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Cultural kinfolk: intercolonial relations in the revolutionary British West Indies

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Cultural kinfolk: intercolonial relations in the revolutionary British West Indies

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Content CULTURAL KINFOLK:
INTERCOLONIAL RELATIONS IN THE REVOLUTIONARY BRITISH WEST INDIES
by
Lydia Rae Sigismondi
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Lydia Rae Sigismondi

ii
For Andrew

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Although a history buff from a very young age, I never expected to become a historian. The daughter
of a working-class teacher and artist, I had zero concept of the graduate school process—and once I
ultimately understood the rules of academic competition, I never believed that I might be one of the lucky
recipients of its’ favor. And yet, I couldn’t shake my eagerness and passion to study the Americas in the
Early Modern world. I embarked on my surprising journey at the University of Southern California with
the utmost gratitude for the opportunity to study with its’ history department, and I leave this adventure
incredibly thankful for every second I got to learn from its’ professors and staff. Ultimately, I want to
emphasize that the importance of my receiving five years of funding from USC to pursue this project
cannot be overstated. I was also fortunate recipient of a one-year dissertation fellowship though the Early
Modern Studies Institute at the Henry E. Huntington Library. I am still pinching myself that I was paid for
six years to study history. I will forever feel like I won the lottery.
In my eyes, it is impossible to separate my academic journey from the influence of a few key
teachers. Mary Page, wherever you are, thank you for being such a grounding force in my life when I
really needed you. Ned Walpin, thank you for being a kindred spirit and the very first professor to make
me feel like I had something of intellectual value to say. Thank you, Dara Orenstein, for your brilliance
and good humor. Participating in academic seminars with David Silverman remains one of the most
singularly thrilling experiences of my life. His passion, rigor, and clarity lit a fire in me that changed my
career trajectory. Professor Silverman remains the shining example I seek to emulate every time I lead a
historical discussion.
During my time at USC, I have studied with many terrific professors. Thank you to Alice Echols and
Paul Lerner for being so generous with their time and wisdom, even though my work is decidedly outside
their fields. Thank you to Alice Baumgartner and Karen Halttunnen for serving as committee members
during the dissertation process. I adored every second I spent learning with Robin Derby at UCLA. Thank
you, Robin, for deepening my love for a region I have still not have the fortune to visit in person. Thank
you to Peter Mancall, Anne Goldgar, and Eliga Gould for serving as my dissertation committee. You have

iv
made this intimidating process extremely simple. I hope that my work has risen to the level of faith
you’ve shown in me. Anne has been particularly generous to me with her time and wisdom during several
long discussions throughout my time at USC.
I would not have finished this process without my advisor, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. A fellow east
coaster fixed in the California sunshine, Nathan has handled my persistent pessimism with kindness and
good humor. Thank you, Nathan, for always keeping this target in mind, especially when I was too
despondent to have eyes on the prize. To say nothing of the fact that you are incredibly, alarmingly, smart
and this dissertation has benefited immeasurably from that fact.
Personally, this past year has been hard. I became estranged from my family of origin in March of
2023 and my father died on September 1, 2023. I am trying to take comfort in the words of my
generation’s bard Taylor Swift and believe that “[y]ou know you're good when you can even do it with a
broken heart.”1 My beloved cat children, Frazier Huckleberry, and Daisy Mae, have happily stepped up to
fill any gap in familial love I might be receiving. Thank you, kitties, for your snuggles and your
companionship on many, many, all-nighters. Frazier, I promise I have all the time in the world to sit with
you now.
Properly, my highest thanks and greatest praise must be reserved for my husband, and best friend,
Andrew Holle. I have only been successful in this process because of Andrew’s love, faith, and
fundamental selflessness. He is the best person I know, and I work every day to make him proud. Thank
you, honey, for loving me so well.
1
“I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” Apple Music, track 13 on Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department: The
Anthology, Taylor Swift, 2024.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………..… ii
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………..... iii
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………. 1
BRITISH HONDURAS…………………………………………………………………………… 13
CHAPTER ONE: Edward Despard’s role-colored glasses: The limits of duty, diplomacy,
and evidence in colonial British Honduras………………………………………………….. 21
CHAPTER TWO: This colony isn’t big enough for both of us: Baymen versus Shoremen
in colonial British Honduras………………………………………………………………… 54
DOMINICA………………………………………………………………………………………. 85
CHAPTER THREE: “Nearly the same people”: Interethnic collaboration between Dominica
and neighboring French Islands…………………………………………………………….. 89
CHAPTER FOUR: A colonial hypothesis: Creole-Royalists and Creole Republicans………….. 126
1801 MILITARY CAMPAIGN………………………………………………………………….. 155
CHAPTER FIVE: The British Empire fails to feather its nest: Saint Croix, banking, and
the big picture……………………………………………………………………………… 161
CHAPTER SIX: The capture of Saint Eustatius: Colonial Audacity at the turn of the
Nineteenth Century………………………………………………………………………… 180
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………. 199
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..…… 205

1
INTRODUCTION
During the first three hundred years after the Columbian encounter, six empires attempted to
establish permanent settler colonies in the Caribbean region.2 Great Britain, Spain, France, the
Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden experienced varying levels of success with their imperial projects.3
Although their scope and purpose of their colonial projects sometimes differed, imperial states shared a
common interest in recruiting colonists to populate these tropical communities.4 However, individual
colonies, separated from their metropoles by both time and space developed their own distinct characters,
with some elements that resembled the metropole and others that differed significantly.
The physical distance between Caribbean colonies and Europe, combined with the West Indies’
unpredictable climate and endemic disease environment, formed Caribbean communities that could
2 To understand the motivations of major colonizing countries Spain, Britian, and France, see Anthony Pagden,
Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1492 - 1830 (New Haven London: Yale
University Press, 1998). For a broader introduction to the problem of legal expansion into the Americas see Lauren
Benton and Benjamin Straumann, “Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European
Practice,” Law and History Review 28, no. 1 (February 2010): 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248009990022
as well as David Armitage, “Introduction,” in Theories of Empire, 1450–1800, vol. 20, An Expanding World
(Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315236346.
3 The boundaries of the Pan-Caribbean region are contested between scholars. Some scholars would also include
Portugal as a colonizing nation because of Brazil. For an overview of the various configurations that can be found
within the term see Tracey Skelton, “The Pan-Caribbean: Diversity and Semblance,” in Introduction to the PanCaribbean (London: Routledge, 2014), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315832487. For a general history of the region
from a Pan-Caribbean perspective see Cleve McD. Scott, “Unity in Diversity?: A History of the Pan-Caribbean
Region from 1492 to the 1970s,” in Introduction to the Pan-Caribbean (London: Routledge, 2014),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315832487. Sweden was a late entrant into European Caribbean colonialism and there
is much less scholarship on the Swedish West Indies than the British, French, Spanish, Danish, or Dutch West
Indies. See Fredrik Thomasson, “The Caribbean Scorpion: The Saint-Barthélemy Archive and Swedish Colonial
Amnesia,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 24, no. 2 (July 1, 2020): 53–66,
https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604478.
4 As explained by imperial historian Christopher Bayly, “there have been three critical periods of particularly active
imperialism in modern European history.” The earliest wave, which Bayly defines as “Iberian and Dutch conquests
in the New World and Asia between 1520 and 1620,” and the second wave, “when European empires first seized
substantial territory…and brought the Atlantic slave system to its peak,” were defined by a settler colonialism that
required the sending of colonists to construct new communities. These new communities set the first and second
period apart from Bayly’s third period that “culminated with the Partition of Africa after 1878, the Russian conquest
of central Asia and the battle for concessions in China,” because by that point Europeans largely rejected the
prospect of moving abroad to new colonies. C.A. Bayly, “The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760–1830,” The
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 2 (May 1998): 28–47,
https://doi.org/10.1080/03086539808583023. To further explore the distinctions between the Settler Colonialism of
Bayly’s first two periods and the extractive colonialism of the third period see Lorenzo Veracini, “‘Settler
Colonialism’: Career of a Concept,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (June 1, 2013):
313–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2013.768099.

2
sometimes feel isolated during their worst crises.5 Ubiquitous shortages of foodstuffs and raw materials
led colonists to forge connections across island colonies to stave off personal or professional destruction,
even if that traffic was sometimes illegal in the eyes of their imperial sovereign.
6 The Caribbean region’s
primary economic structure, plantation agriculture, relied on coerced labor. As a result, slaveholding
colonists from all empires chased self-emancipated laborers across colonial borders to retrieve and
resubjugate them.
7
Initially, plantation owners relied on a mixture of enslaved and indentured laborer, but,
over time, the race-based and hereditary enslavement of peoples of African descent became the exclusive
5
In his exploration of death in the British West Indies, historian Vincent Brown explains how, “[d]eath was at the
center of social experience for everyone [on Jamaica] during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the death rate for the British in Jamaica exceeded 10 percent a year.” Jamaica
was not atypical in this respect. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic
Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), 13, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.07795.
6 As most land in Caribbean colonies was used to produce cash crops, food for subsistence had to be imported into
these communities. The persons who suffered the most from this were undoubtedly the enslaved people who
suffered the worst hunger. See Richard B. Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies
during and after the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 4 (October 1976): 615,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1921718. Sometimes, specific colonies, often Dutch ones, would become trading centers
where colonists could purchase goods outside of traditional imperial boundaries. Linda Marguerite Rupert and
ProQuest (Firm), Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2012). In his classic work, Sweetness and Power Anthropologist Sidney Mintz detailed the long
history of sugar and explained how its’ mass production led to hunger for those living in the Caribbean region.
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power : The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986),
https://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1478330&s
ite=ehost-live&scope=site. Historian Lauren Benton’s book discusses the extent of smuggling in the colonial
Western Hemisphere Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–
1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511988905. Another work
that discusses smuggling is Wim Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600-1800,” in Soundings in
Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830, 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). For a good broad overview of the history of disease in the Caribbean
see John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010),
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=313287.
7 Acts of self-emancipation were undoubtedly primarily motivated by a personal desire for freedom. Additionally,
however, Historian Sue Peabody explains how nations “sought to undermine their enemies by encouraging slaves to
escape, their freedom being guaranteed by the government. Spanish American territory was often a safe haven to
slaves under French, Dutch, or English control in the eighteenth century.” This provocative practice means that in
effect some empires were working against the interests of their own slaveholding colonists, who had an interest in
the preservation of slaveholding rights’ throughout various legal regimes. Sue Peabody, “Slavery, Freedom, and the
Law in the Atlantic World, 1420-1807,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3: AD 1420–AD 1804,
vol. 3, The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 623,
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521840682; Gad Heuman, ed., Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways,
Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London: Routledge, 1986),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203770733.

