West Indies trade

“ Even in the West Indies the planters were a real something. Like the English in Ireland, they produced a remarkable breed of men: the Codringtons, the Warners, and many illustrious names besides. They governed cheaply on their own resources, and the islands under their rule were so profitable that we fought for them as if our Empire was at stake. All that is gone. The days of ruling races are supposed to be numbered. Trade drifts away to the nearest market—to New York or New Orleans—and in a money point of view the value of such possessions as Trinidad will soon be less than nothing to us. ”

“ Our commercial connexion with the West Indies is simply this. We buy our sugar from them at a higher price than is given for it in any other part of the world. The surplus they export to the Continent, where the price is lower; and we pay them the difference out of our own pockets. Our trade with the West Indies is saddled with almost all the expense of their civil and military establishments, and with a bounty of 1,200,000l. ”

“ All those articles of American produce in demand in the West Indies may be had on much better terms in Canada than in the United States; and if the Canadian merchants had sufficient capitals to enable them to trade thither largely, there can hardly be a doubt but that the people of the British West Indian isles would draw their supplies from Canada rather than from any other part of America. The few cargoes at present sent from Quebec always command a preference in the West Indian markets over those sent from any part of the United States. ”

“ The Anglo-West Indians are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get no help except in themselves, and they can help themselves after all if we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically, but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more prosperous than ever they were—on one condition: they will risk nothing in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible government by a black majority. ”

“ The most perfect freedom of trade is permitted between the British colonies of America and the West Indies, both in the enumerated and in the non-enumerated commodities. Those colonies are now become so populous and thriving, that each of them finds in some of the others a great and extensive market for every part of its produce. All of them taken together, they make a great internal market for the produce of one another. ”

“ We had delivered our own souls; we had other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their capabilities. The State is not to help them ”

“ Imported labour, subject to all sorts of restrictions, cannot in the long run compete with free indigenous labour. The question is a very grave one in its ramifications and influence on colonial interests, when they come into the field against the free trade and the free labour of the competing world. I doubt altogether the powers of the West Indies—dependent upon imported and costly immigrants—to rival the rich fields of the East, when [243] capital and activity shall turn to account their feracious soil, more genial climate, and more economical means of production. ”

“ About three hundred sail were employed in the trade with these islands, and some 4,500 sailors; the value of British manufactures exported thither being nearly £240,000 annually, but our imports from Jamaica alone averaged at that time £539,492. Besides rum, sugar, and molasses, we received from the West Indies cotton, indigo, ginger, pimento, cocoa, coffee, etc.
During this period a vast empire was beginning to unfold itself in the East Indies, destined to produce a vast trade, and pour a perfect mine of wealth into Great Britain. ”

“ Foreigners often eluded these impositions by interloping in the West Indies and in the South Sea.34 And as the Contratacion, by fixing each year the nature and quantity of the goods to be shipped to the colonies, raised the price of merchandise at will and reaped enormous profits, the colonists welcomed this contraband trade as an opportunity of enriching themselves and adding to the comforts and luxuries of living. ”

“ They drove a thriving trade among all newcomers: but were somewhat disgusted to find that we, though new to the West Indies, were by no means new to West Indian wares, and therefore not of the same mind as a gentleman and lady who came fresh from the town next day, with nearly a bushel of white branching madrepores, which they were going to carry as coals to Newcastle, six hundred miles down the islands. ”

“ Although the trade of the islands has not increased by leaps and bounds, returns show a decided and continuous advance. But Jamaica has not yet risen to the occasion, for it will require far more than the growing of bananas to restore her fallen fortunes. The cultivation of cane, and the manufacture of sugar, the establishment of central factories, the making of preserves and condiments, and the undertaking of every branch of industry that can be carried on profitably, must be introduced to Jamaicans would prosper. ”

“ By the time that England was ready to abandon its restrictive policy, the United States was beginning to be a manufacturing nation with its chief wealth in its great internal trade, and the ancient interest in the West Indies was fast falling into insignificance. The same men who raged against the Jay treaty and the Orders in Council lived to forget that they had ever considered the West India trade important. ”

“ THE BEGINNING AND PROGRESS OF EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES.
Nothing has ever been done in this world more wicked and cruel than the slave-trade on the coast of Africa. But the temptation to carry it on was very great; for hundreds of men and women could be bought for a cask of poor rum or a peck of cheap beads, and could be sold in the markets of America or the West Indies for thousands of dollars. A hundred years ago men were not at all ashamed of growing rich in this bad way. They were respected in society as much as other men. ”

“ The West Indians, on the one hand, represented the ruinous position in which they would be placed if they were forbidden to trade with the United States: while, on the other, the loyalists of the remaining North American Colonies pleaded that they were quite able to supply the people of the West Indies with all they required, and prayed that the monopoly the war had given them should not be abrogated. ”

“ No part of the country was found in a state of cultivation, and no industrial enterprise was carried on, either foreign or domestic. Not even in the West Indies—prolific with spices, gums, dye-woods, and fruits—was there any trade carried on among or by the natives. These people were put to labor by the foreigners; but, owing to their former habits of hunting, fishing, and want of physical exercise, they sank beneath the weight of toil, fast dying off, till their mortality, in time, from this cause alone, reached the frightful figure of two and a half millions. ”

