Fortune's Frowns and the Finger of God: Deciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600-c. 1720) - Brill
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
chapter 2
Fortune’s Frowns and the Finger of God:
Deciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720)
Sarah Barber
The encounters between Europeans and the peoples, lands and seas, of two
vast American continents were culturally transformative. Amongst the most
profound (though subtle and prolonged) changes was that burgeoning capital-
ism changed the English language. A person’s worth, previously measured
using the yardstick of ancestry and behavior – whether you were noble, or
good – began to be calculated according to profit and estate. Personal worth/
wealth also became dependent on the color of one’s skin. The process of
change, from one type of worthiness to the other, involved the initial process
of establishing a European presence in the Americas, with its hazardous
Atlantic crossings, treacherous internal waters and terrains, strange encoun-
ters, and alien flora and fauna. In a word, the meaning of which was also in the
process of transformation, this was an adventure. It involved bravery, fortitude,
physical strength and health, and a good smattering of reckless abandon. Sir
Thomas Warner, founding governor of St. Christopher was lauded at his island
interment as one who was “Trayned from his youth in Armes his Courage bold/
Attempted braue Exploites and Vncontrold/ By fortunes fiercest frownes hee
still gave forth/ Large Narratiues of Military worth/ Written with his swords
point.”1 Given the uncertainty which dogged all aspects of life in the Torrid
Zone, it is noteworthy how few times individuals admitted feeling fear. One
who did was the Rev. William Smith, minister of St. John’s Figtree, Nevis, who,
during an earthquake in 1717, was thrown out of bed, and for two and a half
minutes heard his wooden house shake and crack loudly: “our Fear then was
inexpressible; and perhaps that very Passion of Fear might cause the minutes
to seem longer than they really were: Surely it could not have affected me
more, to have marched Soldier-like up to the mouth of an Enemy’s Cannon;
1 Part of the encomium on the tomb of Sir Thomas Warner, Governor of St Christopher, died 10
March 1649, and buried in the church of St Thomas (Middle Island), Old Road, which, when
the rebuilt church was sited higher up the hill, exposed the memorial in the churchyard; Vere
Langford Oliver, The Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies (Dorchester, u.k.,
1927), 184–185. Dates are expressed in New Style.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_004 Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 61
and yet … the very moment it stopped, we were no more concerned than if it
had never happened at all.”2
The word can nevertheless be found, with some frequency, in the writings of
British sailors, adventurers, planters and settlers, but used mundanely to
express reasonable doubt: “I was afeared” was attached to statements such as
those of a Mr. Harris who chose to remain aboard ship with his consignment of
sugar because “twas feared” the French would levy excessive duty.3 In 1696 the
Governor of Jamaica “feared” that people were discouraged and that the settle-
ment would decay.4 There were numerous fears – fears that letters would mis-
carry, that people would not obey, that enemies would intercept intelligence – but
these expressions do not capture the modern idiom in which fear is an
expression of emotion heightened by alarm or pain, involving imminent dan-
ger and urgent action. Even though the word with its associations of immedi-
acy and terror seems particular to English etymology, the closest we might
come to a comparable modern usage was in a report by Bahamas’ resident
pirate-chaser, Thomas Walker, and even then it lacks urgency, since it referred
to the islanders’ former “ffeare and dread” of Spanish attack in retaliation for
the pirates operating out of Eleutheria.5 In the seventeenth century one had to
have “reason to fear,” whereas contemporary usage, possibly in an age which
seeks to separate our conscious from our sub-conscious, has detached bravery
from that inaction in which we talk of being frozen with fear. Or, in the age of
scientific rationality, fear is drowned by a flood of adrenaline. This does not
mean that the people living in the Americas in the seventeenth century did not
feel fear in the sense that we understand it, but it does provide a headache for
the historian seeking to chart its expression. Most examples of the word “fear”
quoted so far, come from official documents. It was not circumspect, appropri-
ate, or meet for dispatches to London to convey hysteria, vulnerability or cow-
ardice. With messages apt to miscarry and even straightforward communication
involving weeks of hopeful expectation and unknowability, urgency was point-
less. Such expressions of fear nullified the authority of those charged with the
2 William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis (Cambridge, 1745), 62.
3 The National Archives (hereinafter tna), co 137/10, no. 57, “Minutes taken by Mr. Harris of
what passed at the Board of Trade,” 9 January 1713.
4 tna, co 137/4, no. 14: Governor Sir William Beeston, Jamaica, to William Blathwayt, 23 July
1696.
5 tna, co 5/1265, no. 17: Thomas Walker, New Providence, to the Council of Trade and
Plantations, 14 March 1715. The New Oxford English Dictionary ascribes the word “fear” to an
Old English derivation, and its association with dread and terror to earlier usages: “Old
English fǽr … sudden calamity, danger, corresponds to Old Saxon fâr ambush.”
