Antigua and America – The early days

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The following is taken from the book “A History of Antigua” by Brian Dyde  (with permission from Barbara Arrindell who holds the copyright.) Pages 100-102.

When the war began many of the planters in the British islands had great sympathy for the rebels in North America, and must have been tempted to join them. They had, after all, many of the same grievances, including taxation without representation, interference in their legislative freedom, and trade restrictions imposed by the British Government.

At the same time, an island like Antigua lacked any ability to defend itself, and as the many absentee landowners who were then living in Britain were in no position to support a rebellion, any such feelings in the island were soon repressed. Instead, the merchants and planters all complained vociferously about the effect the war was having on their ability to make a decent living, and turned to smuggling.

Until 1775, the North American colonies had been the main source of estate supplies such as lumber and staves for making hogsheads, as well as cattle and horses. They also supplied the foodstuffs – rice, flour, salted fish, corn and pulses – needed to help feed the slaves. Once war was declared all these supplies were cut off and could only be obtained by Antiguan merchants and planters by trading, in contravention of the prevailing trade laws, with neutral islands such as St Eustatius where they were still available – at a price.

For the slaves, the result of such shortages and high prices, combined with the effects on their own provision grounds of the prolonged drought of the late 1770s and early 1780s, was disastrous. On one estate alone, between the summer of 1779 and the following autumn, one-tenth of the slaves died from a combination of insufficient food and dysentery caused by the lack of clean drinking water. They represented only a fraction of those who perished from starvation and sickness during the war years, of whom an estimated 8000 succumbed in 1780 alone.

While losses on this scale caused great concern to the planters, even if for no other reason than that replacements were now not only scarce, but considerably dearer, it was the effect that the war had on the trade with Britain which produced the greater distress.

American privateers appeared in the Caribbean in 1777, and once France declared war on Britain the following year, sugar shipments were under increased threat. Freight and insurance rates shot up, British rates of duty were increased, and by 1780, after Spain and The Netherlands had joined in the war on the side of France, the planters were facing ruin. The amount of sugar arriving safely in Britain was only half what it had been before the war started, and there was no longer any certainty of even covering production costs.

The British Navy did all it could to protect the trade of Antigua and the other islands, but as it was having to fight a war against all the other major naval powers from 1780 onwards, commercial shipping remained at considerable risk until peace returned in 1783. Any danger of an invasion had ended the year before with the destruction of a French fleet in the Battle of the Saintes, but this had made no difference to the disruption of trade, which remained unabated until the end of the war.

The Legislature and planters of Antigua remained aggrieved throughout, convinced that even though they provided the Navy with its eastern Caribbean base enough was never done to safeguard their interests. As a result, by the time the war ended, the Navy and its senior officers in the region were held in even less esteem than in the days of Commodore Lee.

The dockyard had of course come into its own since 1775, with storehouses, workshops, a boat-slip and accommodation for dockyard officials all being built or enlarged. Its greatly increased use had not, however, been without its drawbacks.

‘The men who are employed in … English Harbour suffer considerably from the heat and closeness of the situation, the access of the regular breeze being intercepted by the elevated ground which environs this spot’, a visitor had noted in 1781, before going on to add: ‘The quantity of rubbish and filth daily discharged from the ships must tend, by quick putrefaction, in some measure to corrupt the water into which it is thrown … This is therefore considered as the most unhealthy part of Antigua, and many have here suffered by putrid distempers’.

One man who quickly came to endorse this view, and to return in full the antipathy expressed towards naval officers by the Assembly and planters, was the 25-year old Captain Horatio Nelson, who arrived there in July 1784 in command of the frigate HMS Boreas, and as senior officer of the Northern Division of the West Indies Station. As the war had drawn to its close the British Government had taken steps to try and exercise firmer control over the West Indian colonies. The Board of Trade had been abolished and the main responsibility for colonial affairs placed in the hands of the Secretary of State for Home Affairs (where it remained until being transferred to the Secretary of State for War in 1801).

Not long afterwards, in order to deal with commercial matters, he set up a Committee of Trade and Plantations, a body which made continuing observance of the Navigation Laws one of its main concerns. This followed an Order-in-Council in 1783 which banned all United States vessels from West Indian ports, and gave the sole right to supply the islands with foodstuffs to Canadian and Irish merchants. Anything else the islands required could be imported from the USA, but only in British ships.

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