to Vernon, Governor Trelawny started from his chair ‘in the rage of a Madman … turn’d as pale as a ghost with Rage and Frenzy, and drew his sword, telling Sir Chaloner, Mr. Dicker was no more a Rascal than he was’.3 Sir Chaloner was provoked by this retort into drawing his sword, or at least made moves to do so. Vernon expeditiously intervened to prevent a duel between the two men. He pinned Trelawny to his chair, and according to some accounts, held down the hilt of Sir Chaloner’s sword before 1

Dicker returned to England in 1747, bought an estate at Walton-on-Thames, and entered parliament in 1754 as MP for Plymouth until his death in 1760. He was one of the Bristol representatives on the committee of the Africa Company in 1750 and in 1757 was consulted along with William Beckford and Rose Fuller on West Indian affairs by the Board of Trade. See The House of Commons 1754–1790, ed. Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, 3 vols (London, 1964), 2:320. 2 [Sir Chaloner Ogle,] Original Papers Relating to the Expedition to Panama (London, 1744), 8. 3 TNA, CO 137/57/1 ff. 161–2; SP 42/92, ff. 177–8. Original Papers … to Panama, 149–50.

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it could be drawn. He then hustled him out of the room. This intervention, and perhaps the rust on Ogle’s weapon, for the sixty-year-old vice-admiral seemed to have difficulty drawing it from the scabbard, prevented an unseemly showdown. Even so, Ogle continued to threaten Trelawny in the gallery and assumed a ‘fighting posture’ until he left the house. Trelawny, for his part, was so distracted with rage that he had to be physically restrained by his servants.4 Trelawny later made light of the incident. ‘One could not help laughing at the absurd extravagant madness of one Admiral and the passive, silly servility & ninny-like apish behaviour of the other’, he wrote to Andrew Stone the following month. ‘I could not imagine that I was to be kill’d by a pudding, but it seems Pallas sav’d me in the shape of rust.’5 Yet Trelawny was sufficiently outraged by this affront to his honour and hospitality to fall out irrevocably with Vernon, believing the popular admiral’s long acknowledged service to the country had been compromised by ‘private resentment and animosity’.6 He complained bitterly to Newcastle that he had been pinioned by one naval officer and menaced by the other in his official residence and he was not prepared to let the matter lie. In fact, Trelawny attempted to prosecute both admirals at the Supreme Court of Jamaica. With Vernon he had little luck, for the admiral had supporters on the grand jury. Yet Trelawny did launch a prosecution for assault against Sir Chaloner Ogle. Nothing, not even the prospect of having to work closely with Ogle on future occasions, prevented Governor Trelawny from taking the vice-admiral to court, although he did waive Ogle’s fine for assault once he had successfully pressed his case. Vernon chided him for so doing. He bluntly told the court that Trelawny had overacted to the criticisms of Samuel Dicker, a man who had allegedly wheedled his way onto the Jamaican council by virtue of some favour his brother had called in helping the court candidates in the parliamentary borough of Exeter.7 Before he left Jamaica, Vernon even told the governor to apologize to Sir Chaloner. The governor retorted he was glad to see the back of him. He had borne enough rudeness from Vernon ‘past the Power of bearing’. What possessed major commanders to fall out in this way? Certainly, impressment was part of the answer, although this was compounded by disputes over who actually had command in wartime situations: admirals, generals or governors?8 Jamaican and North American merchants complained when their inter-colonial commerce was disrupted by the demands of the navy; they were emboldened in their protests by a conviction that a previous piece of legislation, 6 Anne, remained in force. This act prevented the navy from impressing colonial 4

TNA, CO 137/57/1, f. 262, Adm 1/232/374. See also the account in CO 5/42, f. 245. TNA, CO 137/57/1, f. 183. 6 The Tryal of Sir Chaloner Ogle, Kn., Rear Admiral of the Blue, before the Chief Justice of Jamaica, for an Assault on the Person of his Excellency, Mr Trelawney, the Governor (London, 1743), 22. I have followed the History of Parliament and Oxford DNB in using ‘Trelawny’. 7 A True and Genuine Copy of the Trial of Sir Chaloner Ogle (London, 1743), v–vi. 8 The hierarchy of command was an issue at Sir Chaloner Ogle’s trial. See ibid., 7–8, 17–19. 5

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seamen, save those who might have deserted the royal navy. It gave governors and councils more leverage in deciding who should be impressed when the navy geared up its recruitment. The navy for its part was irritated by the way in which the merchant lured seamen away from the senior service with offers of good pay and plentiful rum. Admiral Vernon was not alone in wanting to keep tars away from the fleshpots of Port Royal and from cunning crimps who might encourage them to desert, whether for the homeward bound run with the rich cargoes of sugar, rum and molasses, or for privateering on the high seas. The problem of manpower was also compounded by the fact that the Caribbean was an unfamiliar and deadly disease zone for many British sailors. Long term voyages always brought their fair share of health hazards. They usually came in the form of scurvy, brought on by a vitamin C deficiency, but sometimes they appeared in the shape of typhus-like fevers caused by dirt and overcrowding, and aggravated by any hasty impressment of raw recruits from the urban rookeries. Tobias Smollett, a surgeon’s mate when he sailed with Sir Chaloner Ogle to the West Indies, described in graphic detail the debilitated crews of the 1740s in his novel, Roderick Random. He recalled a sick-berth of fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of day as well of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of morbid streams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies.9

If crew members escaped this insanitary hell, a steady diet of salted beef, biscuit and brackish water, supplemented by generous rations of rum, rendered them vulnerable to the new pathogens of the Caribbean. As one English sailor in Vernon’s squadron wrote to his brother in London, We are in a Mesirable condition for want of fresh provision, our meet is salt as brine, our bread as it lays on the table swarms with Maggots, and the water here fluxes us all…. We are well one day and Dead the next.10

The deadliest of these pathogens were strains of malaria, inflicted by the mosquito; especially yellow fever, a disease that was transmitted by the aedes aegypti. This particular insect bred in casks and cisterns, travelled short distances, and needed a temperature of roughly 20 degrees Celsius to multiply.11 Seaborne traffic in tropical zones was one of its habitats. First discovered in the 1630s in Brazil and Guadeloupe, yellow fever became a familiar killer as the eighteenth century advanced. There were twenty-eight serious outbreaks of yellow fever in North America and the Caribbean in the period 1630–1700; there were forty-six in the next seventy years, to 1770; and a

9

Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random, intro. H. W. Hodges (London, 1927), ch. 25, 153. Cited in freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~cmtilbury/hmstilb.html. 11 W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), 188–9. 10

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further hundred before the century was out.12 The rising incidence of reports can partly be attributed to the growing sensitivity of doctors and administrators to the problem and the disposition to record it. Yet it was also critically related to the mass migrations of the Atlantic: these included some six million slaves, whose forced migration facilitated the growth of yellow fever in the Americas. It also included some 270,000 immigrants from Britain alone; and hundreds of thousands of troops and seamen who were assigned to defend European maritime and territorial interests in colonial economies of increasing importance. The mix of these populations spelt epidemiological trouble. Kingston, Jamaica, for example, the principal terminus of the British slave trade in the eighteenth century and just along the coast from the naval station of Port Royal, was an extremely hazardous place to live in. It had mortality rates that were two, if not three, times higher than those of London in the first half of the eighteenth century and well in excess of the Chesapeake.13 It took three children to make one adult in Jamaica, and only one in ten survived past the age of thirty. For newcomers, life could be very short. Indentured servants stood a forty per cent chance of dying before they served out their term. Seamen fell like ninepins, usually to what was described as the ‘bleeding fever’.14 They constituted twenty-nine per cent of all registered burials in Kingston and the adjoining parishes in the middle years of the century. Soldiers fared no better. Newcomers were especially affected, especially those who drank heavily and did not protect themselves from the ‘meridian sun’.15 Those that managed to serve a year and become more acclimatized to the tropics stood a three times better chance of survival than the next batch of recruits. Even so, mortality rates could be significant. In the late eighteenth century, five per cent of the British soldiers garrisoned in Kingston died annually; nearly ten per cent in Spanish Town.16 Earlier in the century it was a lot higher. Contemporaries had no understanding of what caused yellow fever. Doctors still adhered to humoral or miasmic theories of causation, just as Smollett had in Roderick Random. An account of yellow fever at Cartagena in the 1730s, which was read to the British Royal Society in 1749, believed the disease was caused by ‘a Corruption of the Blood and Humours’. Its author, Don Antonio de Ulloa, certainly recognized the symptoms: weariness, headaches, then acute vomiting and delirium; so violent, he said, that men sometimes had to be tied down in 12

August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, 3 vols (London, 1883–86) 1:318–21. 13 Trevor Burnard, ‘“The countrie continues sicklie”: White Mortality in Jamaica 1655–1780’, Social History of Medicine, 12/1 (April 1999), 45–72. 14 Ibid., 54. 15 William Lemprière, Practical Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica, 1792–1797, 2 vols (London, 1799) 1:223–9. 16 Ibid., 1:229; see also John R. McNeill, ‘The Ecological Basis of Warfare in the Caribbean, 1700–1804’, in Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Maarten Ultee (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1986), 35.

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their beds ‘that they may not tear themselves to pieces’.17 He also had some sense of which populations were vulnerable and which were not. But the causes of yellow fever eluded him as they did others. This meant the cures doctors prescribed – bleeding, blistering or purging – were at best ineffectual and at worst positively destructive. Naval officers who ventured into the Caribbean thus found themselves at the mercy of natural forces. They witnessed fulminant forms of infections devastating bewildered populations. Vernon and Ogle were no exception. Vernon was often troubled by the poor quality of his recruits and the possibility that typhus-ridden sailors would infect the rest of his crews. In 1739 he had sent some seamen in dubious health back to their families with two months’ pay lest they create an epidemic below decks.18 He had attempted to sustain the health of his men by diluting their rum ration with water and limes. His new concoction, grog, so named after his grogram coat, did not go down well with traditionalists. Some sailors were so angry with the new ration that they pulled down a pub sign in his honour during the Rochester election of 1741.19 Yet without a fresh supply of vegetables or sauerkraut, lime-laced grog did go some way to addressing the problem of scurvy. The admiral also built a new hospital at Kingston to handle the sailors who came down with tropical diseases. He had it guarded to maintain discipline and to prevent the importation of punch from ruining ‘their health and their morals’.20 Unfortunately it was built on marshy ground, a breeding spot for mosquitoes. Constructed as an enclosed quadrangle, it proved more of a death trap than a sanitarium. Death there certainly was. With the appearance of a large fleet under Sir Chaloner Ogle, the mortality ratio rose from 6.7 per cent in 1738 to 17.6 per cent in 1741. This was conspicuously higher than the death toll in the Mediterranean, which barely reached 3 per cent. On HMS Lenox in 1741–42, it was 2.5 per cent.21 By contrast, eighteen of Vernon’s ships lost 30 per cent or more of their complement, the most significant losses occurring on those vessels of war that had come out with Ogle in 1740.22 As a result Vernon found himself searching for over 4,000 new men in a market parched of manpower, with testy

17

Philosophical Transactions, 47 (1749–50), 134–9. On Ulloa and his travelogue of Latin America, see Arthur P. Whitaker, ‘Antonio de Ulloa, the Délivrance and the Royal Society’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 46/4 (Nov. 1996), 357–70. 18 TNA, Adm 1/232/156. 19 W. S. Lewis et al., eds, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 34 vols (New Haven, 1937–70), 30:29; London Evening Post, 8–10 October 1741. For the etymology of grog, see Sporting Magazine, 37 (1811), 131. On the introduction of grog, see also TNA Adm 1/232/253 and Adm 51/936 (part 1), logbook of HMS Stafford, 22 July 1740. 20 The Vernon Papers, ed. B. McL. Ranft, Navy Records Society, vol. 99 (London, 1978), 338. 21 TNA, Adm 36/1767, muster book for July 1740– June 1741. 22 Duncan Crewe, Yellow Jack and the Worm: British Naval Administration in the West Indies, 1739–1748 (Liverpool, 1993), table 5.

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merchants complaining of arbitrary impressments and covertly enticing men to desert the navy and switch to privateers. Part of his and Ogle’s frustration at Spanish town in July 1742 stemmed from this chronic manpower shortage and from the inadequate facilities that made sick men eager to desert. But part of it also flowed from the downward spiral of Vernon’s fortunes after a spectacular start to the Caribbean campaign and the tensions inherent in amphibious warfare. How this played out and produced the fracas at Spanish Town we must now tell. Edward Vernon had not anticipated a Caribbean venture in the 1740s. For over ten years he had been a strenuous advocate of a blue-water policy, that is, an international strategy based on Britain’s maritime strength. As MP for Penryn, he had demanded a more aggressive campaign against the Bourbon powers, troubled by the growing commercial and maritime rivalry of the French and the interference of the Spanish with British shipping in the Caribbean. Defeated in the 1734 election and out of sorts with the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole which he had consistently opposed, it appeared that his public career was over. But in the wake of a mounting campaign to wage war with Spain over the confiscations of British shipping and goods by guardacostas, Vernon had applied for a command in the Caribbean through the auspices of his friend, Sir Charles Wager, the first Lord of the Admiralty. George II was averse to his appointment, angered over Vernon’s opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s Excise bill in 1733 and his implicit critique of an international diplomacy which favoured the king’s own Hanover. Yet the refusal of two senior officers to take a post in the disease-ridden Caribbean strengthened Wager’s hand in pressing the services of Vernon.23 With relatively few ships at his disposal, Vernon was not expected to accomplish very much. Indeed, some wondered whether Vernon’s appointment as commander of the West Indian squadron was simply designed to placate a war-mongering public and perhaps underscore the folly of their belligerence. Certainly, opposition politicians treated the promotion of Vernon as clear evidence that the government did not take the war seriously; or worse, invoking the memory of Admiral Hosier, who was sent on a similar assignment in 1726 and lost well over half of his men to tropical fevers, as a sinister design to compromise the war effort and perhaps silence Vernon for ever. Vernon, however, confounded his critics and sceptics by capturing the Spanish treasure port of Portobello with only six men-of-war. This strike-and-destroy venture was quickly followed by the capture and destruction of Fort Chagre on the Panama isthmus, an important station for guardacostas and another treasure port, with good access to the city of Panama. These two victories, and 23

Richard Harding, ‘Edward Vernon 1684–1757’ in Precursors of Nelson: British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Le Fevre and Richard Harding (London, 2000), 164–5.

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the consequent release of some South Sea Company officers by the governor of Panama,24 made Admiral Vernon an overnight hero at home. His victories and birthday were celebrated in many towns and villages up and down the country, and he was later awarded city freedoms from London and Dublin. Favourably compared to Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, his exploits were redolent of a triumphant buccaneering past and a dramatic rebuke of the government’s earlier policy towards Spain, which had appeared to promote peace at any price. In a phrase, Vernon captured the new bellicose mood of British mercantilism that would brook no compromise with imperial Spain.25 In this respect he was seen as a telling counterpoint to Sir Robert Walpole, whose policy of peace and cautious diplomacy was now out of step with the public mood. Vernon was also cast as a modern Cincinnatus, a blue-water patriot who came out of retirement to serve his country, unlike Walpole and his lackeys, whose interest in politics was seen as corrupt and self-serving. One measure of Vernon’s popularity was that he was nominated in absentia for no less than six constituencies in the general election of 1741, an all-time parliamentary record. At Ipswich, where he had been defeated in 1734, he swept the poll, taking ninety-eight per cent of the voters despite the efforts of the government to mobilize the tidewaiters and corporation against him.26 ‘You are certainly at this time the most popular & best loved man in England’, wrote William Pulteney enthusiastically. ‘All places that send Members to Parliament have been struggling to have you for their representative & I dare say you might have been chosen in twenty more places than you are.’27 During the election campaign, news began to trickle back to Britain of Vernon’s adventures at Cartagena. This expedition was of a different order from the others. The early ventures demanded swift naval action and the rapid storming of haphazardly defended forts; Cartagena demanded a campaign. Like Portobello, Cartagena was one of the principal ports on the Atlantic littoral of Latin America, a critical link in the chain of communications by which Spanish bullion, pearls and fine woods reached Europe. But unlike Portobello, Cartagena was strongly fortified and defensible. In fact the new viceroy of New Grenada had been ordered to strengthen the defences of the city and augment

24

Sir William Clowes, The Royal Navy, 5 vols (London, 1898), 3:58. On Vernon’s popularity see Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989) chs 7 and 10; Kathleen Wilson in ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian England: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, 121 (Nov. 1988), 74–109, and in The Sense of the People: Urban Political Culture in England 1715–1785 (New York, 1995), 140–65. 26 The Poll for Members of Parliament for the Borough of Ipswich 8 May 1741. A Supplement to the Poll for Members of Parliament for the Borough of Ipswich (Ipswich, 1741). The turnout was ninety-one per cent. The only placeman who did not vote for Vernon was John Martin, sergeant to the senior bailiff. 27 Ranft, ed., Vernon Papers, 240. 25

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its garrison in the event of a British assault.28 Moreover, the city could not be attacked directly from the sea because the approach from the playa grande was too shallow for a successful bombardment of the town and the swell of the ocean too powerful for a successful landing. As Vernon recognized after a brief reconnaissance of the port in February 1740 and again a year later, the only plausible strategy was to approach the town from Bocachica to the south-west, disable the forts and batteries that guarded the entrance to the lagoon, and approach the town from the inland harbour. This required land forces and a combined operation with the army, something Admiral Vernon did not relish as it compromised his power to make decisions on what he hoped, in the tradition of Drake, who took the town in 1586, would be his next spectacular victory. Three other factors shaped the destiny of this expedition: manning, sailing schedules and disease. As early as February 1740 Vernon was concerned about the loss of seamen through death, sickness and desertion. In December 1740 just prior to the arrival of the expeditionary reinforcements with Sir Chaloner Ogle, Vernon had twenty ships at Port Royal with a sickness roll of about 400.29 The admiral did all he could to recruit more men, impressing one in three from every slaver and one in five from every other merchant ship, much to the consternation of planters and Jamaican merchants.30 But the arrival of Ogle with the army transports compounded his difficulties. Ogle’s squadron arrived late. A poor harvest in Britain led to quarrels between the Navy Board and its contractors over the price of provisions and transports. This delayed sailing by forty-four days. And while the marine and army battalions were embarking at Portsmouth and awaiting favourable winds to sail, a typhus epidemic broke out in the south-western ports. The result was that Ogle arrived in the Caribbean with over 500 sick men and a death toll of twenty per cent. On the transports, eight per cent of the 6,200 soldiers had died, including the commander, Lord Cathcart, who finally succumbed to dysentery off the French sugar island of St Domingue. A further twenty-three per cent were sick.31 Had the expeditionary force arrived as planned in August, just before the hurricane season, it might have had time to regroup and recuperate before a spring assault. But since the campaign season in the Caribbean was confined to December to May, before the ‘sickly season’ began once again, Vernon had to begin his descent upon Cartagena with sick crews short of complement and an unhealthy army led by an inexperienced commander, Brigadier-General Thomas Wentworth. It was a recipe for disaster. 28 Anthony

McFarlane, Columbia before Independence (Cambridge, 1993), 196; Kathleen Romoli, Columbia: Gateway to South America (New York, 1941), 262. 29 Crewe, Yellow Jack, 81; Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Rochester, NY, 1991), 87. 30 TNA, Adm 1/232, f. 229. 31 Harding, Amphibious Warfare, 83, and table 1.

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The disaster was not immediately apparent, least of all to the British public. There were delays in landing troops and equipment because of the swell of the ocean, and then the grenadiers and black macheteros had to hack their way through the bush to construct a battery before the castle of Bocachica, a gruelling process amid Spanish fire and the tropical heat that took over two weeks to complete despite the fact that the castle was only one mile from the landing place. The Spanish quickly fled the outlying forts of Santiago and San Felipe, but they put up some smart resistance at Bocachica and at the batteries of Baradera on the other side of the bay. Eventually British gunpower prevailed. Bocachica fell, and the men of war broke the boom across the entrance and sailed into the bay. This success was relayed in the dispatch of 1 April, which arrived in London in mid-May and was quickly reported in the London Gazette and other newspapers.32 Once again it appeared that Vernon had done it, a narrative he enthusiastically endorsed, signing off an optimistic letter to Sir Charles Wager with the prophetic words from Psalm 118, verse 23, ‘This is the Lord’s Doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’33 The public, of course, was ecstatic at the news and widely interpreted it as a signal for victory. Those opposed to the ministry were especially delighted, for the report came right in the middle of a parliamentary election when there were high hopes of defeating Sir Robert Walpole and his supporters. ‘Of all the glorious Naval Expeditions under our most successful Admirals’, reported the London Evening Post, ‘none have been more for the Honour and Interest of Great Britain than those that had been conducted by the Prudence and Bravery of Admiral Vernon; his taking CARTAGENA exceeds, if possible, his destroying PORTO BELLO.’ At Norwich, where government supporters took credit for the supposed victory, MP Thomas Vere rolled out the barrels of beer for the populace and the local prisoners, despite efforts by the Tories to appropriate Vernon to their party. At Cambridge it was reported that a ‘general joy diffus’d itself thro’ the whole Town’. Bonfires blazed, bells rang and glasses were raised to ‘the brave and glorious Vernon, Ogle, and all the bold Sailors’.34 Medals were even struck in their honour. Some showed British ships sweeping effortlessly into the harbour; others depicted the Spanish admiral, Don Blas de Lezo, surrendering his sword; a scenario that had been staged at Chancery Lane before an enthusiastic, bellicose crowd.35 ‘It is impossible to express to you the Joy that has universally spread itself throughout the whole Nation upon this

32

London Gazette, 19 May 1741; full text, TNA, SP 42/90, ff. 40–50. Made public in the Daily Gazetteer, 25 May 1741; for the first dispatch see Daily Gazetteer, 21 May 1741, London Evening Post, 16–19 May 1741. 34 Daily Gazetteer, 23 May 1741; London Evening Post, 16–19 May 1741. For Norwich, see Daily Gazetteer, 26 May 1741, Norwich Gazette, 18–25 July 1741. 35 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3:73; London Magazine, 7 (1740), 558; Leander McCormick-Goodhart, Admiral Vernon Medals (New York, 1945), who cites twenty-seven different kinds of commemorative medal for this event. 33

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great Event’, wrote the Duke of Newcastle to the admiral.36 News of the victory even reached some European capitals, with rejoicings reported in Turin, Vienna and St Petersburg. In the estimation of the Craftsman, Vernon’s actions put him ‘upon an equal Foot in History with the Drakes, Raleighs, Blakes, and other renown’d Admirals of antient Times’.37 The London Evening Post produced a map of Cartagena so that readers could imagine the victory in more visual terms, and even speculated on what the terms of capitulation might be. One printmaker had a victory scene engraved as if it actually happened. At Marylebone Gardens, a ‘New Grand Martial Composition of Musick’ was performed in honour of Admiral Vernon and the rest of the brave commanders who had taken Cartagena. One poet proclaimed, as a general election unfolded, ‘Let Party Rage and busy Faction sleep,/While VERNON rides triumphant o’er the Deep…While Cartagena yields immortal Fame,/And Cuba trembles at the British Name.’38 As a result of a letter from HMS Shrewsbury, rumours ran that the troops would be back by August. Yet the next dispatch, which arrived in London in mid-June, confounded this optimism. It told a very different story, of an army rapidly depleted by disease and unable to consolidate the initial breakthrough at Bocachica.39 Some papers even wondered how this depressing news could be reconciled with the continuing reports of Cartagena’s surrender. ‘These Letters have occasion’d much Discourse’, remarked the London Evening Post, ‘and many People are surpriz’d that such a Number of Letter should agree in contradicting the Account publish’d by Authority’.40 In actual fact, after the capture of the forts at Bocachica, the navy had been very preoccupied with forcing a passage to the inner harbour through channels blocked by scuttled ships and bombarding the forts of Castillo Grande and Manzanilla. By then, after a month in the field, the tropical climate began to take its toll. Troubling signs of sickness had been apparent soon after the embarkation of the troops, although they were never mentioned in the first dispatch. Colonel Gooch’s regiment, which had been active in the assault upon Boccachica, reported at the end of March that fifteen troops had been killed, nineteen were wounded, but forty-eight had died of sickness. Similarly, the independent company of Jamaicans had twice as many men die from deadly pathogens as were killed or wounded in the field.41 Altogether 400 men were lost in the early weeks of the campaign. As Wentworth dolefully remarked to 36

Edward Vernon, Original Letters to an Honest Sailor (London, 1746), 41. Country Journal, or Craftsman, 6 June 1741; H. W. Richmond, The Navy in the War of 1739–48, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1920), 1:118. 38 London Daily Post, 23, 29 May 1741. BM, 1854, 0614 269, A prospect of the Town and harbour of Cartagena taken by the England under ye Brave Adm. Vernon, dated 1738–9 but surely 1741. 39 London Evening Post, 20–3 June 1741. For the euphoria and the map, see London Evening Post, 26–8 May, 2–4 June 1741. 40 London Evening Post, 23–5 June 1741. 41 TNA, CO 5/42, ff. 33–4. 37

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Newcastle, ‘Your grace will perceive that a great many of our people are dead from the climate tho’ all possible care is taken to preserve their health by giving them as much room as may be on board the transports wch is the occasion that very few have been discharg’d.’42 By 5 April an already feverish army disembarked on the mainland at the Isla de Gracias and proceeded to march in a defile through heavily wooded vegetation towards the convent of La Popa, from which an assault was planned on Fort St Lazar overlooking Cartagena. Because of the logistics of the landing, troops had to lie in the open for three nights awaiting supplies and reinforcements. As a result, many dropped from yellow fever. Rather than encircle Cartagena and cut off its supply lines, a strategy that ran the risk of further deaths by disease, the army decided to race against time and mount a frontal attack on the fort, whose elevated position would enable the British to bombard Cartagena effectively. Unfortunately for the British, Vernon was unable to support the army with cannon fire because the Spanish had scuttled too many ships before the fortified city. To add to the difficulties, the front line of troops lost its way in the darkness. Those that managed to scramble up to the fort and cross the entrenchments surrounding it, quickly discovered that their ladders were too short to scale the walls of the fort. Many were cut down by the fire of experienced Spanish troopers, and the assault was decisively repulsed, with casualties of over 600. As one American captain graphically recalled: ye: Enemie kept an Incessant fire on us while we advanced, & at 4 wee got under ye: Walls, & began our ffire which we Contined till 8 of ye: Clock, when wee found it Impracticable to Continue any longer & was Obliged to Retreat with great Precipitation while our Enemie kept ffireing on us, Wee had Killd or Wounded near 700 Men, but ye: greatest part Kill’d Dead on ye: Spott, wee was so Near ye: Walls, that wee Coud here our Enemies say in English Words, God Dam You why dont you lower ye: Muzells of ye: Guns, lower ye: Muzells, & fire away.43

As further sickness sapped the energy of the army and killed many of its leading officers, Wentworth recommended that the siege of Cartagena be abandoned and the troops re-embarked, a retreat that was subsequently satirized in a cartoon by Richard Parr. Vernon was furious at Wentworth’s decision and was said to have left the council of war in a huff. After the repulse at St Lazar, his own sailors had been digging trenches and erecting a battery to cannonade the fort,44 and he clearly had high expectations of another assault on this strategic fortification. But Vernon had no power to countermand the arm’s decision; and so in mid-April the British raised the siege of Cartagena. Prisoners were exchanged with the Spanish and re-embarkation began, with the navy burning 42

TNA, CO 5/42, f. 31. From the manuscript ‘Journal of Captain John Lloyd, of Maryland’, cited in www.opferauction.com/sales/oaSale_031804_1.php 44 This is evident from the logbook of HMS Weymouth, TNA, Adm 51/1058, 10–17 April 1741. 43

44

Fig. 3. Richard Parr, Army Proceedings, or the Conjunct Expedition, 1741.

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De Lezo’s flagship, which had been used as a floating battery, and demolishing all the forts as it retreated. In his official letter to Newcastle, Vernon attributed the failure of the expedition to the declining health of the combatants. This explanation could not have come as a surprise, for Sir Charles Wager recognized the risks of tropical diseases compromising the expedition as early as August 1740.45 In fact the impact of yellow fever was devastating, for in the end an amphibian force of 29,000 men failed to capture a fortified city of 10,000 people with only 4,700 combatants. This was because the Spanish soldiers and militia had an immunity to yellow fever, thanks in part to the 10,500 enslaved Africans who had been brought there between 1714 and 1736. They helped built up a herd immunity to the disease. Whereas only 700 of the Spanish troops were newcomers, most of the British were, and consequently the Spanish simply had to sustain a defence while the mosquito did its work. In the rainy season of the campaign, 8,000 British and American troops died before Vernon pulled out, of which only 1,000 perished from the wounds of warfare. Within a month, only 2,100 troops of Lord Cathcart’s original force of 9,000 were fit for duty.46 What the admiral’s dispatch did not disclose was the bickering between Vernon and Wentworth about the conduct of the campaign and the accusations that flew back and forth about their responsibilities. Vernon was irritated by Wentworth’s caution and by-the-book proprieties. ‘The most fatal Enemy to be apprehended is from delay’, he wrote to the Brigadier-General on 6 April, ‘exposing your troops to the approaching rains’.47 Wentworth was upset by Vernon’s hectoring tone, by his unwillingness to release some of the marines and American volunteers, whom Vernon was using in seafaring capacities. He was also irritated by Vernon’s refusal to give him adequate cover on the assault upon St Lazar, an issue which Vernon claimed was impossible because he could not get his bomb ketches and men-of-war close enough to bombard the walls of the fort effectively. Whatever the truth of these complaints, and they have been debated ever since, the combined operation worked badly on this occasion and was the subtext of many of the post-mortems. We now know that the final death toll of the army on this expedition was in the region of 74 per cent for the British and 65 per cent for the 3,100 Americans. In addition, over 4,000 seamen were lost to the service in the course of the year, about 18 per cent of the total stationed at Jamaica.48 Many of these men died of yellow fever, but because many deaths also occurred after re-embarkation, dysentery and typhus were probably contributing factors. Vernon noted that the 45

Wager to Vernon, 6 August 1740, cited in Frederic Hervey, The Naval, Commercial and General History of Great Britain, 5 vols (London, 2nd edn, 1786), 4:438. 46 J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York, 2010), 153–64; see also the review by Karl Offen in the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 36/71 (2011), 290–1. 47 TNA, SP 42/90, f. 105. 48 Crewe, table 5; Harding, Amphibious Warfare, table 1.

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‘season’d Ships Companies’ had held up ‘pretty well’, although he was troubled by the fact that the transports threw ‘their Dead into the Sea without sufficient weight to sink them, which fill’d the Harbour with floating Dead Bodies that raise a great Stench in all parts where the Current principally drove them’.49 He was also alarmed by the ‘stinking and brackish’ water that sailors and soldiers had been forced to drink. As for the troops, it seems likely that their poor state upon departure from Britain weakened their resistance to tropical diseases. This was particularly clear in early April, when the army had to survive several days in the open and went down like ninepins. As Wentworth noted, we were so far from being in a Condition to offend the enemy that we had scarcely duty men sufficient for the Ordinary Guards of the Camp, and many of them in a very languishing Condition, besides that another Calamity threatned us, the want of water, all the cisterns from which the camp had been supply’d being near exhausted.50

Back in Port Royal, Vernon grew extremely disconsolate at the prospect of having to work with Wentworth once more. Various options had been proposed over the course of the year: Vera Cruz, Panama, Cuba. Governor Trelawny, on the advice of an ex-pirate named George Lowther, recommended Panama, but the war council eventually opted for Cuba, an essential rendezvous for the treasure fleets and guardacostas. Because the fleet of Don Rodrigo de Torres was anchored in Havana, the war council eventually opted to descend on Santiago de Cuba, a privateering port to the south west that was an easier target for the depleted force of soldiers and sailors and a good haven for British frigates should France enter the war.51 Trelawny had to persuade the Jamaican planters to supply the expedition with 1,000 slaves to help with the baggage and supply lines. In order to secure their loyalty during the expedition, he held out the prospect of freedom and British army service for those who did not want to return to their masters.52 In the estimation of Vernon, Santiago de Cuba was not easily approachable by sea. It had a narrow, defensible entrance to its harbour which, with choppy waters, made ships easy targets for the cannons of Morro Castle. So Vernon elected to disembark the troops further to the south, at Guantanamo Bay, and have them march their way to the fort, a distance of some eighty miles. On the advice he had received from one John Drake, a mariner who had lived in the region as a fisherman, Vernon anticipated that the trek could be made in a mere twelve hours.53

49

TNA, SP 42/90, ff. 139, 146. Harding, Amphibious Warfare, 120. TNA, CO 5/42, f. 36. 51 TNA, SP 42/90, f. 173v; Richmond, Navy in the War of 1739–48, 1:125. 52 TNA, CO 5/42, f. 117v. 53 Harding, Amphibious Warfare, 125–6; TNA, SP 42/90, ff. 228–9. 50

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Vernon’s optimism was misplaced. Quite apart from the scurvy that crippled the soldiers and their general debility,54 Vernon made no allowances for the unfamiliar terrain and Wentworth’s by-the-book tactics. Upon landing in Guantanamo Bay, Wentworth did not proceed with dispatch but set up a camp, which he named Georgestadt, after the king. He then moved with caution, complaining to Vernon that the road to Santiago was no ‘camino real’, as he had been led to believe. After six miles of savannah, it narrowed into a defile through heavily wooded country. This made the march to Santiago extremely vulnerable to attack. In fact, some of his men had already been ambushed by Spanish raiding parties, whose ‘skulking’ tactics demoralized his troops and made progress difficult, especially when trees were deliberately felled to obstruct their advance.55 This response exasperated Vernon, who pointedly reiterated that ‘Delay’ was ‘the Ruin of all West India Expeditions’. He was also convinced, on the testimony of a former British prisoner of the Spanish in Cuba whose anti-Catholic prejudices had clearly muddled his brain, that the mix-raced Spanish forces would wilt at the sight of the British.56 ‘Had the great Julius Caesar ever harboured such Maxims for his government’, Vernon wrote in reference to Wentworth’s tactics, ‘I am persuaded He had never conquer’d Britain. Or had the great Duke of Marlborough, the renowned General of our Age, entertained any such Maxims, He never could have march’d the Confederate Army into Germany, and preserv’d the Empire; or have fought the glorious Battle of Malplaquet [1709].’57 Inevitably, Vernon’s frustrations inaugurated another set of heated exchanges with the general, which became so accusatory that Wentworth notified the admiral he was sending their correspondence back to London to safeguard his own conduct and reputation. Amid these barbed exchanges came news of blacks deserting the advance parties, of troops running out of fresh water and meat and languishing in the heat and thunderous storms. One officer in the advance party remarked on the rapid sepsis of wounds that were allowed to fester without medical aid and of men being taken ‘suddenly with fevers, which much troubled me, there being nothing fit for the sick’.58 Wentworth’s forces were already depleted from the excursion to Cartagena; now he was losing more. Twenty-five per cent of Colonel Gooch’s regiment were sick, and some were clearly dying. ‘Your Grace will perceive by the returns that our numbers decrease sensibly’, the general wrote to the Duke of Newcastle in early October, ‘notwithstanding our hopes that in this Island the men’s healths would have been preserv’d’.59 Although the rainy season was over, men continued to succumb to tropical fevers, so that within a month Wentworth was reporting that ‘the sickness has increas’d 54 55 56 57 58 59

TNA, CO 5/42, f. 119. TNA, CO 5/42, ff. 73–5. TNA, SP 42/90, ff. 296v, 451v. TNA, SP 42/90, f. 431. TNA, SP 42/90, f. 306v. TNA, CO 5/42, f. 80.

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to so great a degree that if it goes on in the same proportion but one week longer, we shall not have one relief for the ordinary guards and can have no other choice but to return on board the transports’.60 Among the more recent regiments from Europe, two-thirds of the complement were sick. By December, these regiments had lost about thirty-five per cent of their men and now had barely twelve per cent fit from a reduced complement of 1,269 troops.61 With Vernon withholding some soldiers and virtually all of the American rangers to man his ships, Wentworth thought it was time to bail. He could no longer hold out for reinforcements from Britain or Europe. In his view Vernon had been obstructive from the beginning, reluctant to risk a bombardment of Santiago, and more interested in his reputation at home than the expedition at hand. At the end of December, after three months in Cuba, Wentworth even accused Vernon of dumping the army at Guantanamo Bay in order to kill them. ‘By their miscarriage’ he confided in Newcastle, Vernon sought ‘to cast an odium on the Ministry: I have long thought, with a great many others, that he is more attentive to making warr against Sr Robt [Walpole] than the Spaniards.’62 After the failure of the Cuban expedition, neither Wentworth nor Vernon was eager to join forces again. Upon hearing of his electoral successes, Vernon was keen to go home and even solicited leave to do so while the Cuban expedition was in progress. Governor Trelawny, however, had various schemes for making some pre-emptive strike upon the Spanish empire in South America, emulating perhaps the famous forays of the buccaneers some fifty years or so earlier. Learning that the indigenous people of Guatemala were vexed by rents and labour services, he thought of establishing a post in the interior to support a smouldering revolt against the Spanish. Trelawny was aware that the Admiralty favoured this plan, for a former South Sea captain had been dispatched in the Bonetta sloop to sail up the River Dulce to mobilize peasant and peon disaffection against the Spanish.63 To further this aim, and to cut off Spanish communications along the Panama isthmus in the event of an attack upon Panama, Trelawny was anxious to utilize the services of the Miskito Indians, whose raids into the interior and incursions along the Matina coast revealed their potential as ethnic soldiers in the service of the British.64 To this end Trelawny dispatched the adventurer Robert Hodgson to meet with their leaders and, through the auspices of William Pitt of Black River, one of the leading British settlers of the Shore, set up the terms for a raiding party.65 At the same time, he counselled secrecy as to British intentions. The Miskito ‘must never know no otherwise than that they were going to the Westwd on some 60

TNA, CO 5/42, f. 85. TNA, CO 5/42, ff. 87, 100. See also Richmond, Navy in the War of 1739–48, 1:130, who argues that 2,260 men were unfit for duty by mid-November. 62 TNA, CO 5/42, f. 112. 63 Original Letters to an Honest Sailor (London, 1746), 46–51. 64 See chapter 6. 65 [Edward Vernon], Original Papers relating to the Expedition to Panama (London, 1744), 44. 61

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expedition, for to my certain knowledge, there are some on that Coast which carry on a Secret Correspondence with the Spaniards’.66 He was also concerned that the predatory habits of the Miskito might alienate other potential indigenous allies in the region, for on an earlier raid to Pananime, but twelve leagues from Panama, the Miskito had carried off several Indians whom Trelawny was forced to buy back to retain the goodwill of the native peoples and to perpetrate the fiction that the British were there to liberate them.67 During the early months of 1742 various options were discussed by the war council in Jamaica. Of all the proposals, the attack upon Panama, utilizing the services of the Miskito and some enslaved Africans, seemed the most practicable, provided it was carried out before the rains arrived in April. Vernon was the least sympathetic to this idea, principally because he was sceptical that he had the manpower for such an operation and, more generally, because he was concerned about the movements of the French in Caribbean waters and the possibility that they might join the war against the British. When Trelawny impatiently waved away his objections at one of the war councils, the headstrong admiral ‘broke into scurrilous language’ and walked out of the room.68 Although Wentworth also had some reservations about the military commitment to the adventure, he was won over by Trelawny, and perhaps voted in favour of the expedition to irritate his naval co-commander. Taking Panama may have been the stuff of filibustering glory, but this incursion of March 1742 was poorly conceived and hastily managed. After Cuba, Wentworth’s troops were in poor shape for another expedition. As he reported to Newcastle, many were emaciated with the ‘fever and flux’, presumably malaria and dysentery, and some of the new arrivals had gone down with yellow fever.69 To intensify the manpower problem, many seamen were deserting the fleet, and although Trelawny was asked to impress stragglers for both the squadron and the transports, Vernon had little choice but to retain some soldiers to sail his men-of-war. To aggravate matters, an ensign in Brigadier Guise’s regiment killed one of the masters of a transport in a brawl, an incident that threatened to polarize relations between the army and navy. Moreover, after the desertion of many blacks from the Cuban expedition, the Jamaican planters were reluctant to loan further slaves for military enterprises. As a result, Trelawny had great difficulty raising a further 300 for Panama, although he was able to cobble together a regiment of motley adventurers from Jamaica and America.70 The success of the Panama expedition depended upon speed, surprise and co-ordination. None of these conditions held. Strong winds and choppy seas dispersed the transports; the condition of the troops deteriorated once more so that over 900 of the 3,000 assigned to this expedition were incapacitated by 66

TNA, SP 42/92, f. 48. TNA, CO 137/57/1, ff. 34–40. 68 TNA, CO 5/42, f. 176v. 69 TNA, CO 5/42, f. 202. 70 Original Papers… Panama, 47; TNA, SP/42/5/132, 202. 67

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sickness by the time the transports reached Portobello. To complicate matters, Admiral Vernon remained rather aloof from the whole affair. He sailed before the transports and refused to accompany them, reconnoitring off Cartagena before sailing into Portobello because he was concerned that the Spanish had re-established commerce with the city. Rather predictably, the straggling transports disembarked their troops in dribs and drabs, and any element of surprise was lost. The governor of Portobello had plenty of time to raise the alarm before men and equipment were put ashore, and the prospect of a swift, unchallenged expedition to Panama dwindled in the tropical heat and humidity. Wentworth dolefully remarked: ‘Nothing, surely, is so uncertain as making offensive War in this Country; it is more than probably that any Scheme projected but a month before the Execution will be disappointed from a failure of a great part of the instruments.’71 In effect, the Panama expedition was abandoned before it had really begun. After Panama there were only recriminations. The frustrations of men whose reputations were being compromised by disease and inter-service disagreements was strikingly evident at the Governor’s house in July 1742 when Ogle very nearly drew his sword on Trelawny. Inevitably they spilled over into print and prompted satirical verses about wrangling commanders who ‘Fall out about what ne’er was won, / And reap up what they might have done.’72 Even before the fracas in Spanish Town, Vernon had been repairing his reputation at home with selective commentary on what had happened at Cartagena. In a letter to a friend printed in the Craftsman, he vindicated his own conduct during that expedition.73 The admiral maintained he had protected the army to the best of his powers, but ‘sickness and want of water’ had allegedly forced the army to raise the siege. Vernon never made it clear whether he thought the declining health of the troops a sufficient reason for abandoning the expedition so precipitously. While he admitted that the sickness among the troops had become ‘very general’ since their re-embarkation, he also declared he was ‘heartily sick’ of combined operations with the army. This led some to wonder whether the ministry should not shoulder some blame for the failure of the expedition. Evoking the memory of earlier, successful, buccaneering incursions by Drake and Venables, opposition weeklies charged the ministry with constraining Vernon’s hand by sending inexperienced troops to tropical climes at absolutely the wrong time of the season. In a fictitious dialogue between a Squire Grub of St James and Caleb d’Anvers of Gray’s Inn that hit the front page of the Craftsman in August 1741, the lawyer accused the government of reserving its crack regiments for Europe and sending a ‘raw, new-raised Corps’ to the West Indies, ‘who had not Time to be taught Half their Business and very

71

TNA, CO 5/42, f. 207. [Honest Sailor], Duel or No Duel; or, the Skirmish of the West-India Heroes (London, 1743), 8. 73 Craftsman, 27 June 1741. 72

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few of them enured to the Inclemencies of any Climate except their own’.74 This accusation chimed with the older theme that the government had reluctantly entered the war from the beginning. In the immediate post-mortems on Cartagena, government indifference or incompetence became the principal way in which the opposition explained the catastrophe. Although it quickly became clear that there was little love lost between the two commanders of the expeditions, few attributed the failure to their inability to conduct joint operations or to their personal failings. The London Evening Post printed an account that was critical of Wentworth’s assault on Fort St Lazar, and later accused the general of indecision in Cuba, but by and large it ascribed the failure of the expeditions to the government’s administrative incompetence. In September it focussed on the lack of experienced engineers; in November, when news of the Cuban expedition began to reach Britain, the paper wondered why the attack on Santiago was so poorly provisioned.75 Similarly, the author of The Conduct of Admiral Vernon Examin’d, while keen to vindicate the admiral from government malice, declared at the outset that he was not about to play navy against army in the aftermath of Cartagena. He reserved his barbed comments for the government’s failure to capitalize on Vernon’s early successes. To be sure, he criticized Wentworth for not pressing forward with dispatch before the onset of the rains, but he was more vociferous in blaming the government for doing too little, too late, and sending poorly trained troops at the wrong time of the year.76 For their part government spokesmen might have been tempted to impugn the reputation of Vernon, well known to be the darling of the Opposition. Yet the government had tried to take some credit for Vernon’s early victories and was hardly in a position to disavow his talents without opening itself to the charge of inconsistency. Instead, government supporters emphasized the role of natural forces in accounting for the failure of the expeditions, especially Cartagena. The Daily Gazetteer attributed the retreat from the Colombian treasure port to ‘the natural Distemper of the Country at that Time of the Year’. To reinforce this notion, the Gazetteer reminded readers of past expeditions where tropical fevers had thwarted plans. It cited General Penn’s abortive raid upon Hispaniola in 1655 where troops languished in the tropical heat without adequate supplies of water and food. It also noted that in 1697, when the French admiral, Jean-Bernard-Louis Desjean, baron de Pointis, took Cartagena after a siege of only seventeen days, he was forced to abandon the town as his troops sickened. By the time his shattered squadron returned to Brest, de Pointis had

74 Craftsman, 1 August 1741; see also Craftsman, 11 July 1741, Common Sense, 18 July 1741; Daily Gazetteer, 25 July 1741. 75 London Evening Post, 24–6 September 1741; 19–21 Nov. 1741. For the criticism of Wentworth for bungling the attack on St Lazar, see London Evening Post, 7–9 July 1741. 76 The Conduct of Admiral Vernon Examin’d and Vindicated (London, 1741).

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lost fifty-eight per cent of his men and as many as fifty-four officers.77 It was a cautionary tale of the hazards of tropical warfare. Despite the failure of the expeditions, Vernon still retained some éclat with the public throughout 1741 and 1742. Some wrote off the failure of Cartagena as an untoward blessing; it was a dubious prize in the first place, nothing more than a graveyard for troops and really of little consequence to a nation committed to maritime commerce rather than territorial empire.78 Others believed Vernon had done all he could in trying circumstances. As the Newcastle Courant remarked: ‘He has sacrificed his Life, his Fortune, and his Reputation for the Welfare and Honour of his Countrymen’, which was all that could be expected of a ‘true Patriot’.79 As long as Vernon served as a viable political counterpoint to Walpole, his limitations as an admiral were overlooked. In November 1741, there were allegations that the hot-headed Vernon had compromised his command through ‘private resentment and animosity’,80 but this did not inhibit many from commemorating his birthday and the capture of Portobello. These were celebrated with gusto as far afield as London, Liverpool, Gloucestershire and Norfolk. As one paper remarked, ‘England deserves a Hero.’81 By the time Vernon returned to Britain in January 1743, however, his star was waning. ‘The great Vernon is landed’, Horace Walpole wrote to Mann, ‘but we have not been alarmed with any bonfires or illuminations: he has outlived his popularity’.82 This judgement was not entirely correct, for at the Atlantic port of Bristol he was received with ‘loud Acclamations by the People’ as he travelled to visit the mayor of the city. Once he arrived in London, moreover, Vernon received his freedom from grateful City merchants and tradesmen in a carefully choreographed matinee.83 Yet after the fall of Walpole in February 1742 Vernon no longer received as many accolades as he once did. His usefulness as a political foil to Sir Robert was over, and consequently the nagging rivalries of the expeditionary commanders surfaced more explicitly than they did in the initial response to raising the siege at Cartagena. One of Vernon’s protégés, Captain Charles Knowles, fired the opening shot in this new round of recriminations. Writing anonymously, he accused Wentworth of unnecessarily exposing his troops to the inclement climate from the moment they landed, sowing the seeds of destruction that followed.84 He 77

Daily Gazetteer, 24 June, 20 July 1741. Considerations on the War: Wherein the Transactions Antecedent thereunto, and consequent thereon, are Fairly Stated and Impartially Examined (London, 1742), 34–5. 79 Newcastle Courant, 19–26 Dec. 1741. 80 London Evening Post, 19–21 Nov. 1741. 81 London Evening Post, 5–7 Nov, 1741. For celebrations, see London Evening Post, 12–14, 14–17, 17–19 Nov. 1741; Newcastle Courant, 21–8 Nov. 1741. 82 168 Walpole Correspondence, 17:466, 18:135. 83 Newcastle Courant, 8–15 Jan. 1743; Cyril Hughes Hartmann, The Angry Admiral: The Later Career of Edward Vernon, Admiral of the White (London, 1953), 128. 84 Charles Knowles, An Account of the Expedition to Carthagena (London: 3rd edn, 1743), 8n. 78

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also lambasted the general for his tardiness in erecting a battery at Bocachica, leaving the navy to bear the brunt of Spanish resistance at the narrow passage to the bay. In Knowles’ opinion the army was feckless and undisciplined, led by rakes and salon officers who knew nothing of tropical warfare. 85 Consequently, they flubbed the landing at the Isla de Gracias and bungled the approach to St Lazar. As for the American auxiliaries who participated in the disastrous assault on the fort, they were a rum-swilling bunch of adventurers, led by amateur officers composed of ‘Blacksmiths, Taylors, Shoemakers, and all the Banditti that Country affords.’86 Knowles’ savage indictment of the army bordered on caricature, but its arresting detail won admirers. As a writer in Old England remarked, ‘Tho’ the Author of this Performance has not thought fit to put his Name to it yet the facts contain’d in it are so new and so perspicuously stated, that it well deserves the publick Attention.’87 The shilling pamphlet ran through three editions in two months and was given a good airing in the Gentleman’s Magazine as well as in some provincial papers.88 The account likely influenced James Ralph in his quick history of Sir Robert Walpole’s administration, where he unabashedly vindicated Vernon at the expense of Wentworth. ‘It is fresh in every one’s Memory’, remarked Ralph, ‘how, when [Vernon] had beaten their Forts about their Ears, sunk their Ships, and rode triumphantly in their Harbour, the whole project was unhappily disconcerted and a great Number of gallant young Britons sacrificed by the supposed rashness of another Off––r, upon a separate command.’89 Five months passed before another pamphlet appeared to question some of Knowles’ assertions. Published in December 1743, the author admitted that Wentworth was a little slow off the mark at Bocachica, but he attributed this to the declining health of many of his troops and to the difficulties in cutting fascines and pickets in the tropical heat. He also accused Vernon of holding back men when Wentworth needed them, and this, together with the difficulties of landing the rest of the army amid ‘the great surf of the sea’ made for a tardy and ultimately fateful expedition.90 By the time the navy had cut the boom at Bocachica and cleared the scuttled ships in the approach to the inner harbour, the tropical heat and night chills were beginning to take their toll, on seamen as well as soldiers. At that point, the logistical problems of digging 85 See also Duel or No Duel, 11, which wondered why the armed forces did not pay more attention to the experience of ‘honest tars’ rather than ‘silkworm courtiers’. 86 Ibid., 56. 87 Old England, or the Constitutional Journal, 16 April 1743, reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 13 (April 1743), 207. 88 The pamphlet was published around 12 April 1743 and was into its third edition by June. See Daily Gazetteer, 12 April, 8 June 1743. 89 James Ralph, A Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (London, 1743), 486. 90 A Journal of the Expedition to Carthagena (London, 1744), 8–23.

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trenches, erecting camps and batteries, and co-ordinating cannonades were aggravated by fatigue and disease, facts which Vernon confronted with obstreperous impatience and despair. Whereas Knowles’ Account explained the failure of the siege of Cartagena largely in terms of military ineptitude, the author of the Journal stressed the difficulties of tropical warfare, where time, weather and disease were the determining factors. In the wake of the Journal came a torrent of documentary evidence from the two commanders themselves. Both Wentworth and Vernon had demanded a public inquiry into the expeditions; the Duke of Newcastle had turned them down, and so they vented their cases in the public domain. Wentworth accused Vernon of holding back men at critical points in the advance on Cartagena and failing to give him adequate cover in the assault of Fort St Lazar.91 Vernon portrayed Wentworth as a diffident commander unwilling to recognize the necessities of tropical warfare, where swift decisions and action were vital to the success of any action. Drawing on de Pointis’ account of his descent on Cartagena, Vernon calculated that the joint forces had six weeks to complete their mission before tropical disease would begin to undermine their military effectiveness.92 This advice, which he maintained he offered constantly to Wentworth, was blithely ignored. Had he been given full command of the expeditions in Cartagena and Cuba, Vernon boldly asserted, victory would have been the order of the day. Both of these large and likely subsidized pamphlets ran into second editions but judging from the lack of response in the newspapers and periodicals, the public was losing interest in the quarrel between these two men over the failure of their expeditions.93 Public interest had shifted to the European theatre of war, where George II’s military strategy at Dettingen had fired up controversy about the baleful influence of Hanover in British politics. West Indian news was crowded out by discussions of Hanoverian subsidies and the insolence of its mercenaries, and then by the disconcerting rumours of a French-sponsored Jacobite rebellion. Even so, Vernon was not completely out of the limelight. His outspoken attacks on the Navy Board for its failure to provide the British crews with the ships and provisions they deserved struck a chord with a public still troubled by rumours of administrative graft and incompetence. Vernon paid the price for his outspokenness, for in the list of naval promotions of June 1744 he was overlooked in favour of junior officers, including his Caribbean subordinate, Sir Chaloner Ogle. To some, he had been mistreated. On the anniversary of his birthday in 1744, Coventry merchants and tradesmen drank 91 [Thomas Wentworth], Authentic Papers relating to the Expedition to Carthagena (London, 2nd edn, 1744). 92 [Edward Vernon] Original Papers relating to the Expedition to Carthagena (London, 2nd edn, 1744), 110. The preface made it clear that this was a reply to the Journal of the Expedition to Carthagena. 93 Although they were recounted in Richard Rolt, An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of the Several Powers of Europe…1739–48, 4 vols (London 1749–50), 2:164–5.

