Caribbean (32 page)

Traveler, you who sail into the Caribbean in silvered yacht or gilded cruise ship, pause as you enter these waters to remember that deep below rest three men of honor who helped determine the history of this onetime Spanish Lake: Sir John Hawkins, builder of the English navy; Sir Francis Drake, conqueror of all known seas; and Admiral Ledesma, stubborn enhancer of his king’s prerogatives and the interests of his own strong family.

^*1
Shitfire.

^*2
A ducat was worth five shillings sixpence, so Drake was asking for £275,000, which in today’s values would be not less than $13,000,000.

B
ECAUSE THE ISLAND OF
B
ARBADOS
,
A PLACE OF HEAVENLY
beauty, lay so far to the east of that chain of islands which mark the boundary of the Caribbean, and so far south of the ocean currents that ships naturally followed when setting out from Europe and Africa, Columbus did not discover the island on any of his voyages in 1492–1502, and it remained unknown for decades. A few Arawak Indians reached there, finding refuge when the terrible Caribs ravaged the other islands, but long before the white man arrived, they appear to have died out.

It was not till very late, 1625, that the waiting island, unpopulated but extremely rich in soil, was seriously taken note of by a chance English trader, and two more years passed before an orderly settlement began. Because this paradise waited so long for the white man to arrive, many believed that the best of the Caribbean had been saved till last. Although lying some hundred miles to the east and not actually a part of that magical sea, it was, nevertheless, widely regarded as one of the loveliest of the Caribbean sisterhood.

Like the Arawaks before them on Dominica, the English settlers shied away from the violent waves and storms of the windward, or Atlantic, side, clinging by preference to the warm and congenial western side facing the glorious sunsets. There, along the shores of a
small and not too well protected bay, a collection of rude houses took shape, eventually to be called Bridgetown, soon to be famed for having one of the most civilized sites in the Caribbean: a curving beach marked by swaying palms, tidy little streets lined with low white houses built in the Dutch style, an industrious population, a small church topped by a tiny steeple, and in the background, a rise of low hills, brilliantly green after a rain. It was even in those early years a village that made the heart expand with a warm assurance when one saw it for the first time from the sea: “Here’s a town in which a family can be happy.”

In the early 1630s a small group of hardy emigrants from England toiled in the fields back of town to raise enough crops to feed themselves yet be able to ship an excess back to England in exchange for the goods they needed: cloth, medicines, books, and such. The cultivation of the three crops that were wanted by traders in England—cotton, tobacco and indigo for the dyeing of cloth—involved such brutal work that the early colonists quickly devised a plan whereby they could supervise their plantations with some ease while others did the work. They imported penniless young men, often from southwest England or Scotland, to serve as bondsmen for five years, after which the young fellows would be given a small amount of cash plus title to whichever five acres of unoccupied land caught their fancy.

In the first group of indentured laborers, as they were legally termed, appeared a surly young chap from the north of England, John Tatum by name, whose passage from Bristol had been paid, as was the custom, by the wealthiest of the Barbados tobacco planters, Thomas Oldmixon. The relationship between the two was never a happy one. Oldmixon was a rotund, hearty man, with a booming voice, red face and the habit of clapping his equals on the back and regaling them with stories that he considered rib-tickling but whose point his listeners usually failed to catch; with his inferiors, and he had so categorized his indentured servant Tatum, he could be brusque and even insulting.

During the five years that Tatum was required to serve—no pay, a dank room, miserable food and not even the work clothes that other masters provided their servants—Oldmixon was vigorously engaged in acquiring additional fields, which meant that Tatum had to fell trees, pull stumps, and till new fields for planting. It was such harsh work for no visible return that he generated a bitter hatred of Oldmixon, and one Englishman in Bridgetown, who treated his indentured
men more humanely, predicted: “Before Tatum finishes his stint, we could see a murder at Oldmixon’s.”

But the next year, when Tatum’s servitude ended and he had selected a choice five acres east of Bridgetown, one of those trivial accidents occurred which alter the history of islands. An English ship on the way to Barbados with a fresh supply of white indentured laborers came upon a Portuguese vessel whose crew was engaged in selling Negro slaves from island to island, in the same way that farmers’ wives in Europe peddled their husbands’ vegetables in town from one dwelling to the next.

The Englishmen, always looking for a chance to earn an honest shilling, attacked the Portuguese slaver, won the sea battle, and found themselves with a cargo of slaves that had to be disposed of. The first available port was Bridgetown in Barbados, and there they off-loaded not only the indentured workers intended for the island, but also eight black Africans. An auction was held on the steps of the church in the town square, with Thomas Oldmixon purchasing three of the slaves, and his recently freed bondsman, John Tatum, spending the first money he ever had in Barbados to acquire one for himself. Each of these canny men realized at the first sight of these powerful black men that money could be made from their services. Thus did slavery begin on this exquisite island.

