690

Government

[1650-1715 pirates were suppressed and its inhabitants turned their attention to agriculture. It resisted with determination and success the attempt made by the mother country in 1678 to destroy the power of the Assembly, by applying to the government of the island the principles of Poynings' law. In 1692 it was visited by earthquake and pestilence and reduced to "a very mean condition," and in 1694 it was exposed to an attack by the French from Hispaniola. But, weathering these difficulties, it continued to make progress, and in 1715 was the most valuable of the English colonies in the West Indies.

For purposes of administration, Jamaica formed a separate Government; and in 1671 the other islands were divided into two groups, the Leeward and the Windward Islands, each with a Governor of its own. In the officers whom the mother country sent out during these years was exhibited one of the best features of her control. The second Lord Willoughby in Barbados, Colonel Stapleton, and after him Christopher Codrington, in the Leeward Islands, are perhaps best remembered amongst those who, against great odds and with little support from home, laboured for the defence and upbuilding of a Greater Britain in these distant seas. The relations of the Governors with the colonial administrators at home were not always of the best. The man on the spot wanted his own way and took it ill if his advice were disregarded. Governor Atkins of Barbados made himself the voice of so many grievances in the system of colonial government that he was at last recalled in 1680. The story of his supersession is "only that of the first of many contests between the local legislature and the English merchants for supremacy in the administration, wherein the victory, in consequence of the defection of a part of the Assembly, lay with the merchants." As a matter of fact, the management of colonial business in England was at times far from efficient. Before the reign of Charles II information concerning colonial matters had been collected by special commissions appointed for the purpose. Charles II established a permanent Council of Trade and Plantations. It was not a success and was dissolved by Order in Council of 1675, its place being taken by a Committee of the Privy Council. For a few years the Committee displayed considerable activity, but towards the end of the reign its administration was marked by great procrastination and negligence. That this was due in part to the indolence of the King may be concluded from the renewed energy exhibited when James II, who understood colonial affairs, came to the throne. But there were other and more important causes in the inadequacy of the organisation for its work and the serious difficulties which had to be confronted. Of these the problem of imperial defence was perhaps the most acute. As the number of dependent whites in the West Indies declined, it became impossible to rely on the militia which they had formed for the defence of the islands; and hence the whole burden was gradually being transferred to the mother country.

1650-97] The pirates of the Caribbean Sea. West Africa 691

Beneath the strain of the great War with which the century closed the Stewart system of colonial administration collapsed, and William III created a permanent Board of Trade.

Mention has already been made of the pirates whose exploits in the Caribbean Sea fill a large space in the early annals of West Indian history. They contributed in no small degree to break the maritime power of Spain and to open the doors of the New World to other nations. But they were the enemies of ordered government and exercised an injurious influence on the progress of settlement and commerce, for they seduced rich and poor alike from steady and honest enterprises to their hazardous and profitable adventures. Between 1660 and 1675 they were exceedingly active. Jamaica, La Tortue, and the Bahamas were their headquarters; and English and French Governors gave them letters of marque against the Spaniard. Though some of their great leaders were Frenchmen such as Grammont, who took Maracaibo in 1679, Hamelin, who cruised in the Trompeuse between 1681 and 1685, and Ducasse, who sacked Cartagena in 1697- they were really an international confederacy, and numbered many English, Dutch, and Danes in their ranks. (Morgan, who led them to the attack on Panama in 1671, was a Welshman.) In time, general interests demanded their extirpation and the civilised nations combined against them. The age of the Buccaneers came to an end with the Peace of Ryswyk.

