Britain in the tropics 1527-1910

Preface

The chief difficulty which faces the historian of British influence in the tropics is that there is seldom any political or commercial connecting link between our scattered possessions in those regions, beyond the fact that all acknowledge the same flag, and all are subject to certain limited similarities of climate. Apart from India, where the vastness of the theme demands separate treatment, the tropical dependencies of Britain are mostly small and generally isolated from one another ; and while Canada, Australia, and South Africa easily find their proper place as the larger jewels in a crown of empire that encircles the earth, the lesser tropical dependencies more nearly resemble the small stones that one sometimes sees strewn carelessly over the jeweller's counter. Many are extremely beautiful ; a few are very valuable. Some, albeit little better than common pebbles, have yet a curious record of vicissitudes attaching to their name that demands a fuller account than their actual importance would otherwise justify. Many shone brilliantly enough at first, but time has long since dimmed their lustre ; others, again, are newly acquired, and possess properties not yet fully realised. But all are scattered loosely round the girdle of the globe ; even the groups that are geographically akin are politically separated.

vi THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS

Chronologically, however, the subject divides naturally into two great periods : the first, during which slavery was the recognised industrial and social basis of every tropical plantation ; the second, when slavery was prohibited after a long struggle between public opinion and private interest in England. Happily the time has come when the passions roused by that struggle have subsided, and a cool, impartial treatment of the whole question is possible ; happily, too, a third period has now opened out before the white man in the tropics. The advance of medical science in recent years, and the preventive treatment of tropical diseases, which is still almost in its infancy, will probably do more to revolutionise the conditions of life in the tropics in the twentieth century than even the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth.

A. Wyatt Tilby.

3lst December 1911.

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Contents

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Preface v

BOOK XII THE AMERICAN TROPICS : 1527-1900

Chapter I England In South America: 1527-1900 1

The threefold incentive of trade, religion, and adventure has carried the English people round the world, and planted them permanently in possession of some of its fairest and most fertile provinces. From Ralegh's love of adventure and the Puritans' zeal for religion sprang old Virginia and New England, the first of those North American colonies that two centuries' growth changed into the United States. From the fur-traders, explorers, and evangelists of a higher north sprang the colonies that grew into the Dominion of Canada. And from the great seamen who traversed the southern seas

1 The early English voyages to South America are described in Hakluyt and Purchas. The scanty records of British Honduras include Henderson's Account of the British Settlement of Honduras, a history that reaches the beginning of the nineteenth century ; and A. R. Gibbs's British Honduras to 1883. The Journey across the Undiscovered Portion of British Honduras adds considerably to our knowledge of the interior. For the Mosquito Coast, Strangeway's Sketch of the Mosquito Shore and S. A. Bard's Adventures ; and principally the official Correspondence relating to the Mosquito Territories, laid before Parliament, 3rd July 1848.

British Guiana has a larger literature. Ralegh's Voyages and the various biographies of him record the first English attempt on Guiana ; its history under Dutch, French and British rule has been carefully traced by Rodway and Dalton, the former reaching to 1894, the latter only to 1850. Rodway contains more colonial plain-speaking, Dalton more general and statistical information. See also The Capitulation of

VOL. IV. A in the early years of George in. sprang indirectly the colonisation and Commonwealth of Australia, and the younger Dominion of New Zealand. Three new nations thus sprang from the threefold force of trade, religion, and adventure in the temperate zones of the earth ; and a fourth was in course of rising from South African soil.

The same threefold force drew Britons to the tropics ; but here was no permanent settlement of England, here no new Ephemeral nations were born to that fertile mother of new character nations. The white man came and trafficked in Tropical slaves or gold, in alcohol or sugar ; he preached in settlements, ^he name of Christ and a common humanity, and slavery vanished ; he explored, and found or lost an El Dorado ; he planted and reaped in those luxuriant regions, and returned home — for in the tropics he made no permanent home — after many years.