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the admiral’s health along with other ‘Defenders of our Liberties’, a toast, the Worcester Journal remarked, that revealed the ‘People’ were ‘HONEST enough to distinguish and pay a due regard to MERIT, even in DISGRACE’.94 ‘All ideas of Triumph and Treasures were effaced by those of Sickness and Mortality’, reflected the baron de Pointis on his venture to Cartagena, in a new English translation of 1740.95 It was a remark that was repeated in the press, yet it was not one that was wholeheartedly endorsed by the British regarding the expeditions of 1741–42. Although there were many who recognized the hazards of tropical warfare and the risks it entailed, there remained an abiding conviction that there was enough play in the ecological system for victory to have been possible. To some extent this was confirmed in the public imagination by the swashbuckling adventures of a buccaneering past. Drake’s descent on Cartagena in 1586, Morgan’s famed sacking of Portobello and Panama during the years 1668–71, and de Pointis’ capture of Cartagena in 1697 were historical precedents that were difficult to ignore in the climate of bellicose mercantilism that characterized the early 1740s, when Britain sought to raid Spanish treasure ports and dislocate its shipping. Those buccaneering exploits were constant referents of the war in central America, and although two of those expeditions (those of 1586 and 1697) were actually telling reminders of the hazards of tropical warfare, they did not dispose the public to believe that the intrepid admiral had simply been defeated by natural forces. Given the very political context of Vernon’s earlier victories, some other, more political, explanation forced itself on the public, usually in the shape of governmental indifference to the West Indian ventures or incompetence in supplying the necessary human resources or materials. Even Wentworth’s seeming ineptitude could be framed within a narrative that blamed the government for not consolidating the command of the amphibious expedition under an admiral of proven abilities and vision. Consequently, the expeditions endured in the popular memory as botched ventures, not tragic ones. If the risks of tropical warfare were understood, the human costs were largely ignored, or rendered incidental to the calamity under review. Pamphleteers tended to assess tropical warfare in terms of national honour or commercial profit;96 the dreadful cost in human terms was a given, at 94

Weekly Worcester Journal, 16/23 Nov. 1744. J. B. L. Desjean, baron de Pointis, A Genuine and Particular Account of the Taking of Carthagena by the French And Buccaneers in the Year 1697 (London, 1740), 63. This was an English translation of Relation de l’Expédition de Carthagène Faite par les François en 1697 (Amsterdam, 1698). 96 For two pamphlets that were preoccupied with the economic profit or loss of the war, see Hireling Artifice Detected: or, The Profit and Loss of Great Britain in the Present War with Spain Set in its True Light (London, 1742) and Philalethes, The Profit and Loss of Great Britain (London, 1742). 95

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best marshalled to make a political point. Even Tobias Smollett’s searing critique of the Cartagena expedition in Roderick Random, with its graphic descriptions of fevers, filth and putrefaction, was unable to foreground the human calamities of tropical warfare.97 Despite the fact that the novel was something of a best-seller, with 6,500 copies printed in its first run between January 1748 and November 1749, its vision of proud commanders neglecting the health of their troops did not take hold among the mid-eighteenth-century public. In his discussion of Cartagena in his naval history of 1757, John Entick took the health hazards of tropical warfare into account, but in the end he attributed the failure to capture the town to General Wentworth’s indecision. Entick’s principal concern was whether Vernon had acted honourably in a situation where resentment and disappointment could easily generate unreasonable retributions on non-combatants; whether ‘through wantonness’ he had ‘given the least Loose to any of those rapacious Practices of War so often committed and so generally expected from the Resentment of an exasperated and even a victorious Enemy’.98 In other words, whether he had winked at brutal pillage. In Entick’s view, Vernon had acted as a brave and responsible admiral, abiding by the acknowledged conventions of war. Five years later, in a further assessment of the Cartagena invasion, John Campbell declared that Vernon would have emulated his buccaneering predecessors ‘if the commander of the land-forces had acted with equal prudence and bravery’.99 Drinking songs perpetuated this myth, casting Vernon as a heroic figure whose venturesome victories restored British pride and transcended political indecision. So, too, did cheap pamphlets like Admiral Vernon’s Ghost, in which a spectre of the ‘glorious’ commander laments the loss of British honour at a low point in the Seven Years War and mourns the fact that the country is now overrun by ‘corrupters, gamesters, r––kes and fools’.100 So Cartagena survived in the tradition of derring-do; as an expedition that might have reproduced the heroics of a buccaneering past and did not abrogate the rules of war. The appalling mortality of troops was secondary to matters of national honour. As one of Vernon’s first biographers put it, the expeditions of Cartagena and Santiago de Cuba cost Britain £3 million, ‘a great many lives’, and ‘what was more’, damaged her reputation as an ‘irresistible’ maritime power.101 In his eyes, Britain’s international reputation counted for more than the human and financial cost of war. It was not until the appalling mortality of the 1790s, when over 45,000 troops died on successive Caribbean expeditions, 97 Smollett,

Roderick Random, ch. 33. For Smollett’s naval career, see Lewis Mansfield Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton, 1949), 30–7 and ‘The Naval Scenes of Roderick Random’, PMLA, 49/2 (June 1934), 593–8. 98 John Entick, A New Naval History, or, Complete View of the British Marine (London, 1757), 757–9. 99 John Campbell, An Account of the Spanish Settlements in America (Edinburgh, 1762), 369. 100 See The Careless Bachelor’s Garland (Newcastle, 1775?); Admiral Vernon’s Ghost (London, 1758), 8. 101 The Life of Admiral Vernon, by an Impartial Hand (London, 1758), 241.

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that the British would begin to attend to the ecological dangers and human cost of empire.102 Even then the attention was sometimes opportunistic and half-hearted. When Richard Brinsley Sheridan raised the issue of the human toll of the West India expeditions in April 1796, Henry Dundas tweaked his sincerity, wondering why the Whig politician had not raised the matter earlier. Indeed, Sheridan had a lot more to say on the subsequent question before the Commons, the tax on sporting dogs. This tax, he declared, ‘was repugnant to the principles of humanity’ because it would mean a death warrant to ‘that valuable race of animals’.103 To this habitué of the turf, the hunt and the gambling table, the fate of sporting dogs was of more concern than the loss of redcoats in far-off tropical climes.

102 On

this issue, see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987), ch. 14. 103 Morning Chronicle, 22, 26 April 1796.

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3 War, Race and Labour in Caribbean Waters, 1740–50 On a Saturday night in October 1744, in the English harbour of Antigua, the crew of the Mercury were living it up. The occasion was the capture of a Dutch sloop, or at least of a sloop flying Dutch colours that had been marauding colonial shipping, and the crew members were no doubt looking forward to receiving the windfalls of the prize. Between ten and eleven o’clock, the sentry on duty spied a smaller craft approaching and hailed it to little avail. Amid the noise of drums, trumpet and general merrymaking, the watch could not identify the approaching vessel, nor comprehend the muffled response of its seamen, some of it in French. The captain was alerted. ‘Warm’ with drink and armed with a pistol, he demanded that the boat heave to. The commander of the vessel, the master of a local tender, pleaded with the captain not to fire ‘for there were only Negroes that were with him in the boat’.1 But Captain Montagu, concerned that the intruders might be French, ‘snapped his piece’ nonetheless and on his second attempt fired indiscriminately into the boat, severely wounding one of the seamen in the thigh. The injured man was brought on board, but the ship’s surgeon was too drunk to dress his wounds properly and so the surgeon from HMS Lynn was called for. By the time he arrived, the wounded man had lost a lot of blood. The second surgeon patched him up as best he could, but the man died the following morning. Crudely sutured with needle and thread, with only a small bandage over the dressing, he bled to death on the deck. Captain William Montagu of the HMS Mercury was hardly perturbed by this incident. The dead man was not simply black; he was a slave, one of the ‘King’s negroes’ belonging to the yard at Antigua whose job it was to careen the vessels of the royal navy. As far as he was concerned, his action merited at best a fine and some monetary compensation to the government for the loss of one of its slaves. This was all the laws of Antigua demanded, he informed the Admiralty. He had not committed a wilful killing, ‘much less was it done illegally or wantonly’, he continued. It happened because of the ‘wilful default of those in the Boat, in not answering when haled to’. In his opinion, the ‘whole island’ and other crews in the harbour ‘looked on it in this light’.2 Montagu was astounded when Commodore Charles Knowles, the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Banbury, sent him home to face a court martial. 1 2

TNA, Adm 1/2007 (Knowles), f. 150. TNA, Adm 1/2100 (Wm Montague), 14 Aug. 1745.

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Not only did Montagu lose his share of potential prizes and his place in the officer hierarchy, he complained to the Admiralty, he also suffered ‘greatly in his Honour and Reputation’.3 The lords of the Admiralty, for their part, sympathized with Montagu’s predicament, and they were no doubt influenced by the fact that Knowles was locked in a dispute with the crown over the distribution of two Spanish prizes.4 Besides, Montagu was a powerful man. His father had been an aide-de-camp to George I and before that a profligate viscount who attacked defenceless women as the most celebrated member of the Mohocks, aristocratic bullyboys who terrorized the streets of London in 1712.5 His brother was the earl who invented the sandwich, the first Lord of the Admiralty in February 1748. And ‘Mad Montagu’, as he was colloquially known, was soon to become MP for Huntingdonshire. While the Admiralty did not question Knowles’ decision to send Montagu home, they did not initiate a court martial either. Indeed, the only court martial to eventuate from the affair concerned the surgeon of the Mercury, and this for professional negligence.6 Rather, the Admiralty quickly restored Captain Montagu to the command of another vessel at the Deptford yard and had him carry volunteers and pressed men down to the Nore. Within a month or two, Montagu found himself reconnoitring off the French and Spanish coasts where he picked up a French ship bound for Bordeaux loaded with cacao and cayenne: a catch, he informed their lordships, ‘which I believe will turn out to be a very good prize’.7 Now back in home waters, with his brother powerfully placed in government, Montagu launched a civil suit against Admiral Knowles for impugning his reputation. He won, but while the newspapers reported that ‘large Damages might have been recovered’, Montagu settled for ten guineas and the costs of the suit.8 The incident at English harbour is a tragic story of racial contempt and of the incredible insouciance of a naval officer who, by the racist standards of the day, thought himself above reproach. But it is also about the predatory world of the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean, where the spoils of war were fierce and competitive. And it throws an oblique light upon the different labour regimes that made up that world and shaped the manner in which great power struggles could be fought. I want to begin with this last theme and note that more than one servile labour force faced one another at English harbour in October 1744. Apart from the poor slaves who were subjected to Captain Montagu’s intemperate actions, 3 Ibid. 4

Authentic Papers concerning a Late Remarkable Transaction (London, 1746). Neil Guthrie, ‘“No truth or very little in the whole Story”? A Reassessment of the Mohock Scare of 1712’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20/2 (1996), 33–56. 6 TNA, Adm 1/2100 (Wm Montague), 14 Aug. 1745. 7 TNA, Adm 1/2100 (Wm Montague), 26 Nov. 1745. 8 London Evening Post, 25–7 June 1752. 5

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his own ship contained seamen who had been brought to the Caribbean against their will and were consigned to serve in His Majesty’s navy for the duration of the war. Precisely how many pressed men were aboard the Mercury in 1744 is uncertain, for the muster books for that year provide no reliable indication of the numbers who were coerced into service rather than volunteered. But it seems likely that approximately one third of the Mercury’s crew were impressed men.9 They were part of a larger resistance to naval service that at its most violent generated widespread anti-impressment riots, the most dramatic occurring at Gravesend where a ‘great Mob of People’ rescued pressed men from the local gaol.10 In fact, there were at least sixty anti-impressment affrays reported by the recruiting officers from the inception of the war to the incident at English harbour. Despite the hoopla that surrounded the war at home and the jubilations that greeted Admiral Vernon’s early victories, despite hard winters and soaring bread prices, the reality was that the Admiralty had to scour the jails and streets to find a sufficient quota of men. As Sir Charles Wager remarked to Vernon at the very outset of the war, ‘We must do as well as we can, but we find great Difficulty in getting Seamen enough for our ships, which has been our Case in all our considerable Sea Armaments.’11 Serving on His Majesty’s ships was a poor substitute for the high wages that a seaman might enjoy on a merchantman, or for the windfalls of war that might be won on a privateer. But the reluctance to serve in the 1740s was amplified by the fact that the main theatre of war was in the Caribbean. This torrid zone was well known to be a death trap. The risks of war were underscored by the popular comparison between Vernon’s victory at Portobello and the fate of Admiral Hosier’s expedition some twelve years earlier, when 4,000 seamen died of yellow fever. In the 1740s the death roll never reached these dizzy heights, at least for seamen; although it has been computed that at least two-thirds of the soldiers who embarked on Caribbean expeditions in the 1740s died of tropical diseases.12 Yet in proportion to the number of seamen borne, the death rate was formidable enough. In the cramped quarters of the lower deck, an early exposure to malaria could quite literally decimate crews. Admiral Vernon tried to offset the mortality by building a hospital at Port Royal and encouraging his seamen to wear Spanish woollen frocks rather than canvass. ‘It seems best calculated for preserving the men’s health in the wet Season in this country’, 9 TNA, Adm 36/2008. The muster book of HMS Mercury has not survived for 1744. This number is derived from the muster of September 1745, when the Mercury had returned from the Caribbean. 10 TNA, Adm 1/2652 (John Williams), 19 Jan. 1740. The number of impressment affrays come from my own file, accessible in Google docs: https://docs.google.com/#D81A02 11 Original Letters to an Honest Sailor (London, 1746), 4. 12 Cyril Hughes, The Angry Admiral (London 1953), 124–5. These are the figures offered for the 6th regiment from Cork under Lt Col. Haldane. Hughes thinks the overall figure may have reached nearly ninety per cent. See also John Robert McNeill, The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain (Chapel Hill and London, 1985), 102–3.

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he observed, ‘as a Man can stand his Watch in them and be warm, and then putting dry Clothes on when he goes to his Hammock and wringing out his wet woollens, they are ready again for him next watch’.13 Yet despite these precautions the mortality rate remained high. Of the two squadrons stationed at Jamaica in 1741, some 2,514 men, over seventeen per cent of the total, were discharged dead, while another five per cent were off duty sick.14 On some ships the proportion of men who went down with either scurvy or malaria topped thirty per cent. Without adequate hospitals to house them, the lower decks were seething cellars of disease, as Tobias Smollett so graphically represented in Roderick Random. At Bocachica, at the entrance of the harbour to Cartagena, he recalled, heavy rains, heat, bad victuals and despair introduced ‘a bilious fever among us, which raged with such violence that three-fourths of those whom it invaded died in a deplorable manner; the colour of their skin being… changed into that of soot’.15 In an effort to offset the inevitable mortality of crews in Caribbean waters, the Admiralty adopted a number of strategies. Crews were supplemented with supernumeraries on setting sail from Britain, but this was only accomplished with difficulty when hostility to impressment ran high.16 Another alternative was to impress men in the colonies, either from the colonial ports or from homeward-bound vessels. To give some examples from the next war, when local muster rolls are more complete, the Gloucestershire, commanded by Richard Condon, lost nearly half his crew to impressment on the Bristol–Cork–Jamaica run between October 1759 and June 1760.17 Seven were impressed by the Duke of Marlborough on the outward run, three more volunteered, presumably because they decided they should at least get the king’s bounty if they were to be forced into the royal navy, and a further six were impressed onto the Loew as they re-entered Bristol’s Kingroad, at the estuary of the Avon. A further three deserted in Jamaica, and one decided to enter the King’s Yard, Port Royal, in April 1760. This meant that Condon had to rely on twenty-one of his thirty-five-man crew when bringing his cargo of sugar and rum to the home port. Condon may have been a little unlucky in losing so many seamen to the royal navy; others fared better.18 But on a routine basis slave-ships were especially vulnerable. Guineamen routinely augmented their complement in anticipation of slave revolts on the middle passage, which happened with alarming

13

TNA, Adm 1/232, f. 229v. Yellow Jack and the Worm, tables 5–6. 15 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, 2 vols (London, 1748), 1:297. 16 For requests for supernumeraries in 1739, see TNA, Adm 1/232/172–3. For a similar request in 1756, see TNA, Adm 1/234/590–1. 17 Bristol Archives (BA), SMV/9/3/1/4, Muster rolls, 1759–60, no. 11. 18 BA, SMV/9/3/1/4, Muster rolls, 1760–61, no. 4. On the Hope, captained by William Clarkson, also on the Bristol–Jamaica run, five were impressed, two discharged in Jamaica, and eight deserted there. The crew size was forty-three plus captain. 14 Crewe,

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frequency.19 Of the twenty-five ships that sailed out of Bristol to Africa in the years 1746–47 for which we have detailed information, the average shortfall in crews on the homeward run was over a third (thirty-seven per cent), and this figure underestimates the turnover because some of the seamen who were discharged at the port of delivery were replaced.20 This meant there were real opportunities for the navy to recruit from slavers as they delivered captive Africans to the islands. The royal navy customarily attempted to impress up to one in three Guineamen on their return voyage and up to one in five from other merchant ships. Sometimes there were complaints that commanders were taking more.21 Admiral Davers, for instance, was criticized for pressing too many men from outward bound vessels in 1745, although he claimed he only did so where they were regarded as ‘mutinous and dangerous fellows’.22 On the Matilda, a Bristol slave ship that had delivered 170 captive Africans to South Carolina in 1755, six of the returning crew of seventeen were impressed, although not until the vessel had reached Kingroad, at the end of the journey.23 The difficulty with this impressment policy was that the flow of men frequently ran in the opposite direction. Once hospitals were built in the major ports of the Caribbean, men-of-war frequently anchored to discharge their sick men; and because all ships were regularly infested with the teredo worm in tropical waters, at least until the introduction of copper sheathing in the 1770s,24 they frequently had to be careened in dry dock. The consequence was that naval seamen had real opportunities to desert. And desert they did. About four per cent of the Jamaica squadron deserted in 1741, over six per cent in 1747. These figures approximated those who disappeared while on general leave at home, yet on some ships the proportion was in excess of twenty per cent.25 One storeship, the Astrea, lost virtually its whole crew between March and December 1741. Lured by the high wages offered by merchants for homeward bound runs, or by 19

David Richardson, ‘Shipboard Revolts, African Authority and the Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58/1 (2001), 69–92. 20 Figures derived from David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America. Vol. 3 The Years of Decline, 1746–69, Bristol Record Society xlii) (Bristol, 1991). 21 Crewe, Yellow Jack, p. 123. Richard Pares, ‘The Manning of the Navy in the West Indies, 1702–63’, Trans. Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 20 (1937), 42. For examples of impressment from the logbooks, see TNA, Adm 51/691, part V, entries for 24 and 27 March 1741 on HMS Princess Louisa, and TNA, Adm 51/232 part II, entries for 29 Feb., 31 Aug., 5 Sept. 1744, 1 Jan. 1745 on HMS Deal Castle. 22 TNA, Adm 1/233/5/30. 23 Bristol Archives, SMV 9/3/1/3, muster rolls, 1755–6, no. 3; Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 4 vols (Washington, 1930–35), 4:314–18. 24 Gareth Rees, ‘Copper Sheathing: An Example of Technological Diffusion in the English Merchant Fleet’, Journal of Transport History, 2 (1972), 85–94. 25 Crewe, Yellow Jack, 73–4, 83, tables 5 and 8. See also TNA, Adm 36/1730, the muster book of HMS Lenox, which registered a 21.8 per cent desertion rate 1744–48, far higher than that recorded by Crewe for the period Jan.–Dec. 1747. For home desertions, see N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World (London, 1986), 144.

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the prospects of privateering, whose shares might be double the monthly wage of a merchantman and six times that of the royal navy, seamen were ready to jump ship.26 Naval officers did all they could to prevent this drain of men. In April 1744, five men belonging to HMS Plymouth were each given three dozen lashes for desertion, a punishment that must have drenched the gratings in blood. Very occasionally a deserter was hanged from the yardarm; ‘to deter others’ remarked Commodore Knowles in 1744, ‘for no corporal Punishments have been able to do it’.27 The following year Admiral Davers executed two men because ‘the continual Desertions from his Majesties ships & the hospital obliged me to make examples of them, as Offenders of the worst kind’.28 Yet punishments of this magnitude could only be used sparingly, for in the end the navy wanted men, not bloody backs and broken bodies. Consequently the Admiralty also attempted to deter seamen from desertion by recommending that they should lose not only their wages but their prize money, the latter being regarded as a form of private property which seamen could claim through the prize courts. This penalty was achieved by an Act of 1744. None of these actions diminished the level of desertion as long as local merchants offered high wages for the homeward bound trade and privateers inveigled men from the service with the promise of ever larger spoils.29 Every commander on the Jamaica station recognized this to be the crux of the problem, yet none proved able to resolve it. Admiral Vernon attempted to bully the merchants into compliance, only to witness the desertion of more than 500 men from the hospital at Port Royal; lured, so he claimed, ‘through the temptation of high wages and thirty gallons of rum’.30 When he scoured the taverns of Port Royal and cracked down on the North American traffic in his quest for men, he so alienated the Jamaica merchants that his second-incommand, Sir Chaloner Ogle, nearly came to blows with the governor over the issue and, as we have seen, suffered the indignity of a prosecution for assault.31 Commodore Knowles, for his part, strove to persuade the merchants that the privateers were seducing their crews and that it was in their mutual interest to restrain their commissions. But he failed to convince them this was so and had to tolerate the harassment of his gangs at the hands of privateers and conniving 26

On the scale of prize shares, see Carl E. Swanson, ‘American Privateering and Imperial Warfare’, William and Mary Quarterly, 42/3 (1985), 382. 27 TNA, Adm 1/2007 (Knowles) 16 Aug. 1744. See also TNA, Adm 1/5285, the trial of Thomas Kavanagh for desertion on board HMS Suffolk. 28 TNA, Adm 1/233/4/159. 29 This became a perennial problem. In 1777 deserters at Antigua pleaded that ‘had been inticed on board the Privateers by considerable Advance Money given them at entering and large promised of Prize Money thereafter’. TNA, Adm 1/309, f. 626. 30 TNA, Adm 1/232, 5 Sept. 1742, cited in Pares, ‘Manning the Navy’, 39. 31 TNA, CO 137/57/1 ff. 198, 210, 249–69. See chapter 2 for the quarrel between Knowles and Trelawny.

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magistrates. His captains, he complained, were ‘insulted by 50 Arm’d men at a time’ when they came on shore looking for men and were ‘obliged to take shelter in some Friends houses’. He was bitterly critical of the magistrates, who rather than quelling the riots, ‘encouraged the Privateers Men to knock the Men of Warr Dogs (as they call them) on the head’.32 Part of the intractability of the manning problem in the Caribbean lay with the fact that the imperatives of commerce did not easily square with the imperatives of war. Island planters and merchants wanted safe convoys for their sugar, rum and molasses; open channels of trade with the North American colonies upon whom they were dependent for provisions and lumber; and a sufficient privateering force to ward off enemy predators and to capture enemy cargoes. In other words, they wanted the best of all worlds. They were quite willing to take naval officers to court over matters of impressment. The captain of the Deal Castle, for instance, found himself facing damages of £2,000 for an alleged trespass upon merchant property following an aggressive impressment exercise in St Kitts.33 Moreover, in its efforts to keep the navy at arm’s length, the colonial elite threatened to revive an old statute of 170834 that prohibited the impressment of seamen in the colonies save those who were technically deserters. Although the act was declared to be null and void in 1740, on the grounds that it had expired at the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, there was still considerable disagreement over its legal status. In the northern colonies the act had been used to stiffen popular resistance to impressment, leading to a full-scale riot against the press gang in Boston in which the council chamber was besieged and the regulating officers run out of town.35 In the islands, there was less insistence upon the act’s legality, but considerable resistance to impressment none the less. In St Kitt’s and Antigua, naval officers were prosecuted for riotous recruitment while in Barbados the governor only prevented a pitched battle between the press gang and the mob by calling out the militia.36 In the circumstances the powerful West India interest pressed for the re-enactment of the 1708 act. It did not entirely succeed. The new act allowed the navy to impress deserters, as before, but it also permitted impressment where an invasion was imminent or where there was ‘any other unforeseen and emergent necessity’.37 Loosely interpreted, this clause might well have nullified the whole act, yet it also specified that impressment could only be undertaken with the assent of the governor or colonial assembly. In the incessant wrangling over impressment in Caribbean waters during the 1740s, the colonial authorities retained the upper hand. 32

TNA, Adm 1/2007 (Knowles) 15 Oct. 1744. TNA, Adm 1/1829 (Samuel Goddard) 1 Oct., 15 Nov. 1743. 34 6 Anne, c. 37. 35 John Lax and William Pencak, ‘The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in 33

Massachusetts’, Perspectives in American History, 10 (1976), 161–214 36 37

Pares, ‘Manning the Navy’, 48–9. 19 Geo II c. 30. The act only applied to the West Indies.

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Among the concerns that fuelled hostility to impressment among the Caribbean elite was the fear that the islands would be starved of crucial supplies from the North American colonies as the naval presence in Caribbean waters intensified.38 Within the planter class there was the further anxiety that the islands would be stripped of white men, disrupting the ratio of whites to blacks that was thought necessary to sustain social stability.39 The urgency of the problem was accentuated by the growth of the great plantations on the major sugar-producing islands, and by the lower ratio of whites to blacks that resulted from British competition with the French, whose sugar economy had overtaken the British in the 1720s and 1730s.40 Profits and imperial security did not always go hand in hand. For the colonists the prospect of internal revolt was a paramount concern. The onset of the war with Spain coincided with the Stono rebellion in South Carolina, in which upwards of sixty insurgent blacks around the Stono river rose, captured a magazine of arms, and marched southwards towards St Augustine, where the Spanish enticed runaway slaves with promises of freedom.41 The Stono rebellion was quickly suppressed by the local militia, but in the following two years there was talk of further uprisings around Charles Town and a much publicized scare of a black insurrection in New York. Exemplary hangings and gibbetings scarcely stemmed the discontent and threats of arson.42 In Antigua there had been an island-wide revolt in 1736 led by a band of Coromantees; four years later white planters and their overseers ‘had a most narrow escape from having their Throats cut by their slaves’.43 And while the ferment in Jamaica had subsided with the conclusion of a decade-long war with the Maroons, 38

In fact, as Richard Pares noted, the dislocation of North American–Caribbean commerce in mid-century wars proved to be modest. See Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles (London, 1756), 19. 39 TNA, CO 137/57, ff. 58–61. 40 Contemporaries exaggerated the ratio of blacks to white, but not outrageously. One pamphleteer thought it 15:1, while modern scholars calculate it at 11 or 12:1. See The Importance of Jamaica to Great Britain Consider’d (London, 1741), 15; David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge, 1987), 311. 41 Daily Gazetteer, 17 November 1739; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 285–326; Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, SC, 2005), xiii. The Spanish created a company of black grenadiers, including runaways, to fight the British. See Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 3–10 Dec. 1742. 42 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), 187–93; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005); Philip D. Morgan, ‘Conspiracy Scares’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59/1 (2002), 164–5. Morgan, like Lepore, disputes the argument advanced by Rediker and Linebaugh that the 1741 outbreak was ‘a revolutionary conspiracy, Atlantic in scope’. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 178. 43 TNA, CO 152/44, f. 155, 1 July 1740; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 120–4.

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the situation remained volatile. In the late 1730s a rumour circulated that the maroons had offered to help the governor of Caracas recapture Jamaica for the Spanish. When the war with Spain began in 1739, it was still unclear whether the Windward and Leeward Maroons would hold to their bargain to return runaway slaves and aid the planters to defend the island from enemy invasion. In the event the Leeward Maroons did help quell a Coromantee slave rebellion in 1742.44 Yet two years later, Governor Trelawny discovered another slave conspiracy; encouraged, so he thought, by the recruitment of an independent militia with black rangers to aid the war with France.45 Trelawny viewed the prospect of arming blacks with increasing concern, even though the Cuban expedition of 1741 demanded it because so many British companies had succumbed to yellow fever.46 The outbreak of another slave revolt in St David’s parish in 1745 very likely strengthened his reservations, and it was predictable that in the discussions for settling the Mosquito coast, Trelawny strenuously argued against large-scale slave plantations for fear of further slave revolts and maroon havens.47 The prospect of slave revolt made the planter class unwilling to commit a large number of its white settlers to man His Majesty’s fleets. They were needed, Trelawny very explicitly remarked, ‘to quell any rebellions that may suddenly arise among their Slaves’,48 particularly in wartime when regular army garrisons were overstretched. Planters were prepared to loan slaves for tropical expeditions, especially in the wake of Admiral Vernon’s early victories against the Spanish. As we have seen, black macheretos cut pathways and built redoubts for the attack upon the forts at Bocachica, at the entrance to Cartagena harbour in 1741, and hundreds of slaves were deployed for the military expeditions to Cuba in 1741 and Panama in 1742.49 Even so, Governor Trelawny had to chivvy planters into providing them.

44 Craton,

Testing the Chains, 92. Jorge L. Chinea, ‘Diasporic Marronage: Some Colonial and Intercolonial Repercussions of Overland and Waterborne Slave Flight, with Special Reference to the Caribbean Archipelago’, Revista Brasileira do Caribe, 10/19 (2009), 275–7; David Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels: A Study of Master–Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore and London, 1985), 12. 45 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 106. 46 On the use of black auxiliaries, see Hartmann, Angry Admiral, 99; TNA, CO 137/57/1, f. 101. The slaves were to be offered their freedom for participating in the expedition, although whether this was observed is unclear. Black slaves were also considered for General Wentworth’s projected Panama expedition in 1742, although the Jamaicans were not happy about this, largely because they thought the sacrifice not worth the effort after the failure of the Cuban expedition. See TNA, CO 137/57/1, ff. 129, 146. 47 TNA, CO 137/57/2, ff. 210–11. 48 TNA, Adm 1/3817, Edward Trelawny to Thomas Corbett, 21 December 1743. 49 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, ‘Arming Slaves in the American Revolution’, in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven, 2006), 184. Free blacks and slaves were also used

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Why were planters reluctant to hand over slaves in the imperial war against Spain? Certainly, it was not a matter of skill. Black slaves were sometimes seasoned seamen.50 Some were hired out by their masters to provision plantations or ships in local harbours. Slave codes attempted to regulate their movements and to ensure that they sailed with white masters or overseers; or in the case of Jamaica, with certificates of leave.51 Yet maritime slavery was growing, constituting perhaps three per cent of the total slave population in Nevis in 1765, and roughly the same proportion in Jamaica a decade later.52 Bermuda’s vessels were stocked with slaves and a third of Antigua’s boats had slaves crewing for commanders. Even so, proportionately more blacks were to be found on light craft called droghers which took tropical produce from the shore to larger ships, or from island to island.53 The privateering mania that accompanied the war with Spain in 1739 also opened up opportunities for blacks with maritime skills. With its 100 sloops and brigs, New York led the way, recruiting over 10,000 seamen to man its berths over the course of the war. Not all of these ventures could be accommodated by white sailors, which meant that free blacks, some slaves, and very probably runaways, were entered to run the ships. The same was true in Rhode Island, where roughly a third of able-bodied men, free and enslaved, were involved in privateering.54 In the trade of the northern colonies to the Caribbean, moreover, the presence of black seamen was very noticeable, enhanced perhaps by the reluctance of white seamen to sail to the Caribbean in wartime. A spot check of the vessels lying in Kingston harbour in mid-December 1743, from Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Bermuda, revealed that thirty per cent of the crewmen were men of colour, and some of them were slaves rather than freemen. In the Bermuda vessels, in particular, blacks routinely outnumbered whites aboard ship; a pattern that deeply disturbed Governor Trelawny.55 Blacks also achieved enviable reputations as pilots in Caribbean waters, where swift currents, shifting winds and shoaled passages could be extremely dangerous to commercial traffic. In the windward passage between Jamaica and Hispaniola, for example, the currents were known to be ‘very irregular’ and ‘seldom set in the same direction for two days altogether’. At Plumb Point in the Havana expedition of 1762. Providence Gazette, 18 Dec. 1762. Bahamian masters were compensated for their losses, see Adm 1/237, f. 40. 50 TNA, Adm 1/3676, ff. 57, 122. 51 TNA, Adm 1/233/4/168–9. 52 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 18; Michael J. Jarvis, ‘Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680–1783’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59/3 (2002), 582–622. 53 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 108–10. 54 Carl Swanson, ‘American Privateering’, 362, 371, 379; Charles R. Foy, ‘Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713–1783’, Early American Studies, 4/1 (2006), 57–63; Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons (London, 2011), 254. 55 TNA, Adm 1/3817, Trelawny to Corbet, 21 Dec. 1743; Jarvis, ‘Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves’, 598.

68

Fig. 4. Samuel Thornton, A Draft of the Harbour of Port Royall and of all the Kees [cays], 1707.

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off Port Royal, it was imperative to get the aid of a pilot; as Charles Roberts remarked later in the century, blacks were such a ‘useful body of men that every encouragement ought to be given them both here and elsewhere’.56 Not surprisingly, they were venerated for their skills and knowledge of local waters, and poached by Britain’s enemies. At the end of the war, Spanish brigantines were reported off the Mosquito Coast looking for able pilots among the blacks before they set off on a raiding expedition to the Cayman Islands.57 Colonists used blackjacks on their coastal vessels and privateers, but they were less keen on lending their own slaves to the British navy and officers could run into trouble if they tried to impress them.58 They had only agreed to the recruitment of black auxiliaries for the 1740–42 military expeditions as exceptional concessions to the British war effort. The vast majority of these slaves acted in an unarmed capacity, as ‘pioneers’ or general drudges rather than as ‘shot negroes’, as they were popularly known.59 Given the general uncertainty about internal rebellion, and the fear that some slaves would avail themselves of the wartime situation to desert their masters, it was hardly surprising that the planters were reluctant to volunteer their slaves as naval seamen. Like their counterparts in Virginia and the Carolinas, they thought maritime slavery corroded bonded labour because of the mobility and worldliness it encouraged.60 Consequently checks were set up to regulate maritime slave labour. In Jamaica a 1725 act decreed that no slave should work a boat or ship without a certificate, and offending masters were liable to a £100 fine. If masters did agree to set their slaves afloat on the high seas – rivers and coastal traffic were less of an issue – it was in privateering vessels rather than men-of-war, and only because of dramatic shortages of white seamen. In 1745, for example, John Curtin, a planter and owner of the privateer, the Dowdall, was forced to put fourteen of his own slaves on board his vessel because too many of his men had been impressed aboard HMS Adventure.61 In the same year one Bermudan 56

Charles Roberts, Observations on the Windward Passage, or the Passage between Jamaica and St Domingo (London, 1795), 4–5. 57 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 274. For contemporary recognitions of good pilots in the Bahamas, see TNA, Adm 1/237/42. In 1762, the second best was reckoned to be ‘Johnno, a Free Negro Man’. 58 TNA, Adm 1/3676, ff. 57, 122. In this 1741 case the captain was taken to court and had to pay damages of over £57, in addition to costs. 59 Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936), 254. This practice continued. Lord Albemarle purchased 500 slaves from Martinique and Antigua for tedious tasks at the siege of Havana in 1762. See Providence Gazette, 18 Dec. 1762. 60 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country (Chapel Hill and London, 1998), 238. In 1784, concerned that an increasing number of slaves worked the rivers and tidewater, the Virginia legislature enacted that only a third of a crew should consist of slaves. For the fear that runaway slaves would seek berths in wartime, see Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, eds, Blacks who Stole themselves (Philadelphia, 1989), nos 7, 18, 19, 21, 27, 32, 41, 51. 61 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 139v. For further evidence of blacks on privateers, see TNA, Adm

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sloop, owned by Richard Thompson and captained by his son, captured a Spanish pay-ship bound for St Augustine with a crew of nineteen, twelve or thirteen of whom were the family’s slaves.62 Planters sometimes deplored the way in which the navy inveigled their slaves aboard men-of-war and kept masters at bay through the ‘licentious and uncontrouled Behaviour of the Seamen’.63 One good example of this occurred in 1741 when Jacob, a personal servant of Archibald Wager, the master of the Charming Molly, was impressed by Captain Webb of the royal navy as the boat sailed from Antigua to Jamaica. Jacob proved a good seaman, able to ‘hand reef and steer as well as any in the ship’, and he was keen to stay on board, ‘well pleased with his station that he was on board as an English sailor and not as a slave’. Not surprisingly, Captain Webb was reluctant to give him up. Wager, however, was insistent, and took Webb to court for an ‘assault and false imprisonment’ of his servant, staying the course until the case came up in December 1746.64 The matter was eventually settled out of court, with Captain Webb having to pay £57-15s (£57.75) plus costs. The court made it clear that Captain Webb had no business impressing slaves, and this was the Admiralty’s official position, until the Somerset case of 1772 became law. That judgement gave enslaved Africans rights of habeas corpus if they were confined in Britain by their masters, and so when enslaved black mariners landed in Britain the Admiralty might dig in, as it did in the case of William Parry, a slave impressed on board HMS Acteon in 1796. In this instance the Admiralty Solicitor thought the indenture of service that Parry was forced to sign in Ilfracombe was a ploy to retain him under master and servant legislation and so he refused to release him.65 It was a questionable decision in law, but one where solicitor Charles Bicknell was prepared to take his chances at a time when naval manpower was stretched to the limit. Throughout the 1740s, however, the navy did not proactively recruit runaways. Vice-Admiral Thomas Frankland condemned the employment of the ‘woolly race’ on board men-of-war, declaring he ‘could not look upon that Race to be proper Instruments for carrying on war amongst Civiliz’d People’.66 Partly 1/232/270. On the 1725 act, TNA, Adm 1/233/4, ff. 168–9. 62 Howard Chapin, Privateering in King George’s War, 1739–1748 (Providence, RI, 1928), 213; Boston Weekly Newsletter, 18 April 1745. Spanish privateers were sometimes manned by Indians. One attacked HMS Antigua in Martinique waters in 1762. Boston Newsletter, 16 Dec. 1762. 63 Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Westport, CT, 1965), 256. 64 TNA, Adm 1/3676, ff. 57, 122. The Admiralty could be officious in ensuring the master was genuine. See Adm 1/3678, f. 166. 65 TNA, Adm 1/3685, 19 Oct. 1796. See also the case of the enslaved black mariners released from the Lawrence in 1776, in Charles R. Foy, ‘Unkle Sommerset’s Freedom; Liberty in England for Black Sailors’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13/1 (2011), 24–9. 66 Julian Gwynn, The Enterprising Admiral: The Personal Fortune of Sir Peter Warren (Montreal, 1974) 73, 232, n.11; TNA, Adm 1/306, 20 July 1757, cited in Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville and

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this was to placate a planter class bent upon reviving the 1708 act against impressment. Partly it was because naval captains themselves upheld the proprietorial nature of slavery. The very detailed accounts we have of Admiral Peter Warren’s financial ventures reveal that he was one of the leading owners of slaves in New York province during the 1740s and traded them in his business transactions. Yet the practice of restricting the number of black recruits on board royal navy vessels may also have been prompted by a general reluctance to mix two servile labour regimes. Slaves were, after all, among the spoils of war, and so too were black mariners on enemy ships. Although the war of the 1740s seldom degenerated into the general manhunt that characterized the War of Spanish Succession, when enemy plantations were raided with impunity, slaves were part of the prizes captured by British men-of-war and privateers.67 The newspaper reports for 1744 are full of such seizures. Among others, Commodore Knowles’ fleet captured two slave ships from the Guinea coast and Angola, the first with 400 blacks on board, the second with 650.68 These prizes would have been worth about £30,000 and shared, albeit very unevenly, among the crews involved. These rewards were one of the few tonics which kept seamen aboard ship in these torrid climes, inducing, noted Admiral Vernon, ‘a good will for the Public Service’.69 Sometimes a privateering captain might retain a black mariner when bringing a prize into port, whether he was free or not. In 1744 Captain Dennis had a black aboard the St Firmin condemned as a prize before the Rhode Island vice-admiralty court even though the captain of the French vessel swore he was a free man. The New York court operated in a similar fashion and raised legal hurdles against black mariners asserting their freedom. In 1749 the court decided that an affidavit attesting to a black seaman’s freedom was void because it did not emanate from his place of birth.70 Very occasionally free blackjacks condemned as ‘prize negroes’ and sold to prospective buyers might secure some justice and win back their freedom. Some Spanish seamen of colour were able to do so in Rhode Island in 1745, but this was because the governor of Havana made an international incident of their treatment and impounded a privateer London, 2013), 121 and Pares, ‘Manning of the Navy’, 32n. Warren also brought in slaves as prizes. See Boston Evening Post, 18 June 1744; New York Gazette, 2 July 1744. 67 A few Rhode Island privateers were known to have raided small Spanish towns and carried off black inhabitants. See Howard M. Chapin, Rhode Island Privateers in King George’s War 1739–1748 (Providence, RI, 1926), 82–3, 133–8. See also Pares, ‘Manning of the Navy’, 32–3n. 68 TNA, Adm 1/2007 (Knowles) 12 June 1744; New York Gazette, 25 July, 6 August, 26 November 1744; Boston Weekly Post Boy, 30 July, 6 August 1744. 69 TNA, Adm 1/231/253, 7 Oct. 1740. On the price of adult male slaves, see David Richardson, ‘The Slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic Growth, 1748–1776’, in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery, ed. Stanley Engerman (Cambridge, 1987), 108. 70 Charles R. Foy, ‘Eighteenth-Century Prize Negroes: From Britain to America’, Slavery and Abolition, 31/3 (2010), 382–3; see also Gould, ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds’, 764–5; and Lepore, New York Burning, 161.

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and its crew as sureties for their return.71 It seems to have been an exceptional case. While the sea provided a possible portal of freedom for black mariners of any status, wartime captures emphasized their vulnerability. For slaves captured aboard maritime vessels, the chances of freedom were virtually non-existent. Even after the ending of the British slave trade in 1807, the ‘prize negroes’ taken by British vessels were wards of the state, and in effect, bonded labour.72 And before British abolition, ‘prize negroes’ were generally sold without much ado. In any case, bringing large numbers of slaves on board to serve in the navy would have unsettled already fractious crews and complicated relations on the lower deck. Slaves capturing slaves was one of the historical paradoxes of Caribbean warfare, but it was best left to privateers rather than the large crews of the royal navy to negotiate the contradictions it involved.73 This did not mean that the royal navy did not bring any slaves on board ship; only that it did not actively recruit them in large numbers, with commanders exercising some discretion as to how many they allowed on board. Naval officers were sometimes accompanied by the black servants they had purchased, as was Olaudah Equiano by Captain Pascal during the Seven Years’ War.74 In the muster book of HMS Plymouth, James Caesar, a carpenter’s servant, was entered on 25 July 1745 along with his master, who collected his wages until his discharge two years later.75 Quite possibly a few runaways were recruited at Caribbean ports, especially when desertion rates were high and complements perilously low. On HMS Lenox, for example, which lost nearly a third of its crew through death or desertion on the Jamaica station, we find that William Quashy was entered as an able seaman at Port Royal, and John Quamino as a boatswain’s servant six months later. On HMS Canterbury, where the ship’s complement was down by twenty-five per cent, we discover entries at Barbados for Hilkia Moor and Black Emmanuel.76 Whether these men were runaways or free blacks is impossible to determine. Free blacks certainly found their way onto men-of-war, either as impressed men or as volunteers who feared re-enslavement on the islands if they were without work.77 Among those aboard HMS Litchfield until his desertion in 1740 was John Henzer. He was described as having ‘a swarthy mulatto complexion and black lank hair, aged about 28 years’, five foot 71 Chapin,

Rhode Island Privateers, 152–3. X. Scanlan, Freedoms Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, 2017). 73 On privateers taking slaves, see Chapin, Privateering in King George’s War, 125, 127, 132–3, 147, 154, 200, 216, 229, 238 and his Rhode Island Privateers, 61, 75–6, 84, 97, 112, 150. On privateers with a few slaves on the crew, see Rhode Island Privateers, 126. Of the 102 seamen on the privateer, The Duke of Marlborough, 8 members were slaves. 74 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (London and New York, 1995), 79–94. 75 TNA, Adm 36/2775, Muster book for HMS Plymouth, 1747. 76 TNA, Adm 36/466 and Adm 36/1730. 77 On the possibility of blacks being enslaved for vagrancy in Antigua, see J. Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua (London, 1789), 130–1. 72 Padraic

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seven inches tall with ‘a large scar on the inside of his shoulder’.78 Yet men like Henzer were not as visible in the royal navy as they would be later in the century, when the free black population in the British colonies was larger. Even then, it is doubtful that black mariners constituted more than five per cent of naval crews.79 Slaves and ex-slaves, then, did find their way on board British men-of-war, but only in numbers that made them a very visible minority. As Jeffrey Bolster has argued, racial stereotyping defined their roles. Too frequently they served as cooks, musicians and servants to officers, ‘reinforcing their distinction from the seamen proper’.80 Under pressure from planters, admirals might discharge them as they did in the Leeward Islands in 1775.81 The only exceptions to the rule in the mid-century were the Jamaican maroons who volunteered for HMS Princess Louisa,82 and because of the 1739–40 treaties they were clearly a special case. Where the British navy deployed enslaved blacks in noticeable numbers, it usually followed the army strategy of using them as auxiliaries, assigning them arduous manual tasks. Admiral Vernon hired two gangs of blacks from their masters to help improve the navigation of Port Royal Harbour. The captain of the Deal Castle sent his carpenter, a gang of men and ‘8 Negroes ashore to Cutt Timber’. Later a further six ‘Negroes’ were brought in from Spanish Town to assist in the work.83 In Jamaica and Antigua, the British government even purchased its own slaves to careen, caulk and repair the ships. With their own women and children, they formed small companies, thirty or so in size, known as ‘His Majesty’s Negroes’. From time to time the British navy hired other slaves to supplement this small, but skilled work force. In Antigua, Governor Matthew arranged for 100 blacks to help the navy rebuild its wharf and careen its ships. In Jamaica, Commodore Knowles asked Governor Trelawny for 250 blacks to assist ‘in heaving the ships’ in order to careen them.84 He was reluctant to commit his own seamen, he said, because too many of them had been enticed away by the high wages offered by merchants for the run home. Besides, he added, echoing the prejudices of his day, blacks were acclimatized to heavy labour in the sun in a way most of his seamen were not. As one contemporary writer asserted, ‘Drudgery in the Sun cannot be borne by the Europeans’.85 78

TNA, Adm 1/2006, 21 Sept. 1740. Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London, 2007), 93–4. See also Charles R. Foy, ‘The Royal Navy’s Employment of Black Mariners and Maritime Workers, 1754–1783’, International Journal of Maritime History, 28/1 (2016), 12–13. 80 Bolster, Black Jacks, 32–5. 81 TNA, Adm 1/309/383, standing order, 21 Nov. 1775. 82 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796 (Granby, MA, 1988), 151. 83 TNA, Adm 51/232, part II, entry for 17 Jan. 1744; Adm 1/232, f. 270v. 84 TNA, Adm 1/234/96; Adm 1/2041 (Lisle), 23 Nov. 1743. 85 An Essay concerning Slavery, and the Danger Jamaica is Expos’d to from the too Great Number of Slaves (London, 1746). 79

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In segregating its servile workforce by race, the British navy inevitably found itself short of men on board ship. Ostensibly the colonial authorities co-operated with the navy in its search for deserters. Laws were passed imposing heavy fines on anyone who harboured them.86 But frequently these laws were honoured in the breach. Too many colonial officials had links to merchants and privateers to take the regulations seriously, and when navy press gangs scoured ports to track down deserters, they were sometimes opposed by colonial forces. In 1746 the search party of HMS Falmouth was arrested by the militia in Spanish Town on the grounds that its unruly behaviour threatened the town on what was a ‘negro holiday’. When the Admiral Davers complained to Governor Trelawny, he retorted that the actions of the militia officer were ‘prudent’.87 Thomas Davers thought otherwise. It was indicative, he informed the Admiralty, of the way in which the service was being compromised by officials whose first allegiance was to the merchant and planter elite.88 The tug of war over manning the navy inevitably led commanders to adopt other expedients. Seamen were threatened with the loss of prize money if they deserted. Laws were also passed allowing merchantmen to employ neutral seamen, although it is unclear whether this alleviated the manpower shortages in the royal navy.89 Prisoners of war were sometimes given the option of serving in His Majesty’s Fleet rather than languishing in close quarters.90 Some accepted, for the muster books are littered with Hispanic names in particular. Indeed, free black or mixed-race seamen from Spanish vessels had a special inducement to enlist rather than be classified as prisoners-of-war, for there was a very real prospect that they might be enslaved if they were construed as British or colonial prizes.91 This minority of foreign mariners provided some support. Sometimes these Spanish seamen seem to have been coerced into service, as a set of depositions taken in Williamsburg revealed. They recounted that a handful of Spaniards were taken up in Hispaniola and Roatán and put on board HMS Assistance, which was responsible for convoying the sugar fleet from Jamaica in August 1744. They were then transferred to a London merchantman that was short of men and were treated brutally by the captain, Thomas Mansfield, who called them ‘Dogs, and if they did not work, he would 86

For those in Jamaica, TNA, Adm 1/233/4/166–7. The fine was £50 for carrying off sailors or soldiers by an act in 1745. An earlier act, in 1725, had levied fines of £200, and £100 for hiding deserters or runaway servants. 87 TNA, Adm 1/233/5/233–4, 240–1. 88 TNA, Adm 1/233/5/256–7. 89 Pares, ‘Manning of the Navy’, 36, 40. 90 Some prisoners of war in convoys were loaned to merchant ships short of men. See Adm 1/3817, letter and depositions from William Shirley, dated 23 March 1745, received 3 June 1745. See also Elliot Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate (London, 1798), 196, where surgeon Arthy notes POWs were used to bring West Indiamen to Britain in 1796. 91 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urban and Chicago, 1999), 41–5; Lepore, New York Burning, 161.

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break their bones’.92 The Spaniards asked to return to the man-of-war, where they were treated better, but Mansfield refused to do this, and forced them ‘to be upon Deck in all weather, to work all day and watch at night’, beating them into compliance. Mansfield drove them so hard that they eventually killed him, and the mate, who replicated the captain’s tyranny. They took command of the ship and sailed to the Canary Islands, only to be picked up by an American privateer and taken to Virginia, where William Gooch decided they should be sent to London to stand trial. Spanish prisoners-of-war were coerced into manning British vessels in times of scarcity. Some of those on HMS Assistance had done over nine months’ forced service. Together with the pressing that took place offshore, from privateers, merchant ships, even from vessels flying flags of truce,93 the navy strove hard to retain a minimal complement of men. In 1744 Commodore Knowles complained that he could only man his squadron in the Leeward Islands by exchanging prisoners with the French, a frustrating experience because island governors deemed such exchanges to be within their jurisdiction and frequently turned them over to privateers.94 In these circumstances, the strain upon crews was severe. It was registered by squabbles over prizes and near-mutinies when commanders lost sight of valuable spoils or were thought to be illicitly selling contraband goods that would otherwise have been condemned. On New York’s first privateer of the war, the twenty-gun sloop Stephen and Elizabeth, there was a mutiny when the captain declined to condemn a French ship operating with a Spanish crew because, technically speaking, the French were not Britain’s enemies at that time.95 The mutiny was suppressed by a majority of the crew, and Captain John Lush disposed of the troublemakers by exchanging them for others in the royal navy. Yet on balance, disappointments over prizes only increased the volatility of crews struggling to survive in tropical waters. It led sailors in the royal navy to resent the long terms of their service. One seaman, who had been pressed into service thirty-two months previously and had little respite from the service beyond a brief sick leave in Gibraltar, was sentenced to thirty-six lashes of the cat for describing HMS Eltham as a prison; despite the fact he had worked his way up to being a quartermaster.96 In the following month, on another man-of-war 92

TNA, Adm 1/3817, depositions taken in Virginia, 26 March 1745, received 3 June 1745. For an example of this, see the entry for 2 Nov. 1746 in the muster book of HMS Lenox, TNA, Adm 36/1730. For an instance of a privateer handing over recalcitrant seamen to a man-of-war, see the case of the Stephen and Elizabeth in Chapin, Privateering, 132. 94 TNA, Adm 1/2007/141–8. 95 TNA, Adm 1/5283, court martial of Lieutenant Joseph Willis, 14 March 1743; TNA, Adm 1/5284/507–48. On the Stephen and Elizabeth, see New York Weekly Journal, 10 March 1739; Lepore, New York Burning, 161; and Chapin, Privateers in King George’s War, 133. For complaints of royal naval captains embezzling prizes, see Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946), 239n. 96 TNA, Adm 1/5285, court martial of Edward Stow, quartermaster of HMS Eltham, 7 Nov. 93

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that had done long service in the Leeward Islands, two men were hanged from the yardarm for trying to desert their ship and drowning a midshipman in the process. The bosun’s mate who had abetted their escape was sentenced to 300 lashes of the cat o’ nine tails, one that if rigorously executed would surely have killed him.97 Deserting a ship in foreign waters was a risky business. It was especially risky in the hurricane season between July and mid-October when merchant shipping was virtually at a standstill, leaving seamen little choice but to linger in port. Without contacts, seamen might eke out a pittance on island quays where they were sometimes derisively known as ‘wharfingers’; or they could fall into the hands of local crimps, who would consign them to the highest bidder. A deserter’s chances of getting home were best when the large merchant convoys were about to sail in the spring and early summer, although the chances of detection on such voyages were high. The other alternatives were finding some space for survival on the Caribbean frontier or joining a privateer, of which there were over 400 in Caribbean waters in the peak years of 1745–47, not to mention those rigged out by the Spanish and French. Historians have sometimes suggested that the possible profits of privateering were little better than the wages and windfalls of war that a seaman might obtain aboard a man-of-war. Yet in the Caribbean at least, the prospects were better because the prizes were distributed more equitably among the crew, with only a third of the share going to the owner, rather than a half, as in European waters.98 Much, of course, depended upon chance, upon the capture of a lucrative prize; for privateering crews were not always paid any wages. But the rewards that accrued from captured cargoes of sugar, molasses, tobacco, coffee and indigo were often more than double the average wage paid to merchant seamen and six times the royal navy’s monthly wage.99 Besides, there were opportunities for running contraband trade to enemy or neutral islands. Gresham Lind, recruited as a pilot on a Spanish privateer in 1738, captured the Lark sloop of Hercules Diggins and ran goods between St Eustatia and Jamaica. He may well have trafficked in slaves. The Bahamian and Bermudan privateers seem to have been notorious on this score. They routinely captured slaves from open boats and canoes off the coast of Hispaniola as well as supplying that island with much needed provisions.100

1745. 97 TNA, Adm 1/5285, court martial of Humphrey Lion and William Hillman of HMS Dorsetshire, 9 Dec. 1745. 98 Rodger, Wooden World, 127–9; Carl E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes (Columbia, SC, 1991), 216–19. 99 Swanson, Predators, p. 219; see also Public Advertiser, 30 Oct. 1776, where seamen were said to desert ships in Jamaica ‘on account of the great Success they meet with in taking prizes’. 100 TNA, Adm 1/3818/311–313A. For Bermudan privateering raiding the coast of Hispaniola for slaves, see Chapin, Privateering, 125. For Lind, see TNA, HCA 1/19, no. 18.

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Naval officers sometimes expressed disbelief that seamen with two or three years of back pay would desert for a privateer, but the lure of spoils was great even if the return was sometimes meagre. Although only ten per cent of all privateering crews actually made a substantial profit, reports of ships securing millions of pieces of eight and rich cargoes induced many to embark on such ventures, to the alarm and chagrin of commanders like Vernon.101 Besides, the discipline aboard a privateer was not as harsh as on a man-of-war, where naval officers had armed marines to back up their decisions. The promise of shorter cruises, usually less than seven months, was also attractive. Among other things, it gave British seamen the opportunity of getting back to British North America and from thence to home, for the principal ports from which privateers hailed were New York, Newport, Boston and Philadelphia.102 As a last resort, a seaman might seek a haven to hide in for the duration of the war. In the Caribbean of the 1740s, the number of places where one might eke out such an existence was declining. Most islands and isthmuses were rapidly becoming part of the plantation zone, one in which there was a significant growth of large estates at the expense of poor white settlers. The one obvious frontier for British colonists in the mid-eighteenth century was in Central America, among the logwood settlements of the Bay of Honduras or further south on the Mosquito Coast, where handfuls of white settlers lived alongside the Miskito Indians and mustees descended from coastal Indians and shipwrecked Africans. The Mosquito Coast was of little economic importance. Its significance was strategic, for the British had cultivated good relations with the Miskito Indians, and indeed paid for their goodwill as a counterpoint to Spanish ambitions in the area and as a reserve force for putting down slave rebellions in Jamaica. The logwood enterprises, on the other hand, were important to British textile industries for their valuable dyes.103 They were largely seasonal settlements, run with slave labour, despite the fiction of patriotic discourse in Britain which portrayed them as industrious territories of free-born Englishmen vulnerable to the lawless depredations of the Spanish. In fact, the Baymen were quite prepared to engage in illicit trading with the Spanish, who claimed the territory, and also with the Dutch and northern colonists who received the lion’s share of their lumber. There was no semblance of government to talk of. ‘The modern settlers, as well as their predecessors’, remarked Edward Long 101 For

reports of rich prizes early in the war, see New York Weekly Journal, 10 March 1739, Boston Post Boy, 7 July 1740, Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 July 1740. On the likelihood of continuing captures, see Swanson, Prizes and Predators, 142. Swanson notes that despite the windfalls, forty per cent of colonial privateers secured one prize, and a further fifty per cent two to four prizes. See also David Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990), 282, who described privateering as a ‘fleeting and extraordinary opportunity for profit’. On loss of men from privateering in the Caribbean and legislation to attempt to address this, see Crewe, Yellow Jack, 72, 127. 102 Swanson, Predators, 118, 218. 103 See chapter 6.