Closely connected with the West Indies through the slave-trade was the west coast of Africa. Here the French had occupied the mouth of the Senegal, the English the mouth of the Gambia, and both English and Dutch had planted themselves on the Guinea Coast. As the American plantations developed, the volume of the slave-trade increased, and to it on the Gambia and the Slave Coast everything else was subordinated. Other nations also, Swedes, Danes, and Germans, visited these parts. Before 1670 the Danes had established two stations, Christiansborg and Frederiksborg, on the Slave Coast; and late in the reign of the Great Elector, the Brandenburgers erected a fort, Grossfriedrichsburg, at Cape Three Points on the Gold Coast; but, though they experimented elsewhere and built other forts (one, it is said, as far north as Cape Blanco) neither they nor the Danes played a very great part in West African commercial history. Here as elsewhere the Dutch, English, and French were the chief disputants. The Dutch, who had ousted the Portuguese, claimed the whole trade "as their propriety" by right of conquest. They were strong, because their forces were concentrated in a single Company, the Dutch West India Company, and in this respect the English were compelled to follow their example. In 1662 the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa, the third Guinea Company, was incorporated. Its life was short and painful. After bearing the brunt of the struggle with the Dutch which prevented the Guinea trade from falling wholly into their hands, it collapsed, and

692

West Africa. The Slave-trade

[1650-1715 in 1672 handed over its stations to the Royal African Company, which was financially a stronger association. It was conducted like the East India Company on a joint stock, and, unlike that Company, was regarded favourably in England, because it carried out English manufactures and assisted the plantations. Its sphere of operations extended from near Tangier to the Cape of Good Hope, but it found its principal business in the slave-trade, of which it received a monopoly. After the Revolution its exclusive privileges, which had never received parliamentary sanction, were disregarded, and it became involved in a continual struggle with interlopers, against whom it at last appealed to Parliament for relief. The result was that, in 1698, Parliament threw open the African trade to all British subjects, though, at the same time, ordering all merchants who engaged in it to contribute ten per cent. of the value of their cargoes towards the expenses of the Company's establishments in Guinea. This assistance proved to be insufficient, and the position of the Company, once flourishing, began to deteriorate. It could not face the severe competition as well as bear the burden of maintaining forts and stations, and in 1712 it was compelled to ask for legislative aid in effecting an agreement with its creditors.

Like the Dutch, the French appreciated the connexion between the West Indies and West Africa. In 1664, Colbert handed over the African trade to the reconstituted West India Company; but, when, ten years later, this body was dissolved, various small companies engaged in the trade, while the islands passed under the control of the Crown. West Africa was one of the few spheres of their colonisation where the French developed no vast schemes, but persisted steadily in what they had undertaken. Leaving the Guinea Coast to the English and Dutch, they consolidated their influence on the Senegal. In 1678 Goree, which had been captured in the previous year, was ceded to them by the Dutch. During the long wars with which this period closes they made several attempts to dislodge the English who had been making themselves masters of the Gambia; but, though Fort James was several times taken, the Peace of Utrecht left the two nations still side by side.

There is not much in the history of the early relations of the European peoples with the weaker races whom they found in new lands which commends itself to the conscience of the modern world. The years immediately under consideration witnessed the missionary efforts of the Jesuits and other religious bodies in America and Africa, the measures of the Spanish Government to protect the indigenous population of its colonies, and the inspiring example of William Penn. Against these must be set in all their darkness the annals of Indian slavery in Peru and Mexico, and the traffic in African negroes. This latter was introduced into Europe and the New World by the Portuguese; but it was the English and Dutch who were responsible for its great develop The Dutch, who excelled as carriers upon the seas, quickly

ment.

1650-1715] South Africa. - Changes in the colonial world 693

picked up the evil tradition as they displaced the Portuguese in Africa. The English began to compete with the Dutch, when they saw the connexion of the trade with the progress of their plantations. Use blunted the finer instincts which had once been expressed in an abhorrence of such a business. Negro slavery appeared to provide an easy solution of a great difficulty, and promised a strong stimulus to the industries of the West Indies. It created the gravest problems for the colonies into which it was introduced; but the planters of the time thought more of profit than of society building, and concerned themselves very little with the moral and social troubles they were bequeathing to posterity. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the extension of the trade became a prominent object of British commercial policy. Its volume was very much increased when the monopoly of the Royal African Company was taken away; and with the privileges which the English received under the Treaty of Utrecht of supplying negroes to Spanish America it entered upon a period of great expansion.

