The Disputatious Caribbean

The West Indies in the Seventeenth Century

S. Barber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137480019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This history of the 'Torrid Zone' offers a comprehensive and powerfully rich exploration of the 17th century Anglophone Atlantic world, overturning British and American historiographies and offering instead a vernacular history that skillfully negotiates diverse locations, periodizations, and the fraught waters of ethnicity and gender.

C H A P T E R 1

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Place

In the seventeenth century the earth and its climates were conceived of as “limited by two Parallels, distant from the Equinoctial toward each Pole,” with five zones of “a certain quantity of land”—two temperate, two frigid, “and one Torrid.” Zones “distinguish[ed] the quality of the Air” in relation to heat and cold and the position of shadows.¹ Thomas Tryon’s sojourn in the West Indies confirmed a jaundiced view of human nature because Britons seemed unable to temper their passions to the extremes of a place. There was “no Region so happy, no Elevation of the Pole so temperate, no Air so salubrious, as to keep People in Health whether they will or no, and those that obstinately violate Nature, and wilfully persue courses absolutely destructive, may justly be rank’t amongst the number of Self-Murtherers.”² The speed with which British settlers cleared the forest would, in a period of ecological awareness, be considered an obstinate violation of nature: contemporaries were more liable to note how much easier was their breathing. Wherever the land was not steep and mountainous, it was made suitable for cultivation and this entailed stripping it of its woodland. In the mid-seventeenth century, land was described as “fallen and unfallen,” but the extent and rate of woodland clearance awaits a systematic study of the wording of hundreds of thousands of deeds, patents, and plat-books.³ At the end of the century, however, woods were still privately managed, even in areas of relative population density: appraising land close to fortifications required public purchase, and privately owned woodland in St. James’s, Barbados, was deemed to hamper the operation of Queen’s Fort.⁴

Britons recognized a need to position themselves using “Globes, Maps, Platts; and Sea-drafts of New-discoveries,” charts, and instruments, such as those sold by Joseph Moxon, at the Sign of the Atlas in London’s Russell Street.⁵ Every British man, at least, laid claim to his position, even if that were the freedom to be mobile across both land and sea, such that by the time John Locke codified a philosophy of propriety, a century of individual cases had cumulatively defined Britons’ relationship to place.⁶ West Indian magistracy relied on those who had a fixed interest in authority’s handmaidens, stability and order. Correspondingly, there developed gradually a hierarchy in which a recognized interest in the land topped the hierarchy of place, followed by those who had a license to travel—merchants and mariners.

The Caribbean possessed two peculiarities that hampered Britons’ attempt to view the new world as a replica of the old. The first was that it was not just themselves who inhabited or came to inhabit it. Some parts possessed preestablished indigenous communities, and some did not, which was further complicated by the fluidity (or absence) of settlement displayed by Americans already in situ. These were joined by gradually increasing the numbers of Africans transported to America, or being born in America, and with whom there developed a contested notion of place, along with significant numbers of other European migrants in both cooperation and conflict over place and possession. Second, the geographical form of such diverse lands, ecologies, and territories of the region lent itself to fluidity and flux, challenging the European fear of the disorder, instability, or unfixity of constant movement. That fear transferred to those who ran away from their ties—indenture, enslavement, obligation, debt—or, even worse, to those who exploited fluidity in the Caribbean to escape their place, such as pirates and mutineers.

The personnel and institutions of control were determined by the area of land under their purview, the close physical proximity of land within the archipelago, one with another, and the interconnectedness of the whole of the eastern seaboard. This made for uppity neighbors. Any administrator of the Leeward Islands was forced to be a “Continuall Vagabond goeing from one to the Other.”⁷ Daniel Parke regarded this as injurious, whereas his hated rival, Christopher Codrington, manipulated his authority as both territorial governor and individual planter, by stalling decision making with constant recourse to his private island of Barbuda.⁸ Islands and forms of fastness territory enabled individuals to escape the government, like Robert Sanford who was accused of using the pretext of recovering runaway slaves in Surinam to muster the slaves, himself, some soldiers, and some indigenous people to flee to St. Vincent.⁹ The relationship of land to water suited those who wished to elude a creditor. William Berkeley complained that Governor William Sayle of Bermuda had seized his person in order to prevent him from sailing in The William, but when Sayle was himself dismissed, Berkeley spent more than 13 years chasing around the West Indies, New England, and Virginia in a vain quest to extract compensation.¹⁰ Gilbert Formby and Henry Ashton (both from Liverpool) were employed as ship’s security but “run off” at Barbados and headed “(by Stelth),” for Virginia: “Security is not worth anny Thinge.”¹¹ Lawrence Crabb, trying to keep his head above water in Antigua, was unable to turn a profit because—although this was not the sole reason—his creditors sailed away without paying.¹²