3
mode of labor used in the region.8 As such, all slaveholding colonists throughout the Caribbean region
had a vested interest in the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy, irrespective of which
empire their home island was aligned with.
9
As West Indian colonies developed away from European centers of power, island communities
experienced direct conflict with their metropoles, as the interests of colonists and their fellow countrymen
diverged.
10 While ongoing political, economic, and social revolutions were resulting in a Europe that was
changing at a previously unexperienced rate, the island colonies of the West Indies relied upon
consistency to maintain local order. These divergent approaches became an existential threat to West
Indian plantation owners within Britain’s empire once the Age of Revolutions began, as slaveholding
colonists began to doubt their nation’s permanent commitment to slavery.
11 However in the wake of the
8
In my view the best overview of the transition from indentured to enslaved labor in the British Caribbean is Simon
P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic, Kindle Edition.,
The Early Modern Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
9
I argue this because the entire Caribbean economic ecosystem was reliant on heritable race-based servitude which
itself was reliant on white supremacy as its’ modus operandi. Therefore, this statement also applies to slaveholders
of color who, although themselves may or may not phenotypically resemble those they held in bondage, relied on
white supremacy to hold enslaved persons in bondage and as slaveholders, their very existence reified a hierarchical
understanding of race.
10 Gabriel Paquette, The European Seaborne Empires, The European Seaborne Empires (Yale University Press,
2019), http://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300245271/html. Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects
and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190465810.001.0001; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World,
Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300133554;
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided : The American Revolution and the British Caribbean
(Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), http://archive.org/details/empiredividedame0000osha.
11 A fundamental historiographical debate in the history of slavery in the British West Indies is over the question of
the role that economics played in the abolition of slavery. On one side, the historian Eric Williams argues that the
abolition of slavery became possible explicitly because it was no longer profitable for the larger empire. On the
other hand, historians like Seymour Drescher argue that the abolition of slavery was primarily an expression of
morality emanating from the metropole outwards to the colonies. I personally subscribe to the Williams thesis rather
than Drescher’s thesis. However, I do argue in this dissertation that the pro-abolitionism movement coming from the
mainland had an impact on the psyche of the British Caribbean slaveholder. Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The Sugar
Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002). J. R.
Ward, “The British West Indies in the Age of Abolition, 1748–1815,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire:
Volume II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198205630.003.0019. David Brion Davis, “Capitalism, Abolitionism and
Hegemony,” in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara Lewis Solow
and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511572722; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Third Edition, Third Edition.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2021),
http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6507003; Richard B. Sheridan, “Eric Williams and
Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay,” in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery:
The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara Lewis Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge

4
American and Haitian Revolutions, slaveholding colonists’ mutual experience of shared anxiety over the
continued existence of plantation slavery, in addition to their mutual dread of facing violence at the hands
of those they held in bondage, was an experience that transcended colonial borders and imperial
overlords.12
There has been no one monograph that examines the broad category of intercolonial relationships
between Caribbean colonists in the Early Modern Atlantic World. However, many themes of West Indian
scholarship, including war, disease, trade, and maritime operation have been natural opportunities to
discuss intercolonial and interethnic relations in the Caribbean.13 Many scholars have examined colonies
aligned with several empires as individual parts of larger projects. Just because colonies belonging to
different empires are discussed doesn’t mean that scholars have necessarily focused on the relationships
that existed or developed among the colonists living on them.14 Historians of the Caribbean still have
University Press, 1988), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511572722; Sheridan; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and
Antislavery : British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective : The Second Anstey Memorial Lectures in the
University of Kent at Canterbury, 1984 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan, 1986),
http://archive.org/details/capitalismantisl0000dres; Seymour Drescher, “Capitalism and Slavery after Fifty Years,”
Slavery & Abolition 18, no. 3 (December 1997): 212–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/01440399708575219.
12 This is true even for slaveholders of color. David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2001), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw1d76k. Julius Sherrard
Scott and Marcus Rediker, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution,
Paperback edition (London New York: Verso, 2020).
13 Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World : Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century
Venezuela, Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of
North Carolina Press (Williamsburg, Virginia: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2018),
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1927727&authtype=sso&custid=s8983984;
Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2010),
https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807895887_jarvis; Adrian Finucane, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the
Struggle for Empire, The Temptations of Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),
https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812292756; Adrian J. Pearce, “Rescates and Anglo-Spanish Trade in the Caribbean
during the French Revolutionary Wars, ca. 1797-1804,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 3 (2006): 607–
24; C. Ernest Fayle et al., The Trade Winds: A Study of British Overseas Trade during the French Wars, 1793-1815,
ed. C. Northcote Parkinson (London: George Allen and Unwin LTD, 1948); Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The
Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983),
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.03163; Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
World,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830, ed. Bernard
Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea : Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American
Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987),
http://archive.org/details/betweendevildeep0000redi.
14 Trevor G. Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650 - 1820,
American Beginnings, 1500-1900 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015); Robert Forster, “Three
Slaveholders in the Antilles: Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Jamaica,” The Journal of Caribbean History 36, no. 1
(2002): 1–VII; James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the

5
much to learn and teach us about these inter-colonial and inter-imperial relationships, with all their
cultural complexities.
This dissertation is intended to be a first in-depth study of intercolonial relationships between
colonists aligned with varying empires during the Age of Revolution. It is built on three case studies
spread across the Caribbean over approximately two decades. The construction of the project aims to
confront rather than evade the inherent challenges of examining such a capacious yet potentially elusive
topic. One major challenge of taking on this subject is that most relationships between colonists of
different empires were covert or involved mobility, making them less visible in traditional sources. In
order to create a dense source base for the topic, I have therefore chosen to focus on moments in which
colonists from different empires were “captured audiences” of the British Empire, and consequentially,
when the empire would have fully expected and endorsed interethnic colonial communication. Focusing
on moments when the British empire captured foreign colonies also addresses another challenge—the
linguistic one. A full investigation of intercolonial relations in the colonial Caribbean would require
fluency in at least six languages. The captor’s English-language sources provides a significant degree of
access to colonists from all ethnic backgrounds and imperial allegiances. This dissertation’s scope is
limited to the period from 1783 to 1801, because this was a period when multiple empires frequently
employed colonial island seizure as a tactic in warfare, and questions of sovereignty, identity, and
belonging were explicitly on the political agenda. While this timeframe naturally limits the applicability
of my arguments, this dissertation aims to chart a method that could be used to analyze intercolonial
relationships during much of the duration of the colonial Caribbean’s history.
To understand intercolonial relationships between colonists aligned with different empires, this
dissertation takes inspiration from one historiographical vein of the imperial history of the Caribbean, that
Age of Revolution (Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=866865; Paquette, The European Seaborne Empires;
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World.

6
is, the study of the British occupation of colonies in the West Indies.15 However, this project is distinct
from much of that scholarship both in that it examines intercolonial relations outside of wartime and
attends to British colonists’ interactions with multiple empires. Each of the case studies that form this
dissertation is fruitful in itself for understanding how the wider forces of the Atlantic world affected, or in
some cases, failed to affect, relations between Caribbean colonists in individual settlements.16 Although
the geography and empires at plays were distinct, each case study shares similar circumstances in which
British colonists who, as a direct result of political choices made by leaders in Europe, were suddenly
sharing spaces with colonists who had previously been aligned with other empires. The official sanction
given to interethnic fraternization by the British imperial government is crucial for this project because,
although interethnic collaboration undoubtedly always existed throughout the West Indies, that
intercolonial dialogue was very rarely legal. In each of the cases I examine here, the British empire
accepted that the integration or possession of formerly “foreign” colonies necessitated a certain level of
interethnic intercourse amongst West Indian colonists, colonists likely felt freer in their communication
and documentation of these relationships than they would have done should those relations have remained
illegal. Finally, using British colonists as the throughline to examine intercolonial relationships in the
West Indies in the Age of Revolution gives access to their relations with wide swaths of Caribbean
colonists but with much of the documentation being in English or French.
When ‘Atlantic history’ took university departments by storm at the turn of the 21st century, scholars
of the early modern Americas cautioned their colleagues about misunderstandings that could arise from
15 Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of
North Carolina Press, 2018), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469645377_schneider.11; David Patrick
Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford : New York:
Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1982); Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, “Chapter Two. ‘Happy to Consider
Itself an Ancient British Possession’: The British Occupation of Martinique,” in Sweet Liberty (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 46–71, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203561.46; Peter M.R. Stirk, “The Concept of
Military Occupation in the Era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” Comparative Legal History 3,
no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 60–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/2049677X.2015.1041726.
16 Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History
39, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 615-630,951, http://dx.doi.org.libproxy1.usc.edu/10.1353/jsh.2006.0010

7
using an Atlantic framework.17 Some cautioned that, although ‘Atlantic history’ presumes a certain
hybridity in its’ analysis, in practice many academics produce work that is limited in scope to single
nations, empires, or languages. Rather than exclusively comparing empires, historians argued that
scholars should look between them to see the ways in which empires are ‘entangled’ or ‘connected.’18

Arguing that scholarship in the Caribbean needed to branch out from ‘the Plantation complex,’ historians
like Jesse Cromwell began exploring how, in the colonial West Indies, transitory professions like
smugglers, sailors, and soldiers also necessitated interactions with several empires in a single lifetime.19
Building on the work of these scholars, historian Jeppe Mulich developed the concept of an intercolonial
microregion, using the Danish West Indies as an illustration, to show how “interconnectedness through
exchanges, rivalries, and cooperation taking place across formal imperial and colonial boundaries.”20 The
work of scholars like these are representative of the ways Atlantic history has begun to consider how
people and goods traversed across political borders in the imperial Caribbean.
However, even as scholars’ new methods for probing the depths of the Atlantic framework break new
ground, the ‘new Atlantic studies’ remains limited due to its tendency to assume that academic questions
of national and imperial hybridity must be coupled with physical movement. By examining the
relationships between colonists living in stationary Caribbean settlements, settlements whose hybridity
was forced upon them, deux ex machina-like, by the choices of their imperial metropole, this dissertation
demonstrates how fundamental ethnic and national hybridity was to the quotidian experience of life in the
17 Nicholas Canny, “Atlantic History: What and Why?,” European Review 9, no. 4 (October 2001): 399–411,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798701000370; Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and
Opportunities,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–57, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.3.741;
David Prior, “After the Revolution: An Alternative Future for Atlantic History,” History Compass 12, no. 3 (March
2014): 300–309, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12145; Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A
Critical Appraisal (Cary, UNITED STATES: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008),
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=415101.
18 Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,”
The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–86.
19 Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World : Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century
Venezuela.
20 Jeppe Mulich, “Microregionalism and Intercolonial Relations: The Case of the Danish West Indies, 1730–1830,”
Journal of Global History 8, no. 1 (March 2013): 72–94, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000053.