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access62 Barber
lawful, reasoned administration of the colonies, or the bravery and daring of
those who, at a more humble level, did the state’s bidding.
As something rarely admitted, fear was usually something imputed. One
implication is that expressions of fear are used to tell a good story. The
Puritan minister, Charles Morton, in compiling a posthumous history of
his friend, Nicholas Leverton, described the point at which the calm of the
company, which had travelled from Barbados to settle in Tobago, was
transformed:
[S]itting on ye ground he was a lighting his pipe when suddenly the man
yt went forth came roaring in a most terrible manner behind him & fell
down by him[.] Mr Leverton was in a passion ready to strike at the fellow
for affrighting him thinking it but a mockery till by the mans stillness And
a greivous wound in his head he perceved he had received a Mortal
wound[.] Mr Leverton hastily apprising ye Indian Arrows flew thick about
him … fled into the woods to save their lives[.] Some few of those in the
booth were roused by the Alarme & fled likewise for their Security the
rest were all cutt off as they lay:
…Mr Leverton flying into the woods with those few that followed him
in a Bog lost one of his shooes whereby he was much afflicted wth a Kind
of Prickly bush growing abundanly [sic] in those parts but his Company
in that affright where in to great haste to tarry for him being therefore left
alone in the woods he Endeavoured if he Could to finde sight of ye Ship
but he was soe beweldred with ye Bushes and bad way that when he
Came, after 5 or 6 hours to ye sea-shoare he Could hear Nothing thereof
he therefore Coasted Along ye shore as Conjecture Led him, still hoping
that behind the next foreland he Came at he should Make descouery, of it
but still in vaine, till towards Evening he came to A bay where, his fear of
ye Indians and weariness togeather made him Resolve not to fetch A
Compass about, about [sic] it & his hopes to find ye ships behind ye fur-
ther foreland Encouraged him, being able to swim to strip him selfe and
so Attempt that way to get Over by ye Nighest Cutt.6
6 C[harles] M[orton], “The Life and Death of Mr. Nicholas Leverton Sometime Minister of ye
Word at St Tudy in the County of Cornwall,” ff. 3-3v [the date must be after 1663 and Morton
died in 1698]: this is a draft of a pamphlet laid out as if to go to the publisher. It is in private
hands and forms part of a collection of transcripts bound together by Morton, including
Leverton’s life, examples of his sermons and a letter from Surinam: vellum bound stitched,
8vo. I am grateful to the owner for allowing me extensive access to this manuscript.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 63
Leverton had presumably related his adventures to his friend, but historians
have few means of knowing whether Leverton described his own fear in these
terms, or Morton embellished the facts to make his account more readable, his
friend more worthy, and them both more pious. Morton, in attributing fear to
a fellow Briton, was at pains to show it was justified.
More often, literary accounts claim that fears are the product of the mind’s
construction, and do not represent a real threat, embedding them within a
second trend: others’ fears are attributed because history is written by the
victor, and the victorious do not admit fear. We fear those to whom we impute
greater force or forcefulness. Aphra Behn attributed fear to her African
heroes, Imoinda and Oroonoko, in the face of the king’s ferocious rage on
hearing of their clandestine marriage: unreasonable because a consequence
of obstinacy. In contrast, Oroonoko’s rage and “indignation” at being captive
on board ship, confirmed his nobility and royalty. The “fearful and cowardly
Disposition” of English women and children provoked them to plead on
behalf of escaped slaves, frantic but doomed in their attempts at self-defense,
but they nevertheless continued to be “possess’d with extreme Fear, which
no Persuasions could dissipate” at the thought of enraged and embittered
Africans acting with freedom in the rain forest.7 Defoe had small boys afraid
of Moors and both Africans at Cape Verde and cannibals on his island ready
to die for fear at the sound of firearms. On finding human footprints in the
sand, Crusoe
stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition … terrify’d
to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistak-
ing every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a
Man; nor is it possible to describe how many various Shapes affrighted
Imagination represented Things to me … the farther I was from the
Occasion of my Fright, the greater my Apprehensions were; which is
something contrary to the Nature of such Things, and especially to the
usual Practice of all Creatures in Fear: But I was so embarrass’d with my
own frightful Ideas of the Thing, that I form’d nothing but dismal
Imaginations to myself … . Thus my fear banish’d all my religious Hope;
all that former Confidence in God, which was founded upon such won-
derful Experience.8
7 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave (London, 1688).
