Free Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart Page B

skin colourand language. There was plenty of alcohol, but none of the usual social norms and constraints. And, according to contemporaries, every kind of deviance was recorded: incest, bestiality, sodomy. The institutions that had ordered their societies of origin had also been left behind. The church was marginal, judicial systems in their infancy, and wives, parents and elders were absent. Theirs was a society of orphans, in which men became almost feral. They formed a new community that was volatile, transient, hyper-masculine, and intoxicated with its own mythology, that of a land where the young and fearless could build their own paradise.
    The historian Richard Pares described these early colonists as “tough guys”: rough, unschooled, physically robust men, given to neither self-doubt nor rumination. They did not make a good impression on visitors to the island: “This Island is the Dunghill whereupon England doth cast forth its rubbish,” wrote Henry Whistler, “rogues and whores and such like people are those which are generally brought here.” He concluded, “A rogue in England will hardly make a cheater here.”
    The islanders’ lack of moral restraint was attributed by one historian to “the weak conditions of the Church” in the colony. In spite of the scriptural writings that justified the colonial project overall, religion had not been established as the centre of life in Barbados, as it was for the Puritans who settled in New England. Many of the islanders neglected their religious commitments, failing to attend church and observe regular prayers. One prominent planter, typically more interested in money than his immortal soul, excused these lapses by declaring wryly that “it is enough to believe that there is a God, and that Jesus Christ died for us.” In 1652, the Assembly of Barbados, in the hope of generating greater religiosity in the unruly islanders, took special measures to clamp down on anti-social behaviour on the Sabbath, such as rioting, drunkenness, swearing, whoring, shooting at marks, gaming, quarrelling, “and many other vicious and ungodly courses.” But the problem was not solved and, five years later, a proclamation by the governor blamed “the continual abounding of cursing and drunkenness, as the root and foundacion of many other crimes and offenses and the disabling and overthrow of divers manual tradesmen, labourers or workmen and the impoverishing (if not ruine) of many families, together with public disorder.”
    Many felt moved to admonish the island’s inhabitants about their unruly behaviour. In a diatribe against the immorality of its white inhabitants, John Rous attacked the inhabitants of Barbados “who live in pride, drunkenesse, covetousnesse, oppression and deceitful dealings.” The Quaker Richard Pinder wrote a tract entitled “A Loving Invitation (to Repentance and Amendments of Life) unto all the inhabitants of the island Barbados.” In it he labelled the island’s whites as “sinners” and criticized their “cruel usage” of their indentured servants and slaves, reminding them that “they are of the same blood and mould you are off.” He also bitingly condemned their behaviour and a way of life “given to the lusts and pleasures of this evil world.”
    The colonists’ rowdy conduct often masked profound unhappiness. For what these men had not fully anticipated, and had little skills to cope with, were the feelings of loneliness, homesickness and fear that overwhelmed them on arrival in the Caribbean; feelings only exacerbated by the deprived conditions in which they lived. According to Ligon:
    The hard labour and want of victuals had so much depress’d their spirits, as they were come to a declining and yielding condition. Nor can this be called slothfulness or sluggishness in them, as some will have it, but a decay of their spirits, by long and tedious hard labour, slight feeding, and ill lodging, which is able to wear out and quell the best