Five of the Leewards, 1834 1870: The major problems of the post-emancipation period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts 0602215870, 9780602215873

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DOUGLAS HALL

Five of the Leewards 1834-1870

CARIBBEAN HISTORY MONOGRAPHS

NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

FIVE OF THE LEEWARDS 1834-1870 The emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies preluded a social revolution and the resultant problems of the Emanci¬ pation in five of the Leeward Islands - Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts - are compared in this volume! Antigua dispensed with the Apprenticeship in 1834 and the other islands followed after a few years. The ambivalent status of the ex-slaves in Barbuda, where the whole island belonged to the lessee, was not resolved until Barbuda came under the jurisdiction of the Antiguan Legislature in 1858. The labour-intensive sugar industry was economically important to the islands but with freedom, many of the ex¬ slaves withdrew their labour, and others cooperated in col¬ lective bargaining, especially during the crop season. The free coloureds became more powerful, and among the ex¬ slaves friendly and benefit societies and other institutions came into being. These developments, together with the removal of the British preferential trade rates on West Indian sugar and increasing competition from slave-grown sugar in other islands, produced a new economic crisis. This social and economic study by Professor Hall provides a valuable addition to our knowledge of West Indian history and an insight into problems, some of which, even today, are still seeking resolution.

CARIBBEAN HISTORY MONOGRAPHS

are published by Caribbean Universities Press on behalf of the Department of History at the University of the West Indies. Five of the Leewards

is the first title to be published in this series. Other history series being developed are: REPRINTS CHAPTERS PAMPHLETS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND DOCUMENTARY THE JOURNAL OF CARIBBEAN HISTORY

(itwice yearly, May and November)

The members of the Editorial Committee are: DOUGLAS HALL, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY ELSA GOVEIA, PROFESSOR OF WEST INDIAN HISTORY F. ROY AUGIER, SENIOR LECTURER IN WEST INDIAN HISTORY

FIVE OF THE LEEWARDS 1834-1870 The major problems of the post-emancipation period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts

DOUGLAS HALL

ba msc PhD

Professor of History University of the West Indies

CARIBBEAN UNIVERSITIES PRESS

He 1ST

-L4H3

First published by Caribbean Universities Press Devon House, Rockley New Road, St Laurence 4, Barbados © Douglas Hall, 1971 ISBN o 602 21587 o 037106 Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark, Ltd. Edinburgh

Distributed by Ginn & Company Ltd., 18 Bedford Row, London WCiR 4EJ

Contents

Preface

ix

One

Conditions and questions, 1834

Two

Emancipation or apprenticeship?

Three

Wage labour and the labouring classes

32

Four

Barbuda: private property

59

Five

Sugar: production and profitability

96

Six

Commerce and enterprise

128

Seven

Governments and the public welfare

147

Select Bibliography

181

Appendix A Antigua estates

185

Appendix B Import duties on selected items

204

Index

1 18

207

257335

,

List of tables

1

Rough estimates of populations (thousands) in the Leeward

2

Islands Sugar (muscovado) duties and prices in Britain, 1820-33

3

Island accounts of Nichola Town Estate, St Kitts

4

Return of total acreage of provisions grown on 50 (of 197)

5

Migrations of people from the Leewards to Trinidad (1839

6

to July 1846) Number of people connected with churches, schools and

7

friendly societies, 1845-6 Daily rates of money wages to first-class field workers and

8

Various prices quoted in St Kitts or Nevis about 1850

9

Average annual duties on British colonial sugars, protection

Antiguan estates

the trend of sugar prices, 1839-70

against foreign sugars, prices of muscovado sugar and quantities imported (tons) into Britain, 1831-61, over 4-year periods 10 Mr Shand’s figures of average costs of production of sugar n

on his Antiguan estates Illustrating the growth of the market for sugar in Britain,

12

1848-^61 Percentages of the British market taken by cane and beet sugars

13

Products of Monserrat exported in 1846

14

Leewards Islands: representation of the people, 1838

15

The composition of legislative councils, 1868

16

Analysis of votes of Leeward Island councils on federation, 1870

Appendix A Antigua estates Appendix B Import duties on selected items

'

Preface

As a Resident Tutor in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of the West Indies in 1955-7, I lived in Antigua and St Kitts and worked there and also in Montserrat and Nevis. As I came to know these islands I was struck by the very real social and economic differences between them. Yet in the 18th and early 19th centuries they had all been ‘sugar colonies’ (though Montserrat had been the least distinguished as such), ruled by their plantocracies and worked by slave-labour to produce sugar, rum, and molasses for the export-trade. And they all lie within a geographical circle of about seventy miles in diameter. I thought that a comparative study of their histories since the Emancipation would be both interesting and helpful to an understanding of their present separate circumstances. Later I visited Barbuda of which I had heard a great deal, but to which my work as Resident Tutor had unfortunately never taken me. The history of the relationship between Barbuda and Antigua, then, and still, a matter of high controversy in the two islands, intrigued me; and I determined to include it in my work, partly because it was so closely tied to the Codrington estates in Antigua, partly because it offered a contrast to the four other ‘sugar islands’ with their established forms of political and economic controls. But although my interest and intention remained strong, several years passed before I could complete the research and writing. A helpful travel grant from the Institute of Social and Economic Studies in the University of the West Indies enabled me to revisit the islands in 1959 in search of information and in each of them I was kindly helped by a number of people who gave time to discuss my work and allow¬ ed me to see and use private papers in their possession. My particular indebtedness to Captain Jack Wigley of St Kitts is apparent in the text and especially in Chapter Six. I take this opportunity to thank them all. Then, in the academic year 1967/68, the offer of a Commonwealth Visiting Professorship at the University of Exeter, gave me the opportunity to work on the materials I had been slowly gathering and to write the book. IX

Five of the Leewards I am grateful to the Department of Economic History of Exeter University for having nominated me, and for their hospitality while I was there; to the Council of Commonwealth Universities and the British Council for offering the award and for the smooth administration of it which enabled me to work undisturbed by negotiation; and to my own University and my colleagues in the Department of History who made it possible for me to accept the award. My account of the motives which led me to write it will explain some of the inadequacies of the book. It is not a history of the Leeward Islands after the abolition of slavery, but rather a comparative look at five of them. As is explained in Chapter One, the Leeward colonies at that time included Antigua, Barbuda, Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, St Kitts, Anguilla (politically annexed to St Kitts in 1825), and the British Virgin Islands. I have written only of the five I have visited, using them to illustrate some of the larger social, economic and political problems of the period, and to indicate the roots of those differences which, since 1834, have increasingly distinguished each one from the others. DOUGLAS HALL University of the West Indies Mona

CHAPTER ONE

Conditions and questions, 1834

At the time of the British abolition of slavery in 1834 the British Leeward Islands included Anguilla, Antigua, Barbuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica,1 Montserrat, Nevis, Redonda (a small, high, uninhabited rock), and St Christopher (St Kitts). In 1832 these islands had been brought together under the administration of a Governor-General of the Leeward Islands who was usually stationed in St John’s, the capital town of Antigua. It was the proposed policy of the British government that a federal government should be established and that a federal legislature and certain federal officials, such as law and financial officers, should undertake the general government of a Leeward Islands colony. This proposal was, about the time of the emancipation, being stoutly and successfully resisted by the established legislatures of the individual territories who were un¬ willing to relinquish any of their local powers and prestige. In this account we shall be concerned, in the main, with Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts. Anguilla and the Virgin Islands, to the north, are excluded because they do not lie within the small area of exclusive British control in the Leewards, and because they were never seriously or lastingly developed as sugar islands. Dominica, south of Guadeloupe, is excluded because by all but administrative arrangement it belonged in the group of Windward Islands rather than in the Leewards. Of the five islands with which we shall deal all but Barbuda were legis¬ lative colonies. Under the over-all supervision of the Governor-General, who also acted as Governor of Antigua, they maintained their individual Governors or Presidents appointed by the Crown, and their elected Assemblies and nominated Councils. Barbuda, however, was an adminis¬ trative relic of the past. It was a proprietory estate, having no local govern¬ ment whatsoever, leased by the Crown, since 1685, to the Codrington family who paid an annual rent of one fat sheep, if demanded 2 Barbuda was never a 'sugar island’, but it was developed as a supplier of slaves, livestock, timber and foodstuffs to the Codrington estates in Antigua, and 1 Brought administratively into the Leeward group in 1832. 2 C.O. 7/41, History of the lease of Barbuda to the Codringtons, enclosed in MacGregor to Aberdeen, 16th May 1835.

Five of the Leewards the history of the two islands is interwoven. Though they lie close to each other the islands arc physically dissimilar.3 Montserrat, 39 square miles in extent, is volcanic. It is an exceedingly hilly island dominated by four peaks: Silver Hill, rising to 1,285 ft in the north; Centre Hill, rising to 2,450 ft; and the two Souffrieres of 3,000 ft and 2,500 ft in the south. A narrow ring of coastline surrounds uneven countryside marked by steep spurs and ravines and around the main hills the land rapidly rises and falls between heights of 600 and 1,200 ft. The upper slopes are well-wooded, the north-easterly trade winds deposit an average annual rainfall of over 50 inches in the central and most cultivable areas, and there are a number of small streams. But it is not good sugar-estate land. The terrain is too rough, costs of labour and transport are thus enhanced, and soil erosion is a constant menace to be countered. Yet, in the 18th and early 19th centuries sugar-estates had been planted and worked by slaves, and in 1834 Montserrat was still counted a sugar island, though not so rich a one as its neighbours. Antigua is larger, 108 square miles. The south-western third of the island is volcanic, and, in 1834, was heavily wooded and comparatively thinly occupied. This is the hilliest part of Antigua, the land rising to 1,300 ft above sea-level. In the centre of the island a flat narrow strip oi deep clayey soil runs between Five Islands and the St John s area in the north-west down to the sides of Willoughby Bay in the south-east. In the northern section of the island limestone uplands reach a height of 300 ft. In these central and northern areas the sugar-estates and the cattle pens flourished when there was enough rainfall. Too low to break the rain-bearing winds, Antigua’s annual rainfall averages about 45 inches and has often been devastatingly less. The sugar-planters of this otherwise highly cultivable island have always prayed for rain. North of Antigua lies Barbuda, 62 square miles of flat, thinly-soiled limestone. In the north-east, coral terraces lift up to a maximum height of about 200 ft above the sea. The rainfall averages about 35 inches a year. The droughts are often prolonged. This was never the land for sugar. It was profitable because of its usefulness as a supplier of slaves and stores, and because the coral reefs which almost surround the island offered the hazards of wreckage to seamen and the profits of salvage to its lessee. South-west of Barbuda is St Kitts, only 6 square miles larger, but always since its first settlement incomparably wealthier. Like Montserrat, St Kitts is entirely volcanic with three groups of peaks ranging even higher, between 3,000 and 4,300 ft above the sea. But unlike Montserrat the lower slopes in St Kitts are smoother and more accessible to cultivation. 3 For all the following geographical details I am indebted to John Macpherson s Caribbean Lands, A Geography of the West Indies, Longmans, 1967, 2nd edition. 2

Conditions and questions The island is shaped like a tadpole. In the main body of it the high peaks are densely forested but below the half-way line cultivation begins and runs steeply but smoothly down to the sea. In the southern ‘tail’ of the island there is a lower, bleaker, aspect. There the highest peaks reach only to 1,200 ft and this area has never been highly cultivated. In the driest parts of St Kitts the average annual rainfall is about 40 inches, but over most of the main part of the island it is closer to 70 inches. This is, and always was, recognised as a sugar island of superior sort whose only real limitation is its small size. Nevis, across a narrow channel, is smaller still. It is another volcanic island, of 36 square miles. Almost circular in shape, Nevis is dominated by its high peak (3,200 ft) almost always capped by cloud. Like St Kitts, it enjoys a good annual rainfall, and its mountain slopes are gentler than those of Montserrat. But it is an island strewn with boulders long ago hurled down its sides by volcanic eruptions. Sugar-planters and others have long known that farming in Nevis begins and ends with the digging out of rocks and stones. In 1834 this too was a sugar island which had pro¬ duced and supported considerable private fortunes.* In 1622, on the break-up of an English colonizing attempt in Guiana, a small group of the colonists led by Thomas Warner had sought new and peaceful fields where they might plant tobacco. Warner had heard of St Kitts, small, fertile, and far from any legend of El Dorado. In 1623 he arrived there with his companions and came to a peaceful agreement with Tegreman, chief of the Carib Indians on the island, by which the English¬ men settled and planted their first crop. Two years later, a French privateer¬ ing ship, damaged in a fight with a Spanish galleon, put in to the island for repairs. The Frenchmen met the English settlers, were impressed by the possibilities of a successful tobacco colonization and, with Warner s agreement, Pierre D’Esnambuc and his crew remained in the island. The English had established themselves in the centre, above Old Road; the French settled on the two extremities. Combining forces, they drove the Indians out. From St Kitts, the English settlements spread to Nevis in 1628 and to Antigua and Montserrat in 1632. From St Kitts, the French spread out in the mid-i630s to settle Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica. English and French colonists were not able, in the days of highly competitive empire-building, to live peacefully together for long. In St Kitts, the English were twice driven out and twice restored in the remaining years of the 17th century, but by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 St Kitts became exclusively an English colony. Subsequently, except for very temporary alarms and excursions, the four islands remained in British possession. Barbuda, never colonized in the sense that the others were, was ♦ R. Pares, A West India Fortune, Longmans, 1950.

3

Five of the Leewards developed from 1685 as a property of the Codrington family who owned estates in Antigua. At first, these Leeward colonies were planted in tobacco. Then, with growing success, cotton was produced for export. Finally, about the middle of the 17th century, sugar was introduced with the assistance of Dutch merchants and Barbadian planters who had learned the skills of sugar production at Pernambuco, the sugar-producing area of Portuguese Brazil, which was occupied by the Dutch from 1624 to 1654. Rapidly increasing tobacco production in the English colony of Virginia on the American mainland made the market for that crop decreasingly profitable. Before the end of the 17th century it had ceased to be an important cultivation in the Leewards. Cotton lasted longer, encouraged in the 18th century by an increasing demand for raw material from the growing British textile industry; but in this too the American mainland competition had become overwhelming and by the end of the 18 th century, cotton production in the Leewards had also practically disappeared. From the time of its introduction, however, the production of sugar had grown by leaps and bounds and by the mid-i8th century the islands had become established as sugar-plantation colonies. The growth of sugar production brought such fundamental economic, social and political changes that the period of transition, in the second half of the 17th century, from the emphasis on tobacco to the establishment of sugar has come to be described as the era of the ‘sugar revolution’.5 Sugar production is both an agricultural and a manufacturing enterprise. A factory is necessary. A factory requires assured supplies of raw material. The raw material of the sugar factory is the sugar-cane. Thus, large areas of land must be planted in cane. This requires a large labour force to be constantly available to the sugar-planter for agricultural and manufactur¬ ing employment. All of this requires considerable capital investment in land, labour and equipment. In economic terms, sugar production led to the disappearance of the small cultivators, the amassing of comparatively extensive landed properties, the raising of large sums of money, and, since other sources of labour supply were inadequate, the importation of slaves from West Africa. Gradually, a small class of wealthy sugar-planters, for the most part financed by English merchant-capitalists, had emerged as the economic elite. In social terms, the previously greater egalitarianism among white, pioneering, small cultivators was displaced by the clear division of society into well-defined classes. At the bottom was the rapidly growing slave population, their numbers increasing not by excess of births over deaths 5 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, London, 1657, describes the beginnings of the change.

