’tis much advance both in strength and wealth, still becoming more formidable.”14
Figure 3. “To the Right Honourable George Grenville, Esq., First Lord Commissioner of Surrey 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.
Port Royal was badly damaged in a 1692 earthquake, effectively ending privateering. Around this time, between the 1680s and the 1720s, wealthy colonists boosted their profits by adopting the integrated plantation model. A massive influx of enslaved Africans ensured that this model would be successful. While the black population was relatively equal to the white population in the 1670s, by 1700 Jamaica was populated mainly by enslaved blacks. In 1710, the Crown allowed private traders into the African slave trade previously monopolized by the Royal African Company. This greatly increased the number of captives arriving in Jamaica. Large sugar estates bought most of those Africans so that by the 1720s, most slaves lived and worked in labor forces of one hundred or more. The dominance of large plantations remained virtually unchanged until the end of slavery. Simultaneously, white servitude declined dramatically. Until the 1680s, most planters with medium to large slave forces also had indentured white servants as part of their labor force. In 1690 Dalby Thomas described a sugar plantation with fifty slaves as needing seven servants.15 From the 1690s, however, the numbers of white servants noted in inventories faded away until by the 1720s a white servant in an inventory was a rarity. By this time, land prices were soaring as the best territory in the settled parishes of the southern coast and in central Jamaica to planters had already been distributed. The hard work of slaves and servants transformed these properties into fertile sugarcane fields.
The rise of the large integrated plantation had two significant consequences for Jamaica. First, it meant that the colony’s population consisted primarily of enslaved African slaves sold to Jamaican planters to labor as sugar workers. Second, their labor produced a planter class with wealth and influence unprecedented in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Elite planters remained the dominant social and political force on the island, despite demographic disaster and metropolitan opposition, until after the end of slavery in 1838. This new plantation world was reflected in the Craskell and Simpson maps of 1763. The engraver, Daniel Fournier of London, included ornate title cartouches that showed just how far Jamaica had developed since perilous times in the 1690s and 1700s. The three scenes showed a confident planter class at work and at play. In the left-hand bottom corner, a planter posed next to an ornate stone on which the names of the governor commissioning the map and the two surveyors were engraved. A kneeling and sub-servient black man carrying pails of water accompanied the planter. Behind him was a well-ordered plantation with a working windmill, cattle trudging along a pathway, and a harbor with ships docked in the distance. Notably absent were the mass of enslaved people necessary for a functioning sugar plantation.
Counterposed to this scene of rural productivity was an urban scene in the right-hand top corner. Likely a composite picture of British West Indian ports rather than Kingston itself, the cartouche depicts a harbor full of merchant vessels and one military gunboat, showing the welcome protection of the Royal Navy for West Indian commerce. The crowded commercial scene is full of dockside workers ferrying sugar, rum, molasses, and provisions overland and across the harbor in small skiffs. Two white men occupy prominent positions in the image, one a gentleman planter and the other a merchant, each with puncheons of rum and hogsheads of sugar at their feet. An open account book sits on a cabriole-legged desk near the two men. To the left is a substantial and elegant merchant’s house with a handsome portico. And in front of another stone engraved with the names of the prime minister, the Jamaican governor, and the two surveyors are two black men, a bag of coffee, and a stack of tropical lumber. The scene advertised Jamaica as a lush and bountiful land where Britons made money and engaged in genteel pursuits, assisted by African workers.
The third cartouche illustrated those pursuits. It showed a white man on foot, with dogs, cornering a large boar in a heavily forested countryside. The three scenes, overall, showed to English spectators an idealized Jamaica: a land of flourishing plantations and bustling towns, with abundant and quiescent black laborers serving wealthy aristocratic Europeans. Sugar and industry anchored the whole tableau. And women and free people of color were invisible.
Maps drawn in the 1720s of Saint-Domingue show not only that it was far larger than Jamaica, but that it was an even wilder place, at least in the first half of the eighteenth century. Jamaica became an English possession in one fell swoop in 1655, when an English invading force drove out a small Spanish colony. In contrast, Saint-Domingue became a French possession incrementally, as hunters and pirates living there began to accept the authority of French governors only around 1665. After this date the colony, or pieces of it, developed slowly under the control of various royal monopoly companies, coming under full royal governance only in the 1720s. In 1700 Jamaica had about seven thousand whites and forty thousand blacks; Saint-Domingue had 4,560 and 9,082 respectively.16 Although early eighteenth-century French maps depict a network of overland roads, the colony’s mountainous interior made shipping the most practical way to transport goods and people. Nevertheless, the colony’s complex coast was difficult to sail around, and local pirates preyed on Saint-Domingue’s coastal traffic until the 1730s.17
There were at least four factors besides geography and buccaneers that kept Saint-Domingue economically two or three decades behind Jamaica. First, Spain recognized French possession of the western coast of Hispaniola only in 1697, in the Treaty of Ryswick. Second, the French navy was ill equipped to protect the kingdom’s transatlantic commerce from foreign enemies or pirates. From a high point of one hundred ships of the line in 1680, it shrank to forty-nine in 1725.18 Third, the French slave trade started slowly. It was only in 1725, after bitter complaints from wealthy colonists about the Compagnie des Indes, which controlled France’s trade with West Africa, that Versailles opened the slave trade to all private merchants.
Figure 4. “Carte de l’isle de Saint Domingue. dressée en 1722 pour l’usage du roy, sur les mémoires de Mr. Frezier, ingénieur de S. M. et autres, assujetis aux observations astronomiques, Guillaume Delisle.” Paris, 1780. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
The fourth factor was the amount of investment sugar required. Father Labat, a Dominican priest who managed his order’s plantation in Martinique, described the technological and human workings of sugar plantations at the beginning of the eighteenth century in his widely read Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1724). In a long and detailed chapter that was copied in commercial handbooks, he advocated a workforce of 120 slaves, which he believed in 1696 would produce net annual revenue of 38,030 livres for over a century, with “a little thriftiness.” But when Labat compared such an estate to the cacao walks he observed in Martinique around 1702, he noted that sugar required three times the investment as a cacao estate that produced the same revenues. This comparison, he noted, revealed “that the cacao walk is a rich gold mine, while a sugar estate is only an iron mine.”19
About the time Labat’s book was published, a fungal infestation destroyed the cacao sector in Saint-Domingue. But in the first half of the eighteenth century, most aspiring planters turned to indigo rather than sugar. Like sugar, indigo dye must be heavily processed after harvesting. But the indigo plant does not have to be crushed or its juice boiled. Instead, it is soaked in a series of masonry tanks until the dye precipitates into a powder, which is then drained and dried before shipping. Indigo cultivation is labor intensive, and the manufacturing process can be subtle, but it can be handled with less than a dozen slaves, a few water basins, and a skilled refiner. Not only was it cheaper to make than sugar, but indigo was easier to transport and store, which made it better suited for smuggling in parts of the colony where French commercial shipping was rare. Up to the
