The First Anglo-Dutch War hit Barbados hard. After a 10 hour battle expended all their ammunition, colonists and king bickered over who should be responsible for buying more. Ultimately, the compromise was to put off the issue by loaning the king the money, and for two years, Barbados defended England’s Caribbean holdings, spending 100,000 pounds, recruiting thousands of soldiers, facing severe food shortages, and ultimately losing its governor in a hurricane. It would never recover.
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Transcript
There was no peace beyond the line even when Europe was quiet, but today, the Caribbean will see its first traditional war break out.
Introduction
If you’ve been listening to this show for any appreciable amount of time, you’ve probably picked up on one important fact: the Dutch were the best at trading. The reason for this was fundamentally that the Dutch had adopted a policy of free trade while the English and other countries still focused on tariffs, customs and monopolies. And the more England fell behind the Dutch, and the less its merchants were able to compete with the Dutch, the more it doubled down on these policies, culminating of course in the Navigation Acts.
Then, under Cromwell, the rivalry and Navigation Act combined had led to the First Anglo-Dutch War, which we’ve referred to because it did affect the colonies indirectly, but ultimately that war hadn’t really spilled over into the Western Hemisphere. The English had nominally won and destroyed lots of Dutch ships, but the Dutch had simply gone to work building more. And when the Dutch rebuilt their fleet, the two countries were back where they started. The Dutch still had the framework right, while the English had changed nothing.
When the Restoration had happened, both the Dutch and the colonists had expected Charles II to repeal the Navigation Act and move back to what they considered a more symbiotic relationship between the two countries. But the English merchants didn’t want that to happen because they wanted their comfortable monopolies without Dutch competition.
Meanwhile, Charles II didn’t want to risk a decrease in customs duties and tariffs because they provided him steady streams of revenue outside of Parliamentary control. And Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, was in charge of the Royal African Company, which put him in direct competition with the Dutch for the slave trade in Western Africa.
And adding to all of this, the English were having trouble enforcing the Navigation Acts, and it might well take an overt confrontation to change that. With Charles’s determination to enforce the act, English colonists had even started to move to French and Dutch colonies so that they could sell the sugar they raised on a free market.
And so, in 1663, England prepared for another war with the Dutch. And in 1664, they declared it. English privateers attacked Dutch ships, and seized Dutch trading posts in Western Africa. The English also invaded the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which had had consistent squabbles with their New England neighbors.
The Dutch put together a fleet to retaliate, and after recapturing their West African posts, they sailed directly to the West Indies. Barbados was the jewel of the English crown, so going after it and its neighbors was the quickest way for the Dutch to strike back at their enemy. France, the other country whose colonies would be caught up in the struggle, chose to ally with the Dutch over the English. The choice had been obvious. They relied on Dutch trade, too, while England had isolated itself using the Navigation Acts.
So in May 1665, Willoughby returned to an island recovering from an attack. His nephew, Henry, had been in charge in his absence, and in February received a letter from the king saying that the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter was probably on his way to Barbados at that very moment with a fleet of 12 warships, so he should probably start preparing for an attack.
Henry had repaired the forts, mustered the militia, and set watches over the island’s coasts. He situated all available ships to defend the island’s ports, and waited. And at 6am on April 20, a fleet of 14 Dutch ships appeared in Carlisle Bay. They sailed directly past the fort, toward the English ships anchored in the harbor, and then fired volleys of cannon and shot directly at the biggest one.
After the first volley, the English ships and forts fired back, and for 10 hours, the Dutch and English fired cannons at each other as fast as they could load them. As the Dutch fleet’s decks, masts and sails were shattered and shredded, and as dozens of its sailors were either killed or injured, they called for a council of war and asked to be able to retreat. The English, who, unbeknownst to them, were nearly out of ammunition, agreed, and the Dutch limped to Martinique, stopping just out of firing range to mend their sails as well as they could.
And as the Dutch sailed away, the English took stock of their own damage. Only three colonists had been killed and 10 wounded, but St. Michaelstown had been devastated. Houses were ruined, and warehouses full of sugar destroyed. And, the battle had used up most of Barbados’s ammunition stock, so if the Dutch decided to attack again, they’d be helpless to resist.
