Caribbee Part 89

"I am not a man of the sea, my friend. My people are of the forest.

That is what I know and where I want to be. And that is where I will fight the Ingles, as long as I have breath."

"Well, see you take care. This may get very bad." Winston studied him.

"We're headed down to the Point. You'll always be welcome."

"Then I wish you fortune. Your path may not be easy either. These d.a.m.nable Ingles may try to come and take it away from you."

"If they do, then they don't know what a battle is. We're going to make a free place here yet. And mark it, there'll come a day when slaveholders like Briggs will be a blot on the name of England and the Americas. All anybody will want to remember from these times will be the buccaneers."

"That is a fine ambition." He smiled, then glanced down at Serina. "I wonder what becomes of this island now, with all of us on it."

"I will tell you." She s.h.i.+fted her musket. "We are going to bring these Ingles to their knees. Someday they will come to us begging." She reached up and kissed Katherine, then lightly touched Winston's hand.

Finally she prodded Atiba forward, and in moments they were gone, through the trees.

"Hugh, I'm not at all sure I like this." Katherine moved next to him as they continued on down the hill toward the dugouts. Bartholomew was ahead of them now, leading the _boucaniers_. "I thought we were going to capture an island. But all we've ended up with is just a piece of it, a harbor, and all these criminals."

"Katy, what did you once say about thinking you could have it all?"

"I said I'd learned better. That sometimes you've got to settle for what's possible." She looked up at him. "But you know I wasn't the only one who had a dream. Maybe you wanted a different kind of independence, but you had some pretty grand ideas all the same."

"What I wanted was to take Jamaica and make it a free place, but after what's happened today n.o.body's going to get this island for a long, long time."

She looked up to see the river coming into view through the trees, a glittering ribbon in the early sun. "Then why don't we just make something of what we have, down there on the Point? For ourselves."

He slipped an arm around her and drew her against him.

"Shall we give it a try?"

London

Report of the Council of Foreign Plantations to the Lords of Trade of the Privy Council Board concerning the Condition of the Americas, with Recommendations for Furtherance of the Interests of our Merchants.

. . . Having described Barbados, Virginia, Maryland, and New England, we will now address the Condition of Jamaica subsequent to the demise of the late (and unlamented) Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration of His Royal Majesty, Charles Stuart II, to the Throne of England.

Unlike Barbados, which now has 28,515 Black slaves and whose lands command three times the price of the most Fertile acres in England, the Island of Jamaica has yet to enjoy prosperous Development for Sugar.

Although its production may someday be expected to Surpa.s.s even that of Barbados (by virtue of its greater Size), it has ever been vexatious to Govern, and certain Recommendations intended to ammend this Condition are here set forth.

It is well remembered that after Jamaica was seized from the Spaniards, the Admiral and Infantry Commander (who shall not be cruelly named here) were both imprisoned in the Tower by Oliver Cromwell as Reward for their malfeasance in the Western Design. Furthermore, the English infantry first garrisoned there soon proved themselves base, slothful Rogues, who would neither dig nor plant, and in short time many sought to defect to the Spaniards for want of rations. These same Spaniards thereafter barbarously scattered their cattle, reducing the English to eating dogs and snakes, whereupon over two-thirds eventually starved and died.

The Spaniards did then repair to the mountains of that Island with their Negroes, where together they waged war for many years against all English forces sent against them, before at last retiring to live amongst their fellow Papists on Cuba. After that time, Oliver Cromwell made offer of Free acres, under the authority of his Great Seal, to any Protestant in England who would travel thither for purposes of settlement, but to scant effect. His appeal to New Englanders to come and plant was in like manner scorned.

Thus for many years Jamaica has remained a great Thorn in the side of England. Even so, we believe that certain Possibilities of this Island may soon compensate the Expense of maintaining it until now.

The Reason may be taken as follows. It has long been understood that the Aspect of our American settlements most profitable to England is the Trade they have engendered for our Merchants. Foremost among the Commodities required are Laborers for their Plantations, a Demand we are at last equippd to supply. The Royal African Company (in which His Majesty King Charles II and all the Court are fortunate Subscribers) has been formed and a string of English slaving Fortresses has now been established on the Guinea coast. The Company has thus far s.h.i.+pped 60,753 Africans to the Americas, of which a full 46,396 survived to be Marketed, and its most recent yearly dividend to English subscribers was near to 300%. A prized coin of pure West African gold, appropriately named the Guinea, has been authorized by His Majesty to commemorate our Success in this remunerative new Business.

