White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (25 page)

Prior to the Restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, even more people from the British Isles arrived in the West Indies than in America, perhaps three-quarters of the total who emigrated.4

Of these, half were Irish. In the period leading up to the American 180

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Revolution, half of all Scots, English and Irish crossing the Atlantic went to the West Indies.

As in America, the servants were slaves in all but name and were treated as chattels. On 12 June 1640, estate agents valued the estate of one George Bulkley. They noted livestock worth 42,000

pounds’ weight of cotton, household stuffs worth 1,125 pounds of cotton and nine servants worth 3,120 pounds of cotton. Barbadian servants could be sold to pay a debt or inherited upon death of a planter.

Fortunes were made. The enterprising James Drax became the richest planter on the island. He was one of those who had benefited from the share-out of the 10,000 acres after the fall of Sir William Tufton. Drax’s monument stands today, a large grey block of a house built in the 1650s. From the exterior, Drax Hall is no tropical pleasure dome designed to titillate and delight the viewer. It was built as a stolid, fortified house of power; the unyielding shape of his home said something about its owner. Drax had influential friends in England and the organisational abilities to make a success of his new enterprise. He established an estate that became the envy of all. Architecture might not have been Drax’s forte but with his business based on food he certainly knew how to entertain. The following is an example of the sumptuous fare on offer at one of his
regalios
.

For the first course, the theme was beef, the most expensive item on a tropical island menu. Drax served rump boiled, cheeks baked, chine roasted, breast likewise roasted, tongue and tripe minced and baked in pies seasoned with sweet herbs, spice and currants: in all, fourteen varieties of beef.

The plates were cleared away. After the glory of the steer, more humble beasts had an opportunity to show their worth: Scots collops (escalope of pork), a fricassee of pork, a dish of boiled chickens, shoulder of young goat dressed in thyme, a kid with a pudding in its belly, suckling pig – and on and on.

Finally, there were custards and creams, preserves of fruit, cheesecakes, puffs and more. To drink, there was the ubiquitous kill-devil, plus brandy, claret wine, white wine and Rheinish wine, sherry, Canary red sack, spirits from England, and ‘with all this you 181

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shall find as cheerful a look and as hearty a welcome as any man give his best friend’, reported a satisfied guest.

While the planters feasted, out on the island’s farms the African slave settled down to sleep on a plank in a dormitory, having feasted royally on a portion of his weekly allowance of a bunch of plantain. In his hovel, the European bond slave dined on potatoes and Indian corn, and perhaps some beans. No fine wines to sluice down this meal, though a spirit distilled from sugar was used as a medicine to revive those who developed a fever – a recurring hazard on the island. We don’t know how Drax treated his European and African workers. Perhaps he was better than some, or worse. Some indentured slaves were treated kindly. In 1657, a planter bequeathed to his servant Desmond O’Doyle ‘my best suit of clothes and my best hat’, plus six months off if he proved a dutiful servant to the departed one’s wife. However, plantation workers were generally dealt with in a more perfunctory manner.

Ireland, with its ready supply of young men with little adequate employment, became a labour exchange for the Barbados sugar industry, although Scottish youths were in even more demand.

The need for labour on Barbados outstripped supply from the British Isles. In 1646, the government published a memorandum to encourage the trade in servants and in 1652 an act was passed allowing two or more justices to issue a warrant for vagrants and beggars to be shipped to the colonies, whether to island colonies or America.

Due to the political turmoil of the seventeenth century, many Irish and Scots were banished to Barbados for political or religious reasons. If they could only get through their seven years or so of labour, they hoped, then
arbeilt macht frei
– work might set them free. If only. For them, Barbados was a penal colony. Those who worked their indentured years here were not part of a plan to create an empire through settlement. No, they were simply part of a mercantile plan to develop capitalism on the island. Their role was purely that: to work and, through their labour, create profit. In some colonies in America, the headright system placed the bonded workforce at the centre of a settlement plan. In Barbados, it made the worker a unit of production that had a monetary value. A new 182

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term entered the English language – to be transported to the West Indies was to be ‘Barbadosed’.

For much of our knowledge of the lifestyle of planters and their workforce in Barbados, we are indebted to the aforementioned Richard Ligon, who sailed from London on the
Achilles
on 16 June 1647. He wrote of his experiences in
A True and Exact History of
the Island of Barbados
. Ligon is an engaging travelling companion, who tells us he was forced to make the journey because he lost all his money in some ‘barbarous riot’ and is now compelled in middle age to try his luck again. In fact, Ligon was a Royalist supporter who seems to have lost his money and property in the Second English Civil War. Destitution staring him in the face, he found himself in the position of the character in the proverb for whom

‘need makes the old wife trot’ and he headed to Barbados to try his luck.

Ligon’s work is part traveller’s tale and part manual for those who would wish to start a sugar plantation. He describes how sugar was refined and details the economics of buying and running a plantation. To buy a 500-acre estate at the beginning of the 1650s, he explained, would cost £14,000. For this outlay, one could expect an annual gross profit, after operating costs, of £8,849. This return was estimated on good-quality sugar fetching three pence a pound in London and was only possible because the workforce costs were next to nothing. Thirty white indentured servants and 100 Africans would run the estate free of charge after an initial fee to buy them for a set number of years.

The cost of feeding the workforce was minimal since almost all their food was grown on the estate. Ligon carefully took note of the smallest details:

The servants built their own shacks and, as for their clothes, these are as rudimentary as decency and the climate will allow. The male servants receive shirts at four shillings each and drawers at 3 shillings. Their caps, if provided, cost 4s and shoes, if they are given any, 3s. The women are given petticoats at 5s a piece and smocks at 4s.5

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If they served in the farmer’s house, the women were provided with a waistcoat and a nice cap. The African workforce was even more simply provided for, with drawers for the men and petticoats for the women.

