Indian Slaves from Guiana in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

Carolyn Arena Ethnohistory (2017) 64 (1): 65-90. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3688375 Published: January 01 2017 Permissions Abstract The economy of Barbados benefited both from the labor of Indian captives and from their isolated position away from indigenous zones of conflict and economic competition. The Anglo-Barbadians accessed labor in Guiana, the region between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers. Barbados was a secure location, away from the indigenous war zones, trade routes, and markets for captives in Guiana. In this context, the Barbadian sugar industry flourished without threat from Indians’ reprisals. Seventeenth-century ethnographies and modern scholarship have emphasized the limited nature of this Indian slave trade, or the finite roles that Indian slaves played in colonial economies. However, the archival sources I use provide evidence that colonists routinely exploited Guiana for native slaves, and once on Barbados, the latter contributed a broad range of skills to the early economy of the island. Indian slavery, Barbados, Guiana, Surinam (English)/Suriname (Dutch) In 1668, Benjamin Worsley, a member of Charles II’s trade council, wrote that enslaving the indigenous people of Guiana and then sending them to island plantations might help make English planters the “sole masters of sugar for all the world.”1 No official policy or merchant company emerged to carry out Worsley’s idea, but other evidence from Barbados, then the preeminent sugar-producing colony of the English Caribbean, confirms that this particular route had delivered Indian slaves to the island since the colony’s foundation. Scholars have emphasized that planters limited the enslavement of indigenous people because, in the words of Richard Dunn, they were “a different sort of barbarous pagan from the black man.”2 These interpretations are rooted in seventeenth-century ethnographies and colonial rhetoric that considered Indians unsuitable for hard labor; European authors promoted amicable trade and military alliances with Indians instead. However, archival research reveals that this discourse differed substantially from colonial practice. The widespread acceptance of Indian slavery also appears more clearly in both English and Dutch accounts of the Caribbean that preceded the settlement of Barbados. In Guiana, English and Dutch settlers had enslaved native people, and learned of indigenous captive exchanges, since the late sixteenth century. Worlsey’s encouragement to drive an Indian slave trade from Guiana to Barbados underlines that interest in this trans-Caribbean slave trade had been sustained for a hundred years. Once in Barbados, the experience of captives followed a trajectory similar to that of slaves from Africa throughout the seventeenth century: extraction from their indigenous communities, shipment to a remote island, intercultural mixing, forced labor, and subjection to an increasingly confining legal regime. Recent histories of early seventeenth-century Barbados have revealed many similarities between indentured laborers and slaves, at least in terms of living conditions, social lives, and labor performed on the island.3 Archeological evidence suggests that slaves were not physically segregated from “Christian” servants until sugar production boomed in the mid-seventeenth century.4 Indian slaves also suffered from this eventual segregation. My research complements other studies of Indian enslavement that consider the practice one of many forms of coerced labor in the Caribbean. Brett Rushforth has recently argued that Indian enslavement in the French Caribbean was limited because of diplomatic and commercial concerns rather than stereotypes about their laboring capabilities.5 Alan Gallay and Linford Fisher have discussed attempts to ship Indians from North America to the Caribbean, also as a means of reducing violent conflict in the former region. Gallay suggests that captives from colonial wars in Carolina entered Barbados slave markets in great numbers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the strong trade connections between the two colonies.6 Fisher shows that Barbados legislators actually refused to import rebellious captives from New England’s King Phillip’s War (1675–76). This was the first time that Barbados had legally restricted an Indian slave trade to the island.7 Other historians have demonstrated how connections to North America contributed to the growth of the slavery in Barbados, but the connections between settlements in South America and Barbados remain hazy.8 Barbados’s unique success story was predicated on the absence of an indigenous population. On most islands of the Lesser Antilles, indigenous populations survived the demographic collapse following the Spanish conquest. The indigenous population of St. Christopher, for example, resisted English colonists’ efforts to subjugate them, although the English responded with the massacre and enslavement of many of those people.9 Barbados’s colonists, however, did not need to negotiate with native populations to settle there, and their development was not constrained by indigenous military action as elsewhere in the Caribbean.10 Just two years after Barbados’s foundation, in 1627, Henry Winthrop described it as “the pleasantesste Ilande in all the weste Indyes” because it was secure from “any enymye interrupting us” and without “any inhabytanse of any other people of other natyones.” There was no one on the island except the new English colonists and “50 slaves of Indyenes and blacks.”11 Winthrop’s letter implied that Barbados was secure because all the Indians on the island were enslaved. In that sense, Barbados shared a major similarity to the Spanish Caribbean: it benefited from the labor of both Indian and African plantation labor.12 Barbados’s fortuitous combination of vacancy at the time of colonization, and connectivity to other Atlantic colonies in both North and South America, helped its early success as a plantation colony. Seventeenth-Century Ethnographies and Tropes of Indian Laborers Stereotypes about Indians being unsuitable laborers, especially compared to African slaves, were pervasive in seventeenth-century ethnographic literature and histories of the Caribbean. Modern scholarship has often presented the idea that indigenous people were inefficient laborers as evidence that Europeans did not enslave them. Both past ethnographies and present scholarship suggest that planters only demanded Indian slaves for limited roles: some male Indians for their skills as fishermen and hunters, but mostly female Indians for their knowledge of native food and cooking as domestic servants.13 Only one scholar, anthropologist Jerome Handler, has previously treated Indian slaves on Barbados as the focus of research articles. He points to these roles as major contributions to the island’s unique creole culture. However, Handler maintains that Indian slaves remained culturally separate from African slaves, while still blending into African slave communities. This blending has made disentangling the narratives of slaves, whatever their origins, challenging and estimating the exact number of Indian slaves on the island an “impossibility.”14 Most