8 Daniel Defoe, The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, Of York,
Mariner (London, 1719), 181–184.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access64 Barber
Thus, if fear was based on the psychological construction of threats, which, if
their reality was exposed, would immediately dissipate, there was room within
both literary and political accounts to speculate on the inner processes of
others. The characters of The Tempest were fearful of the storm that brought
them to the island, but having survived its rigors feared no longer: [Stephano]
“Have we devils here? Do you/ put tricks upon `s with salvages and men of Ind,
ha?/ I have not scap’d drowning to be afeard now of/ your four legs.”9 Whilst the
storm was real, its re-creation plays with imagination’s grip on human senses,
and it could be argued that Shakespeare found a discourse on fear, its reality
and construction, a more creative subject than the shipwreck which founded
the colony of Bermuda.10 The Tempest was an essay on psychological interces-
sions between human control and fear: early modern commentaries on the
Indies frequently referred to similar phenomena. Belief systems and practice
within the Kalinago community involved shamans’ use of “tricks” to “make
themselves feared, loved, and reverenced,” interposing their learning, skills
and authority between the community and evil spirits which might infect
them.11 Daniel Reff describes the same impact – imputing to the indigenous
peoples described in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación a culture of fear, cure and mir-
acles, a mixture of cultural preexistence, traded histories about the Spanish,
and experience.12 The similarity of indigenous and Catholic belief in supersti-
tion was not lost on English protagonists: Puritans described the defense of
Providence Island as the combined effort of black and white, the latter making
a bonfire “of the Gods and idolatrous monuments” of the combined forces of
Spanish, Mulattos and Indians.13
9 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii:ii, ll. 58–61: Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest
(London: The Arden Shakespeare, University Paperback, Routledge, 1964), 64.
10 Shakespeare, Tempest, V:i, ll. 114–16: [Alonso] “since I saw thee,/ Th’affliction of my mind
amends, with which,/ I fear, a madness held me”; Tristan Marshall, “The Tempest and the
British Imperium in 1611,” Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998), 375–400; Samuel Purchas,
Haklvytvs Posthumus, or Pvrchas his Pilgrimes. Contayning a History of the World, in Sea
voyages & lande-Treuells, by Englishmen & others (London, 1625).
11 Behn uses the term “Indian.” That these were Kalinago people, formerly known as Carib,
is my inference: the aim was to use herbs, incantations, sacrifices and so on to ward off the
impact of evil spirits.
12 Daniel T. Reff, “Text and context: cures, miracles, and fear in the Relación of Alvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca,” Journal of the Southwest 38, no. 2 (1996), 115–38.
13 Record Office of Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (hereinafter rollr), Finch Mss.,
DG7 Box 4982: ff. 2–10, f. 8. This account is curious in that it mentions the day of thanks-
giving for the defense of Providence against the Spanish attack, and the sermon and
prayers involved, and then the authors, Puritan ministers, describe the burning of the
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 65
The trope, therefore, is that fear is seldom real. We should not fear what we
know, nor deviate from what we know into mere imaginings. That which was
unknown, could not be anticipated, did not follow a pattern, seemed irratio-
nal; that which did not seem human(e), but animal, passionate and intemper-
ate, could invoke terror and alarm. It feeds into that key Anglophone debate of
the early modern period: what was arbitrary.14 Fear of God was righteous and
right. God was never arbitrary and thus the actions of God and the conse-
quences for man, even if violence were involved, must be the result of authori-
ty.15 Its corollaries were cruelty and surprise. Animals displayed cruelty; people
displayed cruelty when their violence was arbitrary and/or unexpected; or the
climate and environment could be cruel in its surprise. A crew sailing to
Barbados “on board the good Shipp called the John Pincke of Topsham” had no
reason to be afraid of the journey because their master Samuel Shower was
“under God,” but when they were taken by Algerian pirates, and thus by infidels
who practiced surprise attack and violence, they had “ever since … remayned
in miserable Captivity, [and] slavery under those cruel Enimies of our Saviour
Christ [and] all that P[ro]fesse him.”16 It is no surprise that all goods and mes-
sages carried across sea came with an injunction for the captain “whom God
preserve.” Thousands of pieces of correspondence traversed the Atlantic pro-
tected by the Latin cachet Quem Deus Conservat: “P a ffreind Q: D: C:”; “To mesr
George Moore Mercht Att Porters key neare ye Custome house In London P
The Dorrothy Capt Twaites qdc.”17 Fear, and whether it was justified because it
Spanish Catholic idols, in front of their own “heathens,” followed by a moment in which
the English threw off sack-cloth, God gave them a “garland of gladness” and everyone
danced. This performance was therefore similar to the descriptions of pagan
abandonment.
14 James Daly, “The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical
Journal 21, no. 2 (1978), 227–50; Quentin Skinner, “Freedom as the absence of arbitrary
power,” in Cecile Laborde and John Maynor, eds., Republicanism and Political Theory
(London: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 83–101; Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast,
“Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice
in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989), 803–32.
15 Authorized Version of the Bible: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the
knowledge of the holy is understanding,” Prov. 9:10.
16 Devon Record Office, QS128/Topsham 126/1-13, “Maimed soldiers,” no. 7: the petition of
Mary, wife of Samuel Caldome, mariner of Topsham reporting an incident of 2 January
1680(1?).
