After less than a year publishing material on eighteenth century Jamaica, I’m delighted to say that this blog has now been featured as one of the top 40 genealogy blogs around the world in Family Tree Magazine.
If you are looking for clues to family history in other parts of the world, do check out their list.
Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753)
It is perhaps surprising, but the British Museum might be said to have had its origins in Jamaica.
In September 1687 a young Anglo-Irish doctor, who had trained in London and France, accompanied his patron the Duke of Albemarle on a voyage to Jamaica. Hans Sloane was to spend a relatively short time there as the Duke died the year after their arrival, but during that time he practised medicine and studied the island’s plants, later producing the great Natural History of Jamaica. He was already an accomplished botanist and had been made a member of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-five.
In Jamaica Sloane met fellow doctor Fulke Rose, and together they treated the retired pirate and ex-Governor of Jamaica Henry Morgan for the effects of too much drink and socialising, administering millipedes and oil of scorpions! Unsurprisingly this treatment seems to have had no beneficial effect and Morgan died not long afterwards. Treatment of many of his other patients was more successful, perhaps owing to his foresight in taking with him to Jamaica a large quantity of Peruvian Bark – the source of quinine used in treating malaria.
While in Jamaica Sloane was introduced to cocoa taken with water which he found unpalatable. However he later mixed it with milk and prescribed it medicinally. Our modern drinking chocolate had been born.
Sloane returned to London with his collection of Jamaican specimens and drawings, and set up a fashionable medical practice, living for the first six years in the household of the widowed Duchess of Albemarle. His practice was characterised by a common sense approach to treatment, if not to any great advances in medical science, including simple diet and exercise.
He kept in regular contact with various correspondents in Jamaica, and following the devastating earth quake of 1692 he published some of their letters in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. One correspondent wrote to Sloane on the 23rd of September, “We have had a very great Mortality since the great Earthquake (for we have little ones daily) almost half the people that escap’d upon Port-Royal are since dead of a Malignant Fever, from Change of Air, want of dry Houses, warm lodging, proper Medicines, and other conveniences.” Another wrote “The Weather was much hotter after the Earthquake than before; and such an innumerable quantity of Muskitoes, that the like was never seen since the inhabiting of the Island.”[1] Sloane had commented on the use of ‘gause’, that is bed nets, against insects but of course did not know of the connection between mosquitoes and malaria.
Following the earthquake Fulke Rose returned to London to plead the islanders’ case and died there in 1694. His last child Philippa was born posthumously, and the following year Fulke’s widow Elizabeth married Hans Sloane. She had already had eleven children and went on to have four more with Sloane. Four of her daughters with Fulke Rose, and two of Sloane’s daughters, lived to grow up and Hans Sloane was a kindly stepfather and guardian.
Sloane’s medical practice and his good connections led to him attending various members of the royal family and also to promoting the use of inoculation against smallpox. Following the near death of a daughter of the Princess of Wales he conducted experimental inoculation on five prisoners whose lives had been spared for the purpose. The success of the inoculation was then tested by having one of the men nurse, and lie in bed with, a victim of a particularly virulent epidemic in Hertford. The benefits of inoculation would later be taken to Jamaica by British doctors, although in fact the practice was already known in Africa and some cargoes of slaves were inoculated before being sold.
However, I have wandered a long way from the British Museum.
Hans Sloane outlived his wife by more than a quarter of a century, living to be ninety-two and dying in January 1753. At the time of his death his house at Chelsea, where his name is remembered in Sloane Square, was filled with a vast accumulation of books and artefacts collected over his long life, often by buying up the collections of others. His legacy included 42,000 books, a room full of dried plant specimens, cases full of ancient Greek and Roman statues, gold and silver medals, diamonds, jewels and other precious stones. A large panel of Trustees was set up under Sloane’s Will to supervise the disposal of his collection, and the most valuable items were immediately removed to the Bank of England for safety.
In June 1753 an Act of Parliament was passed for the creation of the British Museum. It would house Sloane’s collection (purchased from the Trustees for £20,000, well below its market value), the King George II and Cotton libraries, the books and manuscripts of Arthur Edwards and the Harleian Manuscripts. A lottery was held and raised £95,000 for the purchase of the collections and the purchase and repair of Montagu House in Bloomsbury on the site of the present museum. There was money left over to purchase government stock for the on-going maintenance of it all.
