Free Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart Page A

convenient and agreeable as may be to the laws, statutes, customs, and rights, of our kingdom of England.” Carlisle delegated his authority to a governor, who was to act with a council, some of whom were elected from England and the rest provided by those on the island. The settlers agreed to pay Carlisle “the twentieth part of all profits arising and accruing from the island”; and Barbados adopted the English model of government: a parliament in which the governor corresponded to the Crown, the Council to the House of Lords, and the House of Assembly (instituted in 1639) to the House of Commons.
    But despite the colonists’ desire to transfer familiar institutions and traditions as quickly as possible, the early years of the colony were anarchic. New arrivals to Barbados in the 1630s entered a settlement where the rule of the strongest prevailed over the rule of law. This was epitomized by the men who governed the island. Working from the premise that only exceptionally rough men could be expected to control the island’s unruly colonists, the authorities employed a series of governors who were renowned for their viciousness and cruelty. Hawley, the man George had already encountered, ruled with an iron fist, but his successor was even more formidable. Henry Huncks was characterized by one of his contemporaries as “a drunken, vindictive tyrant,” who was accused of raping a female colonist and threatened to make one of his opponents “shorter by the heade.” Far from being a solutionto the problems of these volatile early colonies, men like Huncks often contributed to their discord. Their aggressive and arbitrary behaviour drove some colonists to leave the islands while provoking others into violent resistance.
    The situation was only worsened by the fact that heavy drinking was an intrinsic part of the social life of the colony. It was considered a mortal insult for a planter to visit a fellow without taking a glass. There was little else to do and the consumption was prodigious: indeed, one visitor described the settlers as “such great drunkards” that they “will find the money to buy their drink all though they goe naked.” In this culture of excessive drinking it is likely that George Ashby too found himself imbibing more than he had previously. Certainly this was true of Henry Colt, who was no mean drinker at the best of times; he found his consumption of alchohol increased more than tenfold during his stay on the island.
    Bridgetown was the centre of debauchery, with the highest concentration of the island’s “houses of entertainment.” It became so disorderly that for a time a curfew was imposed on visiting sailors. Brawling was a particular problem: the colonists were an explosive lot who resorted to violence with frightening speed, especially when they had been drinking. “They settle their differences by fist fighting,” wrote the French priest Antoine Biet. “They give each other black eyes, scratch each other, tear each other’s hair, and do similar things. The onlookers let them do this and surround them so as to see who will be victorious. If they fall down they are picked up, and they fight until they can no longer do so and are forced to give up.”
    Barbados was, in short, an illustration of what was happening right across the New World, from the French islands of Martinique and St. Dominique to the Dutch settlements in Surinam and Curaçao and the mainland colonies in Virginia or the Chesapeake. These early American societies were made up almost exclusively of young men. Of those who departed from London in 1635 for Barbados and St. Christopher, only 1 per cent were female, and only slightly more than 1 per cent were aged over thirty. Suddenly, these ill-educated youngsters found themselves in a frontier town, marooned together in an unfamiliar and threatening wilderness with a bizarre new selection of people of different national and cultural background, class, religious belief,