The Manor Read online

  When the protective tree canopy disappeared, the repeated pounding of heavy tropical rains compacted much of the remaining soil. What remained after severe erosion became impoverished with the constant replanting of sugar. But the crop was too lucrative to abandon, despite the environmental and human costs. Planters compensated with innovative techniques of fertilization, soil conservation, and planting, all of which required that slaves work harder and longer. Sugar producers did not suffer: they simply sold more sugar, satisfying the increasing global demand for the commodity. And the supply of forced labor could be expanded at little cost to them, since the price of slaves dropped over time.

  The first Africans to arrive on Barbados—a handful of people captured from a Spanish ship—had come with the first Europeans in 1627. A 1645 census tallied 23,980 inhabitants: 18,300 white men and 5,680 Africans. By 1650 the number of slaves had more than doubled to nearly a third of the island’s total population. Between 1645 and 1672 a total of 56,800 Africans were imported, an average of 2,030 people per year. Because they were so poorly fed and housed, and the planters considered their lives expendable, slaves on Barbados died faster than they could reproduce. Year after year, slave traders supplied their replacements.

  Between 1640 and 1646 the value of agricultural acreage rose tenfold; during the next four years, the purchase price of a fully equipped sugar plantation increased more than twenty times. Shelter Island’s 8,000 unimproved acres were worth only 1,600 pounds of the cheapest brown sugar in 1651. Little more than a year later, Constant paid 40,000 pounds of sugar for a 67-acre Barbadian working plantation. Measured in sugar, an acre on Shelter Island was worth less than a quarter of a teaspoonful; each of Constant’s new Barbados acres—even taking into account the expensive housing and sugar works—surpassed 200 cups.

  Making a Fortune

  The Sylvesters’ Dutch base gave them a jump on most transoceanic settlers. Dutch capital was more easily available to them, and repayment terms more flexible; Dutch ships were better designed; and Holland’s import duties were lower than England’s. Historians continually debate which nation introduced African slavery to Barbados, but they virtually agree that Dutch shippers cornered a major share of the early markets for European goods and American produce.

  By 1665, Barbados was exporting more than 15,000 tons of sugar a year. In the oft-quoted words of Caribbean historian Eric Williams, “Little Barbados … was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.” Meanwhile the Sylvesters’ trading network expanded throughout the Atlantic Basin. How their father’s death affected the Sylvesters can’t be assessed, except to say that the loss of a family base in Amsterdam, the passage of the English Navigation Acts of 1651–52 and 1660, the huge success of Constant’s sugar plantations, and the purchase of Shelter Island saw the focus of operations shift to the New World, while the European foothold became London.

  A detail from Richard Ford’s 1674 map shows the two Sylvester plantations, each with two windmills, on the island’s richest sugar soils, in St. George’s Valley. By 1679, the Sylvesters were among the wealthiest families on the island, with a total of 695 acres, 260 African slaves, and 11 indentured white servants. Sugar and slaves were the engine of Shelter Island’s first European economy.

  Besides what provisions Nathaniel sent south from Long Island, Constant shipped sugar, molasses, rum, and ginger to Amsterdam, New England, and England. Salt for preserving meat from Nevis went to New England; wine from the Azores traveled to Europe, New England, and the West Indies; and manufactured goods from Europe came to all colonial ports where they could be sold profitably. They had good credit and access to the right people in Amsterdam, London, and Rhode Island, which rapidly became a major West Indian shipping depot. With a trusted family member as factor aboard ship or in almost every major port, they profited from every trip across the Atlantic.

  “They Choose Them as They Do Horses in a Market”

  Before African captives went on sale at the Bridgetown docks, sellers groomed their merchandise to be as presentable as possible. Oil made skin shine, rust and gunpowder concealed sores, anuses were corked to hide the leakage caused by the deadly “bloody flux.” At a well-documented vendue of 251 Africans in 1644, the largest purchaser was James Drax, followed by William Hilliard, a partner of a Bristol merchant, Samuel Farmer, who became Constant’s friend and one of his executors. When Hilliard returned to England, Farmer took on the management of Hilliard’s Barbadian plantation and agreed to supply it with “90 slaves within fourteen months.” The most economical way for Farmer to do so was by slaving himself, or buying shares in an African venture. Nathaniel may also have been seeking to stock family plantations or make a profit by selling slaves to other planters when he made a trip from Barbados to Africa aboard the Seerobbe in 1646.

