Forum Introduction: Sugar and navies in the age of sail

In 1999, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich opened a new permanent exhibition called ‘Trade and Empire’. In a prominent display, a gentlewoman dressed in Regency style sat at a table, sipping tea. Next to her was a bowl of sugar, and under the table, a Black hand reached through the grating of a slave ship, pleading for freedom. ¹ This juxtaposition was an effective, albeit short-lived, way to encourage members of the public to contemplate an uncomfortable truth. At the turn of the nineteenth century, table sugar was not just glucose and fructose: it had many more ingredients. Enslaved labour was obviously the ingredient that the National Maritime Museum chose to emphasize, but there were others as well. To frame this forum on navies operating in the West Indies in the age of sail, let us go back to the basics. What were the ‘ingredients’ in that bowl of sugar? And where were navies on that list? Answering these questions, it is hoped, provides background and context for the contributors’ essays, none of which deals directly with sugar, to be clear. Yet any historical analysis of the West Indies in this period must acknowledge how the sugar economy functioned and why it mattered.

The first ingredient was wind. Why did sugar come from the West Indies, and not from some other region suitable for sugarcane cultivation? One important reason was that northern Europeans failed to find precious metals in the West Indies and so followed the example of the Portuguese and Dutch in Brazil by cultivating sugar. Yet more fundamentally, the West Indies sat roughly at the midpoint of the great circle route of the North Atlantic. To be clear, this had nothing to do with its geodesic distance from any other places; rather, the West Indies were the catchment for ships travelling from Europe to North America. The clockwise circle of trade winds and currents in the North Atlantic meant that the fastest route from London to New York was via the Bahamas. On Christopher Columbus's first voyage, he sailed southwest from Spain to the Canary Islands, then west across the ocean to make landfall in the Bahamas. It was the most northerly of his four crossings – he subsequently made landfall in the Windward Islands, Leeward Islands and near Trinidad. Wind placed the West Indies at the centre of transatlantic navigation and therefore at the centre of transatlantic commerce.

Wind also shaped the internal geography of the West Indies. A voyage from Barbados to Jamaica was usually uncomplicated and quick. A return voyage, against the prevailing winds, was the opposite. One option was to beat into the wind through the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and out into the Atlantic before turning south. Another was to follow the wind west from Jamaica, then use the current to round Cape Corrientes on the western end of Cuba and beat up the northern coast through the Florida Strait. However, that did little to get a ship closer to Barbados, and so in fact the fastest route from Jamaica to Barbados might in practice take a ship via the Windward Passage to New York or London first. ² As Douglas Hamilton notes in his article in this forum, square-rigged deep water sailing ships moved Europeans and Africans to the West Indies efficiently, but once there, the ships failed in the most basic task of knitting the islands together into a cohesive political and economic unit. Instead, indigenous technology in the form of sea-going canoes provided the most effective means of moving from island to island.

By the time the sugar appeared in the bowl in London, though, the indigenous peoples were largely gone. The second ingredient in sugar was smallpox. In the century after Columbus's arrival, smallpox and other diseases almost wiped out the Amerindian communities in the region. Then, in the seventeenth century, the British and French conducted campaigns of extermination or expulsion against surviving Kalinago populations. Whereas indigenous cultures survived in Mexico and Peru in sufficient numbers to shape the colonial societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the West Indies, disease and violence caused indigenous populations to become nearly extinct. Among the reasons for the introduction of sugarcane into the West Indies was that land was easy to claim in the wake of this demographic catastrophe. ³ As one survey has described the West Indies, ‘In the seventeenth century, on this tabula rasa, the dynamic of early capitalist production for the world market then created new kinds of society consisting wholly of nonindigenous outsiders’. ⁴

The outsiders came because of money, the third ingredient in sugar. Sugar exemplified a proto-capitalist commodity. It was produced for a global market by a globally linked system of labour and distribution. Demand for sugar in Europe and North America drove imperial activities in the West Indies. Planters worked hard to grow the market as well, and they successfully increased demand for colonial products, especially sugar. ⁵ Demand was particularly high in Britain, which by the eighteenth century was a fully fledged consumer society in which purchasing power extended beyond a tiny elite. ⁶ Enthusiasm for consuming sugar was matched only by planters’ enthusiasm for making money from its production. Planters maximized production to meet that demand while minimizing moral and ecological concerns.

