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As Jamaica limped along after the Western Design, escaped slaves maintained their own colony in the island’s central mountains, and pirates controlled Port Royal.
From 1661-64, Jamaica had a series of governors, one of whom lasted only 10 weeks in the role. Modiford’s defeat in Barbados, though, sent him to Jamaica and in Jamaica he began to make his mark. He quashed all democratic governance in the colony, helped organize the privateers and established valuable crops on the island.
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Transcript
In 1662, Jamaica was still being run by General D’Oyley, for the simple reason that he was the only person who had neither abandoned the job of governor, nor died on it. Despite untold numbers of people being transported there, a census showed its population to be just 3,643 whites and 550 blacks. And it had become, with D’Oyley’s acceptance, one of the two main pirate bases in the Western Hemisphere.
Introduction
Since the Providence Island series, most of our discussions of the West Indies have revolved around Barbados’s affluent, deliberately laid-back population, and it’s been easy to forget amidst discussion of the Turkey Rule, that for the Caribbean at large, that wasn’t the norm. Though plenty of colonies were trying to follow its lead, Barbados stood alone as a place of real prosperity and relative peace. Yes, there was conflict. Yes, there was slavery. Yes, there was poverty. But there was also a reason that people being pushed out of Barbados didn’t just pack their bags and move somewhere else.
It’s been easy to forget that in a very real way, the story of Providence Island was not just relatively recent, but was also far closer to the common realities of life in the West Indies than that of Barbados. When reading about the Caribbean of the 17th Century, you frequently hear it referred to as having been something of a Wild West. And the phrase “no peace beyond the line” has come to be emblematic of the region at the time. The line in question stretched from Portugal’s Azores to the Tropic of Capricorn, and whether or not there was peace in Europe, whatever treaties had been signed, whatever alliances had been formed, you could expect violent lawlessness once you crossed it.
And of all English islands, the one that best illustrated this reality was Jamaica. Barbados’s rolling hills were tamed, covered in sugar plantations and dotted by houses that had by now been engineered to deal with the heat effectively. Jamaica had wild mountains and jungles, all fraught with danger.
Groups of runaway slaves called maroons controlled the center of the island, an area called Cockpit Country, and had done so since the Spanish had been in control. Even today, this is considered the most inhospitable region in Jamaica, with steep, densely packed hills, formed by limestone and covered in rainforest. Its caves, rivers, streams, ponds and thick foliage made it almost impossible to fight against the people who hid there, which made the area a perfect place for maroons to build their society. They lived in huts which were little more than four walls built into a hillside, topped by a thatched roof, and they raised chickens, cattle and pigs, grew plantains, corn and yams, and made full use of their natural surroundings by hunting. Their language and culture were a mix of African, Spanish and English, and the roughness of their surroundings was reflected in a roughness of interpersonal interactions. Polygamy, prostitution and abuse of women were all common, and children died regularly enough that they were treated as being fundamentally expendable.
But it was free, and maroons could even travel into the places inhabited by Europeans to free other slaves and get extra supplies. There was logic and structure to their society, but from the English point of view they were a mysterious, lurking threat, impossible to understand, impossible to control, and willing to use violence. D’Oyley had managed to forge a temporary alliance with the Maroons, which enabled him to fully kick out the Spanish guerillas who tried to stay there, but after that was done, the maroons had also turned on the English and now killed any white person who tried crossing their borders.
The fact that Jamaica was a non-Spanish island with a struggling society also opened the way for another group of outcasts to settle. The French called them corsairs, the Dutch called them buccaneers, the English called them either freebooters or privateers, and the Spanish called them pirates, but whatever the name, their biggest havens were Port Royal in Jamaica, and Tortuga, off the Haitian coast but at this point also under control of Jamaica’s governor.