4

Conditions and questions but by importations. They were the property of their masters. In the view of their owners they were capital equipment, working stock, to be pur¬ chased, maintained in working condition, and eventually to be replaced. But they were also, obviously, people. Slave-owners had sexual inter¬ course with slaves, producing coloured children. White masters were not always disposed to use their children, even those bom of slave-women, as slaves. They sometimes freed them and tried to make some provision for their future well-being. Some who could afford to be generous sent their coloured children to England to be educated. A class of Free Coloured people began to grow. Its numbers were added to by children born of Free Coloureds and slaves and of Free Coloureds themselves, and by the very occasional manumissions of adult slaves. But these people could form only an intermediary group in the slave society. Being free, they stood above the slaves; but by reason of their colour and their origin they stood below the whites. The status of the wealthy whites as the social elite was unshaken. In political terms the growing profits of sugar aroused the interest of the English government in colonies which they had previously been content to farm out to ‘proprietors’.6 This had simply been a means of achieving colonization cheaply. The proprietors were responsible for the financial success of the settlements they sponsored, and for establishing the govern¬ ment of their colonies by local legislatures. But by the middle of the 17th century European nations had become increasingly jealous of their colonial preserves. Each wished to exclude the other from any share of its colonial wealth. Thus, by the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660, the English acted to exclude foreigners, and they were chiefly concerned with the Dutch who had significantly introduced and financed the early sugarproduction in Barbados and the Leewards, from the English colonial trade. The colonists objected to this interference from England, but they eventually yielded to greater force, and the governments of the various colonies came directly under the authority of the Crown. They would maintain their elected Assemblies, but Governors would henceforward be appointed by the Crown, and the nominated Councils would be appointed by the Governors.7 As part of this new arrangement, which was not totally unwelcome since it secured firm titles to land and elimi¬ nated quarrels between colonists and competing proprietors counter¬ claiming proprietorships over various islands, the colonial governments

%

agreed to pay to the Crown a tax of 4 percent of all exports in return for 6 J. A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietory Patents, London, OUP, 1926. 7 A. P. Thornton, West India Policy under the Restoration, Oxford, Clarendon Press,

I95 41/94/41> 4I/99/2> I0> 27J 41/100/2’ 41/103/7, 8, 12, 16; 41/106/1, 2, 24, 26, 28; and others. FL H

31

103

Five of the Leewards daughters, Elizabeth and Theodora Duer, by their grandfather’s will, were to receive settlements of £2,000 each; two other children, John, and Mary who was married to Charles Creswell, were not mentioned in their grandfather’s will. When Roland Duer, Snr, died, he also left settlements of £500 each, on his daughters Elizabeth and Theodora. All these settlements, now totalling £5,000, represented, at 6 per cent interest, an annual charge of £300 a year on the estates. Also, when Roland Duer, Jnr, died, the entail was broken, the estate passed to his brother John, and additional provision was made for his sisters Elizabeth and Theodora Duer, his married sister Mrs Mary Creswell, and his cousin Mrs Eliza Richards who was the daughter of his previously disinherited uncle. These four ladies were to receive annuities of £50 a year each. Added to the previous settlements, there was now an annual charge on the estates of £500 a year. When John Duer died, he left an additional annuity of £50 a year to his sister Mary Creswell, bringing the annual charge on the estates up to £550. The Misses Theodora and Elizabeth Duer and their sister Mrs Mary Creswell were named co-heiresses-at-law and the estates came under the control of the Court of Chancery. Under the Court’s sanction Mr Charles Creswell was to act as administrator. From this year, 1828, onwards the story becomes more complicated by the necessary intro¬ duction of other people involved. Messrs Manning and Anderdon, London merchants, were the consignees of the produce of the Duer estates, and Messrs Frere, Forster of Lincolns Inn were the legal representa¬ tives of the Misses Elizabeth and Theodora Duer. As had happened with many other West Indian estates, the annual returns from Big and Little Duers had declined during the years of depression following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. More and more, the merchants, Maiming and Anderdon, had been called on for advances of money to finance production. By November 1830 they were pressing for the sale of the properties and they wrote to Mr Creswell giving their reasons. The estates had in the past three years yielded practically nothing. In 1828 the net proceeds from the sale of produce had been £730) in 1829 £600; and in 1830, absolutely nothing. Against this, there were the fixed claims of the Misses Duer and Mrs Creswell amounting to £550 a year. In addition, there were outstanding debts of £1,000 plus interest to a Messrs Ridge and Company, and £12,340 to Manning and Anderdon themselves. Messrs Frere, Forster seemed to agree with the idea that Maiming and Anderdon should themselves be allowed to take possession: 104

Sugar: production and profitability I have long thought that Messrs Manning desire to get the Estate into their power, and I believe that if they had it they would manage it very differently and probably make it productive; that it never can be to Dora and Elizabeth I am sure nor to anyone succeeding them nor do I believe that if they sacrifice themselves to keep a claim to the principal of their fortunes their Nephews and Nieces can benefit by it. I should therefore endeavour to make a bargain of Life Income for them to be secured by Messrs Manning in England, and probably Mr Creswell would do so for his Wife as to her annuity.

But in 1831 Manning and Anderdon, who had been investing heavily in West Indian estates, declared bankruptcy and the long correspondence of claims, counter-claims, demands and explanations, was entered into by their assignees Messrs Oliverson, Denby and Lavie.10 There is no need to go further. Already in difficulties, the Duer estates still faced emancipa¬ tion and free trade. In the remainder of the 19th century they continued their unprofitable way, through various transfers of title, piling up the costs of lawyers’ fees and litigation, and scattering a trail of documents. The main point is that in the post-emancipation period there were estates which, however well-favoured in location and potential productive capacity, were too much burdened by the costs of settlements and annuities made in optimistic times and debts contracted in unprofitable times to be successfully transformed into competitive production. Out of the brief story, however, another matter emerges. Manning and Anderdon and Frere and Forster both were of the opinion that the former would manage the estates very differently and make them once again productive. This opinion rested largely on the very real interest which Manning and Anderdon held in the estate and on their very long experience of dealings with proprietors and planters in several British Caribbean colonies. The Duer ladies were concerned primarily with their incomes and secondly, by derivation so to speak, with the condition of the estates from which those incomes were expected. Manning and Anderdon had both a direct interest, as merchants dealing in the produce of the estates, and a derived interest as creditors. The Duer ladies had seen statements of account of their family s estates; but, though Theodora Duer demonstrated a very sharp eye for business, they probably did not know the difference between a sugar-cooler and a clarifier. Manning and Anderdon certainly did. They purchased machinery for their clients, they were knowledgeable about items which appeared on the inventories of estates, and they were well acquainted at second-hand with the processes of sugar-production and at first-hand with the financing of it. Even so, .oRB Sheridan, ‘The West India Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830^1833’ in the Journal of Economic History, December 1961, briefly discusses the affairs of Messrs Manning and Anderdon in the crisis. 105

Five of the Leewards they were not on the spot, in the West Indies, and there were people, such as Charles Pinney of Nevis, who were understandably pessimistic on the eve of emancipation: My opinion I suppose differs from others, for I observe Mr Manning’s mercantile house is renting and purchasing a number of estates in St Kitts, they may make a considerable sum by this speculation, for most of their purchases have been made on reasonable terms, but unless one of the firm come out to judge of local circumstances, etc., they may lose considerably, the expense incurred on an estate in Nevis by the Messrs Mannings will I venture to predict never return one shilling.11 His opinion was sound. Manning and Anderdon went into bankruptcy. After the emancipation it became common among visitors to the West Indies, and in the Colonial Office, to deplore absentee-proprietor¬ ship and to insist that resident-owners would be far better placed to carry out the business of tightening efficiency and reducing the costs of sugarproduction. The opposition to this view came from two quarters. There had emerged in the sugar-colonies a growing class of professional estatemanagers and attorneys. Some of them were estate-owners in their own right, some were not; but all prided themselves on their skills as sugarplanters and deeply resented any suggestion that greenhorns from England or anywhere else could do better than they. In principle, they were correct. Managerial skills are not necessarily combined wdth proprietary rights. The other opponents of the claimed advantages of resident-proprietorship were absentee-proprietors who had no intention of going to sweat it out in permanent residence on their West Indian estates. One of the most notable of these, with large interests in St Kitts, was Mr Benjamin Buck Greene, merchant and shipowner, proprietor and lessee in 1848 of eight estates,12 and the consignee of the produce of several others. He knew St Kitts. He had lived there from late 1829 to early 1839 as a manager of estates during the period of emancipation and apprenticeship. He had managed sixteen estates producing over one-quarter of the total sugar output in the island.13 Greene produced statistics of areas under cultivation and sugar produced on all estates in St Kitts, and from them drew the conclusion .. . that the Residents hold nearly half the Estates, with more than two-fifths of the Cane-Land, producing four-fifteenths of the Sugar made in the Island. The ” Quoted by R. Pares, A West India Fortune, Longmans, 1950, p. 311. 12 Nichola Town, Farm, Molineaux, Mansion, Hope, Phillips, Spooners, and Godwins. 12 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Greene, 6088-95. 106

Sugar: production and profitability absentees hold rather more than half the Estates, with less than three-fifths of the Cane-Land, but making eleven-fifteenths of the entire Produce.14 His figures showed that 27 resident proprietors and lessees operated 59 estates containing a total of 7,000 acres of cane-land which, on annual average over the previous five years, had produced a total of 1,492 tons of sugar; whereas 67 estates, owned or leased by absentees,15 and contain¬ ing 9,770 acres of cane-land, had produced on average over the same period 4,107 tons of sugar annually. There were, in addition, 23 estates not in cultivation, 17 owned by residents and 6 by absentees. At first glance these details seem to provide clear substantiation of Mr Greene’s proposition; but certain qualifications and closer examination are fruitful. The main qualification is that Mr Greene was not discussing the relative merits of resident and

absentee-proprietorship as social

systems. His very limited concern was to show that the estates of absenteeowners produced more sugar than those owned by resident-proprietors. He was discussing St Kitts as a sugar-island, and he did not therefore ask certain very relevant questions such as whether the devotion of residentproprietors to sugar-production was as exclusive as that of absenteeproprietors. The absentee-owner regarded his Caribbean estate as a source of income to be derived from sugar production. His first concern was with the financial return it yielded. The resident-proprietor, however, expected and received other rewards of a different kind. As a resident property-owner he enjoyed a certain social and political status in the island. His estate could provide, apart from sugar, rum, and molasses, food for his family, space and facilities for recreation, a personal and patronising relationship with his workers, and that very real, intimate, and pleasing sense of proprietorship which the landowner can feel only when he stands on his land. A good deal has been written about the distinctions between the essentially commercial and economic nature of estate operation and the much broader social, political, and economic nature of hacienda operation in Latin America. It seems not an unreasonable proposition that a resident-proprietor even in the sugar colonies had much more of the ‘hacendado’ in his attitudes and expectations than an absentee-proprietor 14 Select Committee, 1848. Statements submitted by Mr Greene in opposition to the evidence of Mr Pickwood, who had told the Committee ‘... that the great evil with which St Kitts had to contend, was that of absenteeism, and described the resident

proprietors as doing much better than the agents of absentees, is He did not say how many, but they were probably fewer in number than the residents. In any case, his figures cannot be credited with exactitude. He admitted that his figures of sugar produced were based on his intimate knowledge of the trade rather than on factual account, and he can be shown to have erred about the pro¬ prietorship of some of the estates. 107

Five of the Leewards would have had. The real ‘pay-off’for the absentee was largely measurable in cash; for the resident, the cash was certainly very important but the ‘pay-off’ included other important things as well. And this suggests other interesting and relevant questions about the attitudes and managerial practices of those who were at the same time resident-proprietors and also attorneys for absentee-proprietors. Nonetheless, no proprietor, absentee or resident, could afford to keep an estate in sugar production if he could not sell the produce. In order to do this, especially after 1846, costs and prices had to be reduced to meet increasing competition. While, in 1848, planters in Antigua and St Kitts were claiming that it cost them between 18s and 21s to produce one hundredweight of sugar, comparable qualities of Cuban and Puerto Rican sugars were being sold at prices ranging from ns 3d to 13s 9d (f.o.b.) at Havana and St Thomas.16 At the same time, capital needed for improve¬ ments in agriculture and manufacturing was scarce and was certainly beyond the command of those, like Mr Davoren and the Duers, whose estates were already indebted and otherwise financially encumbered. For those who sought advice there was plenty to be had. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution had developed mechanical and engineering skills; and agricultural practice, reformed in the 18th century, was now in the 1840s beginning to benefit from the work of the natural scientists. Books and theses on the agricultural and the manufacturing processes of sugar-production were being published. The authors were chemists, engineers, economists, sugar-refiners, and even sugar-planters. Estateowners, and sometimes colonial legislatures, were employing ‘engineers’ to come out to the West Indies and advise on the introduction of steampower, on railway-building, on the provision of water-supplies to towns, and other matters.17 Generally, they pointed to the losses incurred by wastage. Even without very large expenditure a careful planter might reduce his costs. In agri¬ culture, for instance, too much emphasis was given to the quantity of cane grown per acre and too little to the sugar content of the cane. Thinner planting, a better application of fertilisers, and the use of agricultural machinery for ploughing, harrowing, and weeding, would not only save labour and reduce costs but also produce a richer quality of cane. In the mill-house, produce was lost if the cane-juice was not sufficiently 16 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Greene, 6107, 6188, and 6096; Tollemache, 7970-7972. >7 The St Kitts Legislature, for example ‘... engaged a civil engineer at a salary of £500 a year’ for three years \ . . for the purpose of promoting any improvements in machinery that he might suggest.’ Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence, Greene, 6130.