But no children were born to these children of Britain ; and in that fact lay the fundamental difference between the work of England in torrid and in temperate zones. For the white man could not propagate his kind in tropic lands, and therefore his work was evanescent and episodic, his settlements were transitory and ephemeral ; and if they yielded him their wealth without stint, they took their heavy toll of life in exchange. The white man's tropic settlements

British Guiana, by N. Darnell Davis, whose wide knowledge of that country and of the West Indies has been shown in several monographs, and whose generous interest and assistance in my work I most gratefully acknowledge ; Martin's British Guiana ; Sandbach's Pamphlet on the Present State of British Guiana ; Ritchie's First Thirty Years of Schools, in Timehri, the Journal of the Royal Agricultural arid Commercial Society of British Guiana. The health of this colony and of Honduras is discussed in bk. xiv. ch. iv.

The pamphlets mentioned in the text relating to the South Sea Bubble are catalogued in Rariora, a most valuable collection of curiosities in the possession of J. E. Hodgkin ; there is a good bibliography of the subject in the Cambridge Modern History.

For the British in the Argentine, see the War Office Correspondence of 1807, under the heads Buenos Ayres and Montevideo ; also the Trial of General Whitelocke, 1808. See also Mulhall's English in South America.

were ephemeral ; for when adventure called elsewhither the station languished ; when trade and traffic passed the settlers likewise left ; and when the new religion failed, as it sometimes did, to oust a barbarous or elder predecessor, the missionary followed the adventurer and trader to more promising fields.

A childless colony is a living death ; it is a plant that can only propagate itself by continual cuttings from the parent tree ; and while its doom may be long delayed, it is nevertheless certainly doomed if it cannot acclimatise itself to the alien soil, and bear of its own volition. And although the limitless energies of Britain have stretched across the tropic lands of three continents, each of those settlements where all else in nature is so fruitful has been a childless colony, always a consumer, never a creator, of life.

The earliest records of the English people in the tropics are typical of the fragmentary and episodic character of their work in those regions as a whole ; the detached and broken annals of the British in South America contain more failure than success, more disappointed hopes than profitable enterprise, more death than life.

But when first the English mariners burst into the southern seas they hoped, and not without good reason, for victory and booty. They saw the riches of the Spaniards, and coveted their wealth. They fought valiantly and unscrupulously against the mighty but decaying power of that great empire, burning, plundering, and slaying where they might, risking the terrors of the Inquisition, and defying the severe commercial laws which branded them as smugglers and pirates. If they failed, they failed brilliantly, recklessly, as became men who paid with their lives for the stake they flung ; but nevertheless they failed.

It is probable that the first Englishmen who visited South America were the unnamed adventurers who sailed, according to Hakluyt, ' to the River of Plate in the company of

Sebastian Cabota,1527.' Nothing survives of their voyage ; but three years later Captain William Hawkins of Plymouth Early was trading in Brazil, and from that time there

south were many attempts to reach the southern seas, voyag-es, The indefatigable Hakluyt gives a catalogue of 1527-77. ' divers English voyages, some intended and some performed,' to sub-equatorial waters ; among these we notice the great expedition of Drake in 1577, and others which added little to our knowledge and less to our fame.

But Sir Walter Ralegh was the true pioneer of England in South America, and his failure there was but the first of many disasters that befell his countrymen in that continent. Virginia had already disappointed and impoverished him; but the gallant adventurer still hoped for better fortune further south.

On Thursday, 6th February 1595, Ralegh left England for Guiana in the expectation of finding the wealth that had sir waiter so long eluded him. He was not altogether SfSteiX* denied > for if he brought back no gold, he at 1595-16I8. least brought back the report of its existence. On his return home a few months later, he related to his astonished hearers the discovery of a ' large, rich, and beautiful empire, with the great golden citie of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado.' That land, he wrote, had ' more quantitie of gold by manifold than the best parts of the Indies or Peru ; it had more great cities than ever Peru had when it flourished most ; it was the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld.' Watered by mighty rushing streams, healthy of climate, and rich in diamonds as well as gold, Guiana was already claimed by Ralegh for England : ' This empire,' he said, ' is reserved for Her Majesty [Elizabeth] and the English nation, by reason of the hard success which the Spaniards found in attempting the same. All the most of the kings of the borders were already become Her Majesty's vassals, and seemed to desire nothing more than Her Majesty's protection.'