Now that the a.s.semblies of Virginia and Maryland happily have pa.s.sed Acts encouraging the Usefulness of Negro slaves in North America, we may expect this Trade to thrive abundantly, in light of the Fact that Blacks on English plantations do commonly Perish more readily than they breed.

Furthermore, the n.o.blest Plantation in the New World could well one day be the Island of Jamaica, owing to its abundance of fertile acres, if two Conditions thwarting its full Development can be addressed.

The first being a band of escaped Blacks and Mullatoes, known to the Spaniards as Maroons, who make bold to inhabit the mountains of said Island as a G.o.dless, separate Nation. Having no moral sense, and not respecting the laws and customs of Civil nations, they daily grow more insolent and threatening to the Christian planters, brazenly exhorting their own Blacks to disobedience and revolt. By their Endeavors they have prevented many valuable tracts of land from being cultivated, to the great prejudice of His Majesty's revenue. All attempts to quell and reduce these Blacks (said to live as though still in Africa, with their own Practices of wors.h.i.+p) have availed but little, by virtue of their una.s.sailable redoubts, a Condition happily not possible on the small island of Barbados. Our records reveal that some 240,000 pounds Sterling have thus far been expended in fruitless efforts to bring them under submission. Yet they must be destroyed or brought in on some terms, else they will remain a great Discouragement to the settling of a people on the Island.

It is now concluded that, since all English regiments sent against them have failed to subdue these Maroons (who fall upon and kill any who go near their mountain strongholds), efforts must be attempted in another Direction. Accordingly we would instruct the Governor of the Island, Sir Benjamin Briggs, to offer terms of Treaty to their leader, a heathenish Black reported to be called by the name Etiba, whereby each Nation may henceforth exist in Harmony.

The other Condition subverting full English control of the island is the Town that thrives at the Entrance to Jamaica Bay, a place called Cayo de Carena by the Spaniards and now known, in honor of the Restoration of His Majesty, as Port Royal. Said Port scarcely upholds its name, being beholden to none save whom it will. It is home to those Rovers of the sea calling themselves Buccaneers, a willful breed of men formerly of Tortuga, who are without Religion or Loyalty. Travelling whither they choose, they daily wreak depredations upon the s.h.i.+pping of the Spaniard (taking pieces-of-eight in the tens of millions) and have made the Kingdom of the Sea their only allegiance.

Unlike our own Failure to settle prosperous Plantations on Jamaica, this port has enjoyed great Success (of a certain Kind). No city founded in the New World has grown more quickly than this place, nor achieved a like degree of Wealth. It is now more populous than any English town in the Americas save Boston--and it has realized a position of Importance equalled only by its infamous Reputation. In chase of the stolen Spanish riches that daily pour in upon its streets, merchants will pay more for footage along its front than in the heart of London. Having scarce supply of water, its residents do drink mainly strong liquors, and our Census has shown there are not now resident in this Port ten men to every Tippling House, with the greatest number of licenses (we are advisd) having been issued to a certain lewd Woman once of Barbados, who has now repaired thither to the great advancement of her Bawdy Trade.

Although this Port has tarnished the Name of England by its headquartering of these insolent Buccaneers, it is yet doubtful whether the Island would still be in His Majesty's possession were it not for the Fear they strike in the heart of the Spaniards, who would otherwise long since have Reclaimed it.

The chiefest of these Rovers, an Englishman known to all, has wrought much ill upon the Spaniards (and on the Hollanders, during our recent war), for which Service to England (and Himself) he is now conceived by His Majesty as a Gentleman of considerable parts, though he has acted in diverse ways to obstruct our quelling of the island's meddlesome Maroons.

Accordingly, His Majesty has made known to the Council his Desire that we strive to enlist this Buccaneer's good offices in persuading his Rovers (including a notorious Woman, equally well known, said to be his Wife, who doth also sail with these Marauders) to uphold English jurisdiction of the Island and its Port. Should this Design fall out as desir'd, His Majesty has hopes that (by setting, as he would have it privately, these Knights of the Blade in charge of his Purse) he can employ them to good effect.

In furtherance of this end, it is His Majesty's pleasure that we, in this coming year, recall Sir Benjamin Briggs (whose honesty His Majesty has oft thought Problemmatical) and make effort to induce this Buccaneer to a.s.sume the post of Governor of Jamaica.

Afterword

In the foregoing I have attempted to distill the wine of history into something more like a brandy, while still retaining as much authentic flavor as possible. Many of the episodes in the novel are fictionalized renderings of actual events, albeit condensed, and the majority of individuals depicted also were drawn from life. The action spans several years, from the first major slave auction on Barbados, thought to have occurred slightly before mid-century, to the English seizure of Jamaica in 1655. The structure of race and economics in England's Caribbean colonies changed dramatically in those short years, a social transformation on a scale quite unlike any other I can recall. The execution of King Charles and the Barbados war of independence also took place during that crucial time.