108

Sugar: production and profitability extracted. The best answer was a more powerful mill, but much might be gained simply by checking frequently that the rollers of the existing mill were tightly braced. One author claimed that in Madeira, where he had operated a small cattle-mill with horizontal rollers, he had extracted nearly thirty per cent more juice by tightening them.18 These and other comparatively small improvements might yield benefits, but there was general agreement that the greatest advantages could be won only by the expensive introduction of steam-power and new machinery in the factories. The main hindrance to agricultural improvements was not cost but tradition. Ploughs, harrows, weedingmachines, wheelbarrows, were well within the financial reach of all but the impoverished die-hards. But, as another author pointed out, there were two classes of estates: those on which the plough could be used, and those on which it could not. For the latter there was no hope.19 In December 1845, when reports from Antigua and St Kitts told of the general and successful introduction of agricultural machinery, there was still not a plough to be seen in Montserrat or Nevis.20 Factory improvement was a far more costly and difficult business, and here, for the first time, the planters became clearly aware of the concept of ‘optimum size’ in their operations. A small estate, producing a small quantity of cane, simply could not support the heavy investment which would be required to refit the factory and equip it with the latest machinery. The critics claimed that although sugar-cane was made up of 10 per cent of fibre and 90 per cent of juice the most efficient wind or cattle-mills expressed little more than half of that.-1 Then, through imperfect methods of boiling and curing, only about one-third of the sugar contained in the juice ever reached the market.22 They were a little imprecise in their calculations. The fibre percentage, for instance, clearly depends on the species and quality of the cane, and to fix it at 10 per cent is misleading; but this did not detract from the basic validity of their criticisms. There certainly was wastage. Even when the sugar was cured and the hogsheads shipped it was not uncommon for a loss in weight of 5 per cent to be incurred in transit across the Atlantic as molasses leaked 18 W. J. Evans, The Sugar Planter’s Manual, London, 1847, pp. 76, 81. ■ 9 Leonard Wray, The Practical Sugar Planter, London, 1848, chapter 3. 20 C.O. 7/83, Cunningham to Gladstone, 26th March 1846, enclosing reports for the period July-December 1845. , - W. j. Evans, op. cit., p. 75 , J- Scoffem, On The Manufacture of Sugar, London, 1849 pp. 74-84; W. Reed, The History of Sugar and Sugar Yielding Plants, London, 1866^ p. 98; J. A. Leon, On Sugar Cultivation in Louisiana, Cuba . .. etc., London, « A.’ W.1 Anderson, Notes on the Sugar Cane, and the Manufacture of Sugar in the West Indies, Trinidad, i860, p. 19109

Five of the Leewards from the improperly cured muscovado on to the floor of the ship’s hold.23 More powerful mills, driven by steam, would express more of the juice from the canes, nearer 70 or even 80 per cent instead of 50.24 In the evaporation, since heat is destructive to sugar, the introduction of the vacuum-pan boiler allowing evaporation to occur at a lower temperature would save loss incurred in the use of the old-fashioned open ‘coppers’.25 In the curing process, the centrifugal drier, rapidly spinning, would hurl the sugar hard against its inner wall and force the remaining molasses out through tiny perforations in the wall.26 The result would be a drier, better quality sugar, and less loss by leakage during shipment. Not all the critics agreed. There were long controversies about the merits of various substances which might be used as ‘clarifiers’, added to the juice in its first heating in order to bring about the separation of impurities in it; and some were less enthusiastic about the vacuum-pan. One writer argued that some molasses should be left in the sugar because buyers seemed to prefer a darker sugar, and the seller would benefit by getting sugar prices for molasses.27 Nonetheless, there was sufficient consensus of criticism to influence the planters, and those who had money, or prospects of credit, scanned the advertisements of new machinery. The prices were discourag¬ ing. A high pressure steam-engine with 16-inch cylinder and a mill with extra rollers would cost about -£1,250. Steam-heated clarifiers, made of copper, 46 inches in diameter and 42 inches deep, were about £^400 each. A vacuum-pan, depending on size, would cost £400 to

£t>ooo.28

These

were only some of the more important items. There were others, and there would be the costs of shipping and installation. It was not, however, simply a matter of first cost. The new machinery would be expensive, and very difficult to maintain in good working order in the West Indies. Some of it, like the centrifugal drier, needed motive power which the factories could not provide unless they were equipped with powerful steam-engines; some of it, like the vacuum-pan, was so costly that it was thought uneconomic on estates making less than about 375 tons of sugar a year,29 and no single estate in the Leewards produced that quantity. It was important, in order to avoid wastage, to achieve the right proportions between supply of canes, maximum mill23 W. J. Evans, op. cit., pp. 168, 214. 24 W. Reed, op. cit., p. 98; W. J. Evans, op. cit., p. 75. 25 J. Scoffern, op. cit., pp. 59-61. 26 N. P. Burgh, A Treatise on Sugar Machinery, London, 1863, pp. 1-2. 27 J. Scoffern, op. cit., pp. 105-110. 28 These prices are taken from N. P. Burgh, op. cit., pp. 51-3 and Leonard Wray, op. cit., chapter 3. Other items are listed by both authors, but neither of them gives the price of the centrifugal drier. 29 Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, 1835-1865, New Haven, 1959, pp. 74-5. 110

Sugar: production and profitability power, and boiling-house capacity. Too much cane or too little cane, relative to the capacity of the mill, too much juice or too little juice, relative to the capacity of the boiling apparatus, or inadequate extraction of juice from the canes - any one of these could lead to loss. Expensive mills, and boiling and curing-house machinery did not match small caneareas and scarce or irregular labour supply. The innovating planters in the Leewards generally contented themselves with field improvements; and, having installed a small steam-engine to turn the mill, carried out minor reforms in the boiling-house such as installing new ‘coppers’ and aligning them in new ways so as to save fuel. There were exceptions, some of which aroused amusement rather than imitation: Two engines have been erected for the manufacture of sugar by steam in place of the old method by the action of fire, and are reported to yield a commodity of a very superior quality. I must not omit to mention a ponderous machine lately imported, which is said to be intended for the improved manufacture of sugar, but, like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, the shippers appear to have overlooked the means by which so cumbrous a body was to be transported to its place of destination, and, after many ineffectual attempts by the aid of men, horses and cattle innumerable, it has been left by the roadside, within half a mile of the city, until, as I understand, some adequate locomotive power can be supplied from the place of its embarkation.30 And, even after 1846, there was the occasional spark of new enterprise. One gentleman, Mr Fryer, acquired eight Antiguan properties31 with the intention of introducing a shortened manufacturing technique. The canejuice was to be brought as rapidly as possible by evaporation to a solid state of ‘sugar concrete’ which would be exported in blocks to Britain for processing and refining. A ‘patent concretor’ costing about £1,000 had been designed and was to be manufactured by Messrs Manlove, Elliott, and Company of Nottingham for Fryer’s Concrete Company which would establish the new production.32 Fryer was a leading advocate of the ‘concretor’; others showed interest; but the enterprise was not successful. It proved no cheaper to produce ‘concrete’ than ‘muscovado’ sugar, and refiners preferred the latter. And so, for several reasons, planters in the Leeward Islands, however enthusiastic they might have been, could not afford large-scale enterprise. In 1878 there were 35 steam-driven sugar mills in Antigua and 74 in 3° C.O. 7/82, Sir Robert Horsford’s Report on Antigua, 30th June 1845. Enclosed in Fitzroy to Stanley, 23rd August 1845. 31 Bendalls, Belvedere, George Byams, Bath Lodge, Halliday’s Mountain, Bodkins, Green Castle, and Rigsby’s. (Leeward Islands Almanac, 1879.) « W. Reed, op. cit., p. 98. Ill

•

Five of the Leewards St Kitts. This, especially in St Kitts, demonstrated the enthusiasm; but in small islands, on small estates, these were obviously small mills. Thirtyfive years later, two central factories in Antigua, at Gunthorpe’s and Bendalls; and one in St Kitts, at Golden Rock, were making most of the sugar produced in the two islands. In the boiling-houses, planters experimented with cheaper substitutes for the vacuum-pan, such as Gaddesden and Evans, or Schroeder s, disc pans, or Kneller’s concentrating pan, and a ‘vacuum-chest’ for the curing of sugar by using air pressure to push the molasses away from the crystals. None of these proved successful. ‘Crossley’s air-diffusing apparatus and Gaddesden’s Pan’ had both produced a better quality sugar by evaporation at a lower temperature, ... but whether the fault has been in the after processes and in the Curing House, or from the previous deterioration of the juices by overboiling in the old coppers before it was received into the low temperature ones, there has been a failure and the former at least has been given up. The Proprietor of the latter has imported a Knitters [sic Kneller’s?] Pan also in full confidence of success. The comparative failure of his Gadesden [sic] Pan he attributes to the heating surface being too large for the evaporating surface & which he will remedy. As for the curing process, all experiments with substitutes for the too costly Vacuum Pan’ had been unsuccessful.33 On his return from a tour of the islands in 1848 the Governor described Montserrat as the least prosperous and advanced of the islands under his authority; in Nevis, ‘Except by one Proprietor, neither the Plough nor any modern implements of husbandry have yet been introduced.’ In St Kitts, as in Antigua, he found general use of new agricultural machinery and a promising number of steam-mills, ‘. . . but in my opinion neither here nor in any of the other Islands, is sufficient attention directed to the process of manufacture.’ He admitted that there had been experiments, but many ‘intelligent planters’ seemed to prefer to stick to the old system.34 His assessment was accurate in all but his ascription of motive. The intelligent planters had yielded to circumstance rather than to preference: The Sugar trade is throughout so dependent on a system of credit that when confidence is shaken the whole fabric totters. The majority of Estates are heavily encumbered, and very few of the Proprietors have Capital at Command, and the ruinous rate at which we are compelled to borrow, greatly augments the cost of production.35 33 C.O. 7/89, Higginson to Grey, 29th February 1848, enclosing reports for the period July to 31st December 1847. See Sir Robert Horsford’s report. 34 C.O. 7/86, Higginson to Grey, 17th April 1847. 33 C.O. 7/87, Higginson to Grey, 26th December 1847, enclosing a petition to Parliament from the Legislature of Antigua. 112

Sugar: production and profitability

Having little power to reduce costs by large improvements in their factories, the planters had reasonably concentrated on their fields, sub¬ stituting machines for labourers where possible, and, partly because cane¬ cutting machines were not available, by reducing wage-rates. In Antigua, wage-rates were reduced from is to 6d sterling a day. The planters, having agreed on this new level, explained to their employees that with current prices they could pay no more. On the understanding that when the market improved their wage-rates would be increased in proportion, the labourers quietly acquiesced.36 In St Kitts, the immediate reaction of the workers was less agreeable. They were accused of setting tire to canefields.37 In Nevis, where even 6d sterling a day was beyond the means of most planters, the estates began to employ labour on a crop¬ sharing, or metairie, system.38 In Montserrat, where day-labour was in any case almost unobtainable, most estates went out of sugar production and the few remaining either continued to offer job-work or tried to con¬ vert to metairie.39 There, of 75 estates of over 200 acres only 35 still grew cane; and of those, only eight were in dependable operation and paying wages regularly. Since 1845, 16 estates had been sold for recovery of local taxes. Hermitage, one of the largest in the island, had been sold together with four other large properties belonging to the Semper family, in 1845. In the next two years they were again on the market because of tax arrears. Hermitage went for sterling. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, on reading the reports on Montserrat, commented: This is indeed a most lamentable accoimt of the state of this colony, & it affords an additional proof of the unsoundness of that system of protection under which it has grown up.

Nonetheless, he instructed that in the answering despatch it should be pointed out \ . as little offensively as possible, that the ruin of the colony is attributable to the faults of the owners of property ...’ who did not pay wages regularly, permitted the continuance of the tenancies-at-will of their workers, and generally mismanaged the finances of the colony.40 This was official confusion at its height, or official hypocrisy. To have 36 c.O. 7/87, Higginson to Grey, 26th December 1847, enclosing Petition to Parliament from the Legislature of Antigua. See also Select Committee 1848, Minutes of Evidence, ToOemache, 7816-7834. 37 c.O. 7/91, Higginson to Grey, 7th August 1848, enclosing Returns from Mont¬ serrat, with reference to St Kitts. 3* C.O. 7/86, Higginson to Grey, 17th April 1847_ , 39 c.O. 7/86, Higginson to Grey, 7th June 1847, enclosmg Montserrat Blue Book ^OO^/Sp, Higginson to Grey, 10th March 1848, enclosing List of Montserrat estates. 113

Five of the Leewards openly admitted that British policy in the past had been disastrous for the colonies would have been to strengthen the present claims for assistance; and the proprietors, who were certainly not blameless in their attitudes and practices, provided a useful scapegoat. Metairie, or crop-sharing, relieved the planter of the necessity to find ready cash for wages. Instead of a daily or weekly wage, or cash for a completed job of work, the produce of the estate, or the proceeds of its sale, would be divided between the estate-owner and the labourers. The proportions varied, as did the detail and the extent of crop-sharing. In some instances, the system was applied to production as a whole; in others it was applied only to the manufacturing process, field-workers getting the current daily rate in cash. Clearly, also, its operation required previous agreement on the size of shares going to particular classes of workers and to particular kinds of skills. In general, however, the crop was divided either equally between workers as a whole and the proprietor, or with one-third going to the workers and two-thirds to the proprietor. In other circumstances, metairie might have been introduced and refined into a system having advantage for both employers and employees; but in the 1840s it was brought into service as an expedient, not as a pre¬ ferred way of doing things.41 The planters saw it as a means to labour which they could not otherwise afford. Simply, it meant that they got their labour on credit from their employees, with the protection that what they owed could not in any year exceed more than half of what the crop was worth. It was a useful device when prices were low and credit from the merchants was almost unobtainable. As prices rose, and credit was restored, crop-sharing would clearly lose its appeal as far as the planters were concerned. Labourers accepted the system with some misgivings. It was for them a practicable arrangement only if they could otherwise support themselves while waiting for the return. Moreover, if they took their share in produce they had to find a market for it; and if they took it in money they had to accept the planter’s accounting and to run the risk that he might default in payment. Metairie did not flatly reduce the cost of labour, it simply tied it, in a fixed proportion, to the prices obtainable for produce. In Nevis, where the system was most widely adopted, metairie provided a means by which the estates survived the lean years of the late 1840s and the first half of the 1850s. It did not make the Nevis planters more com¬ petitive with lower-cost producers elsewhere; rather it allowed them to absorb the heavy blows of competition. In Antigua and St Kitts, agricultural machinery had reduced the number 41 See Woodville Marshall’s discussion of the metairie system in the Windward Islands in The Jamaican Historical Review, Vol. V, May 1965, pp. 28-55.

Sugar: production and profitability of field labourers required for all but crop-taking, and the reduction of the basic wage-rates by 50 per cent had very significantly lowered the costs of production. But because the lack of capital restricted immigration schemes as much as factory improvement, the planters were now faced with the possibilities of labour shortage. Not only was the initial cost of importing labourers difficult to bear; it was also evident that fewer Madeirans, or others, would now be prepared to indenture themselves to work in islands where the wage-rates were so low.42 As for the supply of local labour, although it at first appeared that in Antigua lower wagerates would drive people to offer more labour in order to maintain their level of income, it soon became clear both in that island and in St Kitts that there was no sense of commitment to estate-labour or to the welfare of the planter-class. The second generation of free people had less of the old subservience than their parents did and were readier to choose idleness in preference to toilsome penury. The justices of the peace called this ‘moral degeneration’ and some of them toughened their sentences for minor convictions. Those who did not, it was said, saved their popularity and got more offers of labour for their estates than the others.43 But since they were paying the same wage-rates, it would appear that

moral

degeneration’ really meant the inability of some planters to face the facts that lower wage-rates are not as attractive as higher wage-rates, and that employer-employee relationships, like all other aspects of production, were also subject to change and in need of reform. By the early 1850s, although the strictures against the undependable young were gaining ground, the worst years of the post-1846 crisis had passed, prices were a little improved, and planters were beginning to raise wage-rates slightly in order to attract and hold more local labour. But at the same time they spoke of renewing the importations of con¬ trolled labour from Madeira, and the Governor’s expressed view that *. . . at existing rates, the Antigua peasant exacts very easy wages for capricious and perfunctory labour ... was intended to encourage them to demand higher productivity for higher wages.44 The planters had felt the need to discipline their own managerial practices also. The spendthrift days of careless expenditure on personal pleasures and conveniences were gone. It was perhaps less easy for the resident-proprietor to separate clearly his private and his business accounts. He was, usually, the manager of his own estate, but there is very little c.O. 7/91, Higginson to Grey, 7th August 1848. « CO 7/106, Hamilton to Labouchere, 10th May 1856, and 23rd May 1856. 44 C.O. 7/100, Mackintosh to Grey, 24th February 1852, enclosing report of a Joint Committee of the Antiguan Legislature on labour supply and the rates of 42

w ages.

