except the Kinnoul pension, which was perpetual, was to revert to the Crown as the liabilities became discharged.1 The planters thus became freeholders, and the islands royal colonies. In 1663 Willoughby went out to complete the settlement and induced each of the island Assemblies in turn to fulfil the bargain by voting a 4 per cent. duty on the export of their produce. The step once taken was irrevocable, for legislation needed the assent of Assembly, council, and governor, and until the nineteenth century no governor was permitted by his instructions to agree to the repeal of the duties. Francis, Lord Willoughby, was an able governor with a regard for his subjects' interests as well as his own. He supported the planters' protest against the enumeration of sugar in the Navigation Act of 1660 and frankly told the King that whoever had advised that measure was rather a good merchant than a good subject. He had other difficulties not of his own creation. The planters expected the bulk of the 4 per cent. duty to be spent upon local needs and conceived that they had voted it for that purpose, but the Crown held that it was a composition for the proprietary dues and ordered Willoughby to ask the Assemblies for further grants for local defence;3 since the proprietorship in its effective period had spent nothing upon the islands and had drawn a large profit from them. The war of 1665-7 bore hardly upon the Caribbean colonies. Fighting with the Dutch began early in 1665, and in April a Dutch fleet under de Ruyter visited Barbados. He was beaten off by the land defences, but afterwards captured some shipping at Nevis and Montserrat. In the following year France joined in the war as an ally of the Dutch. The French of St Christopher conquered the English portion of that colony after savage fighting. Willoughby sailed from Barbados to the rescue, but was lost in a hurricane with the flower of the island's force. Soon afterwards a French fleet raided Antigua and Montserrat, destroyed the plantations and carried off the slaves. Nevis alone remained intact. William Willoughby succeeded his brother in the peerage and the governorship, and receiving naval support recovered Antigua and Montserrat in 1667, but failed to recapture St Christopher. Meanwhile Surinam, Willoughby's proprietary colony in Guiana, had fallen to a Dutch attack. It was a serious loss, for Surinam had prospered as a sugar colony since the Restoration and promised well for the future. The English in the West Indies hated the French far more than the Dutch, and the inhabitants of Surinam had hastily surrendered to the Dutch rather than fall into the hands of "the merciless French", who were known to be approaching. The treaties of Breda ended the war in 1667. 1 Clarendon's Life, Oxford, 1759, pp. 490-6; Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, 1, 362-5. 2 Higham, C. S. S., Leeward Islands under the Restoration, p. 13; Harlow, V. T., Hist. of Barbados, pp. 128–46. 3 Harlow, pp. 147, 157, 160-1. England and France made a mutual restitution of conquests, but England and the United Provinces agreed to retain what they had taken at the date of the negotiation. Before its conclusion was known in the West Indies Willoughby had sent an expedition which recovered Surinam, but by the terms of the treaty it had again to be given up and has since been a Dutch possession. The island colonies were restored to England. They were impoverished and despairing. Barbados was financially almost bankrupt and had lost many of her men. The Leeward Islands had been gutted by their French conquerors, and the work of settlement had to be recommenced. Antigua was resettled by the refugees from Surinam, who were already sufficiently West Indians to entertain no thought of returning to the mother country. The struggle in the West Indies bore a different aspect from that in European waters. In the latter it was an Anglo-Dutch contest in which France bore little part; but in the West the English and the French were the protagonists, a foreshadowing of the conflicts of the eighteenth century. The English and French courts were as yet merely playing at war with one another, but the prize of the sugar trade had forced them to be serious in the region where it was an operative factor. The Barbadians complained that after the war their plight received little sympathy from home. It is evident that in spite of the absentee estate owners living in England there was a lack of liaison. The line of cleavage was between the planter and the merchant, and the nonresidents were chiefly men of mercantile interests. The resident planters were aggrieved not only by the need for supplementing the 4 per cent. with other taxes, but also by the Navigation Acts, the slaving monopoly of the Royal African Company, the engrossment of all island patronage by the King's ministers, and the quartering of a regiment in Barbados. A strong home-rule movement therefore manifested itself in opposition to Willoughby, and in 