THE AMEEICAN TROPICS

It was an age of marvels, and so many discoveries had been made, ' more divine than human/ in the words of an old writer, that Ralegh's golden city of Manoa obtained easy credence. The poet Spenser believed his friend, and urged England to conquer ' rich Oranoaky,' and that neighbouring land where the strange female realm of the Amazons was supposed to lie ; others, too, hoped to share with Ralegh in the wealth of Guiana,1 and either joined his venture or promoted independent schemes for the conquest of the South American tropics.

A second voyage thither was made in 1596, under Captain Laurens Keymis, who, though he found no gold, reported that ' whole stores of fruitful rich grounds, lying now waste for want of people, do prostitute themselves unto us, like a fair and beautiful woman in the pride and flower of desired grace.'

Further enterprises were now undertaken : in 1604 some forty-six people sailed for Guiana under Captain Charles Leigh in the Olive Plant ; but several died soon after arrival,

1 See bk. i. chs. v. and vi. of this work for Spenser's interest in Guiana and Ralegh's expedition to Virginia.

As to the question of El Dorado and the Amazons there have been endless speculations ; the most ingenious theory I have seen is by Richard Spruce, author of the Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes. Referring to the Amazons, he remarks that ' the traditions must have had some foundation in fact, and they appear inseparably connected with the traditions of El Dorado. I think I have read nearly all that has been written about the Gilded King and his city and country ; and comparing it with my own South American experience, I can hardly doubt that that country was Peru — possibly combined (or confused) with Mexico. The lake called the Mansion of the Sun, because the sun sank into it, is plainly the Pacific Ocean ; but some accounts seem to point to Lake Titicaca, and others to the lakes of Mexico ; probably the general notion was made up of all these. Most Indian nations call the ocean and a lake, and in some cases even a river, by one and the same name.' The Spaniards and the early English explorers, who emphatically believed these traditions, may easily be vindicated from the charge of credulity which a later and more prosaic age brought against them. What was the discovery of a gilded king or of a nation of women warriors compared with the discovery of a new world? Yet the latter was before their eyes — and who can wonder if they believed without much difficulty the legends which willing natives poured into their ears? The confirmed sceptics of to-day would have become a devout believer in Mother Shipton's marvels in such circumstances.

and when Leigh himself succumbed, the settlement which had been formed on the coast was given up. The next year another expedition left England for South America, but was driven by stress of weather to Barbados and St. Lucia, where the emigrants were nearly all murdered by the natives.

Yet hope was still not abandoned. In 1606 thirty people sailed under Captain Edward Hartley in the Sea Plmnix, but failed utterly ; three years later another party left for Guiana under Robert Harcourt, a landed gentleman of England, who had been fired by Ralegh's example. Harcourt himself returned safely, and lived to promote a second South American enterprise several years afterwards ; but those he left to found a colony on the Oyapoco River had little profit for their pains.

Many, indeed, had now failed, but Ralegh himself had not lost faith. ' His errors/ he admitted, ' were great/ and had ' yielded very grievous effects ' ; yet in the ' winter of my life/ he wrote, ' I did undertake these travels, fitted for bodies less blasted with misfortunes, for men of greater abibtie, and for minds of better incouragement.' And in 1617, after his unjust imprisonment by James I. in the Tower of London, he headed a last expedition to the supposed land of gold.

For a time matters seemed to prosper. ' To tell you I might be here king of the Indians/ wrote Ralegh to his wife, ' were a vanity ; but my name hath still bved among them/ But disasters quickly crowded upon the hapless knight. His own son, and many of his men fell in a fight with the Spaniards ; Keymis destroyed himself ; and the mortality by sickness among the men was terrible. His hopes thus completely blasted, Ralegh returned ' a withered beggar ' to England, the weary fighter with a tumultuous world now vainly seeking the quiet which was denied him. ' Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall/ he had written in the days of early ambition ; and since he had both climbed high and fallen low, peace was now his wish.

' Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon,'

cried Ralegh in The Pilgrimage. But peace as well as fortune had deserted him when he wrote : —

' Tell fortune of her blindness ; Tell nature of decay ; Tell friendship of unkindness ; Tell justice of delay, And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie.'

Ralegh was again confined to the Tower of London, whence he only emerged to die. ' You shall receive, dear wief,' he sent word as he was condemned, ' my last words in these my last lynes. My love I send you, that you may keep it when I am dead ; and my councell that you may remember it when I am noe more. I would not with my last will present you with sorrowes, deare Bess. Lett them goe to the grave with [me], and be buried in the dust.' A disillusioned and broken man, who had drained life's cup to the dregs, he bade farewell to the world in some verses written in his Bible : —

' Even such is time that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, our all wTe have, And pays us but with earth and dust ; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days : But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust.'

The day after his condemnation, on 29th October 1618, Ralegh was executed, saying, as he felt the axe : ' This gives me no fear. It is a sharp medicine to cure me of all my diseases.'

Thus died worthily the last of the great EUzabethans, and one of the first of England's oversea pioneers ; thus ended unworthily the first period of English enterprise in South America.

In one of the many curious passages of his writings, Ralegh had once attempted to explain a puzzling contradiction of the human brain. ' The mind of man hath two parts : the one always frequented by the entrance of manifold vanities, the other desolate and overgrown with grass, by which enter our charitable thoughts and divine contemplations.' The search for the golden land was one of the magnificent but manifold vanities of the age ; the ' Empire of Guiana ' was inhabited only by savage Caribs, who had resisted the Spanish braves ; the city of Manoa was a figment of Ralegh's brain, similar to that strange tale, which others had brought back from Guiana, of headless men whose mouths grew in their breasts.

And Guiana was now deserted by England ; for when that land of fable and disappointment was mentioned among the Puritan refugees in Holland as a possible home for their congregations in the new world, they rejected it for the more sombre but far less dangerous shores of New England.1 They sought no earthly riches, but a heavenly crown ; and whatever their celestial reward, in doing so they unwittingly chose the path of mundane wisdom. Within a few years Massachusetts was prosperous, while Guiana remained deserted save for a few Spanish and Dutch merchants, and the visit of an occasional buccaneer.

With the death of Ralegh all active attempts on the part of England to conquer Guiana came to an end ; yet the vain The south hopes which his expeditions thither had inspired sea Bubble, continued to move his countrymen. Efforts were

1720 •

still made from time to time to establish trading-stations along that part of the South American coast ; but one by one these ended in failure and loss. The legend of the wealth of Guiana, however, was persistently believed, in spite of every disaster ; and that legend, which attributed enormous wealth to every part of South America, was

1 See vol. i. bk. ii. ch. ii.

in some measure responsible for the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

The history of the South Sea Bubble belongs to insular British rather than imperial annals ; but that mad fever of gambling shows that the elusive expectation of riches in the south was still strong enough, a century after Ralegh's death, to tempt the English people from their customary financial prudence.

The nation paid dearly for its temporary aberration when the bubble of speculation burst : fortunes were lost in the crisis, and the credit of the Government itself was severely shaken. The extravagant ideas of the wealth of South America thus failed a second time.1

It was the fate of Guiana to remain for many years longer

a land of unrealised hopes and vain delusions ; British

ii • • • . ' Honduras,

but eisewhere in torrid America the British had 1662.

already gained a precarious footing, from which they were

not to be dislodged.

The first actual settlement of the English people in the western tropics was formed by freebooters on the coast of the Carib Sea. The surrounding Spanish territories were rich in valuable dyewoods and mahoganies ; and there, where the streams flow down through a swampy jungle into the shallow waters from which Honduras takes its name, some English soldiers of fortune in the West Indies began to ply their trade of log-cutters shortly after the conquest of Jamaica in 1655.

