The early career of the island of Barbados gives a striking instance of a farming colony captured by the plantation system.  Founded in 1624 by a group of unprosperous English emigrants, it pursued an even and commonplace tenor until the Civil War in England sent a crowd of royalist refugees thither, together with some thousands of Scottish and Irish prisoners converted into indentured servants.  Negro slaves were also imported to work alongside the redemptioners in the tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo crops, and soon proved their superiority in that climate, especially when yellow fever, to which the Africans are largely immune, decimated the white population.  In 1643, as compared with some five thousand negroes of all sorts, there were about eighteen thousand white men capable of bearing arms; and in the little island’s area of 166 square miles there were nearly ten thousand separate landholdings.  Then came the introduction of sugar culture, which brought the beginning of the end of the island’s transformation.  A fairly typical plantation in the transition period was described by a contemporary.  Of its five hundred acres about two hundred were planted in sugar-cane, twenty in tobacco, five in cotton, five in ginger and seventy in provision crops; several acres were devoted to pineapples, bananas, oranges and the like; eighty acres were in pasturage, and one hundred and twenty in woodland.  There were a sugar mill, a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery, the master’s residence, laborers’ cabins, and barns and stables.  The livestock numbered forty-five oxen, eight cows, twelve horses and sixteen asses; and the labor force comprised ninety-eight “Christians,” ninety-six negroes and three Indian women with their children.  In general, this writer said, “The slaves and their posterity, being subject to their masters forever, are kept and preserved with greater care than the (Christian) servants, who are theirs for but five years according to the laws of the island.[1] So that for the time being the servants have the worser lives, for they are put to very hard labor, ill lodging and their dyet very light.”

[Footnote 1:  Richard Ligon, History of Barbados (London, 1657).]

As early as 1645 George Downing, then a young Puritan preacher recently graduated from Harvard College but later a distinguished English diplomat, wrote to his cousin John Winthrop, Jr., after a voyage in the West Indies:  “If you go to Barbados, you shal see a flourishing Iland, many able men.  I beleive they have bought this year no lesse than a thousand Negroes, and the more they buie the better they are able to buye, for in a yeare and halfe they will earne (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost."[2] Ten years later, with bonanza prices prevailing in the sugar market, the Barbadian planters declared their colony to be “the most envyed of the world” and estimated the value of its annual crops at a million pounds sterling.[3] But in the early sixties a severe