There are times when I wish Congressmen had no staffs. Then when some family member needed help selecting an insurance plan, they couldn’t turn it over to someone else, who would then call a friend who would call a friend, eventually reaching someone who helped write a 1,100 page law and knew the right person in the industry to issue the perfect policy for the relative.
Understanding the simple basics of medicare options took nearly two full days of surfing the web when my boss thought I was doing something worth my salary. I finally found that, like IBM programming manuals, everything on websites made sense once I had already figured things out for myself, but nothing made sense until then.
I had always assumed that medicare coverage just happened when I turned 65, and I could afford the smaller social security paycheck because I wouldn’t need to pay so much for private insurance.
I also assumed my mailbox would be filled with circulars from various medicare providers. When I got nothing, I called by insurance agent to get advice on what I still called supplemental medicare insurance, only to be told (1) my agent didn’t handle medicare related policies, (2) I had to register with social security, and (3) the best thing to do was call AARP.
Calling social security was easier than AARP, and within minutes I was registered. It took three weeks, however, to receive a piece of cardboard that confirmed my account. It came the same day as a notice from my current insurer saying my rate next year, if I were still 64, would rise from $366 a month to $453 and convert from a PPO to an HMO. It would only be $405 if I lived in a more metropolitan area, filled with more accidents and pollution.
The first thing I had to learn was the meaning of medicare parts A and B. The first covers hospitalization and is free. The other covers medical needs and costs $96 a month. It rises to $110.50 next year, but no one at Medicare seemed to know that. It only found out when I got my first bill.
That’s $1,326 a year. If I remain healthy and only see my doctor once a year for a physical, supported by blood work and an every other year bone density test, I’m essentially paying all my own medical expenses. The physical is explicitly not covered by Part B, and it’s still not clear if the geriatric lab work would be covered.
However, someone rear-ended my car some years ago, and three times in the last ten years I’ve had to go through physical therapy to overcome muscle problems caused by the whip lash. Each clinic charged at least $100 a visit, in addition to my co-pay. If that happens in the future, as it may, I’ll get some benefit on my $110 a month investment.
The next thing I had to learn was that what my father had as supplemental insurance no longer existed after Bush added the drug benefit. Now, one must choose between a heavily advertised medicare advantage plan or a secretive medigap policy. The one is essentially a nicely packaged HMO or PPO that front ends medicare, handles the drug benefit and may add a few other things. Real coverage is only available from an insurance company.
In this state, there are several bottom feeders, defined as those who are working to sabotage health care reform, who offer medicare advantage plans. In addition, there’s a local HMO I vowed to never use after a one year stint when they seemed more interested in generating cash in the form of co-pays required to get referrals than in serving my needs. I finally found my own doctor and paid my own expenses for the rest of the year.
There’s the PPO I currently have who did not have a service agreement with the primary hospital in this region until this spring. Confirming that took some phone calls. The company’s central office said that it was true, but no one at the hospital had worked there long enough to understand my question. As my insurance agent said, that agreement isn’t strong enough to use as the basis for a decision - it could be cancelled any time by either side.
Blue cross simply says they’re no longer offering a medicare advantage plan in the state next year.
When I talked to people who are already on medicare, I found they have no idea what they have. My boss’s mother only knows what she has is free and I must be some kind of fool to be paying anything more than the deeply resented monthly fee.
When she got bubonic plague this year and was hospitalized for five days, she says she only had to pay a few co-pays for follow-up appointments and part of the price of the ambulance because it wasn’t an emergency. Why getting an 80-year-old woman having trouble breathing and a high fever to the hospital isn’t considered an emergency, I don’t know, especially when they discovered e-coli had broken from its confinement as a consequence of the plague.
She says she has no drug coverage, but also says she’s a member of that HMO I boycott who offers medicare advantage with or without drug coverage. The one has no premium, which means she is essentially getting only medicare part B, with no assigned doctor.
Another friend’s father put her mother into a dementia care center this year, and discovered none of the costs are covered by his policy. He won’t tell her any more than that it’s with the HMO/PPO that didn’t have an agreement with the hospital in the state capital, so I know it’s medicare advantage and not the supplemental he may have thought he had.