A few British sailors, who were wrecked off Yucatan,

1 Those who were victimised obtained little popular sympathy. Pamphlets were published, full of gibes at the ruined speculators, among which we may note The Bubbhr's Mirror, or England's Folly, while ' Bubble ' playing cards became the fashion, inscribed with doggerel such as : —

' The headlong fools plunge into South Sea Water, But the sly Longheads wade with caution a'ter ; The First are drowning, but the Wiser last, Venture no deeper than the Knees or Waist.'

had settled on that coast in 1638 ; four years afterwards the island of Ruatan or Rattan was captured and temporarily occupied ; twenty years later, in 1662, the first permanent colony was established in the district now known as British Honduras. The place soon possessed several hundred traders all mainly engaged in cutting down and exporting its rich timber to England.

They were not a very reputable folk ; and they sometimes varied the monotony of their forbidden industry by a Buccaneer plundering the rightful owners of the soil. But colony. although attacked in return and occasionally worsted — 260 prisoners were carried off by the Spaniards in 1675 to work in the Mexican mines — they could not be dislodged ; and as the years passed a straggling British settlement grew up at the place, unrecognised by either its own or the Spanish Government.

Belize, the future capital of British Honduras, was said to derive its very name, as it did its existence, from the buccaneers. A balize or beacon was erected there to guide them through the dangerous islet-studded coral sea,1 and in truth the city — which in the eighteenth century consisted only ' of a few wretched huts in the middle of a miserable swamp ' — saw far more of the swaggering, reckless filibuster in its earlier days than of the peaceful trader.

But permanently profitable industry can only be carried on by regular methods. A few merchants, of less doubtful antecedents than the earlier settlers, gradually engrossed most of the business into their hands ; and despite affrays with the Spaniards, the uncertain nature of their tenure, and the constantly fluctuating price of wood, which varied from £40 to £16 a ton as the fashion for mahogany furniture increased or declined, the trade grew larger.

1 Another derivation makes Belize a corruption of Wallace, a noted Scottish buccaneer who haunted the place in its early days. In neither case can the city dispute the bar sinister on its philologic shield.

African slaves were now imported to fell the logs ; and in the four years from 1713 to 1716 there were exported 14,995 tons of timber. The settlement became less lawless, and, since its existence was still ignored England by the British Government, seven magistrates 1763. were elected to rule by the inhabitants themselves.

At length, in 1763, the Peace of Paris gave British Honduras a more definite political standing. The colony was henceforth known as ' His Majesty's settlement in the Bay of Honduras/ but the suzerainty of Spain was still acknowledged. It was agreed that all the fortifications which English subjects had erected should be demolished ; but ' they or their workmen were not to be disturbed or molested, under any pretext whatever, in their said places of cutting and loading logwood ; and for this purpose they might build without hindrance and occupy without interruption the houses and magazines necessary for their families and effects/

The people, however, had vitality enough to encroach on their jealous neighbours ; and this aroused so much resentment that, on 15th September, 1779, the colony was attacked and practically exterminated by the Spaniards. Most of the inhabitants were deported to Havana and imprisoned there ; the majority died in captivity. The few who survived returned undaunted to British Honduras when the Treaty of Versailles brought peace in 1783 ; and they were strong enough to beat off another attack by Spain thirteen years later. From that time the colony entered upon a period of quiet prosperity, its remote and insignificant character protecting it from the great European wars of the age.

A check was given to its advance when the planters were compelled gradually to manumit their slaves in obedience to the Imperial Law of 1833 ; but some compensation was afforded by the new industry of sugar-cane cultivation, which Spanish immigrants introduced in 1847.

In time Belize grew into a clean and fairly healthy town, with substantial houses for its wealthier merchants. The character of first Protestant church was built in 1812 — the the colony. 0i(j freebooters were more concerned with earthly spoils than heavenly treasure — and the colony was subsequently united, so far as concerned its religious affairs, with the Anglican diocese of Jamaica.

