The other field of English colonial enterprise that concerns us is the West Indies. The West Indian colonies of Britain play a great part in the commercial history, in the naval history, and in the legislative history in connexion with the negro slave-trade and the institution of negro slavery. From the very first they play a great part, also, in the history of epidemic sickness; they and the Spanish, French and other colonies there were the peculiar home of yellow fever for two centuries, having shared that unenviable distinction, after a generation or two, with certain ports of the North American continent. The larger part of the history of yellow-fever epidemics falls outside the period to which I here limit myself. But the beginnings fall within it; and as the beginnings raise the whole question of causation, this part of the subject resolves itself into a somewhat comprehensive discussion of the circumstances of yellow fever as illustrated by the first English colonizations in the Caribbean Sea, and the tradings connected therewith.
By far the most important disease-producing conditions in the West Indies arose out of the Guinea slave-trade. But, so that we may set down to that no more than it deserves, we shall have to review also the earlier experiences of English and French emigrants, both on the voyage and in their settlements in Barbados and St Christopher, and, at greatest length, the disastrous first occupation of Jamaica in 1655 by the army of the Commonwealth. It will be convenient to begin the history, in which there is so much to disentangle, with a few facts about the negro labour-traffic to the New World previous to the time when the demands of the sugar-plantations caused it to be established on a great scale.
African negroes were brought first to the West Indies by the Spaniards to work in the mines of Hispaniola. They are heard of as early as 1501, and are much in evidence after that date. The Christian conscience appears to have been at first tender. It was the high purpose of Isabella of Spain to convert the Indies to the Christian faith; and the cruelties of the negro importation and of the forced labour in the mines were obviously inconsistent with the humanitarian teaching of the Gospels. The remonstrances of missionaries were listened to at the Spanish Court, and licences to trade in negroes were either granted under strict conditions or withheld altogether. However, there were rapacious pro-consuls to deal with as well as monarchs at home, and cargoes of slaves found their way to Cuba, to Hispaniola (St Domingo), and at length to the Spanish Main. Each importation as late as 1518 was still regulated by special licence; but soon after that date a powerful minister sold the privilege to the Genoese, so that it passed somewhat beyond control of the Spanish Court[1164]. Connected with these importations in the first quarter of the 16th century, were the disastrous epidemics of two diseases with somewhat similar names and inextricably confused in the records—the great pox and the small pox; it is not easy to say which did the most harm among the native population of the islands and mainland occupied by Spain; but it is said that by disease of one kind or another Mexicans and Caribs on the main, in Hispaniola, and in Cuba, came near to being exterminated[1165].
The first English share in the negro traffic over sea fell to John Hawkins and partners, who had not even the excuse of an open market for their wares in the Spanish colonies, and had sometimes to dispose of their negroes by stealth. It would appear that it was still in part for the mines that African negroes were in request. In Richard Hawkins’ account of his voyage to the Pacific in 1593, he mentions that he captured a Portuguese ship of 100 tons shortly after leaving the coast of Brazil; she was bound for Angola to load negroes to be carried to and sold in the River Plate: “It is a trade of great profit and much used. The negroes are carried to work in the mines of Potosi.”
It is not until a generation after that we hear of the English as slave-owners. On February 16, 1624, there were 22 negroes on the English settlements in Virginia, the whites numbering 1253[1166]. In somewhat greater numbers, negroes are next heard of in English possession in the Bahamas; but, from the correspondence between the Company of Providence Island in London and their agents in the colonies, it would appear that the policy of using forced labour was by no means admitted by all, or free from difficulties. Thus in 1635 the Company condemned as indiscreet and injurious Mr Rushworth’s behaviour concerning the negroes who ran away, “arising, as it seems, from a groundless opinion [of Rushworth] that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude during their strangeness from Christianity[1167].”
Whatever negroes the English colonists possessed at this time they got either by capture or purchase from Dutch and other foreign traders. Thus, in the instructions to a shipmaster sailing from London, dated March 19, 1636, captured negroes were to be conveyed to the Somers Islands, those who can dive for pearls to be employed at Providence. Again, the instructions to the captain of the ‘Mary Hope,’ bound for the West Indies, January 20, 1637, refer to the distribution of negroes “if a prize be taken.” And, on June 7, 1643, the earl of Warwick instructs the captain of the ‘Elias,’ 400 tons, that captured negroes are “to be left at my island of Trinidad[1168].” The negro carrying-trade was in those years mostly in the hands of the Dutch, who not only stocked their own colony of Surinam on the mainland but used their small island of Curaçoa as a slave-depot for the supply of colonies belonging to other nations. Thus the governor of Antigua, which had then no negroes, says in a despatch of about the year 1670: “At Curaçoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready pieces-of-eight carried thence great store. They intend to settle a mart for negroes at Tortola to engross the trade of Porto Rico.”