And a month after this, Willoughby returned, explaining that he’d been delayed because he, himself, had almost been killed in Suriname, and on his arrival, he set to work trying to put Barbados back in order. The first priority was obviously to get more ammunition. But the severity of the situation only made it a focal point for Barbados’s pre-existing governmental controversies.
Barbados had passed the infamous 4.5% duty with the stipulation that its proceeds would fund the island’s government and defenses. It had taken three weeks to reach that compromise, and Barbados would not have approved the duty otherwise. But, the king had refused the stipulation, while keeping the duty in place. The colonists were adamant that that was the king’s responsibility, and he couldn’t just pick and choose which part of the act to keep. But, the king dismissed them, and had no intention of revisiting the issue. Willoughby had been caught in the middle, sympathetic to the colonists but also the focus of their ire, because he was the king’s representative in Barbados.
The fact that Barbados had had any ammunition in the first place was thanks to Willoughby’s ability to advocate for the colony, because Charles had initially refused to give him any, even knowing war was coming, and refused to let him use the proceeds of the 4.5% export duty to buy it.
But now, the ammunition was gone, and the first thing Willoughby did on his return to Barbados was to write to the king’s secretary of state, Lord Arlington, begging him to get ammunition sent to Barbados, and explain to Charles “what ill condition I am in to serve his majesty’s commands, for I have received very severe checks for disposing any of yt revenue to the king’s service … what can the guns do without powder?” If another Dutch fleet arrived, Barbados would fall.
The king, though, used Barbados’s dire situation to strengthen his own position against the colonists on the issue of the 4.5%. If Barbados fell, Charles would lose a revenue stream, but the colonists would lose everything, their homes, their livelihoods, and perhaps even their lives. The gun was fundamentally to their heads, not his, and he could simply refuse to pay for the things they needed. They would have no choice but to pay for their own defenses if they wanted to survive. Utterly repulsive.
So Willoughby, who hadn’t called an assembly since the last one had been such a disaster, now had to call another election. And yet again, Samuel Farmer was elected as speaker of the house. And instead of giving Willoughby money to buy ammunition, Farmer presented the governor with a Petition of Right, saying that “therein he had followed the example of the best of parliaments.” This quite explicitly hearkened to the Petition of Right presented to Charles I in the early years of his reign as the battle between king and parliament was developing, but Willoughby was its target instead of Charles II.
But while Charles and Farmer tried to gain political advantage, Barbados was physically helpless, and the Dutch could fundamentally attack any day they wanted to. The Dutch didn’t know how low on ammunition they were, and there were plenty of other, weaker English islands to capture, so that bought them some time, but fundamentally it wasn’t a good position to be in.
So, Willoughby ordered all political agitation to stop immediately, and for Farmer’s faction to be prepared to answer for their sedition at the next session of the assembly. Farmer agreed to appear at the next assembly, but as for stopping his political agitation, he said “he would be dam’d and rot where he was, before he would acknowledge any such thing.” So, Willoughby arrested him and put him on a ship to England to stand trial for high treason, explaining the danger Farmer posed to the island, and telling the king he needed to sufficiently punish Farmer in order to dissuade future rebels, for, he said “my back is at the wall, and I find good words and meek carriage begets little but contempt where no other can be used amongst a people who have been rough bred and not used to the yoke.” At the very least, Farmer must not be allowed to return to Barbados until the inhabitants were cooperating with him. The king kept Farmer in prison for three months, and then let him go, though not to Barbados.
Meanwhile, the French had entered the war, so while Willoughby had planned and gotten permission to go to England to argue his and the island’s case before the king, he couldn’t just yet.
St. Kitts had been half French half English, and the two groups had had a longstanding treaty of neutrality saying that colonists on the island would support each other, regardless of who their governments were allied with at any given moment. If this treaty must be broken, the side which intended to break it must give three days warning before doing so.
As soon as the English colonists on St. Kitts had learned of the war with the French, they had, in accordance with the treaty they’d signed, informed the French that they were going to call reinforcements from Nevis and privateers from Jamaica to help defend their portion of the island, not to attack, just to prevent any attack. But when they gave this warning, the French decided to take them out before the reinforcements came.
