majority of these lived in Barbados.41
The main event was in the Caribbean. This would not change appreciably until the mid-eighteenth century, which suggested that the Royal Navy would be more prone to be concerned about challenges to Barbados, not Boston. As early as 1627, the now eminent New Englander John Winthrop sent his son to Barbados for betterment, economic and otherwise. There the Winthrop grubstake grew accordingly, which suggested further that even New Englanders were more concerned about the security of the Caribbean, as opposed to their own backyard. Winthrop was busily selling wine in St. Christopher’s, a Barbadian neighbor. Since letters from New England sailed to London via Barbados, this was indicative as to what was the main arena and what was the periphery. This lasted until the 1770s when the North American settlements were on the verge of secession. Moreover, Winthrop and his fellow New Englanders faced keen competition not only from London traders but even more from the Dutch, who seemed to be the rising power then. Undaunted, Winthrop sought to establish a foundation for New England manufacturing based on Caribbean cotton, but in an early sign of a rationale for secession, this was resisted by London. But England and New England could agree on the necessity of increasing enslavement in the Caribbean, with those ousted from their land in North America and Africans dragged across the Atlantic becoming the chief victims of this inhumane process. New England quickly became a chief supplier of food for the Caribbean, along with horses, casks, and barrels for rum too. The latter product was traded for enslaved Africans.42
From 1630 to 1640 at least twenty ships are known to have sailed between New England and Barbados, Bermuda, Providence Island, St. Kitts, and Tortuga, returning with cotton, tobacco, sugar, tropical produce—and the enslaved. Again, the preeminent Winthrop family of Massachusetts Bay are a stand-in for this commercial relationship: when young Samuel Winthrop moved from Tenerife to Barbados and eventually Antigua, the Winthrops, centered in England and Massachusetts, extended their trade from Rhode Island and Connecticut to the Caribbean.43
It would be an error to ascribe fiendish barbarity to Western Europeans alone, even settlers. The Winthrops were rising as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe was establishing a record for rapacity that continues to astonish. When Magdeburg fell in 1631, women were subjected to mass rape and 30,000 were butchered indiscriminately and the city was put to the torch. Religion—not race, the raison d’être for barbarism in the Americas—was at issue. By 1639 the city now known as Chennai was taken by the British East India Company in the face of stiff resistance.44 Reverberations from this mass violence could not help but spread and was in turn reinforced by contemporaneous trends in the Americas and Africa.
Nevertheless, the symbiotic relationship between ferocious island slavery and New England emerged clearly in 1630–31 when Puritans from the latter established a colony on Providence Island, a process which, revealingly, involved ousting Dutch privateers, a harbinger of things to come. Though London’s settlements were not necessarily a single unitary formation, it would have been unwise for those in, say, Virginia, to ignore events in the waters surrounding the southeast quadrant of North America. Hence, as the settlement in Providence Island was being organized, the laws of Virginia showed a sudden increase in the number of regulations constraining the activities of enslaved Africans.45
The population of the enslaved on the island exploded after 1634, allowing subsequent generations of New Englanders to look down their noses piously and hypocritically at slavery,46 even though their economy had been buoyed by enslavement of the indigenous, while being an extension of a slave-owning Caribbean. As was London’s tendency, this colony allowed for piracy, with Englishmen parasitically preying on the Spanish Empire.47
Dauntlessly, settlers pursued the dangerously inhumane course of slavery on Providence Island in the face of fierce resistance by the enslaved. In March 1636 it was decided that “Negroes” were “to be disposed into families and divided amongst officers and industrious planters,” though, it was cautioned, “a strict watch” must be “kept to prevent plots or any danger to the island being attempted.”48 A year later the investors in Providence Island were complaining that there were “too many Negroes in the island” with a fervent plea for “directions concerning them.” It was urged that “some” should be “transported to Virginia and the Somers Islands,”49 meaning Bermuda. But this was simply exporting problems, a perilous version of musical chairs.
Providence Island did not have many options. The investors had many reasons, they announced, for “disliking so many Negroes in the island,” principally because of their “mutinous conduct.” Their presence was becoming unproductive since it was mandated that “whoever keeps a Negro shall maintain a servant one day in the week upon the public works.”50 “Restraint of buying Negroes” was mandated, but a central directive was one thing, compliance was quite another.51
It did not take long for investors to order that the “taking in of Negroes” be “excused,” though it was well recognized that there was an abject “danger of too great a number.” Somehow they wanted to “send 200 English to be exchanged for as many Negroes,” swapping slaves for settlers or indentured servants, but it was unclear as to who would volunteer willingly to arrive in a kind of war zone. Yet the rule crafted was “to two English men in a family, one Negro may be received and no more.” Barring Negroes altogether was apparently out of the question; instead, the superfluous advice was rendered that “special care … be taken” to avoid at all costs “the Cannibal Negroes brought from New England.” Instead, the recommendation was “buying Negroes from the Dutch,” though placing coin in the pockets of antagonists was hardly a sound solution.52 Besides, what was to keep the sly Dutch from smuggling their agents into the island under the guise of selling the enslaved? This may serve to illuminate why many of the vanquished Pequots wound up being enslaved on Providence Island and Africans from there wound up in New England.53
On 1 May 1638—in anticipation of the late nineteenth-century salutations to laborers worldwide—the enslaved of Providence Island executed the first slave rebellion in any English colony. Thereafter, frightened oppressors engaged in a fire sale of Africans, which indicated that this settlement’s shelf life was to be limited. In possible response, in 1638 the first known attempt to “breed” enslaved Africans happened in Boston, as if in anticipation of twenty-first-century bio-engineering, to produce slaves and become less dependent on the market.54
Providence Island was soon to be overrun and destroyed by Spaniards (not the Dutch), but just before that investors were revealing their dilemma. “Laid aside” were “thoughts of selling their Negroes,” said the investors, though their presence would not enhance settler security when the inevitable Spanish invasion occurred. “If the number be too great to be managed,” they said disconsolately, “they may be sold and sent to New England or Virginia.”55 But like many investors before and since, they held on to this asset too long and lost when marauders dispatched from His Catholic Majesty arrived.
The inherent frailty of island settlements was an inference drawn from the fate of Providence Island. Yes, mainland settlements had their own problems, but as of that moment, New England and Virginia were surviving. The destruction of this island colony, however, sent an ominous signal about the destiny of Barbados and its neighbors. Were island settlements harder to defend than their mainland counterparts? Was it easier to deliver aid to hurricane wracked mainland settlements, as opposed to their island counterparts? If both queries were answered affirmatively, this was further reason for a great trek to the mainland, which was a condition precedent for the emergence of what became the United States of America.
THE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL relationship between New England and London’s island colonies meant that the Crown could afford to import more enslaved Africans. The population of the latter in Barbados jumped from about 2,000 in the 1630s to over 20,000 by the 1650s. The mainland also benefited from this boom, as a trickle of migrants to Jamestown in 1607 became a stream by 1629, then a flood by the 1640s: 100,000 were said to have arrived during