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two decades later, ‘have lived hitherto in a kind of republican state, having no governor appointed over them.’104 Governor Trelawny of Jamaica thought the whole coastline ‘a retreat for Pyrates and disorderly people averse to all Government’ and had been so for forty years.105 Captain Nathaniel Uring, who had spent some time among the logwood cutters earlier in the century, was of the same opinion. He regarded them as a ‘rude drunken crew’, a motley group of ex-pirates and seamen whose ‘chief delight’ was ‘drinking’.106 Naval deserters certainly ventured to the area during wartime. When the Jamaican government decided to build a port and garrison on the island of Roatán as a centre of operations against the Spanish, some seamen jumped ship.107 A few may even have joined the various expeditions against the Spaniards that the adventurer Robert Hodgson organized on behalf of the government. Others may have joined the privateers who cruised the coast, or the raids on Spanish settlements on the Honduran coast in the aftermath of the war.108 Some of them would have been confronted by their own kind; for when two Spanish brigantines conducted reprisals along the Mosquito Coast, half of the crews were said to be English or Scottish. ‘A little hanging for these renegadoes’, remarked Hodgson, ‘would be extremely wholesome.’109 The persistence of hostilities along the Mosquito Coast in the early 1750s points to the difficulties that many seamen had in coming to terms with the armistice of the great powers. Seamen who became habituated to privateering, or to trafficking in contraband goods under flags of truce, sometimes found it difficult to return to normal commerce once war was terminated. Captain Henry Osborn remarked on the shift from privateering to piracy at Montserrat, while Commodore Holborne noted the squall of piratical activity around St Eustatius, which was rapidly emerging as an international entrepôt for slaves and tropical goods.110 The same disposition to go ‘upon the account’ occurred in New York. When several French prizes failed to be condemned before the declaration of peace, several crews mutinied, became ‘very arrogant & desperate’, according to Governor Clinton, ‘& threaten publicly that they will cut out some Vessels, and hoist the Black flag’.111 Among those who did so was Owen Lloyd, a seaman who persuaded the masters of two Rhode Island sloops to steal the cargo of a Spanish galleon moored in Ocracoke inlet in Pamlico Sound and venture 104 Edward

Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols (London, 1774), 1:331. CO 137/57/1, f. 179. 106 Nathaniel Uring, A History of the Voyages and Travels of Capt. Nathaniel Uring (London, 1726), 355. 107 TNA, Adm 36/2775, entries for Dec. 1743–Feb. 1744. 108 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 236. 109 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 275v. 110 TNA, Adm 1/306 (Henry Osborn), 4 August 1748, 20 January 1750; Victor Enthoven, ‘“That Abominable Nest of Pirates”: St Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680–1780’, Early American Studies, 10/2 (2012), 239–301. 111 TNA, Adm 1/3818/424–5. 105 TNA,

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south to Caribbean waters. One of the sloops ran aground, but peg-leg Lloyd successfully charted the other to Spanish Town, Jamaica, and then onwards to the Virgin Islands, where he reached his own treasure island, one Norman’s south of Tortola. There, on the uninhabited island that was a regular rendezvous for privateers with contraband goods, he unloaded 50 chests of Spanish dollars and church plate, 120 bales of cochineal, and 70 bags of indigo and tobacco.112 It was a spectacular heist, worth perhaps £100,000. Lloyd’s own share of the catch appears to have been a tenth, about £10,000, a princely sum for a seaman and one that likely set him up for life. If he managed to get away with it. Owen Lloyd’s haul not only paled in comparison to the windfalls of war that accrued to admirals, several of whom received £100,000 or more in prizes, the risks were incomparably greater. The golden age of piracy was over. Under the vigilance of the royal navy, the pirate community had been broken in the 1720s, dwindling in numbers to little more than 200 men. The great powers of Europe were not about to tolerate its revival thirty years later, once the war had been concluded. Although some captains feared that wartime privateering would ‘breed up a Nursery of Pyrates’,113 policing operations and trials were the order of the day, aided and abetted by the privateering owners themselves, who in the last year of war transferred their investments to less predatory activities. The hazards of piracy were evident in the mutiny of HMS Chesterfield, a ship ordered to police slave stations in West Africa. While the captain O’Brian Dudley was dining at Cape Coast Castle along with his favoured lieutenants, the estranged first lieutenant, Samuel Couchman, led a mutiny with the co-operation of a minority of men, including a former pirate, John Place, the carpenter’s mate.114 Couchman proposed to go ‘on the account’ in the Indian Ocean, but the majority of the crew were not interested, overpowered the mutineers, and sailed to Carlisle Bay, Barbados, where they turned them in. Although Linebaugh and Rediker have made much of the mutiny as a segue from the ‘golden age of piracy’ to the more clandestine resistance of seamen in the mid-century, the fact is the mutiny was an unmitigated disaster, instigated by hesitant, if reluctant, rebels and overhauled by the crew, who had a far better calculation of the risks of piratical adventure. Even Place, who is said to have met his death ‘with uncommon bravery’, was repentant at the end, acknowledging the ‘justice of the Government and of my Judges’. Place may have been ‘the man of the moment’ but he was hardly the embodiment of ‘the subversive 112 TNA,

CO 152/45, ff. 136–8. On Norman’s as a rendezvous for contraband goods, see TNA, Adm 1/578, letter of Thomas Frankland, 28 April 1757. 113 TNA, Adm 1/2041 (Lisle) 24 Oct. 1743. Among the trials was that of the crew of the Old Noll privateer, which had mutinied off Baltimore in Ireland in October 1747. Ten received 300 lashes each; eight were hanged. London Evening Post, 3–6 Sept. 1748. 114 W. E. May, ‘The Mutiny of the Chesterfield’, Mariner’s Mirror, 47/3 (1961), 178–87; A Particular and Impartial Narrative of the Late Mutiny and Running Away with the Chesterfield Man of War off the Coast of Guinea (London, 1749). For the MS courts martial, see Adm 1/5292.

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tradition that lived in tales, in action, in sullenly silent memory, on the lower decks of the Chesterfield and countless other vessels’. This is wishful thinking. On his coffin Place had inscribed: Reader, see now the End of vain Delight; Of many an ill-spent Day and rev’ling Night; Be warn’d by me, no earthly Power can be A Guard ’gainst God’s offended Majesty.115

British seamen of the 1740s were more likely to go ‘upon the account’ on Hounslow Heath than they were on the not-so-Spanish Main. As one English commentator remarked, the end of the war would ‘loose upon the Nation Twenty Thousand Sixpence-a-Day Heroes, with perhaps a Crown in their Pockets, and very little Inclination to starve for want of recruiting out of other People’s Property’.116 In this struggle for survival there were few cross-cultural alliances that extended beyond the lower deck. Indeed, the camaraderie that seamen fostered during the war tended to be concrete and specific to their own crews. There is little evidence that it extended to other subaltern groups in the Caribbean, or indeed in North America. In the incident at English harbour with which I began this chapter, there is fleeting evidence that some of the crew disapproved of Captain Montagu’s intemperate actions. Several had refused to fire into the long boat and the mate had attempted to intervene before Montagu fired his second shot.117 There were also occasions when blacks alerted white seamen to the threat of impressment, joining them (among many others, propertied and un-propertied) in their protests during the Boston riot of 1747.118 Seamen like John Nicol might express some sympathy for the enslaved Africans he encountered unloading and loading goods in the Caribbean. In Grenada, he described them as a ‘thoughtless, merry race’ whose spirited dances and chants ‘beguile the irksomeness of labour’. He admired their physical endurance, laughed at the pomposity of a planter’s butler, and took their slavery for granted. No experience of oppression or ‘hard usage’ united him with slaves. He regarded them with an intrinsic condescension that precluded political activism on their behalf.119 His attitude may well be typical, for there is no evidence that seamen 115 Particular

and Impartial Narrative, 29–30; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 173. General Evening Post, 3–5 Nov. 1748. See also Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749–1753’, in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response in Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750, ed. Lee Davison et al. (New York, 1992), 77–98; and Mayhem: Postwar Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748–1753 (New Haven and London, 2012). 117 TNA, Adm 1/2007/150, 162. 118 TNA, SP 36/52/137–9; Lax and Pencak, ‘The Knowles Riot’, 165, although Lax and Pencak make the further point that the riot ‘was indeed actively supported by all of Boston’. For later examples of slave–sailor co-operation, see Denver Brunsman, Evil Necessity, 204–5. 119 Nicol, Life and Adventures, 50–61. Nicol recounts with amusement the reaction of a Welsh sailor who is enraged when the head butler compares his race to the African, on the grounds that both live in the bush. 116

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actively collaborated with insurgent slaves during the mid-century decades; indeed, in 1760 they helped put down Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica.120 In the milieu in which they worked, seamen frequently stood in an antagonistic relation to slaves; they took slaves as prizes when crewing for privateers and were complicit in the enslavement of French and Spanish free blacks aboard enemy privateers.121 This was also an era when maroons tracked down runaways, and when Miskito Indians, ethnic soldiers in the service of the British, enslaved their rivals and sold them to logwood cutters on the Bay of Honduras, or to Dutch or Jamaican planters. They also served as colonial auxiliaries in the late 1730 campaigns against the Jamaican maroons.122 Briton Hammon, one of the few blacks to have left a record of his sea adventures during this decade, recalled being captured on the Florida coast by a band of Indians who ‘beat me most terribly with a cutlass’. They taunted me in ‘broken English’, he remembered, and swore they would ‘roast me alive’.123 Later they sold him to the governor of Havana. This is not a picture which evokes interracial harmony or some international fraternity of the dispossessed.124 It is, regrettably, more of a dog-eat-dog society whose predatory actions flow from the nature of maritime war, the state conflicts that licensed that predation within very specific international divisions of labour, and the sheer struggle for survival among the marginal and exploited. It is a violent world of marchlands in which relatively little space opened up for amicable relations between people of different cultures, let alone the cultivation of wider solidarities.125 It is a picture, however, that should be contrasted with the prevailing discourse in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, which saw the 1740 struggle with Spain and subsequently France as a pre-eminently patriotic venture. The fervour that greeted Admiral Vernon’s victory at Portobello expressed a libertarian, bellicose mercantilism in which trade and the accumulation of wealth were revered as the highest national and individual good, a felicitous welding of national and imperial interest, of participatory politics and Protestant destiny. Within this context the Caribbean became the site of freedom: of trade; of freedom from Catholic absolutist rule; and, through the growing popularity of sugar and tobacco, of consumer desire. Slavery was deeply imbricated with production and colonial grandeur within this discourse but all too frequently in an elliptical way. The slave was periodically recognized as the raw but necessary muscle 120

Long, History of Jamaica, 2:447–65; Craton, Testing the Chains, 127–38. CO 137/57/2/157. 122 Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 50–5; Craton, Testing the Chains, 84; Matthew Parker, Sugar Barons, 250. 123 Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing 1760–1837 (Boston, 1971), 524: Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices (Lexington, KY, 1996), 22. 124 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, ‘The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (Sept. 1990), 225–51. See also their The Many-Headed Hydra (Boston, 2000). 125 Bailyn, Peopling of North America, 112–21. 121 TNA,

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of the sugar economy, surfacing abruptly at the Stono rebellion as a simpleton seduced by Catholicism and hopes of freedom at the hands of the perfidious Spanish.126 The seaman, by contrast, was foregrounded as the victimized tar of the Spanish guardacosta or as the sturdy arm of a hyper-masculine nationalism. In the same issue of the London Daily Post as covered the Stono rebellion, there was an account of Vernon’s assault upon Fort Chagre, the headquarters of the guardacostas, in which seamen stormed the fort and struck the colours. Such valorous tales were commemorated later in the year with a print representing Jack Tar as the British Hercules; the stuff of imagined communities but not of the experience of the lower decks in the torrid zone.

126 See

London Daily Post, 17 March 1740.

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4 Piracy and Slavery Aboard the Black Prince, 1760–77 In these days of Brexit, the Black Prince may well conjure up images of Edward of Woodstock, aka the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III and one of the most successful English commanders of the Hundred Years War, a major player in the defeat of the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. But the Black Prince was also the name of a Bristol slaver which between 1750 and 1769 made eight voyages to the African coast before it was scuttled on the shores of Haiti.1 The tale of the Bristol Black Prince is one of risk, violence and treachery. Its history dramatizes many of the hazards of the Bristol slave trade. The Black Prince was built after the heyday of Bristol’s slave trade, which lasted from the late Stuart era until roughly 1745, the year of the Jacobite rebellion. By then, the trade was dominated by Bristol’s northern rival Liverpool, although Bristol’s trafficking in slaves still equalled London and was greater than any other European or North American port. Between 1746 and 1769, an average of twenty-four ships cleared Bristol every year with thirty or more leaving the Avon for Africa in the immediate aftermath of two wars, in 1747–48 and again in 1763–64. In the years 1748 to 1750 the outlays for a single ship ranged from £2,800 to £10,000, the average running at £5,539, in today’s terms around £750,000.2 This was a substantial investment in what was a potentially profitable but always risky enterprise. Fortunes could be made, but as the American slave merchant and commission agent Henry Laurens put it in 1755, ‘every one that enters upon it should fortify themselves’ against misfortune.3 1 Some accounts suggest the Black Prince ran aground on the north side of Cuba. See Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 1 July 1769, Leeds Intelligencer, 29 Aug. 1769. Others claim she ran aground at Petit Trou, on the island of Hispaniola. For example, Lloyd’s Evening Post, 25–8 Aug 1769. This might mean Petit Trou, Trinidad, because the Spanish authorities were allegedly involved in the salvage of the vessel; although ‘Hispaniola’ could mean the French rather than Spanish side of the island. It has this meaning in an account in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 15 July 1769. Given the previous location of the boat at Crab Island, Puerto Rico, it is more likely to have been Petit-Trou-de Nippes, on the north side of Haiti’s southern peninsula, west of Port au Prince. The French rather than the Spanish would have salvaged the boat. Sir James Laroche, one of the owners of the Black Prince, claimed the ship was scuttled at Cap François, in northern Haiti. See TNA, SP 89/69, f. 117. This would be compatible with the fact that some seamen were stranded at St Nicolas Mole. 2 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade, 3: xv. 3 P. M. Hamer and G. C. Rogers eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia, SC, 10 vols, 1968–85), 2:38.

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The Black Prince did make money. In four out of nine voyages between 1750 and 1765 for which we have figures, it transported an average of 314 slaves; almost double the capacity it would have done under the Dolben act decades later.4 It was refitted to bring in more. Its next voyage, however, proved a disaster. The Black Prince was built on the Thames in 1739. She was officially a 100-ton vessel although alterations to the hold could increase her capacity. Before she arrived in Bristol it is possible she was a slaver, because there are a variety of accounts of a Black Prince on the Windward coast transporting slaves to Antigua and ports in North America. The name was quite a popular one, however, and reports of a Black Prince sailing to the Guinea coast under John Bruce and John Norrie (or Norris) do not square with the known size of the Bristol vessel or its date and place of construction.5 Whether or not she sailed as a slaver from London, the Back Prince certainly did so from Bristol. Within a year of her registration, she was fitted up to sail to Old Calabar and in the next two decades she became one of the more regular slavers sailing from the port, delivering African captives to Antigua, Jamaica and Virginia to work on the plantations. Only four vessels made more voyages to Africa between 1750 and 1768.6 Her principal owner was James Laroche, the mayor of Bristol when the Black Prince first sailed out of Kingroad at the estuary of the Avon. Laroche was a leading Whig in Bristol politics, an alderman from 1752 to 1770, and master of the elite Society of Merchant Venturers in 1751. He was not the only investor in the Black Prince, which was by no means unusual for slave trade ventures. Among the stakeholders in 1758 were John Gresley, the treasurer of the Corporation of the Poor in 1770, William Delpratt, the warden of the elite club of St Stephen’s Ringers in 1772, and John Thompson, the city’s water bailiff in 1774. In the final voyages, Laroche and company were joined by John Fowler, a warden of the Merchant Venturers in 1771 and its master twelve years later. By this time the 4

The formula under the 1788 act pioneered by Sir William Dolben was five slaves for every three tons to a ceiling of 201 tons, and one slave per ton thereafter. For the Black Prince this would have meant a legal capacity of 165 or so slaves, depending on the number of young Africans on board. Traders were allowed to transport five youngsters for every four adults. See Nicholas Rogers, Murder on the Middle Passage: The Trial of Captain Kimber (Woodbridge, 2020), 80. 5 Daily Gazetteer, 12 June 1741; London Morning Advertiser, 30 Nov. 1741; Daily Post, 10 August 1742; London Daily Advertiser, 6 Oct. 1743; London Evening Post, 4 Sept. 1744; Daily Gazetteer, 12 Oct. 1744. In the slave voyages database, www.slavevoyages.org, number 77566 under Norrie and 77535 under Captain Bruce don’t match the Bristol Black Prince. The vessel commanded by Bruce was a 70-ton snow built in the British plantations; Norrie’s vessel was a 130-ton ship (standardized tonnage 236) constructed in London, but in 1722. 6 These were the Africa, the Cornwall, the Phoenix, and the Indian Queen, completing nine, ten, ten and eleven voyages respectively. For the voyages of the Black Prince under Captain Miller, see www.slavevoyages.org, nos 17258, 17280, 17306, 17386, 17432, 17476, 17522, 17573.

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company included Laroche’s nephew, James, usually known as Laroche junior. He was a member of Bristol’s Common Council from 1764 and represented the Cornish borough of Bodmin in parliament from 1768–80. He was knighted for his loyalism in 1776.7 All in all, this was an impressive group of investors holding a variety of offices in the city hierarchy, revealing the degree to which Bristol’s ruling class engaged in slaving activities. The Black Prince is noteworthy because the regular captain of the vessel, William Miller, left a logbook of one of her voyages and snippets of a second. Now housed in the Bristol Archives, the logbook illustrates very clearly the hazards of running a slave voyage.8 The detailed account covers the journey from Bristol to Cape Mount and St Pauls, and then on down the coast to Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, before heading out to Antigua. Reading the report, one is immediately aware of the changeable climate. Strong winds, torrential rain and high waves could complicate trading and provisioning, with Miller reporting on 14 August 1762 that ‘the sea runs so very high the pinnace [a small boat carrying slaves and provisions] can’t come on board’. Three days later the weather had abated sufficiently to allow one slave to board the ship along with some sacks of rice, but four ‘gang casks’ were lost in the ‘surf wind’. Early on the coastal run, ‘hard rain’ and humid conditions started to challenge immune systems. Particularly susceptible were those members of the crew who were ‘unseasoned’ newcomers, unattuned to tropical climes. In the Black Prince’s seven voyages under Miller, the average percentage of seamen who died on the voyage was thirteen, the median eleven. Fortunately for Miller his crew seemed to weather the sudden changes in temperature on this particular voyage as well as the ticks and mosquitoes of the rivers which could bring on onchocerciasis or what was popularly known as ‘river blindness’. Only the chief mate, William Lovering, succumbed, dying of yellow fever on 27 July after nine days’ illness, and no doubt splattering the deck with black vomit. The death rate might have been higher, for eighteen of forty-one original crew members were discharged at Antigua, including two, Benjamin Morris of Bristol and William Thomas of Wales, who had never been to sea.9 What condition they were in when they reached the West Indies is impossible to determine. On the Gold Coast Miller entertained traders who came on board with what were known as ‘dashes’. King Andrew of Grand Bassa was given a keg of brandy as a token gesture to begin trading. Like others, he stayed all night, concluded his negotiations and left the following morning. This pattern continued for months 7 Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers, Bristol From Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City (Woodbridge, 2017), 242, 245. Most information is derived from Alfred E. Beaven, Bristol Lists: Municipal and Miscellaneous (Bristol, 1899), passim. For the other owners, see J. W. Damer Powell, Bristol Privateers and Ships of War (Bristol, 1930), 189 and TNA, SP 37/7, ff. 53–6. 8 Bristol Archives (BA), 45933/4. 9 BA, SMV/9/3/1/5, muster rolls, 1764 no. 76.

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until the flow of African captives, who seemed to come on board in twos and threes, dried up. In early November, Miller weighed anchor and headed up the coast towards Cape Mesurado (Montserrado) in modern day Liberia to resume trading and then catch the winds to take him down to the Gold Coast. There he picked up a larger batch of slaves from Fort William at Anomabu, an outpost constructed by the British a decade earlier. Some of the trading here seems to have involved ‘pawns’, human collateral for credit advanced to local traders, for the log of late November and December 1762 talked of releasing ‘trading men’ in return for slaves and getting a Liverpool captain to redeem some of them as trading in the area concluded. The pawn collateral could be tricky if slave-ship captains could not redeem them before they sailed, and if these technical hostages were sold into slavery, all hell could break loose. As Thomas Pye, a captain in the royal navy, noted in 1750, the abuse of the pawn system might well generate reprisals from African traders ‘who always make one White Man (as they call them) suffer for another’.10 Miller managed to escape this predicament. By the first week of December, time was becoming a problem, for some of the slaves went down with ‘Meazels and Feavers’ and the second mate and a few seamen became ‘very ill making netting’. Nets were arranged around the perimeter of vessels to prevent slaves jumping off to escape or even commit suicide.11 Despite these illnesses, trading continued for another two months because Miller wanted over 400 slaves so that he could make a good profit. In fact, the Black Prince was obscenely packed with Africans. Under the Dolben formula which became law in 1788 a ship of her size should only have taken 165 slaves on the Middle Passage; or at best 200 if the hold had been modified to take a few more. On this voyage Miller crammed in 438 Africans, principally males, of whom 394 (or 90 per cent) survived the transatlantic journey.12 The captain was very lucky he did not experience a serious outbreak of the ‘bloody flux’ or dysentery. As the numbers mounted so the possibilities of insurrection increased. Such uprisings were not uncommon on slave ships. In the decades 1750–70, British slave ships saw nearly fifty attempts by Africans to commandeer a ship, including five occasions when there were attacks from the shore.13 That is an average of more than two every year. At the time of Miller’s previous voyage, the Bristol slave-ship Mercury suffered an attack from the shore while trading on the River Gambia. The captain, William Engeldue, was ‘desperately wounded’ in the 10

TNA, Adm 1/2289 (Thomas Pye), 19 March 1750; on pawns, see Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Pawnship, Debt and “Freedom” in Atlantic Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade: A Reassessment’, Journal of African History, 55 (2014), 55–78; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History’, American Historical Review, 104/2 (1999), 333–55. 11 BA, 45933/4. 12 Miller delivered 277 males and 117 females, see Richardson, BRS 42, 149. 13 Figures derived from the slave voyages database, www.slavevoyages.org.

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encounter, so a report ran, and when eighty Africans boarded the vessel, he blew it up ‘rather than fall into the Hands of such merciless Wretches’.14 Four years later, James Laroche lost the Jolly Prince, a thirty-ton ship trading at Cape Mount when slaves rose and massacred the whole crew. Miller had a foretaste of what might happen in November 1762 when two females who escaped from a schooner at night were picked up swimming in the water by another Bristol ship, the Phoenix, which had been trading at Cape Coast Castle.15 But it was in the final weeks of trading that trouble broke out on the Black Prince. On 22 February 1763, Miller discovered the slaves intended to ‘rise’, a ‘great number’ having managed to ‘break there irons’. In response the crew were all put under arms and with the help of Captain Johnson’s ‘people’, the incipient rebellion was suppressed. Miller managed to repossess the rebellious Africans, chain them up, and locate the ringleaders, who were ‘well flogged’, very possibly with a horse whip rather than a cat o’ nine tails, which cut deeper into the skin.16 Within a week or so after the rising, Miller filled his hold with slaves. Ten men, nine women and a boy were brought on board on 24 February, and five days later Miller set sail for Antigua. Progress was slow because there was little wind, and within three days the slaves made another attempt to free themselves. Without reinforcements from other ships Miller had to take decisive action. Ten of the ringleaders were brought on deck; they were manacled to one long chain and whipped, so severely that one of them died three days later.17 Exemplary punishments quelled the chance of rebellion, but other forms of resistance surfaced. A day after the death of the insurgent slave, Miller discovered that many of the women were purging themselves; some were described as ‘falling away not eateing’.18 From then on, his logbook entries registered high anxiety about their condition and their intentions. The captain could not determine whether the African women were embarking on a collective hunger strike, languishing out of despondency, or whether their poor state was the result of dysentery, for some complained of ‘griping and fluxes’ and the youngsters of ‘feebleness in the limbs’. Miller noted despairingly on 14 March that slaves ‘fore and aft fall away very much’ even though they appeared to be eating their victuals, principally rice and beans. His anxieties increased when a month into the Middle Passage, one sick slave tried to jump overboard. Miller was troubled when many slaves failed to get up and participate in the enforced dancing on deck, an exercise designed to tone them up for sale. The death of a girl on 20 April led him to scapegoat the surgeon. He suspected the doctor was 14 Elizabeth

Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade in America, 4 vols (Washington, 1930–35), 4:374; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade, 3:179 15 For the voyage of the Phoenix, see Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade, 3:153, Phoenix, 1762/17. 16 BA, 45933/4, entry 22 February 1763. 17 BA, 45933/4, entry 4, 7 March 1763. 18 BA 45933/4, entry 8 March 1763.

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not feeding the slaves appropriately and called him ‘a scoundrel and ungrateful if he treated the slaves as they said’. Miller tried to arrest the sickness of the hold by giving the enslaved Africans better food, a ration of bread and beef, but he was perplexed that they could keep their food down even after ‘two or three Vomits’. On 27 April he wrote: ‘Dead 2 Girls long sick of the flux … Many of the Slaves will not eat bread, Beef, Rice nor Beans.’ On the first May Miller had the hold and platforms washed down to improve the hygiene in the hold, but the slaves continued to ‘fall away’. On the following day he reported that ‘Several of the slaves will not eat any vitles [victuals] … Death AM no 34.’ He saw his profits, the commissions he received for delivering slaves, drift away. In the end Miller lost forty-four slaves, ten per cent of his ‘cargo’. This was not an exceptional rate of mortality for a mid-eighteenth-century slave ship, although one wonders how many of Miller’s captives survived the plantation seasoning. It was not that unusual for a quarter or a third of Africans to die with two or three years of captivity.19 Despite this violence and discipline, William Miller acquired the reputation of being a solid captain in Bristol. One measure of this was the fact that ten of his forty-three man crew, that is, twenty-three per cent, had sailed with him before on the Black Prince; the majority of them Bristolians, or sailors for whom Bristol was their ‘usual place of abode’.20 This was a significant portion. Most slave ship crews had massive turnovers. Sailors were often coerced into joining slave voyages by unscrupulous crimps, who inveigled the reckless into debt and then offered them the choice of ‘Guinea service or gaol’.21 Those that took their chances out of poverty and were attracted by the two-month advance pay soon became disenchanted with the harsh conditions aboard ship and the disagreeable tasks of managing slaves and washing the puke, blood and faeces from the holds. Not to mention the fact that on these ‘industrial’ enterprises, seamen rarely had a decent berth. Unless the slave ship was akin to a frigate, sailors sweltered and shivered under crude awnings to accommodate slaves in the hold, with the result that many died of malarial diseases, or picked up dysentery from the slaves, or contracted ophthalmic disorders on tropical rivers. Mortality rates among seamen were sometimes proportionately higher than those of the slaves. They were among Bristol vessels in the years 1788–91 when the average proportion of deaths was a shocking twenty-one per cent.22 By the harsh standards of the day, Captain Miller seems to have emerged with some credit. There is no evidence from the logbook, at least, that he was a martinet or downright sadist, a man whose frustrations with managing 19 Rogers,

Murder on the Middle Passage, 54. BA, SMV/9/3/1/5, muster rolls, 1764 no. 76. Thirty-two of the forty-three seamen identified with Bristol. The others hailed from Wales (seven), Ireland and Scotland. Only one, Jean Cordero, was from outside the United Kingdom. He was from the Vendée in France and discharged in Antigua, 18 May 1763. 21 Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers, 73:162; 82:26–7. 22 Rogers, Murder on the Middle Passage, 64–5, 69–70, 72–3. 20

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refractory slaves rebounded on the crews. He was not a brute like Robert Elston, the master of the St Christopher galley who whipped two of his crew to death for the trifling offence of breaking a jar of palm oil worth six shillings while trading on the River Ancona, in the Bight of Benin. Or Jeffrey Howlett, who pinned a black seaman named John Dean to the deck for a minor infraction and poured hot pitch into incisions in his back. Or James McTaggart, a former naval lieutenant who so brutalized his crew on the Alexander in 1785 that the black cabin boy attempted to commit suicide by diving through the gunnels. According to the surgeon, Alexander Falconbridge, the boy declared ‘it would be much better for him to be killed at once than to be daily treated with so much cruelty’.23 Miller did discipline his own black servant, John Prince, for being impertinent to his third mate. He recorded in his logbook that he ‘put him in Irons and slaptd [him] down on the Quarter Deck and put him on Bread and Water, Prisoners fare’.24 Yet he did not habitually flog his crew as did some other captains; or at least he did not record it in the logbook or suffer the indignity of a prosecution at the Admiralty court. On the voyages for which we have cursory information, it seems that the rate of survival on Miller’s vessels was pretty good. He did not drive men to desertion or aggravate the risks of dying on the Guinea coast through harsh treatment or reduced rations. Before his last voyage there was only one where the rate of attrition on his crews, including desertions and discharges, exceeded twenty per cent. And that proportion diminished as Miller’s experience of captaining the Black Prince increased.25 Even so, after the eventful and potentially dangerous voyage of the years 1762–4, the number of seamen prepared to follow Miller decreased dramatically. In September 1766 only two men re-entered for the Black Prince. These were Jenkin Rees, a Welshman who had sailed on Miller’s two previous voyages, and the Scot David Robertson, who had sailed with him in 1762. No doubt the searing experience of slave insurrection and dysentery scared some away. Maybe Rees and Robertson were reckless seamen who simply took a chance entering for another Guinea coast voyage, for the previous one had been long and hazardous. In 1764 Captain Miller set out for Cape Mount and traded on the Windward Coast for rice, water and wood and on the Gold Coast for slaves. It was a familiar routine, but the Black Prince lingered on the coast for over a year, a very long time; time enough for tempers to fray and illness to set in. One report disclosed that trade at the Gold Coast ‘has been miserable indeed; so very bad that poor old Miller (who you know always brings good cargoes) has been there six months and has not purchased 20 slaves’. All of Miller’s experience 23

Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788),52–3; Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 2 vols (London, 1808), 1:297–300; Rogers, Murder on the Middle Passage, 7–8; TNA, Adm 1/3671, ff. 158, 261. 24 BA 45933/4, entry 17 July 1762. 25 The relevant percentages for voyage mortality are, in chronological order, 21, 12, 12, 3.6, 4.6.

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– it was his eleventh slave voyage as a captain – mattered little. Mortality and desertion must have taken its toll for Captain Miller arrived at Antigua with a reduced crew, thirty-three of the original forty-seven.26 He discharged fourteen men in Antigua, some of whom were probably in a wretched condition. They were destined to become ‘wharfingers’, debilitated vagrant seamen who could only survive by scratching out a living around the pubs and quays of tropical ports until such time as they rehabilitated their health and sought a berth on a homeward-bound vessel. In the circumstances Miller had to take on five new crewmen to help transport sugar and molasses back to Bristol. The experience wore him out for he died on the homeward run, two weeks from Bristol. Dying on the job was a fate that perhaps a quarter of all slave captains from Bristol and Liverpool endured.27 After Captain Miller’s death, James Laroche contemplated selling the Black Prince. He put it up for sale in late September 1768 after the keel had been rebuilt and its capacity expanded to 200 tons. Within a month, however, he changed his mind and decided to launch the ship on another trip. And so, on 10 December 1768, the Black Prince set sail for the Gold Coast under a rookie captain, one William Hawkins. Most of the crew on this voyage were newcomers. Only two, the second mate, Jonathan Mills, and foremast man James Lynch, had sailed on the Black Prince before. The crew also seems to have been somewhat older than those of other slave ships. Admittedly we have only partial evidence for this, for all the officers are excluded from the ‘sample’ which is derived from the notices of outlawry in the London Gazette. Hypothetically this should bias the known figures towards younger men, and yet they reveal the opposite. Two-thirds of the crew of the Black Prince were 25 years old, or older; two-thirds of the Recovery in 1791, another slave-ship that achieved some notoriety, were under 25. Forty-five per cent of the Black Prince seamen were in their twenties; the corresponding figures for four other slavers in 1791 were markedly higher, in the range of fifty-nine to seventy-one per cent.28 Six of the Black Prince crewmen were in their thirties, that is, over a quarter. They included Joseph Cougthorne, nicknamed, ‘Shoulder of Mutton’, a ‘tall thin young man’ with a long nose, who wore his own hair; Welshman William Dawkins, a ‘tall stout man’ five feet nine inches 26

BA, SMV/9/3/1/5, muster rolls, 1767, no. 26. Stephen Behrendt calculated that twenty-seven per cent of all Bristol and Liverpool captains, 1785–1807, died on voyages. See Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785–1807’, Trans. Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 111. 28 These figures are derived from the Bristol muster rolls of 1791. Pre-1790 muster rolls offer no ages. The vessels are the Wasp, the Prince, the Thomas and the Brothers. Mike Breward suggests that the average age of seamen was 27 on Bristol slave ships 1790–95. The corresponding figure for the Black Prince is 27.5 years. Mike Breward, ‘Crewing the Slave Trade: The Bristol Ships’ Muster Rolls, 1790–1795’, in A City Built Upon the Water, ed. Steve Poole (Bristol, 2013), 100. 27

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high, with a cast or cataract in both eyes, a hazardous predicament on any ship; and one Matthew Thompson, a ‘tall stout man, very pockfretten, very swarthy, rather yellow’, who ‘remarkably’ chewed tobacco. The two oldest seamen on the Black Prince were in their forties: namely John Stone, described as a ‘short thick set man, little pock marked, very swarthy’ who wore his own hair as opposed to a wig; and John Frederick, another short thick-set man, balding, ‘pockfretten’, who had a cut on one side of his head.29 A noticeable number of the crew, in fact, were ‘pockfretten’ or freckled with small-pox scars. Small-pox inoculations were not widespread until the final decade of the century and in the congested space of the ship, seamen were highly vulnerable to the disease. The antidotes were bleeding, barley water and purging, not remedies that could prevent scarring.30 The refurbished Black Prince never made it to Africa. Six weeks out of Bristol and a week or so from the Guinea Coast, the crew mutinied. On the evening watch of either 29 or 30 January 1769, Thomas Austin strolled towards the quarter deck and floored the chief mate Henry Lewis with a club he had concealed in his coat. Other seamen quickly came to help Austin and tied Lewis’ hands with line yarn. Meanwhile George Meager entered the captain’s cabin, hesitating a little before George Wood egged him on. They took the captain William Hawkins captive, although not before a fight because Hawkins was brought to the main deck ‘very bloody, having been cut and wounded’.31 Other officers were rounded up as well, including the surgeon, Gilbert Mason, and the second and third mates. James Lynch, the foremast-man who had previously sailed on the ship, was also identified as sympathetic to the ship’s command, as was the surgeon’s mate, the boatswain, the cooper and the cabin boy, Watkin Morgan. After some discussion the mutineers put the officers and their supporters in the long boat with some provisions, medicines, two quadrants and a compass. Like the long boat of the Bounty twenty years later, the captain and his supporters were denied maps. Ten in all, nine seamen and a boy, they were left to the ‘mercy of the waves’.32 They were never heard of again. What disposed the bulk of the crew to mutiny? The answer is not at all clear. Most mutinies on slave ships occurred when the vessel reached the coast, when the workload of the crew increased exponentially and tensions between officers and men reached breaking point. One example of this concerned the Polly, a 29

The demographic profile of the crew is taken from those who were outlawed, first printed in the London Gazette, 26 August 1769, but found in various newspapers including the New York Journal, 18 Jan. 1770, and the Boston Evening Post, 29 January 1770. 30 A. J. Mercer, ‘Smallpox and Epidemiological–Demographic Change in Europe: The Role of Vaccination’, Population Studies, 39/2 (July 1985), 287–307; Bill Luckin, ‘The Decline of Smallpox and the Demographic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century’, Social History, 2/6 (Oct. 1977), 793–9; William Chamberlaine, The West-India Seaman’s Medical Directory (London, 1785), 13. 31 For this account of the mutiny, the most detailed, see TNA, SP 37/7, ff. 53–6. 32 Derby Mercury, 15 Nov. 1771; Lloyds Evening Post, 21–3 August, 1769.

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small ship of 25 tons that sailed from Bristol in August 1763. When the captain was ashore at Cape Appolonia negotiating for slaves and supplies, John Wynne alias Power, a stocky 46-year-old, shot the first mate in the shoulder and forced the crew to swear allegiance to him. He sailed up the River Bassan where the leading mutineers killed a free black who was on board as a pawn for two slaves. Apparently Wynne and his co-conspirators feared the man might incite a slave rebellion on board. For this murder Wynne was ultimately hanged at London’s Execution Dock in March 1767 before some 20,000 spectators.33 We do not know the exact circumstances that led Wynne and company to mutiny, but we have a better idea on the Antelope, an eighty-ton ship which sailed out of Bristol in late 1748 bound for Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast. In this case the crew thought the captain, Thomas Sanderson, was a harsh taskmaster who refused them their customary ration of rum. At Anomabu three men deserted the ship and at Mine Castle, a Dutch fort further down the coast, where Sanderson had stopped to buy hogs, the crew refused to weigh anchor, angered by the spectacle of the drunken captain severely beating the old boatswain. Sanderson managed to surmount this crisis of confidence by confining the ringleaders in the fort, but his reckless behaviour and decision to sail back towards Cape Coast Castle in search of slaves prompted a full-scale mutiny.34 The surgeon, William Steel, testified that the mutineers swore that they would rather join a man-of-war than be treated so inhumanely by the captain ‘who almost starved them, being constantly drunk, abusing and using them in a cruel manner’. They showed their hatred of the captain by setting him off in the open boat with raw beef, bread, two buckets of water, a gallon and a half of rum, but only one oar. The mutineers proved too drunken a crew to successfully escape. When the Antelope was finally captured, the quarter deck was littered with bottles of wine, rum and beer. The naval commander who brought the mutineers back to London was not, however, unsympathetic to their case. While ‘these unthinking wretches had brought upon themselves a Punishment fatal to them’, reflected Captain Thomas Pye, he pleaded for leniency on the grounds that Sanderson had driven them too hard, forcing them to sail up rivers in the ‘scorching heat of the sun’ and suffer ‘the great Dews by Night’.35 That, combined with poor victuals and brutality, destroyed the health of the crew and had killed two. Something had to be done to secure these seamen ‘a constant allowance’ when they were delayed on the coast, he pleaded, for right now they were fed more poorly than the slaves. The story of the Antelope is one of a crew driven to extremities by the drunken tyranny of the captain and the arduous job of purchasing slaves on a malaria-ridden coast. This was not the case with the Black Prince. According 33

Gazetteer, 28 Feb., 12 March 1767; London Evening Post, 7–10 March 1767; Newport Mercury, 18 May 1767. 34 TNA, HCA 1/58 ff. 2v–8. 35 TNA, Adm 1/2289 (Thomas Pye), 19 March 1750.

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to the subsequent testimony of George Wood, one of the principal mutineers, plans to take over the ship were hatched very soon after the vessel left Bristol. By this account, one of the principal instigators was ‘Farmer’ Henry Burton, a 26-year-old man, five foot eight inches high, who had inherited a substantial farm from his father and had invested in at least two sailing ventures, owning both vessels and cargoes. Burton managed to fritter away a small fortune and he was now paying the price, toiling as an ordinary seaman on a slave ship. Before he entered the Black Prince, he had been working for William Champion, the Bristol brass manufacturer and merchant. At the time the Black Prince sailed, Champion was mired in a legal battle with rival brass and copper manufacturers over the nature of his incorporation at the Warmley works. He was ruined by the disclosure that he had tried to remove money from the company without consulting his partners.36 Had Burton invested in Champion’s failing enterprise? Did he bear a general grudge against Bristol’s entrepreneurs? We don’t know, but whatever disaffection he displayed proved contagious. The teller of this tale, George Wood, aka Geery or Geary, was himself a fugitive from justice, a mackerel fisherman from Hastings who had tried to steal the cargo of a Dutch hoy off the Sussex coast and sell the proceeds on shore. He had entered the Black Prince under a new name to avoid detection. Having dispatched the officers and their retainers, the crew elected their own captain. He was Henry Beach, a ‘short thick set’ man, aged 33. Thomas Austin, the seaman who began the mutiny was chosen chief mate, and George Meager, the one who first confronted the Captain Hawkins in his cabin, became the ‘doctor’, although what medical skills he possessed are unknown. It was quite normal for pirate ships to corral surgeons, carpenters and other critical crewman in the interests of safety and survival, but this did not happen here. The crew took their chances on the open seas without the pertinent experts for emergencies. They decided to forego sailing to the Guinea coast; that might likely raise the suspicion of masters and traders who knew the vessel, not to mention royal navy patrols in the region. This was not an era when one could go merrily ‘on the account’ picking up slave cargoes, as did Bartholomew Roberts in the 1720s. Rather the seamen elected to sail to northern Brazil, either to Ceará or Pernambuco where they hoped to dispose of part of their cargo of linens, handkerchiefs, gunpowder and other dry goods. These were ports that imported slaves from Angola, about 4,000 in 1763, and goods that might be used in slave trading were in high demand.37 It was also an area known earlier for its buccaneering.38 36

Reg Harris, The Warmley Works of William Champion, in www.bittonfamilies.com, retrieved 20 July 2020. 37 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (London, 1998), 278. 38 The American Gazetteer, 3 vols (London, 1762) vol. 1, under ‘Arraciffe’ aka Recife, noted a successful raid by James Lancaster in 1595. Dutch privateers and pirates were active there in the seventeenth century. See Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY, 1998).

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Precisely when the crew decided to sail under the black flag remains a matter of journalistic contention. Some say almost immediately after the mutiny, with the ship renamed Liberty; others, like the correspondent in the Middlesex Journal, claimed this was done after the trip to Brazil.39 Whatever the case, it is doubtful that the Portuguese authorities at Pernambuco were deluded by the appearance of a British vessel selling goods for the Guinea coast in Brazil. The anxiety of being detected as a runaway slave ship probably influenced the exchange of goods for water and provisions. To complicate matters, Thomas Austin and George Meager quarrelled on shore, and so the local governor at Recife imprisoned the latter for an assault on the chief mate. Austin was released the following morning, but he bore a grudge against Meager, and also against Captain Beach, who, he suspected, had encouraged the governor to discipline him. Accordingly, he cut the cables of the vessel and ordered her underway, firing a broadside when she passed the old town in Recife Antigo. Beach and company were left stranded on the shore. Altogether ten men were abandoned in Brazil, including Beach, Meager, the helmsman Benjamin Rice, and a blackjack named Philip Thompson, described as a ‘thick set man, pockfretten about the nose’, five feet four inches high, 26 years of age. Austin’s reckless actions left him with less than three-quarters of the original crew; scarcely enough to navigate the vessel. The subsequent history of the Liberty, aka the Black Prince, illustrates this very well. To begin with, Austin proved unable to chase down potential prizes, partly because the crew could not manoeuvre the vessel in shoal water, which would have required rapid reefing of the sails. Frustrated by his lack of success, he singled out the cook, Allen McCoy, for retribution, subjecting him to a mock court martial for sympathizing with Beach and plotting to displace him. McCoy was hanged from the yardarm, hoisted up by all members of the ‘jury’ who did not want to accept individual responsibility for his death. He was pulled up with such force that the rope broke, finishing his days in a watery grave. This scapegoating resolved little, for the crew were clearly unhappy with this execution, and so Austin marooned a further ten seamen on Crabb Island, or Isla de Vieques, just off Puerto Rico, a ‘desolate place’ one newspaper reported. From then on recruiting extra crew members became a dire necessity. The Black Prince chased down another vessel in the hope that more sailors might enlist, but the crew escaped in a long boat. Subsequently the Black Prince, which by this time cannot have been crewed by more than seventeen men, sailed for Hispaniola. There may have been further disagreements among the crew, for six men, including George Darlington, the carpenter’s mate, were ‘left’ at Môle St-Nicolas, on the northern tip of St Domingue. Whether they were dumped or deserted is unclear. Thereafter the Black Prince drifted down the coast and ran ashore at Petit-Trou-de-Nippes in Le Petit Goâve, Léogâne. Locals helped 39

Middlesex Journal, 13–15 June 1769; see also Gazetteer, 15 June 1769; New York Gazette, 28 August 1769.

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unload and very likely repossessed the goods that were remaining, save for a few horse beans and cottons. Wrecking was a customary form of pillaging for coastal communities, and one imagines many took their fair share, although the governor of the region insisted on keeping the iron on board. A letter from Jamaica reported that a boat beating to windward towards Grand’Anse found a slave ship scuttled on the reef. ‘Half-frigate built’, she was lying on her beam end with the hold and the lower deck in water. The foremast had been confiscated and the main and mizzen sails had been cut away. The sailors did not linger, as wreckers were approaching from the shore. Only the logbook of the captain, which ends abruptly in January 1769, revealed it to be the Black Prince. As a pirate ship the Black Prince was a spectacular failure.40 From the mutiny onwards the crew was riven with fear and dissension and quite unprepared for a life of ‘liberty’. Apart from the original selection of a captain, the crew does not appear to have agreed on anything or had much sense of where to go and what to do. The paranoid antics of Thomas Austin didn’t help. He more than decimated his crew by casting men off and destroyed any possibility of successfully going on the account. His prickly ego left men scattered across the Caribbean: some in captivity in Recife; some struggling for survival on Crabb Island; some wondering what their future might be. It is unclear what happened to most of the sailors left at Môle St-Nicolas. It was an arid and barren place, better known for mining than as a port, but it could accommodate ships of all types to an anchorage of twelve fathoms.41 It was not far from Tortuga, an old pirate station, so it is quite possible these men disappeared into the maritime networks of the Caribbean and availed themselves of old buccaneering haunts. The irascible Thomas Austin is said to have used Môle St- Nicolas as a launching pad to Newburyport near Boston. He was one of three mutineers who headed for Massachusetts; the others being William Dawkins, a 32-year-old sailor from Swansea, and William Marshall, an 18-year-old lad who tried to pass himself off as a pilot in Martha’s Vineyard. Others headed for New York, whose lines of commerce with the Caribbean were strong, particularly in the provisioning, lumber and molasses trades. They included the smuggler George Wood, alias Geary; John Shoals, a rather stout 25-year-old Dane (or Swede) who wore his own hair; William Bolton, the pirate’s boatswain, a Lancastrian with ‘carroty hair’; and William Greenwood, a ‘boy’ who later turned king’s evidence. Anglophone areas were the preferred destinations of British sailors on the run. English then gave them linguistic anonymity, while friendships and known contacts gave them the chance of safe havens from the law. Transatlantic seamen tended to be anchored to specific ports and places, particularly when they were outlawed or under legal scrutiny. While 40

Cf. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 250. Rediker truncates the story for historical uplift. ‘After the mutiny aboard the Black Prince in 1769, sailors “hoisted the black flag” and changed the name of the ship to Liberty.’ Period. 41 Thomas Jeffreys, The Natural and Mineral History of the French Dominions in North and South America, 2 vols (London, 1760), 2:66.

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they sailed around the Atlantic and beyond, it is misleading to regard them as genuine internationalists.42 As many a picaresque life-story reveals, British sailors returned to Anglophone ‘homes’ and familiarities. Some of these men managed to elude the authorities. One story has it that John Appleton and Martin Gow tried to return to London on the slave ship Africa, commanded by a Captain Fox, but were discovered. Gow apparently jumped ship at Cape Mount, Liberia. Appleton changed his name and went underground. The captain of the Phoenix man-of-war thought he had caught him but it turned out to be a false alarm, for one Angelo Ginochio, the boatswain of the Africa, was picked up instead and complained bitterly to the Admiralty about his confinement and committal to prison.43 The second story concerning these men is that they sailed from New York to London on the Duchess of Gordon along with George Wood and William Bolton. They were well known on the river and a reward of £20 a man was offered for their capture. In the event only Wood alias Geary was taken up and tried, not for his piracy on the Black Prince but for his previous offence of raiding a Dutch hoy off the Sussex coast. At first, he denied he was involved in any way in the mutiny and when offered the chance of turning king’s evidence, refused to snitch on his mates. Before he was executed in November 1769, however, he admitted his double piracy.44 He claimed that the Black Prince took a few prizes in her two months under the black flag, but she was by ‘stress of weather’ driven on shore ‘in the desart parts of the island of Hispaniola, where some of the crew perished, thro’ fatigue and want of sustenance’. While it was true that at least one man died in Hispaniola,45 this was a partial view of the Black Prince’s fate, omitting all references to the treachery of Austin and his willingness to imperil the ship by casting off recalcitrant crew members. Wood also threw out some information about the destination of the other mutineers, suggesting that the governor of the southern province allowed many to sail to Portugal under false passports. This might have been the case, for three of the pirates stranded in Pernambuco had allegedly sailed for Lisbon and disappeared without trace.46 The British authorities tried to find out what happened to them, but they never received an answer from the Portuguese Court. Wood was not the only pirate picked up by the authorities. William Marshall was arrested in Martha’s Vineyard and sent to Boston to await a passage to 42

Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004); Linebaugh and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra; Gabriel Kuhn, Life under the Jolly Roger (Oakland, CA, 2010). 43 TNA, Adm 1/3679 ff. 219–20. 44 Old Bailey Online, OA 17700214. 45 This was Barnaby O’Brien. A bandy-legged lad named Archibald Simpson, nickname Ducks, was also ‘left with the Spaniards at Hispaniola’, as was one of the oldest crew members, James Stone. What happened to them is unknown. 46 TNA, SP 89/69, f. 153. These were Philip Thompson, a black, William Sullivan alias Soloman, and Benjamin Rice. Two others, George Meager and Robert Charley remained in Brazil.

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London on the regular packet. He arrived in the metropolis at the end of February 1770 but escaped from the London Packet before he was charged.47 Thomas Austin was also arrested in Boston. He confessed to his crime before LieutenantGovernor Thomas Hutchinson in an attempt to elicit some concession as a crown witness, but Hutchinson was facing rising hostility from Bostonians over the presence of two British regiments in the town, not to mention disputes over the violence of press gangs. He was in no mood to listen to plea bargaining or even to apply for a commission to try pirates in the colonial port.48 He packed Austin off to London on the Paoli commanded by James Hall. There Austin was examined before the Lord Mayor with the Admiralty Solicitor in attendance on 10 February 1770 and committed to Newgate to stand trial for murder and piracy. He died in Newgate less than a week later. Death eluded the first possible execution of a seaman for Black Prince piracy, but another soon surfaced. John Shoals, who had initially sailed to New York with some of the other mutineers, was discovered in Surinam in May 1770 and brought back to London in the fall of 1770. He stood trial for murder and piracy at the High Court of Admiralty in December 1770 but the Admiralty pleaded that they lacked ‘a material witness’, presumably one of the seamen on the Black Prince who had turned king’s evidence:49 either William Greenwood, a boy who claimed he had been forced to go along with the mutineers; or John Bird, another boy, a ‘thin lad’ who had been apprehended in New York; or seaman James Walters. Whichever one it was, he was unavailable for a long time, for Shoals was forced to languish in jail for almost a year. He complained of the ‘utmost distress and want’ and the Admiralty eventually gave him a subsidy of 6d a day.50 When he came before the court on 7 November 1771, he claimed he had been forced to serve on the jury which condemned Allen McCoy, Austin hovering over him with sword and musket. He was acquitted of this charge but found guilty of piracy. He was hanged at Execution Dock on 11 December 1771, with a Danish minister in attendance. His body was gibbetted in chains on the Kentish side of the Thames. By the end of 1771, only two of the mutineers had been brought to justice. This did not go unnoticed. Bingley’s Journal claimed that after one had accounted for the three seamen who turned king’s evidence, and the two who were purportedly blown up in a ship bound for Africa, some twenty-one were still at large.51 Save, that is, for the five mutineers in Portuguese custody in Lisbon: that is, Henry Beach, Matthew Thompson, John Holden, Thomas Walters and

47

TNA, Adm 1/3679, Samuel Sedden to Philip Stephens, 17 March 1770. Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed., The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esquire, 3 vols (London, 1883), 1:74–5, 78–80. Adm 1/3679, Samuel Sedden to Philip Stephens, 12 Feb. 1770. 49 TNA, HCA 1/61, f. 37. For his 1771 trial see HCA 1/61, f. 43. 50 TNA, Adm 1/3679, ff. 211 and 313. 51 Bingley’s London Journal, 7–14 Dec. 1771. 48

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William Devereux. In the light of the poor detection and conviction rate, their fate loomed large. In August 1769 one of the owners of the Black Prince, Sir James Laroche, asked the Secretary of State whether any orders had been issued to extradite the five mutineers and what steps might be taken ‘to bring such desperate Men to Punishment’.52 In the following month diplomats in Lisbon counselled the Portuguese ministers of state and their assistants as to this possibility, but progress was very slow. The principal minister in charge, M. Francisco Xavier de Mendonca Furtado, seemed very reluctant to hand the mutineers over. The British ambassador, William Lyttelton, tried to extricate himself from the task by delegating it to the envoy extraordinary, Sir John Hort. Unsurprisingly, Hort complained bitterly ‘of the thousand teizing excuses and other methods of delay which I have experienced almost uniformly in my representations at this court’.53 There were admittedly some complications. The Portuguese court appeared increasingly jumpy after the attempt by a local bull-runner to assassinate the king at his summer retreat.54 Cornish miners brought over to excavate a tin mine were imprisoned when they refused to work in what proved to be an iron pit.55 They were victims of an act of deception by the contractor, one Captain Maine. A year or so later, the captain of the British merchant vessel, the Argyle, was accused of contraband trading in Rio de Janeiro and when his ship was impounded, he sued for damages. The local authorities responded by incarcerating Captain Robertson and his mate, forcing Sir John Hort to petition for their release. This contretemps was nothing compared to the possibility that Portugal would side with the Spanish in the escalating dispute over the Falkland Islands, over which Britain mobilized and threatened war. In these circumstances, pressing for the extradition of a few pirates became less of a priority.56 Although the government quickly gave up on extradition, it continued to press for a trial. Initially the owners of the Black Prince were asked whether they would pursue a prosecution in Portugal. When they declined, the government assumed responsibility, believing it was ‘unbecoming the national honor that British subjects should remain in a foreign Gaol without Tryal’.57 Two witnesses in the Shoals’ trial were sent over to Lisbon in the Falmouth Packet to give testimony, but the Portuguese were reluctant to use them, claiming that under their rules, two material witnesses were not enough to secure a conviction. In any case, it was not customary for the crown to launch a prosecution.58 Consequently, the British government found itself funding the subsistence of prisoners and witnesses without much prospect that it would influence the 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

TNA, SP 89/69, f. 117. TNA, SP 89/73, f. 74v. TNA, SP 89/69, ff. 196–204. TNA, SP 89/69, f. 180 TNA, SP 89/71, ff. 105–7, 117, 146 TNA, SP 89/71, ff. 163–5. TNA, SP 89/71, f. 326–7.