17 This former example comes from a letter of Thomas Quintyne, judge of St. John’s,
Barbados, to his kinsman German Pole Esq., Radbourne, Derbyshire, 26 February 1679,
Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, D5557/2/120/4; the latter from a letter written by
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access66 Barber
was invoked by legitimate authority, was felt by those who rejected legitimate
authority, and would be unjustified when the arbitrary and tyrannical was
unmediated by divine Providence. This would provoke a particular debate in
the Caribbean, as soon as debate began to rage as to whether God had prede-
termined the nature of Americans and Africans, or whether they could be (re)
claimed from the “Tyranny of Satan” to embrace Christ.18 As those who were
“barbarous, savage, and violent” acted out of ignorance of the Gospel, and
could be educated by those standing in the light, the only intimation of fear on
this understanding, would be in the hearts and minds of those who willfully
stood in the way of conversion, who would receive “a most emphatical
Threatning” of having a millstone around their necks to drown in the depth
of the sea (Matt. 18:6–7), God pouring out against them the “Fury of his Wrath,
and the very Dregs of his Anger.”19
Fear which inspired dread, whether of someone, a group, an animal, an
object or an idea, rested on whether it possessed greater force or power than
you. Lemuel Gulliver showed no fear of Lilliputians, but was afraid of his first
encounter with the giants of Brobdignag.20 Disparaging remarks made about
the threat posed by indigenous people usually related their primitive weap-
onry and the ease with which gunfire scared them away: such as the people of
Tobago who were “of a timorous nature and very much dred a gunn.”21 A (man-
ufactured) suggestion of greater force was often sufficient: General Douglas
defended Montserrat “with only 4 small Ships of Warr & 5 Sloopes the first
appearance of wch so scared the Enemy that they immediately presumed what
might Reasonably be expected from Ten[?],” the residents feeling they “may lie
down at Night without fear of being surprised in [their] sleep or carried away
Sarah Crabb, Barbados, to George Moore in London, tna C110/175, unnumbered. The let-
ter is dated 3 June 1693 and was noted as having been received on the eighteenth presum-
ably, of June. This construction was not confined to Anglophone Christians: see the
example of skipper Claes Lock, A.J.F. Van Laer, ed. and trans., Correspondence of Jeremias
Van Rensselaer, 1651–1674 (Albany, 1932), 383. The other body whose person was always to
be preserved by God was kingship. Given the frequent failure of correspondence to sur-
vive the crossing, many examples of transatlantic correspondence come down to us as
copy-letters, which usually omit the cachet: Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, The
Encyclopedia of Ephemera (London: Routledge, 2000), 69.
18 Thomas Bray, Apostolick Charity in its Nature and Excellence Consider’d in a Discourse upon
Dan.12.3., (London, 1698), 5, of his sermon in St Paul’s, 19 December 1697, which was the
spur to the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
19 Bray, Apostolick Charity, 21, 24.
20 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ch. 9.
21 cm, “The Life and Death.”
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 67
Captives before the morning.”22 Other symbolisms of subordination were
important, and discussed below, but proficiency with firearms carried a capital
which few other advantages could match. Stephen Bull reported that the
Westoes were feared by all other indigenous peoples of Carolina because they
had guns, powder and shot and constantly warred with everyone except the
British. Hinting that the Westoes practiced cannibalism against their enemies
embellished their fearsome image, but this was savagery made frightening
because the firepower made their force real.23
The British tended to construct indigenous peoples as friend or foe, and that
determined whether pragmatic alliances with peoples like the Westoes could be
bolstered by frightening opponents with tales of both barbaric practices and
skillful arms. Africans, on the other hand, were constructed as free or unfree. In
1984, Jerome Handler published an influential article assessing the relative con-
tributions of white and black men to the militia of Barbados. His argument – that
it was only at the end of the seventeenth century that slaves began to be drafted
into the militia, as an expedient to counter inadequate wartime numbers – rests
heavily on a quotation from Richard Ligon’s account of the island in the mid-
century. Slaves, he said, “did not commit some horrid massacre upon the
Christians” because “they are not suffered to touch or handle any weapons.”24
Although Handler assumed that Britons feared slave numbers and armed
insurrection, he decided that decisions whether to arm or not to arm slaves
were pragmatic, and Ligon’s heightened language evidence that fear was some-
thing he imputed to settlers in order to serve his own purposes. Within the list
of presentments to the Barbados Grand Jury in 1664, policing responsible,
moral behavior, with the usual censure of the unlicensed sale of liquor and
illegitimate births, is an otherwise misleading vote of thanks for Lord
Willoughby of Parham’s efforts in keeping the community safe. It might make
it sound as if other issues discussed by the Grand Jury – the Provost-Marshall
indicted for removing prisoners to work on his plantation, town-dwellers
ordered to keep more servants than African slaves within their houses, and
22 tna, co 152/10, no. 27v: tna, co 152/10, no. 27i: Residents of Montserrat to Queen Anne.