1X5

Five of the Leewards evidence that he distinguished between salary and profit. What he clearly knew was that his ‘returns’ were not as they had been and, if he were wise, he sought to economise his personal spending while trying to reduce his average costs of production. For the absentee-owner, who employed a resident attorney or manager on his estate, the distinction was much clearer. But few absentees knew enough about life and labour in the West Indies to be able to do more than complain about declining profits. Those who did, understood that the costs of management might also bear examination and a few, such as Mr John Tollemache, a member of Parlia¬ ment and owner of five Antiguan estates,45 translated their thoughts into rules and regulations. In January 1847, Mr Tollemache had sent out very detailed instructions ‘to be strictly observed’ in the management of his estates. In large part they were intended to cut away the losses incurred by careless and expensive management. His merchants, Manning and Anderdon, had often told him how well his properties were supervised. They, as far away from the facts as he was, were eventually shown to have been mistaken. I constantly urged the attomies (when I saw the direction that free trade opinions were taking in this country) to economise, and I had letters from them informing me that they had carried economy to the utmost extent consistently with my interests. In 1846, however, I went out to the West Indies, and ... when I arrived there, I came to a very different conclusion. By doing away with managerial perquisites and reducing certain extra¬ vagant local expenditures he thought he would reduce his expenses by about .£1,000 a year.46 Not all absentees agreed that such savings were possible. Mr Greene, the St Kitts proprietor, was strong in his contention that the estates of absentees were better managed than those of residents, and Mr Francis Shand was quite certain that his were: You heard Mr Tollemache’s evidence; do you conceive that any such reductions of expense in the management of your estates can be made as those that he referred to? - I do not think so; I have had my estates under the hands of a gentleman who did not manage them exactly upon those terms.47 It is difficult to make any precise and trustworthy estimate of the extent to which all these improvements generally affected the costs of production. Each planter told his own story, based on his particular experience, but none could speak with exactitude of cost analyses or even of individual items of expenditure. The system of accounting, by which the costs of actual production were roughly stated by planters in the 45 Wctherell’s, Gamble’s, Glanville’s, Delap’s, and Lucas’s. 46 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Tollemache, 7812-7815. 47 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Shand, 8120.

Sugar: production and profitability

Caribbean and the costs of marketing were more precisely set down by merchants in Britain, did not lend to exact statement and examination. Generally speaking, the planters reckoned their average annual cost of producing a hundredweight of sugar in the crudest way. They divided the sum total of all expenses incurred during the year by the number of hundredweights produced and gave the answer. Thus, for instance, if in a given year a large sum was spent in the purchase and installation of a new mill, the total cost rather than the interest and amortisation charges would be included in the sum and the answer would be erroneously high. If, in the same year, output of sugar was low, say because of drought or flood, the answer would be astronomical. Francis Shand, merchant, ship-owner, and estate owner in Antigua, presented the figures in Table io to the Select Committee of Parliament in 1848. They were given as the average annual costs of producing one hundredweight of sugar on his estates in each year from 1832 to 1847* The most misleading aspect of figures such as these is well illustrated in some of the evidence given by Sir William Codrington before the same Committee. Codrington was being asked about his costs and his profits. Following the earthquake of 1843, he said, he had spent, over the next three years, a total of

£12,000

repairing damage and purchasing and

installing steam mills and other new machinery. In addition, 1845 had been a bad year because of drought. In consequence, his accounts had shown a clear profit of a clear loss of

£2,000

profit of about

£6,000

in 1844, a clear loss of

£600

in 1845 and

in 1846. For the 1847 crop he hoped to make a net

£1,700.

The Committee then asked if he would agree

that in the period 1844-6 there had been an extraordinary average annual outlay of £4,000. Fie agreed. So, they suggested, if he had had similar expenditures to make in 1847 his expected profit of

£1,700

for

that year would have become a loss of £2,300? He agreed.48 In short, within a period of three years Sir William Codrington’s estates had paid all their current costs, completely paid off a capital invest¬ ment of £12,000, and yielded him a net income of £3,400 after all. A glance at Mr Shand’s average total cost figures shows a close resemblance. He too would have been faced with extraordinary expenditures in 1844-6, and they are clearly reflected, absorbed in his average annual total costs. Then, for 1846, his figures reflect the cost of importing Madeirans at about £5 passage and provisions on board ship for each.49 Apart from bad accounting there were other reasons why those who wished to assess the planters’ financial position found it impossible to arrive at meaningful statements of costs. The variable factors: soil capability, 48 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Codrington, 8400-8425. •*’ Ibid. Shand, 8143-8144 and 8155-8161.

117

Five of the Leewards Table io Mr Shand’s figures ofi average costs of production of sugar on his Antiguan estates

(1) as percentage ofi (2)

Year 1832

—

OO OJ

Average total cost per cwt (2)

Average labour cost per cwt (1)

—

8s

—

Slavery

1834

—

5s 2d

—

Slavery

1835 1836

3s iod

8s 7d

44-7

5s ud

16s 2d

36-6

ns 4d id

Comments Slavery

—

( First year of wage-labour ■

Hurricane then drought \

1837

1 os 7d

1838

29s

id

36-9

4s 6d

7s 8d

1839

4s

7s 1 id

58-7 50-5

1840

7s 3d

15s

id

Contract Act in operation

48-1

Severe drought

1841

10s

id

12s 6d

80-7

Daily wage up from 6d to 9d

1842

12s 5d

15s 9d

78-8

Independent villages forming

15s iod

56-3

Earthquake in February

23s

id

48-0

Repairs in progress

1843

8s 1 id

1844

ns

1845

ns 5d

19s 7d

58-3

Severe drought, then floods

1846

20s 9d

35S 6d

58-5

Shand imports Madeirans

1847

9s 6d

17s 1 id

53-i

Madeirans at work

Notes:

Columns 4 and 5 were not supplied by Mr Shand. During 1832-41 Mr Shand had been resident in Antigua. Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Shand, 8271.

Source:

id

rainfall, wind-force (for so many windmills), local labour supply, managerial skills, sugar prices, estate indebtedness, the availability of credit, were all significant and all affected individual estates in different degrees.50 The most that can be said is that proprietors of estates in Antigua and St Kitts, in 1848, seemed to think that, excluding charges on capital investment and the costs of shipping and marketing, it cost them about 18s to 2 is sterling to produce one hundredweight of sugar and they hoped to be able to bring that figure down to about 15 s.51 50 C.O. 7/90, Higginson to Grey, istjune 1848. 51 Select Committee, 1848. Evidence of Tollemache, Shand, Codrington, Greene (passim). Il8

Sugar: production and profitability A little more light appears when the subject is examined from the marketing end of the business. In September 1848, Messrs Thompson Hankey sold a consignment of 10 hogsheads of sugar (totalling 155 cwt 1 qtr 6 lb) for Messrs Wigley and Burt of St Kitts. Their account was rendered as follows.52 Credit

Debit

.£261 16s 3d

By sale of the sugar: To Customs duty

^101

To Freight and Primage

8s rod

31 4s1id

To Bond and Dock dues

19s

3d

To Warehouse rent

1

To Cartage, Porterage, Cooperage

1 ns 8d

To Weighing and Sampling To Fire Insurance

5s od 12s id 2s 5d

-

£i37 4s

To Bank’s Commission on ^137 4s 2d @ f% To Sugar Broker’s Commission on ^26116s 3d @

2d

6s iod 1

6s 2d

To Merchant’s Commission on sale ^261 16s 3d @ 2-|% 6 10s nd To Guarantee on ^255 5s 4d @ 1%

2 ns id

To Merchant’s general Commission @ 25%

6 10s nd

To Credit Messrs Wigley and Burt

£154 1 os id 107 6s 2d

^261 16s 3d

On the assumption that Wigley and Burt, who were estate owners as well as lawyers, were acting in their own behalf, and ignoring any charges for their services as shipping-agents, the sum of £107 6s 2d was available to cover costs of production, interest on capital invested in the estate, and depreciation, and to yield some profit to the owner. The quantity of sugar sold had beenjust over 155 cwt. Roughly, there¬ fore, the planter received just less than 14s a hundredweight, a hopelessly inadequate return if judged on the claim of actual production costs of 18s a hundredweight. But too much ought not to be read out of a single case, and there were other receipts to be considered. Planters who made sugar also made molasses, and most of them produced rum as well. These added little to costs and yielded some return.53 To some extent, Wigley Papers, no. 382. The form of the account has been altered for the sake of clarity. 53 During slavery, planters had generally counted on the proceeds from sales of rum and molasses to pay all the island expenses of sugar production, leaving the proceeds FL I

119

Five of the Leewards also, they allowed the planter a little space for manoeuvre, because he could, depending on their relative prices, choose to produce more molasses and rum and less sugar, or vice versa. Nothing seems to detract, however, from the basic proposition that in the late 1840s, following the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, the planters had cause to be perturbed about their future. Thompson Hankey’s statement of account indicates that the estateowner received less than half the market-price of his produce. This was commonly so and was a matter of general complaint.54 Indeed, farmers are almost always in protest about the high rewards taken by middlemen in the food trade; but the case of the sugar-planters in the mid-i9th century had its particular aspects. The basic objection was simply that the costs of shipping and marketing increased the price of sugar to the con¬ sumer and thus restricted the market. The customs duties were being reduced and the planters completely agreed with this policy except insofar as it applied to the removal of the colonial preference. In particular, . they objected to the fact that the equalisation would allow foreign-grown slave-produced sugars to enter the British market at the same rates of duty as their own. As the Antiguan Assembly told the Governor, a policy of free trade in free-grown sugar, whether British colonial produce or not, might at least be regarded as hostile to slavery; but the admission of slavegrown sugar at equal rates with free-grown seemed to betray the spirit of the recent British emancipation.55 Since the greatest and most immedi¬ ate rival of the British Caribbean sugar-producing colonies was Cuba, where slavery was still in existence, this argument had its economic as well as its moral implications. The British government’s attitude was that slavery in Cuba would best be broken by international political pressures and measures restricting the foreign slave-trade itself, rather than by denying the Cubans access to the British market. Since British exports to Cuba of industrial machinery and consumer goods were increasing and the importation of Cuban sugar into Britain was also increasing, this argument, too, had its economic as well as its other implications. The lowering of the sugar duties would make possible a lower price to the consumer; but because of the equalisation of them. West Indians expected from sales of sugar to pay for shipping and marketing, imports from Britain, and charges on capital. Francis Shand, for example, claimed that on two of his estates during 1831-4, the average cost of production ‘after deducting the molasses and rum’ had been 7s 1 id per cwt of sugar. (Select Committee, 1848, Minutes of Evidence. Shand 8094-8101.) s* C.O. 7/87, Higginson to Grey, 26th December 1847. See also Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, p. 87. 55 C.O. 7/87, Higginson to Grey, 18th November 1847 enclosing his addresses to the Council and Assembly and their replies. 120

Sugar: production and profitability to gain little by any expansion of demand in Britain when they had to compete, unprotected, against their foreign rivals. In accordance with the British Navigation Laws, British colonial produce had to be shipped to Britain in British vessels manned by British crews. Some West Indian planters complained that foreign transatlantic freight was cheaper than the British, and that this gave added advantage to the Cubans and others who used American and European rather than British vessels. Even the British ship-owners did not deny the claim. They pointed out, however, that British freight charges between the West Indies and Britain had declined from 6s to 5s a hundredweight by 1831,s6 and in 1848 it was 4s.57 They explained the higher British rates by reference to the lower costs of shipbuilding abroad and the lower costs incurred in the victualling and manning of foreign vessels,58 and in 1848 Francis Shand argued that the repeal of the British Navigation Laws to allow British colonial produce to be shipped on foreign vessels would benefit foreigners as much as West Indians, since foreign freight-rates would also fall.59 He was, it will be remembered, a ship-owner as well as a planter and what he lost on the roundabouts he would make up on the swings; but still, the logic of his argument is evasive. When the Naviga¬ tion Laws were repealed in 1850, in keeping with free trade policy and the removal of restrictions on commercial enterprise, the West Indians did benefit to some small degree; but in fact, because of their long-established British trading connections, and the relatively small attraction they offered to foreign shipping, they continued to use British rather than foreign vessels. In addition to lowering the costs of marketing in the obvious way, reductions of duties and freights also lessened the sums advanced by the merchants in payment of them and thus relieved the planters of some of the burden of interest charges. But in all of this, the actual financial gain to the planters in the British colonies was insignificant. Up to 1854 prices remained at a much lower level than they had claimed would offer them any reward. In mid-1855 prices rose sightly because of speculative buying on the knowledge that the total West Indian crop would be small. These higher levels were maintained during the years of the Crimean War, and 56 Statements, Calculations, and Explanations submitted to the Board of Trade Relating to the . . . British West India Colonies. Printed by Order of the House of Commons, February 1831. 57 Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Shand, 8175-8176. s8 Statements, Calculations, and Explanations . . . etc., 1831. This explanation referred to the building of wooden sailing-ships which still carried most trade. Later, with iron steamships, the British were to gain advantage. Timber was scarce in Britain. ” Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence. Shand, 8177. 121

Five of the Leewards then in 1859 another price decline set in. This was to be a prolonged depression of the market for West Indian sugars. The outbreak of Civil War in the United States in 1861 curtailed the American home market and diverted increasing supplies of Cuban sugar to Britain and Europe. In late 1863 a sharp flurry of speculation sent prices up for a few months; but in 1864 the duties on refined sugars entering Britain were reduced by 4s 4d and 5 s 6d a hundredweight and the invasion of the British market by bounded European beet sugar began. Prices in Britain remained low for the remainder of the 19th century.60 Fortunately for the planters of the Leeward Islands there was something in the structure of the sugar duties which was to their advantage and it was really this that saved them. There had been two basic features of the duties on sugars entering Britain: a very high protection for British as against foreign sugars; and a very high differential in favour of muscovado, or unrefined, sugars as against refined sugars. The first had been designed to protect the interests of British colonial producers; the second to protect the interests of the British sugar-refining industry. By the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, the first of these differentials was gradually removed; but the second remained. Customs duties may be levied for the purpose of revenue, or for the purpose of protection, or both. In free trade, revenue-tariffs are not necessarily abandoned, but protective-tariffs are. The fact is that by main¬ taining higher duties on refined sugars the British government offered protection to British sugar-refiners and, by doing so, did not really introduce complete free trade in sugar until 1874 when all duties were removed. Even after the reduction of 1864, mentioned previously, the duties on sugars entering Britain ranged from 8s 2d a hundredweight on the lowest qualities to 12s iod a hundredweight on the best refined. The new factory equipment which estate-owners in the Leeward Islands had, for various reasons, been unable to install - the large steampowered mills and steam-heated boilers, the vacuum-pans, and the centri¬ fugal driers - produced sugar of a superior quality which paid a higher customs duty and which was accepted directly by the British grocery trade without first passing through the refineries. The old-type cattle and wind-mills and the open coppers and coolers, with which many of the Leeward Island estates were still equipped, produced muscovado sugar; and the introduction of a steam-powered mill, unless accompanied by the new boiling-house equipment, made no difference to the quality of the sugar produced. Thus, the British sugar-refining industry remained dependent on these and other producers of muscovado sugar for their 60 W. Reed, History of Sugar and Sugar Yielding Plants, London, 1866, chapter 8. See also Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, Vol. 2 and Philip Curtin, ‘Sugar Duties and West Indian Prosperity’ in the Journal of Economic History, Spring, 1954. 122

