The Long Forgetting: An American Origin Story Retold
Question: Where was the first slave ship in America built and launched?
Answer: In Marble Head, Mass. in 1636
— United Daughters of the Confederacy
Part 1: The Voyage of the Desire
America’s first slave ship was named the Desire. It was built and launched from a boatyard in Marble Head, Massachusetts. Marble Head took its name from an exposed rock layer in the headland that fishermen said glowed like marble when hit by the rising sun. The ship was built in a boatyard that belonged to Matthew Cradock, Massachusetts’ first governor. Although Cradock lived in London, his business agents had purchased thousands of acres for him in places later named Medford, Ipswich, and Marblehead. The colony’s second governor, John Winthrop, recorded in his journal that the Desire was constructed of white oak, with a length (70 feet) and tonnage (120 tuns) revealing expectations for future cross-Atlantic voyages. It was the third ship built in the new colony, the first two having been built in another Cradock boatyard on the Mystic River near Boston. For the first two years, fishermen hand-lined for cod off the sides. Then, in 1638, Governor John Winthrop asked its captain, William Peirce of Salem, if he would use his ship to take seventeen captured Pequot Indians—fifteen men and two women—to sell or trade in the Caribbean slave markets.
Peirce refitted the Desire to accommodate his human cargo and sailed 2,800 nautical miles into the Caribbean to an island off the coast of Nicaragua named Providence (now called Santa Catalina). Providence was a Puritan colony, founded by English aristocrats, and well known to the Puritans of Massachusetts because of its market that sold or traded indigenous Indians and enslaved Africans. Less well known was its role as a safe harbor for a population of privateers charged with harassing Spanish shipping.
Seven months later, Winthrop recorded in his journal that Captain Peirce returned to Boston from Providence carrying a cargo of “cotton, tobacco, Negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos [Tortuga].”
John Winthrop’s brother-in-law, banker Emmanuel Downing, who had moved his family from England to Salem, knew first-hand how important inexpensive labor was to a successful colony. He applauded Winthrop’s business savvy in trading the captured Indians for enslaved Africans, writing, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves. . . we shall maintain 20 Moors [enslaved Africans] cheaper than one English servant.” Downing understood that the laboratory for England’s future empire was already underway in Ireland where massive tracts of land were being distributed to English, Scots, and Welsh settlers while Irish peasants served as the labor force. In fact, John Winthrop Sr. purchased his county estate of Groton Manor from a cousin who was moving to a large land grant in Ireland.
The 1638 voyage of the Desire was largely forgotten in Boston until the summer of 2024 when it was rumored that a replica of the Desire might be sailing into Boston Harbor. It was to be a preview of plans underway for the 2026 celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the war of independence from England and the founding of the Republic. Unmentioned, however, was any remnant of life before 1776. The presence of the Desire might have reminded Bostonians of the 156 years of prior history, much of which involved the colony’s commercial activity in the trade of cured cod to feed enslaved Africans. The time and date of the Desire’s arrival in Boston were still to be announced by the sponsors, the African American Museum of Nantucket and African Meeting House of Boston. The summer of 2024 came and went without any further news of the Desire.
Part 2: The Sacred Cod
I grew up in Swampscott, a small pie-shaped town next to Marblehead wedged in between Lynn, Marblehead and Salem. Atypically it was one of the few towns in Massachusetts that retained its name from the local Indians, a band of the Massachusett (no “s” for the Indians) that translates as “place of the red rock.” (squi-ompsk) The skyscrapers of Boston did not exist when I was growing up, although today they look very near, maybe twelve or thirteen miles by sea. In the earlier centuries of settlement, it would have taken two strong rowers or canoeists only three or four hours to travel the distance from Marblehead or Fisherman’s Beach in Swampscott to Boston’s inner harbor. To follow the most direct route, they would have been able to hug the shoreline at high tide (no Lynn-Nahant causeway yet), parallel the great beach of Revere, and cut through an open channel between Winthrop’s Pullen Point and an island that no longer exists, both swallowed up by landfill for Logan Airport.