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course of justice. An abstract of the expenses to April 1772 shows that the British factory in Lisbon paid for 724 days’ subsistence for the men under trial, 120 days for the one mutineer of the original five who agreed to be a witness, that is William Devereux, and 63 days for two witnesses sent over from England.59 The wheels of justice ground slowly. At some point in 1774 two of the mutineers, Henry Beach and John Holden, were convicted of piracy and sent to the galleys. Holden was pardoned at the accession of the Portuguese Queen in 1777. Beach remained there for life; in the words of Sir John Hort, ‘most justly abandoned to his sentence’.60 What happened to the other two men, that is, Thompson and Walters, is a mystery. Perhaps they rotted in jail. What should one conclude from the chequered history of the Black Prince? I would suggest the logbook illustrates many of the familiar tensions that plagued slave ships where the possibility of insurrection was real. In the situation in which one in ten slave ships experienced a rising of African captives, and where incipient rebellions were probably more commonplace, captains were anxious, tetchy, and sometimes chivvied their crews beyond endurance.61 Miller doesn’t seem to have done this in any dramatic way, at least his punishments did not invite legal reprisal, although he did scapegoat his surgeon when the parlous state of the slaves preyed on his mind. What emerges very clearly from the logbook is that Miller was terrified of some kind of collective passive resistance such as a hunger strike, or of Africans committing suicide by throwing themselves overboard. Actions like this struck at the profits he anticipated from his commissions and his right to two or more ‘privileged’ slaves to sell as he pleased. Allowing for a four per cent coastal commission and two per cent on delivery, a captain in the 1760s might receive £600 on a successful voyage in a ship transporting 350 slaves, the typical capacity of the Black Prince.62 The mutiny on the Black Prince illustrates the hazards of piracy in an era when transatlantic trade consolidated itself around a booming plantation complex. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when colonies needed cash flows and when international trade remained essentially predatory, piracy was tolerated, often under the ruse of dubious privateering commissions. Pirates then had the opportunity to fence their goods and binge on their spoils without harassment from the colonial authorities.63 During the 1720s 59

TNA, Adm 1/3679, f. 313. TNA, SP 89/84, ff. 199v–200. 61 Richardson, ‘Shipboard Revolts’, 69–92. Much of the evidence for shipboard revolts comes from insurance claims, which suggests it underestimates the number of potential insurrections. 62 The average ‘cargo’ of the Black Prince, 1752–63 on five known voyages was 357 slaves. See www.slavevoyages.org, nos 17280, 17286, 17432, 17476, 17522. The average price of slaves is taken from David Richardson, ‘The Costs of Survival: The Transport of Slaves in the Middle Passage and the Profitability of the 18th-century British Slave Trade’, Explorations in Economic History, 24 (1987), 181. 63 Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill, 60

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that began to change. As the plantation complex solidified and trade lines stabilized, piracy was a hindrance rather than a help. Pirate nests were shut down; metropolitan governments reasserted their control over errant colonies like the Bahamas and Tortola. Some piracy continued in the shape of guardacostas during the 1730s as the Spanish authorities reacted to the penetration of their empire by British commerce, but after the war of Jenkins’ Ear there was less international tolerance of piracy all round, which meant that pirates had great problems finding places where they might sell their goods and re-provision their ships. This was the predicament that confronted the mutinous crew of the Black Prince. It encouraged backbiting and betrayal among crews, to the point of self-destruction. And as mutinous seamen sought safe havens, they were hunted down. Despite the rivalries between imperial powers, and despite differences in legal protocol, there was a disposition to bring pirate outlaws to justice. The evidence here questions the claim that high levels of piracy persisted during the long eighteenth century and that international efforts to suppress it were ineffectual. The state was not a marginal actor in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, as Guy Chet has claimed, for after 1725 states began to co-operate to eliminate piracy.64 To be sure, piracy ebbed and flowed according to the rhythms of international diplomacy. Some of the privateering activities of 1777–78 bordered on piracy, for Martinique became a haven for wartime prizes, especially slaves, and some nominally American vessels were manned and financed by the French. Several British newspapers complained that the ‘French from Martinico and Guadeloupe carry on their Piracies under the rebellious Sanction of the Thirteen Stripes’.65 Indeed, among the slave-ship captures of this era was another Black Prince, a Boston-built brig out of London commanded by a Captain Cooke, which was taken on the Middle Passage from Senegal to Dominica with 215 slaves on board.66 This semi-clandestine piracy, under cover of privateering commissions, was a familiar feature of Caribbean warfare. It sprang to life again during the early nineteenth century when the Lafitte brothers, privateers out of Saint Domingue and accomplished smugglers in the Gulf of Mexico, sprang to prominence.67

NC, 2015) and ‘Well-behaved pirates seldom make history: a Reevaluation of the Golden Age of English Piracy’, in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Honour of Robert C. Ritchie, ed. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (San Marino, CA), 129–68. See also David Starkey, ‘Pirates and Markets’, in Bandits at Sea, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York and London, 2001), 69–81. 64 Guy Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688–1856 (Amherst and Boston, 2014), especially the conclusion. 65 Daily Advertiser, 3 Jan. 1778; General Evening Post, 1–3 Jan. 1778. 66 Reading Mercury, 5 Jan. 1778; www.slavevoyages.org, ID 78244. 67 Jack C. Ramsay, Jean Lafitte, Prince of Pirates (Austin, TX, 1996); William C. Davis, The Pirates Lafitte: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf (Orlando, FL, 2005).

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5 Rebellion, War and the Jamaican Conspiracy of 1776 Edward Chambers was one of the largest slave-owners in the parish of Hanover, with almost 800 slaves in three plantations encircling the port of Lucea, from where Africans were unloaded to toil in the cane fields of North-West Jamaica. In mid-July 1776 he suddenly realised something was up. He learnt that the overseer’s boy was ordered to fill his master’s pistols with black sand instead of powder.1 Then Chambers’ personal servant suspiciously entered his room one morning, first on the pretence of wanting to clean his shoes, then to brush his coat. Disturbed by his bustle and slightly odd behaviour, Chambers peeped from under his mosquito net to discover a pistol levelled at him. He grappled the gun away from his valet, who fell to his knees ‘in a tremor’, so the report ran, and confessed to a plot that implicated many of the estates along the coast; by all accounts, over forty estates whose slaves numbered over 8,600.2 The valet’s task was to dispatch Chambers with a gun or an axe, preferably when he was sitting on the toilet. Bells or guns at Batchelor’s Hall would alert others that Chambers had been assassinated. Smoke signals from the burning cane-fields would ignite the insurrection along the coastal plantations. Once three or so estates were taken, so the rebels hoped – and they targeted two of Chambers’ estates and Richard Haughton’s Baulk plantation a few miles inland from Lucea Bay – the momentum for a general rebellion would swell. The immediate object was for headmen to seize local supplies of guns and powder, ‘put to death all the white people they could’, and raise the tocsin of revolt in the contiguous parishes of Westmorland and St James.3 The Hanover conspiracy had been hatched a month earlier, by drovers, carters and elite workers who had opportunities to communicate among the different estates up and down the coast. Over 55 per cent of these estates housed 150 slaves or more, the average number per proprietor being 220.4 The plan was communicated and co-ordinated at local forges and stills, and at gatherings that planters believed to be innocuous, such as the funeral of a ‘negro wench’ called Sarah who lived out her life at the Tryall estate with 200 other slaves.5 It very probably involved some nocturnal gatherings where conspirators observed 1

Public Advertiser, 25 Oct. 1776; TNA, CO 137/71, f. 254. General Evening Post, 24–6 Oct. 1776; TNA CO 137/71 f. 272. 3 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 253. 4 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 271. 5 TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 276–8. 2

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a ‘sacramental bond’ or blood pact, drinking their collective blood in a pail of water and vowing to kill the whites in the parish and beyond.6 One of the principal movers and shakers, ‘Coromantee Sam’ of the late John Haughton’s estate, had been in touch with over thirty key conspirators in twenty plantations. Another, Peter of the Point estate, made two circuitous journeys to finalize plans. He held a meeting at a coppersmith’s shop with representatives from eight different estates. He sounded out others about the availability of guns and gunpowder. He met Dundee Quaico at the still house ‘whilst he was drawing fire’ and secured his allegiance to the plot. A week before the scheduled rising, Peter talked to fiddle Tom at Richmond Hill, who assured him he had a gun and a little gunpowder. A driver from the Georgia estate invited him to visit one evening, but Peter did not wish to arouse the suspicions of the overseer there, who had been cracking down on sojourners. Messengers like Peter were cautious about who they contacted, admitting ‘to their Councils [none] but the Chiefs of the several Estates, sensible that as soon as they declared themselves, the others must follow’.7 Some aspects of this conspiracy must have come as no surprise. Edward Long, the contemporary authority on Jamaica, had warned his fellow colonists a few years earlier that they had been lethargic in safeguarding their arsenals from local slaves. In the light of the black insurrections of the 1760s, he had urged them to be more vigilant, and to renovate neighbouring barracks so that troops could be moved expeditiously to rebellious hotspots. What he and other Jamaicans could hardly have contemplated was that the 1776 conspiracy involved an alliance of different slaves, co-ordinated under the two major ethnic groups, the Akan or Coromantee of the Gold Coast and the Ibos of Biafra, in association with Africans from the Congo and Caribbean-born slaves, or creoles.8 Long had strenuously argued that the high incidence of rebellion in Jamaica emanated from the recently enslaved, particularly the warlike Coromantee, people ‘familiarised to blood, massacre, and the most detestable vices’.9 Jamaicans should not be surprised at the ‘impatient spirit of such an abandoned herd, upon being introduced to a life of labour and regularity’, Long insisted, and he advised planters to desist importing them even though they could be eventually trained into tough, hardy labourers. Yet Long must have been taken aback by the participation of the creoles, for he optimistically imagined they could provide the edifice for a sustainable planter paternalism that would absolve sugar planters from having continually to import truculent slaves from Africa to replenish the work force. Indeed, many believed that the promotion of creoles to positions of responsibility on the plantation, as drivers, 6

Morning Chronicle, 20 August 1776. Testing the Chains, 176; TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 250, 262–3, 276–8, 8 There is evidence that the Congos were also organized into a rebel group, although they are not so prominent as the Ibos and Coromantees. They may have abandoned the struggle early on to form a maroon community in the Cockpit. 9 Long, History of Jamaica, 2:444. 7 Craton,

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or stock and transport workers, would buffer them from unrest and insubordination.10 The incipient rebellion proved them wrong. It seemed to confirm the opinion of the former naval surgeon James Ramsay, in 1776 an Anglican preacher on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. He had endured physical attacks from local proprietors for his opposition to slavery and for his belief, published in the next decade, that planter paternalism was a sham. In his view there was no possibility of any enduring reciprocity between master and slave: ‘the larger part of the community [the slaves] is literally sacrificed to the less [the masters]; their time, their feelings, their persons are subject to the interest, the caprice, the spite of their masters and substitutes, without remedy, without recompense, without prospects’.11 Masters and slaves, he continued, ‘are in every respect opposite terms; the persons to whom they are applied, are natural enemies to one another. Slavery, in the manner and degree that it exists in our colonies, could never have been intended for the social state; for it supposes tyranny on one side, treachery and cunning on the other.’12 Planters and their friends openly pondered how this state of affairs came to be. How was it, magistrate George Scott asked, that the rebellion was planned by ‘the most sensible of the Creoles, both young and old’, as well as the ‘most trusty of all others of all nations’?13 Had the impolitic table talk of ‘liberty’, a familiar refrain as the American crisis unravelled, been a tonic to rebellion? ‘In our late constant disputes’, wrote the Reverend John Lindsay, the rector of St Catherine parish and Spanish Town, ‘at our tables (where by the by Every Person has his own waiting man behind him) we have I am afraid been too careless of Expressions, especially when the topic of American rebellion has been by the Disaffected among us, dwelt upon and brandished of with strains of Virtuous Heroism.’14 Indeed, Lindsay reflected, ‘Dear Liberty has rang in the heart of every house-bred Slave, in one form or another, these Ten Years past … While we only talk’d about it, they went no further than their private reflections upon us, and it: but as soon as we came to blows, we find them fast on our heels. Such has been the seeds sown in the minds of our Domestics by our Wise-Acre Patriots.’15 ‘Wise-Acre Patriots’, as Lindsay scornfully called them, were quite thick on the ground. Jamaica, along with other islands in the West Indies, had shared in the adulation of John Wilkes, the flamboyant London politician who had criticised the peace negotiations of 1763 as a British sell-out to the Bourbon powers and had cast a succession of British governments as authoritarian, trampling 10 11

Richard Dunn, ‘“Dreadful Idlers”’, 805–7; Blackburn, New World Slavery, 346. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (London, 1784),

15. 12

Ibid., 173. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 254. 14 National Library of Scotland, MS 3942, f. 259, cited in Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution’, Journal of Negro History, 61/3 (1976), 300. 15 National Lib. Scotland, MS 3942, ff. 260–1, cited in Sheridan, ‘Insurrection Scare’, 301. 13

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on British liberties, muzzling opposition through unconstitutional warrants and using parliamentary privilege to outlaw Wilkes himself and deprive him of his rightful place in the Commons. The hoopla of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’, well reported in the British press, registered across the Atlantic. Wilkes’ own journalistic ventures were reported in Caribbean newspapers as well as the American, and the thrust of his campaign against the government chimed with the efforts of the Jamaican assembly to keep some legislative and financial independence from the governor and his council.16 Concordances were even made between Wilkes and William Beckford, one of the foremost absentee planters of his day, the owner of over 1,000 slaves and thirteen plantations, another London ‘patriot’ and libertine, who on his death in 1770 left legacies to at least eight illegitimate children.17 American historians have often seen the Wilkes agitation as fuelling the anti-ministerialism that led to the struggle for independence.18 In Jamaica the connection was less obvious, partly because the efforts of the British government to raise colonial taxes after the Seven Years’ War elicited a different response. The British government had made some important concessions to Jamaica prior to the passing of the Sugar Act, which was designed to crack down on the smuggling of French molasses into America and to reap the real benefits of sugar imports. Certainly Jamaicans, like Americans, had to deal with the extra regulations that the 1764 act imposed, including the ramping up of the powers of vice-Admiralty courts. But the act gave the Jamaicans a preferential molasses market in America, and even when that was pared down two years later by a reduction on the duty of foreign molasses, Jamaicans were relieved of paying duties on sugar imports into North America and benefited from a free port policy which gave them access to Spanish markets in sugar and slaves.19 In sum, the Sugar Acts had a different impact upon Jamaica than it did on the American mainland. The same was true of the Stamp Act. The act was officiously burdensome, it was disliked, and both Jamaicans and Americans shared in the celebrations that accompanied its repeal. In Kingston effigies of the island’s stamp commissioner and George Grenville, the policy architect in Britain, were burnt and the militia hoisted a flag representing ‘Liberty Triumphant’ and an ‘odious Stampman’ praying forgiveness for his ‘many notorious oppressions and extortions’.20 Yet despite the fact that many 16

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), 87; Barbados Mercury, 22 Sept. 1770. 17 UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership website, entry for Alderman William Beckford: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146640587. See also Parker, Sugar Barons, 219–27, 250–1. 18 Pauline Maier, ‘John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain’, William and Mary Quarterly, 20 (1963), 373–95 and her From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 162–97. 19 O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 65–9. 20 Ibid., 95.

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Jamaicans believed the Stamp Act to be an unconstitutional imposition on their legislative sovereignty, they paid more stamp duty in the years the act was in force than the rest of the British empire. Jamaicans were thus frustrated at being on the receiving end of the British ministry’s tax collecting schemes and greatly alarmed when their supplies of timber and provisions were cut by American non-importation policies and the subsequent imperial embargo on American trade. Perhaps not surprisingly, copies of Tom Paine’s Common Sense were circulating the island at the time of the Hanover rebellion.21 Yet the hard facts were that Jamaicans knew on which side their bread was buttered. Britain was the crucial market for sugar imports; it was one that was protected from foreign competition. A free market would have exposed Jamaicans to the superior production of St Domingue, whose output soared after 1740 and within decades produced more sugar than all the British colonies combined. Defying Britain would have challenged the Jamaicans’ raison d’être. The Jamaican assembly pleaded with the Privy Council to make peace with America in December 1774 and advanced the same arguments about the unconstitutionality of internal taxation and virtual representation as their American counterparts, but in the end the island would not take the path to war.22 The Americans, for their part, welcomed the Jamaican assembly’s address, but refused to alter its non-importation policies to provide provisions to the islands. The Continental Congress even impertinently suggested that the West Indies should abandon sugar production and its economic power within the empire.23 War produced its own anxieties. John Lindsay had long pondered how domestic slaves might have reconciled the paeans of liberty from the mouths of their masters with their own servitude; especially when liberty was declared worth fighting for among American sympathizers, who allegedly numbered a third of Jamaica’s white population.24 As tensions rose, so signs of black insurgency surfaced. Trouble was already unravelling at the British settlements in Honduras, where slaves were killing masters and fleeing up the coast to join the Spanish at Bacalar. These fugitive acts, which persisted on and off for nine months, eventually culminated in an uprising of blacks on the Belize river and rumbled southward to Black River on the Mosquito Shore where it became 21 William

James Morgan, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 13 vols (Washington, DC, 1964–2019), 5:832. 22 The Humble Petition and Memorial of the Assembly of Jamaica (Philadelphia, 1775); Richard B Sheridan, ‘The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 33/4 (1976), 615–41; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, passim; Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery: The Transfer of British Liberty to the West Indies, 1627–1865’, in Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2010), 50–76. 23 Sheridan, ‘Crisis of Slave Subsistence’, 618. 24 Letter dated 10 Feb. 1776, published in the Pennsylvania Ledger, 27 April 1776; Nat. Library of Scotland, MS. 3942, ff. 260–1.

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necessary to declare martial law. ‘We are in continual danger among even our own Slaves’, one settler wrote, ‘and none to oppose them but a few undisciplined inhabitants.’25 Given the regular traffic between these dependencies and Jamaica, islanders must have been very aware of this spiralling unrest and the disturbing account of grand marronage, the attempt to establish a viable maroon community in the interior. While Jamaicans learnt of marronage and the slaying of logging masters in their Central American dependencies, they soon discovered disaffection on their own island. In May 1775 slaves on the Stowe plantation conspired to kill the planter or overseer and his family. A month or so later, field hands planned a bloody reprisal against a Mr Vellise, a sugar planter who had driven them too hard. Both plots were thwarted and their ringleaders summarily hanged.26 Yet this hardly stemmed the tide of deadly disaffection. In October a surgeon named John Lockhart was killed by runaway blacks as he was travelling between the Anchovy and Montpelier estates in St James Parish, about eight miles from Montego Bay. A search party discovered one assassin asleep in the woods, who confessed it had been ‘their Determination to kill every white Person that came that way’. He was stoned to death before a court was convened to try him. His fellow conspirators, Asherry, Primus and Scipio, slaves of a Mr Dockeray, were at least given a trial, and in November they were ordered to be executed. After a spate of conspiracies on the island, judicial terror was ramped up to deter slaves from rebellion. Primus was gibbeted alive where the murder took place. Asherry tried to escape on his way to execution and was shot. His head was subsequently displayed on a stake at the millhouse of the Anchovy Bottom plantation, an estate of some 1,273 acres very close to the border of Hanover, one of three owned by Martin Williams senior. Asherry’s body was burnt.27 In the same month that these executions took place a dramatic turn of events occurred in Virginia. There had already been signs of unrest among the slaves of the Chesapeake and further south. Early on in the war a correspondent from Charleston remarked ‘our negroes have all high notions of their liberty’. Indeed, a free black pilot named Jeremiah allegedly planned a slave insurrection in conjunction with an invasion of the town by the royal navy, for which he was hanged and burnt at the stake. A little earlier, in July 1775, a Scot named Burnet had circulated a rumour that the ‘old king’ would liberate the slaves. The same month, a slave named Merrick from Beaufort County, North Carolina, circulated another rumour that forty or so slaves from neighbouring counties planned to destroy white families as they tramped west to create a free community in the back country. Judging from the arms discovered on several blacks, it was adopted seriously by slaves anxious to take advantage of the confused political situation. 25 TNA, CO 5/120/35–38; CO 137/72/55–7; Nigel Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize: Essays in Historical Sociology (Belize, 2nd edn 2003), 21–9. 26 Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 3 Aug., 4 Sept. 1775; General Advertiser, 4 Sept. 1775. 27 Daily Advertiser, 8 Feb. 1776; General Evening Post, 6 Feb. 1776; see legacies of slave ownership, www.ucl.ac.uk, under Anchovy Bottom.

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In fact, Governor Josiah Martin, who was somehow implicated in this plot, fled to Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River to rally loyalist forces in the region.28 In the wake of this restiveness, John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and until recently the colonial governor of Virginia, took steps that changed the dynamic of slave disaffection. On 7 November 1775, he issued a proclamation promising outright liberty to all slaves from the American rebel plantations who agreed to serve in some capacity in the British army. The offer was a perfectly pragmatic one, designed to disrupt the American war effort in the South. It drew on the discontent that surfaced in North Carolina and on the billowing numbers of runaways who took advantage of the heightened tensions between the British and Americans to flee the southern plantations: people like Jemmy, ‘a smart, active and well made’ slave who escaped with an ‘iron clog’ attached to his leg; or Harry, a slave on the Ashley river plantation, who fled with his sweetheart Letty and their two-year-old child.29 Dunmore’s proclamation was not a declaration against slavery for it did not apply to the slaves of loyalist masters; if they fought for the British, they would be returned to their masters thereafter. In fact, Lord Dunmore was a slave-owner himself. But the offer of loyalist freedom was taken up by thousands of slaves, some entertaining the idea ‘that the present contest was for obliging’ Americans to ‘give them their liberty’.30 Precisely how many fled to the British is unclear. Some plantation slaves tramped off en masse, as did eighty-seven from John Willoughby’s estate in Norfolk.31 Most came as families, in threes and fours, some from as far as New York. Recent calculations suggest perhaps 5,000 adults fled over the course of the war from the Chesapeake alone, with probably 1,000 fighting-fit blacks reaching Dunmore in the first three or so months.32 Dunmore reported early on that ‘no less than a hundred of those very men who were forced into the field against me the day before came and took the … oath’ and although some were ill-trained in arms, he was confident of getting them into shape. When he began to prepare for the Battle of Great Bridge, for example, he helped garrison 28 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 202–3; London Evening Post, 31 August 1775; Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution (New York, 2005), 161–5; Wim Klooster, ‘Le Décret d’Émancipation Imaginaire: Monarchisme et Esclavage en Amérique du Nord et dans la Caraïbe au Temps des Révolutions’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 363 (2011), 116–17. 29 South Carolina and General American Gazette, 9–16 June 1775, 16–20 October 1775, in TNA, CO 5/396. 30 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 160; quote from William Drayton of South Carolina. 31 Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York, 2005), 72. 32 Ibid., 73. Schama says at least 800, but a report in the Boston Newsletter, 4 Jan. 1766, suggests more than 1,000. See also St James’s Chronicle, 14 Sept. 1776, which noted that fever and smallpox had taken 1,000 of the blacks in Lord Dunmore’s flotilla. See also Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 162, who puts the number between 800 and 1,000. See also Morgan and O’Shaughnessy, ‘Arming Slaves in the American Revolution’, 189.

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the nearby fort with ‘negroes whom I arm and discipline as fast as they come in’.33 The exodus of blacks sent a frisson of fear among the tobacco and rice planters of the Chesapeake and Georgia. Among the whites of Wilmington and Cape Fear, it was rumoured that the British promised ‘every Negro that would murder his Master and family… should have his Master’s plantation’. In the press Dunmore was dubbed the ‘Virginia Negro Chief’.34 ‘If that man is not crushed before spring’, wrote George Washington of Dunmore, ‘he will become the most formidable enemy America has; his strength will increase as a snowball by rolling, and faster, if some expedient cannot be hit upon to convince the slaves of the impotency of his designs.’35 Predictably, southern patriots tried to counter the loss of slaves by telling them they would be no more than cannon fodder, and that if they survived, they would be sold back into slavery in the West Indies.36 Dunmore was stopped in his tracks in December 1775. Outnumbered by American militiamen, he made a foray out of Norfolk that disastrously backfired, forcing him to transfer his troops to a flotilla off the coast. Over time disease and hunger decimated his force, but he did manage to establish an ‘Ethiopian Regiment’, an army of free blacks that steadfastly stood against America and slavery, their coats emblazoned with the motto ‘liberty to slaves’. Sir Henry Clinton built on Dunmore’s initiative by forming a company of Black Pioneers that extended freedom to their families, not simply to arms-bearing volunteers, although he used them in the conventional manner: as labourers, building trenches and repairing barracks, and not in active service.37 It was not until 1779 that General Clinton took steps to arm them. Even so, these were departures from the conventional strategy of using black auxiliaries in tropical or sub-tropical campaigns as had happened at Cartagena in 1741 and Havana twenty years later. On those occasions, slaves were ‘on loan’ from their masters, with singularly few winning freedom through their valorous actions. This was liberation, at least for the slaves who left ‘patriot’ owners and opted to fight for empire. How far these dramatic changes in British policy reached the ears of Jamaican blacks is difficult to determine. At the outbreak of war, New York runaway slaves joined British men-of-war and privateers. Frigates like HMS Rose, which policed the waters of Rhode Island for signs of American smuggling, had a conspicuous number of black mariners on board, perhaps a quarter of the crew.38 Jamaicans very likely heard of these liberated slaves manning British 33

TNA, CO 5/1373, ff. 107v–109. Rough Crossings, 70; Pennsylvania Evening Post, 18 Jan. 1776. 35 Schama, Rough Crossings, 70. 36 Boston Newsletter, 4 Jan. 1776. It was also said that some ‘valuable negro men’ were forcibly taken as recruits for the ‘royal regiment of black fusiliers’. Morning Chronicle, 10 June 1776. 37 Schama, Rough Crossings, 84; Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville and London, 2011), 114–15. 38 Charles R. Foy, ‘The Royal Navy’s Employment of Black Mariners’, 10; Charles R. Foy, 34 Schama,

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boats and forming black armies in the south; very possibly from Cape Fear, which supplied the islands with important sources of timber and naval stories. And if the slave-owners confronted these developments with disbelief, they had the consequences of these changes on their doorstep, because some Virginian planters decided to take advantage of the wartime situation and the hazards of transporting slaves across the Atlantic by selling theirs in Jamaica.39 To Jamaican slaves it must have seemed that the time was ripe for rebellion: the world was turning, freedom was in the air, whites were divided, and in Jamaica the British were diverting their military resources to the North American mainland. The timing of the Hanover revolt, in fact, was co-ordinated with the departure of the 50th regiment and the sailing of the sugar fleet under convoy. Congo Leander of the Spring estate of James Montagu, Esquire, admitted this to one of the rebels on the Chambers’ estate.40 A correspondent to friends in England also surmised that the absence of troops and ships in Lucea was ‘the Cause of the Negroes rising at a Time when all were engaged on the sailing of the Fleet for England’.41 Sir Basil Keith, the governor of Jamaica, went further. He told Lord George Germain that the rebels could not withstand such a tempting opportunity to throw off the yoke of slavery; now, or never, they thought was the time to make themselves Masters of this Country; and altho’ this train of Reasoning may seem to be above Negroe comprehension; yet it certainly does appear from all the examinations and informations, written and verbal, that they were encouraged and did Act upon these foundations.42

Some went further and speculated that Americans were directly implicated in the rising, for rumours also circulated that some ‘American emissaries’ had provided the rebel slaves with arms, a counterpoint to Dunmore’s endeavours.43 Whatever effect the American revolution had on Jamaican disaffection, there were clearly socio-economic pressures that prompted the rebellion. Jamaica was suffering from the trade embargo with America; perhaps not as severely as ‘Seeking Freedom’, 73–4. 39 Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, 22 Dec. 1775; Pennsylvania Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1776. On the hazards of the slave trade, see David Richardson, ed., Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Trade to America, vol. 4, The Final Years, 1770–1807, Bristol Record Society, vol. 47 (Bristol, 1996). Richardson’s research shows that of the twenty ships sailing from the port in 1775, three were intercepted by privateers. In 1776, there was a significant slump in the trade with only eight ships sailing from Bristol. Three of these encountered privateers. 40 TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 234, 254–6. Morning Chronicle, 25 Dec. 1776. This account from Spanish Town, 9 August 1776, thought the insurrection was planned for Sunday 28 July, two days after the convoy was expected to depart. A correspondent in the Public Advertiser, 25 Oct. 1776, thought the insurrection was scheduled for 19 July. This was certainly feared at the time by the military; see TNA CO 137/71 f. 240. 41 Public Advertiser, 25 Oct. 1776. 42 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 229. 43 Daily Advertiser, 26 Oct. 1776.

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some other islands such as Barbados, but badly enough, to a point that slave rations were reduced and scarcity rife.44 Governor Keith noted Jamaicans were ‘labouring under the dreadful Apprehension of Scarcity from the long Drowth [drought] which has prevailed over three fourths of the Island’.45 One absentee planter was told that prices had doubled since the troubles with America began and that the presence of troops and sailors had put enormous pressure on existing supplies. Jamaica did not exactly experience a subsistence crisis of the scale of Barbados, where starving slaves broke into houses in the desperate search for food and were wounded or killed for their pains.46 Yet the edge of hunger certainly spurred Jamaican slaves to revolt. To some extent the cultivation of provisioning grounds by the slaves themselves mitigated the situation, but Hanover was a new parish with a tough labour regime, so that one might reasonably expect its allotments were not well developed.47 A letter from Port Royal, well-publicized in the British press, attributed the conspiracy to ‘the scarcity of provisions’ precipitated by the embargo of trade with America.48 Hanover parish happened to be part of the fastest growing plantation zone in Jamaica. Since the formation of the parish in 1723, its slave population had grown exponentially, from 3,300 in 1730 to around 13,500 in 1768, widening the ratio of blacks to whites. With its seventy-five sugar plantations it was considered one of the richest on the island, fourth in terms of taxes. Relative to other parishes in Jamaica, Hanover did not have a high number of absentee landlords, around twenty-three per cent, but the leadership of the conspiracy seems to have been disproportionately concentrated in those estates where masters were absent and the authority of overseers held sway.49 A noticeable number of estates were owned by the Haughton family, who were linked to some of the richest 44

On islands in general, St James’s Chronicle, 17 June 1776. On Barbados, see the letter in London Evening Post, 25 June 1776, 16 July 1776, 10 Aug. 1776, 24 Sept. 1776; Virginia Gazette, 14 Sept. 1776. On St Kitts, Morning Post, 31 July 1776. On Grenada, Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1776. 45 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 230. 46 London Evening Post, 10 Aug. 1776; Gazetteer, 25 Dec. 1776. It is calculated that 5,000 Barbadians died from malnutrition during the war. See Selwyn H. H. Carrington, ‘The American Revolution and the British West Indies’ Economy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/4 (1987), 833. 47 On the possibility of provisioning grounds mitigating revolt, see Michael Mullin, ‘British Caribbean and North American Slaves in an Era of War and Revolution, 1775–1807’, in, The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), 235–67. 48 General Evening Post, 24–6 Oct 1776; London Chronicle, 24–6 Oct 1776; Public Advertiser, 25 Oct. 1776. 49 Sheridan, ‘Invasion Scare’, 294, 299. On absenteeism, see Parker, Sugar Barons, 333–44 and Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623–1775 (Baltimore, 1973), 385, who claims that 234 of 775 plantations in the whole of Jamaica (30 per cent) were owned by absentee planters or minors. See also Lowell Joseph Ragatz, ‘Absentee Landlordism in the British Caribbean, 1750–1833’, Agricultural History, 5/1 (1931), 7–24, who offers some insights into the migration back to Britain.

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Fig. 5. Map of the Hanover Slave Plot, Jamaica, 1776 (Michael Craton, Testing the Chains (Ithaca, NY, 1982), map 12).

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planters on the island, such as the Taylors, important politicians in the House of Assembly. One member of that family, Sir John Taylor, the baronet of Lysson Hall, Jamaica, was a regular visitor to Europe, spending enough time in London to become a member of the Royal Society. He was captured by Johann Zoffany in the ‘Tribuna of the Uffizi’, and was almost certainly in Europe with his wife, Elizabeth Goddin Haughton, when the rebellion occurred. She inherited three estates in Hanover, two of which were implicated in the revolt. Another hotbed of insurrection was Bluehole estate, owned by the heirs of Benjamin Harding, which produced two conspiring headmen, Coromantee Quamina and Philander.50 So was Tryall, a plantation owned by two London absentees, Jane Allen of Greenwich and John Hyde, Esquire, of Montagu Square. This was where the conspirators had convened at the funeral of Sarah. In 1776, Hanover parish was the anvil of sugar production in Jamaica. Edward Long claimed Hanover contained ‘more sugar-works than some of three times the extent’ and calculated that it took fewer slaves to produce 100 hogsheads of sugar than in any other parish save Westmorland; in fact there was very little to choose between these two in terms of enforced productivity.51 In this respect several conspirators testified that stern whippings and sadistic overseers had spurred slaves to rebel. Marriott of the Dundee Pen, for example, harboured bitter memories of a flogging. He swore he would join the insurrection, and ‘as soon as he was well of a Whipping’ he would repair to the Retrieve estate and speak to his countrymen there. Other rebels complained of overbearing overseers, among them driver James of the Point estate, Ibo Philander, a millwright on the Gilchrist plantation, and Coromantee Sam of the Baulk estate. Many of the rebellious estates were large, moreover; over a quarter comprised 300 acres or more, and the Baulk estate over 700.52 Many of the possible factors that made sugar plantations ripe for revolt prevailed in Hanover: hard labour, hard punishment, food scarcity, a high ratio of blacks to whites, political uncertainty and the relative absence of counter-insurgent forces.53 What also troubled white contemporaries was the proximity of the oldest maroon community in Jamaica, Trelawny town in the parish of St James. Although the maroons there were in principle not averse to slavery and may even have had a few slaves themselves,54 their autonomy from the 50

TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 276–8. History of Jamaica, 2:212, 230, 439. Long counted seventy-one plantations in 1768, Edwards sixty-nine two decades later. See Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 3 vols (London, 1793–1801), 2:249. 52 TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 234, 262–3, 272, 276–8. 53 Monica Schuler, ‘Ethnic Slave Rebellions in the Caribbean and the Guianas’, Journal of Social History, 3/4 (1970), 380–2; Orlando Paterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London, 1967), 273–83; Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979), 11–12. 54 Amy M. Johnson, ‘Gradations of Freedom: The Maroons of Jamaica, 1798–1821’, Journal 51 Long,

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British made them aspirational to chattel slaves. Sir Basil Keith, the governor of Jamaica, was among those who thought the maroons’ presence was a problem. They could do ‘great mischief from their situation in the heart of the country, their manner of Life, and the very High idea the Slaves entertain of them’.55 Sir Basil was almost certainly aware of the stiff resistance of the Black Caribs to the extension of the plantation zone on St Vincent, and he very probably heard of the manner in which maroons in Surinam had encouraged so many defections from the fields that the Cottica-Commewijne plantation economy had nearly collapsed.56 The last thing he needed was a surge of maroon support for rebellious slaves. An address by a fictitious Jamaican maroon amplified these anxieties. Purportedly voiced by one of the leaders, it had circulated in Britain during the 1730s and resurfaced again in American newspapers during the 1770s. It saw the maroon mission as Mosaic, delivering blacks from servitude.57 The author repudiated the racist construction of blacks by people like Edward Long by emphasizing the ‘majestic glossiness’ of their race and their ‘wild imaginative superiority’ to whites. It was one of the first printed declarations of ‘negritude’. Only ‘education and accident’ the author argued, distinguished black from white. ‘Genius and nobility of soul is not confined to sex, colour or country.’ He urged his fellow countrymen to fight a war of position for their freedom, to cunningly play on white assumptions of their inferiority and tactically undermine them. This was not the message Hanover’s slaves would have necessarily welcomed in 1776. They were too impatient to countenance such a strategy; although aspects of the address did lay bare the attractions of grand marronage, the sublimity of its freedom in the mountains, away from the prying eyes of planters and their agents. The local authorities moved swiftly once the Hanover plot was discovered. The foot and horse militia of the area were called out before the governor was informed of the crisis.58 A small ship under the command of Captain Polson arrived within hours from Montego Bay, bringing with her a company of the Royal Americans to help with the round-up of rebels. These soldiers had been active against the Black Caribs of St Vincent and had some experience in bush warfare.59 Retribution was swift. Around seventy-six insurgents were shot; eighty-six were imprisoned including thirty to forty who were suspected of being of Caribbean History, 49/2 (2015), 160–88; Robert C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, 2 vols (London, 1803), 1:98. 55 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 229. 56 Richard and Sally Price, eds, Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (Baltimore and London, 1992), xix–xxii. On the Black Caribs, see chapter 8. 57 Connecticut Courant, 14 Nov. 1774; Boston Gazette, 7 Dec. 1778. See also León-François Hoffmann, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Exponent of Black Power: Moses Ben Sàam’, Caribbean Studies, 15/3 (1975), 149–61. 58 TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 236–7. 59 TNA, CO 101/17/281.

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ringleaders. By the time Governor Keith declared martial law and requested that Admiral Gayton delay the departure of the 50th regiment and send a sloop to Lucea Bay, some interrogations and executions had already taken place among those blacks who were thought to be the chief ringleaders.60 These included Charles of the Baulk estate, the presumed head of the creoles; Prince, the ‘king of the Eboes’ who worked at the estate of John Priest of Lucea, Congo Leander of the Spring Estate; and Peter, who was thought to have masterminded the revolt at Bachelor’s Hall, where the signal to begin the insurrection was to be fired and who had been instructed to mobilize slaves in the windward plantations. The purpose of these summary trials and executions was to cut off the heads of the hydra of black revolt. This was not as easy as imagined. The examination of Coromantee Sam of the Haughton estate revealed that the creoles had substitute leaders if the initial headman died; it was reasonable to assume other groups had them too.61 Evidence of a general insurrection, moreover, was elusive, notwithstanding rumours of chieftains from parishes outside the immediate zone of unrest. One planter from Montego Bay, who despaired of his livelihood in the wake of the revolt, believed insurgents had called upon a previous rebel leader in St Ann’s to aid them.62 Yet as the courts martial proceeded through July and August, it appeared that the revolt had been planned on an estate by estate basis, in a chain stretching twenty-five miles from Green Island, a Haughton estate, as far windward as Colonel Grizell’s Orchard plantation near St James.63 Did this mean that Westmorland parish, with a long border contiguous to Hanover, was essentially outside the sphere of insurgency? The Coromantee had risen in revolt in that parish in 1766, and overtures had seemingly been made again for recalcitrant slaves to rebel. How deep had the contagion of rebellion spread? Some slaves implicated in Tackey’s revolt of 1760 were still on the run; one was captured near Negril in March 1777. Colonel John Grizell, who had experienced the consequences of slave rage when his son was killed by ‘rebellious negroes’ in 1763, was uncertain.64 Thirteen years on, this planter and militia commander still found the prospect of black insurgency unsettling. ‘Our apprehensions were great’, he confessed, ‘as we know not where it will end.’65 The authorities predictably interrogated slaves at the estate of Anchovy Bottom close to where the assassination of John Lockhart had taken place 60

TNA, CO 137/71, f. 250; Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 5:785, 887. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 253. 62 Letter from Montego Bay, 6 Aug. 1776, published in Massachusetts Spy, 2 Oct. 1776. For other talk of a ‘general insurrection’, see Gazetteer, 14 Oct. 1776. 63 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 258. 64 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the AngloJamaican World (Chapel Hill and London, 2004), 170–4. In Thistlewood’s diary: ‘John Wright and John Grizzle jun. Murdered by rebellious negroes; were buried on the 29th of March, 1763’, cited in UCL, Legacies of British slave-ownership database, under Orchard Estate, Hanover Parish, Jamaica, proprietor John Grizzel or Grizzle. 65 Sheridan, ‘Invasion Scare’, 292, 295; London Chronicle, 10–13 May 1777. 61

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the previous October but, more importantly, they seriously wondered whether the maroons of Trelawny town had been implicated in the plan. Pontiac (or Pontack) of the Blue Hole estate claimed they had. He swore that a month previously he had seen two maroons, Billy and Asherry, the latter described as a ‘tall yellow fellow with an Officer’s Badge’, talking to slaves when they were on their way through Blue Hole to Gilchrist’s plantation at Montpelier.66 Pontiac heard them tell Philander they would provide them with guns, powder and shot for an insurrection and that at the appropriate time they would steal ammunition while the slaves created a diversion burning the sugar cane. Bluehole and Magotty plantations were at the epicentre of this plot, extending to Tryall, Barbican and Flint River, all east of Lucea towards Montego Bay.67 The plot was not implausible. A large cache of muskets was found in the Blue Mountains and the maroons were angry that their right to hunt down and return runaway slaves had been usurped by slave rangers employed by the plantations. ‘Bread was taken out of their mouths’, exclaimed Asherry, and ‘they were determined to make the Country come good again.’68 The real problem was deciding whether this grievance was general and serious enough to provoke an insurrection against the whites and forge an alliance between slaves and maroons. Such an alliance had been mooted in Tacky’s revolt of 1760, when the Akan slaves rose in revolt and hoped to carve out an African kingdom in Jamaica that would have compared with the maroon communities in the mountains.69 It was the planters’ worst nightmare, and Governor Keith had a man-of-war sent to Lucea Bay in case there was any trouble while the trials continued. The Trelawny town maroons vigorously denied they were involved in any conspiracy against the planters. If Billy and Asherry were implicated, they were rogue operators outside the clan, and the Trelawny-town men were quite prepared to turn them in for examination and trial. The superintendent of the town, John James, concurred with this view and along with five captains brought the errant maroons in for questioning. To reinforce their loyal disposition, a party of maroons set out for Hanover parish to track down a maroon named Cuffee who had been seen talking to slaves at Bachelor Hall and at Gilchrist’s. He was the ‘third man’ in at least one examination presented to the justices.70 The maroon inquiry proved inconclusive. Billy seemed innocent of the charges against him and it proved difficult to pin down the ‘prevaricating’ Asherry without corroborating evidence. Pontiac was not the man to do this. His testimony at the trial deviated from his previous examination and his interrogators feared he had led them down the garden path. They might have feared the same about Charles of the Bluehole estate, whose testimony proved 66

TNA, CO 137/71, f. 276. TNA, CO 137/71, ff. 276–8. 68 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 288. On the discovery of muskets, see Chester Chronicle, 25 July 1776. 69 See Craton, Testing the Chains, 125–39, and Long, History of Jamaica, 2:447–75. 70 TNA, CO 137/71, f. 288. 67

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‘weak and equivocal’.71 And so they tried to pressure another plausible witness into providing positive evidence, one Cuffee of the Magotty estate owned by John Blagrove. He had been already sentenced to transportation but he was not disposed to be forthcoming. The upshot was that Asherry was acquitted. So, too, were 46 per cent of the 137 slaves who were brought to trial between 20 July and 18 September 1776. Of the others, 17 were executed, 45 were ordered to be transported to other colonies, and 11 were sentenced to a severe whipping, sometimes with the additional penalty of cropped ears. ‘Scarce anything is now going on in this Parish’ one resident remarked, ‘but taking up, trying, hanging and gibbeting alive, though many have been acquitted.’72 For an insurrection that purportedly involved thirty-nine plantations, the punishment was savage enough, although in the end it seems that judicial terror was tempered by mercy. Governor Keith proposed that those sentenced to be transported be pardoned, and the Jamaican council agreed.73 No doubt the reduction of imported slaves in the wake of wartime privateering disposed the planters affect some magnanimity. Nonetheless as the trials came to a close, the presiding magistrates and officers registered acute frustration at the outcome, especially General Palmer. ‘From the Insolent behaviour of the negroes in general’, he railed ‘we are apprehensive that this detestable plot is not searched to the bottom as yet, and so far as my poor conception reaches, it will take some time before we are on a good footing of safety.’74 Slave testimony, in fact, proved elusive enough to keep anxieties high. Pontiac’s account had been contradictory and evasive; Peter, another key witness, a slave on Philip Delaney’s Point estate, seemed ‘distracted’; he ranted or dissembled like a madman.75 And Adam, one of Edward Chambers’ slaves, who it was hoped might enlighten the planters of the conspiracies to leeward, observed a studied ambiguity. His pleadings might have ‘carved out further business for us’ wrote one of the magistrates, but in the end they decided he was a trickster, ‘the most atrocious villain of all concerned in this affair’.76 He paid for it by having his body gibbeted for the vultures. Magistrate George Scott believed the plot was ‘wisely concerted and truely formidable’,77 yet after two months of trials and interrogations he was no nearer unravelling its full dimensions than he was at the beginning. Like other magistrates he thought he had caught the ringleaders, although he admitted he could never be sure. When the Hanover magistrates finally recommended that martial law should come to an end, they concluded that the seeds of insurrection ‘may in time raise up new Danger if proper care is not taken to keep it off’.78 In fact, 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

TNA, CO 137/71, f. 350. Newport Mercury, 7 October 1776. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 360. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 342. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 268. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 352. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 254. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 354.

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the authorities remained incredibly jumpy. In Vere parish on the south side of the island, two blacks were executed for procuring firearms ‘with evil intentions’. When a mulatto reported in early August that the maroons of Moore Town intended to rise in conjunction with the Coromantee, the governor extended martial law, mobilized three troops of militia and ordered them to meet him in Bath to march on the insurgents. It proved a false alarm.79 These incidents revealed that while the authorities had nipped the Hanover conspiracy in the bud, they still had no idea of its range or penetration. Governor Keith wrote to Lord George Germain on 6 August to say ‘there was now an apparent Insolence among the Slaves over the whole Island, and in several Parishes there have been executions and Punishments for open acts of Rebellion, since the commencement of this alarm, so I may truly say we are now in the most imminent Danger, and the most pressing Necessity’.80 By issuing a trade embargo, he had made every effort to stifle reports of the conspiracy outside Jamaica. But he could not stem the flow of news. A letter recounting the scare, written on 7 August 1776, was published in Newport, Rhode Island. It talked of a ‘most horrid conspiracy’ among the ‘Negroes to cut us off to a Man, and even to a white man’s child. The Women were to have been spared to make Concubines for the Ethiopians.’ The author said there was ‘no Intelligence of the Negroes in other Parishes having joined them, but suppose the Massacre was to have been general throughout this Island?’81 Consequently, the Hanover conspiracy generated further anxieties and remained something of an enigma. Was it something that had been simply concocted by an elite clan of craftsmen and drivers? Did it extend to other parishes? Was the discovery of a nocturnal ‘coronation’ in Kingston, in which two blacks in ‘gilt-paper hats’ received homage from their ‘subjects’, in any way linked to the Hanover uprising? Did it in any way replicate the ‘royal’ inauguration of Cubah in the aftermath of Tacky’s revolt, or was it an ennobling ritual without insurrectionary import? And would the insurrection resurface like a rhizome, as in 1765, when Coromantee headmen in St Mary’s parish rose once more in armed rebellion?82 There were signs that it would, for two conspiracies were uncovered the following year, one in Port Royal and the other in Hanover which prompted the mobilization of the militia and more examinations and executions. According to the General Evening Post, a black named Distance was gibbeted alive for ‘rebellion’ and ‘many more were brought in’ and ‘confined in irons’.83 Did these slaves belong to particular ethnic groups, or did they 79

TNA, CO 137/71, f. 358. TNA, CO 137/71, f. 230. 81 Newport Mercury, 7 October 1776. 82 Long, History of Jamaica, 2:455, 465–9; Morning Chronicle, 25 Dec. 1776. There were whiffs of rebellion the following year, see Public Advertiser, 2 May 1777, and Gazetteer, 22 Oct. 1777. For runaways from Hanover after the conspiracy, see Daily Advertiser, 24 June 1777. On crowning rituals, see Morgan, ‘Conspiracy Scares’, 165; Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels, 12. 83 Public Advertiser, 2 May 1777; General Evening Post, 21–4 June 1777. 80

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replicate 1776? For the one singular fact that surfaced from that conspiracy was that it accommodated and appeared to transcend the ethnic identities that had shaped previous uprisings. How the ethnic groups might have reconciled their own differences had they had successfully defeated the white regime remained an open question. One account suggested that the rebels planned to choose three ‘kings’ in each parish to represent the Ibos, Coromantee and creoles, making sixty for the whole island.84 But how would this unwieldy federation function? After a race war against the ‘buckras’ (whites), what next? What sort of African or maroon polities would have been possible in the circumstances? The Hanover conspiracy of 1776 remained an incipient rebellion that threw up more unanswered questions than it resolved. The Hanover revolt of 1776 was just one of many uprisings and conspiracies that spanned the War of American Independence and it is important to place it in context.85 The task is made more daunting by the fact that the historiography of late-eighteenth-century slave insurgency is a shifting field of interpretation. Historians can agree that the transformation of France’s wealthiest sugar colony into the black nation state of Haiti was a pivotal event, but they cannot agree about the depth or reach of the radical enlightenment among slaves. Eugene Genovese put forward the hypothesis that the events of the 1790s qualitatively changed the nature of slave rebellion from its conventional ‘restorationist’ objectives to those that embraced the rights of man as articulated in the French Declaration of Rights of 1789, but others have been more sceptical that slaves fulsomely adopted French republican ideals, even after the French emancipation decree of 1794. Educated leaders and gens de couleur may well have done so, since they baulked at the racial discrimination meted out by white colonial rulers. They could clearly shape the nature of race conflict in a ‘rights’ direction and generate some inclusivity to the struggle in ways that allowed for cross-class alliances between slaves and free blacks.86 When the French general Victor Hugues sent his black emissaries to islands like Grenada and St Vincent, rights discourse surfaced among disgruntled French planters, slaves and rebellious Caribs. Yet it is argued that in insurgent St Domingue, marronage and voodoo may have been critical mobilizing factors, especially among recently arrived Africans; and across the Caribbean, rumours of royal emancipation decrees, 84

Morning Chronicle, 25 Dec. 1776. See Appendix. 86 Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, intro.; Carolyn E. Flick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN, 1990); David Geggus, ‘Voodoo, Marronage, and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt of 1791’, in Proceedings of the 15th Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, 1989, ed. Patrick Galloway and Patrick Boucher (Lanham, 1992), 22–35; Wim Klooster, ‘The Rising Expectations of Free and Enslaved Blacks in the Great Caribbean’ in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden, 2011), 57–74. 85

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generated by news of abolitionist agitation in metropolitan centres, were important precipitants of unrest.87 Some of the salient features of 1790 unrest were clearly not present in the era of the American revolution. The abolition movement had yet to generate much heat, despite legal decisions in England and Scotland which made Britain seem to be a slave-free zone and called into question the British libertarianism of the Caribbean islands.88 The ideals of the American revolution were compromised by slavery, to a point that slave emancipation was more likely to come from generals loyal to the existing regime. Yet in other respects the two eras shared things in common: colonial powers were at war and their military resources were stretched; Caribbean islands were subject to strategic take-overs by foreign powers; tropical zones decimated European troops and prompted thoughts of mobilizing slave or ex-slave armies; 89 and tropical or sub-tropical economies were seriously dislocated by war. These conditions created the space for slave flight or insurrection. In the period 1775–80 there were twenty-eight slave conspiracies and uprisings in the Americas and Caribbean, thirty-four if one includes events that occurred in the years 1773 and 1774, when discontent mounted in the newly acquired islands of Tobago and St Vincent. Seventeen different islands or territories were involved, more if one includes Spanish provinces in Latin America, particularly Peru, where there was a string of indigenous risings in 1780. Some of these conspiracies might be discounted as alarmist, generated by paranoid letters to the press, but these are few in number and do not appreciably alter the total. That figure may be profitably compared with the more turbulent 1790s, for which historian David Geggus has charted twenty-four rebellions and some twenty conspiracies, five of which were impressionistically reported.90 It is true of course that few rebellions in the era of the American revolution could measure up to the massive uprisings in the French colonies of St Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique, or the 2,000 or so slaves who rose in 1795 in Curaçao.91 The exceptions would be in the period just prior to the American 87 David Geggus, ‘The Slaves and Free Coloreds of Martinique during the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions’, in , A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Parry Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997), 280–301; Wim Klooster, ‘Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions’, William and Mary Quarterly, 71/3 (July 2014), 401–24. 88 Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery’, 65–6. 89 On various proposals for creating slave armies, see Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia, SC, 2013), ch. 2. See also TNA, CO 152/59, f. 248, where Governor Burt of the Leeward Islands considered invading Puerto Rico in 1779 with 5,000–6,000 volunteers and 1,500 ‘stout resolute Blacks’. 90 David Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean’, in Gaspar and Geggus, eds, A Turbulent Time, 46–9. 91 Gert Oostindie, ‘Slave Resistance, Colour Lines, and the Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions in Curaçao’, in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Klooster and Oostindie, 1–22.

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struggle: specifically, the maroon-inspired slave insurrection in Surinam in 1772; and the protracted struggles of the Black Caribs of St Vincent, who successfully fought a bush war against the British in the years 1769–73, forced them into signing a treaty, and helped the French repossess the island in 1779. More often than not, the uprisings of the American era were relatively small scale, featuring turbulent takeovers of one or two plantations. In St Kitts, 1778, rebels planned to attack two estates on Easter Monday, hoping that the momentum of revolt would catch fire elsewhere. How many slaves were implicated in this uprising is unclear, but since a Dutch man-of-war offered 250 of its crew to suppress the revolt, it must have been a formidable force. The same was likely true of the maroon uprising in Dominica in September 1778, when the French took possession of the island. As former slaves on Jesuit lands before 1763, they purged and pillaged plantations as the British lost control of the island.92 Elsewhere, rioters could number in the hundreds even if most did not. At the Betsey Hope plantation in Tobago, where slaves killed three overseers and would have killed more had the alarm not been given, the insurgents mustered 200 men, who fled into the woods when the militia approached.93 Not all of them were rooted out. Perhaps more important than the plantation revolts were the opportunities afforded slaves to flee their masters in the wartime situation. In the American South, there was a substantial exodus of slaves to British lines, generating fears of an insurrection in Charleston in March 1779. Over twenty slaves were hanged there five months later for sympathizing with the British.94 On the Honduran shore marronage put loggers on edge, and when the Spanish invaded Black River in 1780 only to abandon it soon after, fifty slaves seized control and only capitulated when their ringleaders parleyed their way to freedom. 95 In the forests of St David’s parish, Jamaica, a group of Congo runaways assembled and raided local plantations for sheep, goats, hogs and poultry. They were led by a black called Bristol, or three-finger’d Jack, the second in command being Caesar from the Regel estate.96 Outside of British territories grand marronage loomed large. The French and Spanish wrestled with the maroon communities of Le Mantiel and Naranjo near its borders and after persistent skirmishes the authorities signed treaties and sought to colonize them, although never successfully. The Dutch had already done this with the maroon bands of the upper Marowijine and Suriname 92

Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The Condition of the Slave in the Settlement and Development of the British Windward Islands, 1763–1775, Journal of Caribbean History, 24/2 (1990), 128. 93 Stamford Mercury, 7 July 1774; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 9 July 1774. On St Kitts, TNA, CO 152/58, f. 32. 94 Manchester Mercury, 31 August 1779; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 267n. 95 TNA, CO 137/ 78, ff. 153–60, 300; CO 137/80, f. 19v. For the flight of logging slaves to Spanish territory, see Matthew Restall, ‘Crossing to Safety? Frontier Flight in EighteenthCentury Belize and Yucatan’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 94/3 (2014), 381–419. 96 St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 Oct. 1780.