1668 the malcontents asked the King to abolish the 4 per cent. and the trading restrictions and to grant a charter whereby the late proprietary rights should all be vested in the inhabitants as a corporate body.2 Since those rights covered the whole field of administration, this proposal would have amounted to what is now called Dominion status, and it naturally received no countenance from the Home Government at a time when imperial policy was seeking to tighten the bonds of empire. It is, however, interesting as showing the views entertained at this date by an intelligent body of colonists; and along these lines the Barbadians continued to agitate for several years. The inspiration was purely economic; the sugar trade was depressed and offices were being given to outsiders, and nothing else mattered. The fact is 1 Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique, vol. VIII, pt 1, pp. 42-5. 2 Harlow, p. 196. 3 Ibid. chap. v, passim. worthy of statement, for, here as elsewhere, the selfishness of the colonists seems to have been the certain consequence of basing imperial unity upon mercantile connections; and yet it must be admitted that there was no other system conceivable at the time, for England was not strong enough to defend the Empire without drawing a profit from its trade. World conditions had to be transformed before any other kind of empire became possible. The Leeward Islands showed the same general conditions as Barbados and were more handicapped by the disablement of war. On the other hand they had the good fortune to be ruled for fourteen years by one of the best of the old colonial governors, Colonel William Stapleton. Until 1671 the Leeward colonies were included with Barbados under the successive commissions of the two Willoughbys. The Leeward planters considered that Barbados was unduly favoured by the arrangement, for her wealth and influence greatly outweighed theirs. In this year the Leeward Islands received a separate governorin-chief, and soon afterwards Stapleton was appointed to the office. He was strict in enforcing the Navigation Acts, but his tact and fairness eased the burden, and the colonists gradually regained a modest prosperity. They did not devote themselves exclusively to sugar growing, and their ginger, cotton and indigo mitigated the fluctuations of trade that resulted from dependence upon a single staple.1 For five years after the Cromwellian conquest Jamaica remained under military government, and little progress was made in transforming the soldiers into civilian settlers. This was due partly to Spanish demonstrations on the northern coast, which required the maintenance of an armed force, and partly to the ill-will of the officers who, in their desire to be ordered home, preferred that the undertaking should prove a failure rather than a success. Inexperience led to the occupation of unhealthy tracts of land, and incompetence to a shocking waste of Government stores and natural resources. As an example of the latter may be mentioned the wild cattle, which were so recklessly slaughtered at the outset that they became too shy to be approached, and so a plentiful food supply was lost. A terrible mortality was the penalty of these mistakes, and only a small percentage of the early settlers survived. The little nucleus of a colony that emerged from this confusion consisted rather of West Indians transferred from the Lesser Antilles than of the troops sent out from England. The Restoration Government, contrary to the expectations of some observers, decided to keep Jamaica and to establish a civil constitution. In 1662 it sent out Lord Windsor as governor with orders to that effect, and the first Assembly met in 1664. Windsor was further instructed to promise customs exemptions, liberal grants of land, and facilities for the people of neighbouring colonies to immigrate, all 1 Higham, Leeward Islands, passim; Beer, G. L., The Old Colonial System, П, 31-46. JAMAICA 245 this with a view to lifting the cloud of ill repute that overhung Jamaica. In 1664 Sir Thomas Modyford of Barbados became governor. He took with him 800 Barbadians and proposed a further transference of 1000 men a year from that island. Lord Willoughby made a strong protest, for he desired to send the Barbadian surplus to his proprietorship of Surinam; and the movement was not carried out at the proposed rate. The Dutch War caused a set-back, here as elsewhere, but under Modyford Jamaica entered on a period of gradual progress. It was perhaps justifiable to employ a planter governor in a new and struggling settlement, and Modyford ruled successfully until 1671. His success, it is true, was threatened by political difficulties. The Jamaica Assembly considered it unjust that, according to instructions from home, the island laws were valid for no more than two years unless they received the royal assent. Owing to the nature of the legislation this assent was often withheld, and a constitutional struggle of some importance