Swampscott’s claim to fame is the wooden Swampscott dory, wide of beam, and stable in rough seas. It is usually designed with two sets of oarlocks and no keel. The lack of a keel lends it to being easily launched and landed from shore. I was always comfortable rowing a dory or paddling a canoe, but much less at ease in a sailboat. The source of wind always seemed whimsical. The dory’s many adaptations included a sailing dory that allowed fishermen to add a mast and a sail in the bow so they could row out in the morning and sail home from good fishing grounds in the afternoon. Marblehead’s claim to fame is its perfect U-shaped harbor, the town’s role as the birthplace of the American navy, and its mariners reputed to be among the most skilled on the Atlantic coast
In the 17th century, some of the good fishing grounds were known to be along the expanse of ocean that runs from Salem Bay to Gloucester. The Atlantic Cod likes gravel bottoms in relatively shallow water. Even more productive fishing grounds were twenty miles out to sea from Marblehead over an underwater plateau now known as Stellwagon Bank. Once part of the mainland, the bank teemed with sea-life—whales, birds, seals and such thick schools of codfish that, in 1605, when the explorer Bartolomeo Gosnold sailed from Maine to Martha’s Vineyard, he crossed the southern tip of the bank and was so pestered by thick, churning schools of cod that he named the visible land off to starboard Cape Cod. He wrote in his notes of the journey, “I am persuaded that in the months of March, April, May there is upon this coast, better fishing and in as great plenty as Newfoundland.”
Like Newfoundland, the offshore bank mixes the warmer north-flowing currents of the Gulf Stream with the chill waters of the North Atlantic, creating some of the most nutrient-rich fishing grounds in the world. Trying to obtain a visual image of the size and shape of Stellwagon, I went to my local marine supply store and bought a NOAA chart of the entire Massachusetts Bay. The map of Stellwagon looks like a long underwater extension of Cape Cod, but curving north and with a depth that rarely goes above one hundred feet. Outer Cape Cod has a milder climate than Boston or Salem because it sticks out so far from the mainland it also intersects with the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream.
I learned little of this early history of exploration and fishing. In my grammar school we dressed up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes for Thanksgiving and had no idea that the holiday originated 200 years after the Pilgrims with Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War. I and my classmates learned that the original settlers were sturdy white men and women from East Anglia who landed on a wild coast, negotiated a peace treaty with their Indian neighbors, learned how to plant corn, squash and other indigenous crops, and survived in the cold New England winters because of their religious devotion and political cohesion. At the same time the native Indians were dying in great numbers, mostly from diseases brought by the English.
The lived history from members of my own family taught me another story of hardship and economic difficulties. Long-ago glaciers had scraped topsoil off the rocky coastal peninsulas leaving massive outcroppings of granite ledge. In both the 1600s and the 1800s farming was a precarious way to make a living. My father’s Swampscott ancestors came from Germany in the1830s. Johannes Nies bought a farm at 451 Essex Street in Swampscott, near the current-day Swampscott cemetery, only to find that the lack of topsoil made farming difficult. Nonetheless his brothers came from Germany to join him. My cousin Jack Russell, who spent his boyhood on the farm, along with two aunts and several uncles, gave me the “family archive,” an old cookie tin filled with deeds and tax receipts that told a story of having to sell or trade different parcels of land to pay taxes or raise cash.
By the late 1800s, Johannes’ grandsons had traded farming for a plumbing business. My grandfather became Swampscott’s plumbing inspector, and in 1887, a member of the Massachusetts legislature. I learned the exact dates of my grandfather’s time in the legislature (still called the General Court) by asking the State House librarian. It was the mid-1970s, and I was working for the state’s newly established Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. My question about how the first settlers made their living was both a personal and historical issue. I worried about my own future and how I would make a living. Women at the time did not have many job opportunities or reliable salaries.
