Caribbean (56 page)

Near the foot of the windmill came a meandering stream, not big enough to be called a river or even a rivulet, but nevertheless a reliable flowing stream that sometimes sang as it tumbled down the hillside to pass under a handsome stone bridge consisting of two arches. This bridge, a structure of elegant proportions, was the center of the sugar-processing area.

From the two crushers on the hill flowed down the freshly extracted juice by way of an uncovered Roman stone aqueduct which ran right across the bridge, forming one of its parapets and delivering its precious liquid to the vats where the juice was collected, the copper kettles in which it was boiled, the pans in which it turned magically into brown crystals called muscovado, the pots in which the muscovado was treated with white clay imported from Barbados to produce the white crystals that merchants and housewives wanted, all contained within a cluster of trimly built small stone buildings which also housed the enclosure for the mules and the stills where the wastage of the process, the rich, dark molasses, was converted into rum.

Trevelyan Plantation enjoyed an enviable reputation in the sugar-molasses-rum trade because of the intelligent decision of one of the first owners. He told his family back in the 1670s: “Cotton and tobacco are fools’ crops in Jamaica. The American colonies outproduce us in both cost and quality. But I’m told there’s a canny fellow over on Barbados, Thomas Oldmixon, they say, who’s beginning to earn real money by growing sugarcane smuggled in from the Guyanas. I’m sailing over to see how he does it.” He did, and found Oldmixon making a huge profit from his canes, but the man was a suspicious lot despite his air of being a friend to all: “Why should I give you my secrets and watch Jamaican sugar outdistancing my own?” and he would tell his visitor nothing and show him less. When he caught Samuel Trevelyan creeping back at dusk to see how the canes grew, he ordered him off his plantation and let loose two dogs to ensure that he stayed off.

The visit would have been fruitless had Trevelyan not encountered a likable chap called Ned Pennyfeather—owner of The Giralda
Inn along the waterfront in Bridgetown—who, after listening to the tale of defeated hopes, said: “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Oldmixon smuggled his canes in from Brazil, I think it was, and they were furious down there when they discovered what he’d done. He doesn’t want to share with you the advantage he’s gained.”

“I’ve come a far distance for this. What am I to do?”

Pennyfeather considered this for a moment, then gave an answer which would account for Jamaica’s future prosperity: “There’s a mean-spirited man atop that slight rise to the east. If you were dying of thirst, he wouldn’t give you a drink, but for a handful of coins he’d sell you anything. Name’s Sir Isaac Tatum.”

“Oldmixon said it was against the interest of Barbados.”

“Sir Isaac recognizes no interests but his own. You’ll get your canes if you have the money.” Isaac Tatum did drive a hard bargain, but Trevelyan did get his canes, and in Jamaica they prospered, as he said in his thank-you note to Pennyfeather, “wondrous well.”

Of course, when he knew more about sugarcane he discovered that Sir Isaac had cheated him outrageously. He had sold him not honest root cuttings which remained viable for years, but only ratoons, accidental suckers from the roots which looked like the real thing but which produced usable cane for little more than two seasons. However, the ratoons did get Samuel Trevelyan launched, and two years later he was able to buy real roots from an honest planter—and the great Jamaican plantation was on its way to the huge fortune he and his family eventually accumulated.

An accidental discovery accounted for much of the Trevelyan wealth. One of the plantation’s slaves, a careless fellow, threw into the still in which molasses was being converted into rum a mess of old molasses whose sugar content had been caramelized in the sun. When he saw how much darker than usual the resulting rum was, he hid it in a special cask which happened to have been made of charred oak, and when Trevelyan finally discovered this mistake, he found not the light-golden liquid produced on the ordinary plantation, but a heavy dark rum, magnificent in flavor, now called by some “a golden black.” Trevelyan became the recognized name for this rum, sought by connoisseurs who relished the best, and the money flowed in from its sale in Europe and New England, because no other plantation had yet mastered the trick of producing its equal.