scholars have agreed that since colonists felt indigenous people were unable to cope with plantation labor, they only used Indian slaves in limited capacities during the foundation of Caribbean colonies.15 These various analyses present Caribbean Indians in contradictory terms: physically weak but strongly skilled, compliant but proudly willed, separate but culturally blended with the larger slave community. However, authors Walter Raleigh, Richard Ligon, Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, and Charles de Rochefort inspired Worsley to pursue the purchase of indigenous captives for Barbados “upon the Coast of Guiana.” Without traveling to the Caribbean himself, he must have relied on his own library to learn that Guiana was a place where “Indians doe not onely take one another prisoner, but doe as usually sell one another for such goods as they lack in that Country.”16 He owned the aforementioned works of Raleigh, Ligon, and de Rochefort (in translation by John Davies, and plagiarized from the history of Jean-Baptiste du Tertre).17 Indeed, it appears that Worsley transposed Ligon’s description of the African slave trade in his A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) to his own proposal. Ligon had written that in Africa’s “petty Kingdomes . . . they sell their Subjects, their Children, and sometimes their Wives; and think all good traffick, for such commodities as our Merchants send them.”18 The parallels between the two warring coasts might have provided an assurance to Worsley that European slavers could purchase indigenous war captives in America with the same impunity as in Africa. For evidence for indigenous captive markets in Guiana Worsley probably consulted Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1595), which contains a description of slave markets near the Caris and Limón Rivers. There, Raleigh wrote, “the Canibals . . . sell the sonnes and daughters of their own brethren” to the Spaniards.19 Although the Spanish had outlawed the enslavement of Indians in the sixteenth century, they made exceptions for the supposedly cannibalistic Caribs; rumors of them eating flesh was taken as evidence that their souls were irredeemable.20 Raleigh’s narrative also detailed an active captive trade on the Essequibo River, where Spaniards bought Indian prisoners, women, and children with tools like hatchets.21 In 1616 the Essequibo colony would become the center for exchanges between indigenous nations and Dutch settlers. In the first half of the seventeenth century it was the only colony in Guiana, among many attempted, that was not destroyed by Spaniards or the native population. It survived because Dutch Governor Groenewegen maintained a peaceful trade with both groups, which may have included the buying and selling of indigenous captives. Essequibo was favorably positioned between the more competitive indigenous trade zones of either the Orinoco or Amazon Rivers. Groenewegen then secretly funneled Indian and Dutch trade goods like tobacco to desperate Spaniards. Groenewegen also traded with the English in Barbados “its first assistance both for Foode and Trade to this mans speciall kindness.”22 During his exploration of Guiana, Raleigh blamed the Spanish and Caribs for the commonplace enslavement of indigenous people, but his own lieutenant, Lawrence Keymis, admitted to capturing an Indian against his will to help him navigate Guiana’s rivers.23 Seventeenth-century ethnographers writing after Raleigh’s voyage and Groenewegen’s settlement of Essequibo acknowledged that the English, Dutch, and French settlers were each guilty of enslaving indigenous people in the Caribbean. Regretting the practice, these authors joined a tradition of discouraging Indian slavery through tropes about natives as unsuitable laborers. This tradition had begun with Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote that the Arawak people of Hispaniola were “unable to withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost any illness.”24 By the seventeenth century, Carib enslavement, like Arawak enslavement, was taboo. Most Europeans understood that Spaniards had exaggerated accusations of cannibalism because of Caribs’ resistance to colonization. Non-Spanish missionaries were eager to champion the potential of Caribs for conversion.25 Missionary sources continued to use the tropes employed by Las Casas to discourage Indian slavery: Arawaks would die from disease or exhaustion, and Caribs would rather commit defiant suicide.26 Charles de Rochefort, a French Huguenot missionary, lived on Tortuga, an island jointly held by the French and Dutch. He also spent a brief time in Dutch Curaçao in 1649.27 De Rochefort wrote that Caribbean Indians “are such enemies to severity, that those nations that take them for slaves, like the English, who by ruse take them from their places of birth, treat them rigorously, and they frequently die regretfully.” This was “quite the opposite of the negroes . . . who want to be treated roughly or else they become insolent, lazy, and disloyal.”28 Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, a Dominican like Las Casas, wrote that Arawaks were prone to dying of misery while enslaved and Caribs would rather die before living as slaves.29 He had lived on St. Christopher, Martinique, and Guadeloupe between 1650 and 1658, islands that each experienced resistance from native inhabitants (fig. 1).30 Figure 1. Detail from “Visite des Sauvages.” From du Tertre, Histoire générale, vol. 11, 395; image obtained from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University VIEW LARGE Detail from “Visite des Sauvages.” From du Tertre, Histoire générale, vol. 11, 395; image obtained from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Richard Ligon, another one of Worsley’s authors, was a plantation manager on Barbados from 1647 to 1650. He was not a missionary but a humanist committed to social reform and harmony between ethnic groups.31 Although he considered it justifiable to purchase war captives as slaves, he thought slaves ought to be able to convert to Christianity and integrate with the colonial community.32 Ligon’s humanism made him uncomfortable with the process of enslaving Caribbean natives. He deemphasized English involvement in capturing indigenous peoples, intimating that on Barbados the colonists had “but a few” Indians, “fetcht from other Countries; some from the neighbouring Islands, some from the Main, which we make slaves.”33 Ligon indicated that Indian enslavement betrayed the colonial goals of befriending and converting the indigenous population of the Caribbean. He narrated the story of Yarico, one of the most famous Indian captives in early modern literature and theater.34 Yarico was one of three Indian slave women on the plantation of Thomas Modiford, which Ligon managed. Yarico was free-born on “the Main,” referring to Guiana, and met an English sailor who had come there to trade. “Her countrymen” attacked him, but Yarico took pity on the Englishman and harbored him in a cave. There, they became lovers and she fell pregnant. As soon as a group of Englishmen found and “rescued” the sailor, however, he betrayed Yarico and sold her into slavery on Barbados. Ligon concludes that the Englishman had “forgot the kindness of the poor maid, that had ventured her life for