The essential element omitted from America’s origin story is the role of money, who made it, where, and how. How the first settlers made their living is not a minor historical consideration. In the accounts of the early settlements money is always an issue. Both Virginia and Massachusetts were financed by investors in London. “Pathetic” is the little noticed characterization of Governor William Bradford by historian Samuel Eliot Morison in describing Plymouth’s helplessness in the face of London investors dunning them for failure to repay the colony’s long overdue note of £1400 pounds (about $300,000 today’s dollars). “Send £1400 immediately” wrote the colony’s London agent, Robert Cushman, only months before he died of the 1625 plague. The Plymouth settlers were supposed to be in northern Virginia, not Massachusetts. In Plymouth they were too far south to catch fur-bearing animals; Cape Cod did not have strong stands of timber; and the settlers didn’t know how to fish. “Our hooks were too small and our seines (nets) too large,” wrote Edward Winslow.
This would have been a compelling story, but I never learned it in my history classes in grade school, high school, or college. My teachers quickly moved out of the colonial period and on to the glory days of 1776. My lack of knowledge about how our original settlers made money and fashioned an economy was brought to my attention by two of the state legislators with whom I worked in Massachusetts State government.
I had been hired by the state because I had previously worked in Congress in Washington and while I wasn’t a lawyer—law schools still had strict quotas for admitting women—I had worked on federal legislation that was going to be of great importance to Massachusetts. Although several new bills about fish and fishery management were still being debated in Congress, the legislation was expected to pass in 1976. The argument behind the legislation was that fishing grounds on both coasts had been poorly managed, overfished, and would soon be “fished out.” Three separate bills were soon combined into one called the Fisheries Conservation Act, named after Senator Walter Magneson of Washington state. Local fishermen from the New Bedford and Gloucester fleets had already expressed their outrage at proposed quota provisions and loudly disrupted a public hearing.
—
One day, as I was hurrying to a meeting of the Natural Resources Committee, I cut through the main chamber of the Legislature at the balcony level, and saw what I thought was a wooden sculpture hanging from the ceiling. At first it looked like a colorful log; then I realized it was a five-foot-long carving of a painted fish.
“Why do we have a wooden fish hanging from the ceiling of the Legislature?” I asked two of the legislators who were waiting in the committee room.
“Wooden fish?” Senator John Olver, from western Massachusetts, looked at me with eyes wide in disbelief. “How can you not know about the Sacred Cod, especially as you were a history major at Tufts?” Tufts was the college from which we had both graduated, me in history, he in chemistry a good decade or more before me. He often marveled at my lack of knowledge about local political history.
“Anyone brought up in Massachusetts has to know about the Sacred Cod,” he continued. I shook my head. “You tell her,” Senator Olver pointed to his colleague. “You’re the historian. I’m just a former chemistry teacher.” In fact, Senator Olver was a former college chemistry professor who had traded academic politics for a seat in the state legislature. In the not too far distant future, he would trade his seat in the state legislature for a seat in Congress. He was known for his sense of humor, for always being well-prepared, and never letting a teaching moment pass.
Sometimes he asked me about the nature of my previous work experience in Congress and wondered aloud who I knew in the governor’s office who helped get my current job. In Massachusetts, as in Washington, professional women in upper levels of government were still a novelty, a fad that many men assumed would soon pass. I had a graduate degree in international studies, a degree that had relevance because most of America’s international treaties had clauses protecting Massachusetts fishing grounds. These included large sections of ocean in the Bay of Maine, huge expanses of waters off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
“I wrote my dissertation on how the Irish got to Dedham. Not about the 17th century slave trade,” Senator Olver’s colleague was protesting.
“Slave trade?” I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly. “The slave trade was in the South, not New England.” Everyone knows that, I thought but did not say.
“You live in a town that started the cod trade to the islands,” he said turning to me. “Ask some questions about Marblehead history. Like how those first settlers made their living. How did they make money? Think about it. Why is it called the Sacred Cod?”