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rivers, but in the 1770s they were confronted with persistent raids on their sugar plantations from the Ndjuka and Saramaka maroons, and by smaller groups under the leadership of Boni and Aluka, who, when the going got tough, fled to resettle in French Guiana.97 In effect, this was a period of considerable uncertainty for slave owners, who were confronted with mass defections as armies swept through the plantation belt and disrupted settlements, and with maroons who took advantage of the international rivalry to advance their own claims. The high level of anxiety was registered in the exaggerated fears of widespread conspiracies. Contemporaries sometimes talked of thousands of slaves ready to massacre their families and were quite prepared to scapegoat ringleaders on the flimsiest of evidence.98 Some of that anxiety was clearly evident in Hanover, in what threatened to be a very formidable insurrection. Planters were very troubled by the possibility of maroon involvement in the rebellion and by the imponderable numbers of slaves who might have been implicated. They were vexed by the loose table talk of some of their contemporaries, who might have given slaves false hopes of liberty. It is unlikely that the political liberties talked of on the American mainland directly inspired the uprising, and it is noteworthy there were no free blacks involved in the planning even though there were 4,500 on the island.99 The revolt remained rooted in the rural parishes along the north-west coastline where labour exploitation was at its fiercest. As far as we know, it did not involve free blacks in the towns or blackjacks who may have worked out of Lucea Bay. In this regard it is noteworthy that when slaves rebelled in St Kitts in 1778, they deprecated the idea of allying themselves with free blacks on the grounds that they were ‘half Bacara [white] as they fight for Bacara’.100 In the case of Hanover, it is more likely that the unsettled nature of the situation itself –- the diversion of troops from Jamaica, the planters’ preoccupation with poor supplies and the security of the island’s convoy, and the news of slave desertions elsewhere and offers of freedom by beleaguered loyalist forces – provided the occasion for the revolt. With extremely harsh conditions driving it forward. Perhaps predictably, the most mobile and skilled members of the 97

Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York, 1973),136–40, 143–6, citing M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique, Physique… de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1797) 2: 498–501, and Yvan Debbasch, ‘Le Marronage: Essai sur la Désertion de l’Esclave Antillais’, L’Année Sociologique (1961), 74–7, 186–91; Richard and Sally Price, eds, Stedman’s Surinam, xix– xx; Charlton X. Yingling, ‘The Maroons of Santo Domingo in the Age of Revolutions: Adaptation and Evasion, 1783–1800’, History Workshop Journal, 79 (2015), 25–51. 98 Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 161; Aptheker, American Negro Revolts, 89. 99 Michael Craton, ‘Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies’, in Strangers within the Realm, ed.. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill and London, 1991), 318. 100 TNA, CO 152/58, f. 35. The same was true of the Congo maroons in St David’s parish Jamaica, who swore they would kill every ‘mulatto Negro’ they caught. St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 October 1780.

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plantations planned the revolt at their local forges and gatherings, out of the earshot of overseers and their assistants. Blood-bonding rituals may have been used to surmount the very evident ethnic differences of the participants, as in the Haitian revolution, for there was talk of slaves cutting their feet in a pail of water and drinking from the pail as if it were a sacramental vow to wage war with the whites.101 Even so, it is noteworthy that the slaves mobilized their ethnic and linguistic affiliations effectively; they surmounted the disorientation that might come from rapid immigration in a harsh, exploitative plantation parish. As an inter-ethnic revolt, which for the first time drew on creole support, the Hanover uprising must have been a shock to the system, rocking the complacency of those planters who thought the creoles a buffer to bloody insurrection.

101 Morning

Chronicle, 20 August 1776. In the Antiguan rebellion of 1735, the Coromantee and the creole had different bonding rituals, the latter swearing on the bible, the former drinking a rum potion over a white cockerel. See Ivor Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris (Chepstow, 1963), 4.

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6 War, Race and Marginality: The Mosquito Coast in the Eighteenth Century The Mosquito Coast or Shore, as it was often called, fits uneasily into the conventional historiography of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Latin America. The Coast belongs to what is now Atlantic Honduras and Nicaragua, a jagged coastline of some 400 miles stretching from Cape Gracias à Dios to the San Juan river in Costa Rica. Geographically it is part of the Caribbean Rim; jurisdictionally, it was part of Hispanic Central America. Yet the Mosquito Coast was not part of the central plantation zone. It did not import large numbers of African slaves to harvest the products that were found there. Nor was the Shore under effective Spanish rule for much of the eighteenth century. Whereas the Spanish stamped their presence upon the Pacific region of Central America, where the rich soils of the tropical savanna provided sustenance for over a million people at the onset of conquest and good ranch land for the Spanish, the region on the other side of the mountain range that divided Central America proved largely inaccessible. The Shore was a disputed territory for much of the eighteenth century, with the British establishing an informal superintendence over the area from 1740 onwards. Until quite recently, it was only in relation to Belize, the strip of forest that the British carved out of Spanish Honduras in exchange for the Shore, that the Mosquito Coast entered the political history of the Central American isthmus. And yet the very marginality of the Mosquito Coast has now become its principal attraction. In recent years, in the wake of renewed globalization and new waves of mass migration, historical attention has shifted away from the master narratives of nationhood and liberation, colonialism and dependency, towards more mobile concepts, whether diasporas, travelling cultures, or hybridities. And historians have become more attentive to the ‘entangled worlds’ in which people lived in the Americas where borderlands bypassed and sometimes subverted official sovereignties.1 Within this context, the Shore seems a fitting site of exploration. For if the Mosquito Coast was not central to the plantation complex, it was very much a part of the maritime Atlantic. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, it was the temporary home of pirates, logwood-cutters, Jamaican debtors and military adventurers, many of whom had sexual relations 1 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Gould, ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds’, 764–86.

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with Indian women, and some of whom settled more permanently around the lagoons of the Coast and to the west of Cape Gracias à Dios at Black River. The dominant indigenous presence on this Coast, and the bane of the Spanish, were the Miskito Indians, a group likely descended from the lowland forest people of South America rather than their Mayan neighbours to the north. In the area around Cape Gracias à Dios they integrated with runaway slaves, creating a sub-group of people African in appearance although Amerindian in cultural identity, diet and language. A coastal people, they formed a strong affiliation with the British, even to the point of having their ‘king’ crowned by British governors in Jamaica or, later, Belize. Indeed, the British connection with the Miskito was invoked during the Sandinista revolution of the 1980s to consolidate support for the contras, for well into the twentieth century the Miskito were said to prefer British to Hispanic foreigners.2 Such a startling intervention prompts us to consider more closely the nature of this British relationship in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the connection was first consolidated. More generally, it invites us to consider the dynamics of power and affiliation in this border zone, where the geometries of subordination were complex. This is all the more necessary in the light of recent attempts to cast the ‘motley crew’ of pirates, sailors, slaves and commoners of the eighteenth-century Atlantic as a vibrant counterpoint to British imperialism; as a genuine collectivity – an ‘Atlantic working class’ – of freedom-fighters.3 And to pose the Miskito Indians as egalitarian eco-commoners who lived ‘under the most perfect equality’ and did not strive to accumulate or enslave.4 The emergence of the Mosquito Coast as a border zone owed much to Braudelian factors, to the determining factors of terrain, wind and sea. Although Hernán Cortés established Trujillo on the Honduran Coast in 1526, the subjugation of the area to the south proved more difficult. Some nations, like the Lencas, stubbornly resisted; others fled to the mountains. And beyond the pine savannas of north-eastern Honduras, swamps, jungles, torrential rains and sand bars kept Spanish expeditions out; not to mention the mosquitoes and sand flies, that so abounded Nathaniel Uring remarked, ‘that neither Mouth, Nose, Eyes or any Part of us was free of them; and whenever they could come at our Skin, they bit and stung us most intolerably’. 5 The Spanish monarchy offered 2

Mary Helms, ‘The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe’, Ethnology, 8/1 (Jan. 1969), 76–84. 3 Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Head Hydra, 165–7. 4 Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (Oakland, 2019), 157–67. I criticized Linebaugh’s characterization of the Miskito Indian in a review of the Many Headed Hydra, ‘The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 48/3 (Sept. 2002), 412–15. But he blithely ignores all counterarguments, including at least twenty references to Miskito slaving, and persists in his idealized portrait of the Miskito as custom-driven, eco-friendly democrats. 5 Uring, Voyages and Travels, 173–4.

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rights to any conquistador who wanted to develop the territory, but the terrain seemed unhospitable and the economic prospects unattractive. Consequently, the Mosquito Coast remained only nominally part of Spain’s American Empire. From Trujillo to the San Juan river, the first navigable river that accessed the alluvial plains of Nicaragua, the Spanish presence was minimal. The Mosquito Coast was none the less part of the Caribbean rimland, with easy access to the sailing arteries of Spanish commerce out of Portobello and Cartagena to Havana. It was not that far from the treasure port of Vera Cruz. Its possibilities as a piratical lair were well recognized by the English. When the Puritans sought to establish a colony on Providence Island in 1633, just off the Mosquito Coast, they did so to plant sugar and plunder the Spanish Main. In order to win the goodwill of the native peoples, John Pym instructed the captain of the expedition, Sussex Cammock, to venture to Cape Gracias à Dios to ‘endear yourselves with the Indians and their commanders’ and to ‘cause no jealousy’.6 This encounter appears to have been successful. It was probably not the first contact that the Miskito Indians had with English corsairs and it was no doubt facilitated by Cammock’s disinclination to preach the Protestant gospel, despite Pym’s instructions to the contrary.7 A few years previously, the Miskito had killed a couple of friars from Guatemala who had attempted to spread the gospel among them.8 Cordial relations between the English and the Miskito Indians were also encouraged by the relative informality of the encounter, which was concerned with trade rather than colonization, and by the two parties’ common enmity of the Spanish. As English observers would emphasize, sometimes with astonishment, the Miskito had an implacable hatred of the Spanish. This was forged in the initial hostile encounter with the conquistador, Diego de Nicuesa, whom the Miskito had successfully repulsed. But it was also vigorously sustained in oral memory as part of a general indictment of Indian genocide at the hands of the conquistadors and a hatred for Spanish servitude. As Edward Long remarked in the next century, the Miskito kept alive ‘an inveterate abhorrence’ of the Spanish, ‘by reciting, at their public council and meetings, examples of the horrid cruelty practised upon their brethren of the continent’.9 The Puritan experiment at Providence Island quickly faltered, but the Miskito association with sea rovers continued. In the heyday of piracy after 1660, buccaneers did not always get a congenial welcome from the native peoples of Central America. According to Alexander Exquemelin, the Indios Bravos of the Darien peninsular were especially hostile, killing the French pirate, Jean-David Nau (aka François L’Olonnais) and several members of his crew when they ventured 6

Arthur P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, 1914), 143. Ibid., 144–5. 8 M. W., ‘The Mosqueto Indian and his Golden River’, in Awnsham Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 6 vols (London, 3rd edn, 1704–46), 6:286. 9 Long, Jamaica, 1:316. See also A Full Answer to the King of Spain’s Last Manifesto, respecting the Bay of Honduras and the Mosquito Shore (London, 1779), 42. 7

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up the San Juan river in search of Spanish gold.10 Yet the Miskito Indians were a good deal more hospitable, especially to the English rovers who happened to venture to their cays to careen their boats and seek fresh provisions. ‘The rovers are on such friendly terms with the native people’, claimed Exquemelin, ‘they can stay and live among them without risk of harm.’11 As one old buccaneer noticed at the turn of the century, when the tolerance for unofficial privateering was waning, there were a number of old seadogs with disreputable pasts who had settled in the lagoons inhabited by the Miskito. In fact, one of the southerly lagoons on the Shore itself, Bluefields, was named after the Dutch adventurer Abraham Blauvelt who, after the collapse of the Providence venture in 1641, remained on the shore for another twenty years, aiding and abetting the plundering of Spanish treasure trains from Peru to Panama.12 If the Mosquito Coast acquired a reputation as a haven for pirates, it is important to recognize the reciprocities that were involved, and the ways in which European contact shaped ethnic relations in this contact zone. From the point of view of the English adventurers the advantages were considerable. The amity of the Miskito allowed English rovers to elude guardacostas, careen ships, and regroup. It also enabled them to avail themselves of Miskito skills in hunting, fishing and navigating the unknown rivers of the interior in their fast-moving pirogues or dugout canoes. Given the general hostility of the Darien Indians to Europeans, Miskito warriors were indispensable scouts on the raiding parties up the San Juan river to the cities of Granada, El Realejo, Leon and even Segovia. Sir Henry Morgan was not alone in praising Miskito guides for their expertise in eluding Spanish soldiers amid the forts and islands of Lake Nicaragua.13 Miskito Indians also provisioned privateers on the run. They were excellent fishermen and harpooners, particularly skilled at striking for turtle or manatee. ‘For this they are esteemed and coveted by all privateers’, remarked William Dampier, ‘for one or two of them in a ship will maintain a hundred men.’14 Not surprisingly Miskito sailors were found aboard English privateers off the coasts of Cuba and South America, replenishing declining supplies of meat with some turtle hunting. In one day’s fishing off the island of Lobos on the Peruvian coast, Dampier noted, ‘our Moskito strikers’ brought aboard enough turtle ‘to serve both Companies’.15 The Miskito Indians aided English or British adventurers in one other crucial respect, and that was in relation to the logwood industry. The logwoods of Central America provided the red colorants for dyes in the silk and woollen 10

Alexander Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, trans. Alexis Brown (Harmondsworth, 1969), 116–18. 11 Ibid., 219. 12 Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism (Cranbury, NJ, 1989), 31, 34. 13 Ernest A. Cruikshank, The Life of Sir Henry Morgan (Toronto, 1935), 57–8. 14 Gerald Norris, ed., William Dampier: Buccaneer Explorer (London, 1994), 39. 15 Exquemelin, Buccaneers, p. 224: William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, 3 vols (London, 1697), 1:146.

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industries, and as the New Draperies of the rural areas took off in England and Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, so the price of logwood escalated from £30 a ton in 1670 to around £50–60 a ton by the end of the century.16 There were several sites for logwood in the Caribbean, including Jamaica and St Croix, but the principal source in the seventeenth century was on the Bay of Campeachy at the Laguna de Términos on the Yucatan peninsula.17 By 1675 about 260 ex-buccaneers and their work parties were actively encroaching on the Spanish monopoly of the trade in the region. William Dampier, who made two visits to the Bay at this time, believed the ex-buccaneers were reluctant loggers who longed for their old ways, although their erratic work habits were in part dictated by the enforced hiatus of the rainy season. This allowed the loggers to raid Spanish villages in the region, kidnap some of the indios to work in their gangs and carry off their women, earning the enmity of the Yucatan authorities.18 The Spanish managed to shut down these operations in 1717, only to find that the British cutters had moved to the Atlantic coast near the River Belize. There they established a rough and ready settlement whose lack of governance and continuing association with piracy troubled colonial leaders. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the Spanish attempted to eject the Baymen, as they were called, from the Belize settlement on at least four occasions. But the Baymen took refuge in the Black River settlement to the south, which became, in effect, a conduit and outpost for the one remaining source of logwood for Britain’s principal export and most prominent cottage industry.19 In the event of Spanish reprisals there, the British settlers could rely on the help of the Miskito Indians. And reprisals happened frequently, with the Miskito combating Spanish incursions in 1730, 1737, 1747–48, 1754–55 and 1779–83.20 In return for these services, the Miskito demanded metalware, especially knives, axes, adzes, and ultimately muskets. Indeed, the term ‘Musquetto’ or ‘Mosqueto’ as it was commonly spelt in the eighteenth century, most probably denoted the firearm (musket, mosquete and mousquet in English, Spanish and 16 Troy S. Floyd, The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia (Albuquerque, 1967), 58; Thomas Salmon, Modern History, or the Present State of all Nations (London, 1739), 586; Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘British Loggers and Spanish Governors: The Logwood Trade and its Settlements in the Yucatan Peninsula, part I’, Caribbean Studies, 14/2 (July 1974), 34. 17 On the sites of logwood cutting, see William Burke, An Account of the European settlements in America, 2 vols (London, 1758), 2:258. See also Renate Johanna Mayr, Belize: Tracking the Path of its History (Zurich and Berlin, 2014), 127–33 and map 6. It is sometimes argued that there was logwood on the Mosquito Coast, but that has been refuted. See Karl H. Offen, ‘British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 80/1 (Feb. 2001), 133–5. 18 William Dampier, The Voyages and Adventures of Captain William Dampier, 2 vols (London, 1776), 1:55–6. 19 Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism, 34, 39–40; Dampier, New Voyage, 2:14–18; Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society (Baltimore, 1977), 25–30. 20 Restall, ‘Crossing to Safety?’ 389.

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French respectively) rather than the insects that infested the swamps around the lagoons.21 As Exquemelin noted, the Miskito were also prepared to trade the sexual favours of their women for these muskets, which were a crucial means of survival in the violent ‘marchlands’ of the Caribbean, where Amerindians could easily get caught in the crossfire of European rivalries. According to Spanish sources, the Miskito were excellent marksmen, in their element handling firearms, so the Governor of Costa Rica noted, ‘like fish in the sea and birds in the air’.22 Inevitably, the very success of the Miskito Indians in gaining access to metal tools and weapons, and their growing involvement with British corsairs and Baymen, changed their own culture and relationship to both Europeans and other Indian peoples. Let me elaborate a little on this point. In the final decades of the seventeenth century the Miskito were a subgroup of the Sumu Indians speaking a dialect of Chibchan, a generic language of Central America and Columbia, although not of the Antilles. Numbering perhaps 2,000 at the turn of the century, they had a fairly egalitarian social structure. Alexander Exquemelin talks of them forming ‘a little republic’ with headmen and shamans (sukyas) only exercising real authority over a population of male hunters and female cultivators at wartime.23 As one anonymous Englishman put it: ‘neither king nor captains of families bearing any more command than the meanest, unless it be at such times when they make any expedition against the Alboawinneys’, that is, their rivals among the other Sumu tribes, especially the Pech, Twahke and Panamahkas who lived up river.24 Indeed, in order to protect their own settlements around the Cape and its neighbouring lagoons, the Miskito integrated with runaway African slaves who either had been shipwrecked on the coast or had deserted the former Old Providence colony for the mainland.25 By the turn of the century, these Zambos, as the mixed black-Indian population was called, were already emerging as leaders on some of the Miskito settlements on the Wanks river south of the Cape. Further south, at the Tuapí lagoon and beyond, the Miskito were Amerindian and more endogamous, often referred to as Tawira, meaning ‘much’ or ‘straight hair’.26 21

Mary W. Helms, Asang: Adaptations to Culture Contact in a Miskito Community (Gainesville, 1971), 15–16n. 22 Cited in Linda A. Newson, Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua (Norman and London, 1987), 203; Exquemelin, Buccaneers, 219–20. 23 Exquemelin, Buccaneers, 220. 24 M.W., ‘Mosqueto Indian’, 293; Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism, 28; Karl Offen, ‘Mapping Amerindian Captivity in Colonial Mosquitia’, Journal of Latin American Geography, 14/3 (2015), 35–65. 25 Newson, Indian Survival, 202–3. 26 Karl H. Offen, ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1660–1787’, in Black and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham and London, 2010), 121, 3n.

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The very success of the Miskito in obtaining arms and honing their marksmanship altered the dynamics of their relations with other Amerindians. Prior to contact with the English buccaneers, the Miskito were a relatively nomadic group that subsisted on fishing, hunting, plantains and nutritional root crops, using maize for fermented beverages. Increasingly, however, the Miskito became more coastal people with permanent settlements near the lagoons, a location from which they were able to act as middlemen in the informal trade of the region.27 The ‘tribalization’ of the Miskito, their emergence as an ethnic group with a more visible hierarchy, was the product of the colonial encounter. Their history squares with Neil Whitehead’s reflections on the emergence of ‘colonial tribes’ in zones of European expansion.28 Contact with corsairs also prompted them to adopt a more predatory relationship towards other Amerindians. At the end of the seventeenth century the Miskito Indians traded with other groups up and down the Wanks and Black rivers, but after these seasonal exchanges were concluded, raids upon each other’s villages were customary, with each group carrying off women and children as slaves or concubines in an unpredictable free-for-all. The increasing use of muskets gave the Miskito an advantage in these encounters, and the eighteenth century saw them take over a large portion of the Coast, push rival Sumu tribes back into the interior, and exact annual tributes from them.29 Slave raids also became more extensive. By 1700 the Miskito were already penetrating the rivers and Matina coast south of the San Juan river in search of women and children, whom they traded with the Jamaicans. Nathaniel Uring talked of their nightly raids of inland settlements, travelling fifty or sixty leagues in their pitpans to snag unsuspecting indios and carry them off as slaves.30 The governor of Costa Rica believed some 2,000 people were captured between Matina and Talamanca in the years 1710–22 and sold into slavery in Jamaica. Indeed, the Miskito increased the geographical scale and intensity of their operations, supplementing the lag in demand in plantation labour caused by the shift from white indentured servants to African slaves and by the growing competition for transatlantic slaves from the French sugar islands.31 By the mid-eighteenth 27

M. W., ‘Mosqueto Indian’, 289; Helms, ‘Cultural Ecology’, 81–2. Neil L. Whitehead, ‘Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes’, in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead (Santa Fe, NM, 2000), 127–50. 29 M. W., ‘Mosqueto Indian’, 295. On tributes, see Helms, ‘Cultural Ecology’, 80. See also William Shuman Sorsby, ‘The British Superintendency of the Mosquito Shore, 1749–1787’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University College, London, 1969), 11; Offen, ‘Amerindian Captivity’, 44. For a survivor narrative that talks of tribal rivalries on the Shore, see John Roach, The Surprizing Adventures of John Roach, Mariner of Whitehaven (2nd edn, Whitehaven, 1784). 30 Nathaniel Uring, Voyages and Travels, 231. 31 M.W., ‘Mosqueto Indian’, 288; Mary W. Helms, ‘Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 39/2 (Summer, 1983), 185–6. 28

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century the Miskito had even penetrated the Amerindian villages 300–400 kilometres up the great rivers, seizing people as far afield as Jinotega, Muy Muy, Boaco, Camoapa and Lovago in Nicaragua. By then the Spanish had installed militias in these towns to counter such raids.32 The great planters of Jamaica were also perturbed by such activities, largely because they feared Spanish reprisals and wanted to maintain a presumption of superiority over their Spanish enemies with respect to indigenous people; the so-called ‘Black Legend’ which damned Spanish slavery as genocide and exonerated the British version as more paternal. In 1741 the Jamaican assembly actually banned Indian slavery. Yet thirty years later, the lieutenant governor of the island was still complaining of the Miskito’s ‘inveterate habit’ of enslaving Amerindians and of the way in which some Jamaica planters and merchants abetted the process by smuggling them into the island as servants or apprentices. Karl Offen calculates that the Miskito sent an average of 100 Amerindian slaves per year to Jamaica in the century 1670–1770.33 Systematic slave raiding and the exaction of tributes necessitated a clearer hierarchy of command within Miskito ranks and, perhaps inevitably, more formal alliances with the British. In the early years of contact in the 1630s the Earl of Warwick had brought a Miskito ‘prince’ to England to teach him English and English ways. Upon the death of his father, he is said to have placed his nation under royal protection. Whether this is true or not – the account of this encounter was reported roughly seventy years after the event by a man who wished to exalt the majesty of the English crown – it is clear that from the late seventeenth century onwards both sides aspired to formalise their relationship in some manner. The Miskito approached the British first. In 1687, King Jeremy of the Miskito presented himself before the governor of Jamaica asking for British protection, a matter which the then governor, the Duke of Albemarle, treated with some scepticism if not disbelief, believing it might be a ruse ‘to set up a Government for Bucaniers or Pirats’.34 But by the 1720s the British were providing commissions to Miskito kings and other chieftains, men who under the titles of ‘General’, ‘Governor’ and ‘Admiral’, were responsible for the governance of other areas along the coast (see Fig. 6). Miskito kings were also being presented to new governors of Jamaica upon their arrival on the island. In 1723, for example, King Jeremy II accepted a new commission from Duke of Portland who, according to Charles Leslie, ‘received his Indian Majesty with a great deal of courtesy’.35 Once British superintendents were established on the Shore, moreover, they started to crown succeeding Miskito kings at a ceremony at Sandy Bay, just south of Cape Gracias à Dios. 32 Newson,

Indian Survival, 301, 304. Offen, ‘Amerindian Captivity’, 55. 34 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nevis, St Christophers and Jamaica (London, 1707), lxxvi; Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain 1500–1776 (Cambridge, 2006), 101–2. 35 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, lxxvi. 33

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Fig. 6. The four districts of the Miskito Kingdom, c. 1760.

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Historians have sometimes interpreted these ceremonies as evidence of the subordination of the Miskito to British rule, if not of their sycophantic emulation of British ceremony. Adopting British notations of rank, and even calling captains by the names of noblemen or buccaneers like Sir Henry Morgan might suggest some acculturation to British ways. In fact the adoption of these names and titles does not appear to have been particularly ironic although it may have involved some playful mimicry. The chiefs seemingly set great store by the British connection, which they traced back in oral memory to before the conquest of Jamaica in 1655. Some of them had their sons educated in Britain or Jamaica, or later in Belize. By all accounts, these ‘tropicopolitans’, men who traversed the worlds of the Shore and metropolitan London, spoke ‘pretty good English’.36 At the same time the Miskito referred to themselves as a ‘nation of Mosquitomen’ and set great store on their free status. ‘They believe they are superior to all other races’, remarked one Moravian missionary. ‘A Miskito Indian … is proud of the fact that he has always been a free man.’ 37 The British connection did not mean that the main body of the Miskito were particularly acculturated to British ways. The Miskito did not adopt English dress for everyday living; they continued to wear loin cloths or pulpera into the nineteenth century.38 John Cockburn described them as ‘naked from head to Foot, both Men and Women. Their Skin is of a dark brown, being marked all over, from the Shoulders to their Heels in Waves, with a Sort of blue Ink which never washes off.’39 These Miskito continued to revere their sukyas or shamans. Despite the fact that British missionaries had baptised some of them by the mid-eighteenth century, they ignored all forms of public worship. They practised polygamy. Miskito chiefs measured their status by their number of wives not their acres. George Henderson thought most of the chiefs had at least two and perhaps as many as six; one king, King George II, crowned at Black River by the British superintendent of the Shore in 1777, acquired no less than fourteen.40 For their leaders, learning English was a conduit to better negotiations with merchants, planters and ambassadors, both official and unofficial. Living ‘right English gentlemen fashion’ was simply a mark of status; wearing military uniforms on ceremonial occasions a mode of theatrical self-presentation from which gifts were expected to accrue. When the headmen of the lagoons hoisted the British flag upon the arrival of Jamaican merchants or British officials, it was a signal for general feasting, for drinking mishaw or fermented plantains to 36 Equiano,

Interesting Narrative, xx, 250–1; TNA, CO 137/57/2/225. Karl Offen, ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia’, 93, 104. 38 Orlando W. Roberts, Narrative of Voyages and Excursions on the East Coast and in the Interior of Central America (Edinburgh, 1827), 134. 39 John Cockburn, Unfortunate Englishmen; or, A Faithful Narrative of the Distresses and Adventures of John Cockburn and Five Other English Mariners (London, 1740), 240. 40 George Henderson, An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras (London, 2nd edn, 1811), 221; Michael D. Olien, ‘The Miskito Kings and the Line of Succession’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 39/2 (Summer 1983), 212. 37

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all hours of the night. Decked out in their uniforms, whether British or not, headmen prepared to combine hospitality with hard bargaining. Captain George Henderson, sent to the Mosquito Coast to renew contact with the Miskito chiefs after the Napoleonic wars, found himself looking at an odd assortment of regimentals when he entertained them at dinner. ‘I really believe’, he recalled, ‘the entire costume of Europe, court and military, for the last hundred years, might at one view have presented itself at my table.’41 The British attempted to pass off these transactions as a matter of ‘humouring the natives’. Their narratives of these encounters were largely condescending, casting the Miskito leaders as primitive if not comic. According to one account, the king who sought a commission from Albemarle was said to have been given a ‘laced hat’ and a ‘ridiculous piece of writing, purporting that he should kindly use and receive such straggling Englishmen as should chance to come that way, with plantains, fish, and turtle’. According to another report, the Miskito king was so fascinated by Jamaica that he ‘pull’d off his European Cloaths’ and ‘climb’d to the top of a Tree to take a view of the Country’.42 His naive incivility was matched by that of his son, who ‘knew not which way to go up Stairs, but jumped Step by Step’. He also used ‘such indecent Expressions’, no doubt derived from the rough language of buccaneers, that the Duchess of Portland was obliged to leave the dining table. But, remarked Charles Leslie, in a story that he must have picked up during his stay on the island, the Miskito king ‘was dismissed very civilly, and went home to his Subjects, proud of his good Entertainment’.43 While the British were inclined to spin a narrative of noblesse oblige, to imply that they were simply going along with the Miskito love of ceremony, finery and trifles, there were more serious issues in play. One reason why the British wanted to formalize their relationship with the Miskito people was because they wanted their military assistance. In 1720 king Jeremy of the Miskito-Zambos signed an agreement with the governor of Jamaica to track down runaways. During the next two decades the Miskito assisted the Jamaicans in their campaign against the maroons, tracking runaways through the mountains.44 They also joined the Baymen in fending off incursions against their logwood activities in Belize from Governor Antonio de Figueroa in the Yucatan. When Figueroa mustered a large Spanish force at Bacalar around 1727, the Miskito joined the pre-emptive strike 41 Henderson,

Honduras, 180. Voyage, lxxvi; M. W., ‘Mosqueto Indian’, 288. For another story of the naivety of natives, see the story of the two African princes, introduced to high society by Lord Halifax, who seeing snow for the first time, believed that they could put it in their pockets and bring it home with them: Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 3 Feb. 1776. 43 Leslie, Jamaica, 277. 44 Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 50–5; Herbert Howe Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America, 2 vols, vol. 2 Central America 1530–1800 (San Francisco, 1883), 2: 600; Craton, Testing the Chains, 84; Parker, Sugar Barons, 250; Offen, ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia’, 102–3. 42 Sloane,

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against it. The exasperation of the Spanish with the Miskito is evident from this letter by the Alcade mayor of Tegucigalpa in Honduras. ‘The sambos [sic] have plenty of vessels, provisions, arms and ammunition’, he wrote, ‘for they are supplied by the English of Jamaica, who egg them on to hostilities against the Spanish. Their country is also a place of refuge for the mulattoes, negroes and other evil-doers who flee from justice in the Spanish settlements and who give them information of the Spanish plans.’45 As the mayor understood, the Miskito were deliberately brought into the British sphere of influence as ethnic soldiers; not under duress, as was sometimes the case in such agreements, but with appropriate douceurs. By the 1740s the Miskito were receiving £300 per annum or more for their services from the British treasury. Between 1774 and 1778 the Miskito received over £28,500 in gifts.46 This money, together with various other artefacts, was distributed to the Miskito chiefs of the different lagoons. Clearly, what the British hoped from the formal linkages were predictable and reliable lines of command among the Miskito and some security that these coastal people would not ally themselves to the Spanish. Certainly, the Spanish were not above trying to tease the Miskito from the British; nor were a few of the Miskito headmen disinclined to consider such offers, despite a social memory that excoriated the Spanish as cruel colonials. In late 1721 a Miskito leader named Annibel purportedly took an oath of obedience to the Spanish crown and promised to deliver his chief as well.47 The plan came to nothing, but the possibility of defections to the Spanish was not inconceivable. In the 1740s the British strove to mobilize the Miskito in their war against Spain. Early on Governor Edward Trelawny of Jamaica had Lieutenant Hodgson visit the Miskito to organise raids on Spanish settlements. How much organizing actually went on is unclear. In a letter to the London Evening Post, full of buccaneering brio, Hodgson reported that when he arrived at Cape Gracios à Dios, the Miskito were already mustering and that he simply assumed leadership of the 200 strong raiding party that canoed down the shore in their periaguas to attack the Spanish on the Panama peninsula.48 At Coclé del Norte the party captured a Dutch sloop with 8,000 pieces of eight on board, and corralled some Hispanic guides to reconnoitre the peninsula itself with the aim of reaching Paniname (Penonomé) where one million pieces lay for the taking. Well, allegedly. Hodgson publicly crowed he had been ‘within an ace’ of a valuable heist but failed because the Miskito decided to abandon the mission, not relishing open warfare. In fact, Hodgson’s real problem was that he could not keep the Miskito in line. He found them recklessly bent on plunder and difficult 45 Bancroft, Central America, 2:600, 624–5. On ethnic soldiering, see Neil Lancelot Whitehead, ‘Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492–1820’, Ethnohistory, 37/4 (Fall 1990), 357–85. 46 Matthew P. Dziennik, ‘The Miskitu, Military Labour and the San Juan Expedition of 1780’, Historical Journal, 61/1 (2018), 161–2. 47 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia, 67–8. 48 London Evening Post, 17–19 March 1741.

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to discipline. His raiding party entered Penonomé without much resistance, but the returns were meagre.49 Hodgson scored a little better on the home run. At Matina the raiding party picked up a prize of 50,000 lb of cacao, a good haul. Yet further north at the San Juan river, Hodgson’s buccaneering ambitions got the better of him. He dreamt of capturing forts and raising large towns on Lake Nicaragua like the filibusters of the past. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to navigate the river in high winds, and Hodgson’s party was blown off course to Blanco Cay, where the ‘wild Indians’, very probably the Toxares, proved distinctly hostile. The Miskito had departed at this point and Hodgson had to slink back to Jamaica in a leaky bark. Nonetheless his exploits were enough to keep the Miskito onside. In the next few years they participated in the abortive expedition to Panama. After this, Hodgson organized his force of 700 into three raiding parties to the Spanish interior: one, by way of the Rio Grande near Bluefields; another down the Patook River; and his own party along the Cape River near Sandy Bay. Hodgson’s detachment sacked San Juan Jinotega to the north-west of León, but the trek destroyed his health and even that of some of his Miskito guides. Hodgson was happy that these incursions put the Spanish on the defensive, although he thought the Miskito love of plunder was sometimes too diversionary. Too frequently, he complained, ‘the whole Country was alarm’d and the People had time to get away’.50 He told Trelawny he needed an independent company of whites to keep them in line. After these expeditions the British authorities proposed to establish a permanent British base at Roatán, an island thirty miles long and twelve–fifteen miles wide, situated fourteen leagues to the north-west of Trujillo, in the Bay of Honduras.51 Occupying Roatán was a provocative move. The Spanish claimed sovereignty over the whole region, and while they could tolerate logwood settlements, they were not prepared to accept military settlements of any kind. Yet this was what was intended. At a council of war at Spanish Town in June 1742, Trelawny proposed to set up a garrison there and requested a naval squadron to police the waters. Roatán was touted as an alternative retreat to St George’s Cay for loggers and their families. It was also hoped that a British naval presence would reduce the activities of Spanish guardacostas and intimidate Dutch merchantmen from taking the logwood trade from the British. The Dutch dominated the carrying trade to Britain and Europe and the British were keen to recover it, especially since dyes were now needed for the blooming trade in printed linens and calicoes. If the British could wrestle trade from the Dutch, so the argument went, they might benefit from the rising demand for logwood and also tap into the contraband trade that creole merchants in Guatemala and

49

TNA, CO 137/57/1, ff. 40– 41v. TNA, CO 137/51/2, f. 29, CO 137/57, f. 351; Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 27–8. 51 Bancroft, Central America, 2:151–6; TNA, CO 137/57/2, ff. 27–30. 50

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Honduras aspired to make with non-Spanish territories, exporting indigo, local silver and sarsaparilla in return for grain, wine, oil and fine textiles. Roatán was part of a broader strategy of bringing order to the Bay and Shore and exploiting its commercial potential. Hodgson thought a settlement on Roatán would prevent the Bay of Honduras ‘from becoming a retreat for Pyrates and disorderly people averse to all Government’ as they had been for the past forty years and were likely to be after the war.52 Trelawny believed it could potentially counteract Spanish imperial ambitions, provided the Miskito could be kept from provoking its governors by raiding Spanish towns and villages. He strove to achieve this by instructing Hodgson to take over the Shore as a British quasi-protectorate, a task symbolically executed with King Edward I of the Miskito in 1740. In March of that year the Miskito king pledged to confer all his country around Cape Gracias à Dios to the British and become His Majesty’s subject, in return for British help in pushing back the Spanish from the Shore. It was an odd agreement, since it was geographically specific to part of the Shore, although several people, including Governor Briton of the southern districts of the Coast, signed it on behalf of ‘all the Mosquito Nation, both Samboes and Indians’.53 Article 5 of the agreement had the Miskito pledge to help other Indian nations liberate themselves from Spanish rule. What the agreement aspired to do was augment the superintendent’s ability to rein in the Miskito and facilitate land deals with them. British intentions are made clearer in Hodgson’s report to Trelawny in 1757: It is to be hoped we have sufficiently experienced the fatal Consequences of treating the Indians of our Colonies with neglect, however much we may affect to despise them; these would be very fatal Enemies, but much positive advantage would accrue from managing them properly; they could easily be reduced into better order, their numbers increased in the proper places, some manufactures introduced, and their Dependence on us rendered complete and at the same time to them desirable, by means whereof, and of making a fair Use of Dividing and Commanding, and the strong Attachment they have for us, we should have a large Body of able willing warlike People at our Beck, who would oppose all foreign Enemies with the greatest Ardour, and would secure the Internal safety of our Settlement. In short, we might do with them what we would: but it should always be remembered that these Poor, lost Fellow Creatures, who give us all they have to give, their good Will and their Country, certainly require some more humanity at our hands than what might be dictated by Hard Policy. 54

Governor Edward Trelawny also hoped that the burgeoning mestizo population of the Shore might act as a potential buffer between Spanish Central America and Britain’s plantations in the Caribbean, and by extension a brake on Miskito recklessness. In this endeavour he was optimistic. Surveys taken in 1753 and 1757 revealed that the adult population on the Shore was small, with fluctuating 52

TNA, CO 137/57/1, f. 179. TNA, CO 137/57/1, f. 52. 54 TNA, CO 123/1, f. 79v. 53

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numbers, and that it was a tall order to imagine a large mixed-race buffer could be easily achieved. What these investigations did disclose were the relatively high number of African and Indian slaves on the Shore, according to one calculation around 800 in 1757, something that Trelawny had always feared.55 While log cutting did not require plantation regimes of any magnitude, the cultivation of sugar, and to a lesser extent coffee or cotton, would, and this would polarize racial tensions rather than encourage inter-racial harmony. Trelawny had toyed with the idea of eliminating slavery from the Shore: ‘only those that are already settlers there & have slaves should be allow’d to keep those they have’, and ‘only for a limited time, not exceeding 14 or 21 years’.56 The prospect of slaves deserting plantations along the rivers to the interior, fleeing to the Spanish or staging black rebellion, deeply troubled him. Robert Hodgson senior, who was made the first superintendent of the Shore in 1749, was more interested in extolling the economic benefits of the territories. He calculated that in 1750 the Shore exported half a million feet of mahogany, 40,000 lb of sarsaparilla, and 50 cwt of tortoiseshell, most of it collected by the Miskito. Further north on the Bay, loggers cut 8,000 tons of dyewood at £20 per ton. Not everyone was keen to develop the Shore, among them Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, the governor of Jamaica from 1752–56. But by 1786, mahogany exports had doubled, sarsaparilla had risen to almost 200,000 lb, and tortoiseshell had more or less doubled as well. The total value of exports from the Shore had more than tripled, for the official figures did not allow for the substantial contraband trade with the Spanish in Nicaragua and Guatemala, particularly through Black River where the principal planter, William Pitt, was extremely active in trading with Comayaguans.57 Exports of logwood from the Bay of Honduras rose dramatically as well, to 13,672 tons in 1755, with nearly half (forty-seven per cent) now transported in North American vessels bound for New York, Rhode Island and Boston rather than by the Dutch (thirteen per cent).58 Yet during the 1760s the logwood trade faced a crisis of overproduction and prices plummeted and so by the mid-1780s, as maps clearly show, some loggers had switched to cutting mahogany deep into the interior.59 This hardwood was used for all manner of things: fine furniture, 55

TNA, CO 137/60, f. 29; CO 123/1, f. 61. Hodgson’s 1757 poll revealed there were 154 whites on the Shore, 170 mulattoes or mestizo, and 800 Indian and African slaves. See also Dawson, ‘William Pitt’s Settlement’, 688. 56 TNA, CO 137/57/2, f. 209. 57 Craig S. Revels, ‘Timber, Trade, and Transformation: A Historical Geography of Mahogany in Honduras’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2002), 100, table 1; TNA, CO 137/57/2 f. 227v. 58 Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 92n. 59 TNA CO 123/2/2, ff. 125–6; Nigel Bolland, ‘The Social Structure and Social Relations of the Settlement in the Bay of Honduras [Belize] in the 18th Century’, Journal of Caribbean History, 6 (May 1973), 6; Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize, 16–17; Michael A. Camille and Rafael Espejo-Saavedra, ‘Historical Geography of the Belizean Logwood Trade’,

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chests, dressers, bedposts, coach panels, wainscoting. Nonetheless, logwood remained an important dye in the textile industry: it had staying power. In 1790–92 logwood imports into Britain lagged behind mahogany, averaging 5,650 tons compared with 8,640 tons per annum. Yet in the years 1799–1802, the imported tonnage tipped slightly in favour of logwood, 6,376 tons per year as opposed to 6,103; and in the years 1807–09, the value of logwood imports was higher than those of mahogany, an average of £83,456 pa. as opposed to £61,195 per annum.60 With relatively few troops at Roatán or Black River, the British were quite dependent upon the warlike activities of the Miskito to keep the Spanish at bay. The Spanish offensive was admittedly compromised by internal politics: between courtiers and governors, and between governors and creoles who wanted to conduct a clandestine trade with the British. Spanish expeditions to the Bay or Black River sometimes took an inordinate amount of time to organize, as did the decision to build a large fort at Omoa as an anchorage for guardacostas and an outlet for a more liberalized trade. The Spanish insisted on sovereignty over the area but often lacked the political will to enforce it, and on the few occasions they successfully ejected settlers from the Bay or Roatán, they were confronted with reprisals from the Miskito. In 1754, for example, the Spanish planned an attack upon Belize and Black River from Bacalar, and a Spanish fleet did temporarily dislodge the Baymen from their woodcutting activities. In reply, the Miskito raided Bocas del Toro and Veraguas, marching Spanish indios into slavery. They clashed and routed a Spanish party at Bluefields and joined Shoremen in an attempt to destroy Spanish fortifications at Omoa. They also sacked the new fort at Matina in 1756 and killed the Governor Pastora of Costa Rica on the beach before the fort. Spanish governors became apoplectic about Miskito raids; they vowed to ‘exterminate’ them. Governor Cavello of Nicaragua thought it ‘indispensable that a bloody war be carried to the Zambos Mosquitos without giving them any quarter’. Yet mestizo militiamen so feared them that they deserted expeditions against them, believing the Miskito to be ‘monstrous in the art of shrinking heads’.61 One Spanish official believed the ambushes of the Zambo-Miskito had been the ‘principal reason’ for the decline of cities on the Guatemalan coast.62 The gold mines of Veraguas were closed because of their all too successful raids. As long as the Miskito did not cause a major international incident, British officials tolerated their sallies into Central America. They occasionally addressed Spanish protests about the countryside incursions of the Miskito and instructed superintendents of the Shore to buy back slaves. Yet there is little doubt that the warlike activities of the Miskito were useful to the British. In 1763, following a Yearbook (Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers) 22 (1996), 82–4; Joseph, ‘British Loggers’, 22, Map 4. 60 BPP 12 (1808), 202–6; JHC, 65 (1810), 694. 61 Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’,114, 146. 62 Ibid., 143.

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successful amphibian expedition to Havana, the British managed to wrench a begrudging recognition from the Spanish of the legitimacy of logwood cutting on the Bay of Honduras, something that had been hotly debated since 1670. The quid pro quo for this understanding was the demolition of all fortifications on the Bay and Shore, a condition that the more affluent settlers at Black River were anxious to avoid. When Colonel Luis Diez Navarro came to inspect the settlement in early1764, he was confronted with a ‘great troop of armed Zambos in lines four abreast, with drummers leading, the head of each file carrying lances flying the English banner’. General Tempest, clad in loin cloth and donning a military coat and red tricorn, greeted the officer with the words ‘God damn you, Spaniard’. He would have executed the colonel on the spot had not William Pitt’s servants intervened.63 The intervention emboldened Navarro’s counterpart, Lieutenant Robert Hodgson Junior, to claim that the fortifications were necessary, despite orders from the Jamaican governor to dismantle them. In the end London backed Hodgson. Lord Halifax at the Board of Trade believed he had ‘saved the Mosquito Shore to the Crown’.64 His lordship might have added that the Miskito had something to do with it. For a variety of reasons, the British policy of laissez-passer started to come unstuck in the late 1760s. Robert Hodgson may have won some favour with the Shoremen by refusing to dismantle the fortifications at Black River, but his appointment as superintendent upon the death of Joseph Otway in 1767 increased the factionalism of the settlement. Part of the problem was the vagueness with which successive ministers defined his responsibilities. Hodgson’s official commission was to ‘cultivate a strict Union and Friendship between our Indian and other Subjects’ on the Mosquito Shore, which Lord Shelburne interpreted to mean no more than past practice. Lord Hillsborough, Shelburne’s successor, amplified his responsibilities to bring ‘good order among the Inhabitants’ and ‘promote the prosperity of the Settlement’ and the ‘commercial Advantages which may be derived from it’.65 This allowed Hodgson to intervene more dramatically in the affairs of Black River, whose inhabitants still retained something of the old pirate codes of self-government and cherished their semi-autonomy. Hodgson was the son of the first superintendent and the son-in-law of the former Bayman William Pitt, Black River’s principal proprietor. Pitt ran an extensive contraband trade in the backcountry, shipped logwood to Europe, North America and Jamaica, and owned a few sugar plantations with hundreds of slaves. Hodgson, who partnered Pitt in the smuggling trade, tried to retain power for his extended family by proposing that Black River be governed by a twelve-man council in which he nominated half the delegates. When this did 63

Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 8133, folder 1, Report by Luis Diez Navarro, 14 June 1764, cited by Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 136. 64 Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 139. 65 TNA, CO 137/63 f. 1; CO 123/1, f.33; Naylor, [?Penny Ante Imperialism].

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not work, he created a land registry by which he would confirm the titles of all claims the Miskito chiefs had conceded to the British. This put the cat among the pigeons, for many of the top men in the settlement had been inveigling large tracts of land from the Miskito, ‘principalities not plantations’ one mused, and some of them were technically the provenance of other tribes. Captain James Lawrie, an officer in the 49th regiment of foot, a sojourner on the Shore since 1751 and a contender for the position of superintendent in 1767, tried to block the registry in his capacity as a justice of the peace, arguing that former commissions of the peace were perfectly adequate for Black River’s governance. He also fell out with Hodgson over the Alberpoyer project, a huge lot seventy miles upriver, reputedly rich in gold, which he and another twenty-one investors had acquired from King George of the Miskito. King George received five shillings in goods for the concession.66 These disputes might have been reconciled had William Pitt lived long enough to mediate a deal. But his death in 1771 led to some bitter power struggles within the Black River elite and disposed rival factions to appeal directly to Whitehall rather than defer to the Jamaican governors who were jurisdictionally responsible for the Shore. The contest generated appeals for the Shore’s independence, and echoing American politics, calls for a more active council or assembly to represent the Shore’s interests. Neither Spanish Town nor London viewed these developments favourably. Jamaican governor John Dalling dissolved the Black River council in November 1773, leaving his successor, Sir Basil Keith, to try to sort out the mess. Lord Darmouth decided to recall Robert Hodgson in 1775, believing he was the problem not the solution, although he was far from happy with the ‘restless and ungovernable Spirit & Temper’ of the Shore’s inhabitants.67 Beset by American grievances and a drift to war, no minister of the crown wanted rebellion elsewhere. The Miskito were drawn into this power game and this sowed seeds of uncertainty in the Anglo-Miskito alliance. The first signs of trouble occurred just before Hodgson’s appointment, when one of the bigger proprietors at Black River, George Hewm, persuaded General Tempest to accompany him to London to petition for the Shore’s status as a colony and to press Robert Hodgson’s candidature as superintendent.68 This generated the unfortunate rumour that the General was also attempting to oust King George I from Cape Gracias à Dios and sell his wife and children into captivity. It led George to plot the General’s death in conjunction with the two chieftains of the south Shore, Governor Briton of Tebuppy and Admiral Dilson of the Pearl Key Lagoon. The plot faltered when Dilson refused to support the project and Governor Briton

66

JHC, 47 (1792), 430–1; Dawson, ‘William Pitt’s Settlement’, 693; TS 11/989/3665; Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 191, 67 TNA, CO 137/70, f. 67. 68 Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism, 56–7.

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could not agree to its terms, but it revealed just how vulnerable Miskito leaders were to factional disputes among the Shoremen. As those disputes intensified with the recalling of Hodgson and the jostling for his position, the Anglo-Miskito alliance became increasingly unstable. Hodgson’s opponents accused him of profiting from Indian slavery despite its official prohibition, knowing full well that Lord Dartmouth, who supported charities to convert indigenous people to Christianity and was sympathetic to abolitionism, would be appalled by the revelation. A letter, purportedly written by Prince George of the Miskito, larded the accusation. Hodgson was described as ‘the foremost trafficker in Indian slaves’ who encouraged the Miskito ‘to destroy our people, disunite and dishonor our tribes, and render us an easy conquest to our common foe, instead of leading us to useful purposes in cultivating cotton, indigo, and other useful articles’.69 The irony was that Hodgson’s white opponents were also complicit in slave trading, using Amerindians in their own plantations and selling others on the black market to Jamaicans. The revelations also put the Tawira Miskito in a difficult position, because they were the principal slave traders on the Shore and any move to curtail Amerindian slavery once and for all would cut into their livelihoods. Under pressure from Whitehall, the Black River council did abolish the Indian slave trade in August 1776, although it protected its own slaves by declaring that those enslaved before 22 October 1776 were not affected by the decree. The new superintendent, James Lawrie, floated the idea that the British government might even compensate slaveholders, who would then return the Amerindians to their nations. He believed that £3,000 might be sufficient to buy out the 150–200 slaves in Miskito captivity. But the Jamaican governor, John Dalling, rejected the idea. He was leery of believing it would work because the Miskito had ‘an inveterate habit of getting those Indians into their possession by force and fraud and employing them in all servile offices’.70 The consequence was the unthinkable. The Tawira Miskito, who had most to lose from the abolition of Indian slavery, started making overtures to the Spanish for some agreement whereby they would refrain from slave raids in return for some compensation, such as tributes or fishing rights. Such a possibility was put to the governor of Panama in the summer of 1775 in the name of King George I and Governor Timothy Briton, with the help of an Irish adventurer in the Tebuppy lagoon named Colvill Cairns. It faltered because the two Miskito chiefs died of smallpox before the deal was completed and their heirs were lukewarm. A similar agreement was offered by the Spanish to Admiral Dilson, the new Tawira chief of the Miskito in the south, in February 1778. It offered a treaty of friendship, land in Costa Rica, very probably on the Matina coast, and twenty-five pesos for every returned slave. Again, the deal came to nothing, but the circumstances were troubling. At the outset of the American 69 70

Calendar of Home Office Papers, vol. 4, 1773–1775, 460, 10 Nov. 1775. TNA CO 137/73, f. 11; Offen, ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia’, 102.

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war, George I of the Miskito had offered the British 500 men to combat the rebels.71 Now the Spanish were about to enter the war in conjunction with the French and any attempt to detach the Miskito from the British was likely to have severe ramifications for British interests in the region, especially since British naval supremacy and Jamaica, the premier sugar island, were now at risk. The most serious attempt to undo the Anglo-Miskito alliance came from a Virginian merchant cum adventurer named Jeremiah Terry. He first surfaces in the Colonial Office papers as a settler in West Florida after the peace of 1763, extending his dealings into New Orleans until it was occupied by the Spanish in 1766. In the period of political uncertainty that followed, Terry failed to redeem his debts in the Spanish colony, which he estimated at over £10,000, and he was subsequently unable to honour his contribution to a co-partnership in South Carolina, a predicament forced upon him by the death of one major investor. Terry appealed to the Earl of Hillsborough, seemingly without success, and in the mid-1770s he left America for the Shore.72 According to James Lawrie he insinuated himself into the graces of the Miskito at Cape Gracias à Dios and persuaded Prince George to go with him to London to complain of Robert Hodgson.73 Lawrie thought Terry a shady character who never declared what his real objectives were, and this opinion prejudiced the Board of Trade against him when he tried to have the British reimburse his expenses.74 Terry’s ulterior motive, one suspects, was to wrestle Hodgson’s office from him. He failed in that endeavour and in 1777 this disgruntled opportunist offered his services to Benjamin Franklin who was the unofficial American ambassador to France. Franklin put Terry in touch with the Spanish who fitted him out with a 350-ton ship, the Atlántico, with eighteen guns and a crew of forty, commanded by an American, Isaac Johns.75 Quite ironically, Terry was taken up by a Spanish guardacosta and subjected to an interrogation in Portobello before he was released in the late summer of 1778. Terry was unhappy about the questioning and wondered whether he and his Bermudan sloop would ‘be made a Jobb of’ by the Spanish.76 Yet he continued with his mission to prise the Miskito from the British. He had orders to set up a small fort at the mouth of the San Juan river and to win over the allegiance of the Miskito with offers of arms and 71 Vaughan,

Transatlantic Encounters, 219. TNA CO 5/72/2, ff. 199–200, 218–19. 73 TNA, CO 5/147, ff. 40, 108. Terry asked the British government for over £1,100 in expenses, but it seems he received no more than £475. 74 Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 83 (1776–82), 27, 30–1; CO 5/7, part 4, f. 544. 75 William B. Wilcox, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 23 vols (New Haven and London, 1983), 23:125–6; TNA, CO 5/7 part 4, ff. 544–6; T 1/1524, ff. 174–5. In the latter Terry said he could produce a witness to disprove some of Hodgson’s counter charges against the Miskito, probably those of Prince Isaac, who Hodgson thought should be indicted for murder. 76 TNA, CO 123/2, ff. 25, 32–3. 72

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ammunition. He also courted them with goods below Jamaican rates and hoped they would meet with Spanish commissioners at Fort Chagre at the beginning of the turtle season. Several Miskito chiefs did turn up, including George II, General Snee and Duke Isaac, but Governor Briton was persuaded to stay away by Colville Cairns, who feared his influence in the region would decline with Terry’s politicking. Cairns alerted superintendent James Lawrie to Terry’s presence at the estuary of San Juan, and he mustered a small party of white settlers, slaves and Miskito to arrest Terry on board the Atlántico. Terry was taken to Jamaica to be interrogated, and on a chance encounter with King George II and his followers on Corbin island, offered them £600 if they would seize the ship and whisk him away to a Spanish port, either Portobello, Cartagena or Havana. George II, who had just renewed his commission with the governor of Jamaica, had the sense to decline the offer, perhaps suspecting that Terry’s actions smacked of treason. The British authorities proved unable to indict him on that score, at least initially. Terry was technically on board a Spanish vessel with a Spanish commission to build a fort on Spanish soil, and it would be a year before Britain was at war with this Bourbon power. A substantial cache of arms was found on board the Atlántico, which made some suspect that this native Virginian was arms-running for the Americans as well as trying to mobilize the Miskito against the British connection. The authorities in Jamaica were exasperated that they could not prosecute him in a conclusive manner. ‘The enormity of Terry’s guilt is too conjectural and vague to lead us beyond a doubtful conclusion’ railed Governor Dalling.77 The British only moved to indict Terry for treasonable offences when Spain entered the war. The only winners seemed to be the Miskito, who impounded the Atlántico and her cargo. Were the Miskito into a double-cross? Had they set up Terry? Or were they flirting with the Spanish to alert the British to their grievances and the real dangers of ignoring them? If the latter, they were certainly playing a dangerous game. One overture to the Spanish might be written off as political credulity; three led the British to believe that the Miskito were inherently untrustworthy if not perfidious. The San Juan expedition of 1780, which we shall discuss in a separate chapter, underscored the problems of dealing with indigenous groups who would not adhere to European conventions of war. The British did not make this an issue while their holdings in Central America were at stake. Governor Dalling of Jamaica told one commander ‘to bend not a little to the caprice of the Mosquitos’ and he allowed Sir Alexander Leith to conciliate the Indians by allowing them all the booty they could take.78 He feted three Miskito chiefs in Jamaica and had two of his emissaries carry gifts worth £3,000 to mobilize Miskito regiments. When the Spanish launched an offensive upon British outposts in 1782, the Miskito helped repel it. At Fort Dalling on Black

77 78

TNA, CO 123/3, f. 34. TNA CO 123/3, Grantham to Fitzherbert, 9 Nov. 1782; Manchester to Fox, 13 July 1783.

