exportation. Once in England, it was further refined and whitened by ‘claying’, a process whereby it was cured in ceramic moulds with clay tops. The moisture seeped through the cones, leaving the muscavado pure white, and shop-ready.11
The Caribbean boiling houses were extremely dangerous for the (usually female) workers in them. The clarification process involved heating and reheating the sugar at ferocious temperatures, and many slaves were scalded and burnt. Often they worked eighteen-hour days, becoming so tired that as they fed the cane through the huge rollers they could be dragged into them and crushed to death. Overseers kept a machete handy so they could hack off trapped limbs. As a result many slaves had missing hands or fingers. In Voltaire’s Candide (1759) a maimed slave explains, ‘When we work in the sugar mills and we catch our fingers in the millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off a leg; both things have happened to me. It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.’12
Again we must turn to Mary Prince, whose History gives a unique account of plantation life from the perspective of a female slave. As a house slave on a Bermuda plantation, she was frequently abused by her owners. ‘To strip me naked – to hang me up by the wrist and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin [whip], was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence.’13 Usually the floggings were administered by slave foremen called ‘drivers’, who were often related to the workers they were called upon to punish. Mary Prince wrote of the particular horror when a driver would ‘take down his wife or sister or child, and strip them, and whip them in such a disgraceful manner’.14
One of the most extensive and disturbing accounts of plantation life can be found in the journal of Thomas Thistlewood, who as we have seen lived with his black slave Phibbah as his ‘wife’ for over thirty years. An inveterate diarist and note-keeper, he left over a million words detailing his life in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786. They build a day-to-day picture of plantation life, of what it was like to be a British owner living with his sugar slaves. Thistlewood was educated and well-read, arriving in Jamaica with the poets Milton, Chaucer and Pope, and the essayist Addison in his luggage, and continuing to build his library during the years in which he lived there. In preparation for his life as an overseer he read a manual by his neighbour, Richard Beckford, about how to manage a sugar plantation. Beckford was the biggest sugar baron in the West Indies, owning more than a thousand slaves. His manual advised that it was best to treat slaves with ‘Justice and Benevolence’, but he also warned about the need to guard against insurrection. Thistlewood took more heed of the latter than the former advice. He was told by other sugar planters to take a tough line with his slaves, and in his early days he was sent the severed head of a runaway slave to display as a warning to his field gangs.
In just a short time, Thistlewood became acclimatised to the planter’s way of life. Showing none of Beckford’s proposed ‘Justice and Benevolence’, he brutalised and tortured his slaves, flogging them for insubordination, rubbing lime juice, pickles, salt and bird pepper into the gashes for added effect. In order to prevent them from sucking the sweet cane juice, he devised a sickening punishment that he called ‘Derby’s Dose’. ‘Had Derby well whipped,’ he records in his journal, ‘and made Egypt [another of his slaves] shit in his mouth.’15
He sexually exploited his female slaves, keeping a detailed account of every encounter in schoolboy Latin. ‘Last night Cum [with] Dido’ was one of his typical diary entries. (This is not our Dido – the name was commonly given to female slaves.) Thistlewood’s journal shows how institutional violence characterised sugar plantations, how slavery brutalised everyone.16 But there was another side to him, which was developed when he fell in love with Phibbah and became the father of a mixed-race boy. His relationship with Phibbah sheds light on the highly complicated matter of inter-racial pairings.
Thistlewood’s sugar plantation was in the south-east of the island. He would probably have known Sir Thomas Hampson, who also owned a plantation in Jamaica. Hampson was Jane Austen’s cousin twice-removed,17 and the shadow story of her novel Mansfield Park, in which Sir Thomas Bertram owns a sugar plantation in Antigua, is the slave trade. Many people in Georgian England were connected in some fashion with West Indian plantations.
Indeed, the character of the West Indian planter became a staple in British fiction and drama during the period. One of the most popular comedies on the eighteenth-century stage was Richard Cumberland’s The West-Indian (1771). Its hero, Belcour, is a wealthy young scapegrace fresh from his sugar estates in Jamaica, ‘with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch’. His entourage includes four black slaves, two green monkeys, a pair of grey parrots, a sow and pigs, and a mangrove dog.
The fine ladies and gentlemen of England piled into the Theatre Royal Drury Lane to see the exploits of this kind-hearted fictional sugar baron. They would have laughed at his bewildered account of arriving from Jamaica at a bustling English port crammed with sugar casks and porter butts. Belcour is depicted as a harmless libertine, who chases English girls until he is as thin ‘as a sugar cane’ – the mild stage image of such a man was a far cry from the reality of Thomas Thistlewood, with his rapes, his floggings and his sadistic punishments.
Georgian high society was a world away from the sugar islands, where all that mattered was efficient production on the plantations, whatever the human cost. As one wit remarked, ‘Were beef steaks and apple pies ready dressed to grow on trees, they would be cut down for cane plants.’18 But in the words of the eminent food historian Elizabeth Abbott, ‘So many tears were shed for sugar that by rights it ought to have lost its sweetness.’19
Sugar was indubitably the main engine driving the European slave trade. England was not the first country to trade in human flesh, but due to its maritime power it became the dominant transatlantic transporter of enslaved Africans. It has been estimated that British ships transported between three and four million Africans to the Americas. The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire, the most valuable of all its colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century, £4 million-worth of imported sugar came into Britain each year from its West Indian plantations.20 Britain was growing rich on the white stuff. Its impact was epic and irreversible.
5. Elevations of the north and south fronts of Kenwood House, and the interior of Lord Mansfield’s Library, by Robert and James Adam
William Murray was born on 2 March 1705, at Scone Abbey in Perthshire, Scotland. He was the fourth son of the fifth Viscount of Stormont and his wife Margaret, and one of fourteen children. Though he was born to Scottish nobility, it was an impoverished line, and he was forced to make his way in the world by his intelligence and hard work. He attended Perth Grammar School, where he mixed with boys from different social backgrounds and was taught Latin, English grammar and essay-writing skills. He later said that this gave him a great advantage at university, as those students educated in England had been taught Greek and Latin, but not how to write properly in English. When he was eight his parents moved away, and left him and his younger brother Charles in the care of his headmaster.1
In 1715, when William was in his tenth year, the recently formed political union between Scotland and England was shaken