The British Museum opened to ‘all studious and curious persons’ in January 1759, the first free national public museum in the world.
How many of today’s visitors know of the connection of its most illustrious founder to Jamaica?
[1] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1694, 18, pp.78-100.
The River Thames and the new West India Docks
From Ordnance Survey First Series 1805
Jamaican sugar planters sometimes struggled to get their produce back to England. Freight rates were often high, ships sometimes in short supply and of course they could be lost at sea. Along with a developing banking industry, the eighteenth century saw the growth of insurance, and new companies sprang up that would insure a cargo against loss. If you have London ancestors you may find them in the Sun Fire Office records, which are held at the Guildhall in London, and indexed on the National Archives online.
Fire was, and is, an ever present risk and it was especially so for warehouses storing Jamaica’s main exports of sugar and rum which are both highly flammable.
I remember stories in my childhood of how the bombing of the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery at Greenock in the second World War caused a fire that could be seen from many miles away. Two decades later a fire in a bonded whisky warehouse in Glasgow remains Britain’s worst peacetime fire services disaster. Wooden barrels stored on wooden racks in an old building with a high wood content burned furiously, and the vapourising alcohol caused an explosion that blew out the sides of the building and cast debris and barrels of flaming liquid onto the firefighters below. Both sugar and alcohol explode at high temperatures, scattering fiery material to start further fires.
Such was the nature of two disastrous London fires in the eighteenth century. You may remember I wrote a while ago about Captain Stephen Blanket who sailed supply ships to Jamaica and ended his life with a comfortable fortune as a merchant, living in Princes Street Rotherhithe, which ran at right angles to the river Thames. There, shortly after his death, a kettle of molten pitch, used for caulking ships and other waterproofing jobs, boiled over and caught fire. The fire spread and destroyed over 200 buildings along the river front at Rotherhithe. The buildings would almost all have been built of wood, many old and dilapidated and many containing flammable materials arriving from abroad or waiting to be despatched. Such fires could be difficult to put out and were sometimes long lasting – after the Great Fire of London in 1666 materials smouldered in cellars for many months afterwards, bursting into flame again when air reached them.
An even more disastrous fire happened at the end of the eighteenth century on the opposite side of the river at Ratcliff. In July 1794 another pitch kettle fire, at Cloves barge builder’s yard, ignited a cargo of saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, in a riverside barge. This sent exploding fragments high in the air over a wide area and before it was finally put out the fire had destroyed 453 private houses, more than 20 warehouses and other large buildings and several ships on the river. The buildings destroyed included offices of the East India Company. Although largely forgotten now, it was London’s worst fire between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz.
Add these risks to the constant threat to merchants’ profits from the pilfering of their cargoes as they were unloaded on to smaller boats in the overcrowded river Thames and rowed ashore to be manually handled into storage, and you can understand the pressure for a new solution to London’s booming international trade.
The need for new docks had been mooted for some time and in the end a large number were built on both sides of the river, but the most brilliant of these were the West India Docks which utilised a bend in the river at the Isle of Dogs to create an industrialised cargo handling system on a scale that had not been seen before. Ships coming up river entered the docks from Blackwall Reach, unloaded their cargoes directly into huge brick built warehouses and then left via Limehouse Reach having loaded a new cargo. The whole site was secured by a continuous high brick wall.
This view of the proposed West India Docks and City Canal is by W. Daniell and was painted in 1802 when construction had already begun. It looks west towards the City of London. In fact the final layout of the docks was rather different, with three broad docks rather than two docks and a canal, and it was further modified later in the nineteenth century to make use of the new railway technology and steam powered cranes.
A survey sponsored by English heritage and published in 1994, when the docks had reached the end of their useful life, can be viewed on British History online and it shows the vast scale of the eventual project.
One spin-off of the West India Dock Company was the founding of the Imperial Insurance Company, ever mindful of the risk of fire.
Little now remains of this huge and wonderful feat of civil engineering and mercantile ambition – replaced by London’s Docklands offices and tower blocks, the symbol of a different age of ambition. Its history is preserved in the Docklands Museum, housed in these few remaining buildings.
I should declare an interest from the start – I love maps! I can look at them for hours.
If a picture is worth a thousand words so too can a map be.
Most people start investigating their family history through photographs, family stories and whatever documents have been kept, moving on to look at old census records and obtain birth, marriage and death certificates.