An interesting contrast to the stations on the Guinea Coast, where the nature of the country and the nature of the trade prevented colonisation, was provided in the settlement which the Dutch East India Company was planting at the Cape of Good Hope. Here a mere watering-place for ships, a fort with its cabbage-garden, was silently growing into a colony. The years which saw the expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil and the conquest of the New Netherlands, also witnessed the beginnings of their occupation of South Africa, where alone they have left a lasting monument of their national genius for colonisation. In 1652 the Company decided to establish a port of call at the Cape of Good Hope for vessels engaged in the Eastern trade. Level-headed as ever, they nursed no extravagant schemes. But, after a time, some of the settlers were permitted to raise cattle and to penetrate a little way inland, in order to find sheltered spots where grains and vines could be cultivated. In 1682 the colony numbered 682 Europeans, chiefly "strong, gallant and industrious bachelors." In 1688-9 its strength was recruited by some French Huguenot families who sought refuge in South Africa. A healthy climate, fertile soil, good leadership, and freedom from distracting wars and rivalries—all favoured its growth; and at the beginning of the eighteenth century the farmers, who chafed under the autocratic rule of the Company, had begun to cross the neighbouring mountains, and lines of scattered settlements branched out into the interior.

Such in its brief outline is the story of colonial progress in the West during these years. New colonies had been planted; new parts of North and South America explored; new territory had been added by conquest to the dominions of almost every great Power. The course of events in Europe, where the fortunes and ambitions of nations rose and fell, had reacted upon their position in other continents. Most important of all had been the internal development of some of the young transatlantic

694 England's maritime and commercial ascendancy [1650–1715

societies; and it is in their life and progress that we must seek the principal causes of the transformation which the colonial world had undergone since 1650. In North America the activity of French and English had paved the way for a great work of colonisation. South America remained the preserve of the older maritime Powers, save that the French and Dutch had planted themselves on the "Wild Coast" between the Orinoco and the Amazon. The West Indies had passed through their experimental stage as a field of settlement. They were no longer merely the vulnerable outworks of the Spanish empire - they had become a great centre of useful enterprise, where the spirit of the colonist had triumphed over that of the lawless adventurer. West Africa had been the scene of many keen contests; yet its history during this period is but the history of its commerce. To a great extent it had been sacrificed to America, since there could be no development of the resources of regions devastated by the slave-hunter. South and east Africa reflected the changes in the East rather than in the West. The Portuguese were losing their hold on east Africa as they gave ground in the East; and the Dutch, waxing powerful in the East, had included the Cape of Good Hope among their acquisitions. Some of the old contentions had been decided, some of the old rivalries were ended; and, as the scene shifted, the grouping of the Powers had changed. The combination, informal but real, of the rest of Europe against the Spanish House of Habsburg, which was still discernible in 1650, had slowly been dissolved as circumstances changed, and, in the struggle to determine the Spanish Succession, it had been replaced by the alliance of France and Spain against the other maritime peoples, and—particularly in North America, the West Indies, and the East- by the bitter rivalry between England and France. In the competition between the English and the Dutch, so keen in 1650, the English had distanced their opponents. The United Provinces did not emerge at Utrecht from their struggle with France as they emerged at Münster from their struggle with Spain. A heavy price had been paid for the safety of their frontiers. England, on the contrary, through all these years had gone steadily ahead. She had joined in the War of the Spanish Succession because Louis XIV had become a menace to Europe, and also because she could not allow a great colonial empire to pass from the weakened hands of Spain into those of a strong and militant nation like the French. That War lifted her on to a new plane as a maritime and commercial Power, both by its exhaustion of her rivals and by the concessions of trading rights and territory which she secured. The close alliance with Portugal and its accompanying advantages, the acquisition of stations in the Mediterranean, the special commercial privileges in South America, the cessions of territory around Hudson's Bay, the mouth of the St Lawrence, and in the West Indies, were all a part of her harvest from this protracted struggle. What was more, she gained thereby the victory in the