Sugar: production and profitability raw material. After the Sugar Duties Act, new alliances evolved between the old-fashioned muscovado-producers and the refiners on the one hand, and the newly-equipped producers of refined or semi-refined sugar and the grocers on the other. There was a good deal of comfort for the Leeward Island planters in that situation: The facilities which now exist in the Mother Country for refining, and the cheapness with which on a large scale such operations can be conducted, pre¬ clude rivalry on the part of the Sugar producing countries in that branch of industry; and it is ascertained that the best of the lower qualities of sugar, which are in demand in England for refining purposes, are the most remunerative to the cane-grower. In a word, it is believed that within certain limits the object to be striven for by the Planter is quantity rather than quality of a higher grade.61 As long as the producers of muscovado sugar could not improve their factories sufficiently to produce a better quality of sugar they would support the continuation of protection to the British sugar-refining industry. At the same time, they strenuously objected to a similar kind of pro¬ tection given to farmers in Britain by regulations forbidding the use of sugar or molasses in breweries and distilleries in Britain; and to the brewers and distillers by deterrent customs duties on colonial rum. These regula¬ tions and duties were in fact shortly to be removed by Parliament, in part because of West Indian protest, in part as another step in the ending of protection to British agriculture which had begun with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845.62 But these, though necessary and desirable, were small concessions. The market in Britain was quickly expanding because of rapid population growth and a rising level of living.63 During the 19th century, sugar gradually ceased to have any pretensions to the luxury trade and became established as a general household commodity. In this growth of the market, the planters in the Leeward Islands, as was shown in Table 10, managed to maintain their output, but their share of the total business declined. From 1854 onwards, when the customs duties were equalised, it was foreign, and particularly Cuban, sugar which during the next fifteen years or so gained dominance in the British market. The ability of the Leeward Island planters to maintain their precarious place in the market was due primarily to their reduction of wages to the estate-workers. Labour cost represented nearly 50 per cent of the cost of making sugar,64 and by the lowering of wages and the introduction of 61 C.O. 7/106, Hamilton to Labouchere, 10th May 1856. 6i C.O. 7/86, Higginson to Grey, 17th April 1847; C.O. 7/87, Higginson to Grey, 18th November 1847; and C.O. 7/90, Higginson to Grey, 1st June 1848.

6* Philip Curtin, op. cit. 64 This is borne out in the evidence submitted to the Select Committee of 1848. 123

Five of the Leewards Table 11 Illustrating the growth of the market for sugar in Britain, 1848-61

Average

Year

Imports of sugar from Cuba

Average

Total

consumption

market price

consumption

per head

Unrefined

Refined

per cwt

(cwts)

(lbs)

(cwts)

(cwts)

38s 2d

6,142,296

25

694,203

40,629

1849

38s 3d

5,905,687

24

664,264

47,864

1854

32siod

8,208,758

34

1,598,993

66,113

1855

30

711,832

19,831

7,259,148

i860

40s 6d

8,506,882

34

1,382,398

22,869

1861

37S

8,937,302

35

2,046,210

16,506

Sources:

Columns 2 and 4: J. Russell, The Sugar Duties. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer, London, 1863. Columns 3, 5, and 6: W. Reed, The History of Sugar and Sugar Yielding

O 00

P-

1848

Plants, London, 1866.

labour-saving equipment, labour cost had itself been reduced by about 50 per cent. Other factors had contributed: agricultural methods had been a little improved, and with the introduction of steam-mills and lesser factory improvements the yield of sugar per acre of cane was a little greater than before. The costs of marketing their produce had also slightly declined. But essentially they depended on cheap labour. In the 1860s another advantage was provided by the West Indian Incumbered Estates Acts. These Acts of Parliament, supported by local colonial Acts, established special Courts for the relief of the proprietors of estates over-burdened with financial encumbrances, and set up a pro¬ cedure to be followed. First, the proprietor of an encumbered estate, or any of the claimants on it, should petitition the Court for the sale of the property. Following the Court’s approval, there should be due notice given to all claimants of the intention to sell. Then, after the preparation and verification of all the relevant documents, the estate should be sold by auction, with the purchaser paying the costs of conveyance. The purchase-money would be applied to the settlement of outstanding claims on the estate. Where it is apparent that the purchase-moneys will be insufficient to discharge more than a certain number of the incumbrances, it is unnecessary to carry the schedule [of encumbrances] beyond the claims of such parties as appear to have 124

Sugar: production and profitability a reasonable prospect of taking any benefit under it, leaving subsequent in¬ cumbrancers to intervene at their own risk, if so advised.65

After a final notice to all claimants the sale would be concluded and the estate would pass, unencumbered, and with clear and undisputable title, to the new proprietor. The advantages seemed clear enough. Up to this time transfers of landed property had been in many cases practically impossible because of ... the impossibility of getting rid of the past, and the necessity of explaining every minute circumstance attending an estate for a long space of years to a series of practitioners, every one of whom is bound, if possible, to find some cause of objection.66

There had, for example, been the prolonged correspondence between Theodora Duer, her lawyers, Manning and Anderdon, their lawyers, the Creswells, and their lawyers over Manning and Anderdon’s proposal to purchase the Duer estates; with each party pressing their own peculiar claims and privileges. The Incumbered Estates Act was brought into operation in St Kitts in March i860; in Antigua in November 1864; in Montserrat in Nov¬ ember 1865; and in Nevis in June 1867. The first estate in these four islands to be sold under its regulations was Hermitage, a property of 240 acres in St Kitts,67 sold in June 1864. In the next ten years 34 encumbered estates in Antigua, 10 in Montserrat, and 5 more in St Kitts, were sold under the Act.68 65 r j, Cust, A Treatise on the West Indian Incumbered Estates Acts, 2nd edition, London, 1865 chapter 3. 66 Ibid. Later, Governor Pine was to give an interesting opinion on the state of the law of real property in the West Indies. He argued that the tangle of complications about property should never have occurred: ‘It is from the earliest times of the law of England and of the colonies that plantations here were, as to liability for debt, in every respect to be treated as chattel, not as real property; and more than half a century ago the highest authorities in the mother-country declared that, by the law of England, there was no analogy between a farm in England and a plantation in these colonies; and that in consequence a Hen for the working expenses of the estate takes precedence of ah charges whatever. And yet ... in the presence of this over¬ ruling common and statute law of England. ... landed property here has been sub¬ jected to entails, to remainders, to reversions, and ah the other subtleties of the English law, when, as to estates of any value, ah these things can be swept away in an instant by the consignees’ hen.’ (C.O. 7/139, Pine’s Address to the Legislative Council of Antigua, 23rd June 1870). The Governor was making the point that the Encumbered Estates Acts had created no new situation, but merely facihtated the true existing law of real property. . Not to be confused with Hermitage Estate in Montserrat, previously mentioned. 6s r j. Cust, Supplement to a Treatise on the West Indian Incumbered Estates Acts, London, 1874. 125

Five of the Leewards But even for the new owners with untrammelled titles and unen¬ cumbered properties the worst was yet to come. By 1880 a new crisis was upon them. With British free trade in sugar a number of European governments began to subsidise and then to pay direct bounties on exports of beet-sugar.69 Table 12 Percentages of the British market taken by cane- and beet-sugars

Percentages Cane-Sugar

Percentages

British Produce

Foreign Produce

Beet-Sugar

1852

84-7

13*4

1*9

1880

28-4

41-0

20*6

100

21*1

64*1

100

1890 Source:

14-8

100

G. Eisner,Jamaica 1830-1930, Manchester Univ. Press, 1961, p. 277.

At the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s, however, the beet-sugar invasion was still not more than a threatening cloud on the horizon; and for some, such as the Montserrat proprietors, despite some apparent improvement, there was not much remaining in the sugarmarket that could be threatened. By 1849 direct trade between Montserrat and Britain had practically ended; the greatest proportion of Montserrat’s trade was with neighbouring islands; and such sugar as was produced was sent in small boats to Antigua and St Kitts for re-export to Britain.70 For Nevis, the threat seemed to contain greater substance. Most estates there had scraped through the lean years by adopting the metairie system of production. Output had decreased, profits had been negligible, but by dint of spending nothing proprietors had hung on to their estates. Then, in 1859, following the short period of slightly encouraging prices, a Barbados proprietor, Mr T. Graham Briggs, described a decade later as the richest man in the West Indies,71 purchased a number of Nevis estates. He quickly became the largest proprietor in the island72 and set 65 Especially Germany and France, but other countries were also involved. See R. W. Beechy, op. cit., chapter 8. 70 C.O. 7/92, Higginson to Grey, 10th March 1849. 71 C.O. 7/140, Pine to Kimberley, 12th December 1870, and Colonial Office comments. 72 By 1871 he had acquired the following estates: Hamilton’s, Stony Grove, Tower Hill, Round Hill, Old Windward, Shaw’s, New River and Cocoanut Walk, Golden Rock, Fothergill’s, Australia, Old Manor, Indian Castle, Morgans, and Douglas; i.e. 15 of about 90 estates in Nevis. 126

Sugar: production and profitability about to lead the way in sugar production by attempting the introduction oflabour-saving implements, paying regular wages to his employees, and improving agricultural skills. He won the unreserved acclaim of at least one writer: ... the influx of capital, the extension of cultivation, the introduction of machinery and implements of husbandry, all branches of industry have bounded forward, and a voluntary immigration has increased the number [of workers]; and there is a prospect that a special aid promised by the local government to organise a stream of a more active tide will in a short time make a radical total exceeding 20,ooo.73

But that was in the early 1860s and Mr Briggs’s new enterprise had coincided with the decline of sugar prices during the American Civil War. The optimism was unfounded. By June 1866: Mr Briggs. . . whose investments . . . some years ago really gave [Nevis] the little activity it has since displayed will throw his Estates into pasturage. The importance of this proceeding to the Island is shown by the fact that Mr Briggs spends in labour and Salaries some two hundred pounds a week. Messrs. Ewing of Glasgow have also given orders to their Agent to call in their Mortgages and withdraw their capital.74

Prices were low, competition was becoming keener, and those who were still committed to sugar-production in the British Caribbean were concentrating their interest and their investments in those acres in which labour was not only cheap, but also regularly available, in which the estates could bear advantage from agricultural

and manufacturing

improvements, and in which the local government was both competent and firm in the protection of their interests. In the Leeward Islands during the 19th century, these criteria ruled out nearly all but Antigua and St Kitts. There, in the early 20th century, with the concentration of ownership of estates in fewer hands, the establishment of central factories, the advantages of freedom from past legacies of debt and encumbrances, and the ending of the competition from European bounded sugars, the industry was to revive. But by then, the estates in Montserrat would have been turned to the production of other crops and those in Nevis would have become suppliers of cane to a central factory in St Kitts. Such sugarproduction as remained in those two islands would be for local consump¬ tion only, and would remain of 19th century muscovado quality. 73 John Alexander lies, An Account Descriptive of the Island of Nevis, West Indies, Norwich, England, 1871. lies had been Colonial Secretary and ajustice of the Peace in Nevis during Mr Briggs’s energetic endeavours. 74 C.O. 184/14, Pine to Cardwell, 26th June 1866.

127

CHAPTER SIX

Commerce and enterprise

We are essentially an Agricultural country. The Professional man - the Mer¬ chant - the Shipowner - the Banker - the Retailer - the Mechanic - the Field Labourer - ay and the Public Servant too, are all directly or indirectly dependent on the produce of the soil.1

Spoken by the Governor in Antigua, in 1847, those words were true of all the Leeward colonies at the time and remain relevant even today. But they do not now mean quite the same thing. In 1847, when the Governor of the Leewards spoke of ‘agriculture’ he thought of estate agriculture; when he spoke of‘the produce of the soil’, he referred to sugar, molasses and rum. His declaration rested on the fundamentally conservative assumption of planter-dominated legislatures that if those staples went all would go with them. It was certainly not easy to see what new commodities might ever match the once-golden profitability of sugar. The estate-interest remained identified as the island-interest, and scant attention was paid, when, on rare occasions, some other view was suggested. In January 1852, the Antigua Weekly Times commented on a recent Report of a Joint Committee of the Antiguan Legislature on the island’s labour supply: We have, on the one hand, properties yielding no return, worked by 6,000 people; and on the other, an independent cultivation by 9,000 labourers, who are so far successful as to place them above the local demand continually made by the estates. There is, at least on one side, and on the side of the larger number, prosperity.

Moreover, the paper continued, these people must be better off than those working on the estates. Can the island, therefore, be said to be less prosperous, than it would be, were the receipts or incomes of these 9,000 free [i.e. self-employed] labourers diminished?2 1 Higginson to Grey, 18th November 1847, enclosing his addresses to the Houses of the Antiguan Legislature and their replies. 2 C.O. 7/100, Mackintosh to Grey, 24th February 1852, enclosing the Report of the Joint Committee on Labour and Wages, and extracts from the Antigua Weekly Times.

Commerce and enterprise Here, apparently, was a clear argument that in discussion of the general economic well-being the distribution of wealth was at least as important a consideration as the quantity of wealth.