his safety, and sold her for a slave, who was as free born as he: and so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty.”35 De Rochefort described similar treachery on the part of the English, “the greatest enemies” of Caribbean Indians. The English would lure Indians into their boats with “a thousand caresses” and brandy, and as soon as the unsuspecting Indians were loaded, they would lift anchor and take men, women, and children to their colonies.36 Additionally, both the English and the French bought both Aroüages and Brasiliens from Dutch traders in Guiana, who had purchased them as war captives from Caribs. The Caribs reserved the Arawak women for their own “pleasures” while they sold the “men and the young male prisoners . . . to the French, Dutch, and English, according to the friendship and commerce between the Caribs and those nations.”37 These narratives concur that the English, Dutch, and French merchants each capitalized on indigenous trade networks and alliances to Caribs in Guiana to acquire Indian slaves. Ligon, du Tertre, and de Rochefort each disparaged the enslavement of Caribbean natives, especially in raids against nonbelligerent populations. They also discouraged purchasing war captives in indigenous markets. Nevertheless, readers like Worsley would have recognized the latter strategy as a legitimate way to acquire slaves. Despite prevalent stereotypes about the capacity or willingness to work of Arawak and Carib people, Ligon unwittingly advertised the benefits of Indian labor when he praised his plantation’s female slaves as “better vers’d in ordering the Cassavie and making bread, then the negroes, we imploy for that purpose.”38 Ligon also thought highly of their knowledge of pottery and architecture, musing that the colonists ought “to procure an Indian or two, to come from that Island [St. Vincents], and give us direction” in building.39 In addition to their skills in pottery and building, he also praised Indians for their medical skills: “The Indian women have the best skill to take them [‘Chegoes’ or fleas] out . . . I had ten taken out of my feet in a morning, by the most unfortunate Yarico.”40 Despite the evidence suggesting that indigenous people labored in diverse ways, scholars have used Ligon’s narrative to argue that Indian slave labor on Barbados consisted of women doing the “chores” usually reserved for female Irish domestic workers, or cooking “cassava for the daily consumption of the plantation.”41 The text itself shows that plantation owners compelled female Indian slaves to draw on a diverse set of skills, comparable to the variety of tasks African slave women performed. Furthermore, lists of slaves from plantation records in Barbados reveal no higher incidence of female Indian slaves than male Indian slaves (table 1). This undermines the notion that planters sought Indian slaves only to replace female domestic workers. Table 1. Indian Slaves in Property Transactions in Barbados Year Property Transaction “Appurt-enances” (implied economic activity) Owners Indian slaves/ total slaves Sex of Indian slaves Source (BARD) 1634 Inventory Household W. Dotin (Dotting) to B. Jemott 1/6 0M 1F RB3/3, 593 1641 Sale, 100 acres P. Hay to Cpt W. Page 1/13 1M 0F RB3/1, 951 1643 Sale, slaves, chattel Slaves P. Hay to A. Hay 1/20 RB3/1, 34 1645 Sale, 71.5 acres Cpt W. Page to E. Missos 1/2 RB3/3, 722 1647 Lease, 250 acres Sugar, distillation Major W. Hilliard to Col. T. Modiford 3/98 0M 3F Ligon 1654 Sale, 140 acres Sugar W. Baldwin and T. Baldwin to W. Baldwin Jr 1/23 1M 0F RB3/2, 708 1654 Sale, 3 buildings Mercantile P. Hancock to J. Hancock 1/3 1M 0F RB3/2, 717 1654 Sale, 100 acres Sugar G. Sanders to Cpt R. Rumbill 1/5 1M 0F RB3/7, 433 1655 Lease, 87 acres Sugar Cpt J. Read to W. Petty 2/16 RB3/2, 799 1656 Lease, plantation & 10 warehouses Sugar, mercantile Col W. Hilliard to Col G. Standfast, E. Pye, Major E. Chamberline, Capt F. Georges, W. Drax, N. Erros Negros Indians and Other Slaves RB3/5, 120 1656 Sale, 100 acres Sugar W. Petty to Maj. Read 1/20 RB3/5, 72 1656 Sale, Plantation Sugar W. Hilliard to F. Georges 1/98 0M 1F RB3/5, 123 1656 Sale, 100 acres Sugar Srgt Major Read to Capt J Beeke, Col. W. Good 1M 0F RB3/5, 129 1662 Sale, slaves, cattle Labor, livestock W. Brown to Millresth 1/41 RB3/3, 276 1670 Sale, Slaves Labor, clothing Cpt Peter Wroth to J Kellicott 1/3 0M 1F RB3/8, 46 1674 Sale, 10 & 18 acres J. Beeke to T. Sturte 2/10 1M 1F RB3/9, 72 1678 Sale, 10 & 18 acres T. Sturte to J. Beeke 2/10 1M 1F RB3/9 494 1701 Sale, tenements in Bridgetown, 270 acres Sugar, mercantile J. and E. Stuart to H. Agrew 1/47 1M 0F RB3/3, 202 VIEW LARGE Similarly, du Tertre also used negative stereotypes to discourage the enslavement of indigenous people, while affirming that natives of the Caribbean provided skills that contributed to plantation economies. He wrote that Caribs’ proud and haughty natures made them refuse to do the tasks associated with “les Nègres,” like planting manioc. Du Tertre concludes that this negotiation and segregation is why Indian slaves worked primarily as fishermen for the governors, officers, and other men of consequence that could afford them.42 On Barbados, Ligon also noted that it was only the particularly wealthy planters who had Indian men for “footmen, and killing of fish.” The Indians would go for days “with their own bowes and arrows” and “kill as much fish as will serve a family of a dozen persons.”43 Other descriptions of fishing contradict this suggestion, however. Even on plantations with large labor forces, fishing only happened “twice or thrice a week” and required the teamwork of many servants to use the large nets known as seines.44 In the rare instance that fishing was a solitary endeavor, du Tertre noted, Indian fisherman would trade their surplus of fish with African slaves for other foodstuffs.45 Anthropologist Richard Price argues that this trade made Indians a privileged “sub-class” of slaves in the Caribbean. However, he also noted how masters encouraged Indians to teach their hunting and fishing techniques (such as nighttime torch fishing, poisoning, and using wooden spears) to African slaves.46 Whatever privilege Indians might have enjoyed, through fishing or other native skills sets, surely dissipated as this knowledge spread throughout the slave and colonial community. The ease of skill transfer from indigenous to colonial societies and the evidence of shared marketplaces and knowledge suggest connectivity and integration rather than a rigid—much less self-imposed—segregation between Indian and African slaves. Thus, the narratives of Ligon, de Rochefort, and du Tertre, as a collection, provide evidence for the diversity of labor activities of Indian slaves in Caribbean colonies rather than a specialized set of economic contributions. Not only did Caribbean natives share skills such as fishing and hunting with African slaves, but they also took on skill sets associated with African slaves as domestic workers, builders, potters, cooks, and nurses. We may also suspect, from circumstantial evidence of their presence on sugar plantations, that they contributed more directly to sugar production as well. Indigenous and Colonial Connections to the Guiana Coast The first Indian slaves on Barbados worked in agriculture. English colonists, inspired by promotional