23 Stephen Bull to Lord Ashley, 12 September 1670, in Langdon Cheves, ed., The Shaftesbury
Papers (Charleston, sc: Tempus Publications, 2000 [Charleston, 1897]), 194.
24 Jerome S. Handler, “Freedmen and slaves in the Barbados militia,” Journal of Caribbean
History 19 (1984): 1–25 at 7; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of
Barbadoes (London, 1657), 46; Myra Jehlen, “History beside the fact: What we learn from a
True and Exact History of Barbadoes,” in Ann E. Kaplan and George Levine, eds., The
Politics of Research, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 127–139; Keith
Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism
(Cambridge: University Press, 2000).
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access68 Barber
aliens warned not to keep slaves at all – might relate to security. In fact, all
referred more to general public order and the community responsibility to pro-
vide employment for poor whites.25 At the 1673 presentments, fright was
imputed to planters to explain their seizure of others’ slaves, but this was also
a complaint about stealing labor and not about the threat posed by slave num-
bers. Commentating on attempts to build up Surinam, a settler decried the
high and mighty in Barbados who denigrated Surinam in order to retain their
servants to balance the number of slaves, but undercut his own argument by
implying rather that their reasons were economic: being also Dons of the Royal
African Company, they hoped to supply slaves for Surinam.26 Worries that on
the smaller, increasingly monocultural sugar islands, overcrowding, lack of
hinterland into which the disaffected could escape, and vastly disproportion-
ate numbers of white and black might cause the former to fear the latter’s vio-
lence are remarkably rare and confined to the very end of the seventeenth
century. In 1683, a correspondent from Jamaica – an encomiastic account of an
island blotted only by settlers’ debauched behavior – noted there was no “ter-
ror” of indigenous peoples as the Spanish had wiped them out, and there was
“no such fear or danger” of Africans “as in lesser Islands” because “Jamaica is of
too vast an extent for any such surprize, being in many places divided with
mountains of difficult access, and great Rivers not passable but by Boats or
Ferries, which dare carry no Negroes without a written Ticket or Licence from
their Master or Overseer.”27 In the seventeenth century, fastness terrains in
Carolina, Surinam and Jamaica – sea islands, rain-forest and mountains –
where escaped slaves established de facto free communities, seem to have
been regarded as a safety valve against insurrection, rather than as a hiding
place from which embittered and hostile people could attack plantations and
emancipate their fellows. This must have changed very quickly in the early
eighteenth century, with Jamaica planters and maroons at war by the 1730s.
Richard Dunn, who noted population density in Barbados (20,000 white/30,000
black inhabitants), did not cite potentially volcanic violence under the pres-
sure of numbers and the thrall of the sugar regime as a reason for migration to
Carolina.28 Wild, savage and feral existence, which has attached to the escaped
25 Presentments to the Grand Jury, Barbados, 13 December 1664, tna, co 1/18/154.
26 Renatus Enys, Surinam, to Sir Henry Bennett, 1 November 1663, tna, co 1/17, no. 88, f.[c].
27 THE LAWS OF JAMAICA, Passed by the Assembly, And Confirmed by His MAJESTY IN
Council, Feb. 23. 1683. To which is added, A short Account of the Island and Government
thereof, (London, 1683), preface, d4.
28 Richard S. Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina,” South
Carolina Historical Magazine 72, no. 2 (1971): 81–93.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 69
slave communities, was not sufficient in itself to inspire fear in the white popu-
lation. It was not even sufficient to intimate violence.29
That which did inspire fear was uncertainty, explaining both the process of
reasoning and the heightened expression of terror. Tobacco exporters in
Virginia were being hyperbolic in describing contracts as a “terror and discour-
agmt,” but what they meant was that they were labyrinthine; the fear of end-
less, unfathomable red-tape.30 Insecurity of authority and possession bred
rumors of arbitrariness: whisperings of false patents made Carolinans “uneasy
for I think no body who could help it would willingly quitt being his Majesties
tennant to be that of a Proprietor, and the bounds being at present uncertain
betwixt us and North Carolina, people do not much care to take up land on an
uncertainty for far lest they should fall under a Proprietorship.”31 People
expected to discern a direct and obvious connection and rationale between
action and effect; the uncertainty of boundaries led to uncertainty of tenure;
evidence of the uncertainty of rule under proprietorship. The hurricanes and
storms of torrid climate were as much a metaphor for real inhabitants of the
region as for Shakespeare’s marooned they had created figments of the imagi-
nation.32 Anglican Alexander Garden challenged those Carolinians who were
tempted by Methodism:
Why will you be carried away with so strange a Wind of Doctrine, as per-
suades to the Belief and Expectation of a certain happy Moment, when,
by the sole and specifick Work of the Holy Spirit, you shall at once (as
`twere by Magic Charm) be matamorphosed, stript of your old Nature and
29 I do not mean to imply that the violence or threat of violence and slave insurgence did not
exist. Commentators retrospectively stressed the violence and brutality of maroon com-
munities in Jamaica in the 1690s, but did so from the remove of an impersonation narra-
tive of forty years later. At the time, commentators played down the numbers involved
and the reasons for their assertive actions: see [Robert Robertson], A Short Account Of
The Hurricane (London, 1733); Idem, The Speech Of Mr John Talbot Campo-bell, A Free
Christian-Negro, To His Countrymen In The Mountains of Jamaica (London, 1736).
