Benjamin Briggs stood in the open doorway of the curing- house, listening to the "sweee" call of the long-tailed flycatchers as they flitted through the groves of macaw palms. The long silence of dusk was settling over the sugarworks as the indentures and the slaves trudged wearily toward their thatched huts for the evening dish of loblolly mush. Down the hill, toward the shore, vagrant bats had begun to dart through the shadows.
In the west the setting sun had become a fiery disk at the edge of the sea's far horizon. He watched with interest as a single sail cut across the sun's lower rim. It was Hugh Winston's Defiance, rigged in a curious new mode. He studied it a moment, puzzling, then turned back to examine the darkening interior of the curing house.
Long racks, holding wooden cones of curing sugar, extended the length of one wall. He thought about the cones for a time, watching the slow drip of molasses into the tray beneath and wondering if it mightn't pay to start making them from clay, which would be cheaper and easier to shape. Though the Africans seemed to understand working clay— they'd been using it for their huts—he knew that only whites could be allowed to make the cones. The skilled trades on Barbados must always be forbidden to blacks, whose tasks had to be forever kept repetitive, mind-numbing. The Africans could never be allowed to perfect a craft. It could well lead to economic leverage and, potentially, resistance to slavery and the end of cheap labor.
He glanced back toward the darkening horizon, but now Winston's frigate had passed from view, behind the trees. Winston was no better than a thieving rogue, bred for gallows-bait, but you had to admire him a trifle nonetheless. He was one of the few men around who truly understood the need for risk here in the Americas. The man who never chanced what he had gained in order to realize more would never prosper. In the Americas a natural aristocracy was rising up, one not of birth but of boldness.
Boldness would be called for tonight, but he was ready. He had done what had to be done all his life.
The first time was when he was thirty-one, a tobacco importer in Bristol with an auburn-haired wife named Mary and two blue-eyed daughters, a man pleased with himself and with life. Then one chance-filled afternoon he had discovered, in a quick succession of surprise and confession, that Mary had a lover. The matter of another man would not have vexed him unduly, but the fact that her gallant was his own business partner did.
The next day he sold his share of the firm, settled with his creditors, and hired a coach for London. He had never seen Bristol again. Or Mary and his daughters.
In London there was talk that a syndicate of investors led by Sir William Courteen was recruiting a band of pioneers to try and establish a new settlement on an empty island in the Caribbees, for which they had just received a proprietary patent from the king. Though Benjamin Briggs had never heard of Barbados, he joined the expedition. He had no family connections, no position, and only a few hundred pounds. But he had the boldness to go where no Englishman had ever ventured.
Eighty of them arrived in the spring of 1627, on the William and John, with scarcely any tools, only to discover that the entire island was a rain forest, thick and overgrown. Nor had anyone expected the harsh sunshine, day in and day out. They all would have starved from inexperience had not the Dutch helped them procure a band of Arawak Indians from Surinam, who brought along seeds to grow plantains and corn, and cassava root for bread. The Indians also taught the cultivation of cotton and tobacco, cash crops. Perhaps just as importantly, they showed the new adventurers from London how to make a suspended bed they called a hammock, in order to sleep up above the island's biting ants, and how to use smoky fires to drive off the swarms of mosquitoes that appeared each night. Yet, help notwithstanding, many of those first English settlers died from exposure and disease by the end of the year. Benjamin Briggs was one of the survivors. Later, he had vowed never to forget those years, and never to taste defeat.
The sun was almost gone now, throwing its last, long shadows through the open thatchwork of the curing-house walls, laying a pattern against the hard earthen floor. He looked down at his calloused hands, the speckle of light and shade against the weathered skin, and thought of all the labors he had set them to.