The Sugar Barons Read Online Free PDF

weakness in numbers, and so, when a French ship arrived carrying a crew of adventurers under Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, he welcomed them and offered to join forces. D’Esnambuc, a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu, had sailed from France on a piracy mission, but after taking a beating in battle with a Spanish galleon, he had ended up beaching his wrecked vessel at St Kitts.
The Frenchmen were persuaded to accept the northern and southern extremities of the island, leaving the English a consolidated holding in the middle. They all agreed to maintain strict neutrality in the event of their parent countries going to war, and to render each other aid in the event of a Carib or Spanish attack. The former was not long in coming. In 1625, a large Carib raiding party arrived in enormous canoes, each holding up to 100 men, and attacked the French settlement of Basseterre. After fierce fighting they were driven back into the sea with help from the English.
This turned out to be the high point of Franco-English cooperation in the Caribbean. Before the end of the century, as Spanish power faded further and the French and English became the leading competitors in the West Indies, they would be constantly at each other’s throats, both on St Kitts and in the wider Caribbean. But for a brief period mutual interest dictated friendly relations, at least for most of the time. Perhaps the similarities between Warner and d’Esnambuc helped. The Frenchman had been, in effect, a pirate before a settler. Warner, having carried his first tobacco crop back to London, took time off to go hunting for prizes in the Channel and the Baltic. On his way back to St Kitts, he tried an attack on Trinidad. Both men were essentially transitional figures between privateer-plunderer and settler.
Warner brought back more settlers with him, many from Ireland, and others from south-west England, and in 1628 a number crossed to nearby Nevis to start a new settlement on its mountainous 50 square miles. In StKitts, Warner now lived in a modest timber dwelling and had built a ‘great tobaccoe house that stood to the windward’. Their product was far superior to that of recently established Barbados, and although it was a hard struggle, the colony prospered and its population continued to grow.
But on 7 September 1629, the annual voyage of the Spanish galleons, on their way to Panama, was diverted from its usual more southerly route and appeared off St Kitts in the late afternoon. Its 35 large galleons and 14 armed merchant vessels must have been an awe-inspiring sight, for the colonists put up little resistance. As night fell, entrenchments were thrown up along the shore, but when the Spanish landed the next morning, their troops made rapid progress. A counter-attack was led by d’Esnambuc’s nephew, but when he was killed, the effort failed, and the defending force of English and French fled the battlefield. The majority of the Frenchmen managed to escape across the sea to St Martin, and 200–300 English took to the woods in the high centre of the island, but 700 English were forced to surrender. The Spanish admiral destroyed the tobacco plantations, but was merciful with his captives, sending the majority home to Europe with a warning not to return on pain of death; the rest were condemned to the mines of the mainland, a perennial hazard of crossing the Spanish.
As the conquering force sailed away, the refugees in the woods crept back to their ruined farms and started replanting. Soon after, a French contingent returned. The settlement recovered, and in the early 1630s established daughter colonies in nearby Montserrat and Antigua. But the Spanish and Carib threat remained.
So in comparison with Guiana and the new Leeward Island colonies, Barbados enjoyed key advantages. It was, for now, comparatively healthy, and its isolated position south of the galleon routes and upwind of the rest of the Caribbean islands had kept it free from hostile incursions. But the