But when you have these don’t underestimate the usefulness of looking at a map to see where your ancestors lived. Sometimes you will find that two addresses in the same town were just around the corner from each other, or that granny had married the boy next door. Sometimes changes in county boundaries mean that people who appeared to live in different counties were actually quite close. Birmingham is an example, since the Warwickshire village at its core was surrounded by others in Staffordshire and Worcestershire meaning you may have to visit three different county record offices or look at a selection of maps covering the area that now makes up the West Midlands.
When our ancestors adventured abroad they always took a little bit of home with them. Sometimes it was in the form of habits that did not translate well to the new country. Early settlers in New Zealand built their houses facing south as they had done in England. But of course they were now in the southern hemisphere and soon realised that the sunny side was to the north!
In Jamaica, the early settlers often named their houses and plantations after the homes they had left. So the Rose family of Mickleton in Gloucestershire established a plantation called Mickleton, and another called Rose Hall – near Linstead, and not to be confused with the great house now associated with the supposed witch. If you saw a place called Stirling Castle you could be pretty sure the person naming it was a Scot – in this case Archibald Aikenhead who was probably born in Lanarkshire. Lluidas Vale and Landovery had Welsh origins. Other names were simply aspirational – Paradise or Arcadia. An eighteenth century street map of Kingston reveals the names of its most prominent citizens – Beckford, Bernard, Beeston and Lawes among them.
To think yourself back into the early history of Jamaica you also need to consider the terrain faced by the early settlers and how they travelled about. Here the maps in Michael Morrissey’s book Our Island, Jamaica are really useful. The first and most essential element for settlement is the availability of fresh water, then the availability of land for growing food and cash crops and the materials for building houses, barns and other outbuildings. Once you start to think along these lines you may be able to understand why your ancestors settled where they did. Look too at transport links remembering that in the earliest days it may have been easier to travel by sea than over land, even between places that are now quite close by road. Apart from a few Taino tracks there were no roads for the early settlers.
High rainfall and mountainous terrain often made travel in Jamaica hazardous. The flat bridge in Bog Walk has remained without any railing after repeated floods washed them away. Fording rivers in flood led to the deaths by drowning of more than one early settler. Even after a hundred and fifty years of British settlement, Lady Nugent recorded in her journal the difficult state of the roads as she travelled around with her husband the newly appointed Governor, and she described the loss of a kittareen down a precipice – the officer driving it jumped clear but she didn’t mention the fate of the horse or mule which presumably perished.
After the improved roads, came the railway making more places accessible and in the twentieth century air travel brought more changes to the map of Jamaica.
One of the most useful modern maps available online is the Esso Jamaica road map made in 1967, shown above, and published on the Jamaican Caves website which shows not only the modern road system but many of the names of places and plantations established by the early settlers. A number of places on this map have clickable areas which give even greater detail.
A search online for old maps of Jamaica reveals a wide selection. You can also find some on the Jamaican Family Search subscription website and on the Facebook Group Jamaican Colonial Heritage Society which is a treasure trove of images and information about Jamaica’s past.
So next time you look at the history of your family, take a look on a map at where they lived and work out why they were there rather than somewhere else. I guarantee you will learn something new.
This week’s piece is necessarily brief as family activities have taken me away from the computer, however in the week of my mother’s ninety-sixth birthday I wanted to cherish the importance of those family members who are the custodians and guardians of our history.
The lovely photograph above is my maternal grandmother taken for her wedding in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, whither she had gone as the first white woman doctor ever seen in that part of south India. Her sister Alice was the principal researcher of the family history, but she was following in the footsteps of their great grandfather, and as a result I have inherited a variety of notes and papers compiled in the days when the only way to get a baptism record was to write to the parish priest of the parish where you thought the event had taken place.
Also through my mother, who now holds the family archive, I first heard the story of the ‘Indian Princess’ that led me through a round about route to Jamaica. A tiny fragment of paper with a sketchy line of descent from the eighteenth century had been written down by my mother’s grandfather after a conversation with his mother in about 1889.
From that we arrive at this website, and in due course I hope also a book.
So cherish your family and the stories they tell – you never know where it may lead!
The Lee family tomb at St Mary’s Barnes, showing the reburial of Joseph Lee who had died in Jamaica
New arrivals to eighteenth century Jamaica were shocked by the apparently callous attitude of the colonists to sudden death. It was not simply that few of the tombstones in the churchyard in Kingston recorded deaths of people over thirty-five, but when people died there was a lack of the respect and extended mourning there would have been in England.
