Free Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart

badly treated. When they work, the overseers, who act like those in charge of galley slaves, are always close by with a stick with which they often prod them when they do not work as fast as is desired.” Though the treatment was not dissimilar to that on the French islands, Biet concluded: “It is an unhappy state of things to treat with such great severity creatures for whom Jesus Christ shed his blood. It is true that one must keep these kinds of people obedient, but it is inhuman to treat them with so much harshness.”
    Servants could only hope and pray that they would survive theirindenture and that, if they did, their “freedom fee” would be enough to buy them a small plot of land on the island. For most, this was a vain hope: as Barbados converted to sugar, land prices rose, and the freed servants were actively encouraged to leave the island. A broadsheet written by the Earl of Carlisle explained: “Each freeman who is unprovided of land and shall therefore desire to go from Barbados shall have a portion of land allotted to him in my islands of Nevis, Antigua, or any other island in my command.” Those who remained in Barbados would be lucky if the fee was sufficient to buy them a horse or set them up in trade. But many servants were too destroyed by their experiences of indentureship to be able to take advantage of even these little amenities after they were set free. Physically broken by the years of relentless labour and nutritional deprivation, and psychologically affected by depression, anxiety and despair, they were permanently damaged men.
    As captive victims of their employers, the indentured servants may have suffered particular cruelty, but their treatment was also symptomatic of the wider culture of violence and disorder that characterized Barbados during these early years. In fact, dissent and conflict had permeated the island from the moment it was claimed in 1627. Charles I had issued not one but two patents for the island: one to Sir William Courteen, the head of a powerful syndicate, and another to James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle. So both men sent their own people to colonize the island, and for ten years the contesting claimants battled against each other on Barbados and in the English courts. Though it was Courteen who had financed the first settlement, it was Carlisle who eventually won out, in what would become known as “The Great Barbados Robbery,” leaving posterity to conclude that the island’s initial colonization was itself a crime.
    Barbados was also destabilized by the constant tensions in neighbouring islands. The struggles between North American settlers and the Native Americans have been the most mythologized in the New World, but the Caribbean colonists also fought long and brutal battles to subdue indigenous peoples. In nearby Martinique, the early French colonists under the command of Guillaume d’Orange engaged in a long and bitter campaign against the island’s Caribs. Jamaica endureda similar and equally bloody conflict. On St. Christopher, the first year of that island’s settlement was devoted to the genocide of its original inhabitants, the Kalingo. But the native people of the region did not succumb without a fight. Charles de Rochefort wrote of the Caribs before 1658, “there hardly passes a year but they make one or two irruptions, in the night time unto some one of the islands, and then, if it be not timely discovered and valiantly opposed they kill all the men they meet, ransack the Houses and burn them and carry off all the women and children with their booty.”
    Amidst these contested beginnings and the pervasive atmosphere of fear, the settlers nonetheless tried to establish some sense of order. When Charles I granted the charter to the Earl of Carlisle he gave him the power to make laws in Barbados, but only with the consent of the free men who settled the colony. The laws were to be “agreeable, and not repugnant unto reason; nor against, but as