Indentured servants, including transportees, with abusive masters could find a reprieve in pirate society. So could slaves, at least sometimes. Transported prostitutes could escape the indentured servant system by returning to their old life in a new place. Western Design soldiers defected and joined the pirates so frequently that the red coats of Cromwell’s New Model Army had become recognizable as clothing worn by English pirates.
Some of the earliest pirates, and in fact the ones who led to the adoption of the term buccaneering, had been people who had checked out of society long before turning to a life of plunder. These people had, for one reason or another, chosen a life on uninhabited islands, hunting wild boar, making jerky and selling it to passing ships. Their shoes had been made by shaping fresh pieces of boar skin around their feet until it dried, and they were known even then for their uncouth behavior. I mean it’s not shocking, given that these were people who chose their lives based exclusively on the ability to be free of societal constraints. As non-Spanish nations encroached into the Caribbean, though, the Spanish had pushed these buccaneers out of their homes by slaughtering all the wild boar before the buccaneers could get to them. That meant the only option left to them had been piracy, and they were angry enough at the Spanish that they had no reservations about using it.
Beyond the immediate needs of escape, revenge, and survival, though, the Americas had always been marketed as a place where people could find a new life, and even become affluent, in a way they couldn’t in England. That had proven false for an overwhelming majority of the people in our story, but piracy offered an alternative to failure. Pirate society rejected the hierarchy of mainstream 17th Century society in favor of democratic crews with elected captains, and contracts signed before each mission detailing how plundered goods would be distributed. People on the bottom of the totem pole, or even halfway up, saw in piracy a quicker, easier, more reliable path to more extravagant wealth than they could otherwise dream of. The majority of pirates were former indentured servants, the very people for whom this would be most attractive.
This was a full generation before the so-called Golden Age of Piracy began, but the society was already pretty well developed, and it was already popular for all the same reasons that it’s romanticized today. But the bloodiness of their methods cannot be overstated. These were people whose methods relied on shocking violence in a time and place where the standards for shocking violence were already very, very high. The average Caribbean settler was already numb to things we’d find shocking.
Pirates started with whatever ships or boats they could get their hands on, and gradually built their fleets by sneaking up to Spanish ships at night, climbing up the sides using grappling hooks, and slaughtering everyone on board. Then they’d take the ship and whatever it was transporting. If they had no use for the ship and it was convenient, a Spanish crew might be able to surrender and survive, but pirates also sacked towns along the coasts of Spanish colonies, and it’s in these stories that the violence of the lifestyle is best illustrated.
So here’s one story I stumbled across, which isn’t even particularly famous. A group of pirates led by a man named Francois L’Ollonois approached a town on the coast of what’s now Venezuela. The inhabitants knew what was coming, so they fled as far as they could inland, buried anything valuable they had, and hid. The pirates entered an empty town, set up shop, and searched the woods for whatever people they could find. The rack, that infamous torture device which stretched people until their joints dislocated, was a standard feature of pirate ships, so they set that up as well.
They found a handful of hiding residents, captured them, and brought them back to town. Anyone who was well dressed, they put to the rack, demanding to know where their valuables were. Limbs were snapped, they added beatings and even laid one man down and put heavy rocks on his stomach, and some prisoners negotiated while others remained silent.
L’Ollonois followed this standard exercise with one of his own. He picked out a random person, stood him in front of the group, and started hacking at him using a blunt sword while telling the others that it was wicked to try to hide their goods, and that he’d do the same to them with even blunter swords if they didn’t reveal the information. When the man fell dead and neither he nor anyone else had spoken, the captain picked out another and prepared to repeat the procedure. At this point, though, one man spoke up. Speaking perfect French, he offered to join the pirates and lead them to the loot.
This man’s name was Henry Morgan. He was a Welsh man who had owned a sugar farm in Barbados before being cheated out of it, and who had been taken prisoner by the Spanish three years before and been living as a servant to the man who had just been killed. And he’s the reason that this story came across my radar, because he became the leader, effectively, of the pirates in Jamaica. And in fact what I’m telling you comes from a biography of Morgan which leaned heavily on his own writings.