8
late-eighteenth century British colonial Caribbean. Even if one were standing still, one could not escape
the touch of cross-imperial relations.
The British Caribbean colonists we meet in this dissertation were trying preserve the status quo of
their own local communities in a rapidly changing world. The American Revolution had already required
British colonists in the West Indies to choose between American republicanism or the British monarchy.21
Now, in the chaotic wake of the Revolution’s success, at least some British colonists perceived they had
shared interests with other West Indian colonists in preserving regional status quos, irrespective of the
empire to which their neighbors nominally belonged. Not only were there practical reasons for keeping
open the lines of communication between colonies, but as some of their fellow countrymen began to flirt
with republican ideology in both the Americas and Europe, there were political and economic incentives
for West Indian communities to remain open to each other. Aside from these pragmatic motivations, the
shared experience of feeling beset upon by abolitionist or republican voices in the metropoles encouraged
a kind of solidarity among West Indian slaveholders—including, in some cases, those who belonged to
different racial groups.
22 These new motivations made this era distinct from prior Global Seven Years’
War, explains historian David Bell as that war’s stakes had “remained relatively low. Neither Britian nor
France had any ambition of overthrowing the other’s king, to say nothing of its monarchy, or religion, or
social structure.”23 The improbable successes of the republican American, French, and Haitian
21 O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided.
22 Trevor Burnard, “Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period
of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 2 (June 2011): 185–98,
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2011.568231; Richard B. Sheridan, “Simon Taylor, Sugar Tycoon of Jamaica,
1740-1813,” Agricultural History 45, no. 4 (October 1971): 285–96; Christer Petley, “Gluttony, Excess, and the Fall
of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 85–106,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.637000; Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic
World; Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana : The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792-
1809 (Lafayette, La. : Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992),
http://archive.org/details/roadtolouisianas0000unse; Nathalie Dessens, “Saint-Domingue Refugees,” December 19,
2012, https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0107.
23 David Bell, “The First Total War? The Place of the Napoleonic Wars in the History of Warfare,” in The
Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. Volume 2, Fighting the Napoleonic Wars, ed. Bruno Colson and
Alexander Mikaberidze, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 671.

9
Revolutions had created a hemispheric environment in which any new future seemed possible, even as
slaveholders themselves desperately sought to keep their own societies intact.
Beginning in 1783, this dissertation’s first case looks at British Honduras, the longstanding but only
recently sanctioned Caribbean settlement on the Spanish mainland. In British Honduras, scholars have a
direct window into how a West Indian community grappled with the attempted implementation of ethnic
hybridity as a matter of imperial policy. The Spanish empire had granted this small community,
dominated by slaveholders, permission to remain on their seized lands in exchange for their agreeing to
absorb another illicit British commune, the Mosquito Shore, located in today’s Nicaragua. However,
despite the Shore migrants’ ostensible Britishness, as well as the many political and practical reasons why
their inclusion in British Honduras might in fact benefit the settlement, British Honduras’ original
colonists sought to socially dominate their new neighbors rather than welcome them. Local colonists’
hostility to the Shore migrants can be traced to migrants’ ethnic diversity and economic success, both of
which were perceived as a threat by the original Hondurans. However, Shore migrants had an ally in the
settlement’s Superintendent, Edward Despard, who in partnership with his local Spanish counterparts,
sought to shepherd his new charges into the community. Ultimately, the chapters focusing on British
Honduras show that a distinct moment of multiethnic community briefly existed in this corner of the
British West Indies before traditional colonial forces wrested back control.
The second case study turns to Britain’s final seizure of Dominica, a colony that had been traded
back and forth between empires for almost half a century, and the local colonial government’s almost
improbable success in keeping a largely French colony British. Geographically placed in the middle of the
Lesser Antilles, Dominica lay between the larger French colonies of Guadeloupe to the north and
Martinique to the South. In the wake of the American Revolution, Dominica’s unalterable location, as
well as it’s populace of largely French extraction, required British officials to govern the empire’s new
colony creatively. Their approach, which called for emphasizing the similarities between colonists of
European descent so they could together continue to dominate enslaved people of African descent,
resulted in a community that deemphasized colonists’ imperial allegiance and stressed commonalities in

10
political ideology. The government relied on this new strategy even more heavily after the outbreak of the
French Revolution in 1789. The political shockwaves French Republicans sent throughout Europe and the
West Indies necessitated that Caribbean colonists take sides on fundamental political questions like
sovereignty and white supremacy. Dominicans coalesced into two groups, Creole-Royalists and CreoleRepublicans, and sought to tie their colonial identity to their specific political leanings. Ultimately, the
chapters studying Dominica at the end of the eighteenth century shows how detached some West Indian
colonists had become from their allegiance to their ostensible home country during the Age of
Revolutions, as they began to place greater value on the cultural connections they held with other
Caribbean colonists rather than the civic ones they held with their fellow nationals.
This dissertation’s final case changes tack and examines two distinct stories that emerged during
Britain’s 1801 military campaign against the Northern Powers, which resulted locally in British troops
capturing the Danish and Swedish West Indies. Each story illustrates the extent to which Caribbean
colonists of varying ethnic backgrounds were socially and economically imbricated with each other at the
turn of the nineteenth century. In the fifth chapter, we see Britain launch a takeover of Denmark’s
Caribbean colonies without properly understanding that an attack on any West Indian colonist, regardless
of their imperial allegiance, would eventually touch their own subjects—and those subjects weren’t
necessarily eager to sacrifice their personal financial interests for the good of the empire. Similarly, in the
sixth chapter, colonists on British Saint Christopher took advantage of a wider British military campaign
to launch an unsanctioned invasion of Dutch Saint Eustatius, with the collaboration of Dutch neighbors,
an invasion distinctly within their own interest. Ultimately, these individual stories, both occurring in
1801, show that for some West Indian colonists aligned with the British at the turn of the nineteenth
century, the emotional pull of colonial sovereignty had lost a good deal of its’ power.
Subjecthood is a relationship.
24 Relationships are most meaningful when those within them value
each member. In the high-times of the earlier eighteenth century, Britain’s Caribbean subjects valued their
24 Muller, Subjects and Sovereign.

11
relationship with their empire due to the economic benefit that flowed from their connection to the mother
country.
25 During the American Revolution, British loyalist colonists in the West Indies were primarily
motivated to stay attached to their empire because of their belief that they needed British troops to protect
island colonies from insurrections by the enslaved.
26 However, in the period between the end of the
American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, some Caribbean colonists aligned with the British empire
no longer perceived being a part of the British empire as bringing colonists the same economic benefits,
and indeed some even came to perceive the empire as having neglected its basic obligations to them as
colonial subjects.
This dissertation demonstrates that colonists’ perception of an imbalance of benefits in the imperial
relations created a regional atmosphere of imperial questioning, in which some West Indian colonists
aligned with the British empire felt confident expressing their anger and frustration with the metropole as
well as a potential willingness to perhaps align themselves one day with a more favorable imperial
sovereign.27 Deeply connected to the empire’s own ambivalence over whether slavery ought to continue
in its colonies, this period of imperial questioning would largely end after 1806 with Britain’s abolition of
the transatlantic slave trade.
28 As with the Glorious Revolution a century earlier, or the recent American
25 Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between North America and the West Indies before the American
Revolution, 2nd ed. (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1968); Finucane, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain,
and the Struggle for Empire; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies (London: Routledge, 1963),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203061381; Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (Woodbridge,
Suffolk, UK ; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010); Adrian Leonard and David Pretel, eds., The Caribbean and the
Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650-1914, Cambridge Imperial and PostColonial Studies Series (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
26 O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American
Revolution (Dordrecht, Holland ; Providence, U.S.A. : Foris Publications, 1988),
http://archive.org/details/britishwestindie0000carr.
27 The extensive lobbying done by slaveholders in the ‘Age of Abolition’ is a well-documented historiographical
phenomenon which showcases what I am characterizing as ‘imperial questioning.’ David Lambert, “The CounterRevolutionary Atlantic: White West Indian Petitions and Proslavery Networks,” Social & Cultural Geography 6, no.
3 (June 2005): 405–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500111345; Christer Petley, “‘Devoted Islands’ and ‘That
Madman Wilberforce’: British Proslavery Patriotism During the Age of Abolition,” The Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 39, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 393–415, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2011.598744;
Christer Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic
Slaveholder,” Atlantic Studies 6, no. 1 (April 2009): 43–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810802696295.
28 As Historian Christopher Brown explains this period “between 1788 and 1806” when “opponents of the slave
trade and its defenders contended over its fate” has already been the subject of significant scholarship. This
scholarly interpretation is meant to build on those works. Christopher Leslie Brown, “The British Government and

12
one, Britain’s choice to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 was such a political controversy that
colonists living in the nation’s wider empire necessarily had to adopt either a pro-abolition or antiabolition perspective. If one was a slaveholding colonist in the Caribbean, after 1806 you either had to
accept the abolition of the slave trade and the likely eventually abolition of slavery in the British empire
or you either had to vote with your feet and move to an empire you believed would be more favorable to
slaveholding rights. Yet the fact that this period of imperial questioning came to a relatively abrupt end
does not make this period of instability was unimportant, or that its history should be consigned to
neglect. British colonists have often been figured as a critical element of stability in the revolutionary
Atlantic world, a loyal group who did not seriously question their place in the empire. Yet for a crucial
two decades in the midst of the age of revolutions, as men and women throughout the Atlantic world were
renegotiating the established social and political order, British and non-British colonists in the Caribbean
were actively reconsidering their own imperial alliances and allegiances. That these colonists ultimately
ended up remaining in the British imperial fold was not a sign of their lack of imagination, or their innate
conservatism, but a result of dynamic decisions that they made to remain aligned with Britain in a harsh
and rapidly changing world.
the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713-83,” Parliamentary History 26, no. 4 (2007): 27,
https://doi.org/10.1353/pah.2007.0030.