  Global maritime traffic united four continents in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World.

  Ligon writes, “When they are brought to us, the Planters buy them out of the Ship, where they find them stark naked, and therefore cannot be deceived in any outward infirmity; they choose them as they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautiful, yield the greatest prices … [The men] are very well timber’d, that is, broad between the shoulders, full breasted, well filletted [muscled], and clean leg’d and may hold good with Albert Durers rules” (the artist Albrecht Dürer). He faults the women for figures that fall short of the German’s standards: “I have seen very few of them, whose hips have been broader than their shoulders.”

  Twenty-five of every hundred men and women usually died during the first twelve months of “seasoning,” the arduous three-year process of acclimation. Recent arrivals fell prey to malnutrition and disease, and to a “fixed melancholy.” Felix Christian Spoeri, a Swiss doctor who visited the island in the early 1660s, observed: “When slaves come first to Barbados and are forced to work they often die of hunger [by refusing to eat]. They imagine that if they die they will go to another land where riches, honor, and splendor will not be lacking and where there will be an abundance of everything.”

  But those who survived seasoning kept memories of African culture alive by shaping a creole community that gained strength from each wave of newcomers. Black resistance also thrived. Absent a single slave testimony from those years, Barbadian legislation offers the clearest insight into plans for black rebellions—and the fears of white masters. Laws enacted from 1646 onward forbade slave-run markets, as well as large-scale black festivals and funerals. Complete enforcement proved impossible. Even though drums, horns, and conch shells (all familiar in Africa) were outlawed as instruments of revolution, the law was often broken: people made music, danced—and plotted—late on Saturday nights, aware that a mounted militia could be watching. They defiantly mourned their dead. Slave women continued to sell their produce in Bridgetown and at plantation corners, enjoying a few hours of independent public existence. Runaways “marooned” themselves in caves and woods until the island’s deforestation eliminated safe long-term hiding places, meaning that if slaves took up arms, the bare choice was victory or death. People continued to slip away for days at a time, however, to visit friends and relations on other plantations, a practice that continued (and was punished) on Barbados, and in all slave societies, as long as slavery lasted. Stealing from whites occurred regularly, often by night when “their bodies black, they [could] scape undiscern’d.” Africans on Long Island would offer similar calculated resistance.

  Several well-conceived black plots on Barbados—betrayed or found out only days before their scheduled execution—exposed a revolutionary life hidden under the eyes of unsuspecting whites. To set a harsh example, authorities tortured or executed slaves for a suspicious word, even a whisper. One old black man was burned alive for frightening his mistress, following the discovery of a 1675 conspiracy. The biggest scare, in 1692, led to the arrests of several hundred slaves “many [of whom] were hang’d, and great many burn’d.” The B
arbados Council authorized an Alice Mills to castrate forty-two black men and paid her ten guineas for the job. In New York Colony, where rebel slaves would also be mutilated, tortured, and then executed as “examples,” the laws enacted to control the slave labor force were modeled on legislation in the West Indies.

  By 1660 the sugar island’s population was almost equally divided between white and black, and by the 1690s, when Constant’s widow owned the Sylvester properties, the numbers stood at about 18,000 whites to 49,000 enslaved Africans and creoles. Fearful whites had walled themselves in against the chances of revolt long before: a siege mentality was expressed in architecture as well as legislation. Ligon describes planters’ houses “built in the manner of Fortifications [with] Lines, Bulwarks, and Bastions to defend themselves, in case there should be any uproar or commotion in the Island, either by the Christian servants, or Negro slaves.”