“ There is no doubt whatever that the lack of energy and enterprise was in a large degree responsible for the poor condition of the island five years ago. Had a strong effort been made to introduce other industries in lieu of the abandoned sugar trade, Jamaica would have been in a better position to-day. The dependence upon one industry has killed other places, even as it brought partial desolation to Jamaica ”

“ For most people in the colonies independence meant a broader scope of activity—to the shipowner and sailor it meant new and serious limitations. England was still engaged in the effort to monopolize ocean traffic by the operation of tariffs and navigation laws. New England having become a foreign nation, her ships were denied admittance to the ports of the British West Indies, with which for years a nourishing trade had been conducted. Lumber, corn, fish, live stock, and farm produce had been sent to the islands, and coffee, sugar, cotton, rum, and indigo brought back. ”

“ In return for the manufactured articles of the English, Dutch and French, and of the great commercial cities like Genoa and Hamburg, they were obliged to give their own raw materials and the products of the Indies—wool, silks, wines and dried fruits, cochineal, dye-woods, indigo and leather, and finally, indeed, ingots of gold and silver. The trade in Spain thus in time became a mere passive machine. Already in 1545 it had been found impossible to furnish in less than six years the goods demanded by the merchants of Spanish America. ”

“ That the returns of the trade to America, and still more those of that to the West Indies, are, in general, not only more distant, but more irregular, and more uncertain, too, than those of the trade to any part of Europe, or even of the countries which lie round the Mediterranean Sea, will readily be allowed, I imagine, by everybody who has any experience of those different branches of trade. ”

“ The encouragement of the banana trade by the Colonial Secretary has been a splendid thing for Jamaica and for Great Britain. The regular shipment of something like 30,000 bunches a fortnight by the Imperial Direct Line steamers, in addition to others, constitutes a trade which is constantly increasing. ”

“ In the Antilles the plantations broke up as I had seen in [Pg 94] Grenada. The whites went away, and the land was divided among the negroes. In Barbadoes, the estates were kept together. The English character and the English habits were stamped deeper there, and were not so easily obliterated. But the stars in their courses have fought against the old system. Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade. Steam and progress have given them a hundred natural competitors; and on the back of these came the unnatural bounty-fed beetroot sugar competition. ”

“ AMONG the leading objects contemplated by the British ministry in this war was the control of the East and West Indies, particularly of the latter, as among the most important sources as well as markets of British trade. In the present day, the value of the West India islands, and of all positions in the Caribbean Sea, is chiefly military or maritime; due less to the commerce they maintain than to their relations, as coaling ports or fortified stations, to the commercial routes passing through that region. ”

“ The great staples of these countries, being partly an agricultural and partly a manufactured product, and not being of the necessaries of life, become the object of calculation, with respect to a profitable investment of capital, like any other enterprise of trade or manufacture. The more especially, as, requiring, by necessity or habit, slave labor for their production, the capital necessary to carry on the work of this production is very considerable. The West Indies are resorted to, therefore, rather for the investment of capital than for the purpose of sustaining life by personal labor. ”

“ And in 1637 the Conde de Linhares, recently appointed governor of Brazil, told the English ambassador, Lord Aston, that he was very anxious that English ships should do the carrying between Lisbon and Brazilian ports.
The settlement of the Windward and Leeward Islands and the conquest of Jamaica had given a new impetus to contraband trade. The commercial nations were setting up shop, as it were, at the very doors of the Spanish Indies. ”

“ But although the West Indies thus maintained a large part of the mother country's export trade, the smallness of their population, and the simple necessities of the slaves, who formed the great majority of the inhabitants, rendered them as British customers much inferior to the continental colonies; and this disparity was continually increasing, for the continent was growing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and requirements. In the five years 1744-48, the exports from Great Britain to the two quarters were nearly equal ”

“ Indeed, although cutting out is a very serious affair, as you combat under every disadvantage, still the mischief done to our trade by the fast-sailing privateers was so great in the West Indies, that almost every sacrifice was warrantable for the interests of the country. ”

“ Jamaica is a pleasanter place to live in than London, but new arrivals should adapt themselves to the condition of things. Clothes{25} and habits admirably adapted for the English climate are generally out of place in a tropical island.
The staple products of the island are entirely agricultural. Jamaica has embraced the fruit trade. Half the total value of her exports is represented by her over-sea trade in bananas, oranges, grape fruit, and pine-apples. The sugar and rum trades take secondary positions, but coffee is rapidly coming to the front. ”

“ It is not surprising, therefore, that the commerce of Seville, which had hitherto held its own, decreased with surprising rapidity, that the sailings of the galleons and the Flota were separated by several years, and that the fairs of Porto Bello and Vera Cruz were almost deserted. To put an effective restraint, moreover, upon this contraband trade was impossible on either side. The West Indian dependencies were situated far from the centre of authority, while the home governments generally had their hands too full of other matters to adequately control their subjects in America. ”