Once I made the decision to use medigap instead of an advantage plan, I learned why the HMO’s and PPO’s are popular. My current physician doesn’t accept Medicare. I can still see her if I’m willing to pay my expenses. When I called the first name on the list of doctors she recommended, his receptionist said he also did not accept Medicare. The other two aren’t accepting new patients. Or rather, I can make an appointment in November for March or May, two months after my current prescriptions expire.
Even having good insurance isn’t enough to guarantee treatment in this part of the state.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile begins as a detective novel wrapped in a light comedy. By the end what Dame Agatha unmasks is not simply the murderer, but the falsity of the social premise of romance.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
South Carolina - Responses to Failure
Richard Ligon may have been a failed planter, but he was a successful promoter of plantations. His book on Barbados was reprinted in 1673, and, according to April Hatfield, owned by planters in Virginia. She believes his influence there was enhanced by the presence of his brother Thomas, who was a cousin and business partner of William Berkeley. In the late 1650's, Thomas bought 2,000 acres, including some land from William Byrd. Hatfield also thinks Thomas Willoughby may have amplified Richard Ligon’s importance, since Willoughby was the agent for Ligon’s Barbado’s partner, Thomas Modyford.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Debate
When I was in high school we had a good debate coach, and our teams were always winning awards.
I was told taking debate was good training in clear thinking. What I didn't understand was if you were supposed to prepare a case for and against whatever topic was selected for the year, and drew lots to determine which side you debated in a contest, exactly what that taught you.
When I see people making the rounds of talk shows, acting as experts on whatever the current topic of public interest, I'm reminded both of trained dogs and of those high school debate matches where the point was your eloquence not your belief.
We were also told in high school the best rationale for taking geometry was that it taught logic. That at least must have been true, because, while I remember little I learned there about the nature of triangles, I do remember something about the nature of proof. Of course, geometry was less ambiguous than debate: there was only one answer to a problem, you couldn't argue both for and against two angles and a connecting line defining a triangle.
It happens the one course was required for graduation and the other was not. It was also happens I disliked the debate coach and was neutral to the geometry teacher. If one were to construct an argument for why I learned to think logically, it would resemble the more advanced forms of mathematics that try to factor in the role of chance than either class I was offered in school.
The truth would be much more complex, but there might still be something to tell with the mathematical formula. Debate was only so much talk.
I was told taking debate was good training in clear thinking. What I didn't understand was if you were supposed to prepare a case for and against whatever topic was selected for the year, and drew lots to determine which side you debated in a contest, exactly what that taught you.
When I see people making the rounds of talk shows, acting as experts on whatever the current topic of public interest, I'm reminded both of trained dogs and of those high school debate matches where the point was your eloquence not your belief.
We were also told in high school the best rationale for taking geometry was that it taught logic. That at least must have been true, because, while I remember little I learned there about the nature of triangles, I do remember something about the nature of proof. Of course, geometry was less ambiguous than debate: there was only one answer to a problem, you couldn't argue both for and against two angles and a connecting line defining a triangle.
It happens the one course was required for graduation and the other was not. It was also happens I disliked the debate coach and was neutral to the geometry teacher. If one were to construct an argument for why I learned to think logically, it would resemble the more advanced forms of mathematics that try to factor in the role of chance than either class I was offered in school.
The truth would be much more complex, but there might still be something to tell with the mathematical formula. Debate was only so much talk.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
South Carolina - Profits
Economic historians have been arguing for years if slavery was profitable or, alternatively, would slavery have died from its own internal contradictions had there been no Emancipation Proclamation.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Aluminum and Steel
One of the most striking things about the current group of fundamentalist thinkers who dominate the media is how little regard they have for what is literally true. It’s as if their argument that everything described in Genesis actually occurred allows them to say anything they like about things not included in the holy book.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Production
Some try to rationalize the existence of African slaves as necessary to do work that Europeans could not do in a tropical environment where heat and disease killed so many. Many forget, in the time before central heating, winter cold was as fatal as summer heat. Before men discovered germs, diseases killed everywhere and life was short: Richard Ligon arrived in Barbaros during a yellow fever epidemic and in London during the plague.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Childhood Memories
Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
South Carolina - Indentured Servants
It’s clear why the Dutch West Indies Company would have promoted slavery. What’s not clear, is why sugar planters like James Drax were willing to go into debt to buy slaves when they lived on an overpopulated island. However, their shared experiences were formed the decade before when Barbados was land rich and labor poor.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
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