literature about Guiana, hoped Barbados could produce the same cash crops touted there: tobacco, cotton, and indigo. Prior to setting out for the New World, the English merchant William Courteen founded a trade syndicate with merchants from Zeeland, one of the dominant maritime provinces of the Netherlands. Originally, Courteen wanted to model the Zeelanders’ Essequibo River colony and trade in Guiana. In 1627, William, his brother Peter Courteen, and their Zeeland associates commissioned ships in preparation to fight any Iberians they might have encountered en route. Instead of the Guiana coast, they landed on Barbados, the easternmost of the Caribbean islands, lying conveniently close to Essequibo. They reported that the island was “not inhabited by any nation,” had good soil, and would be a very good plantation.47 Recent archeological investigation confirms that Courteen’s syndicate indeed found an uninhabited island, but Barbados would be more accurately described as a deserted island. Hundreds of years earlier, indigenous people from the Guianas had sailed northward to colonize Barbados as well as islands in the Lesser Antilles chain. They harvested fruits from the island and hunted sea turtles, tuna, and lobster from the surrounding sea. Freshwater sources in Barbados were scarce and the population never boomed to make the island a major center of indigenous trade, yet the indigenous inhabitants had engineered a system of earthenware cisterns that collected enough rainwater to sustain a small settlement.48 They would have shared an ethnic identity through the Kalinago trade language that linked the Caribs from Guiana in the south to the islands of Guadeloupe and Dominica to the north. The indigenous Barbadians used the Kalinago language to swap their pottery, island produce, and marriage partners for obsidian axes and other tools from islands to the north. When the Spanish entered the Caribbean, many indigenous people remained on the Lesser Antilles, but the native population of Barbados had gone. They may have emigrated to other islands, or back to Guiana when they learned through their trade networks of Spanish conflicts with the Caribs elsewhere in the Caribbean.49 Courteen was both blessed and cursed to find Barbados deserted. He had no need to negotiate with an existing native polity, but he also had insufficient labor and no one to instruct his colonists on the best forms of agriculture for the soil. Courteen, determined to start planting, commissioned Captain John Powell and his brother, Henry, to bring supplies and more settlers from England to Barbados. En route back to Barbados, Powell captured a Portuguese ship with about ten African slaves onboard and brought them to the island as well.50 Two weeks after his return, Courteen suggested that Powell make contact with the Dutch governor Groenewegen at Essequibo to see if they could acquire additional resources for their island.51 Powell recalled that when he had reached the Main he traded with a group of Indians who told him that Barbados was the land of their “forefathers.” This may be a reference to indigenous trade routes and connections between Guiana and Barbados as evidenced in the above archeological and anthropological evidence. Powell insisted that the Indians “had a desire to go with me as free people” if they could have land there for their native crops and raise their children as Christians. Like their ancestors, they also wished to “drive a constant trade between that island and the Main.”52 According to Courteen’s heirs, Captain Powell “fetched” about thirty native people from the Essequibo region to “instruct the English in planting Cottons, Tobacco, Indigo.”53 The Courteen syndicate thus framed themselves as what both the English and the Dutch envisioned of ideal Protestant settlers, simultaneously evangelizing and exploiting the Indians.54 Together, the indentured servants, ten African slaves, and Indians worked on locations called the Corn Plantation, the Fort Plantation, the Indian-Bridge Plantation, the Indian Plantation Eastward, and Powell’s Plantation. Courteen said that he later split these plantations to encourage population expansion, until there were 1,850 people, including men, woman, children, English colonists, Indians, and enslaved Africans.55 The Indians brought to Barbados, whether they came voluntarily or not, shared something important with the ten African slaves that came with John Powell: neither were in their indigenous communities any longer. Colonists simply labeled them as “Indians” and “Negros” regardless of their place of origin or ethnic identity. They faced social isolation from their original political communities, losing many of the connections that once brought them power, and became agricultural laborers. In 1628, one year after planting had begun, a different interest group of English merchants in London pressured Charles I to give James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, a grant of proprietorship over all the English Caribbean islands.56 Unlike St. Christopher, an island shared between the English, French, and Kalinago, Barbados was the ideal center of government since neither colonial nor indigenous powers contested English settlement. Carlisle used the permission of Charles I’s patent to send his own men to Barbados and collect rent from Courteen’s settlers, now disparaged as squatters. This began a suit where the Courteen syndicate and Courteen’s heirs charged the Earl of Carlisle’s government with unlawfully taxing the first English settlers. Powell and Courteen’s heirs charged that Carlisle took the Indians “by force and made them slaves,” and kept them “long in Bondage.” Whether this is true or an exaggeration on Powell’s part is difficult to ascertain. If Carlisle had done what was charged, he was acting against England’s colonial goals to turn Indians away from Spanish alliances, convert them to Protestantism, and gain their trust and friendship through cooperative trade.57 Carlisle was not the only one responsible for turning Guiana natives into Barbados slaves. In 1629, Robert Harcourt, the English patent holder for settling Guiana, took five indigenous people prisoner during a skirmish on the Wiapoco River. He then gave them to one Captain Ellinger for his service in the battle, and Ellinger then sold them as slaves in Barbados.58 Even at this early date, Ellinger knew there was a market for Indian slaves on Barbados. Evaluating Tropes and Recreating Experience Legal records, deeds, contracts and other property transactions from the collection of Recopied Deeds at the Barbados Archives can help us try to recreate the lives of at least some of the Indian slaves on the island. I have interpreted the type of labor they might have performed based on the acreage, location, and equipment listed. The deeds, which already represent a privileged group of people, reveal connections between the owners of Indian slaves and might suggest both connections and employment used to procure them. With them we can compare archival evidence to the ethnographies of Carib and Arawak slaves presented by du Tertre, de Rochefort, and Ligon to see how the practice of Indian slavery endured and changed through the seventeenth century. The legal status of Indian slaves in the early years of Barbados remains ambiguous. As they