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River, General John Smith’s Zambos killed every Spaniard they could lay their hands on, an encounter the Spanish remembered as the ‘Quepriva massacre’ .79 Yet as the war scaled down and preliminary articles were signed with Spain confirming British logwood grounds, the Miskito became expendable. Their fate was tied into the fate of the Shore, which was beginning to look more of a political liability despite efforts by some Shoremen to bolster their claims by inviting American loyalists to settle there. James Lawrie and the Shore agent in London, Robert White, continued to tout the Shore’s virtues as a potentially productive wonder and lobbied for its status as an independent colony.80 They ignored the fact that much of it was mangrove swamp; humid, malarial, with 250 inches of rain a year. Despite the gross exaggerations about the Shore’s fertility and its plantation prospects, politicians like Lord Grantham were quite prepared to abandon it, and by extension the Miskito, if Gibraltar ever became a contentious issue. The Rock, a strategic outpost of British naval power, was of far more importance to home-based politicians than some remote Caribbean coastline. Some diplomats tried to finesse the situation by hoping that the omission of terms regarding the Shore in the final treaty would in practice mean a return to the status quo ante bellum.81 But the Spanish were insistent that all English inhabitants along the coast resettle within the designated area of Belize, and ultimately, after considerable sabre rattling, the British conceded. The Black River white planters, with their hundreds of slaves, had relatively little difficulty relocating in Belize, where they were able to resume business cutting mahogany and perhaps growing indigo; that is, if they could persuade the Baymen to forgo their claims to much of the land.82 Others, particularly people of colour, would find the new frontier settlement hierarchical and distinctly uninviting. As for the Miskito, they were left to their own fate at the hands of the Spanish who had conventionally wanted to exterminate them and during the war had offered ten pesos for each Miskito warrior, dead or alive, and one thousand pesos for the heads of King George II and General Tempest.83 The British pleaded for their protection; the Spanish promised they would never pursue ‘rigorous methods to reduce the Mosquitos except when they could not accomplish the same by softness and moderation’.84 It was a meaningless pledge and the British knew it. Indeed, the Spanish forced the Miskito from Black River 79

Mike Jay, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard (London, 2004), 135–6. TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 19, 30, 201–2. 81 TNA, CO 137/78, ff. 62, 68, 246, 298. 82 Marcus Despard, who was in charge of the resettlement, said Black River had nine sugar works, some indigo plantations, and exported ‘a vast quantity of mahogany and sarsaparilla’. TNA, CO 137/81, f. 127v. On his problems relocating the Shoremen, see Jay, Unfortunate Colonel Despard, 153–81. 83 Archivo General de Indios, Seville, Audiencia de Guatemala, M. Galvez to J. Galvez, 2, 15, 16 April 1782, cited in Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 281. 84 Archivo Historico Nacional, (Madrid), Estado 4227, vol. 1, Campo to Carmarthen, 24 June 1785, cited in Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 314. 80

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and Cape Gracias à Dios using vicious Cuban hunting dogs. As for the British, they foraged around for evidence of Miskito perfidy. Lord Carmarthen asked his underling Liston to find conclusive evidence that the Miskito had tried to ally themselves to the Spanish. ‘Proof of the little credit due to their professions to this country might be of great service in the course of this business.’85 A few Miskito chiefs tried to hang on to their old allegiances with the British and solicit their favours. General Tempest or his son did so in 1795, but the Duke of Portland bluntly told the governor of Jamaica, Lord Balcarres, that the ‘motives which occasioned his being brought here [Jamaica] no longer exist’.86 The Miskito leader was fobbed off with a small quantity of rum and sugar and goods to the value of £50. If the Miskito were abandoned by the British, they ultimately proved they had staying power. In the initial period of diplomatic upheaval, the Miskito were a fractured confederation in which a civil war raged between the Zambo and Tawira; in the struggle the latter were almost obliterated.87 Yet despite this carnage and the fact that the Spanish managed to evacuate the victorious Zambo from Cape Gracias à Dios, the Miskito proved to be more truculent and resilient than anticipated. As Spain became drawn into further wars during the revolutionary decades, it found it could not maintain a military presence in the region to force their presence on people who were regarded as little more than vassals. European conflicts once more gave the Miskito bargaining power, which they used to demand annual gifts commensurate with those of the British, and to remind the Spanish that they were not to be trifled with.88 King George II lectured Antonio de Escheverría, the commanding officer of Rio Tinto, to that effect in 1798. Two years later, the Miskito expelled the Spanish from that small settlement and for the next six decades, against both British and Spanish expectations, enjoyed a full autonomy of the Shore. In the initial phase of imperial expansion, when plunder was the name of the game, the Miskito had been invaluable allies in making accessible the untold treasures of the Spanish empire. One early tract, The Mosqueto Indian and his Golden River, encapsulated this predatory vision quite neatly, for the golden river referred to the River Wanks, just south of Cape Gracias à Dios.89 In the early development of the plantation economy in Jamaica, the Miskito had served British interests well, supplementing its labour force with indigenous slaves; and their strategic importance in holding the Shore during the 85

TNA, FO 185/2, Carmarthen to Liston, 11 Feb. 1785, cited in Sorsby, ‘Superintendency’, 314, 68n; Dallas, Maroons, 2:4. 86 TNA, CO 137/95, f. 2. 87 On this civil war and its legacy, see Offen, ‘Sambo and Tawira Miskitu’, 324–8. 88 Caroline A. Williams, ‘“If you want slaves go to Guinea”: Civilization and Savagery in “Spanish” Mosquitia,1787-1800’, Slavery and Abolition, 35/1 (2014), 12–41. 89 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia, 60.

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mid-eighteenth-century wars was firmly acknowledged by governors, admirals and leading Jamaican politicians. As Edward Long, the former speaker of the Jamaica well understood, the Miskito constituted an unofficial standing army on the Coast, ‘which, without receiving pay, or being in any shape burthensome to Great-Britain, maintains the English in firm and secure possession, protects their trade, and forms an impenetrable barrier against the Spaniards, whom they keep under constant awe’.90 Yet as the British pondered the possibilities of developing the Mosquito Coast, consolidating their logwood settlements and regularizing their trade with the Spanish, the Miskito increasingly seemed an impediment to progress. British officials in Jamaica and on the Shore began to talk of the Miskito as ‘barbarous’, ‘savage’ and ‘very ungovernable’. In wartime the Miskito Indians accompanying British expeditions against the Spanish in Central America were difficult to control. They were too easily diverted by slaving opportunities. In peacetime their slaving raids threatened to create international incidents. British officials found themselves buying back the Indians and mestizos that the Miskito had enslaved and delivering them to the Spanish authorities. They were troubled by the fact that these slaving forays tended to alienate the very populations through which British trade with the interior could be realised. All that the Miskito seemed good for, it seemed, was to recapture the maroons who had fled from British plantations on the Shore. When it came to the crunch, the British government found the Miskito expendable. Under the terms of the peace treaty that concluded the American war, the British agreed to abandon the Shore to the Spanish upon condition that British rights to cut logwood and subsequently mahogany in Belize were recognized. In the end, British capitalism, the priorities of its textile industries and high-end consumerism, prevailed. The government was unimpressed with the claims that the Mosquito Coast was of much productive potential. It was a ‘ragged, miserable, scattered settlement’, claimed Lord Thurlow in one debate in the Lords, little more than a mangrove swamp, inhabited ‘almost wholly of Freebooters and Buccaneers’, scoundrels whom His Majesty’s government could well do without.91 As for the Miskito, his lordship denied that the British had any legal or moral responsibility for them. The opposition protested that this abandonment of a nation so loyal to the British was a disgrace and predicted a veritable bloodbath. But it was unable to encode the plight of the Miskito in the sentimental discourse of the noble savage, as it had done a decade earlier with the Black Caribs of St Vincent. The Miskito could be seen as sturdily independent warriors, but as ethnic soldiers with an increasingly defined hierarchy of command, they could no longer be creditably constituted as particularly egalitarian, naturalistic, or lacking in amour-propre. Of course, the British were never prepared to acknowledge their role in the 90 Long, 91

Jamaica, 1:321. General Evening Post, 24–7 March 1787.

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making of the Miskito, the way in which their own predatory drives in the Caribbean and their institutionalization of slavery helped create the ethnic soldiers that the Miskito became. In fact, they developed an altogether different explanation for the purported degeneracy of the Miskito, one that built on an emergent discourse of race. The trouble with the Miskito Indian, so the argument went, was miscegenation, the contamination of Indian with African blood and the bad consequences that flowed from it. The discourse can first be found in the fulminations of Spanish officials against the Zambos in the early eighteenth century who, within the Miskito nation, were singled out for harbouring ‘mulattoes, negroes and other evil-doers who flee from justice in the Spanish settlements’. 92 It is implicit in a tract written by the English mariner James Cockburn in the 1730s, one that ran through at least four editions in the eighteenth century. In Cockburn’s narrative of his hardships and adventures in Central America, there is a graphic account of the Miskito raid upon Chiriqui province, on the Atlantic side of the Panama isthmus, in which the Indians scalp, flail and burn a Franciscan friar, making ‘barbarous Mirth of his exquisite Tortures … saying that this was but a small Revenge for that Torrent of Indian Blood heretofore spilt by the Spaniards’.93 Cockburn describes these Miskito as diminutive Indians ‘with long black Hair hanging almost to the Ground’ , but the crude print that accompanies the pamphlet clearly portrays them as Zambo. It is the black Miskito, in other words, that have indulged in ‘this lamentable Spectacle’. Although Cockburn is promised a safe passage to the Atlantic coast, he declines the offer; ‘for I must have been more distemper’d in Mind than I was in Body’, he confesses, ‘had I associated myself with a Band of Robbers and Murderers, who could be guilty of so execrable a Deed’. 94 Cockburn’s print reinforced the racial hierarchy of the eighteenth century in which blacks or zambos are considered more brutal and malevolent than Amerindians. The debates of the 1770s elaborated upon this. In the public discussion about the future of the Black Caribs of St Vincent, who had resisted the incursions of English planters upon their territory, the opponents of the mixed breed of Afro-Caribs argued that they were guilty of a double usurpation. Not only had they arrogated a questionable aboriginal entitlement to land on the island; they were also ‘savage people, subject to no law or discipline’ who had assimilated and subjugated the original Caribs, people whom Sir William Young described as ‘the less robust natives of the western ocean’. Dispossession was not an issue in the subsequent debate on the future of the Mosquito Shore, which began in the wake of the Carib controversy. But the same play upon racial stereotypes and the disastrous consequences of miscegenation certainly informed the discussion. These themes emerged in the letters 92

Mary W. Helms, ‘Negro or Indian? The Changing Identity of a Frontier Population’, inOld Roots in New Lands, ed. Ann M. Pescatello (Westport, CT, 1977), 161. 93 Cockburn, Unfortunate Englishman, 237. 94 Ibid., 237, 239–40.

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of the Reverend Thomas Warren, the personal secretary of Robert Hodgson, Junior, and were forcefully reiterated in the work of Edward Long, a judge of the Vice-Admiralty Court in Jamaica and for ten years the Speaker of the House there.95 Long was an advocate of British direct rule on the Shore and a strong believer in its improvement. With proper instruction and civilizing, with some positive economic incentives, Long thought the Indians of the interior could be transformed into hard-working subjects and consumers of British manufactured goods. The fundamental problem was the Miskito. Some of the brutality attributed to this nation, he argued, in a passage that echoed earlier commentaries on the ‘wild majesty’ of the ‘noble savage’, could be attributed to the Miskito’s ‘natural enmity’ against the Spanish and the harshness of their imperial rule. But the fly in the ointment was the Zambo. Like his African ancestor, the Miskito-Zambos were a race apart. Unlike the pure Indian, who was naturally modest, docile and trustworthy, the Zambos had inherited the ‘true characteristics of the African mind, for they are generally false, designing, knavish, imprudent and revengeful’ .96 The real impediment to the improvement of the Shore, then, was the presence of this group, one that always threatened to overwhelm the ‘generous and humane’ Miskito Indians with whom it was intimately connected. Long was not an explicit advocate of bio-power, but his solution clearly implied some breeding-out of the reprehensible Zambos whose racial characteristics seemed fixed and immutable. As his protégé Bryan Edwards asserted in a policy statement to the government in 1773: ‘The proper management of those heterogeneous people, watching over, guiding, and tempering the Sambo restlessness, and giving encouragement and activity to the inoffensive, but indolent disposition of the pure Indians, seem to be some of the most important objects of our policy.’97 It was a policy that a British government might have considered, had it been convinced that the Mosquito Shore would bring enduring economic benefits to its merchants and settlers. But as Britain began to consider an era of freer trade after the loss of America, the allure of the Coast was a thing of the past.

95

For Warren, see Offen, ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia’, 100. Jamaica, 1:316n. 97 Edwards, British West Indies, 5:211. 96 Long,

149

7 Eighteenth-century Warfare in the Tropics: The Nicaraguan Expedition of 1780 The Nicaraguan expedition of 1780 is often seen as an interesting sideline to the British war against America and her allies, a reckless adventure that destroyed a great many lives. Within the larger context of British history, the expedition has attracted attention because it involved two conspicuous characters of the century: Horatio Nelson, the hero of Aboukir Bay (1798) and then of Trafalgar (1805); and Edward Marcus Despard, the radical revolutionary hanged for treason in 1803. The fact that Nelson gave testimony on Despard’s behalf at his trial, so compelling that it induced the jury to enter a plea for mercy, has inevitably led historians back to their days together on the San Juan river, when the two young men strove to accomplish an impossible mission to occupy Lake Nicaragua and split in two the Spanish empire of Central America. Yet the focus on these two men runs the danger of minimizing the logistical difficulties that the expedition encountered and of marginalizing the complexities of managing a multi-racial force that had different expectations of what was intended. For the expeditionary force that was quickly mustered to raid Spanish territory in 1780 involved British regulars, Jamaican irregulars – local militiamen, unemployed whites, privateers and slave volunteers – as well as Baymen and their slaves, and the Miskito Indians. The problems of co-ordinating this diverse crew of participants, in often unpredictable and torrential weather, must form part of the story if it is to be set within the context of eighteenth-century Caribbean expeditions. The San Juan expedition was initiated by Governor John Dalling of Jamaica in hasty and somewhat controversial circumstances. In May 1779, Spain entered the war against Britain and along with France stretched to the limit British resources in the Caribbean. In August, Jamaica was put on a war alert when it was reported that the Count d’Estaing had sailed into Cap-François in nearby Saint Domingue with twenty-six ships of the line and more than a dozen frigates, and that 22,000 troops were massing for an invasion of Jamaica. In the event, d’Estaing left for America to help in the blockade of that coastline, but the concentration of British ships in Jamaican waters left other parts of the sprawling British territories open to attack. In Louisiana the Spanish governor waged a successful campaign in the lower Mississippi valley and eventually expelled the British from the Gulf coast. At the same time, the Spanish governor of Honduras attacked the British logwood settlers in the Bay and expelled them from St George’s Cay, sending 300 prisoners, many of them women and children, to Mérida and later to Havana. The British forces in the area 150

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responded by attempting to take Omoa, at first unsuccessfully. But a combined military–naval operation, involving settlers from Black River as well as 100 Zambo-Miskitos, landed at Puerto de Caballos, some ten miles from Omoa, and took the fort by surprise. With the capture came two register ships whose cargoes were worth three million pesos, not to mention other booty picked up on the way.1 Dalling’s decision to embark on the Nicaraguan expedition is sometimes seen as a response to the raid on St George’s Cay. In fact he had decided to launch it as soon as it became clear that d’Estaing’s fleet was not about to invade Jamaica.2 He wrote to Capt. Samuel Dalrymple of the Loyal Irish, then stationed at Black River, about the proposed San Juan venture on 20 October 1779, before he had actually heard of the raid on British logwood settlements in the Bay of Honduras.3 Schemes for taking over Central America had been circulating for some time. Robert White, the colonial agent of the Mosquito Shore, had proposed one to Lord George Germain at the outset of the American conflict and the former superintendent of the Shore, Robert Hodgson, had proposed another upon Spain’s entry into the war.4 Dalling was almost certainly cognizant of these plans, at least in general terms, and after the Omoa episode he was eager to proceed with his own, an expedition up the San Juan river into Lake Nicaragua, and on to the cities of Granada and León. Expeditions such as these recaptured a grander buccaneering past. Between 1665 and 1670 no less than three armies of irregulars had successfully ascended the San Juan river to sack Granada, the first by the infamous Henry Morgan. These exploits were well known, they had become part of British buccaneering folk-lore; they were even mentioned in Thomas Jefferys’ West India Atlas of 1775, which was one of the essential guides for the expedition. Dalling’s appetite for joining the buccaneering immortals was no doubt whetted by the prospect of further prizes, for which as commander-in-chief he would inevitably get a share. He had probably heard of Thomas Cage’s description of Nicaragua as ‘Mohammed’s Paradise’ and was salivating about the riches it might bring him.5 In a letter to the commander of the expedition he fantasized about ‘rich Cartago’ as if the poorest provincial capital in Central America emulated its classical counterpart. Dalling undoubtedly thought the expedition would also bring him fame. He remembered the glorious days 1 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia, ch. 10, esp. 132–45; see also Sir John W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, 13 vols (London, 1899–1930), 2:302–3 and John Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory (London, 2005), 150. 2 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 199v; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 189. 3 TNA CO 137/81, f. 200; Stephen Kemble, The Kemble Papers (New York, 1884–85: Collections of the New York Historical Society, 17, 1884), 187, 190. 4 TNA, CO 123/2, part 1, ff. 8–15; CO 137/80, f. 323. 5 Thomas Cage’s Mohammed’s Paradise (1669) was a frequently cited text. It is mentioned in Thomas Jefferys, A Description of the Spanish Islands and Settlements on the Coast of the West Indies (London, 2nd edn, 1774), 42.

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when he was with Wolfe at Quebec (1759) and with the Keppels at the capture of Havana (1762). On the San Juan expedition, which had been mooted in previous wars against Spain, he was confident that the indigenous peoples of the region would gladly throw off the Spanish yoke and embrace British commercial freedoms, if not colonial rule.6 In an age of canal construction, he imagined himself as the grand architect of a trans-oceanic route to the Pacific, which lay some twenty leagues or so from the western edge of Lake Nicaragua. The Omoa precedent also led Dalling to think he could deploy enough irregulars, volunteers from Jamaica and the Mosquito Shore, to dampen criticism that his expedition was putting the most profitable sugar island in the British Caribbean at risk. In consultation with the superintendent of the Shore, James Lawrie, Dalling calculated he would need about 2,000 men for the raid. Although Dalling had only two regiments in Jamaica at the time, the news that further reinforcements were coming from Britain allowed him to offer the immediate commander, Captain John Polson, some regular soldiers. Polson was allotted about 100 of his own regiment, the 60th Foot or the Royal American as it was sometimes known, and about 140 of the 79th, the Royal Liverpool regiment. Dalling augmented these troops with further recruits for the Loyal Irish volunteers, some of whom were hardly in a fit state to man a garrison let alone fight in the jungles of Nicaragua.7 To these he added a motley group of adventurers, jail birds, straggling seamen from the waterfront and technically pressed men, seamen from neutral countries coerced into service. Together with some blacks, mulattoes and Indians, no one knows quite how many, they made up the Jamaican volunteers under the separate command of Major James MacDonald. This whole force amounted to about 600 men, far short of what was required. The rest were to be collected from the Mosquito Shore, where the superintendent, Major James Lawrie, was in charge of recruitment. Lawrie had promised a cast of thousands but these were wholly unrealistic expectations.8 As one of the chief plantation owners of Black River, Lawrie was able to deliver men from that area, and he had high hopes of recruiting a great many Miskito Indians from the settlements at Cape Gracias à Dios and Sandy Bay. In a tropical expedition such as this, with a high percentage of irregulars, they were crucial to the plan’s success. The Miskito were expert trackers and extremely skilled in negotiating the coastal waters, rivers and rapids in their pirogues or pitpans. They knew the San Juan river by virtue of their annual tortoiseshell and turtle-hunting expeditions to that area, and they had navigated it on a number of occasions. In 1707, and again in the 1740s, they had been part of British expeditionary forces that had raided San Juan del Norte and had travelled up river.9 In the ensuing war, they were part of 6

Kemble Papers, 233–5. Tom Pocock, The Young Nelson in the Americas (London, 1980), 59–60. 8 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 217v. 9 TNA, CO 137/57, ff. 29–30. They were also familiar with the Bluefield river which flowed into the Lake, see TNA, CO 137/57, f. 60. 7

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the party that had attacked El Castillo (Fort Immaculada) some seventy miles up the river, only to be thwarted, so the legend ran, by the commandant’s daughter, Rafaela Herrera, who took charge of the castle’s cannon herself.10 So the Miskito were no strangers to the San Juan, or to its neighbouring rivers. As Colonel Dalrymple remarked, they were ‘the only people that can conduct troops up the rivers in their crafts… they have a thorough knowledge of every river that leads into the heart of the Spanish Dominions, as they are constantly coasting along in search of the Tortoises – Shell and Pearl, and know every inlet for thousands of miles’.11 Like Dalrymple, Governor Dalling thought them essential to the expedition. As we have seen, however, the Miskito relationship with the British was complicated by in-fighting on the Shore, factional struggles from which the Miskito could not extricate themselves because they were solicited to give testimony against leading Shoremen. One of the charges levelled at the incumbent superintendent at the beginning of the American war, Robert Hodgson, junior, was that he trafficked in Indian slaves. When Prince George was part of the Miskito delegation that petitioned for Hodgson’s dismissal, he was asked to tell his people to refrain from enslaving indigenous people who were potentially friendly to the British. This was rather like blowing in the wind. The Miskito had long had a vested interest in enslaving Indians and exacting tributes from some of the tribes in the interior,12 and neither Prince George nor his planter allies were likely to make much headway in curbing this customary practice. As the new superintendent Lawrie soon discovered, it was difficult not to be embroiled in disputes with the Miskito over their slaving activities and hostile incursions into the interior. He told the governor of Jamaica that he was very troubled by the murder of three Woolva Indians, ‘a commercial tribe the next in number if not equal to the Mosquito men,’ and one whom Lawrie hoped to utilize in subsequent expeditions.13 On several occasions he attempted to buy back Indians captured from Spanish territory lest these actions provoke international incidents. He concluded that it was impossible for him to prevent the Miskito Indians from raiding other nations and enslaving them while they meet with the encouragement which they are certain of receiving from some of the British settlers on the Mosquito shore, but more particularly from the vessels which come from Jamaica and trade on the Windward part of this coast, where the masters and supercargoes purchase all the Indian slaves they can, and either carry them to the Bay of Honduras where purchasers are plenty; or get them indented apprentices or servants for a number of years, and by that clandestine method they are kept in slavery in Jamaica.14

10

Mike Jay, Despard, 99–100. TNA, CO 137/81, f. 226v. 12 Roberts, Narrative of Voyages, 71. 13 TNA, CO 137/72, ff. 95–6. 14 TNA, CO 137/72, f. 97. 11

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As a result, a formal declaration to ban the enslavement of Indians ensued from the Jamaican Assembly, hard on one from the new Council of the Shore.15 It is unlikely these bans made much difference, save potentially to antagonize the Miskito; especially when it was well known that the Shore’s act was not made retrospective in order to accommodate Lawrie and other planters who already owned many Indian slaves. What complicated this tense situation was the intervention of the Spanish. In April 1776 the Spanish intercepted the Morning Star, the ship bringing home the Miskito delegation from Britain, availing the Spanish of the opportunity to court young George and his Zambo chiefs. Nothing seems to have come of this encounter, but in the next two years at least two attempts were made to fraternize with the Miskito and to capitalize on the fissures that were opening up between the Miskito and the British. In April 1777, Colville Cairns, an Irish Jamaican adventurer and slaver who employed Miskitos in the tortoiseshell trade, attempted to get Governor Briton of Tuapí (or Tebuppy) lagoon to sign a treaty of concord with the Spanish, again without success.16 And in the following year the American adventurer, Jeremiah Terry, met with the Miskito chiefs at the San Juan river and had them sign a one-year peace contract with the Spanish before he was captured by Lawrie and sent to Jamaica for interrogation. How sincere the Miskito were about this alliance can only be a matter of speculation. One of the chiefs who purportedly signed this treaty (with a mark not a signature) was Governor Colville Briton of the Tupaí lagoon, the same chief who was in the party that arrested Terry several weeks later.17 It is possible that Terry was set up; but it is more likely that the Miskito were using Spanish overtures to soften up the British, to force them to reconsider their policy towards the enslavement of Indians. Certainly, Lawrie was made aware of the negotiations with the Spanish and they troubled him. The Miskito were a fiercely independent nation whose deference to British interests only went so far. They were unhappy about the ban on Indian slavery. When Lawrie was ordered by the new governor of Jamaica, John Dalling, to ‘cultivate and extend a friendly intercourse with other Indians nations, and by every sort of encouragement to draw over to our Interest men who are situated near the Spanish settlements’,18 he must have known he was going to run into trouble. Such an order struck at the special relationship the Miskito believed they had with the British, and further compromised Lawrie’s efforts to recruit them for the San Juan expedition. 15

For the Jamaican declaration, February 1777, see TNA, CO 137/72, f. 97; for the Council of the Shore, August 1776, see Frank Griffith Dawson, ‘William Pitt’s Settlement on Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central America, 1732–1787’, Hispanic American Historical Review 63/4 (1983), 695. 16 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia,126. On Cairns’ slaving activities, see TNA, CO 123/2, f. 45v; on his employment of Miskito in the tortoiseshell trade, CO 137/72, ff. 164–7. 17 TNA, CO 123/2, part 2, f. 37. 18 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 220v.

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What also complicated recruitment was the treatment of the Miskito in the Omoa raid of October 1779. At the initial landing at Puerto de Caballos the Zambos of General Temple’s unit were of invaluable service, surging ahead through the mangrove swamps and flushing out the advance guards of the Spanish. As Captain Dalrymple recounted, ‘the Indians were advanced in front, and dislodged them [the Spanish] from their look-outs, which prevented them from occupying the defiles and passes until we arrived near the town’.19 In this style of fighting, the Miskito excelled. As Robert White later remarked, they were expert ‘in conducting their Line of March undiscovered’, and ‘attacking their Enemies by ambush and surprise’ .20 Yet it seems that at the frontal assault on the fort, the Zambos were less than happy with their vulnerability. On this account they met some criticism from the regular troops. Captain Dalrymple attempted to smooth this over, but the criticism rankled with General Tempest. So, too, did their exclusion from the spoils of war. The Miskito refrained from taking clothes, watches and other effects from the prisoners, as requested, but none of the 365 prisoners in the fort were handed over to them. Rather they were sent to Santo Tomás for an exchange with British prisoners.21 The result was that when it came to eliciting the General’s support for the San Juan expedition, it was given very begrudgingly. The General, in fact, excused himself on account of his age, and sent one of his brothers and his band in his stead.22 The General’s reluctance to join the expedition was typical. Dalrymple had calculated that Lawrie might raise 700–800 Miskito Indians from the principal bands, but in the end it seems that the British were scarcely able to recruit half that number.23 When Polson arrived at Cape Gracias à Dios to liaise with Lawrie, the superintendent was disturbingly nowhere to be found. Stormy weather had delayed Lawrie’s departure from Black River. When he did arrive, he had about 200 rather than the 250 men from the Black River he had promised, and this included 30 or so regulars from the 49th regiment. Some regular soldiers had been lost in the gales; those that did arrive were suffering from fevers, dropsy and dysentery.24 More alarmingly, Lawrie had not prepared the Miskito for the expedition as was expected. His only overture had been to Duke Isaac, and that through an intermediary named Collins.25 In his absence Polson had to begin the process of recruiting the Miskito himself. He re-opened negotiations with Duke Isaac, the former regent to King George, and contacted Admiral Dick Richards, the principal chieftain of Pearl Key Lagoon, 19

Letter to Lord George Germain, 21 October 1779, extracted in the Naval Chronicle x (1803), 450. 20 TNA, CO 123/2, part 2, f. 50. 21 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia, 139; Kemble Papers, 184. 22 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 285v. 23 Dalling thought the expedition required 700 Indians. See TNA, CO 137/81, f. 250v. 24 Thomas Dancer, A Brief History of tthe Late Expedition against Fort St Juan (Kingston, 1781), 10. 25 TNA, CO 137/81, ff. 215–16.

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who was believed to control most of the Indians to the immediate south of the Cape.26 These chiefs had to be coaxed into providing men, with £3,000 worth of presents, flattery and professions of good will. All this took time, and Polson was troubled that there were too few pitpans, the long, flat-bottomed canoes useful for navigating rivers that were essential for the expedition up the San Juan river.27 He therefore sought some more. Consequently, it was not until 6 March, over a month from the departure from Jamaica, that the expeditionary flotilla of transport, river craft, and the frigate Hinchinbrooke actually set sail. Even then, Polson discovered that he was expected personally to visit every chieftain on the Shore who would provide him with men and to go through the protocol of delivering presents and accepting native hospitality; not to mention some discussion of the terms on which the Miskito would join the enterprise.28 There were also delays through mishaps. The flotilla overshot Sandy Bay where one of the Miskito chiefs resided. It had trouble locating the Tupaí lagoon where Polson and Nelson were scheduled to visit Governor Briton. The Hinchinbrooke, captained by Horatio Nelson, also hit a hidden reef and lost part of her false keel; and one of her sailors, John Rogers of the carpenter’s crew, drowned off Tupaí lagoon.29 These accidents occasioned further delays and meant that the expeditionary force did not arrive at the mouth of the San Juan river until 24 March, well over a month behind schedule. By the time the transports had been disembarked and the river craft loaded, it was another three days before the expedition could embark up river. It was clear to Polson and to others that this under-manned expedition was now racing against time, for the rainy season in Nicaragua was but a month away. Yet there were further complications. There were not enough river craft for everybody, as Polson had originally feared, and so some of the regulars were ordered to remain at the estuary with Major MacDonald and the Jamaican volunteers until further craft arrived. Polson attempted to take as many men up river as he could, but the larger river craft were so loaded with men, provisions and equipment that they were unable to navigate the shoals of the San Juan. There were also huge problems getting the flat-bottomed gunboat, the Lord Germaine, up the river, as there was with the Chichito, one of the Black River boats supplied by Lawrie. Travelling by pitpan and dory proved more successful, but there were too few of these craft. In any case they only carried light loads, which meant several extra supply camps had to be created to ferry provisions up the river. Progress up the river proved painfully slow, sometimes travelling no more than five miles a day amid the heat and humidity, and frequently men had to stow the oars and help in sliding the boats over the sandbars. Troops emerged 26 Sugden,

Nelson, 155; TNA, CO 137/80, f. 336. TNA, CO 137/81, ff. 285–6. 28 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 286. Polson and Nelson had to spend some time at Tupaí lagoon, where Governor Briton wanted to negotiate terms. The protocol of giving presents at Sandy Bay was left to Lawrie, who travelled behind the flotilla with some of the Miskito craft. 29 TNA, Adm 51/442, 15 March 1780; CO 137/81, f. 286. 27

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from these exercises exhausted and wet, only to face the chill and damp of the Nicaraguan night. Inevitably this took a toll on their health and spirits. Before they entered the San Juan river, the British had little sense of its complexity and length. The most obvious reference, Jefferys’ West India Atlas of 1775, was reasonably good in charting the inlets and islands of the Mosquito Coast, but the cartographic representation of the river and Lake Nicaragua betrayed a real ignorance of the interior. Major James Lawrie, who as superintendent of the Shore might have been expected to have gathered up some local knowledge, underestimated the length of the Rio San Juan by about thirty miles. The first real objective, Fort Immaculada, took a lot longer to get to than expected. Lieutenant Edward Marcus Despard, who as chief engineering officer was part of the advance party, became increasingly reliant on the Miskito Indians to ferry him up the river which, from its sluggish beginnings, ran faster over cataracts as the fort approached. Despard sighted the first lookout without being detected, and with the youthful Nelson not far behind, captured fourteen Spanish soldiers with little difficulty. The Miskito sharpshooters cut down the rest. These twenty-something subalterns (Nelson was 21, Despard 28) then set their sights on the fort five miles ahead. This was a rather different proposition. Fort Immaculada was an imposing castillo perched on a hill, a stone structure of 200 feet by 100, with four-foot-thick walls and fourteen cannon emplacements ranged along its riverside prospect. It had one visible vulnerability, which was a hill that overlooked the fort from the north side; but there was no discernible path to it, and its steep sloops were covered with moss and rotting vegetation. As the British realized to their dismay, it was virtually impossible to scale its heights and construct a battery on the top.30 Despard and Nelson wanted to attempt a frontal assault. Captain Polson opted for caution. He attempted to have his sappers dig a tunnel into the fort to blow it up, but the soft mud gave way. Then he had his two batteries attempt to breach the fort. The twelve-pound cannon balls unfortunately proved too inaccurate; the force of the blast blew the cannons off their sliders.31 The four-pounders hit the target, but they hardly dented the thick walls of the castillo. To further complicate matters, the British lines of supply were so attenuated that the number of cannonballs was limited. Polson had the Miskito search for stray balls at night in order to recycle them the next day.32 Reinforcements from the rear were not much help. Macdonald’s volunteers arrived with few cannonballs, for of the 200 that had left San Juan del Norte at the estuary, most had been lost by the capsizing of relay craft. Macdonald’s party also came with few provisions, leaving the commander on the spot with

30 Jay,

Despard, 99–103. TNA, CO 137/81, ff. 292v–293. 32 Jay, Despard, 106. 31

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only five days’ full rations for his troops.33 With such poor supply lines, Polson resigned himself to a frontal assault. Polson must have been elated when the commandant of the fort surrendered. The real vulnerability of Immaculada, it turned out, was the lack of fresh water; the garrison was collapsing from dehydration. Twenty-nine of the seventy-eight troops and bateau men in the fort were very sick, and the numbers were increasing.34 Governor Dalling must have been relieved, given his personal investment in the expedition and the fact that his reputation was on the line. He dashed off an official dispatch to Lord George Germain announcing the fall of Immaculada that hit the London press in mid-July 1780.35 To the commanders on the spot, however, the surrender of the fort must have seemed a pyrrhic victory. The terms of the capitulation outraged the Miskito. They believed that they were entitled to every person of colour in the fort; that was their understanding of the deal Duke Isaac had struck with Governor Dalling at Fort Augusta in Jamaica. No doubt they considered that their contribution to the expedition and the growing sickness and death among their ranks strengthened their claim. ‘They are disappointed in not being allowed to plunder the Fort & strip the prisoners’ , Polson reported, ‘they think all Indians & Negroes are to be considered as [their] Slaves’ including some they captured at the head of the river.36 In contrast, Captain Polson contended that they were only entitled to the real slaves in the fort, and these were few: just two women and four children. Polson expected trouble when the fort changed hands. In the articles of capitulation that he signed with Sieur Juan de Ayssa, the governor of the Castle, he promised to guard against any mishaps. Article two read: ‘il sera placé des sentinelles pour empêcher les Indians de rien faire contre les règles de la Guerre ou les loix de l’humanité’.37 He would stick to his bargain. As he wrote to Colonel Stephen Kemble, who had now assumed command of the expedition, ‘I do not think it reasonable to give up free people, and the dispute is referred to you as the Superior officer.’38 But by the time Kemble encountered their chiefs, they were already at the estuary of the San Juan river, on their way home. Governor Dalling later thought Polson had been a bit punctilious on this matter. ‘On such an occasion the Indians should have been satisfied’, he confided to Kemble, particularly when the Miskito said they only wanted to use the Spanish soldiers as domestic servants and when it was a little unclear that

33

Kemble Papers, 6. TNA, CO 137/80, f. 337v. See also Public Advertiser, 19 July 1780, which has slightly different numbers for the troops in the fort than those offered by Hodgson in his report. 35 The fall of the fort was reported in the Public Advertiser, 19 July 1780. 36 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 232; Kemble Papers, 217. Cf. Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, 160, who completely ignores the Miskito demand for slaves on the expedition. 37 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 310. 38 Kemble Papers, 217. 34

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the people of colour in the fort were genuinely free.39 Kemble agreed. Polson ‘might have given the Indians greater latitude, without infringing the articles of Capitulation,’ he reflected, ‘but he is wary, and constitutionally cautious and fearful of giving offence when his word and honour [is] engaged’.40 Part of the reason why Dalling and Kemble wanted to accommodate the Miskito was that they recognized the consequences of their defection. The expedition was now deprived of good scouts, of useful wild game supplements to a poor diet of salted meat, and of expert navigators of a swirling, unpredictable river.41 The fact that the Miskito left with their pitpans was especially troubling to Kemble, who tried to commandeer them.42 Without much success. Kemble moved swiftly to have the Black River slaves transport goods and troops up the river, but the news of the Spanish attack on Black River, which reached the expedition in May, precipitated the departure of James Lawrie and the Black River settlers, along with their slaves. Some slaves also took the opportunity to run away, leaving Kemble with precious few options save the bateau men, part of the reinforcements Kemble had brought with him from Jamaica. These men were not much help. Robert Hodgson believed they were ‘a worthless nay, helpless set of people, the refuse of the other two bodies of volunteers’.43 This ragged bunch of last-minute volunteers was just as likely to desert as to ply the river with any efficiency. The result was that the already fragile lines of supply from the San Juan harbour broke down. Neither arms, ammunition, nor provisions were reaching the advance parties quickly enough and in sufficient quantities. What did get through, or what was left at various depots on the way, was rain-sodden and rotting. This spelt disaster on another front, disease. There were signs of serious sickness from the very beginning. Of the two initial regiments, the 79th or Liverpool Blues had not been ‘seasoned’ as eighteenth-century parlance put it, that is, acclimatized to the tropics. On the packed transports that took the troops to the Shore, about thirty men fell ill, but only two who died on the passage had been feverish before the voyage started. More fell ill on the mosquito-ridden savannah on which the troops encamped at Cape Gracias à Dios while awaiting James Lawrie and his crew, some from dysentery from drinking brackish water. Yet few serious illnesses were reported until the expedition reached the estuary of the San Juan river and began the trek through jungle, marsh and water amid high humidity and dropping temperatures at night. Thomas Dancer, one of the surgeons of the expedition, noticed that the Amerindian Miskito suffered from fevers and dropsy during the siege of Fort Immaculada, in his view because they did not quarantine the sick from the others. He tried to treat them with purgatives and sweats, but the Miskito never 39 Ibid.,

240. 263. 41 See Dancer, Brief History, 11–12. 42 Kemble Papers, 7. 43 TNA, CO 137/81, ff. 204, 210–11, 328v. 40 Ibid.,

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‘paid any attention to their sick, further than to place them under some true or hut’ and give them water.44 Once the rains came in late April the fevers became general throughout the expedition, aggravated no doubt by the fact that the troops were on short rations and vitamin deficient. The exact nature of the disease that affected the expeditionary force has been a matter of considerable speculation, ranging from yellow fever, to tropical sprue, to typhus and malaria.45 Yellow fever may be discounted because Dancer made no mention of the excessive vomiting that normally accompanies the disease; so too, can tropical sprue, a pre-scorbutic condition that attacks the intestines, because this will not account for the prevalence of sickness among the Miskito. Moreover, sprue is a chronic rather than acute disease, and what the expeditionary troops grappled with was acute, developed rapidly and was often fatal. Dancer typically had a miasmic notion of disease. He thought disease originated from the vapours of jungle rivers, and so he provides few clues as to what the troops and their indigenous allies actually contracted. The most likely candidate seems to have been a malignant tertiary malaria, by which the small blood vessels in the brain become blocked and death comes with dramatic suddenness after a series of intermittent fevers. This was likely combined with either dysentery or typhus. Interestingly the eighth article of capitulation at Fort Immaculada specifies that the Spanish commander should attempt ‘to keep the mosquitoes within the bounds of moderation’.46 By the time Kemble and his party reached Immaculada on 15 May he found the troops paralysed with sickness. Moreover the fort, which might have been a place of shelter and convalescence from the continuous rain, was rank and insanitary, little more than a death trap. The soldiers, he dolefully noted in his journal, ‘were afflicted with Bilious, Remitting, and Intermitting fevers, with fluxes’.47 Virtually all the troops and officers were sick, and those who seemed to recover sufficiently to go on duty had frequent relapses. He noticed that the 79th regiment was particularly hard hit with fevers and that some troops had neither blankets, shoes or stockings. Kemble himself was struck down with a fever within a few weeks, one that lingered on and off until the spring of the following year. So while Despard reconnoitred the head of the river and the Spanish look-out on Lake Nicaragua, he did so in vain. There were few troops in a fit condition to make any kind of assault. Lack of supplies and endemic sickness eventually forced Kemble to more or less abandon the enterprise while the rainy season continued. The critical problem was that supplies were simply not getting through. Indeed Kemble was receiving troubling reports of a disease-ridden base where 44 Dancer,

Brief History, 8–11. See the excellent summary in Sugden, Nelson, 810–11. 46 Ibid., 811, citing Robert Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, 6 vols (London, 1804), 6:230. 47 Kemble Papers, 11. See also the account from an officer accompanying Kemble, published in the St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 October 1780. 45

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there were insufficient healthy men to navigate the river craft. Towards the end of July, he reported that the men at the fort were ‘half-starved’ and unable to sustain six hours of work without shoes and stockings. He wrote of men with ‘fountains of water issuing out of them from their legs, feet, and thighs, attended with fluxes’ .48 On 26 July he jotted in his journal: ‘they die very fast, burying 6 to 8 a day: such distress is not to be conceived’ .49 Kemble thus decided to retain a small garrison at the Fort and remove the sick troops back to the estuary. When he reached the redoubt there on 5 August he found ‘the Sick in a Miserable, shocking condition without any one to attend them, or even to bury the Dead who lay on the beach shocking to behold’.50 Some of the able-bodied, fearing contagion, had fled to Bluefields up the coast. Others, like Colonel William Dalrymple, had taken ill with a cold fit at Immaculada, and groped and gourmandized their way through the crisis. As Sir Alexander Leith mischievously remarked upon his return to San Juan del Norte: It seems this gentleman, during the extreme severities he has undergone in the course of this bloodless campaign, never stirred without his hen roost, claret, turkies. He deems his health of great importance to his Country, and certainly leaves no means untried to establish it effectually. I was extremely ill when he returned but he took up his quarters in the Fort and entertained me every evening with three or four Spanish whores rolling on his bed, with whom he practiced all the conduct of a Covent Garden brothel. I could not help observing to him that I thought his state of health not so very dangerous, as he seemed to apprehend, and that people would look strangely on him as a sick man, when he could drink his Claret, and eat his turkey, as well as any officer in the Camp.51

Colonel William, of course, was an officer and a gentleman, able to use his class position and wealth to insulate himself from the worst of the crisis. He did not linger long where officers were vulnerable. Others were less fortunate. Because the mortality ashore seemed so dire, many soldiers and sailors were confined to the transports and ships in the harbour, from where it was hoped, with brief excursions into open water, they might evade the miasmic contagion that was believed to be overwhelming the expedition. Such at least was the theory. In fact, they were probably as vulnerable to malaria as the others on shore, and they had to contend with the shipworms that were burrowing away at the hulls of the craft, making them exceedingly leaky. Captain Collingwood of the Hinchinbrooke discovered that the ‘old French sheathing’ of the frigate was ‘quite rotten’ and the ‘seams that it had covered quite open’. For three days he employed caulkers to plug the leaks, but within a week he reported that ‘all the

48

Kemble Papers, 31. Ibid., 32. 50 Ibid., 36. 51 TNA, CO 137/81, ff. 247–247v. 49

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old leaks sprung out fresh and the ship makes 12 and 15 inches an hour’.52 Ships like these could easily become floating coffins. Kemble recognized the appalling mortality that was ‘raging among the poor Soldiers on board ship, where Accumulated filth had made all air putrid’.53 Logbooks reveal the same story. The Resource recorded seven deaths in June and twenty-two in July.54 In this cryptic logbook, the state of the rest of the crew can only be guessed at, but we know that Collingwood reported in late June that the ship’s company was ‘much reduced by sickness’.55 In his own boat, the Hinchinbrooke, Collingwood was more specific. He recorded deaths on a daily basis, and in mid-June confessed that the ‘ship’s company [was] very ill and everyday growing worse’.56 By 1 July Collingwood had to get another crew to provide the ship with water, ‘having of this ship’s company scarce enough to bury the dead and remove the sick’. Within a week he was signalling all the transports to discover how many able men were still standing. He found there were ‘only 20 men, the rest sick and dead’.57 As for his own frigate, the one he had inherited from a desperately sick Nelson, Collingwood reported that 170 of the ship’s complement of 200 had died by the end of 1780. He reflected that ‘scarcely any of those who had been attacked by the distemper have recovered so as to be able to serve again’.58 It was this situation that made Kemble despair of resuming the expedition. In November he ordered Despard to abandon El Castillo, to blow up the walls and spike the guns. The rest of the expeditionary force was moved first to Bluefields, and then, when the weather and the health of the troops permitted, to Jamaica. Not many survived to tell the tale. ‘Death soon claimed a third of them’, remarked Hodgson, ‘and the returns of sick & dead have continued ever since truly melancholy.’59 Exactly how many died is difficult to determine. Robert Hodgson, who certainly wanted to expose the folly of the expedition out of pique and ambition, claimed that only 130 of the expeditionary force of 1,500–1,800 troops and volunteers survived. This calculation excluded the Miskito and the sailors, of whom he thought 1,000 were likely dead. If this was the case then the mortality rate must have been in excess of ninety per cent, making the San Juan expedition the most fatal of the century. The figures offered by Dr Benjamin Moseley, the surgeon-general of Jamaica at the time, are probably more reasonable. He calculated the mortality rate at seventy-nine per cent, believing 380 survived out of an expeditionary force of 1,800.60 This 52

TNA, Adm 51/442, part 7, 3, 12–14, 22 May 1780. Kemble Papers, 36. 54 TNA, Adm 51/4309, logbook of HMS Resource, June and July 1780. 55 TNA, Adm 51/442 part 7, 30 June 1780. 56 TNA, Adm 51/442 part 7, 21 June 1780. 57 Ibid., 7 July 1780. 58 Sugden, Nelson, 171. 59 TNA, CO 137/80, f. 332. 60 Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Tropical Diseases (London, 3rd edn, 1792), 146. 53

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would put the fatalities somewhat above those of the siege of Cartagena in 1741 (seventy per cent) and of the British army during the French wars of 1793–1801, when fifty-one per cent died and a further sixteen per cent were discharged as invalids. It would even be above the mortality rate of the British army in occupied Saint Domingue, when sixty-three per cent of the 20,000 force died and a further seven per cent were invalided.61 The 1790s casualties were more dramatic because of their scale, but the 1780 casualty list was proportionately more devastating, even on the most modest calculations. Inevitably, in such a dramatic failure as this expedition, there were finger pointing and recriminations. Robert Hodgson Junior, who had been sent by Lord George Germain to ascertain what was happening, placed the blame first and foremost on his rival James Lawrie, whose failure to muster the Black River settlers and the Miskito put the expedition crucially behind schedule. He claimed he could have provided maps and brought his considerable experience to bear on the assault, but by the time he arrived, Dalling’s hastily conceived expedition had ‘ruined the business in a manner too shocking to be easily spoken of with temper’ .62 He also highlighted the flawed logistics of the expedition and implicitly reprimanded the Admiralty for sending out troops that were typhus- and scurvy-ridden by the time they reached the tropics, making their susceptibility to disease that much greater.63 As far as Hodgson was concerned, a Pacific assault on the Spanish would have been a more successful venture.64 Governor Dalling blamed Lawrie for exaggerating the basis of his support on the Shore and for delaying the expedition. He also accused Polson of failing to storm El Castillo as Nelson and Despard had recommended, and for refusing to accede to the Miskito demands for captives, a refusal which facilitated their departure and wrecked the supply lines as the rainy season began. Dalling protested that he did all that he could to counteract these setbacks by sending military reinforcements and bateau men; but the delays unfortunately ‘laid the seeds of a variety of diseases, which aggravated by the fatigues of the Troops, soon broke out in fluxes, dysenteries, and other terrible disorders, which swept them off with such rapidity as to baffle all the skill and attention of the Medical Gentleman’.65 Lord George Germain, for his part, denounced Dalling for failing to create a working coalition of settlers and Miskito Indians to destabilize the Spanish settlements and facilitate the army’s advance in their wake.66 61

For these figures, see David Geggus, ‘Yellow Fever in the 1790s: The British Army in Occupied Saint Domingue’, Medical History, 23 (1979), 48–50, and Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, 333. 62 TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 23v, 323–42. 63 TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 24–5. This is something that both Geggus and Duffy have recognized in their accounts of war and death in the Caribbean. See works cited in 61n. 64 TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 342–4. 65 TNA, CO 137/81, f. 204. 66 TNA, CO 137/78, 7 Dec. 1780. See also Sugden, Nelson, 173–4.

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All of these men recognised the critical role that the Miskito Indians had to play in any expeditionary incursions into Spanish territory. In this respect their perspectives are an advance on some historians, old and modern, who have tended to marginalise or trivialise the Miskito role, even to write them out of the story.67 But Dalling and Germain, in particular, who began their careers as army officers in the European theatre, had a very superficial view of what it might take to bring the Miskito in line with their plans. They rather thought that these ‘savages’, as Dalling sometimes called them,68 could be bought off with a few arms, trifles and the spoils of war. They ignored the complex politics of the Shore in which the Miskito were enmeshed; not only with respect to the settlers, but also to the rival Amerindian bands that lived there. Both of these aspects of the story are critical to an understanding of why the Miskito entered the expedition with reluctance in the first place, and why they were so angry when their expectations were not met. Recent attempts to dress these Zambos and Amerindian Miskito as freedom-loving smallholders and fishermen outside the parameters of capitalism and empire will not do.69 The Miskito were hard-headed ethnic soldiers between empires, part of a predatory landscape of adventurers and slavers in a world where the glories of plunder could sometimes dazzle the imagination and dumb the brain. The mystique of riches and glory was what drew Dalling to consider this wild adventure in the first place, at an appalling cost. Of course, Governor Dalling would not accept responsibility for the failure of the San Juan expedition. He attributed it to delay, military incompetence and the ‘villainy of the Shore settlers’ who poisoned the minds of the Miskito into thinking they might be enslaved.70 At the same time he could not avoid criticism from the Jamaican assembly, who railed at the cost of the enterprise, or the observations of Robert Hodgson, the displaced superintendent of the shore, who informed Lord George Germain that his experience of the area and familiarity with the Miskito would have mobilized a more successful company of indigenous rangers. If he was given the chance, so Hodgson claimed, he could muster a ‘flying corps’ that could capture the rich plains of Central America, lands that would outgrow Florida, Georgia, Carolina and Virginia.71 John Dalling was eventually replaced in the messy aftermath of the expedition, ostensibly because he fell out with Sir Peter Parker over his share of the spoils from the capture of Omoa, and because he overreached his powers while seeking legal reprisals against his critics. Ultimately the failure of the expedition was 67

See Fortescue, British Army, 2: 303–4; Terry Coleman, Nelson: The Man and his Legend (London, 2001), ch. 4; Edgar Vincent, Nelson, Love and Fame (New Haven and London, 2003), ch. 3; Carola Oman, Nelson (London, 1947), 29–33; Sir Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (New York, 1954), 533–4, who says the Miskito detachment were ‘of little value’. 68 TNA, CO 137/81/203v. 69 Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 265–7. 70 TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 198–208. 71 TNA, CO 137/80, ff. 23v–30, 57v.

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attributed to the hubris of those who believed such a grandiose venture was possible in the first place. Officers dreamed of returning with ‘Wealth and Fame’ one newspaper remarked, but ‘their Career to Riches and Glory’ was ‘arrested by Disease and Famine’. In the end, as Benjamin Moseley observed, the Nicaraguan expedition was buried ‘with many of its kindred in the silent tomb of government’.72

72 Moseley,

Tropical Diseases, 149; St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 October 1780.

165

8 The Carbet and the Plantation: The Black Caribs of Saint Vincent I do not command in the name of anyone. I am not English, nor French, nor Spanish, nor do I care to be any of these. I am a Carib, a Carib subordinate to no one. I do not care to be more or to have more than I have. (A Carib leader to José Rossi y Rubi in Gaceta de Guatemala, 1/21, 26 June 1797, 164–5)

In August 1769 Captain John Quinland of the Ranger sloop was ordered to cruise between St Lucia and St Vincent to arrest any Black Caribs who were trading across the eight leagues of water that separated the two islands. The British authorities on the spot were particularly concerned with the traffic in arms, fearing that the mixed-race band would stiffen their resistance to the plans to develop the recently acquired volcanic island of St Vincent. On 24 August, two leagues off St Lucia, Quinland espied four large canoes or pirogues, each containing about nineteen men. The captain of the Ranger fired off a signal ordering them to bring to. The Caribs simply dropped their sails and paddled aggressively toward him. Quinland then ordered them to approach one pirogue at a time, fearing his small crew of nine sailors might be overwhelmed by these burly warriors. The Caribs paid no attention, and so Quinland instructed his men to sink their vessels. Two canoes were disabled, but the Caribs continued to swim towards him with their cutlasses between their teeth, signalling a clear intention to board the Ranger. Quinland and his crew fired away at the approaching men, bayonetting those who climbed the rigging. He killed many, he subsequently recorded in a deposition filed at Kingstown five days later, losing two of his own men in the encounter. When the wind came up, he sailed off, leaving the rest of the Caribs ‘to shift for themselves’.1 The affray off the coast of St Lucia was one of a series of confrontations between the Black Caribs and the British authorities in the years 1768 and 1769. The fundamental problem was land. Under the terms of the Peace of Paris in 1763 France ceded the hitherto neutral islands of St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago and Grenada to Britain. These islands were supposed to have been evacuated under the previous treaty of 1748, but all save Tobago had Francophone planters 1

TNA, Adm 1/309/1, f. 15; Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, 17 (1771–74), cols 628–9; Authentic Papers, 65–6. Robin F. A. Fabel, Colonial Challenges: Britons, Native Americans and Caribs, 1759–1775 (Gainesville, FL, 2000), 164–5.

