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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 documents, 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 encompass. 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 ashore, 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 Assembly 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 ship (using dugouts), and ending with the much-hated French buccaneer-king Le Vasseur, 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.