13
BRITISH HONDURAS
Setting the Scene: The 1783 Treaty of Versailles
The 1783 Treaty of Versailles provided the British empire with an opportunity to reset relations with
the Spanish crown.29 Ostensibly crafted to formally end the conflict over American Independence, the
terms of the treaty were also written to resolve several longstanding colonial issues between empires.30
One such conflict was that for almost a century, a small population of British colonists had occupied
various hodgepodge settlements along the Yucatan Peninsula on the Spanish mainland and successfully
avoided reprisal from local officials because the Spanish government located at Bacalar lacked the
manpower and political will needed to remove them from the continent.31 The British metropolitan
government surveyed the situation cynically “[w]hile publicly decrying the practice of cutting wood and
blaming it on the irresponsible actions of a few privateers, the authorities recognized that it was the most
lucrative means of increasing their treasury and at the same time harassing the Spaniards with whom they
were almost constantly at war.”32 Settlers of British descent wouldn’t have any legal protections “until
1763 [when] the settlement was given any recognized status and then the treaty only gave the right to cut
29 Historians Gabriel Paquette and Gonzalo Quintero Saravia argue “the main story” of the relationship between
Britain and Spain after 1783 “was the normalization of relations.” Gabriel Paquette and Gonzalo M. Quintero
Saravia, eds., Spain and the American Revolution: New Approaches and Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2019),
29, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444777. The two empires would next be at war in late 1796. However, areas of
tension occasionally surfaced between the British and Spanish empires during the intermittent period. Notably, the
Home Office spent time in 1789 & 90 warning British governmental officials in the Caribbean that an attack from
Spain might be imminent as a result to imperial disagreement over Spain’s refusal to return self-emancipated
enslaved people from Cuba to Jamaica. The attack never came.
30 The amount to which the British and French empires succeeded in accomplishing these goals varied over time.
Paquette and Saravia describe these five conflicts as: ownership over the Mississippi river; Florida’s boundaries;
commerce between the empires; “the status of several Amerindian polities;” and slavery. Paquette and Saravia, 26–
30. For an extended analysis of the treaty making process see Richard Brandon Morris, The Peacemakers; the Great
Powers and American Independence (New York, Harper & Row, 1965),
http://archive.org/details/peacemakersgrea00morr.
31 Although British Honduras wouldn’t become a traditional British colony until 1862, traces of British colonists had
existed on the Yucatan peninsula since the mid-seventeenth century. Originally involved in piracy, historian Nigel
Bolland explains that for local British settlers the “suppression of privateering that occurred after the Treaty of
Madrid in 1667 encouraged the shift from buccaneering and raiding to logwood cutting and settlement.” O. Nigel
Bolland, “The Social Structure and Social Relations of the Settlement in the Bay of Honduras (Belize) in the 18th
Century,” The Journal of Caribbean History 6 (May 1, 1973): 5. British Honduras became a settlement as a
provision of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles.
32 Alan K. Craig, “Logwood as a Factor in the Settlement of British Honduras,” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 1 (1969):
57.

14
logwood in a limited and ill-defined area.”33 The era of British evasion came to an abrupt conclusion on
September 15, 1779 when the governor of the local Spanish settlement at Bacalar ordered the settlement
at the Bay of Honduras to be destroyed and the settlers captured.34
Colonists were subjected to a series of
imprisonments: first at Bacalar (the closest Spanish fort), next at Merida (the seat of the local Spanish
governor), and finally, after a voyage across the Bay of Campeche, in Havana on Cuba. These ‘settlersof-war’ were released in 1782 and permitted to sail to nearby Jamaica. It was the terms of the 1783 Treaty
of Versailles that granted British settlers permission to return to British Honduras—as they agreed to
remain within certain geographic boundaries—in exchange for absorbing a separate collection of British
colonists who would surrender their own illicit settlements on the Mosquito Shore in what is now
Nicaragua.35
33 Bolland, “The Social Structure and Social Relations of the Settlement in the Bay of Honduras (Belize) in the 18th
Century,” 21.
34 Mavis Christine Campbell, Becoming Belize: A History of an Outpost of Empire Searching for Identity, 1528-
1823 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), chap. 7.
35 As Historian Frank Griffith Dawson explains, “In 1784 Sir Robert Liston was appointed English Minister
Plenipotentiary to Madrid…For Liston…surrendering the shore was a small price to pay for re-establishing good
relations with Spain and dissuading it from joining a French-Dutch alliance. Eventually…enlarging the Belizean
lumbering area while permitting mahogany cutting. In addition Belizeans were allowed to occupy St. George’s Key
and other islands as long as they were not fortified, and to fish and grown food for their won use. Spain’s
concessions in Belize, however, were purchased by Liston’s agreement to the complete evacuation of the shore.”
Frank Griffith Dawson, “The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786-1800,”
The Americas 55, no. 1 (July 1998): 67–68, https://doi.org/10.2307/1008294. The final text of the 6th article of the
1783 Treaty of Versailles would read: “Article VI. The intention of the two high contracting parties being to
prevent, as much as possible, all the causes of complaint and misunderstanding heretofore occasioned by the cutting
of wood for dying, or logwood; and several English settlements having been formed and extended, under that
pretence upon the Spanish continent; it is expressly agreed that his Britannick Majesty’s subjects shall have the right
of cutting, loading, and carrying away Logwood, in the district lying between the Rivers Wallis or Bellize, and Rio
Hondo, taking the course of the said two rivers for unalterable boundaries, so as that the navigation of them be
common to both nations, to wit, by the River Wallis or Bellize, from the sea, ascending as far as opposite to a Lake
or Inlet which runs into the Land, and forms an isthmus, or neck, with another similar inlet, which comes from the
side of Rio-Neuvo or New River; so that the lie of separation shall pass strait across the said isthmus, and meet
another lake formed by the water of Rio-Neuvo, or New River, at its current. The said line shall continue with the
course of Rio-Neuvo, descending as far as opposite to a river, the source of which is marked in the map, between
Rio-Neuvo and Rio-Hondo, and which empties itself into Rio-Hondo’ which River shall also serve as a common
boundary as far as its junction with Rio-Hondo; and from thence descending by Rio-Hondo to the Sea, as the whole
is marked on the map which the plenipotentiaries of the two crowns have thought proper to make use of, for
ascertaining the points agreed upon, to the end that a good correspondence may rein between the two nations, and
that the English workmen, cutters and labourers may not trespass from an uncertainty of the boundaries. The
respective commissaries shall fix upon convenient places in the territory above marked out, in order that his
Britannick Majesty’s Subjects, employed in the felling of logwood, may, without interruption, build therein Houses
and magazines necessary for themselves, their families and their effects; and his Catholick Majesty assures to them
the enjoyment of all that is expressed in the present article; provided that these stipulations shall not be considered as
derogating in any wise from his rights of sovereignty. Therefore all the English, who may dispersed in any other

15
As these unique British settlements were physically inside of the American Spanish mainland, they
were on the margins of larger British West Indies. If we view the Yucatan Peninsula, Central, and South
America and the Caribbean islands together as forming a wide oval, the British settlements at the Bay of
Honduras and the Mosquito Shore lay on the oval’s far left side. As a result of the Yucatan peninsula
jutting out into the Caribbean Sea, two bays fall alongside it: the Bay of Campeche, which falls outside
the region’s wide oval, and the Bay of Honduras, which forms the oval’s left loaf end. Naturally
possessing a rough and craggily coastline, the settlements that would become British Honduras originally
began on small local islands (called ‘Cays’ or ‘Keys’) scattered off the Bay’s coastline. By the 1770s, the
largest of these, St. George’s Key, “was the most thriving place of the settlement.”36 Saint George’s Key
laid just offshore from ‘the Haulover,’ the small coastal community that existed alongside the banks of the
river Belize, which flowed into the Bay of Honduras. Most of the action in my first two chapters will take
place at ‘the Haulover,’ but we will also follow officials as they travel throughout the dense wilderness in
their efforts to manage the territory.
The original locations of the Mosquito Shore settlements, whose settlers British Honduras would be
forced to incorporate into their community at ‘the Haulover’ in the wake of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles,
can also be located using the Bay of Honduras. If we picture the Bay as a horseshoe, whereas ‘St.
George’s Key’ and ‘the Haulover’ would be found roughly halfway up the left side, the largest Mosquito
parts, whether on the Spanish continent, or in any of the islands whatsoever, dependent on the aforesaid Spanish
continent, and for whatever reason it might be, without exception, shall retire within the district which has been
above described, in the space of eighteenth months, to be computed from the exchange of the ratifications; and for
this purpose orders shall be issued on the part of his Brittanick majesty and on that of his catholic majesty, his
governors shall be ordered to grant to the English dispers’d every convenience possible for removing to the
settlement agreed upon by the present article, or for their retiring wherever they shall think proper. It is likewise
stipulated, that if any fortifications should actually have been heretofore erected within the limits marked out, his
Britannick majesty shall cause them all to be demolished; and he will order his subjects not to build any new ones.
The English inhabitants, who shall settle there for the cutting of Logwood, shall be permitted to enjoy a free fishery
for their subsistence, on the coasts of the district above agree on, or of the islands situated opposite thereto, without
being in any wise disturbed on that account provided they do not establish themselves, in any manner, on the said
islands.” Great Britain and Spain, The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship, between His Britannick Majesty,
and the King of Spain. Signed at Versailles, the 3d of September, 1783. Published by Authority (London: Printed by
T. Harrison and S. Brooke, in Warwick-Lane, 1783), 11–13, https://link-galecom.libproxy2.usc.edu/apps/doc/CB0129961803/ECCO?u=usocal_main&sid=primo&xid=04c3ed74&pg=1.
36 Mavis C. Campbell, “St George’s Cay: Genesis of the British Settlement of Belize -- Anglo-Spanish Rivalry,”
Journal of Caribbean History 37, no. 2 (December 2003): 181.