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on them and two, St Vincent and Dominica, a fair number of indigenous people. On St Vincent, the leeward side of the island was inhabited by the aboriginal Red or Yellow Caribs, ancestors of the native bands that had lived throughout the Caribbean until the seventeenth century. On the windward side, the native bands were mixed race, the product of unions between the aboriginal Caribs and slaves who were shipwrecked off the coast of Bequia close to St Vincent when a ship from the Bight of Benin overshot Barbados. These Black Caribs were African in appearance, save that their foreheads were flattened at infancy; some claimed, to distinguish them from African slaves.2 They were considerably more hostile to the European development of the island than the semi-assimilated Red or Yellow Caribs, and under the French occupation of the early eighteenth century, the thousand or so French planters who resided there cultivated the more mountainous leeward slopes of the island where the more innocuous Red Caribs lived.3 The governor of Martinique is said to have arbitrated between the two native groups in 1710 by essentially splitting the island in two; a division that allowed some European plantation to take place without harassment. In 1719 the French sent an expeditionary force to attempt to re-enslave the Black Caribs, but it fled in disarray.4 Thereafter, the French regarded the windward side of the island as off-limits, the home of Black Caribs who grew a few crops such as cassava, yams and tobacco, but subsisted largely through hunting and fishing and selling their uncured tobacco to French settlers in St Lucia and Martinique in return for guns, flints, powder and cheap rum called raffia. When the British took over the island in 1763, they assumed full sovereignty over it. They did not respect native land claims in the same way as the French, who believed the Caribs ‘natural to the islands’ were ‘possesseurs et que la Propriété leur en apartient’.5 They believed that the Francophone planters who resided there and bought lands from the Red Caribs would have to renegotiate their leases, unlike those in Grenada, who had security built into the AngloFrench agreements of 1762–63.6 Some of them subsequently left for St Lucia 2

There is a debate as to how ‘Carib’ the Black Caribs really were. Modern genetic evidence suggests the sickle trait among the Garifuna (descendants of the Black Caribs) was as prominent as their West Indian ancestors. See Douglas M. Taylor, The Black Caribs of Honduras (New York, 1951), 18–28. On the initial contact in St Vincent see Bernard Marshall, ‘The Black Caribs: Native Resistance to British Penetration into the Windward Side of St Vincent, 1763–1773’, Caribbean Quarterly, 19/4 (1973), 6. 3 Nancie L. Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna (Urbana and Chicago, 1988), 16, puts the number at 700. Ivor Waters thinks 1,300. Waters, Unfortunate Valentine Morris, 35. 4 William Young, An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent’s (London, 1795), 12–13. 5 TNA, SP 78/194 f. 531. See also SP 78/241, f. 12 concerning the possible dispossession of French planters. The French declared they had no pretensions to rights in St Vincent and Dominica ‘as they had long ago agreed to be the property of the Caribbee Indians’. 6 D. H. Murdoch, ‘Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783’, Historical Journal, 27/3 (1984), 552.

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and Martinique. Those that remained were mainly smallholders, for most lessees and the few Francophones who bought estates rarely exceeded fifty acres. Only ten per cent of the new purchasers were French, and these included thirty-two creditable planters who raised coffee and cacao with some 750 whites and 7,000 enslaved Africans. The others included Anglophone planters from Antigua, Barbados and even some landlords from North America. The intention of the Land commissioner, Sir William Young, and of early promoters such as Dr John Campbell, was to encourage ‘yeoman’ planters from the islands where the sugar plantations had been worked out, although Young himself did not shut the door on the subsequent amalgamation of estates as had occurred in Barbados and Jamaica. Despite the fact that the British had returned the valuable island of Guadeloupe to France at the behest of the planter lobby, who wanted to control the price of imported sugar and molasses, it was felt that new ventures in tropical staples might work to Britain’s advantage; provided they did not involve accumulating military expenses in their train. Young certainly touted the virtues of St Vincent: ‘The richness of the soil and the face of the country are perfectly adopted for the growth of sugar’, he proclaimed; the island ‘will very soon be classed among the best and most valuable of our sugar colonies’.7 St Vincent is a small volcanic island, pear-shaped in size, some eighteen miles long and eleven miles wide. It has a mountainous spine with heavily wooded valleys running down to the sea on both coasts. At the far north is a volcano, Mount Soufrière, which periodically erupted and destroyed the hillside plantations around its circumference. Although the volcanic valleys were fertile and replenished with rainfall, and although twenty-two of the island’s rivers were capable of driving sugar mills, St Vincent was not quite the plantation paradise Young made it out to be. That did not stop land sales rocketing in the early years of resettlement, reaching prices as high as £50 an acre. Artisans and small planters migrated to this new plantation frontier, and the population of St Vincent is said to have grown by thirty per cent in the first few years. British merchants and speculators also hoped to cash in, driven by the financial frenzy which accompanied the fortunes of the East India Company after its assumption of Diwani in 1765; that is, the right to collect revenue directly in Bengal and expand its territorial ambitions.8 In essence the speculative mania in East India stock affected the land sales of the ceded islands, which were often auctioned in London. In St Vincent a total of 7,340 acres were sold in the first year of sales, a figure that equalled the combined sales in Dominica and Tobago. By the end of 1767 as many as 12,507 acres had been purchased in St Vincent for around £125,000. These acquisitions did not include the 7 Sir William Young, Considerations which May Tend to Promote the Settlement of our West Indian Colonies (London, 1764), 9, 11. 8 On the rapid in-migration, see Joseph Spinelli, ‘Land Use and Population in St Vincent 1763–1960’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), 227. On the Diwani, see Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006), passim.

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unofficial sales procured from the Red Caribs by those who wished to pre-empt or undercut commission prices. Early on, before the land commission was firmly established, a syndicate of financiers and speculators led by Lauchlan Macleane, who had briefly been the lieutenant-governor of St Vincent, had been buying up the lands of departing French planters at knock-down prices. These technically irregular purchases continued into the 1770s. The most spectacular purchase came from Edmund Burke’s brother, Richard, who was the collector of the customs in Grenada, largely in absentia, but who had visited St Vincent in person. Through an agent named Patrick Connor, Richard Burke purchased four lots on the Leeward side of the island, each about 300 acres, stretching from the Wallibou river to the northern tip of the island within the shadow of Mount Soufrière. Only the southernmost lots were cultivable, and much land had to be cleared, but this long tract of land along the north-west coast was bought for a trifle, well under the market price.9 The first scramble for land in St Vincent ended rather abruptly in 1767. The Leeward side of the island was suitable for cultivating coffee and cacao, but by and large it was too mountainous to grow sugar in any quantity. The possibilities of doing that lay on the Windward coast, in the territory of the Black Caribs, and so the government opened negotiations with them. The Board of Trade counselled caution. The ‘wild Caraibes’ and ‘free Negroes’ by which it meant the Black Caribs, ‘consider themselves to be and really are an independent people, very jealous of any settlement of Europeans upon this Island, which they look upon to be their own property’.10 Without their consent, the development of St Vincent would be an upward struggle. The British commissioners tried to persuade the Black Caribs to sell their cleared land at £8 an acre and suggested that in return for a recognition of His Majesty’s sovereignty and ‘protection’, they be moved within five years to a reservation. They were to be given ‘title’ to their new lands which they could not alienate to whites. The British presumed that the Black Caribs would not be perturbed by the move. In their eyes the Caribs lived a scratch-as-scratch-can existence centred on their carbets, or hamlets, from which they roamed to hunt game or fish.11 They were not, after all, real cultivators in the tradition of John Locke. They were not improvers. William Burke, Richard’s cousin, declared that ‘No Sugar Colony ever yet flourished which was not cleared of Caraibs.’ If one did not eliminate them, he claimed, admittedly ‘a detestable and dangerous policy’, one would have to accept only a ‘nominal

9

P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2007), 33; P. J. Marshall, Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power and Slavery (Oxford, 2019), 66–92. 10 W. L. Grant and J. L. Munro, eds, Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, 6 vols (London, 1908–12), 4:586–7. 11 A ‘carbet’ is a hamlet in Martinique French, although it is also a boathouse in formal French, or a place where a boat is stowed. Both meanings are appropriate to the habitus of the Black Caribs.

169

Fig. 7. Map of St Vincent, 1763–97 (Michael Craton, Testing the Chains (Ithaca, NY, 1982), map 10).

THE CARBET AND THE PLANTATION

possession’ of the island.12 In 1768 the government believed it could soft talk the Black Caribs into accepting a more peaceful settlement without abandoning the prospect of a new sugar island. With the release of Windward land, a further quarter of the island’s cultivable acres would be ready for development. The Black Caribs listened; they took in the advice of the Abbé Valladares, the go-between of the commissioners who understood their French patois; they discussed the plan themselves; and they demurred. Valladares told Robert Wynne, the only commissioner then on the island, that chief Joseph Chatoyer and his people in Grand Sable would not allow a road into their territory. But in November 1768 the commissioners began one anyway. A surveying party constructed a route a few miles northwards from the Coubaimarou river but were obstructed by Black Caribs at the river Jambou, well short of La Colonarie. Work on the road stopped only to resume in the spring of 1769, this time with an escort of forty men from the 32nd Infantry. The makeshift barracks for these men at Masserica, between the Jambou and Colonarie rivers, was then unroofed by the Caribs and the troops were effectively cordoned off from the outside world. The infantrymen became de facto hostages to about 300 Black Caribs, a move that prompted the government to send in 100 more soldiers and some armed settlers. As the situation escalated and talks on the project stalled, some Black Caribs broke into the house of mediator Valladares, wounded his nephew, and allegedly killed his black servant. At this point both the St Vincent assembly and the commissioners believed no progress could be made without a show of force. The Black Caribs had consistently declared they were a ‘free people’ who owed no allegiance to the kings of Britain or France. They were not prepared to barter away their land. Suffering the Caribs to remain in ‘their present state’, argued the commissioners, would be ‘injurious to the future of the island’. They were a haven for runaways and in the event of a rupture with France, it was probable ‘they will join in distressing the inhabitants’.13 To the commissioners, and ultimately to the Earl of Hillsborough, the Secretary of State, the affray off St Lucia in August 1769 with which this chapter began, underscored the real possibility of a Franco-Carib intervention. In fact, there were rumours that the Black Caribs had sought the aid of Count d’Ennery, the governor of Martinique.14 The British authorities in the Caribbean still hoped that a show of force might induce the Black Caribs to negotiate. Admiral Parry ordered naval patrols to restrain the Caribs from communicating with the French and trading their highly prized tobacco and a few slaves for arms. Ulysses Fitzmaurice, the lieutenant governor, indulged in some sabre-rattling. He mobilized the St 12

William Burke, An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiation between Britain and France (London, 2nd edn, 1762), 63–4. 13 TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 5–6. 14 Parl. Hist. 17 (1771–74), col. 600. See also CO 101/17, f. 47v. Victor-Thérèse Charpentier d’Ennery was governor of Martinique, 1765–68, and then governor-general of the Windward Islands, 1768–71.

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Vincent militia and brought four companies of the 32nd regiment stationed in Dominica to join the five already on the island. At the same time the government in London was reluctant to commit more troops to the field. The British were already embroiled in a war with Spain over the Falkland Islands, and trouble was brewing in Boston. Hillsborough did not think the moment propitious to try to overwhelm an unspecified number of Black Caribs, whose numbers fluctuated between 2,000 and 5,000. Frankly no-one knew how many there were. And so Sir William Young, the leading land commissioner, made one last effort to reach terms with the Black Caribs. He agreed to meet Chatoyer and the Grand Sable Caribs at Morne Garou. He offered them money for the cleared lands around Morne Garou, Rabacca and Grand Sable if they would swear allegiance to the crown. Chatoyer was not interested. They were an independent people, he declared, and their land was not for sale. At this point Governor William Leybourne told Hillsborough that negotiations were over; military force was now required to bring these ‘savages’ to a proper sense of duty. Projects to remove the Black Caribs from the island now came to the fore; it was suggested they should be deported to the coast of Africa, or possibly an island off it, like St Matthew or Principe. Once the Black Caribs were removed the government could put the Red Caribs on the same footing as the maroons of Jamaica; they could help track runaways in return for some autonomy on the island. Mobilizing forces against the Caribs quickly ran into problems. The 32nd regiment was debilitated with disease. The oak carriages of the cannon brought in from Antigua were rotten and had to be rebuilt with hardwood. More troops were brought in, from Florida, the Bahamas and Boston, but progress was slow because some regiments had to be replaced before they could sail, particularly in hotspots like Boston, and their transports encountered storms that delayed their arrival in St Vincent. To compound matters, the naval support for the expedition was disabled by a massive hurricane that hit the Leeward islands. When hostilities began in September 1772 the colonial forces were not at full strength and there was a lot of squabbling among the high command. Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple was the most experienced officer. He had enforced the Townshend Acts in America and was in charge of British forces during the Boston Massacre, but he had to contend with an unwieldy council of war led by Governor William Leybourne, whose main claim to fame was that he had been an ‘exceedingly good fox hunter’ back in the old country.15 Dalrymple also had to contend with the lightning raids of the Black Caribs on military and settler targets. Using the wooded terrain for cover, the Caribs practised hit-and-run tactics, picking off stray soldiers, ambushing encampments, burning down plantations.16 Leybourne set up an auxiliary force to 15

Parl. Hist. 17 (1771–74), col. 729. London Chronicle, 3–5 Dec. 1772; Stamford Mercury, 10 Dec. 1772; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 12 Dec. 1772; Morning Chronicle, 13 Feb. 1772; Northampton Mercury, 22 Feb., 29 March 1773.

16 See

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engage the Black Caribs in bush warfare, but he had to admit his volunteers quickly ‘grew weary of the fatigue of being in the woods’. On Dalrymple’s advice he replaced them with two companies of rangers, one drawn from the regular troops, the other comprising eighty slaves under the command of one of the surveyors, Mr Myers.17 Dalrymple’s problem was that he had to balance the needs of internal security with search-and-destroy tactics, and until Admiral Parry arrived in November with three men-of-war and marine reinforcements, he was not in a position to entrap the Black Caribs and encircle their forces. He admitted that the ‘obstinate and well-regulated conduct of the Savages’, not to mention the difficult terrain and ‘intolerable rain’, had made the going tough. In fact, Dalrymple’s men were experiencing ‘very great hardships and fatigue’ in the unhealthy climate.18 Eleven per cent of the men were sick in November, eighteen per cent in December, and sixteen per cent in January, in spite of a continual influx of troops, whose complement grew from 1,163 to 2,155. By 20 February 1773, 100 rank and file had died of disease, 394 were sick, 65 had been killed, 73 wounded and 4 had deserted. That meant over a quarter of his men were out of action.19 Early on in the campaign Dalrymple recognized that ‘the fatality attending the climate of this season … joined with the numbers of savages, present difficulties only to be overcome by our utmost diligence and perseverance’. By December he thought that if the Black Caribs abandoned the coastal areas for the hinterland, the nature of the war would change ‘so as to spin the affair to a considerable length’. ‘No white man has been in their concealed places of retirement’, he maintained, ‘the inhabitants are entirely ignorant of these quarters of the Island, neither guides nor intelligence can be procured.’ In those circumstances there was ‘great reason to believe that the reduction of the Savages will be the work of time and attended with great expense’.20 Fortunately for Dalrymple his forces scored some victories on the southern plains in January: at Massaraqua, then at Colonarie on the coast, and further up at Grand Sable. By early February, the Black Caribs informed Major Etherington, the commander of Chateau Bellair on the leeward side of the island, that they wanted peace. Nine chiefs begged for mercy a week later, having exhausted their supplies of ammunition.21 In view of the poor health of many of his troops, Dalrymple was certainly happy to oblige them. His field officers were complaining of the ardours of the campaign and were agitating for land grants as compensation.22 Dalrymple told London he would drive the business ‘to its issue’. He bragged to the War Office of the ‘total reduction and submission of the Charibbs’ and added that His Majesty would have peace and

17 18 19 20 21 22

TNA, CO 101/17, f. 44. TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 35, 45. TNA, WO 1/57, ff. 30, 35, 38. TNA, WO 1/57, ff. 67, 98–100. TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 83, 93–7. TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 102–4.

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‘a great addition of excellent lands’.23 Yet he was also concerned with the effect a drawn-out campaign might have on ‘the minds of slaves of all the islands’. In one, very probably Tobago though possibly Surinam, they had already shown a disposition to rebel ‘inspired by the Idea of the Impracticality of reducing the Charibbs’.24 Dalrymple’s willingness to reach terms with the Caribs at this point in the campaign was also dictated by the fact that the new Secretary of State, the Earl of Dartmouth, was again counselling moderation. Dartmouth was the founder of the American college of the same name and had been involved in Amerindian charities, but his desire to avoid a bloodbath in St Vincent was likely prompted by the parliamentary opposition’s demands for an inquiry into the whole affair. Thomas Townshend, a former ally of Lord Rockingham, had been pestering the first minister Lord North for papers relating to the Carib conflict since December 1772. The opposition’s tail was up; it smelt foul play and ministerial malevolence, and indeed ministerial incompetence in the light of sending British troops to a tropical island in the rainy season, some without tents and many without adequate supplies of drugs to combat malaria.25 In framing their criticism, Opposition politicians sentimentalized the Black Caribs, echoing the writings of the Abbé Raynal, du Tertre and Rousseau on ‘noble savagery’; that is to say they were men whose simplicity and collective customs compared favourably with the corruption and amour-propre of the Europeans.26 The American merchant Barlow Trecothick described them as ‘the last remains of the Aborigines of South America’, a ‘defenceless, innocent and inoffensive people’. Land-hungry planters and speculators wanted to ‘extirpate’ them, to shuffle them off to some distant island. Townshend believed ‘such a spirit of gaming is gone forth’ in Britain that ‘the rapacity of the planters in St. Vincent is clearly connected with the rage for making fortunes by the most destructive means’.27 Were the Black Caribs not entitled to their land? Had not the French recognized their claim? Why, then, were the British trying to remove them? Townshend said the cabinet were so blasé about the fate of the Black Caribs that they sketched out some possible deportation destinations on a piece of blotting paper.28 Sir Richard Sutton believed the government should recognize their sovereignty as had the French. In response to the speaker of the St Vincent assembly, who declared the Black Caribs were a dangerous, debauched, polygamous people, Isaac Barré flippantly retorted that if the Black Caribs liked 23

TNA, WO 1/57, f. 15. TNA, CO 101/17, f. 37v, 97v. On Surinam, see the report in the General Evening Post, 13–16 Feb. 1773. 25 See Lord Barrington’s speech in mid-February 1773, reported in Lloyd’s Evening Post, 15–17 Feb. 1773. 26 See Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, eds, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford, 1992). 27 As reported in the Craftsman, 12 Dec. 1772. 28 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 15–17 Feb. 1773. 24

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women and wine, liberty and property, they were no different than Englishmen, save for their colour.29 They were liberty-loving libertarians with entitlements to land. Some politicians questioned whether the Black Caribs knew anything of European notions of sovereignty and whether their rights amounted to anything more than simple occupancy. But government spokesmen would not be drawn into this line of reasoning, even though they had clearly studied the international agreements of 1660 and 1763 regarding the status of Carib lands. They were virtually taciturn save for Lord North, who insisted that the Caribs had been offered reasonable terms and hostilities had not been entertained without ‘sufficient provocation’ .30 In the end the dead weight of ministerial influence prevailed. Motions to indict the ministry for undertaking an expedition to exterminate the Caribs and destroy the health of British troops, failed by healthy majorities: 88 votes to 206, and 78 votes to 199. The opposition had been allowed to work off some steam; the real situation was that a treaty between the government and the Black Caribs was in the making. Five days after the debate in the Commons, on 17 February 1773, Colonel Dalrymple concluded a treaty of peace and friendship between His Majesty’s government and the Black Caribs at Massaraqua. The treaty was captured by Agostino Brunias in a painting that found its way into Bryan Edwards’ history of the British West Indies. It depicts the Caribs as more or less capitulating to the British, although Brunias adds ambiguity to the encounter by casting the Caribs as either credulous or sceptical participants. The Black Caribs had lost a lot of men in the campaign; Dalrymple believed as many as the British, with many chiefs suffering death or wounds.31 As far as the natives were concerned it was time for a strategic retreat, a better option than total defeat and very possibly deportation. The Caribs agreed to swear allegiance to the British crown, and in their relations with whites to abide by British law. They were obliged to attend the governor of the island when required, to assist the British in an emergency, and to render an account of their numbers. They were also obliged to return runaway slaves and not harbour them. It would be a capital crime if they took any off the island. Approximately half of Black Carib land, the more fertile sector which also included General Monckton’s 4,000-acre grant of 1765, was handed over to the British for new plantations. The Caribs retained the sector north of the River Byera, which they could not alienate without colonial permission. In fact, no whites or strangers were allowed to settle on Carib land without the permission of the governor. On the positive side, the Black Caribs were offered a pardon if they took the oaths of allegiance. They were allowed to fish around the island, and their products could be sold in English markets 29

Parl. Hist., 17 (1771–74), 727, 735. Earlier, in the December debate, he had declared that the Caribs ‘loved liberty and property and every Englishman should applaud them’. Craftsman, 12 Dec. 1772. 30 Parl. Hist., 17 (1771–74), 732–3, 738–9. On the agreements, see TNA CO 101/17, ff. 8–17, 31–2. 31 TNA, CO 101/17, f. 66v.

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Fig. 8. The 1773 Treaty with the Black Caribs (engraving of a painting by Agostino Brunias).

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and colonies. At the same time, ‘no undue intercourse’ with the French islands was allowed, a crucial clause as far as the British were concerned, since it would deprive the Black Caribs of arms and ammunition.32 The agreement approximated that of the Jamaican maroon treaty of 1739 in terms of giving the Black Caribs some supervised plot of land, with the proviso they should not become a haven for runaways but facilitate their return. Unlike the Jamaican maroons, they were not required to have a superintendent in their midst, although their lands were always accessible to bounty hunters and planters tracking down runaways and they had to tolerate roads through their territory. It was not as good a settlement as that of the maroons because the Jamaican runaways carved out some legal autonomy for themselves from nothing. The Black Caribs lost land, and much of their independence, although they were not without some freedom of manoeuvre. Breaking the resistance of the Black Caribs was one thing; getting them to comply with the terms of the treaty was another. Once the treaty was concluded, troops were moved out of St Vincent to confront the deteriorating situation in North America and Tobago, where a slave rebellion had broken out in 1774 on one of the estates of Sir William Young, the land commissioner.33 Those soldiers that remained were not always in great shape. In February 1773 the field officers had complained that they found duty in St Vincent particularly ‘distressing, being engaged in a fatiguing, expensive and dangerous War’.34 This reluctance to serve in St Vincent did not change once the treaty had been signed. It meant that the British authorities did not always have the capacity to enforce the settlement. The best they could manage was to maintain rudimentary forts at strategic points through the ceded lands; at Coubaimarou, Massaraqua, Biabou and La Colonarie, for example. To further complicate matters, the Carib war had prompted slaves to flee. Some managed to reach the islands of Cumana and Marguarita;35 others escaped to the forests and mountains of St Vincent. There they established impromptu maroon communities which were often supplied with food and arms by the Black Caribs. From time to time the Black Caribs made gestures of bringing in runaways, on one occasion the heads of two fugitives who had killed the military escort of a surveyor,36 but it was more in their interest to foster maroon communities and complicate the British expansion of the plantation zone. In 1775, two years after the treaty, it was claimed the Carib chiefs kept ‘large, daring well-armed knots of runaway negroes’ under their protection.37 32

TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 68–9, 87–8. TNA, CO 101/17, f. 152. 34 TNA, CO 101/17, f. 104. 35 TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 131–4. 36 TNA, CO 101/18, ff. 46, 51v–52, 71, 77–8, brought in by chiefs Bigot and Simon in March 1775. The culprits had purportedly killed Lieutenant Renton when he was surveying Carib lands. Morris thought Bigot culpable, Leybourne didn’t. 37 TNA, CO 101/18, f. 141. 33

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The colonial authorities were dismayed when only twelve of the twenty-eight chiefs who had signed the treaty bothered to swear allegiance to the crown. They were very troubled when Black Caribs declined to leave the territories they had formally ceded to the British. Although they had united to defend what they regarded as their ancestral lands, the Black Caribs were actually a decentralized group under the nominal leadership of local chiefs. Leybourne was told the Carib chiefs had no power ‘but over those of their own particular Familys’ and did not always see eye to eye with one another. Consequently, some of the Caribs returned to their old quarters in the ceded zone, to Coubaimarou, Jambou and Massaraqua, rather than retire to that part of the island allotted them by Dalrymple. When confronted about this infringement of the treaty, they claimed they ‘were fearful of being murdered’ by the Windward Caribs of Grand Sable and Rabacca if they resettled above the treaty line. Governor Leybourne was prepared to listen to their concerns, if only because he was miffed that General Dalrymple had concluded the treaty without consulting him. He was surprised and perplexed by their determination to stay and seems to have given ground on the issue of their removal until roads were built and a true state of their numbers ascertained. Leybourne quietly despaired he would ever get an accurate count, even if the Black Caribs were ‘as obedient and tractable’ as General Dalrymple ‘flattered himself they would be’.38 And on the question of roads, he found it difficult to hire enough slaves to build them, having ruled out using soldiers, who would in any case be needed to protect the black workers from possible incursions from the Caribs. Some progress was eventually made on that front, yet without a sufficient force to overawe the Caribs, Leybourne felt he had to tolerate Carib intransigence, at least temporarily; particularly as his duties as governor-general forced him to attend to the other Windward Islands as well. Ultimately Governor General Leybourne gave the Caribs nine months to vacate the ceded territory and built huts and plant provisions within the allotted area. Late in 1773 he had Major Etherington of the 60th regiment convene the chiefs at Rabacca and Point Espagnol to ascertain what progress had been made. He discovered the Caribs were procrastinating. Joseph Chatoyer assured Etherington ‘they would do what they could to bring the other Charibbs to reason, but it could not be expected they would assist to destroy their own relations’.39 The Caribs of Byera declared they would not move north of the treaty line to join those of Grand Sable. Those from Colonarie simply made themselves scarce. Leybourne then met the chiefs himself at Biabou and told them he had indulged them enough. With the backing of the 70th regiment he gave the Caribs of Byera eight days to leave; he would burn their houses if they resisted, but if they showed some compliance, he would allow them two further months to get their carbets in order. In total, 425 houses were burnt; 38 39

TNA, CO 101/17, f. 152. TNA, CO 101/17, f. 234v.

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only 40 remained. The Assembly of St Vincent, who had chafed at the treaty, thanked Leybourne for executing ‘the first fruits of the Charibb Peace’. ‘From the unsteady disposition of these savages’ intoned the Assembly, it had little reason to expect the Caribs would observe ‘the conditions they have submitted to’.40 This was a start, although the assemblymen railed at the perfidy of Caribs carrying off their slaves to the French islands. As Governor of the Windward Islands, William Leybourne began to bow out of Vincentian affairs after the Byera evictions. His place was taken by Valentine Morris, an Antiguan creole planter, who became known for the picturesque landscaping of his Piercefield estate in the Wye valley, his ardent commitment to turnpike roads in the West Country, and his disastrous attempt to enter parliament in the Monmouthshire by-election of 1771. Political and economic pressures forced Morris back to Antigua in the early seventies, where he tried to repair his flagging fortunes, and he was fortunate enough, very probably through his planter connections, to land himself a position as lieutenant governor, and then as the fully fledged governor of St Vincent. Morris continued the Leybourne strategy of building roads through Carib territory but not without difficulty. Lieutenant Renton, who was mapping Carib territory for the commissioners near Rabacca, was shot by runaways in March 1775, very probably with the complicity of Carib chief Bigot. Soon after some estates at Tyrell’s Bay near Calliaqua were set on fire, prompting Morris to speculate that he might soon be facing another Carib war.41 Whatever anxieties Morris had on that score, he soon found it difficult to root out Caribs from their old haunts. Black Carib huts dotted the landscape from Calliaqua to Colonarie, he complained, and Monckton’s lands were full of fugitive blacks and Caribs. One chief, Louan, who had given the British a lot of trouble during the Carib War, defiantly refused to leave Jambou, just within the boundaries of Monckton’s concession.42 Morris’ solution to these problems was to secure Byera, whose bay was a perfect landing place for pirogues from St Lucia. That way he might stop the traffic in arms. More generally, he hoped to use small settlers to weed out the Caribs; he wanted people with a personal investment in their property, who could contribute to the ‘useful peopling and strength’ of the colony. Opulent planters often had time to wait for Treasury grants on land, Morris complained, and when ‘Tracts of land are monopolised the ignavum fucus [parasites] enjoy the honey with relatively little or no pains, while the industrious bees are driven from the hive’.43 Morris was interested in small lots of 10–25 acres for discharged and disabled servicemen, with preference given to those who had enlisted for seven years and spent at least three in the Caribbean.44 He wanted to break up large tracts of land like the Monckton concession and 40

TNA, CO 101/17, ff. 185v, 245. TNA, CO 101/18, f. 63. 42 TNA, CO, 101/18, ff. 53, 83, 91–2. 43 TNA, CO 260/1, 4 Oct. 1777. 44 TNA, CO 101/18, ff. 34–8. 41

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convert them into smaller lots. And he was particularly devoted to the idea of developing a cordon sanitaire of small proprietors along the treaty line, on lots ranging from 50–125 acres. This would provide a ‘thick settled frontier’ between the Caribs and the sugar estates. Between 1776 and 1779 a further 2,156 acres were sold, none of them over 100 acres.45 Some of these smaller lots, growing crops like cacao, coffee, indigo, ginger and cotton, were taken up by Francophones, for Morris was keen to use small French planters to ingratiate the Black Caribs into accepting the new settlement of 1773. And to encourage more to come to St Vincent in the wake of departing French planters, whose lots were exhausted. In fact, he believed that racial intermarriage among the subaltern groups would facilitate peace on the island and so he tolerated a few Carib and mixed-race squatters within the ceded territory.46 The plan was novel, but it ran up against vested interests. Large planters from the other islands, particularly those who were absentee landlords, did not welcome the exodus of men who might have otherwise acted as overseers and managers on their own estates. The assemblymen of St Vincent, who were keen to criminalize many small-time, mixed-raced Francophones as ‘vagrants’, were not happy with the Francophile nature of Morris’ proposals, which were accompanied by placing some of the larger French planters on his council, in defiance of the Test act disbarring Catholics from office. The large proprietors on the Assembly were doubtless unhappy that the land set aside for sugar plantations would be pared down; and those proprietors who struggled to pay their instalments on purchased land were aghast when Morris offered new settlers financial deals which absolved them from paying entry fees and quit rents. The plan alienated the assembly and many white Anglophone settlers. As war broke out in America and American privateers broached Vincentian shores, the assembly of St Vincent increasingly adopted the rhetoric of its American counterparts. It claimed the right to reject the 4.5 per cent duty on exports which had been imposed on all the ceded islands and refused to renew the militia bill without restricting its mobilization to more than three days without its consent.47 Morris found himself increasingly hamstrung both financially and administratively by the assembly, which he tried to circumvent by issuing new writs of election and adding two extra seats to the assembly. Confronted by popular planters whom he thought adopted the rhetoric of ‘Faneuil Hall’, one of the epicentres of American revolutionary sentiment, he mourned the departure of some of the first settlers like Harry Alexander. Alexander had experienced losses during the Carib war and was now obliged, ‘beyond the Meridian of Life’, to ‘seek elsewhere more favourable opportunities of providing for a numerous Family’. Morris particularly prized him because he had checked ‘that spirit of Opposition 45

Spinelli, ‘Land Use’, 58–9. TNA, CO 101/18, ff. 143–4; TNA CO 260/1, 13 Nov. 1777. 47 TNA, CO 101/18, f. 196. See Selwyn H. H. Carrington, ‘Eighteenth-Century Political Conflict in the British Empire: A Case Study of St Vincent, 1775–1779’, Journal of Caribbean History, 20/2 (1985–86), 147–68; Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery’, 50–76. 46

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to the measures of the Crown which American folly & madness have but too generally diffused through all the Colonies’.48 Morris’ letters from 1777 onwards convey the sense that Vincentian society was coming apart at the seams. It had always been dangerously volatile under British rule, but now it was drifting into anarchy. In total, 1,100 slaves had fled the plantations, perhaps fifteen per cent of all on the island. They were clustered in eight hideouts, ‘some uncommonly situated and nearly inaccessible’, and received reinforcements from ‘many fresh Negroes of the Estates’. The greater part was armed by the Black Caribs who were ‘more than uncommonly Insolent’ and talked among themselves and among the black fugitives ‘of our soon being … engaged in a French war, and then will be the time for them all to emancipate themselves’ .49 When troops tried to penetrate the maroon hideouts, the Black Caribs alerted them with conches. Governor Morris calibrated the rewards for runaways according to the period of flight and hoped to ‘set Charibb avarice at war with their other inclinations’. As much as £33 was offered for runaways who had been absent for more than two years. Yet there is little evidence that the Black Caribs were taken in by this ruse, and seemingly co-operative Carib guides sent troops on a wild-goose chase. When the Caribs themselves offered to bring in runaways, it was often for the provisions and arms they hoped to wrestle out of the British authorities. Many returned empty handed. Morris’ troops did force one maroon camp to surrender, and over time they managed to recapture about 300 fugitives.50 It was an uphill battle, compromised at first by the rainy season, which took its toll on the few troops who were still in St Vincent. Although 350 were annually stationed on the island, in September 1777 Morris thought he could only rely upon 120, for the rest consisted of ‘a very great number of disabled old men that ought to be discharged, & of the new Recruits, mostly the sweepings of London streets’ whose ‘Health (to say no more) could not be depended on’.51 To compound matters Morris was without a truly mobile militia, for the refractory Assembly limited its movements to three days’ duty, which operationally placed the regiments well short of the fugitive strongholds. In fact, the St Vincent assembly wanted to limit the duties of the militia to areas inhabited only by whites, which Morris promptly vetoed.52 This meant that by the time France entered the American war against Britain in 1778, Morris was unable to raise money for the defence of the island and was forced to declare martial law by mobilizing the militia under an executive order, a commission of array. Already embroiled with the assembly over the payment of quit rents and export duties, and reeling from accusations that his private secretary, Resolve Smith, was an American spy and a wartime marketeer, Morris was accused of tyrannically imposing military 48

TNA, CO 261/3, unfoliated, 27 June 1776; Carrington, ‘Political Conflict’, 150–2. TNA, CO 261/3, 3 March 1777. 50 TNA, CO 261/3, 23 July 1777. 51 TNA, CO 261/3, 6 Sept. 1777. 52 Carrington, ‘Political Conflict’, 159. 49

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impressment on Vincentians. The governor indicted six prominent planters for refusing militia duty, but no officers would sit on the court martial and the judges refused to entertain the charges. The assembly accused Morris of using instruments ‘void of legal foundation’ and a ‘manifest usurpation of the libertys of the subject’.53 In an address to Morris the assembly declared he could not but recognize ‘the Inconveniences that must arise to any Civilized People living nearly connected with a lawless savage tribe who can commit murder or any Offences against Society without being under the Controul of a Civil Power’. It moved to establish its own ‘Committee of Public Works’, ostensibly to monitor the activities of the French fleet; in effect, to usurp the functions of the executive power in war. Morris promptly dissolved it. Amid this deadlock in government, the Black Caribs quietly armed themselves and awaited a new British war with the French. Morris was well aware that the Caribs were in correspondence with St Lucia and Martinique, trading andouilles (rolls) of tobacco and even the odd slave for muskets and ammunition. In June 1777 he reported that twenty-two of the larger pirogues or perriaguas had been arms-trading with the French and at least 500 men now had French muskets in their possession.54 That traffic continued and there was little Morris could do about it. He lacked the men to disable all the pirogues in the coves and beaches, and once France and then Spain entered the war against Britain, British naval resources were too stretched to police the waters between St Vincent and St Lucia.55 Morris calculated he needed a regiment of 600 seasoned men to ‘bid defiance to all future machinations of the Charibbs & Runaway Negroes’ and also some chasseurs and bloodhounds to track down hostiles and beat them at their hit-and-run tactics.56 But all the Windward Islands were vulnerable to the French fleet under the command of Count d’Estaing, and Morris had to tolerate the constant intrusion of American privateers in Vincentian waters, often crewed by Frenchmen. They stole slaves from the Grenadines and even St Vincent and were selling them in the French islands.57 It was only a matter of time before the French invaded St Vincent. In September 1778 Morris was speculating whether the French planters would remain neutral, and where the Caribs might mount their offensive, which many believed would be in the settlements near Tyrell’s Bay.58 In December 1778 Morris received word that some of the French, ‘chiefly of the Mulattoe, free Negro & mongrel tribe’ had slipped away to join the Caribs in the woods. An invasion seemed imminent, with the Caribs commanding the beaches where the French might land. At this point, Valentine Morris’ only hope was that Admiral Barrington’s Leeward Island squadron would intercept the invasion party, but 53 54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 160; TNA CO 260/6, ff. 43v, 87. TNA, CO 261/3, 13 June 1777; CO 261/4, 2–4 Oct. 1778. TNA, CO 261/4, 11 Sept. 1777. TNA, CO 261/3, 13 June 1777. TNA, CO 261/3, 1 Aug. 1777; CO 261/4, 22 Jan. 1788, 30 June 1778. TNA, CO 261/4, 17 Sept. 1778.

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British complacency after a successful assault on St Lucia and the demands of sugar convoys on the larger islands allowed a small French expedition from Martinique to sneak through. When he was not fighting with the assembly and its principal planters, the governor was attempting to ensure that his fortifications throughout the island were adequately manned and the roads free from impediments. But his military force was over-extended, strategically diverted by the Black Caribs, leaving a body of 450 troops from Martinique under the command of a Lieutenant du Rumain, a French Breton who had previously taken St Maartin, to land at Calliagua and Kingstown and take control of the island.59 It was an easy victory, and a British surrender came quickly because planters feared bloody reprisals from the Caribs who, with a small company of French soldiers under the command of Captain Percin de la Rocque, had already overrun British settlements in the recently ceded areas. Morris ‘blushed to be obliged to think of capitulating to a party so inconsiderable’ but with troops stranded in the outposts, no one relished an engagement with hundreds of arrived Caribs threatening massacre and arson. The French insisted on an unconditional surrender and among its terms wanted an inquiry into the treaty of 1773 and the plausible infractions the British committed at the expense of the Caribs. Valentine Morris smarted at this, but it became clear that this was part of the agreement made with Count d’Estaing for Carib aid and co-operation, and he had to give way. Chatoyer, their spokesman, did not speak of encroachments in the preliminary talks, but he alleged that his nation never meant to do more than lease a few acres to the British. He clearly wanted to undo the treaty and compromise the plantation zone. On their way home, the Caribs, who eventually mustered 1,100 in arms, did ‘considerable violence to some Estates & Individuals’ including Lieutenant David Gordon of the outpost Fort Hillsborough, who was plundered of everything but the clothes on his back.60 The defeated Morris reflected: ‘these unhappy, restless lawless People (hitherto devotedly attached to the French) cannot be kept in submission’ without ‘examples of terror and punishment’. If Britain were ever to recover St Vincent, the most effectual way of dealing with them would be ‘to remove them from the island’ for it would ‘save infinite expense protecting the colony’. ‘Humanity dictates the choice of a spot where they may meet with Wood and Water in great plenty’, but if Britain was at the time at war with Spain, then a clandestine deportation to a distant spot on the Spanish Main might be best.61 His words were to prove prophetic. Britain did consider repossessing St Vincent in 1780 when the island was devastated by a hurricane. Troops aboard Lord Hood’s squadron even landed 59 Léon Guérin, Histoire Maritime du France, 6 vols (Paris, 1851), 5:71; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 169–70. 60 TNA, CO 261/4, 20, 22, 24 June 1779. 61 TNA, CO 261/4, 18 Sept. 1779.

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there briefly in December of that year, but they binged on sugarcane, fruit and rum, slept in the open, and came down with fevers and fluxes.62 In the event the British had to wait another two and a half years. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1783, St Vincent was returned to them, without any stipulation of what might happen to the Black Caribs. If the French tried to ensure they had some protection in 1779, they abandoned them to their fate four years later. That fate was, in the short term at least, determined by money. During the American war the British National Debt rose from £131 million in 1775 to £245 million in 1783, the steepest rise in its history.63 Sixty-six per cent of tax revenues were needed to pay down the debt; the landed gentry had become increasingly disgruntled and were demanding the reform of a sinecure-heavy political regime; and Britain had to reorder its economy in the wake of the loss of the American colonies. Troops were being disbanded at a rapid rate, and ministers had no stomach for pouring troops into a would-be sugar island. In 1783 St Vincent had 61 sugar estates, most on the Leeward side of the island, with 500 acres of land under cultivation for coffee, 200 for cacao and 400 for cotton.64 Sugar production ran at roughly 2,500 tons in the 1770s or possibly 4,000 hogsheads a year. That paled into insignificance when compared to the big sugar producers, for Jamaica delivered 100,000 hogsheads annually, Grenada 20,000, St Kitts 16,000, and Antigua 10,000. St Vincent produced less than Nevis in 1783 and was at the time considered of little account. When British planters in East Florida were invited to settle in St Vincent after the peace, they were troubled by its prospects. The Caribs were seen as an impediment to healthy staple products and continuous production, and until the colonial authorities subordinated them, or indeed removed them, a profitable planter society was illusory. The new governor, Edmund Lincoln, recognized the problem, but he did not see what he could do about it without a good influx of healthy soldiers and black chasseurs. With only 230 men and no militia, the governor flattered himself that he might be excused issuing an order for the Caribs to retire from the ceded lands, or take the oaths of allegiance, or even cease communicating with the French. In effect, he did not see how he could even enforce the 1773 treaty. The secretary of state, Lord Sydney, said he was ‘fully sensible’ of the advantages of removing the Black Caribs, but in the summer of 1784, he did not think there was anywhere in the ‘neighbourhood’ that was ‘appropriate for their reception’. And so he pushed Lincoln to find some way of winning the confidence of the Black Caribs and persuading them to comply with the treaty.65 62

Gilbert Blane, Observations on the Diseases of Seamen (London, 1799), 27. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 115–17. 64 Edwards, British West Indies, 1:425; Spinelli, ‘Land Use’, 56. The sugar production of other islands is noted in Morning Herald, 7 Feb. 1783. 65 TNA, CO 260/7, 8 March 1783, 7 July 1784. 63

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This was a tall order, even when the Assembly relented over the militia and a few more troops were brought in from Grenada.66 Lincoln found it very difficult to root out Caribs from the ceded territories, and while Chatoyer seemingly collaborated with the British, assuring them that the Caribs would be won over in time, he declared he could not restrain some of the other bands, who were quite prepared to kill him if he ventured into their territory.67 The governor was pleased to learn that those Caribs who went to visit Viscount de Damas, the governor of Martinique, were discouraged by his response. But he was dismayed to learn they were still receiving arms from the French and he had to tolerate intermittent raids on sugar plantations. The Assembly of St Vincent persistently called for the deportation of the Caribs in the light of these depredations, and Lincoln rather dolefully told Sydney he was doing all he could ‘to keep the people here in good humour and the Charaibs quiet’.68 Meanwhile, progress towards increasing sugar production was steady. In 1790 St Vincent exported 6,500 hogsheads and in 1791 just over 10,000. More slaves were brought in to sustain production: 2,166 in 1784; 4,746 in the years 1789 and 1790, of which over 2,000 were resold elsewhere, bringing the total number of slaves to around 12,000.69 In 1788 there were still 28,000 acres of potentially cultivable land on the island, and Lincoln’s successor, James Seton, was pressing for new settlers to take possession and manage its clearance. The difficulty, as always, was the presence of the Caribs. After years of uncertainty, things moved into high gear with the French Revolution and another war with France. The insurrection in Saint Domingue, beginning in the summer of 1791, sent shock waves throughout the Caribbean. Together with rumours of emancipation decrees from London and Paris, they precipitated slave unrest in the islands of St Lucia, Dominica and Martinique and high anxieties in St Vincent. The rumours of incipient insurrection on the island were registered soon after the French republican commissioner, LégerFélicité Sonthonax, offered freedom to slaves on Saint Domingue if they would fight in the service of France. The Morning Chronicle reported that the Black Caribs declared for the French republic and hoisted the tricolour.70 The event signalled the fact that French emissaries were already trying to win the allegiance of the Caribs. That fear then became a pressing reality in June 1794 when Victor Hugues, one of the Jacobin commissioners assigned the task of implementing the emancipation decree in Guadeloupe, overran the British-occupied island and started mobilizing black armies for the Republic.71 He soon targeted the

66

TNA, CO 260/7, March 1784. TNA, CO, 260/7, June 1784. 68 TNA, CO, 260/7, 8 Sept. 1784. 69 TNA, CO, 260/8, 4 Dec. 1787, 1 July 1788; CO 260/11, 7 Nov. 1790. 70 Morning Chronicle, 4 Oct. 1793; Public Advertiser, 7 October 1793. 71 Laurent Dubois, ‘“The Price of Liberty”; Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798’, William and Mary Quarterly, 56/2 (1999), 363–92. 67

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Windward Islands for a French counterattack to the British invasions of St Domingue, St Lucia and Martinique. The island of St Vincent was once again in an extremely vulnerable position. The British government poured thousands of soldiers into the coastal towns of St Domingue in an effort to stem the tide of insurrection and protect Britain’s principal sugar colony, Jamaica, which was within a day’s sail. British resources were once again stretched to the limit, especially so because many of those garrisoned in St Vincent had been requisitioned by Lieutenant-General Charles Grey for his amphibious assaults on Martinique and St Lucia. As soon as Governor Seton learned of the Grenada revolt under the mixed-race planter, Julien Fédon, he mobilized the island’s militia and declared martial law. Seton also summoned two of the principal chiefs, Chatoyer and his brother, Duvallé, who had previously sworn to remain neutral in the event of a war with France, but they did not appear. Chatoyer is said to have firmly refused to attend Seton, saying it was too late for such a meeting, which in the governor’s eyes revealed his intentions to fight.72 Seton then approached the Caribs of Massaraqua, who had professed neutrality, but within days they were attacking plantations within their area along with French sympathizers. By early March 1795, the second Carib war was in full swing. Victor Hugues had offered ‘General Chatoullé’, the ‘Chief of a free nation’, military aid to destroy the British in the name of the National Convention and, together with some runaway slaves, the Caribs mustered warriors on both sides of the island.73 As Anglophone planters fled the windward coast, a party of blacks and militiamen under Major Sharpe managed to repulse the first Carib attack at Massaraqua, but a second party was caught in crossfire as Duvallé, in association with Hugues’ Guadeloupean lieutenants, moved south, burning houses and sugar cane. In a swathe of destruction through the ceded territories from Byera to Jambou, virtually every plantation was attacked and no quarter was given. Shepard later alleged that the wounded were ‘murdered with savage barbarity; some had their legs and arms cut off’ .74 Meanwhile Joseph Chatoyer and his party moved down the leeward coast from Chateau Bellair, gathering French supporters on the way, requisitioning if not burning estates.75 ‘Who is the Frenchmen who will not reunite with his brothers at a moment when the cry of Liberty is heard among us?’ Chatoyer’s declaration ran. ‘Fall in, Citizens, our brothers rally around the flag that flies on this island, and hurry to join us in

72

Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival and the Making of the Garifuna (Jackson, MI, 2012), ch. 5. 73 TNA, CO 260/13, f. 55; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 230–5. 74 Charles Shepard, An Historical Account of the Island of St Vincent (London, 1971, 1st edn, 1831), 66. 75 Chatoyer is alleged to have kept the estate of Mr Keaton, just north of Barrouallie, as his share of the spoils. Shepard, Historical Account, 67.

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the great project that is to begin.’76 Within three days the Caribs had pushed the Vincentian militia back to Kingstown and on Dorsetshire Hill outside the capital replaced the Union Jack with the republican tricolour. Newspaper accounts suggest the rebels on the Hill included 200–300 Caribs and about 150 French troops and planters, white and coloured, although as many as 700–800 Caribs were noted as combatants ‘on the windward quarter’. It also reported that some black slaves were requisitioned to drag two large cannons from Stubb’s battery to Dorsetshire Hill.77 Despite the turnout, the British were on the run, holed up in Fort Charlotte on the top of Berkshire Hill. Fortunately, reinforcements arrived. Forty men of the 46th regiment arrived from Martinique with arms and ammunition. The following day HMS Zebra docked in Kingstown bay, to be followed by HMS Roebuck bringing further reinforcements. At this point, fearing that the republican ideology of liberty, fraternity and racial equality might prove contagious with the 12,000 slaves on St Vincent, Seton planned a surprise attack on Devonshire Hill. With 4,000 men at his disposal, including 300 black pioneers, Seton successfully stormed the fort.78 In the brief early morning confrontation twenty-one Caribs died, including Chief Chatoyer, who according to one account received five bayonet wounds. On his person were the declaration urging Francophones to join in the struggle, the gorget given him by the future British king, William IV, and the sword presented to him by Sir William Young; a mélange that probably signified he was no man’s subject, but his own master.79 Chatoyer’s death was a severe blow to Carib morale, and the main body retreated towards their own territory, ‘confounded and dismayed’.80 The French moved Leeward to Layou. On the way one of their alleged ringleaders, Monsieur Dumont, was captured and hanged along with twenty others. More French planters sympathetic to the Caribs were to share the same fate in what amounted to a purge of the Francophone population. Governor Seton made it clear that the British would not observe the normal ‘laws of war’ when the Caribs committed atrocities.81 He executed four Marriaqua Caribs for their perfidy and one ‘Red’ or ‘Yellow’ Carib called Joseph Gerard, unusual because the Red Caribs were normally regarded as an innocuous group. He also called for reinforcements to repel and ‘totally exterminate this savage & merciless Race of Charaibs, with whom no Treaties are

76

TNA, CO 260/13, f. 16. The declaration was written in French. The Times, 16 May 1795. Governor Seton learned that the rebels consisted of 120 whites and 250 Caribs but in a letter of 8 May to the Duke of Portland, he talked of 700–800 Caribs on the windward side of the island. See TNA, CO 260/13, ff. 14–15, 59. 78 Craton, Testing the Chains, 204. 79 Craton, ‘Planters, British Imperial Policy and the Black Caribs of St Vincent’, in Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean, 131. 80 Shepard, Historical Account, 75. 81 TNA, CO 260/13, proclamation, 20 March 1795. 77

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binding, no Favours conciliating, nor any Laws Divine or human restraining’.82 In the immediate term he lacked the manpower to achieve this, although his black rangers, recruited from the slave population, proved valuable trackers in the mountainous terrain. The conflict dragged on for another year, with the British replenishing their force with four battalions under Major General Irving, and the Caribs winning support for their cause from St Lucia insurgents under the leadership of the Pèdre brothers and one of the black regiments.83 There were fierce battles at Chateau Bellair, Morne Ronde, Owia and the Vigie ridge in which neither party was able to gain a decisive initiative. In the military stalemate of 1795 and early 1796, disease and fatigue took their toll as they did in other parts of the Caribbean.84 The British regiments were reputedly ‘reduced to skeletons’. Attacks and counterattacks at the principal British post of Mount William and around Dorsetshire and Sion Hills, overlooking Kingstown, left the forces in much the same position as they were in March 1795. At home, British newspapers expressed astonishment that 2,000 regular soldiers and 300 black rangers had not been able to suppress the 400 Frenchmen and roughly 400 Carib warriors who were still at large fighting.85 The war swung to Britain’s advantage when Sir Ralph Abercromby arrived with 12,000 troops to retake St Lucia from the French and then embark for St Vincent in June 1796. His six divisions overwhelmed a combined Carib/French force at Vigie and forced a surrender from the French commander, Marinier, and several hundred combatants. A few French soldiers held out, including Marin Padre, the brother-in-law of Marinier, and his band of men. They did not surrender until October 1796. But essentially the Caribs were on their own after the defeat at Vigie, and it was only a matter of time before the British moved to deport them. In mid-July 1796, the remaining Carib chiefs were summoned and told their people would be moved to the island of Balliceaux in the Grenadines while the British considered their final destination. Just under 300 Caribs under the leadership of Chatoyer’s son were rounded up by Colonel Henry Haffey at Mount Young. Chatoyer junior told his people it was no disgrace to surrender, but like the rest they retreated to the wooded hills of the interior to avoid deportation.86 Charles Shepard later recounted that the 82

TNA, CO 260/13, Seton to Portland, 30 March 1795. David B. Gaspar, ‘La Guerre des Bois: Revolution, War and Slavery in Saint Lucia, 1793–1838’, in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 119, 129, 54n. Marinier was purportedly the brother of Marin Pèdre. Both were sent by the republican commissioner in St Lucia, Goyrand, to aid the rebellion in St Vincent. 84 Michael Duffy calculates that in 1796, 14,000 European troops in British service died, the equivalent of 40 per cent of those who had embarked for the Caribbean that year. Over 20 per cent were sick at any one time. See Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, 257; Colin Chisholm, An Essay on the Malignant Pestilential Fever Introduced into the West Indian Islands (London, 1801), 153–4. 85 Morning Chronicle, 3 Feb. 1796. 86 TNA, CO 26s0/13, f. 250; Taylor, Black Carib Wars, ch. 7. 83

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Caribs ‘did not revolt so much from the prospect of death as from the idea of submission’.87 It took another three and a half months of bush-fighting and the systematic destruction of the Carib carbets, pirogues and provisioning grounds to beat down and starve them into compliance with the order. One British officer described the campaign as ‘a horrid butchering war with the Caribs who neither give nor receive quarter’.’88 Just over 5,000 men, women and children eventually surrendered, over half in the month of October 1796, but many were so weak and wracked with dysentery that only 4,633 reached Balliceaux in the months September to February 1797. It was a desolate place, without fresh water or a supply of fruit and vegetables. The British claimed they provided the Carib captives with adequate supplies, but many perished on this concentration camp of an island, possibly from typhus or yellow fever, so that when the Black Caribs sailed for the island of Roatán a month later, only 2,248 were still alive. In other words, fifty-six per cent of those who surrendered had died, and over forty-eight per cent of those who initially reached Balliceaux. Of the British deportations of the eighteenth century, the Acadians in 1755, the Jamaican maroons in 1797, it was the closest to genocide. British promises that the Black Caribs would be treated with humanity went by the board. And without any outcry from the public and the politicians who but twenty-five years earlier had cast them as innocent victims of colonialism, admired for their ‘wild majesty’. The Caribs had committed treason; they had persistently aided the enemy; they disrupted the progress of the plantations. After the exodus of the Black Caribs, who eventually resettled in Honduras, sugar cultivation grew apace. The size of sugar plantations on former Carib reserves reached 500 acres, larger than on the Leeward side of the island. After the Napoleonic wars, sugar exports grew to between 10,000 and 15,000 tons (or perhaps 20,000–30,000 hogsheads) per year. The exports from all the Windward Islands reached an average of 32,495 tons per year in the twenties, surpassing the return from the Leeward Islands and Barbados, but not those of Jamaica and the new sugar colonies of Trinidad and Guyana.89 Consequently, the vaunted production of sugar from the Ceded islands of 1763, heralded by Campbell and Sir William Young, did not materialize as predicted. Quite apart from the natural impediments to production on this small volcanic island, the Caribs had blocked cultivation for over thirty years, and after two bitter wars and considerable political turmoil between the colonial government and planters, investors were leery of promoting sugar when better opportunities emerged. Moreover, the taint of corruption surrounding the allocation of Vincentian land, so visible in the early sixties, did not end. In 1804 the government leased 6,000 acres of the best Carib land, including seven already established estates, 87 Shepard,

Historical Account, 166–7. TNA, CO 260/13, letter of Robert Bisset, 27 July 1796; Taylor, Black Carib Wars, ch. 7. 89 Spinelli, ‘Land Use’, 65–7; J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford, 1988), 242. 88

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to Colonel Thomas Brown, a Georgian planter who had been tarred and feathered for his loyalism during the American war, but continued to fight for the British, notably at the siege of Savannah. Local planters howled about his preferential treatment, and his lease was eventually pared down to 1,600 acres, with a handsome compensation of £25,000 on the side. Even so, St Vincent retained a reputation for political hucksterism, and there were few colonial officials who did not seek to profit from the expulsion of the Caribs or the eviction of the French.

