to be the idol of the Island.” Jamaica was “a Chaos of Men Negroes & things which made my Young American head Giddy.” Fighting his way “through this obnoxious Crowd,” the innocent narrator reflected that “the Island itself looked like a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing Men by the power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess” so that “Life resembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion & desire to some premature Extreme.” His only response to these extremes, to the “Exhausting Climate,” and to “the perpetual struggle subsisting between the two great factions which Inhabit this Island,” was to take leave of Jamaica and not think about it again.3
Travelers to Saint-Domingue were similarly dislocated. Colonists there were highly materialistic, and had few communal institutions or spaces that were reminiscent of France. Isolated on their estates, many colonists adopted the customs of the buccaneers that preceded them and the enslaved Africans that surrounded them. It was a place that seemed at one and the same time to be very French and also the least French place imaginable. The colony inspired both desire and disgust in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, a minor nobleman who sought his fortune there in the late 1780s. He was entranced, on the one hand, by the colonial landscape and by beautiful “mulâtresses” who “combine the explosiveness of saltpeter with an exuberance of desire, that scorning all, drives them to pursue, acquire and nourish pleasure.” But he saw Saint-Domingue as a world turned upside down, where morality was absent, mainly owing to slavery. It was a society based on pursuit of profit, not religious virtue, social cohesion, or imperial loyalty. He proclaimed, “The Commerce of France is the true owner of Saint-Domingue.”4 Lieutenant Colonel Desdorides, stationed in Saint-Domingue in 1779, was also struck by colonists’ pursuit of profit and pleasure. He lamented that “it seems that in Saint-Domingue violent agitations of the heart take the place of principles; except for illusions of love, dreams of pleasure, extravagances of luxury and greed, the heart knows no other adorations.”5 Desdorides believed that an obsession with money had fundamentally transformed the character of French colonists: “In Saint-Domingue, men and women behave in a manner totally opposed to what I have described [of the French character]. Men there reduce everything to financial gain.”6
In this chapter, and the next, we look at a variety of images that help us understand these places—even if they lead us to the same feelings of displacement, dislocation, and unease felt by contemporary visitors. We start by examining large-scale maps, which show the geography and diversity of environment in each colony and which also give a glimpse into some of the underlying ideologies animating the West Indian ruling elite. We proceed to a treatment of the sugar plantation (the quintessential institution in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue) through two allied but very different portraits—one an idealized pastoral scene that hides the reality of enslavement and the other an estate plan that makes abundantly clear the underlying violence of the plantation machine, as well as the luxury it allowed owners. From an extensive survey of rural life in the two colonies in Chapter 2, we move, in Chapter 3, to examine the vibrant culture of colonial towns.
In 1763, the year that the Peace of Paris confirmed Britain’s victories in the Seven Years’ War, Thomas Craskell and James Simpson published an elaborate map of Jamaica (Figure 1). Encompassing twelve sheets, it was the culmination of the first detailed survey of the whole of the island, done under the direction of Governor Henry Moore between 1756 and 1761. This map stood for the next forty years as the most detailed image of Jamaica, identifying sugar plantations, some with water mills, and some with wind and cattle mills. It also located ginger, cotton, and pimento estates, livestock pens, military barracks, principal anchorage points, and Jamaica’s road system.7 By the 1760s the English had been developing Jamaica for a century.8 Though it was roughly one-third the size of Saint-Domingue, it was much bigger than any of Britain’s Lesser Antilles islands, more geographically varied, and consequently more capable of future development. Indeed, at the start of the Seven Years’ War much good land was still uncultivated.9
Figure 1. “To the Right Honourable George, Earl of Halifax … This map of the island of Jamaica … humbly inscribed by Thos. Craskell, Engineer, and Jas. Simpson, Surveyor.” London: Fournier, 1763. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
Unlike the smaller colonies, Jamaica had mountains, swamps, and arid sections, as well as fertile coastal plains. This variety made it far more difficult than, say, Barbados to transform into a large-scale sugar producer. Francis Price’s attempts to establish the Worthy Park plantation in the central parish of St. Thomas in the Vale illustrate how difficult this process of agricultural transformation turned out to be. Price, who arrived in Jamaica in 1655, acquired the land soon after English settlement, but when he died in 1689 he was still relatively poor. His land was only partly cleared, and it was devoted mainly to food crops and pasture rather than sugar. Price’s farm was the sort of modest pioneer property that might have been found in the backwoods of seventeenth-century Virginia. It was Price’s grandson Charles, who died as Speaker of the House of Assembly in 1772, who transformed Worthy Park into a large plantation with hundreds of slaves and significant amounts of cane land.10 Jamaica’s slow development disappointed English imperialists. Celebrating British American growth and expansion in 1776, Adam Smith reminded his readers that a century before, “the island of Jamaica was an unwholesome desert; little inhabited and less cultivated…. The island of Barbados, in short, was the only British colony of any consequence of which the condition at the time bore any resemblance to what it is at present.”11
Jamaica became the jewel of the British Empire because of the ability of its planters to extract great wealth from sugar. But the risks involved in starting a plantation were considerable. A remarkable set of planter’s records from Jamaica in the 1670s details the frustrations of the process. Cary Helyar was an aspiring but impecunious younger son from a genteel background. He came to Jamaica in the early 1660s, made some money in slave trading, and developed connections with leading politicians. He bought prime sugar land. He boasted to his brother that his Bybrook plantation of 1,236 acres was “almost square, of as good land and as well-watered as any in the island.” Yet to make sugar at Bybrook required a large capital investment in slaves, equipment, and livestock.12 Only in the late 1680s did Bybrook generate significant profits, and those disappeared in the 1690s, after Helyar’s son, who had inherited the estate, returned to England. The Helyars could not find honest and skilled managers to supervise their overseers. Sugar production dropped, dead slaves were not replaced, and equipment wore out. By 1713, when the family sold it, the property was close to worthless. As Helyar’s experience suggests, sugar planting was a tricky business.
Figure 2. “To the Right Honourable Robert, Earl of Holdernesse, this map of the county of Cornwall, in the island of Jamaica … humbly inscribed by Thos. Craskell, Engineer, Jas. Simpson, Surveyor.” London: Fournier, 1763. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
Small planters preferred other options to the risky enterprise of large-scale planting. Piracy was one option.13 For ordinary white men an enjoyable life could be had roistering in the narrow streets of Port Royal, seeking fame and fortune through plundering expeditions against the Spanish. They could supplement their income and ensure a measure of landed independence by growing small quantities of crops on a few acres of land in nearby parishes. A British migrant, John Taylor, gives us a lively picture of Port Royal at its zenith. It was not only Port Royal’s “merchants and gentry” who “live here to the hights of splendor,” but “all sorts of mechanicks and tradesmen … all of which live here verey well, earning thrice the wages given in England, by which means they are enabled to maintain their