First, they sent a group of slaves to set fire to English canefields and houses, and then they flooded the settlements around Cayon, and then marched up the island’s eastern coast pillaging, slaughtering and burning. The English reinforcements launched a retaliation on the French portion of the island, and in that conflict the leaders of both sides, including both governors and the leader of the Jamaican Privateers, were all killed or mortally wounded. The privateer leader was Edward Morgan, uncle to the Captain Henry we talked about last episode. The privateers were furious at his death, blamed the English for warning the French about their arrival, and in retaliation went to the now-dead governor’s house, destroyed everything inside and tried to rape his wife. Fortunately they were stopped, but doing so was evidently difficult.
The English colonists didn’t want to fight anymore. They’d been attacked by both their opponents and their reinforcements, and they didn’t know the French ammunition was almost exhausted, so they surrendered. Under the terms of the surrender, they gave up all English forts and firearms, and they could only remain on the island if they took an oath of allegiance to the French king. More than 8,000 English settlers left, mostly going to Virginia, and their properties were destroyed in their wake. Irish transportees, though, were sent to St. Bartholomew, Martinique and Guadeloupe.
After St. Kitts, the French had captured Antigua, and there they solidified their reputation for fighting much more viciously than the Dutch did. They burned most of the island’s houses, and allied with the local Carib populations, who took on most of the dirty work of pillaging, raping and massacring the English settlers.
Meanwhile, after repairing his fleet at Martinique, de Ruyter had proceeded to St. Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat. There, he captured 16 English ships, and then sailed back across the Atlantic.
The fall of its most substantial neighbors left Barbados effectively alone. The only other military-like English force in the region were the privateers based in Jamaica, and even they were in competition with Barbados as much as they were on the same side. And even as the only strongish colony, Barbados had no ammunition.
To get it, Willoughby called another assembly in early 1666. And the colonists restated their position. The 4.5% duty had only been passed with the understanding that it would be used for things like this. Willoughby noted that even if that was the case, the king was not only the king but also the lord proprietor of the colony, and he had explicitly refused to allow that. The people who collected the customs duties worked directly for the king, and they also refused to redirect the funds. He could not change any of that, and at the end of the day, because Barbadians were going to be the people who were attacked, they were the ones who had to bend.
And now, though Charles wasn’t willing to pay for defense, he ordered the colony to repair all its forts, and restock its ammunition supplies. No help, no support, but orders which restated the obvious and did little more than rub salt in the wound.
And, on a note that’s more irritating in the context of our Virginia discussions, Charles also gave Barbados instructions that all merchants must sail in fleets at designated times of year, and trade in designated ports. This was exactly the policy that Berkeley had unsuccessfully asked him to order for Virginia.
Infuriated, the assembly came out swinging, under an ally of Farmer’s who was even more belligerent than the former speaker. It demanded detailed information about the condition of Barbados’s defenses, as well as to see random paperwork and documents, and a frustrated Willoughby snapped. He said the king wasn’t only their sovereign, but their proprietor, by their own choice, might I add, and given that fact he could reasonably “have insisted upon and prayed an aid from you, whereby to have assisted his majesty” in this time of war. He wasn’t the one calling the shots. He was on their side, and he would give Barbados whatever concessions the king would allow, but ultimately he had to follow the king’s orders, and nothing they said or did would change that.
In response to this, the assembly made a proposal. They would provide money for guns and gunpowder, but instead of that money being in the hands of the governor, they would name three planters to be in charge of everything. When the supplies arrived, those three planters would sell them to colonists at fixed rates, and then the proceeds of the sale would go back to the three directors to use as the assembly instructed them. Their compromise would put three of Willoughby’s opponents in charge of the colony’s militia and weapons for the foreseeable future.
Willoughby vetoed this, saying it was too dangerous a solution. Its practical effect “was nothing less than to draw the militia from the king, and to put it into the hands of his subjects, a design as unanswerable for us to suffer as for them to project.” And beyond that, it went against Barbados’s longstanding, staunch belief that there should be no standing army. Willoughby emphasized that if Barbados were conquered, there would be no reason to argue about who carried the purse or managed the sword. Ammunition was a matter of survival.