But if the territorial authority of a governor was dependent on the security of the people, an island territory required particular defensive requirements. Bermuda was such a “fforelorne Place,” with its inhabitants “bred to Sea” that they would not put themselves under any form of authority; neither that used on land, nor on the ships of the Royal Navy.¹³ The islands were a pressure-cooker enclosure of domestic populations, required to be kept entire and safe by sea. Island groups, like the Leewards, contained divided peoples and potentially divided allegiances, so with large Irish and Scottish populations and the presence of the French, sometimes on neighboring islands and sometimes cheek-by-jowl, the English feared being overawed, and were apt to “runne away [and] stragled to other places.” Worse, English emigrés put their personal safety before that of the island territory and carried their arms away with them.¹⁴ The private and personal endeavors of settlers of islands, such as Barbados, could be rendered useless when supplies were shipped in from elsewhere.¹⁵ Councillor Colonel Richard Bayley of the Barbados militia was instructed in 1667 to ready the ports, particularly Speightstown in the northwest, close to his own interests, for defense of the island at sea. While the threat of enemy incursions was no doubt there, his care was to concentrate on victualing, such that the island was not depleted of resources, nor the ships used to carry away residents. In tiny Nevis, the domestic house of Elizabeth Barnes accommodated soldiers, weapons, and ammunition, for which she was paid a mighty 8,700 pounds of sugar.¹⁶ The balance of internal and external defense was a delicate one.

Stone, in short supply throughout the region except for Barbados and Bermuda, was reserved for fortifications, as a first line of defense against people rather than the elements. The same conditions which made Bermuda such an attractive prospect for settlement, could work in its favor when plans were afoot to render its Atlantic isolation strategic. At the very end of the century, its former governor, Isaac Richier, suggested a role for it as an entrepôt: “Concerneing the Charge and materialls to ffortifye Bermuda[,] Stone and Lime are there (the best for such use and for houses) to be had without any other Charge then Mens Labour, there is Sufficient Stumps and Rootes of Trees upon the Kings Land to Burne the Lime; and the Stone is in most places, and to be raised with little trouble being soft and poarous, but most durable[. E]ver since the Island was Inhabited the people in generall was imployed in Building and repaireing of fforts and fortificacons.”¹⁷ Building and repairing fortifications was the major—sometimes the sole—consideration of governors, particularly in the latter half of the century when the West Indies became embroiled in inter-European wars. The public accounts for Montserrat in the 1670s show spending on little else except repairs to the “old fort” (Old Road Fort?), those at Plymouth—a fort with bastions—and Kinsale. Rough stone was brought by sloop from elsewhere to be worked by a team of masons, with additional work in timber, wattle, and daub.¹⁸ Willoughby-Fort was Surinam’s only non-timber building, a bastioned star construction at the mouth of the Surinam River, while its counterpart in Bridgetown was a basic square, crenellated design at the mouth of the Carlisle River; that is, as a last line of defense for the boats approaching the wharfs. The square James Fort at the north end of Carlisle Bay and the more sophisticated Needham’s Fort on a spit of land to the south were reinforced by small gun platforms and batteries.¹⁹

It was important there be a physical authority in the territories, in the figure of a resident of as high a status as possible, which, in view of the number of different territories comprising the Caribbees, and the distance between authority in Whitehall and that on the ground, was rarely achieved. Governors were responsible for the movement of others on and off their territories, and issued licenses to travel. In such a diverse, scattered territory, all supplies no matter how humble, all messages, and all labor forces were moved around by water, and thus in the issue of travel licenses it is hard to separate social control from the public coffers. Contested authority was the inevitable consequence of the clash between the liberty to travel and truck and the sanction, protection, and allowance offered by those who believed liberty should be bounded and circumscribed. Examples of cases raised against governors from the early 1640s included Captains Gell, who refused to transport a banished woman from Antigua back to Barbados, and Ackland, who, tired of his tickets for travel not being entered, resolved to carry goods off the island without a further license.²⁰ In the figures that are available to us, presumably typical, between 1672 and 1674 Montserratians paid twice as much for licenses as they did in fines for misdemeanors, and half as much as total import duties.²¹

The authority to travel traveled up the line. Sir William Stapleton, as governor of Nevis, expressed his indignance at receiving a copy of an Order in Council forbidding governors’ return to England without leave. It was worse than death to him to desert one’s post, he protested. Since he had failed to secure slaves in Tobago, privateers or mutineers, so in turn he would expect the greatest censure to fall on those in overall authority who tried to escape the fixity of their responsibilities.²² During the Nine Years’ War, Christopher Codrington was given the task of distributing the Crown’s subjects around his territories. Ordered to combine to take Guadaloupe and Martinique, he had then to ration out from among “Our Forces” just sufficient to take and keep possession while not spreading his resources too thinly.²³

Given a network of islands and their connection to mainland colonies such as Surinam, Carolina, and Darién, the interplay of territories in the hands of European enemies, or the presence on the seas of indigenes, care was taken to note the best routes to negotiate the region. The Bahama islands were strategically positioned at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, “commonly Cal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Disputation
• 1 Place
• 2 Resource
• 3 Connection
• 4 Body
• 5 Will
• Conclusion: Design
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index