190

Epilogue: The Caribbean Crucible at the Turn of the Century At the mid-century, Cornelius Arnold penned a frothy paean to British commerce and the ‘unrivall’d Empire of the Main’ on which so much of its wealth was based. Written at the time the Royal Africa Company lost its monopoly to a new consortium of merchants, it inevitably featured the slave trade, noting the ‘sooty Sons’ sent to the West Indies to ‘drag the galling Chain of Life’.1 Arnold felt sure the ‘jovial crews’ who shipped the Africans could effortlessly endure the torrid zone in which the trade was conducted. He was an incurable optimist as well as a racist. As other writers were well aware, the torrid zone conjured up images of searing heat and sultry climes, of environmental constraints and innumerable insects that tortured body and soul. It is worthwhile parsing these constraints according to a Braudelian formula. Some clearly belong to the longue durée of Caribbean history, featuring hurricanes, rainy seasons, and the volcanic landscapes of the Windward Islands which, as Colin Chisholm recognized, produced not only earth tremors but micro-climates quite unlike the flat islands of Barbados and Antigua.2 The winds of the Caribbean also generated pathways across wide waters, lairs for privateers and pirates, such as the Bermuda or Florida straits through which so much of the traffic northwards passed. And the often unpredictable weather affected the communicative links between colony and metropole. The passage of news between Charles Town and London could take anything between five and ten weeks depending on the winds, the likelihood of storms, and the vicissitudes of the season. ‘Advices’ from Jamaica normally took eight to eleven weeks, although in May 1780 news reached Britain’s capital from the outer Antilles island of St Kitts in only six.3 There were also environmental changes that were strictly speaking conjunctural. The demand for sugar, and the consequent development of the slave trade, brought new diseases to the Caribbean. Yellow fever, passed on by the 1

Cornelius Arnold, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1757), 128–9. C. Chisholm, An Essay on the Malignant Pestilential Fever, 2–5, 47–8. Chisholm said Grenada had five earthquakes in three years during the 1780s. He also noted that Grenada escaped the hurricane of 1780 whereas Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, St Vincent and Dominica did not. 3 Derived from random checks of ‘plantation news’ in the British newspapers. 2

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Aedes aegypti whose range was rarely more than 100 metres, travelled across the Atlantic in the water casks of slave ships from western Africa. It is no accident that the early outbreaks of yellow fever broadly coincided with the growth of the slave trade, beginning in 1635, growing in volume in the 1690s, picking up speed in the 1740s, and positively exploding around the American–Caribbean basin in the 1790s.4 Yellow fever epidemics blossomed on rapidly developing islands where the proportion of non-immune populations was high: Martinique and St Domingue in the 1730s; Guiana and the Windward Islands in the 1760s.5 The fever spread exponentially in wartime when raw troops and sailors, often with compromised immune systems through heavy drinking in typhus-ridden habitats, descended on the Caribbean to shore up the profits of tropical staples for their respective countries, and play the lottery of wartime prizes. Elliot Arthy, a naval surgeon, believed impressment in the tropics increased the chances of yellow fever among seamen because they often slept rough while trying to evade the press gang.6 The prescriptions to battle yellow fever didn’t help. Doctors and early epidemiologists had a miasmic, humoral definition of the disease and tried to purge the infected body with bleedings and emetics, often with disastrous results. The medical men recognized many of the symptoms of yellow fever: haemorrhaging; black vomit; diarrhoea; the coated tongue with red edges; the haggard jaundiced face; a very rapid decline after a seeming recovery. ‘Yellow fever attacks in furious currents’, maintained William Fergusson, a doctor in occupied Saint Domingue during the 1790s, ‘often quite unexpectedly’. He cited a case where a Lieutenant Wright rose in ‘perfect possession of his senses’ after four days of fever, went to market to buy fruit and vegetables, and died that evening ‘in a torrent of black vomit’. Fergusson believed yellow fever was a ‘terrestrial poison which high atmospheric heat generates among the newly arrived’.7 Others assumed it was brought on by noxious vapours in marshes and spread in the confined spaces of ship holds. Arthy thought the fever was brought on by rain and the heat of the sun, by which vegetable and animal tissue petrified and emitted ‘a subtle effuvia’.8 A few assumed yellow fever was contagious, although Fergusson believed neither ‘places nor persons’ constituted the ‘rule of its existence’.9 This meant that while surgeons took steps to prevent the spread of the disease, by fumigating decks, by encouraging encampments in upland locations where the air was cleaner and the winds brisk, they really had no clue about its causes, only where it was likely to strike, which was in ports where northern servicemen and new immigrants congregated. Yellow fever was not the only Caribbean killer. Malaria was also prevalent, although the chances of surviving it were higher with appropriate doses of 4 Hirsch,

Geographical and Historical Pathology, 1:318–21. David Geggus, ‘Yellow Fever in the 1790s’, 41. 6 Arthy, Seaman’s Medical Advocate, 21–7. 7 William Fergusson, Notes and Recollections of a Professional Life (London, 1846), 147–8, 151. 8 Arthy, Seaman’s Medical Advocate, 2. 9 Fergusson, Notes,155. 5

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cinchona bark, which contained quinine and other alkaloid antidotes. People who survived mild cases of yellow fever or malaria, who were in eighteenth-century parlance ‘seasoned’, were sometimes able to pass on their immunity to their children. This meant that malarial diseases were more lethal to sailors and newly arrived troops and white colonists than they were to the resident Caribbean populations or Africans who might have had some exposure in childhood.10 As we have seen, the balance of forces in wartime was affected by disease and the immunity to it. With unseasoned troops the window of opportunity for victory was small, and expeditions had to be timely, before the rainy season. Many an able commander came a cropper because of torrid climes and unfamiliar terrain, where the conventions of open-field warfare were inappropriate. The experience led military commanders and governors to deploy seasoned irregulars in tropical expeditions, and to hire African slaves, offering manumission to those who provided exceptional service. Tropical warfare stretched the boundaries of black codes in the Caribbean, to the consternation of those who sought to maintain a clear division of labour in the staple economies.11 As the battle for Caribbean supremacy intensified in the 1790s, new precedents were launched, including the formation of permanent black regiments in the British colonies. By the end of the decade, they constituted perhaps a third of all soldiers defending the British empire in the islands.12 Soldiers and sailors often had little choice about venturing into the torrid zone; cautious officers in particular shied away from the prospect. The predicament was mitigated by the lure of the Caribbean as a treasure trove of spoils, an imaginary that retained its resilience long into the century. It was sustained by a macho-nationalism that found expression as a chivalric code of the ancien régime or as a robust counterpoint to the purported ‘effeminacy’ of eighteenth-century politeness. Admiral Vernon’s acclaim drew on the notion he was a tough, resourceful commander; his exploits could never be replicated by ‘salon’ officers, whose repartee with the ladies was the only thing that commended them. Martial nationalism affected the way campaigns were reported. One good example of this is the comments that littered the press after the siege of Havana in 1762, where Britain lost approximately fifty-seven per cent of its troops, sixty-three per cent of them to malaria. Engineers on the spot reflected that ‘our people are so reduced by sickness that we had but a melancholy prospect’, but the newspapers of the day talked of the ‘bravery and resolution’ of the men and the honour of losing a limb or two ‘to the Service of

10 Ibid.,

142. David Lambert, ‘“[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race”: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46/4 (2018), 627–50. 12 Roger N. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments 1795–1815 (New Haven, 1979), 130–1, and his ‘The Admission of Slave Testimony in British Military Courts in the British West Indies,1800–1809’, in A Turbulent Time, ed. Gaspar and Geggus, 227. 11

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their Country’.13 Over time, however, the conventions of derring-do slowly gave way to a lament for the loss of life, slow being the appropriate word. After the appalling mortality of the Nicaraguan expedition of 1780, there were still those who could slough it off. One gentleman at Fort San Juan believed ‘a plentiful use of Bark and two day’s fine weather’ would send ‘our complaints a-packing’. Even when it was admitted that the expedition had suffered an ‘uncommon’ mortality, it was still anticipated it would be ‘plain sailing’ to Granada and León and there would be real opportunities to incite a creole insurrection in Latin America. Only ‘Destiny’, in a jeremiad against the war that attributed much to George III’s blinkered obstinacy towards American grievances, blamed the government for the destruction of 100,000 soldiers and seamen.14 The rest switched gears and quickly focussed on Admiral Rodney’s ventures against the French for the defence of Jamaica. Rodney had bottle. ‘He has more sense and Gallantry about him than half the Navy of England’, crowed one correspondent in the Public Advertiser.15 By the 1790s it was impossible to ignore the plight of the troops and sailors because of its ramifications for morale in a tense international situation where the future of sugar was at stake. In 1792 the abolitionists mustered the largest petition movement in history in an attempt to secure an immediate end of the slave trade. That challenge was diverted by a motion for gradual abolition and a policy review in 1796, but by then the situation was too dire for pragmatic politicians to contemplate with any equanimity. Saint Domingue was in the throes of a bitter civil war; the French had granted emancipation to their slaves in an effort to win back the initiative from the British who had profited from the troubles on her most coveted sugar island. In Guadeloupe, commissioner Victor Hugues was mobilizing ex-slaves into a revolutionary army whose immediate project was to win back the Windward Islands by aiding free Francophone blacks and Caribs in their efforts to oust the British. Britain, in reply, poured thousands of troops into the Caribbean to contain the situation, including more than 20,000 into St Domingue to create a cordon sanitaire between black insurrection and Britain’s prime sugar island but a day’s sailing away. The toll of this expedition was immense. Within nine months of landing on the island, the British lost fourteen per cent of its soldiers to yellow fever, and more were to follow in 1795. In five years of inconclusive occupation, Britain lost over seventy-five per cent of its troops to malarial fevers and dysentery, and not a few sailors to boot. ‘The name of St Domingo’ one doctor remarked, ‘is execrated and dreaded by all descriptions.’ Regiments mutinied rather than face West Indian service. Officers declined to go. Of the twenty-one regiments under 13

Public Advertiser, 8 October 1762; Asa Bird Gardiner, ed., The Havana Expedition of 1762 in the War with Spain, 2 vols (Providence, 1898), 1:83. The figures of the casualties vary a little, from historian to historian, as does the size of the army. I have used those of Raphael Murillo, ‘Slavery and the Siege of Havana’, Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (Fall, 2013), 20. 14 Public Advertiser, 25 Aug., 7, 14 Oct., 15 Nov. 1780. 15 Public Advertiser, 6 Dec. 1780.

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General Abercromby that were sent to the Leeward Islands in 1795, thirty-eight per cent of the 600 commissioned officers never appeared. This absenteeism aggravated the loss of morale felt by soldiers buckling under the ever-present threat of tropical fever, the principal cause of the death of the 45,000 soldiers (out of 89,000) who perished in the wars of 1793 to 1801. ‘The disease was so general and so fatal’, surgeon Lemprière noted of the 1st regiment of the Irish Brigade, ‘that it dampened the spirits of the officers and men to a degree that threw the whole regiment into a state of despondency.’ Some consoled themselves with drink. In Saint Domingue, William Fergusson recalled, ‘we had somewhere about a week of drunkenness at every [pay] muster, and I have seen the troops then in such a state that no parades could be formed for days together’.16 Drink and disease nearly brought the British army to its knees. Had it not been for food shortages at home and a demographic regime that privileged youth, the British army might not have been able to hold on or even increase its holdings in the Caribbean; although clearly the chequered experience of the French in the cauldron of black insurrection and emancipation complicated the picture. St Domingue proved a huge diversion of French resources. And while the French Jacobin Victor Hugues recaptured Guadeloupe from the royalists and British, and successfully took St Lucia in 1795, he proved unable to export revolution to the Windward Islands, despite the fact he successfully integrated men of African and European descent into a 10,000-strong army. Hugues nearly succeeded. Coalitions of rebel forces besieged British colonists in the capitals of St Vincent and Grenada and came close to toppling their regimes. British naval superiority won the day, for the French tactic of ‘guerre de course’, deploying small frigates and privateers on rapid seek-and-destroy missions, was ultimately no match for British men-of-war when it came to blockading islands. And it was British blockades and Sir Ralph Abercromby’s troops that eventually turned the tide in the Windward Island rebellions. Hugues’ interventions are worth considering in detail, for while much has been made of the sweep of revolutionary ideas in the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean, it is important to ponder what this might have meant to the participants. In essence the rebel forces that mobilized in St Vincent and Grenada were anti-British coalitions with rather disparate aims. The Francophone mixed-race planters and free blacks who joined or led the rebellions smarted at their political exclusion, a long-standing local grievance sharpened by the French declaration of 1789 that granted full citizenship to all free men, whatever their ethnic background. Many of these men owned slaves, usually no more than forty or fifty on their small estates, although Julien Fédon, the leader of the Grenada revolt, owned a hundred on his Belvedere estate where they cultivated cotton, 16 Fergusson,

Notes, 85; Lemprière, Practical Observations, 1: 208–9; Michael Duffy, ‘The British Army and the Caribbean Expeditions of the War against Revolutionary France, 1793–1801’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 62/250 (1984), 71.

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cocao and sugar.17 These planters would have been very reluctant to emancipate their slaves without some guarantee that production would continue, although the slaves who joined them no doubt had strong expectations of freedom following France’s emancipation degree of 1794. The same applied to the Black Caribs, who wanted above all local autonomy on the island of St Vincent and the restitution of all their lands. They welcomed the French as co-partners on the island according to the customary arrangements prior to 1763, but they were not ideologically opposed to slavery. Their leader, Joseph Chatoyer, had slaves himself and even borrowed money from English investors to develop plantations. On his trek down the leeward side of the island in 1795, he requisitioned one estate as his own.18 Chatoyer’s troops did not destroy the French plantations; it was the Guadeloupe republicans who led the devastation of the British estates on the windward side and put planters and slaves to the sword. Fewer slaves followed Chatoyer and company in St Vincent than Julien Fédon in Grenada. Many were downright hostile, resenting the fact that Caribs competed with them in the markets of Kingstown. How these contradictions would have worked themselves out had the French taken possession of the islands is an open question. Perhaps Victor Hugues would have persuaded the slaves to adopt the same stance imposed on their counterparts in Guadeloupe; that is, to return to the plantation fields as free men and women, to perform their duty as new citizens of the French republic, to reconcile freedom with ‘le nation’ according to the dictates of Jacobin virtue.19 Former slaves who detested plantation life and desired a squatter existence with some self-autonomy, a life lived by many in Jamaica after emancipation, would not have been welcomed. The bourgeois revolution of the late eighteenth century may have instilled a notion of rights in slaves, but their understandings of freedom were very different. The Jacobins were prepared to free slaves, but they had no wish to destroy the plantation economy in its wake. It was the civic duty of ex-slaves to work for the republic. This was not simply true of the white commissioners sent from France to oversee the colony, but also Toussaint Louverture, the ex-slave and ex-master who rose to prominence as the leading military figure in Saint Domingue. He told rebellious slaves in the mountains above Port-au-Paix that ‘if they wanted to conserve their liberty they must submit to the laws of the Republic, be docile, and work’.20 He wanted the ex-slaves to revitalize the plantation economy for nationalistic reasons, but also to counter 17 Edward L. Cox, ‘Fedon’s Rebellion: Causes and Consequences’, Journal of Negro History, 67/1 (1982), 14. For more on Fedon’s life, see Tessa Murphy, ‘A Reassertion of Rights: Fedon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795–96’, La Révolution Française, 14 (2018), 1–26, which stresses the local factors of exclusion rather than French revolutionary ideas as causes of the revolt. 18 Young, An Account of the Black Charaibs, 106–7. 19 Laurent Dubois, ‘The Price of Liberty’, 363–92. 20 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 188, 190.

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insinuations from former planters and racist deputies in Paris that blacks were inherently lazy and undisciplined. He also recognized that if Haiti was ever to become independent, it needed a strong economy to survive and that meant some sacrifice on the part of ex-slaves. Ex-slaves did not always take kindly to these imperatives. They tried to bargain for more days off; they sought to augment their own provisioning grounds at the expense of the old plantations, what some historians have regarded as ‘counter-plantation’ activity. Commissioner Polverel offered them incentives to labour a six-day week, which featured a third of the proceeds from the plantations, but when the ex-slaves proved recalcitrant, Louverture imprisoned the lazy and forced many back to work in the cane fields. ‘Freedom was sweet, but it had a cost’ writes Laurent Dubois, ‘France still needed the sweetness of sugar, and the coffee to go with it.’21 Toussaint was even prepared to use white planters, former enemies of the republic, to restore the economies of estates formerly occupied by the British. Small wonder that some ex-slaves thought the Jacobins were simply helping the whites. ‘Aren’t you tired of being poor?’ protesters asked disgruntled workers in Guadeloupe. ‘If you are free, why are you working on the land of the whites? Why doesn’t the fruit of your labour belong to you?’22 Over time ex-slaves fought a successful battle against their conscription as sharecroppers on the plantations; they wanted to be peasants not plantation labourers. In this context, it is not surprising to learn that the maroons on the borders of Santo Domingo and future Haiti, ex-slaves who had secured some autonomy from the plantation complex, adopted a ‘realpolitik of evasiveness’ when it came to negotiating with rival colonial powers.23 Why trust emancipation appeals if they came with the rider that freedom had to be earned by toiling in plantations, work that underscored a black man’s inferiority? Antislavery did not seem to augur racial equality. Indeed, disillusionment with ex-slaves led ultimately to efforts to re-enslave them, a situation that triggered race war and independence in St Domingue (Haiti), but defeat for ex-slaves in Guadeloupe. The complexities of the situation in the 1790s can be tracked in Jamaica, which was only a day’s sailing from St Domingue and in constant communication with the French island by virtue of the British occupation there. At the outbreak of the insurrection in 1791, Jamaican slaves reputedly celebrated it in song, a plaudit which made one slave master gasp that ‘the Ideas of Liberty have sunk so deep into the minds of all Negroes that whenever the greatest precautions are not taken, they will all rise’.24 The fear of a slave insurrection that Christmas led to a huge mobilization of the Jamaican militia, and once it became known that slavery had been abolished in St Domingue, the situation 21

Ibid., 184–93, quote 190. Cited in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 309–10. 23 Yingling, ‘Maroons of Santo Domingo’, 27. 24 David Geggus, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, 44/2 (1987), 276–7. 22

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became very tense, especially when the British occupied St Domingue, to contain the contagion of rebellion, and prompted fears of ideological contamination. In this regard, a petition from Jamaica’s free coloureds for the abolition of laws restricting their inheritance and the right to testify in court didn’t help, since it seemed to echo the civil rights given gens de couleur by the French National Assembly. In July 1795 trouble broke out in the maroon township of Trelawny Town. Two maroons were taken to court for shooting the pigs of planter George Maclennan on the testimony of slaves. This prosecution was permissible under a 1793 act, although slaves were still barred from giving evidence against whites. The maroons were then publicly whipped at the Montego Bay workhouse by other slaves, an act that the maroons thought humiliating, since they regarded themselves as superior to the bonded labourers of the plantations. Members of the jury and the judge were threatened; the superintendent of Trelawny Town, Captain Craskell, was ejected from the settlement; and other local grievances surfaced in the wake of the flogging, such as the arid quality of maroon provisioning grounds and the difficulty of finding others without appropriating lands from the planters. The maroons were angry, but in July and early August they were prepared to parley with the authorities and seek the rectification of their grievances through the mediation of the former superintendent, Major James, who they trusted. Six maroons even approached the governor, Lord Balcarres, to negotiate a deal, but he had just lost his brother in Fédon’s rebellion in Grenada and was in no mood to parley. He pre-empted the situation by deeming maroon recalcitrance to be insurrectionary and declared martial law. The maroons were ordered to surrender within four days, and after that a £20 reward was offered for any arms-bearing maroon, dead or alive.25 Although the leading magistrate of St James’ parish thought the authorities were dealing with ‘a few trifling causes of discontent’, Balcarres insisted he had to ‘cut at the very Root of Rebellion’. In his eyes a ‘valuable Colony’ was ‘on the brink of destruction’.26 Historical interpretations of the 2nd Maroon War largely revolve around Balcarres’ assessment. Was he paranoid, or was he right? To what extent did the news that his brother, Brigadier-General Colin Lindsay, had shot himself as Fédon’s forces were closing in on St George, Grenada, influence his judgement? Certainly, there were rumours that French agents were actively fomenting discontent, among gens de couleur, slaves and maroons. In early August a woman named Leah Fletchell overheard a conversation in Montego Bay that in France ‘things are not there as they are here, there all are citizens and upon a footin, here we are kept in ignorance and know nothing but we will wait and see how the matter ends, if they get the better then will be the time for us to come forward’.27 She could not identify the speakers, but assumed from their accents 25

TNA, CO 137/95, f. 104; Craton, Testing the Chains, 214. TNA, CO 137/95, ff. 96, 100. 27 TNA, CO 137/95, f. 123, sworn 27 August 1795 about three weeks after the incident. 26

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that they were slaves or people of colour. Stories like this, of French infiltration or of imminent invasion, continually surfaced. Léger Sonthonax, the commissioner in St Domingue, is said to have identified the Blue mountain maroons as a possible fifth column; a mixed-race visitor to New York from the French island declared that the Cap of Liberty would be put up in Jamaica ‘this summer, so keep a good look out among you’. Perhaps the most compelling revelation came from a French prisoner-of-war, Jean-Joseph Maurenson. He claimed that a French attaché in Philadelphia, one Citizen Fauchet, had dispatched bilingual spies to rustle up support for a French invasion, zoning in on maroon leaders and French refugees. Victor Hugues was apparently in on the plan, and 10,000 troops would embark for Jamaica. It was reports like these that prompted Balcarres to send many French refugees back to St Domingue, out of harm’s way.28 He did not want a predicament similar to that in the Windward Islands of Grenada and St Vincent. Maurenson’s report was a fabrication. He later admitted it, claiming he was angling to become a double agent. In the end no conclusive evidence emerged of significant French involvement, although one of the magistrates in Montego Bay said he had picked up people of colour and ‘foreigners’ for ‘disseminating sedition’.29 Indeed, it was the free blacks not the maroons who were most attentive to events in Saint Domingue. Robert Dallas actually thought the maroons were remarkably ignorant of events across the water. It was the northern side of the island, not the south, that was more concerned about the possibility of invasion.30 Even so, when provoked by Balcarres, many of the younger maroons dug in and tried to mobilize support against the colonial forces. Abraham of the Bog estate in Westmorland said three maroons approached him and ‘asked if they did not know there was a quarrel with the Buckras and Maroons, that Buckra had spoiled the Country, and they must go with them and when they had got the better of the Buckras [white people] they should live very easy and should have their freedom’. Leonard Parkinson, one of the maroon leaders who held out to the end, claimed they were ‘fighting to make all negroes free’.31 In endeavouring to broaden the challenge to the plantation regime, the maroons proved reasonably successful, mobilizing hundreds of slaves in their fight against the colonial authorities.32 At the same time, the Jamaican authorities recruited slaves to fight against the maroons, rewarding the families of those who died with their freedom.33 Militarily stretched, with hundreds of troops reeling from 28

Geggus, ‘Enigma of Jamaica’, 281–2; TNA, CO 137/95, ff. 149v, 160–2; cf. Craton, Testing the Chains, 212–13. 29 CO 137/95, f. 124v. 30 Dallas, Maroons, 1:168–9. 31 TNA, CO 137/95, f. 124; CO 137/96, f. 6. 32 Michael Sivaprasagam, ‘The Second Maroon War: Runaways Fighting on the Side of Trelawny Town’, Slavery and Abolition, published online, 9 Sept. 2019; cf. Craton, Testing the Chains, 217–18. 33 TNA, CO 137/96, f. 132. On sickness with regiments, TNA, CO 137/95, f. 286v.

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yellow fever and on the sick list, Balcarres used black soldiers to handle internal disorder and rebellion, although the Jamaican assembly baulked at sending them to St Domingue for fear they might pick up the wrong ideas. At least 2,000 black pioneers were deployed tracking down the Trelawny Town maroons, and subsequently eight special black regiments were created.34 So the second Maroon War saw slaves fighting slaves, and even maroons fighting maroons, for while most of the maroon communities observed a studied neutrality during the crisis, the Accompong fought alongside the British against their rivals in Trelawny Town. Once defeated, some of the Trelawny Town maroons asked to become ethnic soldiers of the British rather than be deported to the wastes of Nova Scotia.35 In the light of their fierce and bitter struggle against the colonists in the forests and creeks of the Blue Mountains, in which the British ultimately used Cuban hounds to root them out, it was a bewildering choice. Some later achieved this dubious honour, policing the colony of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone and putting down an incipient rebellion.36 Like so many conflicts in the Caribbean, the Second Maroon war proved a crucible of contrarieties. In years that saw unprecedented numbers of new slaves enter the colony and fuel epidemic disease among European troops and even the militia, Jamaica did not experience the revolutionary anarchy of St Domingue. It did not come close, despite the massive involvement of British troops in the French colony and the evacuation of over 1,000 French refugees and their slaves. As it transpired, common winds did not always produce common destinies. The Caribbean of the turn of the century was full of paradoxes. It witnessed the first significant defeat of colonialism and the formation of the first black state, albeit one initially run by a military oligarchy with two more or less autonomous ‘kingdoms’.37 It also saw an extension of the plantation complex in Trinidad and Guyana and the development of a vibrant sugar economy in Cuba on the ashes of St Domingue. In Guadeloupe it saw slavery abolished and then reinstated, although not without a hard struggle. In the many insurrections of the period, blacks frequently confronted blacks, since rival colonial powers quickly learned the art of deploying their own subject populations to fight for them. Although the soldiers of the British West India regiments were technically slaves and never secured the citizenship conferred by the French, the logic of their service eventually resulted in their manumission in 1806. And although they fought to preserve slavery and a slave system built on continuing inflows of African labour, their loyalty buttressed abolitionist arguments that the end 34

TNA, CO 137/96, ff. 90–2; Roger N. Buckley, ‘The British Army’s African Recruitment Policy, 1790–1807’, Contributions in Black Studies, 5/2 (1981), 5–16. 35 TNA, CO 137/96, f. 267. Petition of Montague James, James Johnson, Jarrett, Charles Shaw and Smith, 27 April 1796. 36 Schama, Rough Crossings, 393–4. 37 For a clear account of the impact of the French Revolution on St Domingue and the Haitian struggle for independence, see Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York, 2012), 24–88.

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of the slave trade would not inflict a Haitian nightmare on British colonies. Furthermore, although Wilberforce seems to have been an inspiration for Jamaican conspirators in 1791, presumably because his strenuous advocacy of abolition that year, he was not in favour of immediate emancipation, believing blacks were unprepared for such privileges until such time as they could be integrated into the Atlantic economy through discipline and industry.38 Like many Frenchmen of the same era, Wilberforce thought blacks had to show they were worthy of freedom. A similar argument emerged in Sierra Leone, Britain’s colony of emancipated slaves, where settlers were not automatically granted voting privileges but were forced to follow the dictates of their governors.39 Given their isolation and dependence on British goods, there was little they could do about it. As the British and French experience of the 1790s made very clear, antislavery advocates were not necessarily equity advocates. Many held condescending views of blacks’ abilities, even though they might admire their fighting skills. In the melting pot of war, insurrection and emancipation, new geo-political realities emerged. The more liberal slave regimes of the French, which contained a higher proportion of free blacks than the British and produced a new planter class from its mixed-race progeny, could not contain the passions and contradictions of the French Revolution, which freed slaves, enhanced political rights, but also protected property. Although a redistribution of land might have been an option for the Haitian revolutionaries, the imperatives of trying to shore up the existing economy prevailed because leaders feared for the vulnerability of their hard-won independence. Their policies could not contain the contradictions of emancipating slaves and preserving plantations. Their economies crashed as a consequence. In 1791 the French colonies vied with the British as the leaders of sugar production, cultivating nearly 103,000 metric tons to the British 100,000; or thirty-nine per cent of international production as opposed to thirty-eight per cent. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, British sugar production soared to over 173,000 metric tons per annum, making it overwhelmingly the leading producer in the world.40 The French, having lost their most valuable sugar colony, were now in fourth place, behind Brazil and Cuba, cultivating just under eleven per cent of the world’s supply. It was a cruel irony that the colonial power that had tried to come to terms with the demands of black freedom, only to backtrack when its economy was imperilled, paid the highest price. The collapse of the French colonial economy might have had deleterious consequences for the British, because the French produced a good share of the raw cotton that was fuelling the burgeoning textile industry, the critical sector 38

David Geggus, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica’, 278; Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, 29 (1790–92), 1058. Before a planned uprising in Christmas 1791, Jamaican rebels who were members of a secret society drank ‘King Wilberforce’s health out of a cat’s skull’. 39 Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors. 40 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: Complejo económico social Cubano del azúcar, 3 vols (Havana, 1978), 1:40–2.

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in Britain’s industrial take-off in the five decades after 1780. Raw cotton from non-British colonies in the West Indies, principally French, constituted nearly a third of Britain’s supply in 1786–97, but that supply drizzled away in the decade after 1795.41 Fortunately for British industrialists, the overall decline in West Indian cotton was replaced by new American sources, whose plantations in the deep South quickly emerged as the leading supplier of Lancashire’s textile mills. In a way the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 signalled the geo-political shift of the region. The French no longer needed Louisiana to supply food to St Domingue and abandoned any pretensions for a large presence in the region. The Americans needed Louisiana to expand its cotton belt, a vital economic asset of the new republic. The purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States, adding a vast swathe of territory from the Mississippi delta to the Canadian border. It made the United States a critical player in the region’s politics. Whereas Haiti was a momentous victory against slavery and for the freedom and equality of all races, the development of the American South was a counterpunch. Despite the ending of the American slave trade in 1807, its slave population increased five-fold in the sixty years after 1790 and surpassed 4 million by 1860. The legacy of that development still lives with us today.

41 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Durham, NC, 2010), 57, 84–5. Also cited in Blackburn, New World Slavery, 556.

202

Appendix: Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773–80 Abbreviations

Aptheker Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943) Craton Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982) DA Daily Advertiser Debien Debien, G. ‘Le Marronage aux Antilles Françaises au XVIIIe siècle’, Caribbean Studies, 6/3 (1966), 3–43. GA General Advertiser Gaz Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser GEvP General Evening Post LC London Courant LChron London Chronicle LEvP London Evening Post MC Morning Chronicle MJ Middlesex Journal MM Manchester Mercury MP Morning Post Offen Offen, Karl H. ‘Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1660–1787’, in Black and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham and London, 2010) PA Public Advertiser Piecuch Piecuch, Jim. Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia, SC, 2013). Price Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York 1973) SC Shrewsbury Chronicle Sheridan Sheridan, Richard B. ‘The Condition of the Slave in the Settlement and Development of the British Windward Islands, 1763–1775’, Journal of Caribbean History, 24/2 (1990), 121–45. SJC St James’s Chronicle SM Stamford Mercury

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APPENDIX:

List of Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773–80

St Vincent: 1772–73, First Carib War (ch. 8) Honduras: Oct. 1773, revolt in Belize River (TNA CO 5/120 ff. 35–8; CO 137/72, ff. 55–7; Craton 338) Surinam: late 1773, rebellious slaves raiding plantations (SC 15 Jan. 1774) Tobago: March 1774, revolt at Sir William Young’s plantation, and Queen’s Bay (Craton, 338; TNA CO 101/17, f. 250; DA 2 July 1774) Tobago: June 1774, insurrection at Betsey Hope plantation, and elsewhere (TNA CO 101/17/250; SM 7 July 1774) St Domingue: 1774 and 1775, maroon raids and confrontations in the north-east, between Le Cap and the Spanish frontier. Some ringleaders executed (Debien, 7) Virginia: Norfolk, April 1775, slaves plot to murder whites at night (LEvP 8–10 June 1775) Jamaica: Stow plantation, May 1775, planned insurrection (Gaz 3 Aug. 1775) Jamaica: June 1775, attempt to kill Mr Vellise and family, planter or sugar mill manager, two ringleaders hanged (Gaz 4 Sept. 1775; GA 2 Sept. 1775) North Carolina: July 1775, Beaufort County (Aptheker, 203) Virginia: July 1775, flight of slaves to British men-of-war at Norfolk (MJ 5 Sept. 1775) Mosquito Shore: Sept. 1775, insurrection on Corrin’s estate, Bluefields, involving black and Amerindian slaves (Offen, 118–19) Jamaica: October 1775, John Lockhart, surgeon, killed between Anchovy and Montpellier estates; three perpetrators executed (DA 8 Feb. 1776; GEvP 6 Feb. 1776) Virginia: November 1775, flight of slaves following Lord Dunmore’s declaration to free American-owned slaves ready to fight for the British (DA 9 Feb., 7 March 1776; GEvP 9 Jan. 1776; GEvP 18 Jan. 1776; TNA, CO 5/1373) Surinam: early 1776, confrontations between maroons and Dutch East India soldiers (MP 11 May 1776) Honduras: flight of slaves in Belize and Black River to Spanish; Rebellion, July 1776 (GEvP 3 Dec. 1776) Jamaica: July 1776, Hanover revolt (ch. 5)

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Jamaica: August 1776, conspiracy to blow up Withywood estate (DA 24 Oct. 1776) St Domingue: August 1776, maroons pillage and abduct blacks from Grand-Bois and Fond-Parisien, and assassinate the agent at Bellevue (Price, 136) Georgia: c. Sept. 1776, black slaves on the run as Governor Tonyn attempts to defend East Florida (GEvP 16 Jan. 1777) Virginia: late 1776, riots in Williamsburg after emancipation decree (GEvP 11 Feb. 1777) Jamaica: March 1777, slave conspiracy uncovered in Port Royal (PA 2 May 1777) St Domingue: April 1777, maroons attack settlements in retaliation for attempt to eliminate colony in Bahoruco (Price, 137). Maroons regroup at BoucanGreffin in 1778 (Debien, 7) Surinam: Feb. 1778? two rebellions on plantations (DA 29 June 1778) Curacao: March 1778? conspiracy (DA 30 July 1778) Barbados: early 1778, slave insurrection planned (MP 15 April 1778) Louisiana and West Florida: Jan. 1778, Americans from Fort Pitt pillaged loyalist plantations on the Ohio and Mississippi. Blacks in flight. Attack upon Natchez (Gaz 26 June 1778; MC 24 June 1778; TNA, Adm 1/241, f. 36) St Kitts: Easter 1778, slave rebellion (TNA, CO 152/38 f. 35; Craton, 337) Dominica: Sept. 1778, maroon uprising (Sheridan, 128.) South Carolina: March 1779, fears of an insurrection in Charleston (MM 31 Aug. 1779; Piecuch, 267n) St Vincent: June 1779, Black Caribs and French overpower British (ch. 8) Mosquito Shore: May 1780, black rebellion at Black River (LChron 22 Aug. 1780; TNA CO 137/78, ff. 153–60) South Carolina: May 1780, blacks liberate themselves around Charleston as war intensifies in the region (LC 3 July 1780) Jamaica: c. May 1780, Congo runaways raid plantations in St David’s parish (SJC 12–14 Oct. 1780)

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223

Index Abercromby, General Ralph  188, 195 Abolition of slave trade  73, 120, 194, 200–1 Alexander, Harry  180 American War of Independence  106–10, 120–1, 142–3, 147, 153, 172, 180–2, 184, 190 Andrew, King of Grand Bassa  86 Anomabu (Gold Coast)  86–7, 93 Antigua  59, 65–6, 71, 74, 81, 85–6, 88, 91, 123n, 168, 179, 184, 191 Arnold, Cornelius  191 Arthy, Elliot  192 Austin, Thomas  92, 94–6, 98 Bahamas  77, 101, 172 Baker, Henry  11 Balliceaux 188–9 Bamford, Samuel  29 Barbados  65, 80, 111, 167, 189, 191 Barré, Isaac  174–5 Beach, Henry  94–5, 98, 100 Beckford, William  105 Belize  124–5, 128, 134, 139, 145 Bermuda  68–70, 77, 191 Bicknell, Charles  71 Black Lives Matter  10 Black Prince slaveship 84–92 crew 90–2, as Liberty 92–101 Black River (Mosquito Coast)  125, 128, 130, 133, 138–42, 145–6, 152, 155–6, 159 Blauvelt, Abraham  127 Bocachica  42–3, 54, 62 Bolster, Jeffrey  74 Borrow, George  29 Boston  68, 78, 96–7, 101, 138, 172 Bradley, Richard  24 Braudel, Fernand  125, 190 Brazil  24, 94–5, 99, 201 Bristol (England)  53, 62, 84–6, 89, 93–4

Briton, Governor Timothy (Miskito chief)  137, 141–2 Briton, Governor Colville (Miskito chief)   154, 156 Brown, Colonel Thomas  189 Brunias, Agostino  2, 175 Buccaneering past  7, 40, 42–3, 49–51, 56–7, 136, 151, 165 Burke, Richard  169 Burke, William  169 Burton, Henry  94 Cage, Thomas  151 Cairns, Colvill  142, 144 Cammock, Sussex  126 Campbell, John  57 Campbell, Dr. John  168, 189 Campe, Johann Heinrich  11, 13, 27, 30–1 Cape Gracias à Dios (Mosquito Coast)  124–6, 135, 137, 143, 146, 152, 155 Caracas 67 Caribs  6–8, 19–20, 22–8, 114, 119, 147–8, 166–89, 196 Red or Yellow Caribs  167, 169, 172, 187 Carolinas  66, 70, 121, 191 see also Charleston Cartagena  37, 40–2, 52, 55, 57, 126, 144, 163 Cathcart, Charles, 8th Lord Cathcart 41 Cavendish-Bentinck, William, 3rd Duke Portland 146 Central America  5–6, 49–50, 78–9, 106, 121, 124–49, 150–65, 189 Chalmers, George  12 Cham ChiThaungu, Tartar idol  20 Chambers, Edward  102, 117 Charleston  66, 107, 121, 191 Charpentier, Victor-Thérèse, Comte D’Ennery 171

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Chatoyer, Joseph  171, 178, 183, 185–8, 196 Chet, Guy  101 Chisholm, Colin  191 Churchill, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough 48 Clairmont, Mary Jane  30 Cockburn, John  133, 148 Colley, Linda  21–2 Collingwood, Cuthbert  161–2 Colonialism 20–8 early ventures  2–3 ceded islands  166–8, 185–6 indentured labour  3, 18, 25, 111 racial profile  3–4, 66, 26-7, 111, 113, 137–8, 147–8, 201 see also under Race, Slavery, Slave societies Condon, Richard  62 Congolese  103, 110, 121 Connor, Patrick  169 Conrad, Joseph  21 Coromantee (Gold Coast)  66–7, 103, 113–14, 118–19 Cortés, Hernán  125 Couchman, Samuel  80 Cowper, William  31–2 Craton, Michael  4 Cuba  42, 47–9, 52, 55, 57, 72–3, 82, 144, 200–1 see also Havana Curaçao 120

Devereux, William  99–100 Dickens, Charles  15 Dicker, Samuel  34 Dilson, Admiral (Miskito chief)  141–2, 144 Disease  1–2, 17, 36–9, 43, 46–50, 52–5, 57–8, 86–7, 108n, 159, 165, 172–4, 184, 188, 194–5 dysentery  41, 46, 87, 90, 155, 159–60, 189, 194 malaria  34, 61–2, 93, 160, 174, 192–4 typhus   36, 38, 41, 46–7, 160, 189, 192 scurvy  36, 38, 48, 62 small pox  91–2, 108n, 142 yellow fever  1–2, 36–8, 44, 46, 61, 86, 159, 189, 191–2, 194, 200 Dolben Act (1788)  87 Dominica  121, 166–8, 172, 185 Drake, Sir Francis  40, 41, 43, 51, 56 Dubois, Laurent  197 Dundas, Henry  58 Duvallé (Black Carib leader)  186 Du Tertre, Père Jean-Baptiste  174

Dallas, Robert  199 Dalling, John  141–2, 144, 150–4, 158–9, 163–4 Dalrymple, Captain Samuel  151, 155 Dalrymple, Colonel William  153, 161, 172–5, 178 Dampier, William  19, 127 Dancer, Thomas  160 Davers, Vice-admiral Thomas  63–4, 75 Defoe, Daniel  6, 11–34 see also Robinson Crusoe Delpratt, William  85 Desjean, Jean-Bernard Louis, Baron de Pontis  52–3, 55–6 Despard, Edward Marcus  150, 157, 160, 163

Falconbridge, Alexander  90 Fédon, Julien  186, 195–6, 198 Fergusson, William  192, 195 Figueroa, Antonio de  134 Fitzmaurice, Ulysses  171 Fletchell, Leah  198–9 Forster, John  31 Fort Chagre  40, 83, 144 Fox, Charles James  13 Frankland, Vice-admiral Thomas  71 Franklin, Benjamin  143 French Revolution (and rights discourse)  119, 185–7, 195–6, 198–9, 201 Furtado, Francisco Xavier de Mendonca 99

East India Company  68 Edward of Woodstock (Black Prince)  84 Edwards, Bryan  149, 175 Engeldue, William  87 Entick, John  57 Equiano, Olaudah  73 Exquemelin, Alexander  126, 129

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Gayton, Admiral Clark  115 Geggus, David  120 Genovese, Eugene  119 George I, (Miskito chief)  141–3 George II, (Miskito chief)  143–5 Germain, Lord George  151, 158, 163–4 Gildon, Charles  23 Ginochio, Angelo  97 Godwin, William  30 Gold Coast 86–8, 90–1, 93 see also Anomabu Grenada  81, 119, 166–7, 184, 186, 195–6 Grenville, George   105 Gresley, John  85 Grizell, Colonel John  115 Guadaloupe   120, 168, 185, 196–7, 200 Guyana  189, 192, 200 Haggard, Rider  21 Hammon, Briton  82 Haughton family (slave owners)  102–3, 111, 113, 115 Havana  47, 72, 126, 144, 150, 152, 193 see also Cuba Hawkins, William 91–2 Hector, Jean Baptiste C. H., Comte d’Estaing  150–1, 182–3 Henderson, George  133 Helm, George  141 Herrera, Rafaela  153 Hill, Wills, Earl of Hillsborough  140, 143, 171–2 Hispaniola  77, 84n, 95, 97 see also St. Domingue Hodgson, Robert  79, 135–7 Hodgson, Robert junior  140–3, 149, 151, 159, 162–4 Holden, John   98, 100 Holland, William  2 Hosier, Vice-admiral Francis  39, 61 Hort, Sir John  99 Hugues, Victor  119, 185–6, 195–6 Hutchinson, Thomas  98 Ibos (Biafra)  103, 113–14, 119 Indentured labour  3, 25 Indigenous people  7–8, 24

Isaac, Duke (Miskito chief)  155, 158 Jamaica  1–2, 34–7, 61–2, 64–6, 68–71, 74–5, 77, 80, 85, 96, 102–23, 125, 128, 130–1, 136, 142, 144, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 184, 186, 189, 191, 197–200 Hanover revolt (1776)  102–23 Tacky’s revolt (1760)  82, 106, 115, 118 see also Kingston, Port Royal, Spanish Town Jane Eyre  22 James, Abraham  1–2 Jeffreys, Thomas  151, 157 Johnson, Dr. Samuel  15 Joyce, James  33 Juan Fernandez (Chile)  16, 19, 25 Kipling, Rudyard  21 Keith, Sir Basil  110–11, 115, 117–18, 141 Kemble, Stephen  158–62 Keppel, Augustus  151 Keppel, George 3rd Earl Albemarle  151 Keppel, William  151 Keymer, Thomas  19 Kingston (Jamaica)  37, 105, 118 Knowles, Charles  53–5, 59–60, 64, 74, 76, 138 Laroche, James  85–6, 91 Laroche, Sir James  86, 99 Lafitte, Jean and Pierre  101 Las Casas, Bartholomew  24 Laurens, Henry  84 Lawrie, James  141–4, 151–2, 154, 156–7, 159 Leeward Islands  74, 76 Leith, Sir Alexander  144, 161 Legge, William, 2nd Earl Dartmouth  141–2, 174 Lemprière, William  195 Lewis, Henry  92 Leybourne, William  172–3, 178–9 Lezo, Don Blas de  42, 46 Lincoln, Edmund  184–5 Lindsay, Alexander, 6th Earl Balcarres  146, 198

226

INDEX

Lindsay, Brigadier-Gen. Colin  198 Lindsay, John  104 Linebaugh, Peter  9n, 66n, 80–1, 82n, 97n, 125n, 164n Liverpool  84, 87 Lloyd, Owen  79–80 Locke, John  26–7, 169 London  6, 12, 40, 42–3, 53, 84–5, 98, 140, 142, 168 Long, Edward  78–9, 103, 114, 126, 147–9 Louisiana Purchase (1803)  201 Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de  13 Louverture, Toussaint  196–7 Lovering, William  86 Lowther, George  47 Lyttelton, William  99

Mortality  36–7, 41, 46–9, 57–8 in army  2, 6–7, 41, 43–4, 46–9, 50–4, 56–8, 67, 161–3, 173, 193–5 in merchant marine  86, 89–91 in navy  36, 38–9, 41, 46–7, 54, 62–3, 73, 162–3, 194 among slaves  4, 87–9 Morris, Valentine  179–83 Moseley, Dr. Benjamin   162, 165 Mosquito Coast  67, 78–9, 106–7, 121, 124–49 Murray, John, 4th Earl of Dunmore  7, 108–10

Macleane, Lauchlan  169 Madagascar   21 Mansfield Park  22 Mansfield, Thomas  75–6 ‘Marchlands’   9–10 Martin, Josiah  108 Martinique  101, 120, 167–8, 182–3, 185–7, 192 Maurenson, Jean-Joseph  199 McCoy, Allen  95 Meager, George  93–5 Merchant Venturers, Society of   85 Miller, William  86–91, 100 Miskito Indians  6–8, 25, 49–50, 78, 82, 125–49, 150–1, 157–60, 163–4 and British commissions  131–5, 137 as ethnic soldiers  7, 49–51, 82, 135–6, 139–40, 146–7, 151–2, 155, 157, 164 and slaving activities  130–1, 139, 142, 144–5, 147, 153–5, 158–9 Mohocks 60 Monckton, General Robert  175, 179 Montagu, John, 4th Earl of Sandwich 60 Montagu, William  59–61, 81 Montagu-Dunk, George, 2nd Earl Halifax 140 Moore, John Robert  12 Morgan, Sir Henry  3, 7, 56, 127, 133

Naval impressment  34–6, 41, 61–6, 70–1, 75–7, 152, 192 Navarro, Luis Diez  140 Nelson, Horatio  150, 156–7, 163 Newcastle upon Tyne  32 Newport, Rhode Island  78, 118, 138 New York  66, 68, 72, 78–9, 96, 98, 108, 138, 199 Nicol, John  29, 81 Nicuesa, Diego de  126 North, Frederick, 2nd Earl Guilford 174–5 Ogle, Sir Chaloner  34–5, 38–9, 41–2, 55, 64 Offen, Karl  131 Otway, Joseph  140 Paine, Thomas  12, 106 Palmer, General John  117 Panama  49–51, 67, 135–6 Parker, Sir Peter  164 Parkinson, Leonard   199 Parr, Richard  44–5 Parry, Admiral William  171 ‘Pawns’   87 Pelham-Holles, Thomas, 1st Duke of Newcastle  35, 42–3, 48–50, 55 Percival, Thomas  11, 31 Pernambuco  94–5, 97 Petty, William, 2nd Earl Shelburne  140 Philadelphia  28, 78, 199 Pilgrim’s Progress  12

227

INDEX

Piracy  8–9, 18, 20–1, 79–81, 92–101, 124, 126–7, 129–31, 137, 191 Pitman, Henry  19 Pitt, William (Black River)  49, 138, 140–1 Place, John  80–1 Polson, John  152, 155–9 Pontiac (rebel slave)  116–17 Portobello  39–40, 42, 51, 82, 126, 143–4 Port Royal (Jamaica)  41, 47, 61–2, 64, 70, 73–4, 118 Portuguese authorities  93–4, 97–100 Poverel, Etienne  197 Privateering  39, 59, 60, 64–5, 68, 70–3, 76–80, 100–1, 109, 150, 180, 191 Providence Island  126 Pye, Thomas  87, 93 Pym, John  126 Quinland, John  166 Race  23–8, 71–6, 103, 113–14, 118, 129–30, 133–4, 137–9, 142, 148–9, 152–3, 158–9, 167–9, 171, 174–5, 177, 187–8, 195–6, 198–201 armed slaves and auxiliaries  7, 42, 46–8, 50, 66n, 67, 73–4, 108–9, 150, 173, 186–8, 193, 199–200 enslaved  1–5, 9, 23–7, 46, 59–60, 71–2, 102–23, 142, 158–9, 177–8, 180 free people of colour  9, 68, 72–3, 75, 93, 119, 198–201 maroons  8, 66–7, 74, 113–14, 114, 116, 118, 121–3, 147, 172, 177, 178–9, 181–2, 197–200 ‘savagery’ and ‘cannibalism’  6, 13, 19, 22–3, 29, 71, 147–9, 164, 172–3, 179, 182, 187–8 see also under Colonialism, Slavery, Slave Societies Raleigh, Sir Walter  40, 43 Ramsay, James  104 Raynal, Abbé Guillauame Thomas  174 Rediker, Marcus  9n, 66n, 80–1, 82n, 96n, 97n, 125n, 164n

Rhode Island  68, 72, 78–9, 109 see also Newport Richards, Admiral Dick (Miskito chief) 155–6 Roatán  75, 79, 136–7, 139 Roberts, Bartholomew  94 Robinson Crusoe  6, 11–33 adaptions  11, 13–14, 27–9, 30–3 Rodney, George Brydges, 1st Baron  194 Rogers, Woodes  19 Royal Africa Company  23, 191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  13, 30–1, 174 Sailors  6, 8–9, 15, 21, 26, 29, 36–9, 41, 46–7, 54–5, 61–5, 68–81, 83, 86–101 black seamen  68–75, 109–10 desertion  41, 63–4, 73, 77–9, 91 St Domingue (Haiti)  2, 84, 95–6, 101, 106, 119–20, 123, 163, 185, 194, 196–202 see also Hispaniola St Eustatius  77, 79 St Kitts  65, 104, 121–2, 184, 191 St Lazar (fort)  44, 46, 52 St Lucia  166–8, 182–3, 185–6 St Vincent  119–20, 166–89 Sanderson, Thomas  93 Scott, George  117 Scott, James, 1st Duke of Monmouth 19 Selkirk, Alexander  16–17 Seton, James  185–7 Sharpe, Dr. John  13 Shepard, Charles  188–9 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  13, 28, 58 Shoals, John  96, 98 Sierra Leone  23, 201 Slavery  2–4, 8, 19, 21–8, 47, 59–60, 62–3, 71–2, 82–3, 102–4, 130–1, 138, 140, 142, 145, 153–4, 168, 185 and industrialism  5 and abolition  119–20 see under Colonialism, Race, Slave trade, Slave societies Slave trade  3–4, 8, 18–24, 62–3, 80, 84–92, 146, 191, 200–1 food strikes  88–9, 100

228

INDEX

insurrections  62–3, 87–8, 90, 100 mutiny 92–4 recruitment of seamen  89 ship discipline  88–90 see also Abolition of slave trade Slave societies  1–5, 8, 18, 78, 102–23, 184 armed slaves  67, 109–10, 120, 184, 200 conspiracies  67, 107–8, 120 francophone planters  166, 168–9, 180, 182, 186–8, 190, 194–5, 199–201 insurrections  6, 8, 66–7, 82–3, 87–8, 93, 102–23 marronage  66–7, 106–7, 118–19, 121–2, 177, 181 Smith, Resolve  181 Smollett, Tobias  36–7, 57, 62 Somerset, James  71 Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité  199 Spanish Town (Jamaica)  34, 39, 80, 104, 141 Speedwell, Charles  14, 27 Spence, Thomas  32 Staden, Hans  19 Stamp Act (1764)  105–6 Steele, Ian  6 Stono rebellion (1739)  66, 83 Stothard, Thomas  27 Stuart, King James III  19 Sugar Act (1764)  105 Surinam  98, 121–2, 174 Sutton, Sir Robert  174 Taylor, Sir John  133 Taylor, William  11 Tempest, General (Miskito chief)  141, 145–6, 155 Terry Jeremiah  143–4, 154 Thompson, John  85 Thurlow, Edward, 1st Baron  147 Tobago  120–1, 166, 168, 174, 177 Tortola  80, 101 Tortuga 96 Townshend, Thomas, 1st Viscount Sydney  174, 184

Treaty of Utrecht (1713)  21 Trecothick, Barlow  174 Trelawny, Edward  34–5, 47, 49–50, 74–5, 79, 135–8 Trelawny Town  113–16, 198–200 Trinidad  189, 200 Tropical staples coffee  77, 138, 168–9, 180, 184, 197 cotton  3, 5, 138, 180, 184, 195, 201–2 indigo  3, 77, 137, 145, 180 logwood  127–8, 136–40, 145, 147 mahogany  138–9, 145, 147 tobacco  3, 77, 82, 109, 167 sugar  2, 4–5, 36, 65, 77, 82, 102–3, 107, 111, 113, 138, 140, 168–9, 184–5, 189, 194, 196–7, 201 Ulloa, Don Antonio de  37 Uring, Nathaniel  79, 125, 130 Valladares, Abbé  171 Vernon, Admiral Edward  6–7, 34–6, 38–57, 61, 78, 82–3 Virginia  24, 70, 75–6, 85, 107–9 Wager, Sir Charles  39, 42, 61, 71 Walpole, Horace  53 Walpole, Sir Robert  39–40, 42, 53–4 Warren, Sir Peter  72 Warren, Thomas  149 Wedgwood, Josiah  27 Wentworth, Brig.-General Thomas  41, 46, 48–9, 51–2, 54, 56–7 White, Robert  144, 155 Whitehead, Neil  130 Wilberforce, William  201 Wilkes, John  104–5 Windward coast (West Africa)  87, 90 Wolfe, James  152 Wood, George  96–7 Wynne, John  93 Young, Sir William  148, 168, 176, 187, 189 Zoffany, Johann  113

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson

X Commune, Country and Commonwealth The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E.E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor XVII The Civil Wars after 1660 Public Remembering in Late Stuart England Matthew Neufeld XVIII The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited Essays in Honour of John Morrill Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell

XIX The King’s Irishmen The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 Mark R.F. Williams XX Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions Edited by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare XXI Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Mark Hailwood XXII Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 Fiona Williamson XXIII British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 John Cramsie XXIV Domestic Culture in Early Modern England Antony Buxton XXV Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 Craig Spence XXVI Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland Essays in Honour of John Walter Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington XXVII Commerce and Politics in Hume’s History of England Jia Wei XXVIII Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers

XXIX Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England Caroline Boswell XXX Cromwell’s House of Lords Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 Jonathan Fitzgibbons XXXI Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London Lena Liapi XXXIV Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall XXXV The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes XXXVI Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England Barbara Crosbie XXXVII The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 Chris R. Langley XXXVIII Visualising Protestant Monarchy: Ceremony, Art and Politics after the Glorious Revolution (1689–1714) Julie Farguson