On the right side of the bridge clustered the little cabins of the slaves, masonry walls halfway up, then wooden poles at the corners, with woven wattle and mud, well hardened in the sun, in between, and thatched roofs of palm fronds. The floors were hard and dry, a mixture of mud, pebbles and lime, well pounded and swept. Sir Hugh, inspecting them casually as he rode by, found them in reasonable order.

On the hill, not far from the windmill, rose the great house, a three-storied manor with mansard roof and projecting wings, called Golden Hall because of the row of trees whose bright yellow blossoms made the place joyous. Lady Beth Pembroke had loved these trees, and their brilliant blooming reminded both Sir Hugh and his three sons of her onetime presence.

Safe at last on the veranda of Golden Hall, Sir Hugh, home from the wars, could look down upon a scene whose elements were so perfectly disposed—arched bridge, stone buildings, slave quarters, rum still, tilled fields, woods—that it might have been created for the brush of some medieval artist. It was a little kingdom of which any prince of that bygone age would have been proud.

By no means the largest of the Jamaican plantations—Pentheny Croome’s was more than twice as big even without the lands recently acquired—it did have seven hundred acres, of which seventy-seven were in mature canes, one hundred and fifty-four in ratoons and another seventy-seven in young plants. It was worked by two hundred and twenty slaves, forty mules and sixty-four oxen, and their joint efforts produced just under three hundred tons of sugar, about half of it clayed, the other half brown muscovado which would be shipped to England for refining. And, pride of the plantation, each year it barreled more than a hundred puncheons of Trevelyan rum, or about ten thousand gallons, at a masterful price when delivered abroad.

Sir Hugh, a good man with a pencil, figured his costs carefully: “Each slave, two hundred and five American dollars; each mule a hundred and eighty; total cost of replacing the stone buildings and the windmills, two hundred thousand American; out-of-pocket expenses each year, about thirty thousand dollars; average income per year, fifty-five thousand; average profit per year, twenty-five thousand American.” He also kept his accounts in pounds sterling and Spanish currencies, but however he calculated his profits, they were immense in the money values of that time and enabled him and his family to live in what was called “the grand style of a Jamaican planter.” This
meant that Golden Hall had some dozen house servants, six yard boys, grooms for the horses, a plantation doctor, a clergyman for the little church beyond the bridge, and numerous other helpers.

As Sir Hugh studied the excellence of his plantation he reflected on what a superior island his Jamaica was. The last rough census had shown some 2,200 whites of the master-mistress category, about 4,000 whites of lower category, and 79,000 slaves. As he had told a recent visitor from England: “We never forget that we whites, counting every one, are outnumbered six to seventy-nine. It makes us careful how we act, very careful how we manage our slaves, who could rise up and slay us all if so minded.” But he also confessed that he himself earned substantial profits from the slave trade: “Last year in Jamaica we were able to import some seven thousand slaves from Africa, and we could have sold twice that many: we immediately forwarded more than five thousand of the newcomers on to Cuba and South Carolina, and on their sale we made a tremendous profit.”

He told every stranger who asked, either in Jamaica or England, that his island was a haven of refuge for all kinds of people: “We accept Spaniards who flee harsh governments in South America, slaves who escape cruel masters in Georgia, artisans from New England who want to start a new life, and last year the governor issued a proclamation that henceforth he would admit even Catholics and Jews if they promised not to create public scandals.”

But the life of the Pembrokes was not limited to Golden Hall by any means, because each of the three boys had been educated in England at Rugby School in Warwickshire and had spent much of his youth at either the Pembroke townhouse on Cavendish Square near London’s Hyde Park, or in the small and lovely Cotswold cottage in Upper Swathling, Gloucestershire, some fifty miles west of London, where Lady Pembroke—known to all as Lady Beth—had supervised the creation of one of the finer small flower gardens in the south of England.