Tropical conditions meant that burials took place within a day or so of the death, and often in the place of death even when that was not the person’s home parish. Although deaths were recorded in the parish register, the burial of members of the Plantocracy often took place on the estate in a family burying ground rather than in the parish church or graveyard. Sadly over the years many of their grave markers have been lost – overgrown or vandalised.
Occasionally a colonist expressed a wish for their body to be returned home to England, and so although a burial took place in Jamaica the coffin was later dug up to be transported back for reburial. A lead coffin would probably have been used, perhaps packed with sawdust.
In the twenty-first century with much increased life expectancy we regard any death under the age of seventy as premature, accidental death as unusual, and death in childbirth as wholly avoidable. Not so in the eighteenth century. Quite apart from the deaths caused by yellow fever, smallpox and malaria, the dry bellyache caused by lead poisoning, and the heart disease and stroke brought on by diet and lifestyle, even a simple accident could result in death. Take the case of a small boy, possibly a slave, in the household of Rose Fuller who shortly before the event had left for England. His Jamaica factor, John Lee, wrote to him:
‘There has been an accident happened to little Tom, Nelly’s Son, who as he was leaving the Cattle fell down and the wain run over him and broke his Leg, he was not far from town when the Accident happened and was immediately brought there. Doctor Worth set the Leg and he was very hearty for thirteen days, on the fourteenth he was seized with spasms and dyed on the fifteenth notwithstanding all the Care imaginable was taken to save him both by the Doctor and Mrs Rose.’
Poor little Tom almost certainly died from infection which today would have been easily avoided with the use of antibiotics.
The same letter listed the latest roll call of the dead, which is typical in such correspondence:
‘Since you have been gone we have lost Mr Baldwin[1], Mr Halked[2] and Mrs Taylor the Widow of Patrick Taylor[3], and last night Mr Henry Byndloss[4] the Attorney General of a very short illness’ .
Not long afterward John was also reporting the death of Dr Worth, and within six years he himself would be dead.
One of the reasons given to account for the failure of Jamaican colonists to establish the kind of society which was built in North America was their inability to reproduce in sufficient numbers to establish family continuity. Some families did succeed of course, although many then left for ‘home’ in England, but the mortality among women and children made the establishing of families difficult and although infant mortality in Europe at the time was high it was far exceeded in Jamaica. Although the colonists were perceived as callous it would be wrong to assume that parents did not grieve for their dead children, and their tombstones often attest to this, but the frequency of the event tended to harden their outward reactions. Hurried burial and the frequent death, or absence through illness, of parish priests also contributed to attitudes regarded by newcomers as irreligious.
We get a glimpse of the reaction of an outsider to the suddenness of Jamaican death in the Journal of Lady Nugent, who went to Jamaica in 1801 as wife of the new Governor. ‘Heard of the serious illness of poor Captain Cathcart. He is a fine young man and I trust may be spared’. On the following day she wrote ‘We all went melancholy to bed, having heard not only of the death of Captain Cathcart, but also of five of his officers!’.
On another occasion she wrote of her shock at the way such deaths were joked about. ‘Mr Mitchell, is a course looking man, but humane, and treats his negroes most kindly. He disgusted me very much the other day, by making a joke of poor Lord Hugh’s death; but it is common custom here’.
[1] William Baldwin buried Spanish Town 18 July 1755
[2] Richard Halked buried Spanish Town 13 July 1755.
[3] Martha Taylor, death recorded as Maximilia Taylor, buried Spanish Town 21 July 1755. Patrick Taylor was a Member of the Assembly for St George 1753.
[4] Henry Morgan Byndloss (c.1703-24 Jul 1755, buried Spanish Town the following day.)
Guinea Grass is now grown throughout the world
When the first English settlers arrived in Jamaica in 1655 they found large numbers of cattle roaming wild. They had been introduced by the Spanish who had found the herds multiplied and were profitable on native grasslands. The English soldiers of the Penn and Venables expedition, having largely trashed the existing settlements when they could not find treasure, then faced starvation – which you have to say rather served them right!
The ill-disciplined expedition nearly failed there and then especially as those who ventured outside Spanish Town were frequently picked off by escaped slaves and the remains of the local Taino Indian population. However the reservoir of cattle on the island provided a buffer against disease and starvation and gradually the toe-hold won by Penn and Venables became an British colony.