16
Shore community, named Black River, could be found at the tip of the horseshoe’s right side.37 Where the
horseshoe ends and begins to turn southward is at the Cape Gracias a Dios. This area, in what is now the
eastern region of Nicaragua, is referred to as ‘the Atlantic Coast.’38 Similarly to British Honduras, which
relied on the region’s coastline, “almost 90 percent of the waters of all the rivers in Nicaragua…run
through the Atlantic Coast…This vast and abundant fluvial system has traditionally been a way of life and
a means of transportation for the coast population.”39 According to historian Daniel Mendiola, “The name
Mosquito applies generally to the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape Gracias a Dios region who spoke a
Misumalpan, Macro-Chibchan language with South American roots.”
40 Over time the Mosquito
community formed friendly relationships with British sailors and traders who made their way to the
region. After “the integration of shipwrecked Africans near Cape Gracias a Dios in 1641” the Mosquito
community became multiracial. 41 The alliance between the local population and the British empire
strengthened “since at least 1687 when their principal chief was crowned in Jamaica by the Duke of
Albemarle as King Jeremy. Thereafter each new Mosquito king was crowned either in Jamaica or
Belize…while the alliance was kept lubricated by English arms, rum, and trade goods.”42 In 1757, the
first Superintendent of the ‘Mosquito Shore’ Robert Hodgson calculated the “Shore’s total ‘British’
population, excluding military and free Indians [to be] 1,124, of which 800 were Indian and African
slaves, 170 were mulatto or mestizo freedmen, and 154 were white, all scattered in small groups.”43 The
alliance between the Mosquito monarchy and the British ended in 1783 when, despite the Mosquito’s
37 Frank Griffith Dawson, “William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in
Central America, 1732-87,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 4 (1983): 677–706.
38 Carlos María Vilas, State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua: Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary
Change on the Atlantic Coast (Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1989), 1, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.03843.
39 Vilas, 1.
40 Daniel Mendiola, “The Rise of the Mosquito Kingdom in Central America’s Caribbean Borderlands: Sources,
Questions, and Enduring Myths,” History Compass 16, no. 1 (2018): 2, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12437.
41 Karl H. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu: The Colonial Origins and Geography of Intra-Miskitu
Differentiation in Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras,” Ethnohistory 49, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 320,
https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-49-2-319.
42 Dawson, “The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786-1800,” 64–65.
43 Dawson, “William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central
America, 1732-87,” 688.

17
objection to their new Spanish overlords, “the shore became a minor pawn in more important territorial
exchanges agreed upon in the 1783 Versailles Treaty.”44
The unique historical circumstances which guided the development of British communities in
Spanish America had the result of creating communities that differed from Britian’s other Caribbean
colonies. The settlements at British Honduras and the Mosquito Shore were distinct in their empire
resulting from their differing economic spheres. The economy of most colonies in the British West Indies
was organized around plantation agriculture, which enabled some planters to own vast tracts of land to
grow cash crops that were then sold back to the metropole at heightened prices under a protectionist trade
monopoly. Free colonists who were not planters made their living by plying a trade or as hired overseers
of enslaved labor—but the plantation itself was the bedrock of these communities.
45 The economy of
British settlements on the Spanish mainland, on the other hand, rested on the extraction of natural
resources from the local environment. The settlers of British Honduras, both before and after they
received sanction to remain on the continent, primarily supported themselves by chopping down
dyewoods, especially logwood.46
Although the historiography of central America has sometimes claimed
that settlers on the Mosquito Shore were also loggers, historical geographer Karl H. Offen argues
definitively that it is unlikely to be correct. Instead, Offen argues, the evidence shows that the major
exports of the region were mahogany, sarsaparilla, and turtle shells, as well as various sundry items that
could be acquired through trade with the Spanish or British.47
Although the British settlements on the Spanish mainland shared an economic reality, the
communities’ populations were distinct. Whereas colonists at the Bay of Honduras largely descended
44 Dawson, 701.
45 Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves.
46 David Morgan McJunkin, “Logwood: An Inquiry into the Historical Biogeography of Haematoxylum
Campechianum L. and Related Dyewoods of the Neotropics” (Ph.D., United States -- California, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1991), https://www.proquest.com/docview/303932948/abstract/48EE3F90A1F444A6PQ/1;
A. M. Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Essays in the History of
Modern Europe, ed. Donald McKay, 2nd ed., Essay Index Reprint Series (Freeport, New York: Harper & Row,
1968); Craig, “Logwood as a Factor in the Settlement of British Honduras.”
47 Karl H. Offen, “British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 80, no. 1 (February 1, 2000): 113–36, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-80-1-113.

18
from colonists of British ethnicities, the communities on the Mosquito Shore, the largest being Black
River, were multiracial.48 As these communities served a key economic role as the tenuous bridge
between the British and Spanish empires, settlers of color in Nicaragua reached a level of economic
comfort that wasn’t largely available to people of color elsewhere in the British West Indies. These unique
historical circumstances had the result that, overall, the incoming settlers of color from the Mosquito
Shore were the peers or even economically better off than the colonists they were joining.49
It is not surprising that these two distinct settler communities, those living at British Honduras
hereafter referred at as ‘the Baymen,’ and those living on the Mosquito Shore, hereafter referred to as ‘the
Shoreman,’ had trouble coalescing into a single community. What is surprising however, is that the man
appointed to supervise the process, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, believed it to be possible.
The following chapters look at one process, the forced integration of the Mosquito ‘Shoremen’ into
the community at British Honduras, from two perspectives. The first chapter is told from the perspective
of Superintendent Despard and his Spanish counterparts who had to enforce the transition. The second
chapter reverses the view and instead takes the perspective of the ‘the Baymen,’ who, from their
perspective, had to endure it. By examining this single story in this double way, we can see how colonial
leaders like Despard and his Spanish counterparts understood the inherent obligations of colonial
sovereignty in the British West Indies in an entirely different way than did the ‘Baymen’ colonists in
British Honduras.
48 Dawson, “William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central
America, 1732-87”; Dawson, “The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786-
1800”; Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu”; Caroline A. Williams, “Living Between Empires: Diplomacy and
Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Mosquitia,” The Americas 70, no. 2 (October 2013): 237–68,
https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.2013.0116; Adrian J Pearce, British Trade with Spanish America, 1763-1808, 2014,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv1qp9gbs.
49 James Lawrie, the British superintendent of the Mosquito Shore as the British settlement was evacuated, prepared
an astonishing, meticulous census of Mosquito Shore immigrants in October 1786. Lawrie lists each colonist by full
name as well the number of enslaved people, cattle, horses, sheep, “pit pans,” and framed houses that colonist
owned. Notably, there is a small portion of the census devoted to “free negroes” although most individuals listed
there are only referred to by their first names. Lawrie also took the time to designate which areas of the Mosquito
Shore each colonist came from, the most populated town by far being Black River. The total free population of 448
settlers possessed 1, 891 enslaved people, 415 cattle, 130 horses, 163 sheep, 305 “pit pans,” and 19 framed houses.
Overall, this group of settlers was financially comfortable. “Jamaica: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 3
Dec 1785 Dec 3 - 8 Nov 1787” (December 3, 1785), 164, CO. 137, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

19
For this case study of British Honduras, the primary source base is the first-person accounts of events
at British Honduras written by colonists or officials stationed on the Yucatan peninsula and held as part of
the Colonial Office archive at the UK National Archives.50 In order to construct a cultural history of
British Honduras in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, I employ methodologies like reading against
the grain and thick description to bring the historic narrative as close to the ground as possible. Although
Despard’s fastidiousness was a thorn in the side of the Colonial Office, it is indisputable that this project
has greatly benefited from his conscientiousness. In his correspondences, both with the Colonial Office
and his Spanish counterparts, Despard is descriptive, earnest, and sometimes, far too indiscreet for his
own good. Fortunately, in addition to those detailed exchanges, prompted by the Home Office’s decision
to investigate Despard’s superintendency, at least four separate accounts of the period were prepared by
interested parties: Colonel Edward Marcus Despard himself;51 the local committee of magistrates;52 Peter
Hunter, Despard’s replacement;53 and James Bannentine, a former colonist of British Honduras who had
sometimes worked as Despard’s deputy during his Superintendency.54
These totalizing accounts, written months or even several years after the events originally occurred,
likely reflect the views of their authors after they digested the colony’s developments over time. As many,
if not most, of the Colonial Office’s records concerning British Honduras during this period were written
by professional bureaucrats who wrote with their own particular interests from their own particular
worldview, these authors stand as mediating forces between scholars and full understanding of what
occurred in the settlement. However, because Despard and his Spanish correspondents were so
50 The documents held at Kew referring to British Honduras can all be found under the call number CO 123.
51 In addition to his memoir, Despard sent along an appendix with 151 items to be read as evidence supporting his
claims. Edward Marcus Despard, “A Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from 1784 to
1790,” CO 123/10, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean; Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the
Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from 1784 to 1790,” CO 123/11, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
52 The magistrates account contained a full narrative and an attached appendix with 82 items. “The Magistrates,”
“British Honduras: Narrative of Public Transactions by the Magistrates,” CO 123/12, Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
53 Colonel Peter Hunter, “Narrative of the Public Transactions Which Have Happened in the Bay of Honduras since
the Convention of 1786...,” CO 123/9, 129-135. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
54 James Bannantine, Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard. By James Bannantine. His Secretary, When King’s
Superintendent at Honduras, &c (London: printed for J. Ridgway, York Street, St. James’s Square, 1799),
http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CW0102699361/ECCO?sid=primo&xid=860454db&pg=1.

20
painstakingly detailed in their exchanges, I’ve reconstructed other local perspectives by reading these
documents against the grain. Most importantly, resulting from various censuses taken of the settlement
over time, I was able to identify the key demographic information of individual colonists in order to use
those details in my analysis.55 Although records from the Colonial and Home Offices are traditional
sources which rest comfortably within the category of ’British imperial’ history, the specific items I focus
my attention on as well as my methodological practices also make this a micro-scale cultural history. 56
55 I constructed this database by compiling census and attendance records taken in British Honduras and the
Mosquito Shore taken or received over the period of Despard’s superintendency. As I chose to only record
information that was affirmatively recorded, we should consider the information collected here as reflected of only
that which was recorded and not a full representation of the entire settlement during Despard’s superintendency.
However, by combining the results of several census—some of which recorded things like gender or race and some
of which did not—we are able to surmise colonists’ demographic information with a reasonable reliability. In this
and the next chapter, when attributing demographic or personal information to individual colonists in British
Honduras, the information collected can be attributed to this spreadsheet.
56 Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole.”

