Bridgetown, Barbados

What was Bridgetown like around 1715?

English settlers landed on Barbados in February 1627, near today’s Holetown, and Bridgetown grew up on Carlisle Bay soon after, usually dated to 1628. The island had no inhabitants when they arrived, but the settlers found a bridge built earlier by Indigenous people, and the English called the spot “the Indian Bridge”. The town’s name grew from that bridge and the ones built after it.

Big ships anchored out in Carlisle Bay, while smaller craft unloaded in the inner harbour, called the Careenage, where boats could also be careened (tipped on their side to clean the hull). For many ships Carlisle Bay was the first stop after crossing the Atlantic. Unlike Spanish and Dutch grid towns, Bridgetown has winding streets like an old English town. St Ann’s Fort, begun on its present site in 1705, guarded the bay in the game’s years; the large Garrison with its barracks was mostly built after 1780.

How did sugar make Barbados rich?

The first settlers grew tobacco and cotton. In the 1640s planters switched to sugar, with credit, equipment and shipping from Dutch merchants. Sugar paid far better, but it needed huge numbers of workers to cut and boil the cane.

Planters turned to buying enslaved Africans, taken by force from their homes. Historians estimate that around 1650 about 30,000 Europeans and 12,800 Africans lived there, and that between 1640 and 1660 English planters in the Caribbean, above all in Barbados, bought some 55,000 African captives. Land and people ended up in few hands: in 1679, just 181 large enslavers held more than half of all enslaved people on the island. In the late 1600s Barbados was the wealthiest colony England had; the historian Richard Dunn called it “the richest colony in English America”.

By the game’s era that lead was slipping. Larger Jamaica was overtaking Barbados in trade and sugar, a change historians place somewhere between about 1713 and the 1720s.

Who lived in Barbados in 1715?

In 1715 about 16,888 white people lived on the island. Counting enslaved people was a different matter: a 1684 count found 19,568 white people and about 46,600 enslaved people, about 70 per cent of the population, and a later figure gives about 42,000 enslaved people in 1696. No source we checked gives an exact total for 1715, but enslaved Africans and their children were clearly the large majority.

The white population was falling as small farmers sold up and left, many for Carolina and other colonies. Bridgetown was also home to a Jewish community, Sephardic families who came after the Portuguese retook Dutch Brazil in 1654. Their synagogue, Nidhe Israel, was founded in the 1650s and is one of the oldest in the Americas; it was rebuilt after a hurricane in 1831.

What was the Barbados slave code of 1661?

On 24 September 1661 the Barbados assembly passed “An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes”. It treated enslaved people as property that masters held “for ever”, like goods and chattels (the old legal words for movable property). It made them carry a written pass, called a ticket, to leave their plantation, denied them trial by jury, and said a master who killed an enslaved person while punishing them would face no penalty.

The law spread far beyond Barbados. Jamaica, South Carolina, Antigua, St Kitts and other colonies drew on it, and many of Carolina’s founders came from Barbados. Under the system it helped build, slavery was for life, and the children of enslaved mothers were enslaved too. That rule about children was practice in Barbados rather than written into the 1661 text itself.

How did enslaved people in Barbados resist?

In the 1650s Richard Ligon, an Englishman who lived on the island from 1647 to 1650, claimed a revolt was unlikely, because enslaved Africans had no weapons and came from many language groups. They organised anyway. In 1675 people from the Gold Coast, in today’s Ghana, planned a rising over several years and meant to crown an elder named Coffee as king. An enslaved woman named Fortuna revealed the plan, and at least 35 people were executed. Most of what we know comes from a 1676 London pamphlet written from the planters’ side.

In 1692 the authorities uncovered another island-wide plot; summaries of the records report more than 200 people arrested and more than 90 executed. Resistance went on long after the game’s era: the largest uprising in Barbados history, Bussa’s Rebellion, began on 14 April 1816.

Was rum invented in Barbados?

Not quite, but it is one of the first places Caribbean rum was written about. Ligon describes a strong drink called kill-devil, distilled on the plantations from the waste of sugar-making and given to enslaved workers. A Barbados text of 1651 gives it another name, rumbullion, and by 1654 people in New England were calling Barbados spirits rum. So by about 1650 planters were distilling one of the earliest Caribbean rums. People in Brazil had been distilling a cane spirit even earlier, in the 1500s.

Which pirates were linked to Barbados?

Stede Bonnet was a Barbadian. Christened in Christ Church parish in 1688, he became a planter in St Michael parish, the parish of Bridgetown, and a major in the island militia. In 1717 he bought and armed a sloop, the Revenge, and left his wife and children to go pirating. He was hanged at Charles Town, South Carolina, on 10 December 1718.

Black Bart Roberts made Barbados an enemy. A 1724 book, A General History of the Pyrates, says that in 1720 the governor fitted out a 20-gun ship and a sloop that fought Roberts off the island, and that he escaped only by throwing guns and goods overboard. According to the same book, he treated Barbados ships harshly afterwards and flew a flag showing himself standing on two skulls marked “ABH” and “AMH”: a Barbadian’s head and a Martinican’s head. Roberts was killed off West Africa in February 1722.