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The Decline of Caribbean Smuggling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2018

Theodore C. Hinckley
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Extract

In the 1760's, the commerce of the British West Indies followed four general channels: (1) the trade with the Mother Country; (2) the exchange of goods and money with continental sister colonies to the north; (3) the African slave trade; and (4) the illegal intercourse with Spain's New World possessions. So extensive was the last that Josiah Tucker referred to it as “that prodigious clandestine trade.” This paper will explore one facet of that traffic: its eclipse in Jamaica in the years immediately after the 1763 Peace of Paris.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only Bridgetown in Barbados and Kingston in Jamaica were markets of “conspicuous size and wide commercial connections.” The unloading of only a few cargoes would glut the capital towns of the lesser islands. Notwithstanding this fact, these islands held a coveted position in the Empire. London's high esteem for these possessions rested on their agricultural value, their importance in the crucial bullion exchange, and their utility as naval bases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 1963 , pp. 107 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1963

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References

1 Tucker, Josiah, Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects (2nd ed.); Gloucester, 1774), 163.Google Scholar

2 Pares, Richard, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade Between North America and the West Indies Before the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1956), 84.Google Scholar

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9 Tucker, Four Tracts, 26.

10 Rose, Newton, and Benians, The Old Empire, 330.

11 Pares, Richard, War and Trade in the West Indies (Oxford, 1936), 241.Google Scholar During the wars of the mid-eighteenth century, the islands had such bargaining weight on the economic scales of the Empire that the English government devoted more of its naval strength there than it had ever done consistently before. Beginning in the reign of Queen Anne, the Admiralty stationed in the Caribbean waters a permanent naval force known as the Jamaica Squadron. Ibid., 265.

12 Ibid., 84-88.

13 Long, Edward, A Free and Candid Review of a Tract. Entitled “Observations on the Commerce of the American States” (London, 1784), 48.Google Scholar Jamaica's Jewish merchants, though denied their political rights, were leaders in the Spanish trade. Ferguson, Zenophon F., The Old Plantation Regime in Jamaica: 1655-1834 (Unpublished M. A. thesis, University of California, 1925), 131.Google Scholar

14 Sir Whitworth, Charles, State of the Trade of Great Britain in Its Imports and Exports, Progressively from the Year 1697: Also of the Trade to Each Particular Country during the Above Period, Distinguishing Each Year (London, 1776), xlvi.Google Scholar

15 Ragatz, Lowell Joseph, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833, A study in Social and Economic History (New York, 1928), 120.Google Scholar North- American and British home vessels also engaged to an unknown degree in the Caribbean contraband traffic. Sir Charles Whitworth noted in his compendium of eighteenth-century trade that Mosquito Shore and Honduras Bay are the only places the English trade to in the Spanish West Indies. Whitworth, State of the Trade, lvi. With this simplest exception, all commerce with the Spanish Caribbean possessions was usually outside the law. Therefore any attempt to find evidence of commercial trends through the custom house records, shipping notices, etc., must invariably be very incomplete. An objective analysis of this commerce is likewise handicapped by the itinerant cruises of the skippers engaged in smuggling. Bell, Herbert C., “The West India Trade before the American Revolution,” American Historical Review, XVII (January, 1917), 272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar2f.

16 “The exceptions to this rule are of two kinds. On the one hand some of the big ‘town agents’ of Barbados and Jamaica occasionally thought it worthwhile to trade to North America on their own account. They may have belonged to the rising class of merchant-attorneys for absentee planters; at any rate, they had a constant demand for lumber and some responsibility for keeping the plantations supplied with this necessary article without which not a barrel of sugar or rum could be shipped. These people, such as Samuel Dicker, or Bayley, Elworthy and Bayley, of Kingston, Jamaica, or Alexander Sandiford of Bridgetown, Barbados, sometimes thought it worthwhile to contract for their lumber and provisions beforehand, and to get it brought to them by fixing a vessel in the trade (perhaps in partnership with a North American) or by promising a full freight from the continent by such and such a date.” Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 8-9.

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19 Quoted in Pares, War and Trade, 21.

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36 Christelow, “Contraband Trade,” 321.

37 Gentlemen's Magazine, XXXIV (July, 1764), 337.

38 The Annual Register, London, 1764, 107.

39 Namier, England, 274. At about this time of the thirteen members of Parliament who were genuine West Indians, seven were from Jamaica. Ibid.

40 Christelow, “Contraband Trade,” 322.

41 Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial, I, 294.

42 Great Britain Public Record Office, Colonial Office 137, vol. 62 (Official correspondence relating to Jamaica, 1764-1767) no. 156. Note that these numbers are penciled on photostat copies and are not official. Microfilm at Indiana University. Hereafter cited as: Colonial Office 137.

43 Ibid., no. 172.

44 Ibid., no. 180.

45 Ibid., no. 167.

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49 Colonial Office 137, Vol. 63, no. 82.

50 Pares, War and Trade, 473-474.

51 Whitworth, State of the Trade, xxxv ff.

52 Edward Long, History of Jamaica (3 vols.; London, 1774) I, 376.

53 See: The History, Debates and Proceedings of both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain, from the year 1743 to the year 1774, IV (London, 1792), 485-497.

54 Armytage, The Free Port System, 3.

55 Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial, I, 312-313.

56 Parry and Sherlock, A Short History, 131.

57 Wesley Frank Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700- 1763 (New York, 1917), 30-31.

58 Long, History of Jamaica, I, 125-126.

59 Bell, “The West India Trade,” 286.

60 Ferguson, The Old Plantation Regime, 130,

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62 Haring, The Spanish Empire, 342.

63 Parry and Sherlock, A Short History, 128, 117, and 132; Gardner, W. J., A History of Jamaica (New York, 1909), 144.Google Scholar It is well to recall that England's Sugar Islands exported more than the prize sweetener. The Beekman Mercantile Papers (3 vols.) New York, 1956, masterfully edited by Philip L. White, reveal the variety of her agricultural products. See Index, III, 1454.

64 Whitworth, State of the Trade, xxxv.