I did live in Marblehead but its early history was much less known than its prominence in 1776 history. Maybe for the sacred money? I thought Marblehead was founded in 1631 by Isaac Allerton, deputy governor of Plymouth, the same man who was sent to London five years earlier to successfully restructure Plymouth Colony’s debt. As part of the agreement, the London investors wanted him to set up a fishing station. Allerton ended up in Marblehead rather than Plymouth because Governor William Bradford disliked fishermen and refused to have him and his “drunken crew” anchor in Plymouth. Bradford found fishermen “crude” and “ungodly.” They drank too much, lazed around when they weren’t fishing, and were utterly uninterested in religion. In fact, some of them still celebrated Catholic holy days.
It was Boston’s port inspector, Samuel Maverick, an Anglican and no friend of the Puritans, who recommended Marblehead to Allerton. He even sent along his younger brother Moses to assist Allerton in setting up the fishing enterprise, a more complicated project than it appeared. It required ready cash to buy bait and pay the fishermen, carpenters to build wooden flakes, and advance knowledge of schedules of large ships that would take the processed fish to market. Those schedules were determined in London. The market was in the Caribbean.
Once in Marblehead, Allerton bought land in Little Harbor adjacent to Matthew Cradock’s boatyard, hired carpenters to assemble wooden barrels and racks for drying cod, and sent teams of fishermen out into the coastal waters of the North Shore to fish for Atlantic Cod, the single most popular fish in England and Europe. Marblehead would soon make it valuable cargo in the Caribbean.
While fishermen were out fishing, Allerton had to organize a team of shoremen to salt the captured fish, lay out the fillets to dry, cover it up if it rained, and package the catch. Just across the Bay, Salem fishermen had congregated on Winter Island, an island directly opposite Marblehead’s Naugus Head. It was a short sail from Winter Island around the tip of the headland into what was called Little Harbor. It was there that Matthew Cradock’s business agents found a side harbor with several coves, small beaches, and two protective offshore islands. Cradock also wanted “ready access to the sea” so they bought a good sized parcel of land for the boatyard that would eventually build the Desire. And it was in that same spot that Allerton purchased another parcel of land to set up a fishing station.
In the three years since Salem had been founded, eighty of the 300 members of the advance settler party had died, many more were sick, including Governor Endicott’s wife. Some of the Salem fishermen joined the boat builders and fishing activity in Little Harbor. In 1634, a fire broke out in the Cradock warehouse where Allerton and some of his fishermen were sleeping. Although everyone emerged unharmed, John Winthrop recorded the event in his journal: “Eight boats! Allerton is fishing with eight boats.” It revealed some agitation on Winthrop’s part because eight boats implied a successful commercial fishing operation. Unfortunately, Allerton was unprotected by a lawful grant from the Bay Colony. Soon the General Court in Boston requested Salem’s governor to bring Allerton before the court with the intention of having him removed from Massachusetts. Allerton wasted no time in transferring his lands, boats, and equipment to his new son-in-law, Moses Maverick, now married to his daughter Remember, and leaving Massachusetts for New Haven.
We don’t know what the charges were because Allerton never showed up in court. The Mavericks became founders of a new town, enlarged the fishing station, attracted more fishermen and their families, and bought and sold land along the coast in mortgages that were acquired and paid for in quintals of fish. In 1649 Marblehead was legally separated from Salem into a town that would become known for rowdiness, drink, and peerless mariners.
Part 3: Barbados and the Sacred Cod
When you look at a map of the Lesser Antilles, you see a perfect arc of small volcanic islands running from Puerto Rico at the top almost to the coast of South America at the bottom. One island sits outside the chain. That island is Barbados and it is a coral island rather than volcanic. Thirteen degrees above the Equator and the island closest to Africa, Barbados was discovered by a shipper blown off course during a Caribbean storm and claimed for James I of England. As one of three new English colonies formed within the same five- year period—Barbados (1627), Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630), and Providence Island (1631)—the island became a port of call for many ships arriving from England or Africa. (The larger islands like Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico were known as the Greater Antilles and owned by Spain.)