21
CHAPTER ONE
Edward Despard’s rose-colored glasses:
The limits of duty, diplomacy, and evidence in colonial British Honduras
From the metropole’s perch in 1783, Edward Marcus Despard likely seemed an easy choice to
become British Honduras’ Superintendent. He had a demonstrated history of leadership in the colonies,
was a military officer who came from a minor aristocratic family in Ireland, and was vouched for by other
British officers.57 Although Despard had been born in Ireland in 1751, at the time of his appointment in
1784 he had spent over half of his 20 plus year military career in the British West Indies, having enlisted
in the army infantry 50th regiment in 1766 when he just was fifteen.58 Despard was first stationed on
Jamaica in 1772, where he worked to help prepare military infrastructure during the American
Revolution.59 Useful for his future assignment in British Honduras, Despard’s next placement was to
assist a covert military expedition as the chief engineer, setting off from the Mosquito Shore on the
Spanish mainland around 1780.60 During this period, Despard was first introduced to many of the settlers
who he would later supervise at British Honduras.61 Stationed on Jamaica, Despard received the
appointment of Chief Commissioner to supervise the fulfillment of the terms of 1783 Treaty of Versailles
57 Historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh see Despard’s Irish background as crucial for thinking through
Despard’s views on colonialism and the British Empire. Rediker and Linebaugh have produced the most scholarly
examination of Despard’s life thus far. Although they survey his full life, their primary focus is on Despard’s life
after he returned to England in 1790. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, UNITED STATES: Beacon Press, 2000), 248-286.
58 For Despard’s exact birthday of March 6, 1751 see Clifford D. Conner, Colonel Despard: The Life and Times of
an Anglo-Irish Rebel (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Pub, 2000), 24, 27. Historians Marcus Rediker and Peter
Linebaugh see Despard’s Irish background as crucial for thinking through Despard’s views on Colonialism and the
British Empire. Rediker and Linebaugh have produced the most scholarly examination of Despard’s life thus far.
Although they survey his full life, their primary focus is on Despard’s life after he returned to England in 1790.
Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston, UNITED STATES: Beacon Press, 2000), 248-286,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=3117968.
59 According to Clifford D. Connor, “Despard was given responsibility for overseeing the emergency construction of
fortifications and the location of artillery batteries.” Conner, Colonel Despard, 27, 29.
60 The mission, dreamt up by Jamaica’s governor, John Dalling, was an attempt to cut through the central continent
and find passage to the Pacific Ocean. The plan was to cut across Lake Nicaragua once the British had captured the
local Spanish fort. It would not go well. During the expedition to the Mosquito Shore, Despard was notably
accompanied by his brother, Andrew Despard, who would command a company of soldiers. Conner, 29, 40–41.
61 During his military expedition to the Mosquito Shore, Despard became acquainted with Horatio Nelson who
would later rise to military fame for his role during the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson would later serve as a witness for
Despard’s defense in the trial against him in 1803 London.

22
in British Honduras and the Mosquito Shore in March 1784.62 At a minimum, Despard’s extended service
in the British West Indies would have reassured the Home Office that he would likely stay healthy at a
new posting due to his extensive ‘seasoning,’ and that he was familiar with the social dynamics of British
West Indian planter society, and experienced at living in a majority Black, but white-dominated colony
like Jamaica. Due to his time spent on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Shore, Despard was also familiar with the
social dynamics of living in a slave society populated largely by slaveholders of color.63
However, despite his professional bona fides, Despard’s possessed key differences from the typical
Caribbean colonist which colored his management style and made him quite different from those usually
in charge in the colonies: He had spent his entire professional life as a soldier; he did not own enslaved
people;64 and he had traveled widely in both the Caribbean and Spanish mainland. Although on paper
these qualities might not have raised red flags to the Colonial Office, they were accompanied by a set of
62 Notably, his co-commissioners were local Baymen commissioners Messrs. Hoare, McAulay, and Bartlet. Edward
Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 7.
63 Although unknown by the imperial government at the time of his appointment, Despard’s wife Catherine was a
woman of color and likely significantly contributed to shaping the superintendent’s worldview. It is unclear exactly
when Despard met his wife although it occurred at either Jamaica, the Mosquito Shore, or British Honduras.
Despard does not refer to Catherine in any of the records held by the Colonial Office regarding Despard’s
Superintendency. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue that “while it is conceivable that Despard
met Catherine in either Jamaica or Nicaragua, it is perhaps more likely that they forged their alliance in Belize.
Having arrived in the settlement unmarried, Edward a wife and a son by the time he sailed back to England in April
1790.” Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra, 248-286. Historian Mike Jay argues that “Despard and
Catherine had probably met and married in 1784 or 1785 while he was patrolling the shore, assessing how many
British Shoremen were likely to arrive in the Bay enclave and hammering out the details of the new settlement with
the Spanish garrison in Trujillo. It is also possible that she was responsible for nursing him through one of his many
tropical illnesses, as Cuba Cornwallis had done for [Horatio] Nelson. Catherine’s own background remains unclear:
by one account she was the daughter of a Jamaica preacher, by another an educated Spanish creole.” Mike Jay, The
Unfortunate Colonel Despard (London; Toronto: Transworld Publishers, 2005), 192. Historian Clifford Connor
details that “[d]ocuments from later years when he was living in England reveal the existence of a wife, Catherine,
and a son, James, and it can be inferred that they had also been with him during his superintendency of the Bay
settlement. They boy may have been born there. Catharine was said to be a ‘remarkably fine woman, and much
younger than her husband.’ She was ‘brought up in the West Indies’ and ‘her father was a most respectable
clergyman of the Established Church.’ The couple must have met before or during Despard’s last stay in Jamaica,
from November 1785 through April 1786. Letters she would write during Despard’s later imprisonment in England
indicate that Catherine Despard was well-educate and deeply attached to her husband.” Conner, Colonel Despard,
137.
64 At the time of his appointment Despard did not own any enslaved people. There are passing references to
enslaved people who he may have purchased in British Honduras after he arrived, but in short order they were
supposed to have fled to Spanish territory. I have not personally been able to locate any primary evidence which
directly speaks to Despard owning enslaved peoples during his time in the Americas. Historian Doug Tompson
discusses this vague tale in Doug Tompson, “Between Slavery and Freedom on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras,”
Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 405–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2011.622123.

23
professional values—Despard highly valued obedience and honesty, and there was a certain rigidity in his
attitudes—that would contribute to his removal. Even as they drove a wedge between him and key local
colonists, however, Despard’s habitual defense of aristocracy, his militarism, and his bureaucratic mindset
lay the foundation for a great deal of trust between himself and his local Spanish partners—partners who
Despard, at least on paper, had no reason to favor.
Superintendent Edward Despard has mostly been studied in relation to the political events which led
to his execution in England in 1803.65 No scholar has connected the events of Despard’s Superintendency
in British Honduras to the wider trends of the Atlantic world towards the end of the eighteenth century.
No scholarship has probed Despard’s working relationship with his Spanish counterparts on the Yucatan
Peninsula. I argue that the friendly relations between Despard and his Spanish bureaucratic partners in
America offer a valuable window onto a bureaucratic ethos which appeared to span across empires at the
beginning of the age of revolutions.
The most important historiographic interventions made in this chapter challenge historian’s
understanding of what geopolitical loyalty looked like in the Caribbean region. Historians have long
claimed that rivalry was a key stimulus behind imperial action, however, Despard and his Spanish
counterparts’ focus on honorably fulfilling the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, even if those terms
didn’t personally benefit their empires, suggests that there were many situations in which little to no
rivalry was expressed by international bureaucrats in Caribbean communities on the ground.66 As the onthe-scene representatives of vast empires, Despard and his Spanish counterparts were able to work
65 Conner, Colonel Despard; Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard and Other
Studies (New York, Longmans, Green, 1922), http://archive.org/details/cu31924027757198; Marianne Elliott, “The
‘Despard Conspiracy’ Reconsidered,” Past & Present, no. 75 (1977): 46–61; Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed
Hydra, 248–286; Jay, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard.
66 In his 2019 The European Seaborne Empires, historian Gabriel Paquette argues that the question “How did
Europeans obtain access to, lay claim to, and justify control over the territory, material resources, and labor of
human subjects in the extra-European world,” has three answers: coercive violence, bureaucratic governance, and
elite collaborators. However, when discussing the why of colonialism, Paquette writes “the galvanizing force that set
and kept these processes in motion was competition among European states.” I have always found claims like
Paquette’s to be unsatisfying. There is a world of difference between decision-makers in the metropole and those
enlisted to carry out those orders in the colonial world, or even the colonists themselves. A desire to understand how
far down the rivalry of nations’ “trickled” into the colonial world is at the root of this dissertation. Paquette, The
European Seaborne Empires, 4.

