The Sugar Barons Read Online Free PDF Page B

first few years of the colony were blighted by more than the ‘Starving Time’ food shortages of 1630–1.
No sooner had the Courteen-funded William and John left England with Barbados’s first settlers, than James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, came forward to claim that the island had been promised to him by the recently deceased James I. Carlisle was a Scot who had come south with James Stuart, and as a court favourite had received an earldom and a number of lucrative government sinecures. But he was a man of spectacular extravagance and enormous appetites, and he was by now deeply in debt, in the large part to a syndicate of London merchants, who urged him to claim his rights in the West Indies and thereby repay at least some of what was owed.Charles I had a habit of signing anything put before him, and in July 1627 he duly granted to Carlisle the whole of the ‘Caribee Islands’.
The Earl of Pembroke protested vigorously on behalf of his grant and the Courteen interest, but in the meantime Carlisle leased 10,000 Barbados acres to the merchants’ syndicate and dispatched a party of 64 men to take possession, led by a Captain Wolverston, who was to be the colony’s new governor. As soon as they reached Barbados in June 1628, they arrested and imprisoned Governor John Powell and started clearing Courteen settlers off the allotted 10,000 acres around ‘the Bridge’ (later Bridgetown).
While the argument between Pembroke and Carlisle continued in London, in Barbados, might made right. In February 1629, Henry Powell returned to the island with nearly 100 men, enticed Wolverston to a conference, and then had him seized and manacled. John Powell was released and reinstated as governor, and all the Carlisle party’s possessions were confiscated, including a large tobacco crop. Henry Powell then took this back to England to be sold by the Courteens, accompanied by Wolverston in chains.
But soon afterwards, the characteristic dithering of Charles I’s court came to an end. Although most lawyers thought Courteen had the better claim, royal instructions were issued in May 1629 confirming Carlisle as the rightful proprietor. To the fury of the Courteens, who had by now sunk £10,000 into their venture, Carlisle had proved the more dextrous courtier.
A new Carlisle governor, Sir William Tufton, was appointed, and while he prepared to take up his new post, a deputy governor, Henry Hawley, was quickly dispatched to the island. Hawley arrived in August and initially made conciliatory noises to the Courteen settlers. But he then tricked the Powell group on to his boat anchored in Bridgetown’s Carlisle Bay on the pretence of holding a conference. Once on the ship, they were arrested. Some of their number escaped by jumping overboard, but Governor John Powell and his brother William were stripped and chained to the mast for over a month. Eventually they were shipped to St Kitts, where they arrived just in time to be taken prisoner by the Spanish during their descent on that island.
A visitor to Barbados that year wrote of the islanders that ‘there have beene so many factions amongst them, I cannot from so many variable relations give you an certainty for their orderly Government’. While tensions simmered between the Carlisle party, now established in the area near ‘the Bridge’, and the Courteens, based around Holetown, Henry Hawley was cultivating his own particular ambitions, aware that the island’s isolationgave the man on the spot free rein to assert himself. The arrival of Governor Tufton in September precipitated a power struggle between the two men. When Tufton became embroiled in armed clashes between the Courteens and the Carlisles, Hawley seized the chance to have him arrested on trumped-up charges and promptly executed by firing squad. This fait accompli would allow Hawley to remain as governor for the next decade, running a spectacularly corrupt regime, during which he concentrated entirely on enriching himself and