The first time the crew of a Massachusetts ship saw the dazzling mix of turquoise and cobalt blues of the deep Caribbean was when they joined a supply ship sailing to Barbados. Their vital cargo was cured fish. The Massachusetts-Barbados connection began early because of Barbados’ urgent need for protein. Planter families with wealth nourished themselves with imported salted beef or pork, but imported livestock was far too expensive to provide for their labor force, largely made up of indentured servants and by the 1640s enslaved Africans.
From the beginning nutrition was a challenge. As a lone coral island beneath a fierce tropical sun, Barbados became known for its saturating rains, equatorial heat, and swarms of insects that infected islanders with various “island fevers.” Even fresh fish caught in a Barbados morning rotted by evening. Refrigeration was non-existent. Visitors to the island reported that general health was extremely poor, aggravated by notorious over-consumption of alcohol. Both rich and poor died suddenly from malarial fevers, smallpox, influenza, and unnamed tropical diseases. Children failed to thrive and many adolescents were sent back to extended family members in England.
Soon, the Barbados planters adopted the same food that the Portuguese provided to the enslaved workers on their sugar plantations in Brazil.
Cured cod.
Atlantic cod, filleted and dried until it was hard as a board and capable of spending months of travel became the indispensable protein. At its destination a few days of soaking the dried fish in water or milk allowed it to be reconstituted into the crucial ingredient for a nourishing chowder or stew. The three sources of supply were Massachusetts, Newfoundland and England. Massachusetts was a thousand miles closer. By 1640, Marblehead was already an established fishing port with captains who were experienced in navigating long distances to the Canary Islands, Bilbao, and the 2800 miles into the Caribbean to Barbados. By 1647 John Winthrop recorded in his journal how “It pleased the Lord [for us] to open a trade with Barbados.” His son Samuel was already there selling Madeira wine, the only wine that didn’t spoil in the heat.
Today, we might think about Barbados as the location for a luxury winter vacation or as a cruise destination, but in the 17th century Barbados became known as “the jewel” of the English colonies. It was the place where the combination of sugar and enslaved labor created the wealth that launched the English Empire. British historian Simon Schama has called the Barbadian sugar planters of the 17th century “by far the wealthiest people in England or British America.”
From the beginning most of the early Barbados settlers were young men interested in becoming rich. They were uninterested in religion. The first settler ship to Barbados included another of John Winthrop’s sons, Henry. Like all other middle sons in England, he was subject to the laws of primogeniture (eldest son inherits everything). As a son of the landed gentry, Henry needed to marry an heiress or find a way to make his own livelihood. Barbados did not begin with profits. It began with settlers clearing land, setting tobacco plants, and leading a hardscrabble life in a tropical climate with daily rains and “humidity like jelly.” Barbados is known for hot to scalding temperatures. In Barbados Henry planned to copy the Virginia and Chesapeake planters and grow tobacco as a profitable commodity crop. He found clearing land and planting tobacco hard labor. He wrote back to England asking his family to send him a few more indentured servants. His father, who was in the midst of his own financial troubles, could not.
Atlantic Cod is a fish with thick white flesh, little muscle, and not much oil. It is, and was, a lazy fish that spends much of its time close to the ocean floor, hovering in ocean currents, and eating shrimp and small minnows from other species that happen by. Once hooked, it doesn’t fight. It is the lack of oil that makes cod the ideal fish for drying or “curing.” Once pulled into the boat, fishermen split it open, throw the internal organs overboard as chum, and save the cleaned fish to pass on to shoremen. The shoremen butterfly the body, lightly salt the fillets, and spread them out on wooden racks to dry. Once the flat fillets are dried and hard as a board they can be packed in hogshead barrels ready to be loaded on ships for what might be months of travel. Once the barrels arrive at their destination, the dried cod can be used like currency.