All doc.u.ments, letters, and broadsides cited here are essentially verbatim save the two directly involving Hugh Winston. Of the people, there naturally were many more involved than a single novel could encompa.s.s. Hugh Winston is a composite of various persons and viewpoints of that age (such as Thomas Tryon), ending of course with the famous buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, later appointed Governor of Jamaica in recognition of his success pillaging Spanish treasure.

Governor Dalby Bedford is a combination of Governor Philip Bell and his successor Francis, Lord Willoughby. (Neither was actually killed in the Barbados revolution. The revolt collapsed when, after defectors had welcomed Parliament's forces ash.o.r.e, five days of rain immobilized the planters, whereupon a stray English cannon ball knocked down the door of a plantation house where the island's militia commanders were gathered and laid out one of the sentries, demoralizing them into surrender.) Katherine Bedford was inspired by Governor Bell's wife, "in whome by reason of her quick and industrious spirit lay a great stroak of the government." Benjamin Briggs is an embodiment of many early settlers; his installation of the first sugar mill on the island and his construction of a walled compound for protection recall James Drax and Drax Hall, and his later career is not unlike that of Thomas Modyford, a prosperous Barbados planter who later became governor of Jamaica.

Anthony and Jeremy Walrond are vaguely reminiscent of the prominent royalists Humphrey and George Walrond. Edmond Calvert was drawn for some portions of the story from Sir George Ayscue and for others from Admiral William Penn. Richard Morris is a combination of Captain William Morris and General Robert Venables, and James Powlett recalls Vice Admiral Michael Pack. Most of the Council and a.s.sembly members appearing here were actually in those bodies, and my Joan Fuller is homage to a celebrated Bridgetown brothel proprietor of the same name; of them all, I sincerely hope I have done most justice to her memory.

Jacques le Basque was modeled on various early boucaniers--beginning with Pierre le Grand, the first to seize a Spanish s.h.i.+p (using dugouts), and ending with the much-hated French buccaneer-king Le Va.s.seur, who built Forte de la Roche and its "dovecote." Tibaut de Fontenay was the latter's nephew, who murdered him much as described over the matter of a shared mistress.

Although Serina, as mulatto "bed-warmer" to Benjamin Briggs, had no specific prototype at that early time (a condition soon to change, much to the dismay of English wives at home), Atiba was inspired by a Gold Coast slave named Coffe who led an unsuccessful revolt on Barbados in the seventeenth century, intending to establish a black nation along African lines. As punishment he and several others were "burned alive, being chained at the stake." When advised of his sentence, he reportedly declared, "If you roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow." A contemporary broadside depicting the affair retailed briskly in London. Atiba's subsequent career, as a Maroon leader with whom the English eventually were forced to negotiate, also had various historical models, including the fearsome Cudjoe, head of a warlike nation of free Negroes still terrifying English planters on Jamaica almost eighty years after it was seized.

Very few physical artifacts survive from those years. On Barbados one can see Drax Hall, on which Briggs Hall was closely modeled, and little else. On Tortuga, this writer chopped his way through the jungle and located the site of Le Va.s.seur's Forte de la Roche and "dovecote." A bit of digging uncovered some stonework of the fort's outer wall, but all that remained of the "dovecote" was a single plaster step, almost three and a half centuries old, once part of its lower staircase and now lodged in the gnarled root of a Banyan tree growing against the huge rock atop which it was built. On Jamaica there seems to be nothing left, save a few relics from the heyday of Port Royal. Only the people of those islands, children of a vast African diaspora, remain as living legacy of Europe's sweet tooth in the seventeenth century.

The story here was pieced together from many original sources, for which thanks is due the superb Library and Rare Book Room of Columbia University, the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, the Archives of Barbados, and the Inst.i.tute of Jamaica, Kingston. For information on Yoruba culture and practices, still very much alive in Brazil in parts of the Caribbean, I am grateful to Dr. John Mason of the Yoruba Theological Seminary, the Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, and friends in Haiti who have over the years exposed me to Haitian _vodun_. For information on Tortuga and the boucaniers, including some vital research on Forte de la Roche, I am indebted to the archeologist Daniel Koski-Karell; and for their hospitality to an enquiring novelist I thank Les Freres des Ecoles chretiennes, Christian Brothers missionaries on the Isle de la Tortue, Haiti. I am also grateful to Dr. Gary Puckrein, author of Little England, for his insights concerning the role slavery played in Barbados' ill-starred attempt at independence.