24
together effectively because they saw themselves as members of a separate and distinct bureaucratic class
bonded by their shared commitments to ideas like law and duty as well as their similar lived
experiences.67
The chapter’s first section focuses on Despard’s state of mind during his superintendency. Why
would a man who had spent many years in West Indian colonial society, and presumably had been a
witness to the many challenges British officials frequently experienced, believe that he could successfully
impress his will onto local colonists? The second and longest section tracks Despard’s efforts to supervise
local colonists during the term of his Superintendency, from 1783 to 1790. It is important to
chronologically follow Despard’s efforts because it was through the numerous and continually hindered
attempts to see his authority obeyed that he built his connections with Spanish partners. The officials’
shared frustration over local intransigence eventually built up so much that in the summer of 1789,
Despard took the radical step of dissolving British Honduras’s elected magistracy, the only local
institution that resembled a government.
68 It was this drastic action that eventually led to Despard’s
removal. The chapter’s last section reflects on the perspective of the government in London, considering
why it made sense for British officials to remove such a devoted Superintendent, even though Despard
had technically not diverged from his official instructions.
67 It is important that we distinguish that Despard wasn’t motivated by any larger republican ideology. Rather,
Despard was motivated by the idea that one ought to always complete one’s duty. Illustrating the ambivalence of his
protection, Despard spent a lot of his time working with Spanish officers trying to locate self-emancipated enslaved
people who had gone missing locally, “It may be also proper that I mention to your Lordship a correspondence
which I became engaged in and which from certain circumstances continued from the time of the evacuation of the
Mosquito Shore until I left Honduras. When Captain Hutt arrived in the Bay in June 1787, he delivered to me a list
of 32 slaves who had deserted from their owners during the evacuation of the shore; and for which the Spanish
commissaries had agreed to pay reasonable value to their owners…the matter was so long in dependence during
which time I had occasion to correspond with the commandants of Rio that I would give permission to certain
vessels to carry cargos of logwood and mahogany to the United States of America for the purpose of purchasing
provisions.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 267–68.
68 In a December 1786 letter written to his direct supervisor, Jamaica’s Governor Alured Clarke, Edward Despard
described: “This government consists of six magistrates, who are annually elected by the people at large, and though
they have never had the approbation of government, yet by a kind prescriptive right they possess and exercise a
legislative executive, and judicial power; and the other settlers conceive themselves to be subject to no law or rules
but those which are made by this representative body: and as his Majesty has no power to check or controul their
determinations, it is not surprising that his interests should be but little considered to therein.” “Jamaica:
Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 3 Dec 1785 Dec 3 - 8 Nov 1787, CO 137/86” 224, Edward Despard to
Alured Clarke, December 1, 1786.

25
Despard’s Ideological Commitments
Superintendent Despard and various Spanish counterparts worked together throughout his
superintendency to enforce the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles. Physically separated from Spain’s
closest fort at Bacalar by a wide distance, during his superintendency Despard worked with a variety of
Spanish military partners: whoever had been dispatched to work with him at a particular time.69 However,
these international duos’ mutual choice to enforce the terms equally among all British settlers irrespective
of a colonist’s race or class infuriated colonists in British Honduras, especially once the community
received an influx of settlers, including many settlers of color, from the Mosquito Shore. Despard and his
Spanish partners formed robust relationships based in a mutual understanding of themselves as members
of the same elite bureaucratic club whose primary obligation was to honorably complete the shared terms
of the 1783 treaty—not to look out for the best interests of local colonists or for the individual interests of
69 The structure of local government in the Spanish mainland worked as follows: Viceroyalties were the largest
administration division of the continent. The Viceroyalty of New Spain, which contained the Yucatan peninsula,
was first formed in 1635. Divisions within viceroyalties changed over time and included local governments titled
Cabildos, judicial court divisions titled Reales audiencias or audiencias, or divisions within the viceroyalty “with
independent military capacities and semi-independent government” titled capitania generals. Within a capitania
general a local military captain-general “served as the head of the Spanish military within his jurisdiction, as well as
filling a role in the civilian government of the capitania general as the governor of the territory. In addition, the
individual served as president of the audiencia…if one was present in the seat of government.” H. Micheal Tarver
and Emily Slape, The Spanish Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia [2 Volumes] : A Historical Encyclopedia,
Empires of the World (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2016), 71–73,
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1260225&authtype=sso&custid=s8983984,
Entry: Bourbon Reforms. Colonial administrators were under the jurisdiction of the captain-general they were
appointed under: “Lower offices reporting to the captain general would include the corregidores and alcades
mayores, the municipal governing officials. These offices also held military authority as lieutenants of the captain
general, which they did not exercise under viceroyalties, and were responsible for military organization in the event
of an insurrection, foreign invasion, or attack by the natives.” Tarver and Slape, 79–81, Entry: Captaincy General.
Another administrative position, the intendant, came to the Yucatan peninsula during Despard’s superintendency:
“In addition, the French political institution of the intendency (intendencia) was brought to Spain and eventually the
Americas. In 1765 an intendancy was created in Cuba, followed by several in New Spain, the entirety of Spanish
America was under the intendancy system. Designed to improve the administrative efficiency of colonies, the
system called for the intendants (intendentes) to relieve the overburdered viceroys. The intendants were also
expected to foster the economic development of their districts, especially in the areas of agriculture, mining, and
infrastructure.” Tarver and Slape, 184–86, Entry: New Spain, Viceroyalty of.

26
their own empires. Despard and his Spanish partners chose to prioritize the preservation of good relations
between the Iberian and English crowns rather than make efforts to minimize local conflict.
70
Despard viewed the world with a mind deeply shaped by military service to the British Crown. When
Despard surveyed the behavior of local settlers, he applied a military lens, and focused on changing
colonists’ behaviors rather than on effecting any change in their hearts and minds. Put simply, Despard
did not care why local colonists were disobeying the 1783 Treaty of Versailles; he just expected them to
do it. In doing so, he was drawing on the well-established practice of the eighteenth-century British army,
in which shared behaviors frequently served as a bridge between soldiers of varying ethnicities.71 In
Despard’s view, his monarch could expect colonists to display polite honorable behavior in the Americas,
and he, as superintendent, had an obligation to ensure settlers met that standard. In the memoir of his
superintendency, Despard explained how the settlers on the local magistracy committee were “equally
subversive of the duty every colony owes to the mother country, inimical to the interests of the settlement
itself, and incompatible with that harmony and good understanding which it has been so much the wish of
the Kings of Great Britain and Spain should exist between their respective nations.” The language of
“duty,” prominent in this passage, suggests the primacy that Despard accorded to obedience and to
fulfilling obligations towards one’s sovereign and other authorities.
72
In Despard’s eyes, to be an honorable British colonist at the Bay of Honduras necessitated putting his
counterparts needs, as well as the needs of the Spanish throne, on an equal footing with the needs of their
70 The sort of relationship experienced by Despard and his Spanish counterparts during the last quarter of the
eighteenth century was not unusual for military servicemen who had spent significant time in the Americas as
historian Stephen Conway explains, “Britian’s army shared with other European armies the international (or perhaps
transnational tendencies of eighteenth-century military life that united soldiers of many nations in an occupational
fraternity. Based on the transfer of personnel, technology, ideas, and institutions, and underpinned by the
Eurocentric laws of war and a common commitment to the dictates of military etiquette, this soldierly fraternity
might be called ‘military Europe,’ to borrow a term from one of the leading historians of eighteenth-century
European warfare. Military Europe incorporated not only members of the same army but also allies, auxiliaries, and
even enemies. To be on opposing sides was not necessarily a barrier to mutual respect and occupational solidarity.”
Stephen Conway, “The British Army, ‘Military Europe,’ and the American War of Independence,” 70.
71 “The truly ‘British’ national composition of the army, combined with officers’ identification as ‘polite
gentlemen’, could bridge sub-British national identities by allowing officers to recognize each other as cultural
equals.” David Huf, “British National and Patriotic Identities in the Army Officer Corps, 1793–1815,” Historical
Research 92, no. 256 (May 2019): 343, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12266.
72 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 203.

27
English monarch. Responding directly to “the ideas of Mr. [Robert] White and others [NB: Baymen], that
I am actuated with motives of partiality towards the Spaniards,” Despard argued that his critics were
casting a nefarious sheen on something that had none, explaining how local settlers “will not see the
difference between common civility and a criminal partiality. Had I been actuated by an improper
partiality towards the subjects of the King of Spain, I would have exercised it when I had better
opportunity…”73 By describing his relationship with his Spanish partners as expressing common civility,
scholars can see what behavior Despard considered to be ‘common’ within the wider British West Indies.
Perhaps it was Despard’s steadfast belief in their routineness of these interactions which clouded his
judgement and contributing to his failure to predict local colonists’ disinclination to abide by the
regulations
Despard’s military habits help to explain his commitment to equal treatment of white and non-white
colonists. Although married to a woman of color, Despard may have occasionally owned enslaved
peoples and certainly had no problem with the institution of race-based slavery writ large.74 Despard had
also spent much of his professional life in the colonial West Indies. His seemingly sincere belief that he
could command local settlers, irrespective of their color or class, into following the terms of the 1783
Treaty of Versailles may thus seem bizarre or to smack of republicanism. (He was indeed accused of
harboring such sympathies.) Yet the superintendent was no republican. In fact, Despard went out of his
way to negatively characterize the local magistrates as republicans in his correspondence with the Home
Office.75 Despard’s commitment to treating settlers of color equally, I will suggest, was guided by his
military and bourgeois ethics, not by any larger political commitment to equality.76
73 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 110.
74 The extent to which Despard owned enslaved peoples is unclear but, in an October 1791 letter to the Colonial
Office, Despard described how enslaved people whose labor he had once purchased had escaped to the Spaniards,
explaining, “the greater part of the Domestic Negroes, your memorialist was necessarily forced to purchase for his
use, in order to procure their liberty, ran away to the Spaniards, whereby your memorialist, on this occasion only,
was a sufferer to the amount of £350.” “The Humble Memorial and Petition of Edward Marcus Despard, Esquire...”
in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1775-1800” CO 123/14, 192–93.
75 In his memoir, Despard writes of his plan to describe “the effects of the democratical & independent system of
magistracy established in Honduras.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 92.
76 Despard and his wife Catherine appear as key figures in Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s Many Headed
Hydra which speaks to the creation of the revolutionary era zeitgeist from below. I am not intending to dispute that

28
In addition to sharing military-bred behaviors like politeness and honor, Despard and his various
Spanish counterparts connected over their shared frustration with the Baymen’s disregard for the 1783
Treaty of Versailles and their mutual desire to effect good governance. In his memoir, written in London
after his removal from the Superintendency, Despard claimed that local “Spaniards had long seen that
these magistrates had always been the encouragers, and generally the actors in every infraction of treaty
in the settlement.”77 By limiting the designation of scofflaw to only members of the magistracy in this
communication, Despard sought to show that his bureaucratic peers had assessed local events and saw
things the same way that he did—undoubtedly in the hope of boosting his credibility in the eyes of the
Colonial Office. In his memoir Despard sought to communicate just how ethnically imbricated the
community truly was: “I may observe that the Spaniards, from their people constantly going backwards
and forwards, and even at times having persons residing there know every publick and almost every
private transaction in the settlement.”78 Not merely complaining with his Iberian associates, Despard also
took advantage of the sporadic arrivals of British ship captains sailing from Jamaica to communicate his
frustrations over the locals’ intransigence.79
From the time of his first visit to British Honduras, Despard consistently—and, it became clearer and
clearer with time, without much basis in fact—assumed that local colonists would show a similar level of
devotion to the empire and its commands. Despard’s foremost assumption was that local colonists desired
to follow the 1783 Treaty. This unsubstantiated premise resulted in Despard frequently accepting specious
research but the evidence examined here suggests that, at this point in Despard’s life, he did not identify as someone
who wanted to challenge the larger structures at play in the Atlantic World. Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed
Hydra, 248-286.
77 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 162–63.
78 Ibid, 164.
79 No. 121: Extract of letter Edward Marcus Despard Esquire to Captain John Hutt of His Majesty’s Ship Camilla
dated Belize July 1787, Edward Marcus Despard, Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 397; No. 60: Extract of letter
to commodore Gardner, Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 257–58. In a letter to the British commodore Gardner,
Despard described the government of the settlement: “But the government of this country being still in the hands of
six or some times eight magistrates who are annually elected by the inhabitants at large, an interference at this time,
I think with what they are pleased to call their inherent rights, viz. that of making their own laws and regulations,
might be attended with great confusion and in the end be productive of but little advantage to the settlement
especially as I am informed by the right honorable lord Sydney that a code of regulations for the government of the
bay is now before the King in council and may be shortly expected out, Captain Mitchel and myself have deemed it
more prudent to decline any interference in the police of the settlement for the present.”