In Barbados the single greatest supplier of cured cod came from a small and distant colony of which few English had ever heard. The small port of Marblehead, an outpost of England’s fledgling empire, proved to have the ships and skilled mariners capable of delivering all manner of supplies. Soon Barbados planters bought as much dried cod as Massachusetts fishermen could catch, dry, and deliver.
As Mark Kurlansky points out in his perfectly titled book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, the Barbados market for cod, particularly secondary cod, was bottomless. “The low-end market became the dominant market,” he writes. “Badly split fish, the wrong weather conditions during drying, too much salt, too little salt, bad handling . . . the West Indies presented a growing market for the rejects, for anything that was cheap.” In fact, small, poor-quality cod from Massachusetts became known as “West Indian cure,” and was priced at thirty percent less than perfect quality cod.
Some younger sons on Barbados did exceptionally well. Another passenger on the same settler ship as Henry Winthrop was James Drax, the second son of a clergyman. James Drax also would not inherit, but his family had Dutch connections and he had an entrepreneurial spirit. After tobacco proved disappointing––Barbados could make any crop flourish, but the minerals in the coral soil did not produce flavorful tobacco–– Drax experimented with cotton, indigo, and ginger. He used his cotton profits to buy and sell land until he had assembled a plantation of 300 acres in the center of the island, a half a square mile of land said to have the richest soil and most dependable rainfall on the island. Cotton, however, was expensive to process and ship. By the late 1630s he used his family’s Dutch connections to inquire about the success of sugar planters in Brazil. Could sugar cane flourish on Barbados?
Yes, they answered, because you have good soil, tropical heat, and saturating rains. Be advised, however, that it takes fourteen months for the cane to ripen, so you can’t have two crops a year. Then, when you harvest, you must immediately squeeze the juice from the cut cane so it doesn’t begin to ferment. That requires a mill with rollers that crush the cane to squeeze out the juice. The power for the mill has to come from either the sails of a windmill or oxen. Happily, Drax and a few other large landowners believed that Barbados’ steady offshore wind would make windmills highly dependable. Less happily, they were advised that someone with a machete must stand alongside the rollers to lop off a hand if someone gets pulled in.
The Portuguese managers suggested that the indentured pale English youths the planters contracted from England were unsatisfactory, both in terms of cost and labor expectations. Buying enslaved Africans from Dutch merchants was much less expensive than providing five years of room and board for English youths. James Drax and his neighbor James Holdip understood that to plant and harvest 300 acres of sugar cane was a farm-to-factory process and they would need additional laborers. They also understood that the production of sugar was far more complex than any agriculture procedure seen on Barbados or in England.
Some historians have speculated that Drax and some of the other large planters traveled to Brazil to see the sugar plantations of Pernambuco operations. If so, they also saw the luxurious living conditions and dramatic wealth of the plantation owners. Drax and Holdip decided to invest in a few enslaved Africans and use part of their land holdings to plant sugar cane. Not only could Dutch traders sell them all the equipment they needed, but could also give them credit based on the expected profits from their first sugar crop. Drax ordered all the necessary equipment from Dutch merchants, purchased Africans, frequently hired Portuguese plantation managers, and planted acres of sugarcane. Until the late 1640s, when wealthy British aristocrats, fleeing the losing side of the English civil war, began arriving on Barbados with money to invest, Dutch financing was key to the success of start-up sugar plantations.
Drax convinced his elder brother, who had inherited, and sister to come to Barbados. His brother bought another 300 acres, more land doubling the size of their plantation. Then they invested in the needed equipment as well as a few enslaved Africans. Once they began buying African labor, and producing refined white sugar, the extraordinary profits were such that they never again contracted for white English indentures except as kitchen or domestic help. In this labor decision they were joined by their fellow planters.