Ecological concerns could not be entirely ignored, however, because the requirements of sugar production left the islands and their inhabitants devoid of other sources of calories. The unrelenting logic of capitalism meant that all the incentives for planters pointed towards monoculture and agribusiness on as large a scale as possible. The profits could be used to pay for food imports. This system—sugar out, food in—was fundamental to the imperial, commercial and social history of the West Indies. Food for the enslaved laborers was the fourth ingredient in sugar—the fuel that powered slavery's horrors.

Where each empire sourced its calories varied, but the consequences of that supply chain failing were always severe and sometimes unexpected. During the Seven Years War, for example, French planters on San Domingue struggled to get food to their island amid the disruptions of the naval campaigns. In these difficult conditions, they also grew increasingly alarmed by the spate of sudden deaths among livestock, enslaved people and planters. They accused the Maroon leader François Mackandal of a systematic poisoning campaign. Executing Mackandal solved none of the planters’ problems and instead created a martyr for the later Haitian Revolution. In fact, the cause of the deaths was anthrax, pulled up through the roots of grasses by starving animals. Examples of island food supply chains being disrupted can be found in all the major eighteenth century wars. ⁷

Clear-cutting islands to plant sugarcane and fuel the sugar mills had additional unintended consequences beyond food insecurity. Sugar transformed the ecology of the Caribbean basin. Rats overwhelmed native species of birds and monkeys. Flash floods became more common and more dangerous. Soil erosion decreased sugar yields, which spurred planters to import more enslaved labour. The combination of ecological change and increased transatlantic arrivals created the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. Those mosquitoes carried yellow fever and malaria, which made the West Indies a graveyard for those who had not before been exposed. ⁸ Planters believed that West Africans possessed greater immunity against tropical diseases. ⁹ Here was another incentive to increase the traffic in enslaved people, exacerbating the vicious cycle of slavery, disease, climate change and profit. Yellow fever and malaria were two more ingredients in sugar.

European empires cultivated all of these ingredients, especially the less savoury ones, because there was so much money to be made from sugar. That money spurred not only ecological transformations, the slave trade and epidemics, but also competition. In every war, competing empires sought to capture sugar islands from their enemies. Sometimes, they kept their conquests at the peace, to exploit the sugar; other times, influenced by West India lobbies concerned about oversupply, they used the islands as bargaining chips to secure other strategically vital gains. Wars that started for other reasons in other places inevitably spread to the West Indies.

At last, then, we have arrived at the naval ingredient in the bowl of sugar. Wind, smallpox, money, food, slavery, yellow fever, malaria­—and naval power. For navies, the West Indies were strategically vital. Not only were the islands waypoints to other theatres in North America, but they were also an operational theatre themselves. Imperial competition meant that navies had to learn how to operate in the West Indies. Islands were easy targets, dependent as they were on external sources of food. If an expeditionary force could arrive at the right time of year and with sufficient troops and ships, it could quickly capture islands owned by imperial rivals. The Spanish had arrived first, making their outposts frequent targets of rivals’ attacks. For that reason, in the 1740s, the British and French established important naval bases in the Windward and Leeward Islands where the prevailing winds kept them to windward of most of the rich Spanish colonies. Operating in the West Indies also meant learning to manage yellow fever and malaria, as Cori Convertito's article in this forum explores. Seasonal hurricanes added further complexity to naval operations, shaping the rhythm of convoy departures, the location of anchorages and the logistical infrastructure needed for repairs.