In these years Bridgetown was becoming an increasingly delightful place in which to live: the white Dutch houses now had roofs of red tile surreptitiously imported from Spain; new streets were being opened, some with spacious parks set among the houses; mahogany benches had been installed in the church; and even a small shop had been opened by a widow who sold goods “imported” from all parts of Europe. The Dutch architecture and the smuggling were easily explained, and appreciated by everyone in Bridgetown: the settlers had turned to the Dutch when avaricious English traders, hungry for every shilling they could squeeze from their colonies, persuaded their Parliament to pass laws obligating the settlers to trade only with English firms and at whatever prices those firms decided to establish. Those same preposterous mercantile laws were already beginning to rouse protests in other colonies like Massachusetts and Virginia. Lucrative trade with suppliers in France, Holland, Italy and Spain was forbidden as was trade among the different colonies themselves; a
would-be merchant on Barbados was not allowed to deal directly with a manufacturer in Massachusetts, much to the disgust of established men like Oldmixon or those just starting out like Tatum. To aggravate matters further, the English firms frequently failed to deliver their expensive goods, thus leaving the settlers doubly frustrated.

The solution was simple. Dutch trading ships, captained by men of extreme daring and commercial competence, ignored the English laws, sailed where they pleased, became remarkably skilled in evading English patrol ships, and conducted their smuggling operations on a vast scale. Barbados survived for two reasons: sensible English government abetted by capable Dutch semipirates. Whenever the settlers in Bridgetown saw the Dutch ship
Stadhouder
edge surreptitiously into port under the expert guidance of Captain Piet Brongersma, smuggler extraordinary, they knew that goods they needed would now become available, and they applauded his coming, even going so far as to post sentries on the headlands to alert him in case a British warship approached unexpectedly. Then all the Dutchmen on Brongersma’s ship would leap into action, weighing anchor and hoisting sail, and sometimes within minutes the speedy
Stadhouder
would be safely out to sea before the English warship arrived.

In this easy manner, without any shots being fired, honest men thrown into jail, or bitterness engendered, life proceeded: Thomas Oldmixon gathered new fields year after year; to his five acres John Tatum brought a sturdy English lass, who gave him a daughter, Nell, and two fine sons, a very sober-sided Isaac and a rambunctious Will; governors came from England, some sagacious, some pathetic, as in all colonies; and the slave population increased because numerous babies were born to those already on the island, and Dutch smugglers kept slipping in more slaves from Africa.

There were two developments which worried thoughtful men in both Barbados and England: with the slow depletion of the soil, it became more difficult each year to grow the basic crops, tobacco being especially destructive. In London traders affiliated with Barbados saw with dismay that year by year tobacco from the island was becoming inferior to that grown in competing colonies like Virginia and Carolina, while Barbados cotton simply could not compare with that grown in the more easily cultivated fields of Georgia. In 1645, when Oldmixon saw how little his factors in London had remitted from the sale of his tobacco and cotton, he told his fellow planters:
“We’re sliding downward. Worse every year. We must find some new crop, or we sink beneath the waves.”

All agreed that Barbados would find a new crop to prolong its prosperity. This general optimism was well voiced by Oldmixon one day when he went to the harbor to greet a new settler who had come from Sir Francis Drake’s old bowling ground, Devon. As he walked the newcomer through the clean streets of Bridgetown, pointing out the red-roofed Dutch houses, he recited a litany: “Have you seen a better island than ours? A finer town? Here you can feel the peace and ease. You’ll see the little churches that mark our crossroads. My friend, this is Little England, and some of us believe it’s better than the big one.”

This phrase was remembered, and in time it became the accepted description of Barbados: “Little England, forever loyal to the homeland.”

There had been one ugly moment in 1636 when the authorities clarified a matter which had been causing some concern. At that time the nature of slavery had not been clearly defined: neither the slave nor the master knew for sure how long the term of servitude was intended to last, and a few generous-hearted Englishmen argued that it was for a limited period only and some went so far as to claim that any child born to slaves on the island should be free from birth.

Authorities put a quick halt to that heresy: they passed an ordinance stating that slaves, whether local Indian or African, served for life, as did their offspring. Only a few slaves were aware that the new law had been passed, household servants mostly, so it did not occasion any island-wide protest, but those who did understand chafed under the realization that their servitude would never end.

Gradually, these few dissidents began to infect many of the island blacks, and by 1649, a vague subterranean sense of unease had spread through the entire community without the white masters being aware of the change. The racial composition of the island had altered radically in recent years, for when the law of 1636 was passed, Barbados had few slaves and mostly white indentured workers in a total population of only six thousand. But by 1649, there were thirty thousand slaves on the island as against almost the same number of whites, so that the slaves judged they had a chance for victory.

Among them was one of the Tatum slaves, a clever Yoruba named in his homeland Naxee and by his classically trained Barbadian owner, Hamilcar. In both Africa and Barbados he had shown a
marked capacity for leadership, and had he been a white man emigrating from Europe to a colony like Massachusetts, he would surely have played a significant role in the political development of his colony. On Barbados, because he was black, he had no opportunity to contribute his skills, so in despair he began secretly to organize a rebellion against the irrational deprivations he suffered.

He was a tall, robust man with sparkling eyes and commanding voice, and so persuasive that he quickly enlisted a dozen supporters, each of whom enrolled four or five others who could be trusted, and the night came when he revealed his gruesome plan.