But despite the influence thus brought to bear, British Honduras retained, and, perhaps, still retains, many of the old irregularities, which use has hardened into customs. The buccaneers were not remarkable either for sobriety or chastity, and their manners were more forcible than refined ; their descendants of to-day are said to be addicted both to immorality and drink, while crimes of violence are not uncommon.1 There is little education or culture in the colony, and so long as the richer merchants look on Belize as a place of exile, and generally leave after some years to end their days in England, matters in this respect are hardly likely to improve. In 1812 the population consisted of 1098 free men and 2540 slaves ; by the census of 1905 it was 40,372 in all.

Though British Honduras differs from most other English colonies in origin and character, it has yet possessed sufficient likeness to England for its annals to enshrine a constitutional struggle in miniature.

The system of elected magistrates, which had grown up naturally in the settlement, was so successful that two comits Govern- missioners, who were sent out by the Imperial ment- Government in 1741, left the administration as

they found it. In 1765 Vice- Admiral Sir William Burnaby. assisted by Captain Cook, the explorer, drew up a code which

1 I need not comment on the fact that the illegitimate birth-rate of the colony in 1905 was 44 -90 per cent, of the total number of births. In other parts of the world it varies between 2"65 in Ireland and 14-73 in Austria : the latter is quite exceptionally high. But in some of the West Indian islands the rate is considerably higher than even that of British Honduras.

Altogether, it was not without good grounds for his disgust that a British sailor once described the colony as one of the most benighted spots on the face of the earth. — Reminiscences of Admiral Montagu.

was afterwards regarded as the charter of liberty for the colony, and when disagreements occurred with the Lieutenant- Governor in later years, ' Burnaby's Code ' was always invoked to settle the dispute. In 1840 the Imperial Government declared that ' the law of England is and shall be the law of this settlement ' ; seven years previously the elected magistracy had been abolished for nominees of the crown, and a long struggle supervened, which did not terminate when, in 1853, a constitutional executive was appointed, consisting of a Superintendent and a Legislative Council of eighteen elected, and three nominated members, with an Executive Council of six to assist the Superintendent. In 1870, however, this constitution was withdrawn, and British Honduras was proclaimed a Crown Colony.

Thus the old pirate settlement grew into a permanent and legitimate appanage of empire ; but its miserable offshoot on the pestilent Mosquito Coast failed as abso- T]le

lutely as the abortive Scottish experiment lower Mosquito

Coast

down on the isthmus of Darien or Panama.1 A Failure, few planters and traders attempted to found a 1740-1820. colony in 1740 among the unsubdued natives of the Mosquito district ; but since their efforts were unsuccessful, they were disavowed by the British Government and the place was given up.

Forty years later, however, in 1779, some refugees from Belize again came thither when the older colony fell before the Spaniards ; but the Treaty of 1783 required them to evacuate the territory, and they returned to British Honduras. Notwithstanding this rebuff, the scheme was not allowed to die ; in 1820 another settlement was attempted, and the farcical ceremony of crowning a native king took place.

But the whole establishment was utterly mismanaged. Within a few months it was abandoned, and the project was never revived ; and in 1859 England finally gave up all pre-

1 For the Darien failure, see vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii.

U THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS tensions to the Mosquito Coast, or, indeed, to any part of Central America beyond British Honduras.

The one permanent English settlement in South America was British Guiana ; but Ralegh's dreams of conquest in British ^at delict were only fulfilled, and then only in Guiana, very modified form, some two centuries after his 1804, death. Isolated efforts had often again been

made to establish a colony on the Orinoco ; but continued misfortune seemed to pursue every attempt. In 1626 an expedition to Guiana under a Captain Marshall failed ; the following year another project put forward by Robert Harcourt to found a ' Company of Adventurers to the River Amazon ' came to grief, and nearly ruined its promoter ; 1 in 1652 a trading-station was founded at Paramaribo, but seventeen years later was exchanged with Holland ; and though the Dutch were now successful merchants in Guiana, every English descent upon that coast came to naught.