30 tna, co 1/4 no. 45: “The humble answer of the Governor and Counsell together wth the
Burgesses of the severall Pla[~]tations assembled in Virginia vnto his Mats Letter con-
cerning our Tobaccoe and other Com[~]odities’, 26 March 1628.”
31 Sir Francis Nicholson, James City, to Lords of Trade and Plantations, 27 August 1700: tna,
co 5/1312/2, f[c].
32 Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783
(Baltimore, md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Karen Ordahl Kupperman,
“Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser, 41, no. 2 (1984): 213–240.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access70 Barber
cloathed with a new? Why carried away, I say, with so strange a Wind of
Doctrine as this, which can blow only from enthusiastick Heads, and can
serve only to scare and hurry you into frantick and convulsive Fits of
Religion, which must terminate either in Bedlam, or Deism, or Popery, or
at least in such a Manner as to prove hurtful to true Religion, its real
Interest and Concerns?33
What Britons feared was disorder, seeking clear and consistent – “sole and
specific” – lines of communication and authority. When the French “surprised”
the north of St. Christopher in 1666, it was not their presence or their arms
which the English feared, but the fact that they “fell in pell mell amongst our
men, whoe, being but Planters, tooke a freight at soe suddeyne and desperate
an onset.”34
Violence was justified, and would ameliorate the fear of those who might
experience it, if it was to instill rightful authority. A godly people would assent
to be ruled by a godly magistrate, because the magistrate legislated according
to the laws which were a natural, revealed compact between divine and human
authority. Those who behaved in an ungodly and thus inhuman fashion had
cause to fear retributive justice, both of God and man. Governor Hender
Molesworth of Jamaica, faced with a seaman who asked for a fifth share in
return for identifying a treasure wreck, threatened him with corporal
punishment “very terrible and severe” if he spoke falsely in order to fright him
into truthful testimony.35 Molesworth did not regard the putative punishment
(seven years in the galleys without pay and corporal punishment as the gover-
nor saw fit) as arbitrary. It was not contrary to, but rather confirmed, his right-
ful authority. Christopher Billop, captain of the naval ship, Bentley, is usually
cited as an example of the rewards of loyalty, but he wove a preservationist
path through rival authorities, several times claiming his own primacy. His
operations in Nevis were the subject of complaints from Governor Sir William
Stapleton because he took it upon himself to seize goods from prize ships and
interlopers without going to law: according to Stapleton, “he has taken upon
him to relinquish seizures, detaineing with his own part without any trial,
33 Alexander Garden, Regeneration, and the testimony of the Spirit. Being the substance of two
sermons lately preached in the Parish Church of St Philip, Charles-town, in South-Carolina
(Boston, 1741), 13–14.
34 tna, co 1/20, no. 93, 825– 826: Governor Lord Willoughby of Parham to [Secretary Lord
Arlington], my emphasis.
35 Col Hender Molesworth, Jamaica, to William Blathwayt, 3 February 1685: tna, co 1/59, no.
9, f.[f].
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 71
taking 6 gunns of an interloper in Antego, compounding with some for incon-
siderable sum, breaking of chests and taking mony out of them; freightning the
kings subiects heresoe yt they durst not goe in ships or sloopes about their
lawfull occupasions…; after he run away from the flag or coulours I thought it
felonie by ye com̃ on and statut law to run away from ye kings coullours.” At
the point Billop turned pirate, and acted outside the accepted bonds of order,
he provoked fear.36
Britons, especially those of Protestant confessions driven by Old Testament
texts and eschatological determinism, imputed fear and cowardice to others
because they, as God-fearing people, did not fear the wrath which was reserved
for the unrighteous. It was a form of social control, since breaking the code
could not be admitted. Further down the Great Chain of Being, amongst the
ordinary people of the commonwealth, loyalty and obedience to the magis-
trate and the magistrate’s ability to secure allegiance, was based on right action,
as a true magistrate was the inheritor of godliness. Thomas Carlyle romanti-
cized that “[u]nder the soil of Jamaica [lay] the bones of many thousand British
men – brave Colonel Fortescue, brave Colonel Sedgwick, brave Colonel Brayne”
whose adventure, risk and courage founded Britain’s presence in Jamaica, but
the Protectorate Council had been humbled before the Lord by such great loss
of life, ascribing English deaths to He “who hath in such legible characters
made known his displeasure,” and after much continued heart-searching,
Britons resolved to hold, fortify and settle the island “in His name and fear.”37 It
is a truism that fear would always be something ascribed to others, because no
one would admit to ungodliness. Faith made one brave, and the brave, as the
godly – faced with the enemy, who must therefore be a force of sin and the
Devil – would be saved by faith, as the finger of God would direct earth, seas,
and events to a Providential end.