Antigua

might indeed be

poorer, but most ‘Antiguans’ might be better off than before. The observation carried little weight in high places. It was too funda¬ mentally egalitarian to find support in a traditionally hierarchic society and it rested on notions of a large and prosperous peasantry which were no longer compatible with economic thinking in Britain. Even in the Antigua Weekly Times itself, the argument was not pushed to its logical conclusions. Since the 9,000 ought not to be expected to give up their more remuner¬ ative small-cultivations for estate-labour, then, the paper lamely con¬ cluded,

what was needed was immigrant labour,

combined with

managerial energy and enterprise, and blessed with rains and right good will. In this environment of strong sense of commitment to sugar-production the efforts of those who sought to establish new agricultural enterprises were given unenthusiastic attention, and they all failed. The reasons for failure were various. In some instances, those who had ideas needed capital which was not forthcoming. President Hamilton, in Montserrat in 1835, for instance, anticipated the collapse of many of the sugar-estates and proposed [the] placing under cultivation, by free labour, those large tracts of arable and wood lands now lying waste at the north and south divisions of this Island, and which are well calculated for the growth of coffee, cotton, indigo, tobacco, com and ginger, and pulse of all kinds. To accomplish this great good, pecuniary means are of course required, and without the generous and liberal assistance of His Majesty’s Government for that purpose, this very desirable object cannot be accomphshed. There were other possible developments suggested by Hamilton: grape culture in the south-west, potteries and brick-works in the interior, and livestock farming in the north.3 But, as with later proposals made for the creation of new enterprise in Barbuda and Anguilla, the British government was not, in the mid-i9th century, prepared to engage in the financing of economic development schemes. Nor, as President Hamilton had implied, was private capital available. With few exceptions, those who had capital were either putting it into the improvement of the sugar-estates or withdrawing it from the Leeward Islands altogether. One of the most notable of these exceptions was Mr Francis Burke, the J C.O. 7/41, MacGregor to Aberdeen, 18th March 1835, enclosing the report of the President of Montserrat. 129

Five of the Leewards resident-proprietor of Dwyers estate in Montserrat, who between 1839 and 1845 tried unsuccessfully to introduce silkworms and establish the production of silk.4 In this, the limits of government assistance were clearly established. The British Foreign Office, at the request of the Sec¬ retary of State for the Colonies, instructed consuls in France and Italy to obtain silkworm eggs and ship them to Mr Burke in Montserrat.5 At first, all seemed to go well. The mulberry trees flourished and a wooden¬ framed cocoonery was erected. On the last day of November 1839, the first batches of silkworm eggs to arrive in good condition were delivered to Mr Burke. Then the disappointment began. The eggs did not hatch. Mr Burke complained that he lacked information, especially about the transportation and treatment of silkworm eggs. The Secretary of State tried to help further: he arranged for reports of experiments in silkculture to be sent from Martinique and Guadeloupe to Mr Burke and he asked the Foreign Office to lend its assistance in finding skilled Europeans - ‘Lyonnese accustomed to the care of silkworms’ - who might be sent to Montserrat. Meanwhile, Mr Thomas Shirley Warner, the Stipendiary Magistrate in the Island, had visited the cocoonery and seen diseased worms hatched from the eggs brought from Europe. He reported that The Director . . . was closely watching the manifestations of the illness, from which some creole worms, that is worms hatched from eggs laid in this country, were wholly exempt. Mr Burke was keeping detailed and precise records which he would readily make available to others. A few samples of white and yellow reeled silk were now on the way to the Colonial Office. But the venture failed. Mr Burke lacked information, expertise, and the large capital needed to import them. In his report accompanying the Montserrat Blue Book for 1845, President Baynes remarked: The efforts to introduce the silkworm into this colony, are said to have failed. I doubt much whether it had had a fair trial. . . . The bad quality of the eggs seems to have been ... the cause of failure. They were procured from various quarters and had perhaps been injured in the transmission, or were too old ... [and, whatever the reason, had] ... produced a sickly worm.6 4 A similar attempt made at about the same time in Jamaica also failed for much the same sorts of reasons. See Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, chapter 4. 5 Eggs were received from Ancona, Trieste, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Guadeloupe. 6 For reports on the silk-culture see C.O. 7/64-83 containing the Reports of Mr Thomas Warner, the Presidential reports accompanying the Blue Books, occasional notes from Mr Burke; and summaries of reports by Colonial Office staff. 130

Commerce and enterprise We know now that even if Mr Burke had been successful the economy of Montserrat would not have been lastingly established; but that is not the point. In the 1840s, encouraged by American demands for raw silk, landowners in several Caribbean islands turned to attempt its production. In all cases they were eventually defeated by lack of know-how, by slow transatlantic shipping (aggravated in the case of Montserrat by the infrequency of calls) and by lack of capital. Other attempts at diversification were even less notable. In 1840 a blind Montserratian produced a small quantity of rope from aloe fibre. It was sent to the Colonial Office for testing. It was there described as ... a small matter: which does not promise much, beyond that encouragement to ingenuity and enterprise which every successful experiment of the kind must hold out, and in which no one can tell how much of the future prosperity of these Colonies is involved.7 The Colonial Office staff' were less committed to the estates than were the planter-dominated colonial assemblies.

In Montserrat, only Mr

Francis Burke, apparently, attached even that much significance. In 1854 he was in Antigua displaying locally-made goods at an island exhibition. His exhibits included various ropes and cords made from the fibres of the aloe, the banana, and other plants. He was going on to England to patent the machine he had designed for their manufacture.8 Other exhibits included some agricultural implements made in Antigua, some furniture, a sugar hogshead made of wooden staves from Montserrat, and livestock.9 In the following year other specimens of fibres were sent to the Colonial Office, this time from Barbuda.10 There was little else. The most important aspect of these experiments was that they took place in Montserrat, where the sugar-cane had never entirely dominated the landscape, and Barbuda, where it had never been grown for export, rather than in Antigua, Nevis, or St Kitts which had been the sugar-planters’ strongholds in the Leeward Islands. By the mid-i840s the list of goods exported from Montserrat indicated a degree of diversification of production which was unique among the former sugar-producing islands. In Antigua, Nevis, and St Kitts, the wellknown trinity of sugar, molasses, and rum, though much weakened, still stood practically alone; and even in Montserrat most people of influence, 7

C.O. 7/64, Colonial Office: summary of reports from the Leeward Islands up to

July 1840. 8 Again similar to work being attempted with various plant fibres in Jamaica. In no instance was a profitably marketable commodity produced. 9 C.O. 7/104, Mackintosh to Grey, 22nd November 1854. ■ 0 C.O. 7/105, Mackintosh to Russell, 22nd May 1855.

HI

Five of the Leewards while noting the new developments, were more concerned to bemoan the collapse of sugar and pray for its revival. Table 13 Products of Montserrat exported in 1846

Item

Quantity

Sugar

488 hogsheads 150 tierces 10 puncheons

Rum

280 puncheons

Molasses

3 boxes

Arrowroot Boat-timbers

250 pieces

Cattle

267 head

Charcoal

145 barrels

Firestones (heat-resisting stone for furnaces, etc.)

127 barrels

Potatoes Succades (preserved fruits)

10 boxes 230 barrels 18 kegs

Tamarinds Terrace (i.e. Tarras, volcanic rock)

Source:

12 sets

84 barrels

C.O. 7/86, Higginson to Grey, 7th June 1847, enclosing Montserrat Blue Book for 1846.

By this time also, since the number of British freighters calling at Montserrat had fallen with the decline of sugar production, the majority of this export trade was in the hands of local merchants and shipowners in the Leeward Isands.11 The activities of these merchants in the mid-i9th century are of interest and importance but neither the merchants nor their functions are easily described. There were factors, or commission-agents, who received goods on consignment from English or foreign merchants and disposed of them for the owners in return for commissions, usually calculated as percentages of sums received for the goods and credit advanced. In the previous account of Thompson Hankey’s transactions on behalf of Wigley and 11 The complexities of the West India trade in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the activities of those who were engaged in it have been examined by the late Professor Richard Pares in his works: A West-India Fortune, Longmans, 1950; Yankees and Creoles, Longmans, 1956; and ‘Merchants and Planters’ in Economic History Review, Supplement 4, Cambridge, i960. 132

Commerce and enterprise Burt, for instance, the last three debit items represented the agent’s charges. There were also merchants, who purchased goods for re-sale, making their incomes by profits, not by commissions. And some com¬ bined both sorts of enterprise, dealing both as the factors of merchants overseas and as merchants in their own right. By the mid-i9th century this was easily the most important class. Another sort of difference lay between those who dealt chiefly in the American, and those who dealt chiefly in the British trade with the Lee¬ wards. But here again there was not always a complete separation. Some conducted business on both sides of the Atlantic as well as locally in the Caribbean. Finally, by the mid-i9th century, a colonial distinction tended to separate those merchants and factors of Nevis and Montserrat who, with the decline of their islands’ export staples and the reduction in the number of vessels calling, dealt with the larger merchants of St Kitts and Antigua into whose warehouses most of the incoming vessels unloaded their cargoes. Before the emancipation the activities of local merchants had been restricted by the use of slave-labour and by the system of marketing estate produce in Britain. Slaves, whose basic food, clothing, and shelter had been provided by their owners, had provided little effective demand in the local shops and markets. Where, as in Montserrat, they had been allowed the right to cultivate food-crops on estate back-lands they had been able to produce and sell small surpluses; but even in the most liberal circumstances their purchasing power had been small. The planters and slave-owners, by far the most important colonial buyers and sellers, had consigned as much as possible of their estate-produce directly to their merchant-agents in Britain and, through them, ordered whatever estate supplies could be obtained there. Their important local trading had been generally restricted to the purchase of supplies not available from Britain, especially lumber, dairy-produce, some grain, and livestock, which they obtained from American sources. Even in this, however, they had often by-passed the local merchants by dealing directly with the captains or super-cargoes on visiting American vessels. Gradually, through the later 18th and first part of the 19th centuries the possibility of thus avoiding the local middleman had weakened. After the American War of Independence, especially, the United States-West Indian trade had shifted in emphasis from the British to the French and then the Spanish Caribbean colonies. American traders calling at the British islands had become increasingly reluctant to take British colonial produce which was comparatively dear. They preferred to take cash or bills of exchange on British merchant-houses for their incoming cargoes 133

Five of the Leewards and then to use these to purchase the cheaper rum and molasses of the nonBritish islands. Then, during the period of the Anglo-French and Napoleonic Wars, the prices of imports tended to rise while those of British colonial plantation produce fluctuated, sometimes violently, largely as a result of the uncertainties of British merchant-shipping which led to alternating scarcities and gluts of colonial produce on the British market. Shortly after the war, British planters were hard hit both by economic depression in Britain and by the falling values of their property in the immediate pre-emancipation period. All these changes strengthened the position of the local merchants. As traders, they had connections with merchants in the foreign ‘commercial’ (as distinct from ‘plantation’) colonies such as St Croix, St Thomas, St Bartholomew’s (St Barts), St Martins, and St Eustatius (Statia), and were thus able to acquire, either as factors or as merchants, American cargoes in those islands. Then, as the planters’ credit in Britain wavered or weakened, the local merchants, who benefited by the increased profits of war-time trading, gradually became substantial creditors of the planters who needed American supplies and could not always afford to pay for them. Indeed, merchants were not the only local people to whom the planters became indebted. In March 1834, one Antiguan merchant, Mr John Wood, was putting his claim to some of the slave-compensation money that his debtors would receive and which, apparently, would pass straight into the hands of merchants and others in Britain who held mortgages on West Indian estates: Many instances have occurred since the depressed state of these Colonies, and at this moment exist wherein the Mortgagee has refused to advance one shilling to the Planter, and some Estates must have been ere this thrown out of cultiva¬ tion but for the support obtained from the Colonists - these claims are those of Physicians, Merchants, and Tradesmen of almost every denomination, and who cannot contend with the Mortgagees, in as much as their individual claims on Estates are comparatively of small amount, and preclude their appeal to a Court of Equity.12 The indebtedness of planters to local merchants became greater in the later 1840s and early 1850s when, after the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, merchants in Britain severely curtailed their advances to the planters. Even so, the local merchant seldom escaped the role of second fiddle to the greater creditors in Britain to whom many of the estate-owners were bound by liens on their produce. In May 1852, a St Kitts merchant explained a disappointment. He had been promised quantities of rum by planters who were indebted to him for supplies provided, but 12 C.O. 7/40, John A. Wood to Rt. Hon. E. G. Stanley, dated Antigua, 1st March

i834134

Commerce and enterprise Both gentlemen who promised me the rum have shipped it by Wade’s vessel to London stating that they were compelled to do so, their crops falling so far behind that they could not ship opposite advances and had no alternative. This is not the only piece of bad treatment I have received lately. It appears when one is going down a hill every neighbour gives him a push.13 The emancipation had also fundamentally altered the role and function of the local merchants. As slaves became wage-earners and purchasers of their own food, clothing, and other commodities, they turned to the local markets. The immediate consequence, reported from all the islands, save Barbuda, was an increase in the volume of imports of consumer goods and a proliferation of small retailing establishments. The barrels of salted or pickled fish and beef, the barrels of meal, the bolts of osnaburgh and cheap cottons, and the hoes and machetes, which had previously been consigned to the estates for the supply of slaves, now passed to workingclass consumers through local wholesale and retail dealers. Moreover, after the emancipation and the repeal of such taxes as had been levied on slaves, the revenues of the islands became almost totally dependent on customs and excise duties and on trade licenses, and the business of the merchants and shopkeepers thus gained greater political importance. This was to lead occasionally to disputes between planters and merchants over the rates of import and export duties. Planters generally tended to support higher import tariffs in order to inflate the prices of consumer goods and so induce the working-population to earn more money by giving more labour on the estates; whereas merchants usually argued for lower tariffs which would enable them to increase their volume of sales and their profits. Nor were the local merchants, despite their increasing business with the planters, opposed in principle to increasing independent cultivation by peasant farmers provided that the produce was exportable and did not simply provide import substitutes. In this respect, however, they lacked real reason for much enthusiasm. As the list of exports from Montserrat indicates, there was some inter-colonial trade in local foodstuffs and other small produce; but the peasant-proprietors and other small-farmers of the Leeward Islands did not, in the 19th century, develop any important production for an overseas market.14 The fruit, vegetable, and root crops, ” Wigley Papers (unnumbered correspondence). Robert B. Roden, St Kitts, to Richard Dinzey, St Barts, 31st May 1852. 14 By contrast, merchants in Jamaica in the 1870s and onwards became mvolved in the production and marketing of bananas, grown largely by peasants for export to the United States. But the Leewards were too far from American ports for enterprise in such a highly perishable commodity in the days of the sailing vessel. See Douglas Hall, Ideas and Illustrations in Economic History, Holt, Rinehart, 1964, chapters 4 and 5, for discussion of the early Jamaican banana trade. FL K

135

Five of the Leewards which were their main output, even if they could survive the long journey by sailing-vessel to the American mainland or Britain, were too small to find profitable markets there. Indeed, the Antiguans were importing some of these things from Britain and the United States as well as from Caribbean sources: The daily markets continue to be tolerably well furnished with most of the ordinary articles of indigenous production, with the exception of vegetables, the facility of procuring which has seriously diminished since the abandonment by the planter of the cultivation of ground provisions, and we are dependent upon England and Ireland, Bermuda, the French Islands, and America for our supplies of potatoes, onions, and occasionally carrots, turnips, and other esculents.15 These, however, were all subordinate to the main dealings in imported flour, cornmeal, and pickled or salted fish and pork, obtained chiefly from the American trade; manufactured goods from Britain; and lumber and livestock from the United States and Caribbean America. The business was highly competitive and the successful merchant went almost as much by intuition and good luck as by information and good judgement. The island markets were small and easily glutted. The in¬ opportune arrival of a vessel with a cargo for a rival could result in heavy loss. Arrivals and departures of sailing-ships could not be precisely fixed,16 and without telecommunication there was no sure means of sending quick messages of enquiry, explanation, or information. On the last two days of January 1852, Mr Robert Roden in St Kitts wrote letters to Mr Richard Dinzey, a merchant in St Barts for whom he acted.17 He described the state of the St Kitts’ market and the activities of some of his competitors there. On 30th January he mentioned that he had received no reply to his letter to Dinzey dated the 23rd. Meantime the ship Washington had arrived with a second cargo of cornmeal. The first had been sold by Mr Cock to Messrs Gould at $4.62 a barrel in bond at sixty days’ credit.18 The second cargo, cornmeal and flour, had been 15 C.O. 7/82, Fitzroy to Stanley, 23rd August 1845, enclosing the report of Sir Robert Horsford, Stipendiary Magistrate. 15 Scheduled arrivals and departures came with the introduction of steam-ships. In the mid-i9th century, the only steamers regularly calling at the islands were those of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. They provided two return voyages between Britain and the Caribbean each month. The return transatlantic fare was about £40-£45 sterling. The Barbados-Antigua fare, one-way, was just over £4. 17 The Roden-Dinzey correspondence is all taken from the Wigley Papers (unnum¬ bered items). 18 Exchanges fluctuated, especially at crop-season, but the standard rates were Si to 4s 2d sterling with the local St Kitts currency equal to four-ninths sterling.