Their upkeep was subsidised by their children, who were sold from planter to planter ‘like hogs’. Ligon estimated the total cost of the workforce per year was £1,349, leaving a net profit of £7,500.

Of course, there were risks. Ligon points out that health was an issue: ‘Sicknesses are there more grievous, and mortality greater by far than in England, and these diseases many times contagious.’

An English mercenary soldier passing through Barbados in the seventeenth century wrote:

This is the dunghill where our England doth cast forth its rubbish. Rogues and whores and such like people are those that are generally brought here; a rogue in England will hardly make a cheater here; a whore if handsome makes a wife for some rich planter.

Those who first made a go of the frontier life must have been made of stern and determined stuff to withstand the rigours of climate and the unknown. When the small holdings of the pioneers gave way to the large sugar plantations, life for the few became agreeable and the rough and tough men without capital drifted to other colonies such as Virginia or Rhode Island in search of a living and a dream. For those with capital and a hunger to make quick money, Barbados became the Mecca of the west:

A man that will settle here must look to procure servants, which if you could get out of England for 6 or 8 or 9 years time only paying their passages, or at the most but some small above it, it would do very well.6

And so it would. By doing our own sums, we can cast new light on just how well the indentured-labour system benefited the sugar manufacturers. From his notional labour force and total annual profit, we can work out that Ligon’s labourers contributed £57.69

of annual profit each to the planter.

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From this, we can extrapolate that, thanks to the low one-off cost of buying a labourer, a planter would expect a profit of around

£230 over four years or £288 over five years. All this profit could be gained because of the servant’s want of £6 or so for a ticket. By Ligon’s figures, the servant earned that for his master in thirty-eight days. If we consider the price the planter might have paid for a servant – to err very much on the high side, say £20 – we can work out that a servant would earn that for his master in 126 days.

And remember, overheads were low: a servant’s clothing cost only a few shillings, they built their own huts and their simple food was grown on the estate.

How different it all could have been if the plantation owner had paid a wage to his workers. If so, it might have been at the typical seventeenth-century English farm labourer’s rate of ten pence to a shilling a day – or about £15 a year.7 This would mean that over a four- or five-year period of indenture, total wages would amount to no more than £60 to £75. In such a case, the four-year profit margin from the labourer’s work would drop from £230 to £170, and over a five-year period from £288 to £218. From these figures we can see that the economy of the sugar industry on Barbados in the mid-1600s did not rely upon the indentured-servant system

– it used it to create a class of slave labourer whose efforts boosted profits rather than merely making the colonial enterprise possible.

Let us consider if there might have been another way in which migration of the impoverished masses might have been managed.

What if the penniless migrant had been advanced credit with which to buy his or her own ticket? This is not such a fanciful idea for its time as might at first appear, for in the eighteenth century a form of credit system did evolve. If an equitable form of credit had been available, it is reasonable to suppose that a labourer might have been able to pay off the price of an Atlantic voyage sooner than the periods of indenture then operating. On a wage of £15

or so per annum, a thrifty labourer could perhaps have paid back the lender over time. For a skilled man such as a carpenter, in 1642 earning up to £25 or even more, the task would have been proportionately easier. Given the levels of profit made from the exertions of each labourer, it is perhaps also worth considering 185

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whether or not a notional level of pay for an agricultural labourer in Barbados might not have been considerably higher than the current rate in England.

The servant was made to work for anything from four to seven years, or even more. The fact is that the indentured-labour market was a crude racket and the servants were coerced and conned into unnecessarily lengthy periods of slavery just as in Maryland or Virginia. The indentured servant did not simply sell his or her labour for a period of time to pay off the cost of a sea crossing; the circumstances they encountered in the labour market forced them into giving a substantial period of their productive life to another for free. In his ground-breaking book on slavery, Eric Williams pointed to the many differing types of servitude and bondage, being careful to make distinctions between them and what he saw as the true slavery suffered by Africans – a life term that was inherited by their children.8 While this was definitely the worst situation of all, it was worse by degree rather than by intrinsic nature. It has been argued that since the indentured servant was not born a slave, this was sufficient to differentiate him from one.9 The lengths to which some previous writers on this subject have gone to separate out servitude from slavery seems to us to miss the point that there were, and are, different types of slavery.

In Barbados, the illegitimate children of servants were forced to work for nothing but their food until they were twenty-one.

Other methods were used in the attempt to keep servants for longer than the period of their indenture, including adding years on for infractions of the endless rules that governed their lives.

Many of these rules can be seen as being deliberately irksome, so that servants were likely to break them at some point.

At the conclusion of a servant’s indentured term, his master was usually obliged to give freedom dues comprising a sum of money, some implements and clothing, a piece of land, or even some configuration of all three; in practice, this hardly happened. By the 1640s, the plantation owners had taken over most of the good land on the island. It became difficult for newly freed servants to set up a farm. The former servant would find that he or she had to work for a plantation owner for a subsistence wage. In this way, the 186

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labour force was effectively kept in thrall to the plantation owners for life. In 1676, the island’s Governor wrote: ‘As for the lands in Barbados, I am confident there is not one foot that is not employed down to the very seaside.’10

Ligon describes the position of each person in the social strata of Barbados:

The island is divided into three sorts of men, viz. Masters, servants and slaves. The slaves and their posterity being subject to their masters for ever, are kept and preserved with greater care than the servants, who are theirs but for five years, according to the law of the island. So that for the time the servants have the worst lives, for they are put to very hard labour, ill lodging, and their diet very slight.