In 1640, the Spanish made an attempt on the islands of Old Providence and
Saint Catherine, the provocative Puritan-pirate outpost roughly equidistant
36 Sir William Stapleton, Nevis, to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 20 December 1682:
tna, co 1/50, no. 131, f. 206. Billop was awarded a huge estate at Staten Island for negotiat-
ing the territory for the Crown against the Proprietorship of New Jersey, involved in vari-
ous practices, some legitimate some illegitimate in Delaware and Nevis, as well as being
indicted several times at the Old Bailey.
37 tna, sp 25/77, 162; a post-Emancipation debate about authority and its inequitable con-
struction, from which these quotes of Carlyle are taken, is provided by John Stuart Mill’s
essay “The Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country no. 41 (January 1850):
25–31, with editorial note by John William Parker, Jr., and signed “D.,” in response to
[Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine
no. 40 (February 1849): 527–37.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access72 Barber
from the Spanish ports of Trujillo, Porto Bello, Nombre de Dios, and Cartagena.38
The Spanish attempted to inspire fear. A party which made it ashore sang in
somber, stentorian tones “dreadfull and formall.” Fear was imputed to the
Spanish: they were “skared” by a shot from one of the English forts; from land-
ing at their original intended spot, driven to a different place where the ground
was more treacherous; and because the English had installed a new mounting
of a great gun. Some English people were afraid, but were persuaded out of it.
The women – a few pregnant, some with sucking babies and others with
infants – felt their spirits droop, fearing “the Accomplishmt of or Saviors woe
upon themselves,” but were buoyed by the shouts of the soldiers and the
prayers of the ministers. Men, who in times of safety, had derided and mocked
the clergy, now gave them such new esteem that they seemed like different
people.39
The ministers and ordinary soldiers are the heroes of this story: the latter
showed “more then a natural courage”; despite lacking hats and shoes, being
outgunned and outnumbered. The English authorities, other than the clergy,
were marginalized. Seventeen military officers, of whom just three had been
sent by the Adventurers’ Company, “were but as cyphers [and] lookers on
being so needlesse for the present occasion.” The island’s magistracy “shewed
now [in] yt time of danger no small weaknes [and] pusillanimity.” The English
general, Captain Andrew Carter, whom the departed governor, Nathaniel
Butler, had placed in both civil and military authority, failed to assert leader-
ship, being swayed by the opinions of any and all. Described as flinching each
time a shot flew near him, at which the common soldiers were ashamed, he
took a position at Black Rock Fort, which seemed to provide an overview of his
own troops’ fire, “those yt best knewe him coniectured it to bee rather for feare
of ye enemies shott.”40 Later he sought to escape a place which was in danger
of becoming a battleground by travelling three miles to fetch pincers, powder
and shot.41 The commander of Fort Warwick, in the heat of battle fell on the
soldiers’ victuals and showed not the stomach for a fight, but for a feed. Both he
and Carter were assumed to be at the location which afforded the best chance
of flight.42
38 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The other Puritan Colony
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The Spanish attacked Providence in 1635,
1640 and 1641.
39 rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: ff. 2–10, f. 4v.