ensued. Modyford's successors could seldom induce the Assembly to work in harmony with them, and in 1678 the Earl of Carlisle was sent out with orders to apply the principle of "Poynings's Law" in force in Ireland, whereby no legislative proposals could be initiated without the previous consent of the Crown. The experiment failed; the Assembly refused to pass the proffered bills and, in spite of intimidation, made good its resistance; in 1680 the earlier constitutional position was restored. The planters had won a victory on a matter of principle-their claim to the enjoyment of the rights of Englishmen, and the contest had not been complicated by economic objections to the laws of trade, which do not seem to have been a grievance in Jamaica. In a polity so largely governed by precedent as the British Empire, the Jamaica struggle was of more than local significance.1 The early development of Jamaica was affected for good and ill by English relations with Spain. Owing to the refusal of Charles II to restore the island a state of war continued until 1670, and out of it arose buccaneering, the final stage of the semi-lawful warfare which had existed from Tudor times. The buccaneers, who may be described as the frontiersmen of the Caribbean, were originally men who engaged in cattle-hunting and similar pursuits falling outside the category of regular trade and planting. The war with Spain tempted them to the sea as privateers, and the strategic position of Jamaica rendered its coast an ideal base for their attacks on all the Spanish possessions in the western Caribbean. They inflicted enormous damage on Spanish colonies and shipping, culminating in the sack of Panama by Henry Morgan in 1671. They brought their booty to Jamaica for disposal, but although the influx of wealth was considerable it did not accelerate the settlement of the island; for all the most energetic and ambitious men were drawn away from planting 1 Gardner, W. J., Hist. of Jamaica, pt п, chap. i; Beer, vol. п, chap. vii. to the easier road to fortune. In 1670 England and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid, whereby the Spaniards acknowledged the English right to Jamaica and other de facto possessions. England then made a serious effort to stop buccaneering. Modyford, who had patronised the rovers, was recalled, and Sir Thomas Lynch took his place as governor. With the aid of the Navy he restored order to some extent and wrote in 1672 that there were no English privateers or pirates remaining in the West Indies, although the French were continuing their depredations. This report was perhaps too favourable, but it is true that in the decade ending in 1680 the buccaneers dispersed. A few, like Morgan, settled down as planters, others became logwood cutters in Yucatan and Honduras, and others, continuing to rob, were scattered far and wide over the oceans.1 Jamaica benefited by the change. The logwood industry proved to be permanent. Its exploiters claimed that they were working in unoccupied territory and that their business was therefore legitimate. Spain asserted her sovereignty over the logwood coasts and declined to permit the intrusion. The dispute dragged on unsettled into the following century, but the trade was not stamped out. Its profits enriched the mercantile element in Jamaica, which owned most of the ships engaged, but the agricultural development of the island felt the competition.2 During the Restoration period the maritime nations displayed an intense interest in the Caribbean, and the eighteenth-century view of the paramount importance of that area then took shape. No European Power as yet possessed the capital and the population for the full development of the American continent, and England at least was already conscious that the control of large continental dominions might prove difficult. The islands, on the other hand, produced great and immediate wealth, negro labour supplied the lack of European man power, and the planters, hampered by their slaves and by their dependence on imported supplies, were in no position to seek independence. Sea power could not maintain discipline in large, selfsufficing areas like New England, but it had a perfect grip upon the island Plantations to which blockade would bring collapse. Mercantile statesmanship therefore made the Caribbean the focus of international rivalry. The little colony of Bermuda stood in a class by itself. In its strategic relation to the mother country it resembled the Caribbean islands. In its tobacco and shipping industries and its social circumstances it was more like the colonies of the American mainland, whilst it was unique in being the only settlement governed during the greater part of the Restoration period by a chartered company with its headquarters in London. The continuance and ultimate extinction of the Company's control is the outstanding feature of the colony's 1 Haring. C. H., Buccaneers in the West Indies, esp. chaps. vi, vii. 2 Beer, 11, 66-72. |