As agriculture became established the colonists began to grow some of their own food, although Jamaica would remain heavily dependent on imports throughout the eighteenth century. Initially the cattle were simply hunted and killed with their hides forming the basis of a profitable leather industry, but gradually the cattle too began to be farmed. The areas given over to raising stock and food crops were known as penns, and names of some survive today as in the town of May Pen, on land that once belonged to the Rector of Kingston William May.
On to the scene came Guinea grass. In one of those little accidents of history it arrived from Guinea in Africa together with some exotic birds brought in 1744 to George Ellis Chief Justice of Jamaica by the captain of a slave ship. The seed was intended as bird food, but the birds died and the story goes that the seed was simply thrown out, whereupon it thrived and grew seven feet tall in the ideal conditions of tropical Jamaica.
It was discovered to be excellent for grazing, it made good hay and it grew on land that could not be used for sugar. Altogether it was in many ways as valuable as sugar, for to cultivate that crop large quantities of animals were needed – oxen and mules as draught animals and cattle to feed the local population (although slaves were mostly fed on salt fish). Slaves walking home from a day in the fields were expected to bring back a bundle of the grass with them to feed the animals. Guinea grass spread across the world for pasture, silage, hay and it is also used for mulching land in dry areas prior to establishing a crop and planted to stabilise land to help control soil erosion.
Human beings however could not live off grass, and the planters ever looking for cheaper ways of feeding their slaves heard that the breadfruit of Otaheite (now Tahiti) might provide the answer.
Breadfruit
Enter the much maligned Captain Bligh. I say much maligned because he seems to have been considerably less brutal than other naval captains of his day, a fact supported by the number of his crew who in 1789 opted to go with Bligh rather than join the mutineers.
Bligh attempted a landing on the small island of Tofua where one crewman was stoned to death by the islanders. Then by a feat of incredible seamanship and with only a quadrant, a pocket watch and a memory of charts he had seen, Bligh navigated the 23 foot open boat across 3,618 miles of the Pacific to Timor and did not lose a single man. It took them forty-seven days and they had been given only enough food for a week.
Four years later following a second attempt Bligh finally delivered another cargo of breadfruit plants to the Bath Botanical Gardens in Jamaica, where it became established as a staple food. The town of Bath, named for its English counterpart because of the spa and springs there, today holds an annual Jamaican Breadfruit Festival.
Guinea grass: Photograph from http://www.fao.org/ag
Breadfruit: Photograph from http://www.soniatasteshawaii.com/
Chelonia Mydas – The Green Turtle
In July 1772 Robert Cooper Lee wrote to his wife, who was on holiday with their children in Margate ‘Captain Hepburn sent me the Turtle yesterday. What was I to do with it? I thought it would die before it got to Margate, or you should have had a Turtle Feast’.
There are numerous references in these family letters to turtles arriving from Jamaica for the family to feast on. Presumably once caught in the Caribbean they were kept alive in barrels of sea water until the ship arrived in England, once out of the water their survival time would have been limited.
On one occasion the Lees sent a present of a turtle to their sons’ headmaster, which caused no little stir in the school!
That such a present could be sent on the assumption that the headmaster’s cook would know what to do with the creature shows how widespread was the delicacy, even if it was still something of a luxury item.
To cook the turtle it would be killed and the head removed, then the whole animal plunged into boiling water for about ten minutes to make further preparation easier, once removed from its shell, gutted and skinned, the flesh could be cut up and treated much as you would chicken – perhaps coated in flour and seasoning, fried and then slowly stewed.
The fat of Chelonia mydas has a greenish tinge, which is how this species came to be called the green turtle, and it was much valued in the creation of turtle soup.
Needless to say overfishing and environmental challenges due to pollution, noise, light disturbance of nesting sights and the dangers posed by fine filament fishing net fragments have all contributed to a huge decline in turtle numbers since the eighteenth century. Most species are now protected and hopefully their numbers will recover.
Jamaica offered a large number of other delicacies not obtainable in Europe, and there are references in correspondence to candied ginger, pimentoes (allspice), yams, cashews and chocolate in addition to the sugar, coffee and rum that formed the greater part of the island’s exports.
The wonderful photograph is courtesy of Brocken Inaglory
(Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Robert Burns, the most famous Scot who never went to Jamaica!