The next morning, Morgan led the pirates in their search, but the people who hadn’t been captured had changed all the hiding locations, so he couldn’t find anything. The pirates then decided to move onto the next town, a few miles inland, but there the residents were prepared for them. They’d set up barricades, and now unleashed a barrage of bullets at the pirates. The pirates fired back, but 75 of them were either injured or killed, and it was clear they couldn’t win by continuing the shootout. The trees protected them somewhat, but they were waist-deep in mud, and the barricades were tall enough that they couldn’t climb them.
Morgan suggested that they feign a retreat and then turn around and cut as many Spanish throats as they could, and L’Ollonois agreed. They killed 200 people this way, and lost virtually none. The next day they entered the town, and learned that they’d killed or mortally wounded 900 others. At this point, they buried their own dead and loaded the Spanish bodies into boats, which they then sailed a mile away from the coast and sank. They then occupied the town for another three weeks looking for treasure. They didn’t feed most of the town’s residents during this time, only allowing them to eat the corpses of their dead donkeys and mules. The exception was the pretty women, who were given food in exchange for entertaining them.
Over the three weeks, they tortured a series of people until they either revealed the location of their valuables or died. For the people who genuinely didn’t have anything, the only option was death. And at the end of the three weeks, they threatened to burn down the town if they weren’t given 10,000 pieces of eight within 48 hours. The money wasn’t produced in time, so the town was burned. The surviving inhabitants begged them to put out the fire, promising to collect the money, but it was too late. The town burned, and the pirates left, taking with them their loot, including slaves.
On their way back to their ships, they stopped by the original town and made a similar ultimatum, and in case anyone still doubted them, they looted the church. The town’s residents agreed to give them not just the 8,000 demanded, but 20,000 plus 500 oxen if the pirates would promise to leave without hurting anyone else. The pirates agreed, and left. Three days later, though, they returned, saying they needed a pilot to help them navigate safely through the nearby waters, and the townspeople complied.
Because Morgan had facilitated their victory, when it came time to distribute the loot, they agreed to give him an officer’s share. And then, because they had no idea what the jewels were worth, he was able to take his entire share in jewelry and make even more money than his colleagues realized. With everything distributed, they sailed to Tortuga to sell it and spend the money. The slaves would end up in English and French colonies, that was a pretty standard way for colonists in those areas to get slaves. If you remember, most of the Africans in the English Americas before 1652 had been brought by pirates to initially-befuddled colonists. Providence Island in the 1630s and Barbados in the 1640s had been the first two colonies to intentionally import slaves. The rest was simply a matter of pirates needing to sell their “loot,” and the colonists who wanted to support their attacks on Spain buying them.
And with everything sold, the pirates went on to spend everything they’d taken over the course of a few weeks. This type of spending sent lots of money into Jamaica and Tortuga in the early years, which quickly learned to cater to every type of vice imaginable. Morgan was able to increase his earnings from the trip even more because he was actually good at gambling, especially with games like เล่นสล็อตที่ UFABET, but most of his colleagues were soon penniless again. In one story, pirate bought a barrel of wine and forced every passerby to drink some. In another, a group bought a barrel of wine and used it to drench women passing by. In another story, a pirate wanted to marry one of Tortuga’s prostitutes, and when he found her with someone else, he murdered them both a couple days later. Morgan was one of few pirates who was careful with his money, but most of his companions had soon spent everything. With that done, they were ready to go on another voyage, and Morgan eagerly joined them. They had killed well over a thousand people for money which they simply wasted. Morgan liked the life, though, and stayed with the crew until L’Ollonois’s death, and then he went out on his own. He explained later that in his life, the more brutal he’d been, the luckier he’d ended up, and so that’s how he chose to live.