regarded them as heathens, masters may have treated them similarly to African slaves, but as they were potential converts, masters may have treated them more similarly to “Christian servants.” Indentured servants were the dominant laboring group of Barbados until midcentury. Many came from Ireland as well as England. They cultivated the experimental tobacco, cotton, and indigo plantations of the 1630s and 1640s.59 Christianity and contracts were the two signifiers that differentiated the indentured servants from Indian and African slaves, even though they shared close living quarters and material culture throughout this early period.60 It was understood that Christians could not serve in perpetuity, although transported criminals serving life sentences were exceptions.61 Deeds and leases from the period often list the names of each servant along with the number of “years left to serve” on their contracts, which could span anywhere from three to ten years.62 Other “servants” from this early period, however, appear in the record without the benefit of a contract or time limit attached to their service. Such is the case of an Indian woman who appears on the inventory of William Dotting, a member of Governor Henry Hawley’s council.63 In 1634 Dotting leased his nine muskets, pots, kettles, kitchen supplies, and servants to Barnard Jemott. There were “five servants Indentures” (including a steward and an overseer) and “an Indian woman servant.” Dotting was thus leasing the contracts of the five servants to Jemott while leasing the person of the Indian woman, who had no such contract or indenture.64 Indians who were slaves in practice soon became slaves in law. According to the Memoires of the first Settlement of the Island of Barbados, in 1636 it was “resolved by the Council, that Negroes and Indians, that came here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was before made to the contrary.”65 Perhaps the resolution of the Council came about because African and Indian servants pressured their masters into clarifying their ambiguous and uncodified position. Unfortunately, in the absence of a contract, and the interests of the island being the interests of the planter, the council condemned both groups to serve in perpetuity. It is also unknown how many slaves, if any, either African or indigenous, had the type of contracts that would have exempted them. Although I found no examples of Indian or African servants with a contract in Barbados, Dunn found an Indian slave (from Barbados) with a ten-year contract once sold to live in Massachusetts.66 This 1648 Bill of Sale for “one Indian man called Hope” followed “the Orders and Customs of English servants in the said Iland [Barbados], both for maintenance, and other recompense, for and during the full Terme of ten yeares from the day of the date here of.”67 In this case, Hope’s new masters were instructed to treat him on terms similar to a Christian indentured servant, serving no more than a period of ten years. In the 1630s and 1640s, the condition of servants and slaves, whether Indian or African, in all English colonies was still “elastic,” based on the particular nature of the contract (or lack of one) rather than a set of rigid laws for each ethnic group.68 As late as 1655, the ambiguous nomenclature “servant” persisted for Indians, although it seemed to refer more specifically to those possessing an indenture. Owner George Sanders rented out his “Servants and other goods and chattel” to Captain Robert Rumbell, including “one Indian man servant named George Johnson, One Negro man by name Owen, One negro Woman by name Mattie with the Increase of what children she shall produce or being forth during the tearme if she shall live[,] Two negro children one boy one girl by name Owen and Moll who are to be returned at the end of the tearme if then living.”69 In this example, George Johnson was called a “man servant,” while the other slaves of African descent had no such title. Johnson’s listing with both a given name and a surname suggests that he may have been the son of an Indian and a Christian servant. Johnson may have used his religious affiliation or parentage to his advantage when claiming his status as an indentured servant. In contrast, the document clearly determined that Mattie’s children would follow the condition of their enslaved mother. After the Barbados council decided in 1636 that “Indians and Negros” should be enslaved for life unless a contract was provided, both Indian and black slaves became subject to the same legislation regulating slavery. Tellingly, the index to the Barbados Laws and Acts printed for Richard Hall in London in 1764, indicates that for all laws passed regarding “Indians” one should “see Slaves.” Throughout the seventeenth century, the Barbados Assembly passed more ordinances regulating the increasing population of “Negros and other slaves.” The council minutes reveal intense debates about how slaves should be inherited, whether as chattel or real estate, or both. The council minutes do not show how these debates were resolved, but as Indians were most certainly the “other slaves” encompassed in the slave codes, they and their progeny were also subject to treatment as either chattel property or real estate, and were inherited as such.70 The unified code to govern all slaves indicates that there was no class difference between African slaves and Indian slaves, but there may have been class differences in those who owned Indians, as suggested by both Ligon’s and du Tertre’s narratives about Indian fishermen.71 Like William Dotting, the council member who owned the first Indian slave to appear in the deeds, men of high rank and connections appear frequently in the archival material. Of the set of deeds and leases that explicitly sell Indian slaves (see table 1), nine of the original owners are captains, majors, or esquires, and seven of the purchasers have similar honorifics. Members of Barbados’s governing elite owned Indian slaves, including the proprietor Earl of Carlisle’s cousins, Peter and Archibald Hay. Carlisle had appointed Archibald Hay (along with James Hay) as trustee of the island and Peter Hay as receiver general, in charge of collecting customs, rents, and revenues. In August 1643, Peter sold “all my Christian and negro servants, both men women and children, with one Indian, two mares and one coult with all the profitt produce or incrase that shall happen to arise or bee made of them” to Archibald.72 This deed confirms the elite networks of plantation property transactions and that there was little legal difference to these colonists in matters of livestock, African slaves, or Indian slaves changing hands. This document also supports Powell’s and Courteen’s accusations that members of the Earl of Carlisle’s government were responsible for enslaving Indians. Under the Carlisle administration, Indians were no longer ambiguously positioned laborers but slaves whose lineage was, like animals, owned in perpetuity. Sir Peter Hay’s slaves, “Culley a negro” and “Jug an Indian,” were bought and sold together throughout their lives, perhaps demonstrating an equality of status between them. Peter Hay’s frequent sales of property, including the initial sale of Culley and Jug to Captain William Page in 1641, communicate his financial desperation.73 Culley