But the representatives didn’t budge. It wasn’t just that the king wasn’t using the 4.5% for their benefit. It was that in a year of war, a war which Barbados had not wanted, the king had given them nothing for defense. Nothing at all. He had demanded the 4.5%, then refused to use even a fraction of it for public expenses that he pushed on them, “and now it is expected that all neglects should be supplied by this assembly without question or satisfaction.” This wasn’t an issue of Barbados not wanting to do its fair share for the king. It was an issue of the king starting a war, and then putting the entire defense of the English Caribbean on their heads, and expecting them to fund it without the slightest bit of help. And they still weren’t being allowed free trade, and the London merchants weren’t even providing them enough food at this point to prevent starvation. Plus, the Navigation Act had pushed sugar prices low enough that people were starting to consider leaving the island, anyway. The king was using the fact that the gun was to their heads, to take advantage of them, and that was unacceptable.
And they were right, but Willoughby also knew all of this, and whether or not the assembly knew it, he’d been making this exact same argument on Barbados’s behalf in letters to London. “I cannot but admire,” one read. “That places of so great consideration as these islands are to the king, should be no more looked after nor regarded, but left to look to themselves.”
Finally, they came to an agreement. The colonists would raise a loan of 4 pounds of sugar per acre on the credit of the 4.5%. This avoided submitting to the king’s demand that Barbados pay for its own expenses in addition to paying the 4.5%, and it meant the king would be expected to pay them back, or let them off the hook for the duty until they’d recouped their losses. And it was under this framework that Barbados would continue to raise money for its defense through the duration of the war.
With that done, and the issue of ammunition finally settled, Willoughby commandeered 30 English merchant ships preparing to cross the Atlantic, recruited 600 soldiers from Barbados, and assembled a fleet to sail under his nephew Henry to defend and reinforce the English Leeward Islands. First, he went to strategically important Dutch Tobago, but privateers under the command of Thomas Morgan, based in Jamaica, had beaten him there. They agreed to hand over the island to him on condition that they were allowed to sell their loot in Barbados. Loot including 20 cannons, 925 Black and Indian slaves, 300 cattle and 50 horses.
Henry Willoughby then moved onto Antigua, but after recapturing it, the English merchant ships, fearing they’d lose their cargo in further combat, left. They dumped the Barbadian troops on the island and returned to England.
With this news, Willoughby wrote to the king, yet again, telling him that England was going to lose all its Caribbean holdings simply because the king wasn’t bothering to reinforce them while the French and Dutch governments had the good sense to invest in the region. St. Kitts was now gone. Nevis was effectively gone, “and if it, once come to run in a blood, God bless Barbados, that fair jewel of your majesty’s crown.” Barbados was one of the king’s most valuable colonies, populated by a spirited and industrious people, Willoughby said, and yet it faced starvation, and its defense was neglected, and if the king wanted to keep it, he had to send them help, and allow them to restock their food supply by permitting free trade with foreigners.
And in response, Charles sent two warships to Barbados, with orders to retake St. Kitts. Willoughby once again commandeered six English merchant ships, for a total of eight. He knew that he was exceeding his gubernatorial powers, but he had no choice. The king had sent inadequate help, and yet-more demands. He also recruited 1,000 more Barbadian soldiers, and prepared to sail for St. Kitts, this time leading the expedition in person.
Willoughby captured some more ships at Martinique, and still more at Guadeloupe, giving them a fleet with a fair chance of victory, but as they pulled away from Guadeloupe, a hurricane struck suddenly, and hard. A small handful of badly battered ships reached Montserrat a few days later with the news. 400 survivors managed to reach Todos de los Santos, a group of French islands off of Guadeloupe, and there they held out for two weeks hoping to be rescued. Henry Willoughby tried to get them in a couple boats from Antigua, but the French naval force pushed him back not only to Antigua but to Nevis, and the survivors surrendered. And not too long afterward, a couch which belonged to Willoughby washed ashore at Montserrat with a handful of ship fragments. Henry wrote to the king that the French were now the masters of the seas, and Barbados’s governor was dead.
When Willoughby was confirmed dead, the merchants pushed for an experimental change to the island’s government. Instead of the norm, both in Barbados and elsewhere, in which the governor’s council was an upper house representing the colony’s owners, while the elected lower house represented the colonists, Barbados’s upper house was now split. Half of the governor’s council would represent the king, and half the colonists, with no single governor to lead them.
This change locked up the island’s government entirely, and pushed the factional split into the island’s general population. The people who had been appointed to advocate the king’s side didn’t actually want to do that, for obvious reasons. So they joined the other two councilors. But, Farmer’s old faction didn’t have things exactly right either, and now there was no governor or council to check their agenda. So, that became the job of the elected assembly, which meant that it was the job of the everyday people, and that dynamic split the island’s population into two hostile factions. And the war hadn’t yet ended, nor had food shortages, so this might not have been the time for an experimental government change.