Though L’Ollonois had a reputation for being more intense than the average, nothing I described above was particularly out of the ordinary, except the hacking to death of random people. That was L’Ollonois’s personal tactic. But, other pirates had individual tactics of their own. Some burned people alive on makeshift crosses, some burned until the skin was mangled but the person was still alive, some crushed people alive or came close, Morgan was a fan of a method in which a knotted cord was tightened around a person’s head until his eyes popped. L’Ollonois’s death was a fairly fitting one. He was captured a few voyages later, though, by a group from Panama’s Darien tribe. They tied him up, cut off his limbs and burned them while he watched, and when he finally died, they burned the rest of his body as well.
And before we go on with the story, I do want to take a minute to note that every time I talk about the English using privateering as a strategy against the Spanish, this is the type of thing they were endorsing. When Robert Sedgwick told Oliver Cromwell that no Godly society could be built on a foundation of privateering, this is what he was talking about. And when he said that privateering gave the English a bad name among the very people they claimed to want to protect and convert, this is why.
But back to the story, if you were one of the handful of colonists in 1661 Jamaica, you had the looming threat of maroons on one side of you, the violent debauchery of the pirates on the other, and were also surrounded by disgruntled Irish transportation victims who would be more than happy to rebel. The death rate was off the charts, and there was nothing around that resembled normal society.
Given this situation, D’Oyley had put the island under martial law and kept it there. He befriended the privateers, though, and even made Morgan one of the island’s judges. They were the strongest group on the island, and he needed them. When the Restoration happened, Charles planned to keep him in office, but D’Oyley asked the king to find someone else and let him return home.
The king agreed, and five months later D’Oyley’s replacement arrived, along with the people he’d recruited in Barbados, and the king’s instructions for the government of the colony. This man was named Lord Windsor, and he lasted 10 weeks before noping out, claiming to be sick and sailing home. Ten weeks. He’d spent longer on the ships crossing the Atlantic than he did in Jamaica. He arrived in England perfectly healthy, and was accused by the king and pretty much everyone else of weakness and frivolity. He tried to argue for a little while, saying that he’d been sick south of the Tropic of Cancer, and that it must be an issue of latitude, but soon he realized that no one in England could imagine what he’d been up against, brushed off the insults and went back to the lifestyle of a Restoration noblemen, parties, plays, and luxury. Since the first settlers at Jamestown, people in England dismissed struggling settlers as weak, greedy, undisciplined, and otherwise flawed. In Jamaica, populated by so many soldiers against their will, they were also dismissed as being too military minded.
In Jamaica, Windsor had left his lieutenant, Sir Charles Lyttleton, in charge. Lyttleton’s wife died not too long after he arrived in Jamaica, but he led the colony competently. He didn’t try to forge civilization, simply realized that he was dealing with a bunch of groups of people who couldn’t be controlled and did his best. He managed to call an assembly and pass a set of laws to run the island, and didn’t bother sending them to the king to make them permanent. By the king’s instructions, any laws would remain in place for two years even without the king signing off on them. So he got a set of laws past that would get them through, but without the pressure of potential permanence.
Lyttleton even tried to negotiate with the maroons, offering freedom and 20 acres of land to anyone who would surrender. They were already free, though, and had thousands of acres. The colony wasn’t strong enough to stop them, nor did it have a standard of living high enough to entice them. They didn’t take the offer, and when Lyttleton sent soldiers to push them into submission, the maroons wiped them out. A second confrontation resulted in more of a draw, and the maroons made a treaty, but they soon broke it and retook control of their old territory.
After Lyttleton had been acting as de facto governor for two years, Modiford arrived in Jamaica and relieved him, bringing 800 settlers and a new set of government instructions. Modiford’s instructions expanded on those given to Windsor, such as freeing Jamaica from its designated 5% export duty for 21 more years. They also ordered him to kick the pirates out of Jamaica, because England had finally made peace with Spain and he didn’t want privateer actions to jeopardize that. The privateers were way stronger than Jamaica colonists, though, and they outnumbered them, and the only money Jamaica managed to bring in came from the pirates. And on a personal level, Modiford was friends with Morgan from their Barbados days, and he had been one of the Providence Island colonists before moving to Jamaica. Providence Island’s stated purpose was to act as a privateering base to weaken the Spanish, and in this context it’s not surprising that Modiford had so heartily supported the Western Design. So Modiford quickly, and by quickly, I mean within two weeks, revised his strategy of actually trying to follow these orders.