and Jug were included in the sale of Hay’s entire plantation: one hundred acres of land (most likely for tobacco production), four indentured servants, six other indentured servants, an unnamed thirteen “Negros”; “Culley a negro” and “Jug an Indian” were listed separately from the other laborers.74 Neither Culley nor Jug had contracts listed, but they may have had skilled positions to warrant their separate listing from the other anonymous slaves. Culley and Jug remained together throughout the vicissitudes of the unsteady economy of Barbados in the first half of the seventeenth century. Captain William Page needed to sell Hay’s plantation, including the two slaves, almost as soon as he had acquired it.75 Then Hay sold it again four years later. By the time of sale, all of the thirteen anonymous slaves were gone, but Hay sold one hundred acres with “one negro and one Indian” to a London gentleman. The continuity of the separate listing indicates these were Culley and Jug. If they were specially skilled or prized, however, it was clearly not because one of their ethnic groups was favored over another for their usefulness. And if Jug, whether stereotyped as a proud Carib or a miserable Arawak, had ever scoffed at his association with Culley, it mattered little to those who reduced both men to chattel. The other anonymous slaves had probably been sold in advance of the land in order to recoup some of the losses generated by investing in a failing plantation. Slaves were ready credit in Barbados; a sailor reported that Barbadians sold slaves the way that men in England sold sheep.76 In terms of value, one court’s appraisal deemed slaves of indigenous origin equal to those shipped from Africa. In 1645 Edmund Reade’s court on Barbados seized an Indian slave for damages in a case against Captain James Futter and his partners. The court appraised his Indian slave at the price of 2,500 pounds of tobacco. This is the same price for which merchants sold African slaves in Barbados, according to price lists from the previous year.77 The appraisal of the island authorities, therefore, did not reflect the stereotypes of weakness, haughtiness, or resistance to work that appeared in du Tertre, Ligon, or de Rochefort. Indeed, the reputation of indigenous Caribbean slaves, as equal in value to African slaves, was a durable one that lasted until the eighteenth century.78 Especially in Barbados, where the isolating geography of a small island was coupled with a flat, open topography, slaves could not as easily form maroon communities, and nor did Indian slaves benefit from an indigenous-controlled frontier.79 Indian slaves in Barbados were less of a flight risk than in other colonies, another reason for their being comparable in value to black slaves. Indians Slaves in the Sugar Boom The late 1640s saw a decisive shift away from cotton, tobacco, and indigo cultivation toward sugar production. The Anglo-Dutch trade connections that established Barbados had given the Earl of Carlisle hopes of marketing Barbados tobacco in both England and the Netherlands.80 Although the Dutch could not sell the island’s “evil smelling” tobacco,81 Dutch planters, with experience from Pernambuco, might have taught the “English the Art of making of Suger.”82 The composition of Barbados plantations shifted from the carding houses of cotton production to the boiling houses, engines, and coppers for sugar. Anglo-Dutch trade made Barbados a cosmopolitan island by the 1650s, “in habited with all sortes: with English: french: D[ut]ch: Scotes: Irrish: Spaniards thay being Jues: with Ingones: and Miserabell Negros Borne to perpetuall slavery.”83 With one exception, the nine properties that listed Indian slaves from 1654 to 1662 were all sugar plantations, as indicated by the equipment.84 Although this provides only circumstantial evidence that Indians worked in the fields along with African slaves, it does show that Indian slaves contributed to the juggernaut of sugar production. Indian slaves may have also aided the mercantile transactions of the Barbados economy. In 1654, the merchant Peter Hancock sold 160 square feet, a shed, and the “court house” located near the Indian Bridge to John Hancock. The labor force included “one Indian named Sampson one negro man named King one negro Boy called Peg: One Smith named John Mountfield one sawyer named John Stafford one man servant named Howlett one boy called John.”85 The location of the property was near the main port of call: the Indian Bridge was over the Careenage inlet of Carlisle Bay. The location, and relatively small workforce, including both a smith and sawyer, indicate that this property was perhaps involved with the import and cutting of lumber, which Barbadians imported from Guiana.86 The presence of Indian slaves on properties such as these, in addition to tobacco plantations and sugar plantations, demonstrates that Indian labor was not tied to specific skill sets but rather evolved to accommodate the demands of the Barbados economy. In 1650, Governor Willoughby sent colonists to join a small settlement on the Suriname River in Guiana where they could expand sugar production and engage directly with the Caribs in trade, much like the Dutch at Essequibo. George Warren, a visitor in Surinam, wrote that the surrounding Caribs “take Prisoners . . . who they preserve for Slaves, and sell them for Trifles to the English.”87 After the Navigation Acts of 1651, both English and Dutch trade policy suggested that colonists court friendly Indian nations, instead of each other, to buttress their trade and military power. After the English took Jamaica in 1655, Cromwell’s government proposed that the English in the Caribbean should renew interest in befriending Carib Indians, soliciting them in their fight against mutual enemies, namely the Spanish, and implicitly the Dutch.88 The First Anglo-Dutch War did not effectively alter the trade between the Dutch and the English in the Caribbean,89 but during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in 1667, the Dutch conquered Surinam using allied Arawak forces, and English colonists solicited Carib trade partners as allies. During this war, the English also courted the Kalinago after decades of testy relationships with them. In 1668, the Kalinago of St. Vincent demanded that the English return their Indian captives on Barbados in exchange for their allegiance.90 It is unlikely that these treaty conditions ever came to fruition, however, considering that these captives had most likely become the property of Barbados colonists. The Second Anglo-Dutch War pitted the English and Carib against the Dutch and Arawak. This gave Barbadian colonists the legal cover of a just war to capture Arawaks and turn them into slaves, even after they had capitulated to the Dutch in Surinam. In 1668, the Dutch caught twenty English soldiers from Barbados with instructions from English Governor William Willoughby to wage a war against the Arawaks.91 The Dutch accused them of breaking the Treaty of Breda, as well as using the war to cover slave-raiding activities.92 Two years later, a captain during the Anglo-Dutch wars, Peter Wroth, sold a group of three slaves including “Semo, an Indian” on Barbados.93 During the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74), the Barbados government commissioned