Free Bittersweet by Peter Macinnis Page B

slavery.
    Many of these servants were seen as troublemakers in their new homes. The Scots servants were rated more highly than the English; the Irish servants were rated so poorly that the Barbados Assembly enacted a law in 1644 against any increase in their numbers. Because Barbados had to take what it could get, however, some 20 per cent of servants were still Irish in 1660.
    In the meantime, yellow fever had come to the New World with the African slave ships. Spread by the mosquito Aedes aegypti , it had to wait until a fast trip carried a single generation of mosquitoes across the Atlantic from Africa in the open barrels of foul drinking water. Once they reached the islands and South America, the insects dispersed and passed the disease on. To European populations, this tropical disease was a serious threat. Those who survived never got it again, so an immune population of survivors eventually developed, but new arrivals were always at risk.
    A yellow fever epidemic on Barbados around 1647 killed an estimated 6000 whites, many of them indentured servants. This increased the demand for black slaves in the 1650s, but for the moment the wars in Britain kept up the supply of indentured servants. As the number of black slaves increased, cheap white labour was needed to keep control. An Act of 1652 provided a solution, allowing two justices of the peace to
    . . . from tyme to tyme by warrant . . . cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant . . . to be conveyed into the port of London, or unto any other port . . . from which such person or persons may be shipped . . . into any forraign collonie or plantation . . .
    In other words, the magistrates, who represented the wealthy of a borough or parish, could ensure that the poor, who otherwise would be a cost to the parish, were rapidly and permanently removed. Note the use here of ‘plantation’ as a synonym for ‘colony’. Up until about 1650 it was people who were thought of as planted, and settlements of English families in Wales or Scotland were also ‘plantations’. It was only later that plantation came to mean a single (generally monocultural) farm. When first settled, Barbados was a plantation of people; it became a sugar plantation when sugar cane was introduced, and then a sugar colony filled with sugar plantations.
    THE WHITE SLAVES
    The indentured servants who survived the yellow fever probably saw themselves as fortunate, especially those who had gone to the
    For the most part, the plantations of Barbados were clustered near the coast.

    islands of their own accord and were able to hire themselves out. The servants who had been ‘Barbadoed’ by a court on a trumped-up charge, or stolen away from their families by the Spirits and sold into virtual slavery in the islands, might have accounted themselves fortunate to get out of plague-ridden London, but many died of island diseases instead. For some this would have been a happy release. It was the island diseases that kept servants in short supply, so that judges in England and Ireland would happily find prisoners guilty and send them to the West Indies, or ‘Barbadoe’ them, as the saying went. It was why the Spirits were able to operate in the various ports; because there was such a shortage of servants they could pay well for people to turn a blind eye, knowing they would be well paid for all they captured.
    The Spirits got up to all sorts of tricks, the same ones the crimps of that time played on sailors, using knock-out potions or getting people drunk, and sending the victims to sea with forged papers showing they were indentured. This meant the victim would spend seven years working for a master who generally cared little for the welfare of a servant who would be lost to him at the end of that time.
    Of course, not all the servants could get away from their indentures. Under a code passed in 1661,