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.
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