The Pembrokes were like most of the West Indies sugar planters, legally domiciled on the island where their plantation lay but emotionally always tied to England. Their sons were educated in England; they maintained family homes in England; and they served in Parliament so as to protect what was recognized throughout the empire as “the Sugar Interest.” In these years, some two dozen planters like Sir Hugh held seats in the House of Commons, where they formed an
ironclad bloc monitoring all legislation to ensure that sugar received the protection they felt it deserved.

But how did an almost illiterate planter like Pentheny Croome in remote Jamaica gain a seat in Parliament? Simple. He, like the others, bought it. There were in those years in England a handful of what were called “rotten boroughs,” the remnants of towns which had been of some importance when seats in Parliament were originally distributed but which had declined or in some cases actually disappeared. Still, each of those shadowy areas retained the right to send a man to Parliament and it became the custom for a landowner who held title to a rotten borough to sell his seat to the highest bidder. Pentheny had paid £1,100 for his borough; Sir Hugh, £1,500 each for his two, one for himself and one for his oldest son, Roger. The other West Indians had made their own deals, and all agreed with Pentheny: “Some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Helps protect us against the rascals,” a rascal being anyone who wanted a fair price on sugar.

And that was the significant difference between Great Britain’s West Indian colonies and her North American ones. Maturing colonies like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia controlled not a single seat in Parliament; they were unprotected against the taxes and rules so arbitrarily imposed; they kept their politicians at home, where they mastered those intricacies of rural American politics that would carry them to freedom. The West Indies islands, infinitely more favored in those decades, would never master the local lessons, for their best men were always absent in London.

Of equal importance, when bright young lads from Jamaica and Barbados were away at school in England, their contemporaries from Boston and New York were attending Harvard and King’s College in their hometowns and forming the intercolonial friendships that would be so important when their colonies decided to strike for freedom. In retrospect, it would become clear that the West Indies paid a frightful penalty for the ephemeral advantages they enjoyed in the period from 1710 through the 1770s.

But now, in 1731, Sir Hugh was quite content to be in residence at Golden Hall prior to returning to London for the coming session of Parliament, when matters of grave concern to the sugar planters would be discussed. It was pleasant to have his three sons at home. Roger at twenty-six would one day inherit the baronetcy and become
Sir Roger; for the present he owned the second rotten borough that the Pembrokes controlled and was making his way slowly and quietly in Parliament, in accordance with the instructions handed down by his father: “For the first two sessions, say nothing, attract no attention, but be there to vote whenever a sugar item comes up.” Roger gave strong promise of becoming, with maturity, a leader of the sugar delegation.

But in many ways it was the second son who made the exalted position of the Pembrokes secure, because Greville stayed in Jamaica and ran the plantation. At twenty-four he had proved himself a genius in scheduling work for the slaves in such a way as to keep them reasonably happy and more than reasonably productive. He was also good at figures and had a sharp judgment as to whether it was more profitable to ship his surplus molasses to England or to Boston. As the Jamaica planters said: “Massachusetts citizens must drink more rum per person than people anywhere else in the world. They have seven distilleries up there and their appetite for our molasses is insatiable.” He had engineered a profitable deal with Pentheny Croome’s brother Marcus, who operated two small ships carrying cargo out of Jamaica, and it seemed that whatever Greville turned his hand to earned money for the Pembrokes.

To have a son occupy the position of plantation manager was a boon that most families missed. Because many of the owners preferred to spend most of their time in England, they had to leave the running of their plantations to untested young Scotsmen or Irishmen who came to Jamaica for that purpose. Or, if lucky, they found a trusted local lawyer who would serve as manager; if unlucky, they fell into the clutches of some dishonest man who stole half their profits while they were not looking. Of the two dozen West Indian planters who formed the Sugar Interest in Parliament in the year 1731, only two had been fortunate enough to find honest members of their own families to run their plantations, whereas an appalling thirteen had gone to England as young men and had never once returned to their home island to supervise the on-site production of sugar. They were concerned only when they had to defend the islands against competing interests in England, in France, and especially in North America.