Family commitments over Easter mean this week’s piece will be a short one, but as I am half Scots I have a particular interest in the role of Scots in eighteenth century Jamaica.
It is sometimes said that most of the planters in Jamaica were English in origin whereas the Scots supplied the bookkeepers and overseers on the estates. Like all generalisations this is only partly true. There were Scots such as Hercules Ross, James Wedderburn, Colin McKenzie and others who were highly successful planters and merchants, just as there were English bookkeepers and overseers. There were also many Scots doctors in Jamaica some of whom, in addition to providing medical services, were also planters.
The events that drove Scots to seek a future in Jamaica were however rather different from those motivating the English. Deportations of Scots to Jamaica by Cromwell, and following the failed Monmouth rebellion in the 17th century, were augmented by three huge historical events that resulted in the young Scots arriving in Jamaica.
The first of these was the Darien disaster, a “noble undertaking” of Scots empire building that envisaged a New Caledonia linking the Pacific and the Atlantic in Central America. Vast sums of money were raised in Scotland, and a large fleet fitted out. When the whole affair ended in disaster and enormous financial losses to the backers in Scotland a handful of survivors ended up in Jamaica. If you are interested in reading more, The Darien Disaster by John Prebble[1] provides an excellent account.
Scots also suffered from the failure of two Jacobite rebellions, in 1715 and 1745, both of which resulted in migrations to Jamaica. James Wedderburn, already mentioned, left for Jamaica after watching his father hanged, drawn and quartered in 1746 following the defeat at Culloden Moor. The family estates were confiscated and sixteen year old Wedderburn was left to make his own way, something he did with conspicuous success, returning to Scotland a very wealthy man.
In this he was far from alone. Edward Long in his “History of Jamaica” in 1774 wrote that:
Jamaica, indeed, is greatly indebted to North Britain, as very nearly one third of the inhabitants are either natives of that country, or descendants from those who were….. To say the truth, they are so clever and prudent in general, as, by an obliging behaviour, good sense, and zealous services to gain esteem, and make their way through every obstacle.
According to T.M. Devine, in his book Scotland’s Empire 1600 to 1815[2], in the period 1771-1775 Scots accounted for nearly 45% of all probate inventories valued above £1000, and about 40% of personal property inventories were those of Scots.
Another book that tells the story of Scots in the Caribbean in the latter part of the 18th-century is Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820[3] by Douglas J Hamilton.
If you are searching for Scottish ancestors who may have been in Jamaica, you will find David Dobson’s book Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855[4] a very useful reference work. It is an alphabetical listing with brief references to the sources of information on each individual, together with two pages of details of some of the ships that sailed between Scotland and Jamaica.
Oh, and in case you did not already know, Robert Burns was nearly lost to Scotland and poetry when he planned to migrate to work as a bookkeeper for Dr Patrick Douglas. Fate intervened, delaying the ship he should have sailed on in August 1786, until after the birth of his twin children and the sudden success of the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ of his poems.
[1] The Darien Disaster, John Prebble, Pimlico, New edition,2002. ISBN-10: 0712668535, ISBN-13: 978-0712668538
[2] Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, T.M.Devine, Penguin, 2004. ISBN-10: 0140296875, ISBN-13: 978-0140296877
[3] Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820, Douglas J.Hamilton,Manchester University Press, 2010. ISBN-10: 0719071836, ISBN-13: 978-0719071836
[4] Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855, David Dobson, Clearfield, Baltimore, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8063-5540-5
When I was transcribing the 1754 census of Spanish Town I came across three people listed as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”. Two of them I knew already – Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter who each lived in the house that they owned. Then there was Susanna Hosier who was recorded as a sugar planter and who owned a house worth £60 that was un-tenanted. I was surprised that I did not know who she was and could not find any reference to her, since as a mixed race woman she seemed to be unusually wealthy.
Sometime later I was working on the family of Susanna Augier and realised that the name was sometimes written as Augier and sometimes as Hosier. Once you pronounce Augier as ‘O-gee-er’ with a soft G you realise how it could come to be written as Hosier. It was also occasionally mis-transcribed as Augire, Angier and Augine. I often use dictation software when transcribing Wills and writing these blog pieces, and the software delivers ‘osier’ for ‘Augier’ ! It is the kind of name transformation that makes the work of the genealogist both frustrating and fascinating.