  Even plants had useful defensive capabilities: the “Lime Tree … is like a thick Hollybush in England and as full of prickles: if you make a hedge of them, about your house, ’tis sufficient proof against the Negroes; whose naked bodies cannot possibly enter it.” Ligon, who wanted to promote colonization, nonetheless manages casually to introduce the subject of slave uprisings in a discussion of hydraulics: “Water they save likewise from their houses, by gutters at the eves, which carry it down to cisterns. And the water which is kept there, being within the limits of their houses … serves them for drink whilst they are besieged as also, to throw down upon the naked bodies of the Negroes, scalding hot.”

  Slaves and servants found ways to retaliate that could appear to be accidents. Worst of all preventable disasters—from the planters’ point of view—were cane fires, where “whole lands of Canes and Houses too, are burnt down and consumed, to the utter ruine and undoing of their Masters.” Everyone smoked a pipe—men, women, slaves, servants, and masters—and a careless or malicious smoker might start a blaze, with “every knot of every Cane, giving as great a report as a Pistol.” Ligon wrote that “Mr. Constantine Silvester … had not only his Canes, but his house burnt down to the ground. This, and much more mischief has been done, by the negligence and wilfulness of servants.” Only a few lines before, Ligon had extravagantly praised another planter’s kindness to his slaves and servants, adding that such “care and charity” paid off, not only in the “love of his servants,” but also in “foreseeing and preventing mischiefs.” Ligon was a deft and politic writer on a small island in an inferior position (not a planter, but a manager): perhaps he was in no position to criticize a powerful man directly. I read his description of “Mr. Constantine Silvester’s” fiery disaster (from which he soon recovered, building another house and still greater wealth) as a statement that Constant mistreated his workers—and paid for it.

  Satanic Mills

  The basic layout for a successful Barbadian sugar plantation was well developed by the 1650s. Near the typical planter’s house stood the sugar works, as close by as Nathaniel’s warehouse and other outbuildings stood to his Shelter Island dwelling. The two-hundred-and-fifty-acre spread where Ligon lived and worked from 1647 to 1650 had an “Ingenio,” or mill (powered by oxen or horses), to press the canes, along with “boyling house, filling room, Cisterns and Still house, carding house, stables, Smith’s forge, and rooms to lay provisions of Corn, and Bonavist” (a kind of bean). He counted a workforce of “96 Negroes and three Indian [perhaps Guyanese] women with their children” in addition to “28 Christians.” Two hundred acres of cane fields yielded a crop that a single sugar mill could effectively process.

  Every part of the sugar-making “machine” wore out, especially the living parts. The biggest maintenance cost was the annual replacement of human and animal cogs, totaling as much as 37 percent of all outlays. Once cut, cane must be processed within forty-eight hours or the juice dries, so the mills operated twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. During the hellish nights, straw was burned for light. Exhausted workers sometimes fell into cauldrons of boiling sugar, which scalded them to death. Every mill had axes for chopping off hands or arms that got caught in the rollers.

  Oxen and horses that were hitched to booms to power the mills died in their harness traces. Without replacements, work stopped. Because island breeding programs had little success, most draft animals were shipped in at great expense from New England, Britain, and the Netherlands. Nathaniel’s 1680 inventory lists forty horses, many more than could have been used on Shelter Island, where oxen were generally used for plowing and pulling heavier loads and horses only for lighter draft and travel. Shipping livestock to the West Indies probably generated much of Nathaniel’s income.

  “Negro Yards,” the Barbadian plantation villages where slaves lived, belonged to the same complex as the “mansion house” and sugar works. At both Sylvester plantations in St. George, where more than a hundred people lived, some twenty-five to fifty slave huts clustered around the sugar works. Each village probably stood on about five acres. The housing arrangements on Shelter Island would differ because of the difference in numbers of people, climate, and work requirements: slaves slept in the attic or the barn lofts for warmth, meaning, among other things, that they had no home hearth for themselves. But the nucleated pattern of life and work—and surveillance—that Steve Mrozowski and his team unearthed on Shelter Island revealed the same tight spacing of house, outbuildings, and work areas (which persisted through the centuries). Black Barbadian villagers created their own commonwealth of family, friends, lovers, and enemies. They raised chickens, guinea fowl, and sometimes a pig. As on Shelter Island, they laboriously ground their ration of corn—a pint per person per day—by hand between two stones.

