Caribbean (35 page)

On Barbados the Cavaliers were led by robust Thomas Oldmixon, who announced: “I’ve always been loyal only to the king and shall remain so, and if Charles I is truly dead, his son Charles II is my king and I’ll fight to protect his claim,” and men of similar loyalties began to cluster about Oldmixon and look to him for leadership.

Control of the Roundheads, fewer in number but equally dedicated to their cause, devolved naturally upon Henry Saltonstall, who approved of the deposition of the king though not his murder, and who believed that Parliament could rule England more effectively than royalty had done.

The effect of all this on the Tatum brothers was especially divisive. Isaac was a young man who intuitively liked royalty and its attendant nobility; secretly he hoped that one day he would, through increase in the size of his plantation, his slave holdings and the consequent amount of sugar produced, amass a fortune. Then he planned to donate large sums to enterprises in which the king was interested and thus win attention in London, and who knows, perhaps even a title.

Roustabout Will would not have known what to do with a title had it been offered him. In fact, he had already shown certain tendencies which greatly disturbed Isaac and Clarissa: he had been overly familiar with the slaves; he sometimes ridiculed Thomas Oldmixon’s pompous ways; twice he had absented himself on Sundays from the parish church, when everyone knew that attendance was required by law; and most distressing, he had frequented the waterfront,
palling around with Captain Brongersma, who only a few years before had been at war with England.

As the political debate intensified, Clarissa warned Isaac: “Your brother isn’t a person to be trusted. Next thing you know, he’ll be announcing that he’s siding with Saltonstall.” She proved a good prophet, because a few nights later at supper Will made bold to say, even though he knew the loyalties of the older Tatums: “I think Saltonstall and his Roundheads make a lot of sense. Does England really need a king?” The question was so bluntly asked that Isaac and Clarissa were too stunned to respond.

As the turmoil on the island spread, Isaac became increasingly concerned that his favorable start with Oldmixon might grind to a halt. As he explained to his wife: “With the execution of the king, anything can happen,” but she advised steadiness: “Don’t falter now. All’s at chance.” When she learned that Oldmixon had declared for the king, she told Isaac, leading him to his horse and spurring him on: “Now’s the time to strike. Ride up there and tell him you’re with him.”

Bursting into Oldmixon’s hall, Isaac cried in the deep voice he cultivated: “I’m for the new king,” and the wealthy owner clasped him warmly: “You’re a welcome volunteer to the Cavaliers, Tatum.” Then he drew back, studied the man he had only recently come to know, and cried: “Egad, Tatum! You have done me three favors. Forestalling the slave rebellion, planting sugar, and now joining me for the king. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” Even in his enthusiasm, Oldmixon took care to say
egad
, because blasphemy was severely punished on this island, which led men to use old, safe forms like
egad
as a substitute for
ah God, “sblood
for
by God’s blood
and
zounds
for
God’s wounds
.

When Isaac Tatum returned home he told Clarissa: “I did what you said. We’re in this together now.” They did not say anything to Will, but that evening the Tatums had a serious conversation, started by the wife: “If Will persists in his sentiments, I can’t be happy having him share quarters with us.”

“Half the house is his, my love. Half the fields.”

“Can we buy him out?”

“With what?”

After a long silence Clarissa said: “Will’s a hothead, we’ve seen that. He’s a rebel, and if this island remains loyal to the new king, as I’m sure it will, he’ll do something that will drive him from Barbados. His land will be forfeit …”

“My love, there’s no way we can ask him to leave now. I need his help with the new slaves and the sugar.”

Petulantly she said: “Isaac! I’m not happy with him around. Answer me this. Why did that Naomi tell him about the plot? Why didn’t she tell us? What was there between them?”

Isaac had to lay down the law: “We need him. We need his share of the land. And we must have his share of the work.” When she began to cry, he promised: “As soon as things are steady, we’ll ask him to leave. He can always stay with the Pennyfeathers,” referring to the Tatum sister, Nell, who had married a fairly worthless shopkeeper, Timothy Pennyfeather. The thought set Isaac’s mind to working: “On one thing you’re right, Clarissa. Will’s share of the land must come to us, because the secret of wealth on this island is control of land, and I aim to accumulate a great deal of it.”