Wroth again to run a reconnaissance mission along the Guiana coast, where he took the opportunity to capture Indians. King Charles II told Governor Atkins of Barbados that these Indians needed to be sent back, praying that “a fair coreespondence should be preserved between the Caribbee Indians and the English and that the provocation should be avoided which the detention of these Indian would in all likelihood prove.”94 Indian slavery not only undermined English rhetoric, but had the potential to destabilize Barbados’s previously secure position away from islands and coastal areas populated by indigenous peoples. Despite the Crown’s admonishment of Wroth and the stop on imports of North American Indians in 1676, the Barbados legislator did not forbid the import of any and all Indian slaves until 1688. In that year, the Barbados legislature passed a bill entitled the “Act for securing the possession of Negroes and slaves.” Most of the text is an attempt to stop the smuggling of black slaves, circumventing the Royal African Company. The end of the act reads: “All persons whatsoever are prohibited to bring sell and dispose of any Indians to this Island upon paine of forfeiting the same unto his Ma[jes]tie.”95 The Council Minutes reveal that they added the stipulation regarding Indian slaves in order to “fully meet with the safety of the People of this Island.”96 This did not make owning Indians already in Barbados illegal, however. A deed from 1701 shows that “Jack Indian” was sold along with the forty-seven other slaves on the plantation of John and Elizabeth Stuart.97 Conclusions Barbadian colonists capitalized on indigenous and colonial warfare in Guiana, transforming indigenous captives into Indian slaves. Barbados, an island both uninhabited and unimportant to Caribbean natives, thus enjoyed an unparalleled security from Indian war coupled with access to war captives. Authors of seventeenth-century ethnographies discouraged the use of Indian slave labor, often using negative stereotypes about their demeanor. Despite these stereotypes, the governing and military elite of Barbados modeled a surprising demand for Indian slaves. On Barbados, imported slaves of both American and African origin were isolated from their own societies; they worked and lived together on plantations performing a wide variety of economic activities, not strictly limited by either native skill set or gender expectations. After sugar production took hold on the island, Indian slaves, included with African slaves under law, suffered from similar degraded social and legal positions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Omohundro Institute conference “Political Arithmatik,” 17 March 2012, and at the AiO-Club at the University of Amsterdam, 15 January 2013. The author would like to thank the participants of both, especially Alejandro Cañeque, Holly Brewer, Justin Roberts, Suze Zijlstra, and Henk van Nierop for their comments. She also thanks Christopher L. Brown, Arne Bialuschewski, and the anonymous readers for Ethnohistory for their careful reading and suggestions on later drafts. 1 Benjamin Worsley to [Duke of Buckingham?], “Paper [no. 9] on the importance of Jamaica and sugar, c. 1668,” page 244, copy in “The 1661 Notebook of John Locke,” entered under “Jamaica,” 215–19, 232–52, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Ms. Film 77. The author thanks Thomas Leng for sharing this source. 2 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 74 (quotation), 227. See also Handler, “Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados”; Handler, “Aspects of Amerindian Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century Barbados”; Breslaw, Tituba, 9. 3 Newman, New World of Labor. 4 Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted; Shaw, Everyday Life; Armstrong and Reilly, “Archaeology of Settler Farms.” 5 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 112. 6 Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 301–2. As Gallay notes, import records for Barbados, unfortunately, do not exist to verify this movement or the number of slaves involved. 7 Fisher, “‘Dangerous Designes.’” 8 Native North Americans did not arrive as slaves in the Caribbean until the Pequot Wars of 1637 sent at least seventeen Indians to Providence Island. See Fickes, “‘They Could Not Endure That Yoke,’” 61; Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief,’” 1038; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 31n57; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 227. 9 For Indian rebellions on Hispaniola, see Guitar, “Boiling It Down.” On St. Christopher the English massacred the Kalinago population in 1626 because they suspected that the Indians “did intend to kill them all.” John Hilton, “Relation of the first Settlement of St. Xtphers & Nevis,” 29 April 1675, British Library, London (hereafter BL), Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 503; “Copy Extracted from the Original of St Thomas Warner’s Commission for Govr of St. Christopher’s,” 29 September 1629, BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 15. 10 For examples of colonial-indigenous cooperation to secure the expansion of black slavery, see Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,” 35; Kars, “Cleansing the Land.” 11 Henry Winthrop to Emmanuel Downing, 22 August 1627, in Forbes, Winthrop Papers, 356–57. 12 Guitar, “Boiling It Down,” 42. 13 Breslaw, Tituba, 7. 14 Handler, “Amerindian Slave Population,” 38. 15 Beckles, “Kalinago (Carib) Resistance”; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 40; Breslaw, Tituba, 41; Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit, 184. 16 Benjamin Worsley to [Duke of Buckingham?], “Paper [no. 9] on the importance of Jamaica and sugar, c. 1668,” 244. 17 John Dunmore and Richard Chiswell, Catalogus librorum . . . instructissimarum bibliothecarum tum clarissimi doctissimique viri D. Doctoris Benjaminis Worsley (London, 1678), cited in Leng, Benjamin Worsley, 1. 18 Ligon, True and Exact History, 67. 19 Raleigh, Discoverie, 179. Raleigh’s focus on enslaved “daughters” may have contributed to the previous scholarly consensus that women made up the majority of Indian slaves even though male pearl divers constituted most of the island of Margarita’s slave population. See Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers,” 345–62. 20 Watson, Insatiable Appetites, 68–69. 21 Raleigh, Discoverie, 153. 22 [John Scott],“The Description of Guiana,” 1665, BL, Sloane Ms. 3662. 23 Keymis, Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, E Verso, Beinecke Rare Book and Manusript Library, Yale University. 24 Casas, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 10. 25 “Caribs” were grouped together because they were the enemies of the Spanish or Spanish-allied Arawak Indians. Rochefort wrote that the Spanish “imposer ce nom à toutes ces Nations, comment pourroit on prouver qu’elle l’eussent voulu accepter de la main de gens inconnus & ennemis.” Histoire naturelle, 346. On the political construction of “Carib” and “Arawak” tribes, see Whitehead, “Carib Ethnic Soldiering.” 26 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 47; Canny, “Protestant or Catholic Atlantic World?,” 112–13. 27 Charles de Rochefort to Classis van Amsterdam, 10 February 1649, Stadsarchief Amsterdam, 379.2.2.2.3.224, 6. 