By the turn of the century, an island that began with 8,000 white farmers owning small nine or ten-acre parcels, along with 1,000 African laborers, ended the century with the island’s entire 166 square miles divided into plantations owned by 355 families and supported by the labor of 46,000 enslaved Africans. The total white population was 19,568. By 1670, the plantation owners’ profits from sugar were like Jack in the Beanstalk wealth, growing greater and taller every year. The Crown’s excise duties on sugar alone (4.5 percent) gave the royal treasury enough money to commission new ships for the navy, order more guns and cannons for the army, and transport soldiers to new English trading stations in India and China. Sugar profits became an incomparable engine of wealth.
Barbados author Andrea Stuart, whose family dates back to a pioneer settler who arrived in the 1640s, characterized the Barbados sugar barons as “the Russian oligarchs of their day, ludicrously rich” and compared them to the oil tycoons of the 20th century and America’s tech billionaires of the 21stcentury. They bought paintings by Dutch masters, built huge mansions, entertained with fourteen course meals, and brought musicians from Europe to provide entertainment. They also purchased large estates in England, sent their own representatives to Parliament, later known as the West India lobby, and developed new theories of empire, politics, and the superiority of whiteness.
Even though frontier Barbados was notorious for debilitating heat, swarms of mosquitoes, and “humidity like jelly,” the island attracted far more colonists than any other island and more than either Virginia or Massachusetts. Of the 65,000 people who left England in the 17th century, 20,000 went to Massachusetts and 45,000 were divided among Barbados or other English islands (Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, Montserrat) and the Virginia-Chesapeake region. We know this because every person leaving England was required to obtain an exit visa showing the name of their ship and destination. None of the other English islands in the Lesser Antilles had the same advantages as Barbados. Antigua had no rivers or springs and was prone to severe drought; Monserrat was mountainous with a still-active volcano; St. Kitts was divided among the French, English and a population of native Indians called Caribes (formerly Arawaks or Tainos). Nevis was 50 square miles of mountain with little level land.
On the other hand, the treatment of enslaved Africans on Barbados raised many questions. The moral issue of enslaving fellow human beings was a topic that the Anglican religion did not touch. The eleven ministers on the island were opposed to even a discussion of the conditions of enslavement. Only the Quakers who arrived on Barbados in the 1650s, took up a discussion of the future for enslaved people. Many of the Quakers were plantation owners themselves with a number of enslaved workers. Because Quaker belief held that every person had an “inner light,” they also believed that the enslaved could be “saved.” This led to instruction in Christian religious beliefs which also led to Quaker landowners bringing their enslaved Africans to Quaker Meetings. In a violent, materialistic, and frontier society tlike early Barbados this thinking and behavior was seen as a highly subversive. In the 1680s the Quakers left Barbados en masse for Pennsylvania. There they joined the larger Quaker community and became leaders in what would develop into the American Abolition movement.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the town of Marblehead and its cod fishery kept expanding because more fishermen and their families arrived from England, the Channel Islands, and Nova Scotia. Fishermen who spent six months fishing in Newfoundland could not sustain a year-round fishing settlement because Newfoundland’s interior had no game, a crucial source of winter protein. Consequently, they had to return to England because they couldn’t feed themselves during a Newfoundland winter. (The many moose that now populate Newfoundland’s interior were 20th century additions, an import from Canada to attract hunters.) They also explored new year-round fishing locations like Marblehead and Salem.
The street that paralleled Barbados harbor was eventually called the New England Street and became the meeting place for planters, business agents, merchants, and captains to negotiate purchases or trades of cured cod for sugar, molasses, rum and enslaved Africans. Back in England, Thomas Breedon, an English captain, described “New England [as] key to the Indies.”
Over time, the business agents for Massachusetts merchants or even the captains who delivered the product might be offered the opportunity to purchase shares in an expanding sugar plantation or in a slave ship. When a Massachusetts ship was short a crew member, the captain might buy an African boy in Bridgeton’s active slave market.
