South Carolina - Barbados

South Carolina’s history begins with the ambitions of men who looked to the Caribbean islands where Spain was generating so much wealth. In 1625, soon after the Virginia Company started settling North American, men financed by London merchant William Courteen landed on Barbados, far east in the Lesser Antilles near the coast of South America.

The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.

Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.

Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.

The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.

Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.

Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.

The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.

The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.

Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.

Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.

Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.

By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.

Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.