40 Ibid, ff. 3v, 5v.
41 Ibid, f. 6.
42 Ibid, f. 6v.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 73
Fear was both an indicator and a consequence of ill character. It was a sign
that a person either possessed insufficient faith in the True God, or held to false
gods. It was the difference between superstition, to which fear attached, and
Providence, which would always prevail.43 The dead Spanish soldiers were
found to have been fatally wounded by shots passing through their icons, or as
their dying act, to have thrown down their powerless crucifixes. Such useless
power, without proper godly authority, was arbitrary. The Spanish had demon-
strated their fear of death: it was revealed that they were carrying “pardons”
which permitted them sex with virgins, arbitrary because they could keep the
women alive or kill them “at their pleasure.” As they had sung on their march
up the beachhead their lyrics had invoked the “horny devil.”44 Of those English
who died, one had twice attempted to run away, and another who had boasted
“fearfull+despate curses & oaths” about what he would do to the enemy, was
killed by shot from an English weapon. The commander of Fort Warwick
assumed charge and Carter was deemed to have usurped the governorship, giv-
ing repeated examples of his arbitrary actions. One of those who had been
falsely imprisoned, without trial, was the gunner whose lone bravery in man-
ning the island’s big gun turned the siege. He had been released on the day of
this engagement: imminent salvation. Those who were useless were shown to
be fearful, which highlighted that Providence alone could regulate justly the
balance of power, for “God himselfe seemed to putt [redundant officers] out of
office in affording them no roome for any Imploymt, yt he might have all the
glory of or great Victory unto himselfe alone.”45 The Gospel of Matthew offered
counsel that what was meted out by you would be repaid by God and “while
the enemy did lay siege to us” the clergy “did by the powerfull engine of praies
lay siege to heaven to helpe the Lord against ye mighty.”46
It is no surprise that the authors of this account of the siege of Old Providence
took it upon themselves to impute fear and its earthly and heavenly corollaries,
cowardice, and superstition. Two of the signatories were dissenting ministers
who had been a thorn in the side of any authority which saw the Laudian
church as a bulwark to civic hierarchy. Colonel Richard Lane was a client of the
43 The Protestant English and Scots had a longstanding narrative against the intertwined
evils of arbitrariness, tyranny and superstition: it lay at the core of the Reformation theol-
ogy. They were well practiced at applying it to Catholics within their own borders and to
the Irish, and to Irish Catholics: see the essay by Elodie Peyrol in this volume.
44 “Vera diabolo, cornuda, sa fa fa”: rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: f. 5v.
45 Ibid, ff. 4, 5v.
46 “[margin – Mat. 7.2.] With what measure [scored out] ye mete to others, it shalbee
measured to you again”: Ibid, ff. 4v, 9v.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free access74 Barber
chief mover of the Puritan Adventurers Company, the earl of Warwick, and
would be the choice of the anti-Butler faction for governor after this battle.
Colonel Henry Halhead was a supporter of toleration for the sectaries and
another who had fallen foul of Butler, who possibly associated him with dis-
senting rebellion.47 So, cruelty, arbitrariness, and fear are attributed to God’s
enemies, whilst resolution is the preserve of the faithful. Presumably, attribut-
ing fear, or the lack of it, was dependent on whether one was a predestinarian,
or believed all capable of salvation. The slaves of the colony had demonstrated
their godly potential by showing, at a time of urgency, their ultimate loyalty
and steadfastness:
That the hearts of our Negroes should bee fast knitt unto us in this time
of distresse, who yet had formerly rebelled against us even in times of
peace [and] prosperity: [and] yt neither any of them nor of our English
should attempt to run to ye enemy lying so neere us, although divers of
them had before this very desperately done it at a farre greater distance.
This was the Lords doing, who is the God of the spirits of all flesh.
The slaves did not cease being “heathens,” and did not join in the prayers, burn-
ing of effigies, or the wringing of hands, but this was an instructional homily
that false gods could not save them from the fire or England’s enemies from the
slaughter.48
Whether we are reading colonial or modern accounts we are the passive
recipients of directed reading. If fear is seldom admitted, it is invariably accom-
panied by an admission that it was fleeting, regretted, shameful and overcome,
usually through an expression of faith and trust in the Lord. Imputed to others,
we are directed to note weak resolve – temporary because, like the women who
watched the siege of Providence they were the “weaker sexe” – or signifying
cowardice. But how do we know whether men showed fear because they were
cowards, or behaved ignominiously because they were afraid? Those historians
who wish to impute to Europeans a fear of the Other make statements such as
“[m]ost of all [the plantocracy] hated and feared the hordes of restive black
47 British Library Sloane mss. 758. The majority of this manuscript is the autographed man-
uscript of Nathaniel Butler’s “A Dialogicall Discourse” (1634), but the first three folios, in
Butler’s hand, are notes of letters sent by Butler during his time as governor of Providence.
He complains about Sherrard and another minister, probably Leverton, and “La: Holly,”
which may well be Lane and Halhead (as the name is rendered Hollyhead elsewhere):
“No. 35,” Butler to Lord Saye and Sele.
48 rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: f. 8.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessDeciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 75
captives with whom they had surrounded themselves”?49 Others wish to
downplay the threat of slave or indigenous resistance, imputing to the
Europeans no need to fear because they had greater resources to keep them-
selves safe.50 Colonists were prepared to commit the latter sentiment to paper,
not the former. To return to the Reverend Smith’s account of God and nature in
the West Indies, he felt the need to counter critics who did not believe what he
wrote, and bid them accept “Traveller’s Privilege”: “I smile at their unjust
Censure, and pity their Prejudice.”51 Describing the West Indies was one of
Smith’s hobbies: another was deciphering codes.
49 Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English
America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26, no. 1 (1969): 3–30 at 8, 30.
50 Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the
Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society
79, no. 7 (1989), and within this volume “Counts of indictment and defense of the Negroes
of Mina Contra,” 17 May 1740, 164–168.
51 Smith, Natural History, 251–252.
Sarah Barber - 9789004314740
Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:13:21PM
via free accessYou can also read