28 Rochefort, Histoire naturelle, 455–56. 29 Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:485–86. 30 Hughes, Versions of Blackness, 327. 31 Parrish, “Richard Ligon,” 212. 32 Ligon, True and Exact History, 72. 33 Ibid., 44. 34 Ligon’s story of Yarico was transformed into the opera “Inkle and Yarico” in the late eighteenth century and became more famous in the nineteenth century with a “sentimentalizing ‘anti-slavery’ version that moved the first scene . . . to the African coast.” See Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 259. 35 Ligon, True and Exact History, 67, 77–78. 36 Rochefort, Histoire naturelle, 531. 37 Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:484. 38 Ligon, True and Exact History, 77. 39 Ibid., 34–35. 40 Ibid., 92. 41 For “chores,” see Handler, “Aspects of Amerindian Ethnography,” 54; for female Irish domestic workers, see Breslaw, Tituba, 7; for “cassava for the daily consumption of the plantation,” see Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit, 184. 42 Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:486. 43 Ligon, True and Exact History, 77. 44 Ibid., 52. 45 Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:491–92. 46 Price, “Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen,” 1371. Molly Warsh has recently concluded that mixed African and Indian crews in the Spanish Caribbean had similar patterns of skilled knowledge dissemination. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers,” 345–62. 47 “A true State of the Case between the Heires and Assignes of Sir Willian Courten Knight, Deceased, and the late Earl of Carlisle, and Planters in the Island of Barbadoes, annexed to the Petition of William Courten Esquire, and others, exhibited in parliament,” BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 602. 48 Ligon, True and Exact History, 34–35, 44. 49 Drewet, Amerindian Stories, vi, 4–11. 50 Handler, “Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados,” 40. 51 [John Scott], “Description of Guiana,” c. 1668, BL, Sloane Ms. 3662. 52 Quoted in Handler, “Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados,” 41. 53 “A true State of the Case between the Heires and Assignes of Sir William Courten, Knight, Deceased, and the late Earl of Carlisle, and Planters in the Island of Barbados,” undated, BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 602. 54 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, xxvi. 55 “A true State of the Case,” BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 602. 56 Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 15–16. 57 “A true State of the Case,” BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 602. 58 “Extracts from a further deposition by John Ellinger, 10th/20th May 1631,” in Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement, 334–36. 59 Shaw, Everyday Life, 6. 60 Armstrong and Reilly, “Archaeology of Settler Farms.” 61 Europeans had established common-law traditions that Christians could not enslave each other, perhaps mirroring Islamic law that was more explicit in forbidding Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. See Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 81–84. For exception of transported criminals, see Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 8. 62 “Delivery of six servants for four years a piece,” 16 June 1641, Barbados Archives Recopied Deeds (hereafter BARD), RB 3/1, 891. Another deed has two French boys with seven years to serve each, 10 August 1640, BARD, RB 3/1, 945. For voluntary servants in Barbados between 1635 and 1680, the average term was 6.75 years. See Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 5. 63 Anonymous, “Memoirs of the First Settlement,” 206. 64 Inventory of William Dotin’s Goods in Custody of Barnard Jemott, 27 May 1634 (entered 9 August 1649), BARD, RB 3/3, 593–94. 65 Anonymous, “Memoirs of the First Settlement,” 208. 66 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 228. 67 Bill of Sale between Susanna Winslow, Edward Winslow, and John Mainffort, in Forbes, Winthrop Papers, 196–97. 68 Fickes, “They Could Not Endure,” 77. See also Berlin, Generations of Captivity, chap. 1. 69 Indenture between George Sanders and Captain Robert Rumbell, 2 May 1655, BARD, RB 3/7, 43335. My emphasis. 70 “An Act declaring the Negro-Slaves of this Island to be Real Estates,” 29 April 1668, in Acts and Laws of Barbados (London, 1764), The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), Colonial Office 30/1, fol. 41. 71 Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:484–89, translated and quoted in Price, “Caribbean Fishing,” 1368. 72 Deed of Peter Hay to Archibald Hay, 25 August 1643 (entered 30 June 1644), BARD, RB 3/1, 34. My emphasis. 73 Peter Hay to Edward Lake, 8 July 1643, BARD, RB 3/1, 352. 74 Articles of Agreement Peter Hay, Esq to Captain William Page, 21 February 1641 (entered 16 February 1641), BARD, RB 3/1, 951–52. 75 Invoice of Appurtanences and Moveables which Capt William Page . . . sold . . . for the use of Mr. Edmund Keger, 23 October 1645 (entered 6 May 1650), BARD, RB 3/3, 722. 76 Henry Whistler, “A Jornall of a Voyadg from Stokes Bay: and Intened By gods asistant for the West Inga and prformed by the Rigt Honorable Generall Penn: Admirall,” 1654, BL, Sloane Ms. 3926. 77 Appraisal of Capt James Futter and partners John Reynals and Arthur Casson’s goods, 3 July 1645 (entered 15 July 1645), BARD, RB 3/1, 691. 78 In Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 309. 79 Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 184. 80 Puckrein, Little England, 40. 81 Agreement between Renold Allen and Lord Carlisle, 27 May 1641, BARD, RB 3/1, 852. 82 “An Account of the English Suger Plantations,” BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fol. 629. English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Jewish émigrés were also critical in disseminating sugar production. See Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 16. 83 Whistler, “A Jornall of a Voyadg from Stokes Bay,” 1654, BL, Sloane Ms. 3926. 84 For examples, see Deed Colonel William Hilliard to Colonel George Standfast, et al., 12 March 1653, BARD, RB 3/2, 638; “Deed transferred from William Baldwin Senior and William Baldwin Junior son of Thomas Baldwin,” 20 May 1654 (entered 9 June 1654), BARD, RB 3/2, 708–11. 85 Bill of Sale, Peter Hancock to John Hancock, 30 May 1654 (entered 16 June 1654), BARD, RB 3/2, 717–18. 86 Warren, Impartial Description, 16. 87 Ibid., 26. 88 “A Propostion for erecting a West India Company for the better interest of the commonwealth in America,” [c. 1655], BL, Egerton Ms. 2395, fols. 87–88. 89 Koot, “Adaptive Presence,” 69–76. 90 “Treaty concluded by ye Lord Willoughby wth ye Gov of ye Island of St. Vincents,” 23 March 1668, TNA, Colonial Office 260/3, 1 (ii). 91 “Instructions for Srgt Major William Neadham for this Present Voyage,” Barbados, 6 May 1668, Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg (hereafter ZA), Staten van Zeeland (SvZ) 2035.1-025; “Copie- Commissie van den Majoor Nedham, N1,” made in Suriname from the Original, written in Barbados, 1 May 1668, ZA, SvZ 2035.1-027. 92 “As to the persons who mention that tooke away five Indians from the river of Marrawijn, I know nothing of them. 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