  Some areas were set aside to grow food for slaves. Besides the plots that surrounded their houses, they were allocated a few acres, often on the worst land and at the outskirts of the plantation. This “Negro ground” or “Negro garden” was usually divided into separate family allotments. Here, as in their tiny house gardens, blacks exercised one of their few freedoms: choosing what to plant. Given dawn-to-dusk work hours, that meant Saturday afternoon and Sunday. On Shelter Island, Nathaniel apparently followed this pattern and laid out a “Negro garden” that continued to be cultivated as such at least until 1856, twenty-nine years after slavery ended in New York. Planters also laid out a third area, the “provision ground,” where blacks grew basic foodstuffs under white direction, so that—ideally—they would “maintain themselves without burdening their master.” In fact, because the provision ground usually comprised only about 15 percent of a plantation’s land, it often did not provide enough food to sustain the slave population.

  “They Are Happy People, Whom So Little Contents”

  Observant, curious, and a humanist, Ligon paints more portraits of individual enslaved Africans than of planters. Occasionally, however, his observations reduce them to mere aesthetic objects, as when he writes, “But ’tis a lovely sight to see a hundred handsome Negroes, men and women, with every one a grasse-green bunch of these fruits [plantains] on their heads, every bunch twice as big as their heads, all coming in a train one after another, the black and green so well becoming one another. Having brought this fruit home to their own houses, and pilling off the skin of so much as they will use, they boyl it in water, making it into balls, and so they eat it. One bunch a week is a Negroe’s allowance. To this, no bread nor drink, but water … They are happy people, whom so little contents. Very good servants, if they be not spoyled.”

  Those “happy people” were in fact gravely malnourished—sometimes actually starving—in every season except “crop time,” when vegetables were more plentiful and blacks were allowed to chew cane and drink the sugar skimmings. To keep costs down, planters fed slaves barely enough to enable them to work efficiently. The two hundred and sixty enslaved people at Constant’s two plantations would have survived almost entirely on carbohydrates, such as plantains, though their rations doubtless included a small amount of (often rancid) salt fish shipp
ed from New England. (White servants and overseers ate most of the salt meat Nathaniel shipped.) Ligon noted that “if any cattle dyed by mischance, or by any disease: the servants eat the bodies, and the Negroes the skins, head, and entrails which was divided amongst them by the Overseers; or if any horse [died], [then] the whole bodies of them were distributed amongst the Negroes.” Wars, embargoes, shipwrecks, crop failure, plagues of worms, long droughts, and “Horicanes” frequently decimated imported and homegrown supplies.

  Because slaves were chronically hungry, food theft was common. James Drax’s son, Henry, in a 1679 directive to his overseer, instructed that “if att any time there are any taken Stealling Sugr Molasses or Rum which is our Money and the finall productt of all our Endewors and Care the[y] must be Sewerely handled theire being No punishment tooe terrible on Such an octation as doeth Not deprive the party of Either life or Limbs.” Father Antoine Biet, a French Catholic priest visiting Barbados in 1654, wrote, “As these poor unfortunates are very badly fed, a few occasionally escape during the night and go to steal a pig … from a neighboring plantation … If they are discovered there is no forgiving them … One of these poor Negroes … his hands in irons, the overseer had him whipped by the other Negroes until he was all covered with blood. The overseer, after … seven or eight days, cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and forced him to eat it.” Whether or not Nathaniel practiced such outrageous cruelty on Shelter Island is unknown; he would certainly have been aware of the treatment routinely inflicted on slaves in Barbados. In New York Colony, colonial law sanctioned any punishment meted out by a slave’s master or mistress excepting dismemberment or death. All enslaved people knew this.