Having resolved the name puzzle I was able to build the story of Susanna Augier and her extended family. She was a quite exceptional woman and well known to the Jamaican Plantocracy. Her case was used to support the argument in the construction of the 1761 act preventing “Devizes to Negroes”, limiting the inheritance of black, mixed race, and illegitimate Jamaicans to £2000. The size of her inheritance seems to have been exceptional, but it provided useful ammunition for those wanting to restrict the size of legacies.
Susanna was the daughter of John Augier, a planter who died in 1722. He seems to have had little connection to his origins and a fondness and care for his Jamaican family. Under his Will he freed his daughters Susanna, Mary, Jenny, Frances and Jane. Subsequent references to his family show that there was a further daughter called Elizabeth and a son called Jacob, and probably a daughter Sarah who died young. Susanna, who was probably born about 1707, seems to have been particularly favoured and in due course became the mother of four children with a planter called Peter Caillard or Calliard. Mary, Peter, Frances and Susanna Caillard were born between 1725 and 1728. [But see Postscript below].
Peter Caillard died about 1728 leaving Susanna hugely wealthy. In addition to her inheritance from her father she now had a life interest in several properties in Kingston and Spanish Town and an estate including a Penn in St Catherine and a Mountain at Way Water, all valued for probate at £26,150 8s 1d, and entailed for her children Mary and Peter. By 1753 Susanna owned 950 acres of mainly good land in the parish of St Andrew (including 40 acres under coffee, 100 acres of provision ground and 800 acres of woodland) with eighty negroes, one white servant and forty-two head of cattle. Like many other free mixed race Jamaicans Susanna owned slaves – for example John Augier ‘a negro man belonging to Susanna Augier’ was baptised in Kingston on the 4th of March 1740. Few women in eighteenth century Jamaica owned estates (most who did were planters widows), fewer still managed them themselves as Susanna appears to have done.
Peter and Susanna Caillard both died young, but in 1738 Susanna applied for the rights of whites for herself and her children Mary and Frances Caillard. A Private Act of the Jamaica Assembly dated 19th of July 1738 granted them the legal status of whites.
Mary Caillard travelled to England, perhaps to meet her father’s family in Bristol, and on the 19th of April 1748 at Henbury, Gloucestershire she married Gilbert Ford who would in due course become Jamaican Attorney General. It was an unusual marriage for a mixed race Jamaican, even more so for a young English Lawyer. Ford came from a well-to-do family – his brother James became Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, Physician Extraordinary to the Westminster Lying-in hospital, and Consulting Man-Midwife to the Westminster General dispensary. Sadly there were no children of the marriage and Mary died in May 1754 at Clifton, Bristol[1]. It seems to have been after her death that Gilbert Ford went to Jamaica where he married for a second time to Elizabeth Aikenhead.
Within about a year of Caillard’s death Susanna was living with Gibson Dalzell with whom she had two further children, Frances and Robert, and on his death in about 1755 she inherited a life interest in his estate worth £6854 1s 3d. Dalzell made full provision for Frances and Robert who by then were living with him in London.
Robert Dalzell was sent to his father’s college, Christ Church Oxford in 1761. In 1762 aged just twenty he married Miss Jane Dodd, ‘an agreeable young lady of large fortune, and with every other accomplishment necessary to adorn the marriage state.’ [2] There were three children of his marriage who lived into the nineteenth century and had descendants, owning the manors of Tidworth and Mackney in Berkshire.
Frances Dalzell married the Honourable George Duff, son of the first Earl of Fife, on the 7th of April 1757 and moved into the ranks of the aristocracy. Tragically her first child was ‘a lunatic from birth’[3] perhaps severely mentally handicapped, or born with Down’s syndrome. Her son George and her two daughters died unmarried.
Susanna herself died in February 1757 and was buried on the 12th in Kingston.
All of this would be remarkable enough until you take into account the rest of Susanna Augier’s siblings. In 1747 two Private Acts of the Jamaican Assembly were passed. The first gave the rights of whites to Jane Augier and her children Edward James, Thomas, Peter and Dorothy. The second on behalf of Mary Augier gave ‘the same rights and privileges with English Subjects, born of white parents’ to Mary’s children William, Elizabeth, Jane and Eleanor; to her brother and sister Jacob and Elizabeth and to Elizabeth’s son John. Even this does not tell the whole story.