Even more than that, too, England’s peace with Spain had come at the same time as war with the Dutch, and England wasn’t going to send any ships to protect Jamaica from its enemy. In the war, the Dutch would take St. Kitts, Suriname and Montserrat, and privateers were the only reason Jamaica didn’t follow. So instead of stopping them, Modiford actually ended up working with them and helping them refine their organization methods. He kept Morgan in his place of leadership, while the king knighted him.
Modiford’s time as governor of Jamaica was incredibly important for the colony. He oversaw its transition from being what I’ve been describing to being an actually stable colony, poised to overtake Barbados in prestige and prosperity. Jamaica would never hit Barbados’s peak, but it would remain economically stable for much longer than its rival. He introduced not just sugar, but also allspice and cocoa, as well as salt production to form the colony’s economic foundation. And with this, Jamaica would remain more stable economically than Barbados, which had already reached the height of its importance to the empire. He was so successful in this endeavor that he was made a baronet. It was a transformation which marked a broader transition, into an era where England was ascending in global importance, while Spain’s dominance waned.
Modiford’s time in office was remembered as a borderline-tyrannical one in Jamaica, though. His leadership style became evident when called the colony’s first assembly which would have lasting effects. Lyttleton’s laws had expired after the two years, so Jamaica’s government was once again a blank slate. Modiford didn’t work with the colony’s previous leadership, though. He simply replaced the governor’s council with his own friends and family.
People who had lived in Jamaica through it’s darkest days resented being pushed aside now that things were stabilizing, and true to the island’s nature, this resentment turned into violent conflict. When the Assembly met and tried to figure out the power balance between the elected lower house and the governor’s council, one elected official killed a member of the governor’s council, and Modiford dismissed the meeting. The next time Modiford called an Assembly, he had to dismiss it, too, to prevent something similar from happening.
Modiford never convened another Assembly, and ruled alone, advised only by his friends and family. He had as much Caribbean experience as anybody, but this still earned him a huge amount of resentment. One man, named Thomas Lynch, complained to Charles’s privy council that Modiford “would have none to shine in this hemisphere but himself and his son,” while others said that despite his “avowed anti-monarchical principles, he is the openest atheist and most profest immoral liver in the world.” Some people were even angry enough to leave.
It’s interesting to see the difference between Modiford’s legacy in Barbados and in Jamaica. Barbadian sources depict him as an advocate for colonist rights, a moderate and a largely sympathetic person, though with a desire for power that went unfulfilled, while Jamaican ones depict him as a corrupt, greedy, borderline tyrant who crushed colonist rights, but was nonetheless important to the colony’s history.
Who knows which was closer to the truth regarding Modiford, but the difference in perception is a good demonstration of the difference between the two colonies. Jamaica’s anarchy couldn’t be controlled by Barbadian politics, and Modiford had plenty of experience with both extremes. Modiford had experienced devastating factionalism in not one but two colonies, and Jamaica couldn’t afford to be a third. Democracy was risky even if Modiford valued it. And even if he didn’t value democracy at all, and was governed by pure desire for power, advocating planter rights was the way to do it in Barbados, while quashing them was a means to stability and survival in Jamaica. I think most likely, Modiford was the person he needed to be at any given moment, and that decades of experience had taught him to be that way.
Whatever the truth of Modiford’s character, though, Jamaica’s stabilization was another step toward England’s ascendance as an empire. Next week, we’ll get another glimpse of that empire building as we look at the effects of the Third Anglo-Dutch War on the West Indies.
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