Men who started out as fishermen could become captains. Ambrose Gale, for example, whose 1663 house is around the corner from me on Franklin Street in Marblehead, is listed in town records as a fisherman; twenty-three years later in 1686 Ambrose Gale, probably his son, is listed as a merchant. Captains in Barbados could also purchase a male-female African couple to bring back to Salem or Boston as domestic servants. This explains why shares in Barbados plantations show up in the wills of farmers and merchants of Essex County and other North Shore ports. By 1700, the sale of “seasoned” slaves from Antigua were being advertised on Boston docks by the grandsons of a settler who arrived in 1630 with John Winthrop. The grandsons changed the name from Ryall to Royall and purchased a great estate on the Mystic River in Medford. The great grand children gave a grant of land that when sold, endowed Harvard Law School. The Royall house in Medford is restored and open to visitors.
When the Barbadian planters ran out of land, they petitioned the king to open up the Carolinas to settlement. Three of the new Lords Proprietors of South Carolina owned Barbados plantations, and when they expanded to South Carolina in 1670, they brought the Barbados plantation and Slavery Codes with them.
—
The ship the Desire had a repeat voyage to the Caribbean. In 1641 Captain William Peirce of Salem was asked once again to sail the Desire to Providence Island. This time the request came from John Humfrey (sic), owner of a 500-acre farm in Swampscott, deputy on the General Court, and a member of the Boston militia. The aristocrats in England had recently appointed him as the new governor of Providence Island. He took with him more than thirty settler families from Massachusetts, most of them traveling on a second ship.
As soon as the Desire sailed into Providence’s harbor, Captain Peirce was concerned. It was too quiet. No one answered his calls. He saw no flags flying, no activity around the shore. Forewarned that the Spanish were in the area, he wisely turned the Desire around in order to exit the harbor quickly if necessary. At the same moment someone on his ship yelled that a soldier in the fort was aiming a gun at them. The Spanish opened fire. Captain Peirce was hit and died immediately. A second casualty died ten days later. Both the Desire and the second ship sailed out of the harbor and back in the direction of Boston. When the Spanish released their inventory of Providence Island, they listed hundreds of enslaved Africans, hundreds of English settlers, and looted Spanish treasure of pearls, silver, and more than 30,000 gold and silver coins.
The true legacy of the Desire resides its violent trade: land-rich American Indians out, enslaved Africans in. The larger meaning of that exchange was the removal of Indians from every colony in America and two centuries of importing more than a million enslaved Africans. It also required the destructive philosophy of the supremacy of whiteness. After the replacement of Barbados as the key island of the African trade, the state of South Carolina, often described as the colony of a colony, became the largest American port for importing enslaved Africans to America.
Works Cited
John Winthrop’s quotations are from Vol. 1 of three volume edition of Winthrop’s Journal, and from the abridged edition, both from Belnap Press (1996).
Morison’s characterization of Pilgrims’ poor financial acumen is from Of Plymouth Plantation (Knopf, 2004).
The description of “West Indian cure” and secondary “cured cod” are from Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997).
A quintal is a Newfoundland term for 112 pounds of fish.
The characterization of Barbados wealth is from Simon Schama’s History of Britain, Vol. 2, and narration in the BBC video series on the History of Britain.
“New England is key to the Indies” is from Wendy Warren’s New England Bound (2016) and an Emmanuel Downing quote.
The information about Ambrose Gale, fisherman and merchant, is from Sidney Perley’s History of Salem, Vol. 2, (1924).
Judith Nies is the author of four nonfiction books including the memoir The Girl I Left Behind (Harper Collins, 2008), Native American History: A Chronology (Ballantine, 1996), winner of the Phi Alpha Theta award in world history, and Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa and the Fate of the West (Nation Books, 2014) Amazon’s “Best 100 Books of the Year” and Arizona librarians’ “Southwest Book of the Year.” Her current nonfiction project is about how residents of 17th century Salem, Marblehead, and Boston, Massachusetts earned their living. Her awards include the Black Mountain Institute/Kluge Scholars award at the Library of Congress, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship.