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trade. The end result, though, was that his third voyage brought the first West Indies sugar into England, and Francis Drake had gained valuable experience in dealing harshly with the Spanish. You needed a fierce resolve, cold steel, iron cannonballs and plenty of lead musketballs to trade on an even footing with the Dons.
    Curiously, lead is a recurring theme in the story of sugar. Alexander VI, the Pope who approved the Treaty of Tordesillas, father of Cesar and Lucrezia Borgia (among others), bribed and poisoned his way to the papal throne. He probably died of a fever, though at the time there were plenty willing to believe that he had accidentally drunk poisoned wine set aside for Cardinal Corneto, and so suffered a just fate. That, at least, is the story that Alexandre Dumas told in one of his novels.
    The poison the Borgias used was probably lead acetate, a soluble lead salt, known from its sweet taste as ‘sugar of lead’. It is likely that Corneto’s wine, if it was his, was laced with this. But whether or not Pope Alexander VI died in this ironic (leadic?) way, we will probably never know.
    There was another link between lead and sugar, apart from the use of lead pipes to carry cane juice from the mill to the boiler-house. Around AD 1000, lead acetate was used in Egypt as a defecant, an agent to clean the heated cane juice, but using lead like this was soon banned. After that time, suspect syrups were exposed near a latrine where the action of hydrogen sulfide coming from the cesspit would produce a tell-tale black precipitate of lead sulfide in the syrup.
    In 1847 a British patent proposed the use of lead salts in the preparation of sugar, an idea which alarmed so many people that Earl Grey felt the need to send a circular to all British colonial governors, warning them against allowing it.
    THE INDENTURED SERVANTS
    Given the piratical habits of all sides, it is hardly surprising that when William and John , the first British ship to reach Barbados, arrived there in 1627, it carried 80 English settlers, and also half a dozen Negroes plundered from a Portuguese vessel ‘met’ on the way. On the return voyage, the crew captured a Portuguese ship with a cargo of sugar. This cargo was sold for £9600, which went to benefit the colonists. While the colony might thus seem to have begun on a combination of black slaves and sugar, it really began with indentured white labour, and with crops other than sugar.
    A year after the British had first settled on Barbados, Henry Winthrop reported a mere ‘50 slaves of Indeynes and Blacks’— and that included the blacks collected on the way to the island. Between 1628 and 1803 the island imported 350 000 slaves, of whom 100 000 were women, but when the last of the slaves were freed in 1834 they were just 66 000 in number. Many of those would have been born after imported slaves stopped arriving, for when slaves could no longer be shipped in, breeding was encouraged. For a comparison, in the United States, between 1803 when the importing of slaves was officially banned, and 1865, the slave population increased tenfold due to internal population increase.
    The white indentured servants of the seventeenth-century colonies were seen as people excess to the needs of the home nations. As early as 1610, Governor Dale of Virginia pointed out that the Spanish had greatly added to the (white) populations of their American colonies by sending out their poor, their rogues, their vagrants and their convicts. In 1629 Henry Winthrop realised that he needed ‘every yere sume twenty three servants’ to work his tobacco plantation in Barbados. While these were not always available, the English Civil War began to provide shipments of prisoners in 1642. Soon a group of kidnappers known as the Spirits became active, ‘crimping’ or kidnapping people who found themselves carried to Barbados, where the ships’ captains would, in effect, sell them into