The direct share of England in the negro carrying-trade arose out of the monopoly of the Guinea Company. The history of English interests in Guinea and “Binney” need not detain us. When the first patent for sole trade was granted in 1624, it was felt to be a grievance, as “many had been there almost for fifty years since.” The charter was renewed on November 22, 1631; but in course of time, some who had been ousted from their original share in the monopoly traded on their own account, the rivalries at home being aggravated by conflicts with Swedes (in 1653) and Dutch at the factories on the coast. The trade was ostensibly for gold dust and ivory, but live freight soon found a place in English bottoms as well as in Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others. We may now return to our proper subject—the state of health in the first English and French plantations in the West Indies.
The English and French arrived in the West Indies almost at the same moment. Their experiences were probably not very different, but it happens that it is of the French emigrants that we have particulars, which it is important to introduce here.
In the year 1625, a Norman adventurer of good family, D’Enambuc, sailed from Dieppe in a brigantine armed with four pieces and manned with 35 or 40 men, on a roving cruise to the West Indies[1169]. Having been battered by a Spanish galleon at the Kaymans, D’Enambuc made the island of St Christopher. He found it occupied by the native Caribs and a few stranded Frenchmen, who were on good terms with the natives. Shortly after, an English captain (“Waërnard”) appears upon the scene, who joined D’Enambuc in the alleged murdering and poisoning of the natives and the plundering of the island. Loaded with his Carib spoils and a quantity of tobacco, D’Enambuc set sail for France, and having sold his tobacco and other things in Normandy, entered Paris with a fine equipage, thus giving evidence to all men of the fortunes that awaited them in the Indies. In a short time he had an audience of Richelieu, and on the 31st October 1626 the charter was signed of the Compagnie des Isles, granting a monopoly of trade with “les isles situées à l’entreé du Perou”—namely St Christopher and Barbados. The Company raised 45,000 livres, of which capital Richelieu held 10,000 livres in his own name. The money was spent in fitting out and furnishing with stores three ships—the ‘Catholique’ at Havre, a craft of 250 tons, and the ‘Cardinal’ and ‘Victoire’ at St Malo, two much smaller vessels. Numerous poor peasants and artisans from Brittany and Normandy were induced to go out as colonists, the ‘Catholique’ (250 tons) carrying 322 souls, the ‘Cardinal’ 70, and the ‘Victoire’ 140. The two last sailed from St Malo on February 24, 1627 under the command of Du Rossey. The passage was long, the provisions both bad and insufficient, and the mortality terrible. When the ‘Cardinal’ arrived at the Pointe de Sable of St Christopher on May 8, only 16 of her 70 souls remained alive, and these were sick. In the other ships, also, “most of the people died on the passage out.”
The English experience can hardly have been so bad as that. When the French colonists landed, they found four hundred Englishmen settled near the chief anchorage, hale and strong and well stocked with provisions, having lately come out under Lord Carlisle’s patent. Cordial to each other at first, the two nationalities soon fell out. The French had rather the worst of it, having lost many of their number by sickness, while the English kept their health. Help came to the former from home, and a victory over the English is claimed for them. But they had also a Spanish fleet to reckon with, and eventually the French colony fell into disorder and escaped to Antigua, while its leader, Du Rossey, went home to France and was thrown into the Bastille by Richelieu, one of the largest shareholders. The refugees to Antigua soon returned to St Christopher, again suffered from famine, and had the mortification of seeing all the profits of their monopoly swallowed up by unlicensed Dutch traders. In 1635 they obtained a new charter; at the same time a fortunate capture of a ship-load of negroes from the Spaniards gave them a supply of labour so that “the island began to change its face.” English usurpation was kept within limits, and the French colony grew daily, by addition of European settlers and of “Moorish slaves whom the French and Dutch ships go to buy in Guinea, or capture from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil.” The French on St Christopher were now strong enough to send branch colonies to Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635). It was then the turn of the English to have disastrous sickness among their immigrants. Sir Thomas Warner, who had planted the English colonies in Barbados and St Christopher, and was now governor of the latter, went to England in 1636 to bring over new settlers. On his arrival out on 10 September, he wrote home that one of his two ships, the ‘Plough,’ was given up for lost, and that in his own ship there had been “great sickness and mortality, not 20 out of 200 having escaped and 40 having died, some near to him in blood and many of especial quality and use.”