136

Commerce and enterprise purchased by Mr Haville at $4.75 and $5-75 a barrel, in bond, respectively. Mr Cock (who apparently owned the himself, said Roden.

Washington)

had had the market to

Mr Wade was momently expecting to sight a

schooner which was supposed to have sailed from New York on 10th January, and Mr Millard was daily expecting an assorted cargo from Philadelphia. ‘The first to arrive will do well with flour, meal, butter, cheese, candles, etc.’ By the next day, 31st January, one of Dinzey’s ships had arrived bringing a letter for Roden, but not the answer to his latest one sent to Dinzey by the

Rosebud

Washington.

Another ship had arrived, the sloop

from Guadeloupe with fish which Messrs Gould had taken.

But breadstuff's remained scarce. Gould had no more flour and were expecting none. East India rice was in demand and would fetch $5 a bag in bond. Neither Wade’s nor Millard’s vessel had yet arrived. It was not always like that. Sometimes a market was glutted and the merchants went looking for trade, buying or selling as need be, in the neighbouring islands. On 17th March, Roden wrote hastily to Dinzey:

DeLisle hearing from St Thomas of several arrivals at that island had com¬ menced selling out the ‘Adelle’s’ [DeLisle’s vessel] cargo here in small lots when Millard offered $6.25 for flour, meal $4.50, Mess Pork $18.00, Butter I7(f, candles $2.75 taking the whole. This offer was gladly accepted and as Millard is now selling in lots flour at $7-5°> meal $5-5°> Mess Pork $21.00 duty paid he will make very httle on his purchase. Millard had also purchased 100 barrels of No. 3 quality mackerel which had arrived on the schooner

Swift

Rosebud from

St Thomas. He had paid $6 a barrel. The

was in from Demerara with rum and rice, and Mr DeLisle

was sailing that evening on the

Adelle

for St Thomas in search of freight.

Later, on xst April, Millard and Peterson had received a joint cargo of 500 barrels (presumably of cornmeal and flour). Millard had sold his part in lots. Peterson had sent a boat-load to Nevis but could find no sale and was still holding the goods. Nobody knew what he proposed to do with the stuff, and Millard had refused to join him in sending the brig back to Philadelphia for another cargo. Prices in St Kitts, said Roden, might remain firm unless an anticipated glut at Antigua were to materialise. It was not only the arrivals of cargoes which affected prices. Two weeks later, Roden was complaining that business was slow. Mr Wade had received a cargo and stored it. There was little selling because, though it was crop-season and more money than usual was being paid out in wages on the estates, the people were not taking time off to come into town to spend it. He had recently bought 60 barrels of flour and had sold only 10 and the latest news from Antigua was that flour there was expected to fall from $6 to S5.50. Mr Thurston was expecting a vessel from New York

137

Five of the Leewards and Mr DeLisle’s ship Adelle was due in about a month. By that time, the first to arrive would be likely to sell to advantage, and Mr Thurston wanted to know if Dinzey expected any cargoes in St Barts as he would like to make a purchase. Robert Roden’s position was difficult. He was a comparative newcomer to the trade. He owned a small vessel and did some buying and selling on his own account, but the majority of his business was as a commissionagent for Richard Dinzey who supplied American goods from St Barts. As a newcomer and a comparatively small dealer, his connections both with planters in St Kitts and with merchants and planters in the other islands were still unsure. By comparison, Messrs Gould, DeLisle, Wade, Millard, Peterson, and others were firmly established. Messrs Gould, in 1852, were apparently withdrawing their main interest from the American trade and turning towards the sugar-trade and Britain. This was not surprising. In addition to the merchant’s business the Gould family also owned sugar-estates, Bellevue and Geagons and Pogsons.19 Mr Wade, too, had been moving into the British dry-goods trade. Mr Emile DeLisle owned vessels and despatched them to the United States for cargoes on his own account. He was one of the leading merchants, importing sometimes three times as much in value as his nearest competitors, and with a regular clientele which Roden envied. People such as these had relatively little difficulty in finding large custom with the planters and securing either produce or bills of exchange with which to pay for their cargoes. Nor were their relationships with the planters purely those of business, for in the Leewards, as elsewhere, merchants and land-owning families were joined by convenient marriage-alliances and by the purchase by merchants of landed property. One of Roden’s greatest worries, which was to lead eventually to the transferral of Dinzey’s agency to Peterson in May 1852, was the need to extend large credit to the planters who needed supplies in advance of the crop-season. In seeking payment, he had to compete not only against the larger claims of planters’ agents in Britain, but also against the claims of better-established local merchants to whom also the planters were indebted. Thus in early January 1852 he wrote explaining to Dinzey that trade in the previous year had been slow: . . . for we were so overstocked with a bad article of flour at the very com¬ mencement of 1851 that we were obliged to credit out to a far greater extent than we otherwise would have done so as to get the article off our hands, and 19 The Saint Christopher Almanac for 1855 (printed at the Gazette Office, St Kitts). By 1864, the Wade family too would be in possession of Bayfords, Blois, College, and Douglas Estates, totalling 459 acres. (Saint Christopher Almanac for 1864.) 138

Commerce and enterprise as crop closed we found it difficult to collect the cash and I regret to say that on 31st October I found I had over $5,000 out for 1851. . . .

He saw the imprudence of this kind of business and hoped that he would be able to do more cash business in 1852. His hopes were optimistic. Farmers, whether estate-planters or peasants, need credit while waiting for their crops to mature and be sold. For this reason, at least in part, merchandising, whether wholesale or retail, in the West Indies tended to fall into the hands either of comparatively wealthy individuals, whose capital reserves were sufficient to withstand heavy outlays on credit and losses on bad debts, or of immigrant groups such as Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, and Syrians, who as immigrant minorities tended to stand together and to aid one another in times of individual financial distress. In May 1852, Roden was reiterating both his new determination and the weakness of his position. He was still waiting for payments from his customers, and he was carrying large stocks of goods, especially tobacco, as a consequence of having misjudged the pace of the market. I have now stopped that kind of business ... as I find it will only do where there is a large capital at work’, he wrote to Dinzey, and again expressed his policy to sell \ . . for cash or not at all.’ He had 50 puncheons of oilmeal ‘... scattered amongst the planters for the last six months all of which was to be settled for in produce and I can neither get them to do one thing nor another by way of arranging these accounts.’ By the end of that month the Dinzey agency had been given to Peterson, and Roden was hard put to remain in business. Planters settled their local accounts in produce, in cash, or in bills of exchange on their merchants in Britain. The produce consisted of molasses; a little rum, because in the 1850s rum prices in Britain were more attractive to the planters; sometimes a little sugar; and in the dry seasons, salt from the Frigate Bay and Salt Ponds areas of St Kitts.20 But the essential commodity offered by the estates to the local merchants was molasses, and the willingness of the merchants to accept it obviously depended on its current prices in the island and in the markets abroad where they purchased their imports. Sometimes, dealers abroad, such as Richard Dinzey, would ask for shipments of molasses. Sometimes, the local merchants would themselves try to engage markets in advance. In February 1852, for instance, Roden wrote asking Dinzey about a reported rise in the price offered for molasses in the United States, and enquiring whether Dinzey’s father, who had recently refused to take molasses, 20 Frigate Bay Estate (129 acres) was owned by the lawyers Wigley and Burt; Salt Ponds Estate (249 acres) was the property of Sir Wastel Briscoe (The Saint Christopher Almanac for 1855). Salt was also produced on the island of Anguilla.

139

Five of the Leewards would now accept a promise of ioo puncheons, and whether Richard Dinzey himself *... would at any time take Rum in exchange for Bread stuffs’. In such ‘exchanges’ money was used as a measure of value and only as necessity arose as a means of payment of outstanding balances. The merchant’s work was, in consequence, doubly exacting. He could not simply assess the market for, say, cornmeal, then import and sell for cash at prices calculated to yield him a profit. As importer-exporter it was necessary for him to keep a sharp eye on the prices of local produce as well as of imported goods and so to time his transactions that he did not lose on the one side what he expected to gain from the other. Moreover, he had to keep as well informed as possible on fluctuations of prices abroad in the commodities which he imported and exported. There would be little advantage in taking molasses when the market was low in the island if the market were even lower abroad. The ‘exchanges’ did not, of course, have to be immediately concluded.. There was, for instance, an open account between Roden and Richard Dinzey. Roden might receive several cargoes of imports before sending anything in return. This allowed necessary room for manoeuvre; but even so, unless a merchant could afford large warehousing and could count on having shipping-space when he needed it, his dealings in local produce could be exceedingly risky. Warehouse room was also necessary for incoming cargoes which met a dull market, and since it was limited and expensive, the merchant was heavily dependent on the good timing of the arrivals and departures of vessels with incoming cargoes and out¬ going freight-space. There was a clear advantage to those merchants, such as Dinzey in St Barts, who owned several ships, and all the larger mer¬ chants in the Leewards were ship-owners, though few could afford more than one or two small vessels in the inter-island trade. Thus they main¬ tained their numerous connections with merchants in those neighbouring non-British islands, long developed as commercial entrepots rather than plantation colonies, through whom they received most of their American supplies. When they did not pay in produce, planters generally settled their accounts with local merchants in bills on their merchant-agents in Britain. This practice was not welcomed by the merchant-agents of estates in precarious financial condition, and one reason for the planters’ delay in settling local accounts was that they preferred, from traditional as well as current financial pressures, to cover their local costs with ‘the proceeds of the molasses and rum’. Nor, indeed, were foreign merchants in the Caribbean or the United States too eager, in the mid-i9th century, to accept planters’ bills which, on presentation in Britain, might not be 140

Commerce and enterprise discounted. They preferred to receive payments in sterling (the hard currency of the time) drafts on British banks. When the local merchants received planters' bills, therefore, they usually presented them at the local branches of the Colonial Bank in Antigua and St Kitts for discount, and forwarded sterling drafts on that bank to their creditors abroad.21 The Bank, however, also sought to protect itself against irredeemable bills, whether on planters or on merchants, and its branches had been instructed to keep their local discounting within specified limits. Thus, in March 1852, when Roden presented a bill for discounting, the manager of the Colonial Bank refused, saying that they had already discounted as much as they were allowed for that quarter of the year. Roden managed by getting Mr Bertram Dinzey, who lived in St Kitts, to endorse his note for $2,500 payable to Richard Dinzey in St Barts. But he explained in his accompanying letter: I have no doubt but he [the bank manager] will discount this on the 1st proximo unless he shows favour to one party more than another for he has discounted my notes to Delisle before now for twice the amount and I am sure he would have done so in a few days had I purchased from the Adelle [one of Delisle’s vessels].

In this particular instance the discrimination might have been imagined, but there can be little doubt that there was much practice of the kind. Settlements of large amounts in cash were rare, even in purely local transactions. The volume of currency was small, and it consisted of a wide variety of coins of fluctuating value. At the time of the emancipation it had been necessary to import from Britain quantities of silver and copper coins of small denominations in order to make possible the payment of wages to workers; but these had supplemented and had not displaced the foreign coins previously in circulation. In 1834, the other common media had been Spanish dollars and quarter-dollars, which were becoming scarce since they were accepted by visiting traders and were thus drained off to the foreign West Indies and the United States; the old Spanish pistreen (‘pistareen’ from ‘peseta’) valued at 2s local currency in Antigua and is 9d in St Kitts; half,-and quarter-pistreens; and, especially in Mont¬ serrat, halves and quarters of Spanish dollars which had been cut into 21 The Colonial Bank, with head offices in London and branches in the West Indies, had begun to operate about the time of the emancipation. The notes of the Bank were convertible into sterling. Another bank with branches in St Kitts and Antigua had been the West India Bank, with head offices in Barbados, which had also com¬ menced operations at the time of emancipation. But the West India Bank had failed and gone out of business (in not altogether unquestionable circumstances) during the crisis of 1846-8. (See C.O. 7/87. Higginson to Grey, 26th December 1847; Higgmson to Grey, 9th February 1848; and C.O. 7/91. Committee of Privy Council for Trade to Herman Mcrivale, 21st March 1848.)

141

Five of the Leewards pieces to prevent their use for external payments. There were, also, a few Spanish doubloons, gold coins worth .£3 4s sterling, each; but these too were quickly taken by foreign traders and, like the unmutilated silver dollars, they were sold locally at a premium of 6 per cent because of their scarcity.22 In the late 1850s, there was still a variety of foreign coins in circulation; and there were some pieces, such as ‘shudies’ (silver coins valued at iod sterling), commonly used in Nevis, and ‘dogs’ (copper discs valued at 2| farthings sterling), used in Nevis and Montserrat, which though pre¬ sumably British were of uncertain source.23 These coins were used by employers in the payment of wages, and by wage-earners in the shops and markets. In these ways, they spread through the islands with the local retail trade in foodstuffs and other commodities. The increasing importance of Montserrat as a provider of provisions and small stores to the remaining ‘sugar-islands’ was reflected in the concern expressed by the Administrator and Executive Council there in 186524 over the increasing number of ‘mutilated and valueless coins’ current in the island and, especially, of the rapid introduction of ‘Shudies and cut pieces imported from Nevis’. Legislation was passed to call in the variety of local tender, to replace it with sterling coinage, and to assimilate the currency of Montserrat with that of the United Kingdom.25 Behind this inter-island retail commerce were larger transactions carried out chiefly by the merchants of Antigua and St Kitts, paid for not in ‘dogs’ and ‘shudies’ but in bills and estate-produce, and connecting British and non-British islands in a network of mercantile arrangements. Messrs Swindell and Bankhead in St Kitts, for example, dealt with merchants in St Thomas, and with Messrs Nelson and Company in Antigua who dealt with Richard Dinzey in St Barts. Mr John Foreman, the active partner in Nelson and Company, joined with Mr C. Seton in 1857 to establish a separate Antiguan firm of C. Seton and Company which dealt with Swindell and Bankhead in St Kitts. All were closely tied in with the estate-proprietory. John Swindell owned five estates in St Kitts,26 and John Foreman was the local agent for Byams and Belvedere estates in Antigua and, apparently, also for Gilberts and Richmond estates whose 22 C.O. 7/40, Thomas Johnston Bourne to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1834. 23 C.O. 7/109, Hamilton to Labouchere, nth February 1858. 24 By this date the old Montserrat Assembly and Council had been abolished and a form of Crown Colony government instituted. (See Chapter Seven.) 23 C.O. 175/14, Hill to Cardwell, 4th May 1865; 19th May 1865; and 27th September 1865 - all with enclosures from Montserrat. 26 Key (104 acres), Hope (107), Mansion (106), Rose Hill (75), and Colquhoun’s (106). (St Christopher Almanac for 1855.) 142

Commerce and enterprise owner, Mrs Gilbert, was indebted to Swindell and Bankhead. Through C. Seton and Company, Foreman proposed to ship estate produce to St Kitts in return for which he would receive through Swindell and Bankhead, imported estate stores such as oats, lime, coal, and firebricks, and also

good articles for which we will obtain good prices in supply¬

ing private families - this refers to the eatables and drinkables.’27 He clearly intended to deal primarily with the wealthy. Besides their Caribbean connections, both companies had contacts with English firms: Swindell and Bankhead by direct business in their own vessels, and C. Seton and Company through Foreman’s dealings in Antigua with F. & G. Garroway and Company who were the consignees of produce from Byams and Belvedere estates.28 Previously, before emancipation, the trade with England had been hardly touched by local merchants, unlike the Caribbean and American trades. The majority of imports had entered the islands on direct supply to estates or on consignment to Caribbean factors of merchant-houses in Britain. But as planters became increasingly indebted to local merchants the latter came into more regular receipt of estate-produce, and in some cases themselves became estate-owners. Thus, merchants such as Wade, Gould, and Swindell and Bankhead began to venture more on their own account into the transatlantic trade. By 1850, therefore, it was possible to make certain fairly clear dis¬ tinctions between various types of importers of goods into the islands. Still the most important were the large ship-owning absentee-proprietory, represented by people like Francis Shand with his estates in Antigua and Montserrat, and Benjamin Buck Greene with his in St Kitts. Their vessels brought in British machinery, stores and supplies for their own estates and consignments of assorted cargo, chiefly of manufactured goods, for local merchants and factors. On the return journey they carried the produce of their proprietors’ estates and sold freight to others as well.29 In addition, there were other vessels owned by merchants and ship-owners in Britain who were not themselves estate-proprietors but who were in the West India trade and were, in many cases, the creditors of estates and the consignees of their produce. These vessels too would have offered general cargo space, especially on the westward journey. On the eastward n Wigley Papers (unnumbered items). Correspondence between John Foreman, Antigua, and Messrs Swindell and Bankhead, St Kitts. See Foreman to Swindell and Bankhead, 20th January 1858. 28 Wigley Papers. Foreman to Swindell and Bankhead, 28th November 1857, 20th January 1858, 12th February 1858, 12th April 1858, and 26th September 1858. 29 The Shand vessels unloaded and re-loaded at Antigua. Goods to and from Montserrat were carried by droghers (small coastal vessels). See Select Committee, 1848. Minutes of Evidence, Shand 8189.

