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By Root 1253 0

fashions. The sack of Panama had been a brilliant feat of arms. But the mercantile class preferred predictable yields. Slaving, for example, was an especially lucrative and largely predictable trade. A new governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, was dispatched to Jamaica carrying orders to end privateering and to arrest Modyford and send him to England. To placate the Spanish, who were furious when they heard what had happened to Panama City, the order was extended to include the arrest of Morgan as well. The two men were shipped to England and locked up in the Tower of London. But Morgan’s ‘disgrace’ did not last long. By 1674 he had been released and sent back to Jamaica, this time as lieutenant-governor. There, he set himself up in some style and invested in sugar production. More discreetly, he invested in the ships of other privateers, who for a while managed to go about their business under licences from the French. By 1682, under Morgan’s patronage, Port Royal had become the most fortified town in English America. When he died, six years later, he had amassed a fortune which included three plantations, assorted servants and 122 slaves.

By then the privateers’ days in the Caribbean were more or less done. Some travelled to North Africa, where they joined the Barbary pirates, whose raids the British did not suppress until the nineteenth century. A few struck out west, crossed the Panamanian isthmus, hijacked boats on the Pacific shore and set off on raids down the coast of South America. An archbishop of Quito remarked that had it not been for their absence of virtue, ‘the buccaneers’ daring in attack, their patience in enduring all sorts of toil and hardship, their perseverance despite the most terrible setbacks and their indomitable courage [might] arouse our admiration; we might call them heroes’. There spoke the vestiges of one empire to the harbingers of another. Wild, tough, enterprising, ruthless and often very much happier when away from the land they called home, the privateers had much in common with those who followed over the next few hundred years.

Sugar was the future. Experience of growing the crop in Barbados (the island had been captured by the British in 1627) had shown the phenomenal rewards to be had: at one point, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Barbadian sugar plantations promised speedy returns of up to 50 per cent on invested capital. And Europe’s appetite was apparently insatiable: in the next 150 years, British sugar consumption grew by 2,500 per cent. Sugar made tea, coffee and drinking chocolate palatable, sweetened the porridge of working people and made possible the puddings for which the country was acquiring an international reputation. The demand was more than strong enough to ride out the occasional hiccup in production caused by hurricanes, droughts or plagues of locusts.

By the time of his death in 1710 – during a punch-up among the colony’s politicians – Peter Beckford, for example, was reputed to own twenty estates, over a thousand slaves and £1,500,000 in further investments. He had arrived in Jamaica as a seaman, his son was Speaker of the Jamaican assembly, a grandson became lord mayor of London and an MP and a great-grandson the exquisitely sensitive collector and creator of the neo-Gothic mansion Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

The planters were not immigrants – home was thousands of miles away. But their wealth allowed the so-called plantocracy to enjoy lives of cartoonish extravagance. As the appalled young wife of a newly arrived governor noted in her journal:

I don’t wonder now at the fever the people suffer from here – such eating and drinking I never saw! … I observed some of the party, today, eat of late breakfasts, as if they had never eaten before – a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock-negus; then Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meat, stews and fries, hot and cold fish pickled and plain, peppers, ginger sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet jellies – in short, it was all as astonishing as it was disgusting.

The sugar which made this