Of John Augier’s daughters it must be assumed that Jenny and Frances had probably died before 1747 and so were not included in the family’s bid to acquire full white status. Jenny had a daughter called Sharlott, born in 1729 and dead just under two years later, whose father was the choleric Theophilus Blechynden.
Around the time of his daughter Sharlott’s death he married Florence Fulton the widow of Dean Poyntz who had left his wife an annuity of £200 a year. Poyntz was in partnership with Mathias Philp and years later Blechynden and his wife sued the estate of Philp’s other partner William Perrin for £10,000 of back payments of her annuity. The case dragged on for years and was only finally settled by Blechynden’s son when almost all the other parties were dead!
A not untypical example of Jamaican litigation.
Frances Augier had two sons William and John Muir, and a daughter Hannah Spencer born in 1736. Frances probably died in Kingston in February 1738. Elizabeth whose son John was granted the rights of whites in 1747 had also had a daughter called Elizabeth who died at the age of four, both were the children of Richard Asheton. Elizabeth was buried in Kingston on the 16th of January 1749/50. Jacob Augier also died in Kingston and was buried on the 18th of September 1751, I have found no record that he had any children.
Mary and Jane Augier both had large families. Jane had six children with John DeCumming, of whom two died before she could apply for their rights. It is the children of Mary who have descendants that we know the most about. Mary had at least seven children with William Tyndall a Kingston merchant, and her daughter Elizabeth (born in 1726) had nine children with the wealthy Kingston merchant John Morse. Morse also had a daughter called Frances, probably born before he began his relationship with Elizabeth, who was brought up by his sister Sarah Vanheelen in Holland, and who died, unmarried, in London about 1818. Several of his children died before their father, but his three youngest daughters all married and had descendants.
John Morse had returned to London before his death – he was buried at St Mary Aldermanbury on the 2nd of April 1781. His family may have travelled with him, or may already have been educated in England. Catherine Morse married a young lawyer called Edmund Green at St Mary Aldermanbury in 1777 – the witnesses at the wedding included her uncle by marriage Joseph Royall.
Catherine had eight children, among whom her daughter Frances Ann married William Farington from the Isle of Wight who became an Admiral in the Royal Navy. Edmund’s training as a lawyer was called into play during a lengthy Chancery suit[4] on behalf of John Morse’s children against the Morse family who were unhappy at the legacies left to his mixed race illegitimate offspring. In this he may have had help from Robert Cooper Lee who had himself secured his children’s future via a Private Act of the Assembly passed in 1776. Frances Lee, his daughter, left legacies to her friend Catherine Green and her daughter Frances Ann Farington.
As the boom days of Jamaica were coming to an end so the focus of empire switched to India. Catherine’s sisters Ann Frances and Sarah went to India with their brother Robert and both married there in 1780. Ann Frances married Nathaniel Middleton and had ten children born variously in India and England. The Morse/Middleton fortune passed down the generations and in 1898, at the death of Hastings Nathaniel Middleton, was worth £84,100 15s 7d.
Sarah married William Cator in Calcutta and their daughter Ann Frances became the wife of Colonel Edward Baynes who as Adjutant General to the British forces in North America was sent to negotiate the armistice with the US government in July 1812. After service in North America they settled happily to retirement in Devon, their investments managed by Robert Cooper Lee’s son Richard. Their son William Craig Baynes migrated to Canada taking charge of the extensive estates acquired while his father was serving in Quebec.
Edmund Green eventually won the Chancery case on behalf of his wife and her siblings.
By the early nineteenth century the descendants of the Augier sisters had blended seamlessly into the highest levels of British society, their Jamaican slave roots conveniently air-brushed from history.
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POSTSCRIPT : 2nd August 2012
I have been looking again at the children of Susanna Augier and I think a confusion has arisen over her children with Peter Caillard. I now think that her children with Peter Caillard were Mary, Peter and Susanna and that there is only one child called Frances – the daughter of Gibson Dalzell.
[1] I have a reader of this website to thank for this information. “Last week died at Clifton near Bristol, after a lingering illness, the Lady of Gilbert Ford of the Middle-Temple, Esq.” London Evening Post (London, England), May 7, 1754 – May 9, 1754
[2] ‘Parishes: Tidmarsh’, A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 3 (1923), pp. 433-437. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk
[4] For more detail on the Morse sisters and the Chancery case see Daniel Livesay (2018) Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family 1733-1833. Williamsburg, VA.:Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