143

Five of the Leewards voyage they would have given preference to the produce of estates on which the companies in Britain held claims. The second most important group of importers were those larger local merchants whose activities we have been examining. Originally, they had dealt primarily in the American trade but they had recently begun to move across the Atlantic in consequence of their growing control over estate-produce. From United States ports, or through dealers in the ports of foreign Caribbean islands, they brought in certain basic supplies of foodstuffs, lumber, and livestock, which, though previously destined for the estates, had since 1838 found increasing retail sales to wage-earners. From Britain, they would bring assorted cargoes of manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Thirdly, there was the group of smaller local merchants, nearly all retailers, who purchased cargoes or freight from the ship-owners, and, having little claim on sugar, rum, or molasses, were almost totally dependent on a steady flow of cash sales. Such, for instance, were the Misses M. and S. Archibald of St Kitts who dealt chiefly in articles of clothing which they obtained through the firm of Comfort and Elmslie in London. Up to 1847 they did fairly good business, but then Comfort and Elmslie went bankrupt and demanded payment of a debit balance of £828 on the Misses Archibalds’ account. The latter, too, were then in serious difficulty. In May 1848, they explained: The oldest inhabitant has no recollection of such distressing times. Many of the planters are forced to suspend the cultivation of the estates for want of money to pay the labourers even at the reduced rate of wages which the latter are now quite willing to accept; in consequence of which money has ceased to circulate, and the stores are almost entirely abandoned by purchasers.30 The defaults of planters were bad enough, as Robert Roden and others like him discovered, but planters at least had estates and other property which might be seized.31 When, as in this case, the shop simply emptied of customers disaster could come more suddenly to the smaller dealer whose main business was with the ordinary individual consumer. Finally, though they were not in the same sense dealers in imported goods, mention should be made of the owners of sloops and other small craft plying between the islands and the small dealers who used them. These vessels, especially between St Kitts and Nevis, and between Antigua 30 Wigley Papers. Item 1. M. and S. Archibald to Comfort and Elmslie, 12th May 1848, and other dates. 31 Appendix A gives some indication of changes of proprietorship of estates in the 19th century following emancipation, the Sugar Duties Act, and the West Indian Encumbered Estates Acts. The consolidation of ownership and the increasing pro¬ prietorship of merchant families and firms are evident. 144

Commerce and enterprise and Montserrat, freighted general cargoes between the merchants of the larger and the smaller islands; but they also carried the bags and baskets of fresh produce from the provision-grounds of the peasant-farmers, accompanied sometimes by the growers themselves, but more often by the higglers or hucksters who were, and still are, the important middledealers in the market-places of the towns. There can be little doubt that it was largely in support of this purely local inter-island traffic that 'three remarkably well-built vessels were launched and nine new retail stores were opened at Montserrat in 1851. The sugar crop had shown a sudden spurt in that year; but much more likely reason for these new enterprises was the increasing export of miscellaneous products such as timber, firewood, arrowroot, corn, cotton, horses and cattle; and the agricultural excitement of the year had been stirred up by the apparent success of a recently planted corn and cotton estate’ which seemed to promise a clear financial reward.32 During the 1860s, when, through Civil War, supplies of American raw cotton to Britain were cut off, there was to be a revival of cotton pro¬ duction in nearly all of the British Caribbean territories. In Montserrat and Nevis, particularly, but also in Barbuda, Antigua and St Kitts, encouraged by the British Cotton Supply Association in Lancashire, landowners planted the crop and looked to a new large source of income. But the promise was short-lived. When the Civil War ended in 1866, and normal trade was resumed between the United States and Britain, the market fell. Although cotton production did not entirely cease, and was later, in the 20th century, to be revived, it did not become a sub¬ stitute for sugar in the period up to 1870.

In agricultural islands everybody, ultimately, depended on the products of the soil. That was obvious. But the identification of agriculture in general with estate-agriculture was not logically unassailable. The Antigua Weekly Times had argued that peasant-farmers could be at least as pros¬ perous as estate wage-earners. But in all except cold logic the identification was understandable. Any other view would have been difficult to achieve in the economic, political, and social circumstances and conditions of the day. In order to have shelter, clothing, and the tools of their labour, even the working-classes were dependent on imports, whether of raw materials or of finished goods. Imports had to be paid for by exports. To conceive of major exports other than sugar, molasses, rum, or other established tropical staples, was beyond the ordinary power of societies limited by the existing level of technology, traditionally developed as exporters of those commodities, and themselves shaped and determined by the role 32 C.O. 7/100, Book for 1851

Mackintosh to Grey, and Report on

24th

February

1852,

enclosing Montserrat

Blue

it. 145

Five of the Leewards and relationships of the plantation-colony economy. In political terms, the collapse of the estates would mean the decline of the established planter-elites, and there was already, in the 1840s, some evidence of this happening in Montserrat and in Nevis.33 In social and broader cultural terms, any large diminution of exports, especially to Britain, would reduce the ability to import from thence not only material goods but all those services and influences by which the ex-slaves and their descendants were supposedly to be lifted out of ignorance and primitive crudity into the ordered knowledge and well-behaved respectability of the ideal English labourer of the day. The ex-slaves and their descendants, though they clearly were not always impressed by the model constantly described to them, were not in principle opposed either to estate-agriculture or to large land-owners as such. Had they been, they would not have so quickly accepted the drastic cuts in wage-rates after 1846. Even in Barbuda, the people protested not about the proprietorship of the island, but about the behaviour of certain proprietors or their agents. For them too, the coming and the going of the ships brought excitement, work and wages, and new things in the shops to spend the wages on. And they, too, knew that the ships some¬ times brought other things as well as goods: governors, for example, who sometimes acted on their behalf, and stipendiary magistrates, and, above all, the British Act abolishing slavery. They had no wish to model them¬ selves on English labour; but even more positively, they had no wish to be cut off from Britain, from the Queen from whom, as they understood the thing, freedom and justice came. Nothing short of social revolution could upset the export-import economy and the society it harboured, or shatter the estate-economy and the hierarchy it bred and sustained. Merchants and planters together were agreed on that. But there would be no social revolution; or at least not yet; for the surgery of emancipation had removed the infection which might have violently disrupted the body politic. 33 See Chapter Seven.

146

CHAPTER SEVEN

Governments and the public welfare

In the conduct of internal colonial affairs the acts of the elected legislatures were subject to the laws of England, the veto of the Crown, and the scrutiny of the Colonial Office. Parliament could, as in the case of the Abolition of Slavery, pass acts which bound the colonial legislatures to some measure of conformity; but Parliamentary enactments of that kind were rare. Except when some major issue, such as slavery, or some particularly embarrassing instance of complaint or of misrule reached the attention of the Houses of Lords and Commons, the affairs of in¬ dividual colonial territories were scarcely sounded in the halls of West¬ minster. The volumes of reports from governors, magistrates, and others were all 'put before Parliament

in the sense that they were

placed in Parliament and Members who wanted to read them could, but few did. There were occasions when Secretaries of State would deliberately suppress certain parts of colonial reports in order to deny any overzealous Member of Parliament grist for the mill at question-time in the House of Commons. In March 1846, for instance, Mr Baynes, President of Montserrat, in his Report on the Blue Book for 1845, criticised the metairie system as unsuitable for that island. The Acting Governor of the Leewards, Mr Cunningham, in his accompanying despatch, was very critical not only of Mr Baynes’ opinion, but of Mr Baynes himself. The Colonial Office staff debated whether to put everything before Parliament and risk the discovery of this quarrel between executive, officers in the Leewards, or to suppress Baynes’ Report, or Cunningham s comment on it, or both. The final decision was to suppress the comments of LieutGovernor Cunningham. Even more interesting was the observation that whether or not reports such as these were actually read by the Members of Parliament,

the

writers

of them

certainly

believed that

they

were.1 . .. It is a supportable proposition that reports always affect the behaviour of those who write them and far less often influence the behaviour of 1 C.O. 7/83, Cunningham to Gladstone, nth March 1846, with enclosures, and Colonial Office minutes and draft reply.

Five of the Leewards those who are supposed to read them. Nonetheless, for the sake of formal¬ ity, and probably also as a disciplinary measure, they were (and still are) demanded for distribution to all with the slightest claim of interest. In 1857, when Parliamentary interest in Montserrat was certainly no greater than it had been in 1846, a circular from the Colonial Office complained of a ‘serious embarrassment which is constantly arising from the want of a proper supply of Colonial Acts and Ordinances’. Colonial Regulations required that six copies of everything be sent to Whitehall, but twelve would be better: one for the House of Lords, one for the House of Commons, one for the Board of Trade, one for the Emigration Com¬ missioners, one for the Treasury, two for the Law Officers of the Crown, one for the British Museum, one for the Incorporated Law Society, and three for the Colonial Office.2 The local official’s view of his metropolitan audience was highly inflated. The care with which Inis views and opinions were scrutinised at the Colonial Office was impressive, but the circulation of them was small. Indeed, one of the functions of the Secretary of State for the Colonies was to ensure that colonial problems were settled, as far as possible, in his office rather than in Parliament. As a legislative body, Parliament’s con¬ cern was to provide the general statutory framework within which the colonies would be governed. The affairs of particular colonies were brought to Parliament only if they impinged on the wider colonial policy, or if there seemed to be no way to settle a difficulty other than by Parliamentary enactment. The history of Barbuda clearly illustrates the reluctance of successive Secretaries of State for the Colonies to bring local colonial problems into debate between government and opposition in Britain. The immediate and most effective control over individual legislative colonies was exercised by the Secretary of State in the scrutiny of colonial Acts. But even here, his power, constitutionally disguised in the giving or refusing of the royal assent to a colonial enactment, was modified by the well-understood dangers of too frequent refusal; and by the fact that his powers were almost entirely negative. He could refuse to accept, he could suggest what might be done, but he had no power to make laws. Colonial legislatures were understandably annoyed when their enact¬ ments were refused the royal assent, and they did not always take kindly to legislative suggestions emanating from the Colonial Office. Certain very effective means of retaliation were open to them. They could, in last resort, simply refuse to vote money in support of the civil list or to do any business at all; and actions of that sort, if persisted in, could scarcely be kept from the notice of Parliament with consequent discomfort or even defeat 2 Journal of the Assembly, Montserrat, 1857. 148

Governments and the public welfare for the government which would have to admit failure in dealing with a colonial problem.3 The key figure in this complex of government was undoubtedly the colonial governor on whose shoulders lay the often difficult task of recon¬ ciling the interests of the Colonial Office and the local legislature. The over-ambitious ‘career’ governor, whose chief purpose was to secure promotion to a senior post, might fail through too much wanting to please his master in the Colonial Office. The ‘weak’ governor might be destroyed by discreditable vacillations between support of the Secretary of State and the colonial legislature. The ‘sympathetic’ governor who too closely allied himself with the views of the local legislature might incur the displeasure of the Secretary of State. And within the colony itself, the governor was often tested in his support of opposing or competing social, economic, and political groups and interests.. In this last respect the task of the governors of the Leeward islands in the 19th century was made easier by the fact that, except in the case of Barbuda, influential colonial opinion, both in and out of the legislatures, was agreed that the economic alternatives were either profitable sugar-production or general poverty. The political commitment to the maintenance of the sugar industry derived from the economic and political organisation of the pre¬ emancipation sugar-colonies. Sugar-colonies had been developed to produce sugar. There was no recognised alternative economic raison d’etre, and consequently no economic basis for a political opposition. The sugar-plantocracy ruled and the only divisions were those based on personal antipathies, or on differing views of the relations between metropolis and colony, but never seriously on any doubt of the funda¬ mental and all-pervasive importance of profitable sugar-production. In the Leeward Islands after emancipation the situation was not complicated by the existence of large coffee-planters, or growing urban interests, or an expanding domestic sector of the economy based on an increasingly important class of peasant-farmers. Even in Montserrat and Nevis, where the plantocracies tended to move out of the legislatures after the economic crisis of the late 1840s, new members brought no new economic proposals into discussion. Montserrat, in particular, remained throughout the century, and after, as the fallen sugar-colony. The President, in October i860, making his first address to the Legislature spoke of the beauty and fertility of the island but went on to say: I have also been deeply impressed with a degree of pain and sorrow at witnessing on every side the crumbling monuments of her former greatness.4 3

See Philip Curtin, Two Jamaicas, Harvard University Press, 1955, pp. 96-7, for a

nice illustration of this. 4 Journal of the Assembly, Montserrat, i860. 149

Five of the Leewards The glory of Greece, the grandeur of Rome, the sugar-mills of Mont¬ serrat, all sadly gone beyond recall. Much emphasis has been placed by some historians on the unrepresent¬ ative make-up of the membership of the colonial assemblies.5 It is true that franchise laws were restrictive and that the so-called people’s repre¬ sentatives were elected by mere handfuls of voters. It is also true that the same conditions prevailed in many parts of Britain before the Reform of Parliament in 1832. Table 14 Leeward Islands: representation of the people, 1838

Colony

Antigua

Dominica

St Kitts and Anguilla

Population

35>594

Number of members No. of voters at last election

323

43i(c>

I04(e)

?

?

Total no. of voters

Notes:

?(b>

159

144

143

(a) According to Blue Book, 1835. (b> No registration of voters and no law defining qualifications.