Cargoes of despair

Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.

Modern Britain, one might say, was built on sugar: there is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not in some way connected to the ‘Africa Trade’. The glittering prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, indeed, was derived in large part from commerce with Africa. In the heyday of the British slave trade, the period 1700–1808, planters became conspicuous by their wealth. Typically they cast Jamaica or Barbados aside like a sucked orange in order to fritter their profits in England. A popular melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, satirised planters as boorish but essentially lovable creatures, who overturned English standards of civility.

Behind the great wealth of most West Indians (as white planters were then known) lay the ‘triangle merchants’ who motivated the slave trade between Britain, Africa and the West Indies. A typical ‘triangle voyage’ carried trading goods from England to Africa, then slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, cotton and rum on the home stretch to England.