The French easily retook Antigua, yet again plundering the population and selling its goods and slaves elsewhere. When a commander from Nevis now led 300 Barbadians to try to take the island back for England, the cowed population refused to support them. After winning what ended up being a minor battle, the French looted the island yet again, destroying whatever property they couldn’t carry away. A letter from John Winthrop Jr. in November 1668 talks about how his brother Samuel “was ruined by the French and driven from his plantations, losing a great estate, both at St. Christophers, and in his goods and sugarworks at Antigua, and his negroes there, having settled his chief plantations there.”
When, in early 1667, the French captured Montserrat, the island’s considerable Irish population deserted to the enemy. Montserrat had been Irish and Catholic since 1632, long before Cromwell’s policy of transportation, and it was unique in that respect. Its Irish population had of course been bolstered over the years, and they had no reason to fight for England over France, so they didn’t. Like the transportees in St. Kitts, they took an oath of allegiance to the French king and remained undisturbed by either the French or their Carib allies. The island’s English population were massacred by the Caribs, though, and survivors sent to Jamaica.
And French privateers now blockaded Barbados, and the French and Dutch recaptured Tobago and St. Eustatius from the English. And now, the Dutch attacked Suriname. Suriname wasn’t particularly well armed, its fort hadn’t been completed, and a disease had weakened its population, so the colony’s governor, William Byam, decided to surrender to the Dutch and simply be thankful that it wasn’t the “merciless French” who had arrived instead. He was charged with cowardice, but when he explained his situation and reasoning, he was acquitted.
Nine months after Willoughby’s death, Charles nominated a new governor to replace the disastrous council of four, and that was William Lord Willoughby, brother and heir to former governor Francis, and father to his nephews and right hand men, Henry and William Willoughby, Jr. And yes, this is going to get a bit confusing, name-wise.
William the new governor reached the beleaguered colony in April 1667, with a regiment of soldiers under the command of Sir Tobias Bridge, and a supply of arms and ammunition. And at the same time, naval reinforcements arrived from Jamaica at the king’s orders, sailing under Captain John Berry. And, if help had been a long time coming, it was certainly effective once it got there. Berry broke the French blockade, fitted and recruited yet-another expedition in Barbados, and then went on a voyage where he raided Dutch shipping, defeated the French and Dutch fleets at Nevis, and pushed the Caribs away from the island. Reports differ so wildly that we don’t know exactly how it happened, but we know the fighting was intense, we know the English were outnumbered, and we know they won. And Berry is a person to remember. A former royalist, he’d been pushed to a life at sea when Cromwell had won, been captured by the Spanish and lived with them for several years. When he’d returned at the beginning of the Restoration, he’d become an officer on an English navy ship and sailed for Jamaica. The Battle of Nevis gave him a reputation, and made him a leading English military figure in the Western Hemisphere.
After Nevis, the Dutch went to raid Virginia, the French returned to Martinique, and Berry recaptured Antigua and Montserrat, though St. Kitts was still too strongly held to be attacked.
It had been dramatic, but that was only one victory and it was still carried largely on Barbados’s shoulders, and it was becoming ever clearer that the war was pushing Barbados to a tipping point. With limited help, Barbados had led a whole theater of a war alone for over two years.
In total, Barbados would spend over 100,000 pounds for the defense of the region, a cost which it bore almost singlehandedly, and that’s not including the economic impact of a destroyed town, destroyed sugar and merchant privations. And to make matters worse, the Navigation Acts now being fully enforced created the type of dynamic which Virginia had experienced with tobacco. Sugar simply wouldn’t be worth as much in the future as it had been in the past.
And worse still, the fact that Barbados had devoted all its agricultural land to sugar production, and relied on food imports rather than giving up land that could be so profitable, shipping disruptions had caused severe food shortages. In his last letter to the king, Francis Willoughby had said that the abolition, or at least suspension, of the Navigation Acts was the only way to save Barbados from starvation, but his request had again been refused.
What had been the most fabulously wealthy colony in the English speaking world was now dangerously close to widespread starvation, and it would never return to its former splendor.
Next episode, we’ll finish this story.