And then, as the year closed with the island divided into two almost warring factions and with the split in families like the Tatums, an event transpired which demonstrated the unique quality of Barbados, for when it was announced in the various churches that a hunting party would be setting forth for the island of All Saints, one hundred and fifty miles to the west, men of every persuasion flocked to the little ship that would convey them there. Thomas Oldmixon, head of the Cavaliers and a master shot, had nineteen of his supporters at his side, while Henry Saltonstall, armed with two fine guns, led the Roundheads. Isaac Tatum stood with Oldmixon, brother Will with Saltonstall.

When the ship hove to on the western side of the glorious bay of All Saints, its small boat ferried the hunters ashore, with leaders Oldmixon and Saltonstall sharing the same small craft and the Tatum brothers riding side by side on a later trip. When the party was assembled, Oldmixon issued instructions in his hearty voice: “Men, Saltonstall, a fine shot, will lead his half in that direction, rest come with me—and we’ll see if we can finish with these buggers.”

What would they be hunting? Carib Indians who had fanned out from their original home on Dominica to the neighboring islands of All Saints and St. Vincent, where the cannibals had proved murderously dangerous to any English or French sailors shipwrecked on their shores. They were an implacable foe who so belligerently refused any overtures for peaceful sharing of their islands that European
settlers deemed extermination to be the only policy. This was not the first hunting party sent after them, but it was the largest, and the Englishmen with their long muskets set out at a merry clip, with many cries of self-encouragement to battle with the savages. It was by no means a one-sided fight. Venal Dutch and French and English traders—pirates, really, of whom Brongersma of the
Stadhouder
was one of the worst—had provided the Caribs with guns fabricated in the American colonies and ample shot and shell to go with them, so the Barbadian hunting party and its intended prey started about even; the English shooters knew they were going to be shot at.

Thus, in only a few centuries, the fierce Caribs who had uttered wild war cries as they swept down to annihilate the Arawaks, now heard those same cries shouted against themselves.

In the first half-hour Thomas Oldmixon, with Isaac Tatum at his side as kind of gun-bearer, killed two Caribs and dodged Indian bullets as they rattled back at him. Saltonstall’s team, containing many Roundheads who tended to be fine shots, also killed its share of Caribs, and for about two hours the hunt continued, with Barbadians shouting in triumph whenever they brought down an Indian and keeping score as they might have done at a pigeon shoot, for it was wildly exciting to see a brown form scuttling through the low brush and to hit him dead-on and see him turn and twist as he fell. Of course, sometimes the running figure was a woman or a child, but the shooting continued, and during the entire hunt not one Barbadian expressed concern about gunning down the savages, male or female, and certainly no remorse.

At the end of the third hour, when light was beginning to fade, both teams put on an extra drive, and because they were attacking from different directions, they forced the Indians into a defensive position at the far end of the beautiful bay that gave this island its distinctive character, and there they hammered at the Caribs with a deadly crossfire until some nineteen men and women, plus a handful of children, were exterminated. That night the Barbadians returned temporarily to their ship, and there was considerable celebration in which Cavaliers and Roundheads toasted each other with good English ale.

During the second day, as the group was surrounding another Carib camp, one Carib marksman who had mastered his fine New England musket, hid in a tree, drew a bead on young Will Tatum, and would have killed him had not the boy moved at the last second. The
bullet ripped through Will’s left arm but missed the bone, and when Isaac bound the wound with a bit of torn shirttail, all members of the hunting party congratulated Will as the hero of the expedition. In that congenial frame of mind the Barbadians sailed away from All Saints satisfied that they had “taught the damned Caribs a lesson.”