Navies were therefore necessary ingredients in the production, transport and protection of sugar, and they interacted with every ingredient listed above. Prevailing winds brought them to the islands easily; operating in the islands required the sea control that navies were built to gain; and the riches of the islands generated tax revenue that moved them to the top of the strategic priority list for naval, military and civilian leaders. Navies starved enemy islands of food and escorted food convoys to friendly islands. That food fed the enslaved laborers, and navies were involved in the maintenance of slave societies through the suppression of revolts. Navies brought diseases with them into the theatre, suffered losses from yellow fever and malaria, and developed new techniques for mitigating their effects.

The contributors to this forum examine both how navies shaped the sugar islands and how the sugar islands shaped navies. Each article has an abstract and does not require an additional summary here, but there are some themes that span multiple articles that are worth highlighting. The contributors rely to a significant degree on naval sources, and the result is that they emphasize how naval activities shaped imperial structures and logistics more so than the societies on the sugar islands. Each also looks at the sugar islands from the British perspective. That was not the original intention of this forum, but the result presents readers with ready comparisons across different facets of naval operations. ¹⁰ For example, Ryan Mewett and S.A. Cavell look at how naval officers could not resist the temptations of the wealth available in the West Indies. Despite describing events nearly a century apart, both point out how the state struggled to control its agents over the horizon. Mewett's officers participated directly in the global marketplace, carrying illicit cargoes and even organizing illicit convoys. They used the power of their position, backed by the guns on their ships, to enrich themselves, even if their actions did not always align with the interests of their empire. A century later, Cavell's officers seem to have been more aware of at least keeping up the appearance of doing their duty, but many succumbed to the same temptations.

Food insecurity plays a role in several essays. Mewett describes how the Spanish colonies depended on Jamaican merchants for food and other goods, even though trade between these islands was illicit. Here was an opportunity for naval officers, themselves agents of the state, to exploit the limits of state power and the complex network of competing interest groups, both public and private. For Cavell, the British commanders in the West Indies in the Napoleonic Wars could take their time deciding which island to take, and how best to exploit their advantage, because the French garrisons were weakened by the inability of the French state to supply them with food, materiel and reinforcements. That is not to say that it was easy for the British to resupply squadrons in the region, as Convertito points out. Admiral George Brydges Rodney and his physician, Gilbert Blane, produced remarkable results when it came to preventing yellow fever and malaria from taking their usual toll. That they did so late in a war in which British logistics were stretched thinly was even more impressive.

Rodney appears in Cavell's essay as well, but not as a paragon of man-management. Rather, Cavell argues that his mentorship of Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane explains some of Cochrane's enthusiasm for plunder and exploitation. Rodney earned notoriety for his extortion of the merchants of St Eustatius in 1781. While some officers clearly saw Rodney as a cautionary tale, Cochrane seems to have vowed to make similar profits while avoiding any consequences. What emerges from these discussions is how much agency naval officers had when operating on the other side of the ocean. If they wanted to exploit their position for personal gain, there was little standing in their way. If they chose instead to maintain what later generations would call professional standards of conduct, they still had to confront some of the contradictions inherent in the imperial system.

Hamilton's essay drives right at these contradictions: the same naval officers who captured slavers on the west coast of Africa enforced slavery in the West Indies. After Cochrane's campaigns and the end of the Napoleonic Wars reduced the threat from other empires to the British plantations in the West Indies, naval officers were free to focus on maritime counterinsurgency operations. Afloat, they used naval power to isolate islands and contain the spread of information about enslaved revolts; ashore, they participated directly in the violent suppression of revolts. They did so because that was their duty: the social system that underpinned the production of sugar relied on state violence to function. While Hamilton focuses on the early 1830s, it is noteworthy that the same contradictions can be found in Cavell's analysis of the immediate aftermath of the 1807 act that abolished the slave trade.

The great insight of the National Maritime Museum's 1999 display was that it was not possible to be a part of the British empire in the long eighteenth century without being financially (and therefore morally) connected to the institution of slavery. The British navy and British naval officers were more connected than most. Not only did the navy operate frequently in the region, competing with other navies from other empires, but naval officers were tools that the state and the planters used to enforce white supremacy and generate sugary profits. The goal of this forum is to explore some of these tensions and hopefully spark further inquiries into the strategic, operational and social history of navies in the sugar islands.