When the hunting party returned to Barbados, the almost-forgotten factionalism revived: at times debate between the two parties grew heated, and men with any sense of history anticipated the day when angry words would be replaced by ugly deeds. But it was to be a characteristic of Barbados in those troubled years that both sides, Cavalier and Roundhead, carefully, almost passionately, avoided overt actions of a hostile kind or the bloodshed that might have been expected to accompany such basic and emotional differences. Credit for this common-sense approach was due to the two leaders, Oldmixon and Saltonstall, for neither man was the kind who might encourage his followers to drastic action; each believed in legal procedures and the avoidance of either riot or rebellion. Oldmixon might talk louder than Saltonstall but never to the point of incitation, and although Saltonstall seemed to have beliefs more profoundly grounded than Oldmixon’s, he never saw civil disturbance or attack upon his adversary’s property or person as a proper means for advancing them.

In short, and this was the highest praise that could be bestowed on Barbados at this crossroads in Caribbean history, the islanders were behaving like properly disciplined English gentlemen and proving that they merited the enviable title “Little England.”

The same courteousness prevailed in the Tatum household, though Clarissa clearly wanted to rid the place of her disreputable brother-in-law and Isaac considered him an embarrassment, especially when Thomas Oldmixon asked one day: “What’s this I hear about your brother Will? Is he with us or not?”

“He’s been contaminated by Saltonstall.”

“Cut him off, Isaac. No good ever comes from brothers in contention.”

“He owns half my land.”

Oldmixon, who delighted in making immediate decisions, growled: “Time may be at hand, Isaac, when men like your brother will be gone from this island … forever. Prepare for that day.”

When Isaac told his wife that Oldmixon had agreed with her attitude
about Will, she said: “We won’t blemish Christmas and let’s celebrate New Year’s together, but after that, out he goes, land or no land.”

It was a tense holiday season, despite the fact that Barbados never seemed lovelier. Palm trees bowed in that heaven-sent wind, blowing always hard from the east, and on Christmas Day the three Tatums carried their dinner to a hill on the edge of Bridgetown, where Isaac, in a burst of brotherly affection which he knew would soon be terminated, said: “That divine easterly wind, it never fails us. It protects our independence, Will, and our freedom.” When Clarissa asked how that could be, he said in a dreamlike voice: “Why was Barbados, of all the Caribee islands, unpopulated when Columbus passed through to the north? Why did the Spanish never conquer this island? Why have the French and the Dutch and the others captured one island after another, but never Barbados? Why are we so special, as if God looks over us?”

“You mean the wind?” Will asked, and his brother clapped him on the shoulder: “That I do. The wind from the east that bends those trees, as it has unfailingly for a thousand years. All the nations I’ve mentioned have
wanted
to conquer Barbados. They’ve known it was the choicest island in the Caribees, with the best land, the best crops. But to conquer us, they would have to sail their ships from the west where the other islands are, to the east where we are, and they cannot breast that furious wind.”

Clarissa asked: “Then how did the English land?”

“Because they came as friends. They could take their time and ease their way in. No one on shore shooting at them.” And he directed his wife and brother to study an incoming Dutch merchant ship that had been trying for two exasperating days to beat against the wind and make the harbor.

“Imagine it a warship,” Isaac almost chortled, “coming to do us damage. It would stand out there almost motionless, caught in the wind, and our guns would pound it to pieces,” and the others could see that what he said was true. “But if we want to capture All Saints, which we may have to do before long, we load up our ships, move them into the stream, and ride right down that furious wind, landing on All Saints forty minutes after they first see us.”

For some minutes they contemplated the beneficence that the easterly wind provided and felt themselves enveloped in a warm family companionship, but then Will broke the spell by asking: “Why
would we want to invade All Saints? Nobody there but Indians,” and Isaac said sharply: “The time of testing may be at hand. We cannot risk leaving any island unguarded … to fall under control of the king’s enemies.”

“Do you think we could capture it?” Will asked, almost innocently, and his brother snapped: “We’re more powerful than you might think. These islands may prove to be the salvation of England.” He rose, moved about nervously, then came to stand over his brother: “You might be interested to know that secret messengers from Virginia and Carolina, two of the strongest American colonies, have crept into Barbados recently to assure us that they’ll join us if we make a stroke for the king. The Bahamas, too.”

Will, who had been talking geography and maritime affairs with Captain Brongersma and his Dutch pirates, laughed at his brother’s pretensions: “Do you know how big the Bahamas are? How many people there are in Virginia? Parliament would muster a fleet in three weeks …”