29
excuses from settlers for their scofflaw behavior and believing statements from colonists that he had no
business believing. For example, in November 1786, Despard interceded between local colonist James
Bartlet and the Spanish Captain Valentine Delgado. He succeeded in preventing the Spanish captain from
destroying Bartlet’s property after “taking the whole entirely on myself” while simultaneously being
hoodwinked by Bartlet’s assurances that he would leave Saint George’s Key.80 Similarly, after a hurricane
in September 1787, Baymen took advantage of Despard’s generosity and assumption that local colonists
would naturally feel concern for other settlers, in order to launch a speculative business selling local
necessities.
81 Settlers often reached out to Despard for help in the face of perceived Spanish abuses, but
80 Despard describes the full incident here: “About the same time I received a letter at the Haulover from Mr. James
Valentine Delgado was just arrived at the rivers mouth from Omea; and that (as he informed him) he had orders to
destroy all the houses upon Saint George’s Key; that he (Mr. Bartlet) had informed him, that news had been received
of the convention whereby the use of St. George’s key was given to the English with the privilege of building houses
upon it; that Valentine said he was very glad to hear it; but that he must execute his orders, as he had heretofore been
frequently blamed for not being more particular in executing his instructions. Mr. Bartlet added that he had proposed
to him to wait upon which; which he seemed to think he could not do with propriety as he had no instructions. On
receiving this letter I went immediately to the river’s mouth, when I saw Capt. Valentine; and upon conversation
with him he informed me that his instructions were to see not only the houses upon Saint George’s Key but also
those on the south side of the river Belize evacuated and likewise destroyed; upon which I represented to him that I
had some correspondence with the Captain General on the subject of these houses lately; and as the convention had
now taken place, by which we were to have the liberty of occupying as well the south point as Saint George’s Key;
and as I knew that from Captain Valentine’s rout his instructions must have been of a prior debate to the letter which
I had from the Captain General of 12 August, I begged him not to destroy the houses; which at last he agreed to,
upon my taking the whole entirely on myself, and writing by him to the Captain General, and at the same time
sending a copy of the convention, and answering the Captain General that the houses were already evacuated. And
hoping they should be allowed to continue so till the demarcation of the new limits. This assurance I soon afterwards
saw was not true, and not one of the houses on the south side being evacuated; altho’ Mr. Bartlet at whose house I
wrote the letter to the Captain General, positively assured me that he had seen them empty.” Edward Marcus
Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 28–29.
81 After the Hurricane on September 1, Despard “sent a verbal message to Mr. Bartlet and some other of the
principal people by my secretary, that I would if agreeable to the inhabitants send the before mentioned boat to
Jamaica, or any where else with any letters which they might wish to transmit to their friends…I sent these
gentlemen a verbal message by Mr. Bogle, that I should be happy to see them to take a share of anything I could find
that had escaped the hurricane, but I never heard more of the business. And it will hardly be believed that
notwithstanding the foregoing letter Mr. Bartlet and his friends should have had the inhumanity never to community
my message to the inhabitants; instead of which upon the arrival of the gentlemen from the key these magistrates (as
I was afterwards informed) entered into a combination to speculate upon the general calamity of the inhabitants. To
carry this scheme into execution they with all possible expedition fitted out a small vessel the property of Messrs.
O’Brien’s, which on the 9th of October they sent off to Bristol in the most secret and clandestine manner; and as a
return to my civility in offering to send my boat to Jamaica, these gentlemen although they well knew that I had
three different sets of very material dispatches to Lord Sydney on board of the vessels cut away in the hurricane,
sent off this vessel without giving me an opportunity to send my dispatches by it. Nay so inhuman were they as to
refuse to allow the masters of the vessels which had been wrecked to send home letters to acquaint their friends of
their personal safety.” Ibid, 99–102.

30
the superintendent frequently had trouble verifying their claims.82 The Baymen were able to trick Despard
so frequently because, even as late as May 1789, Despard told his Spanish counterpart Don Juan Bautista
Gual that he still felt “sorry that any of the subjects of the king my master should be so unmindful of their
duty as to give you reason to apprehend from them any resistance or obstruction in the execution of a
stipulation agreed upon and ratified between the two crowns.”83 Even as Despard continued to hope that
settlers would begin to comply with the 1783 Treaty of Versailles if he could just convince them to do it,
he was forced to confront continued trespassing in light of the Baymen’s bad faith efforts to diminish the
success of ‘the Shoremen’.
Even as it was becoming clear that he would be dismissed by the Colonial Office, Despard retained
an almost naïve faith in the ability of methodical rule-following to save his position.
84 Despard prepared a
82 Here are two examples of this phenomena. First, in November 1788: “In the month of November 1788 an affidavit
was presented to me stating a party of wild Indians or Spaniards had come out of the woods into the New River, and
there robbed the settlement of Hannah Jeffreys, a woodcutter and murdered a negro woman slave belonging to her;
whereupon I wrote to the Captain General upon the subject who immediately on the receipt of my letter sent out a
captain and a party of soldiers for the discovery of these murderers, acquainting me of it at the same time; when I
went a gentleman into the new river to give what assistance he could in finding them out. This Spanish party
discovered them, when they proved to be a party of wild Indians and carried sixteen of them men and women
prisoner to Bacalar. And as I have reason to believe that the conduct of the Spanish officers in Honduras has been
sometimes misrepresented to his Majesty’s ministers, I beg leave to refer your Lordship to the letter of 12 February
1789 from the Captain General to me upon this occasion;” Second, in August 1789, “having been informed that a
number of Spaniards with officers had been seen in and below the south branch of the river belize; and that they had
erected a number of hutts, and cut a road on path throw the woods; and also that a number of them had been seed at
the head of the new river lagoon, where they had erected a number of hutts; and as the wood cutters and were
extremely apprehensive that if the Spaniards were to establish posts in these rivers it would be very prejudicial to the
settlement, as being a means of facilitating the desertion of negroes; I therefore of the 30th Aug. directed Mr.
Thomas Davis a half pay ensign of the late Duke of Cumberland's Regiment, to proceed to these places and make a
particular inspection and enquiry as to this. Mr. Davis returned the 16th of September, and reported that in the north
west branch he found 40 hutts which appeared to have been six weeks or two months built and very lately inhabited
-- he also found several paths through the woods which appeared to him to have been opened two or three years
before; but they seemed to have been very lately frequented -- and that at the new river Lagoon he found 36 hutts
and a path cleared, and some other marks of the place having been lately inhabited.” Ibid, 122; 271–72.
83 “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original Correspondence” (Correspondence, December 10, 1789), 16-17,
CO 123/8, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
84 Despard may have also been prompted to prepare these documents because he suspected that whatever
information had been provided to the Colonial Office from colonists in Honduras would likely be false. In a letter to
ship captain Trevor Hull, Despard asked if the captain “will say to Mr. Nepean, that as he will in all probability by
this opportunity receive a great deal of matter, written on the subject of the recent disagreements in the Bays I must
intreat that he will give no credit to any papers subscribed relating to them by Messrs. Potts, Bartlet, O’Brien, Kaye,
Hughes, Seddon, Douglas, Garnett, and Young; as I am confident that they have no authority from the community to
represent their sentiments to his Majesty’s ministers; and I pledge myself to Mr. Nepean, to send him by the very
next conveyance from hence proofs incontrovertible of what I assert.” Despard to Hull, 12/02/1789, Honduras
“British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790” CO 123/9, 44–45, Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.

31
long memoir to justify is conduct, with included a voluminous appendix of supporting documentary
materials. He also prepared several signed petitions testifying to his good conduct as Superintendent prior
to his departure from British Honduras. Despard even secured notes from colonists who claimed that their
names and signatures, signifying assent to the magistrates’ actions, had been purposely added by bad
actors.85 Despard sought to defend his Spanish compatriots from untrue accusations by personally
testifying to their honor in conducting their duties.86 Finally, just prior to his departure, in an effort to
demonstrate his support in the colony, Despard himself ran as a candidate for the new magistracy to be
elected in British Honduras winning the election with a final tally of 203 votes out of 250 people voting.87
Despard likely hoped that by documenting his broad support in the colony the Home Office wouldn’t
obey the wishes of a minority of colonists and dismiss him while carried the support of the vast majority
of most local colonists. Again, it failed to occur to Despard that the Home Office might value the voices
of certain colonists over others.
85 After a meeting on May 29, 1789 at Belize Point a group of petitioners signed their name to an address that stated
“we whose names are hereunto subscribed, do request the magistrates to do their duty according to local regulations
entered into by us, until such time as His Majesty shall be pleased to promulgate other laws and regulations in their
stead.” However the “said address was signed by 70 people or there about and was surreptitiously taken away from
Josias Robinson, the clerk of the meeting by some people never as yet returned.” And yet, colonists George
Tompson and William Usher testified that when they got a chance to look at the original document, “which said
original paper recorded by the swaid Josias Robinson to have been signed by seventy people or thereabouts was
found by the deponent George Tompson in one of the Books of Record…and which said original paper and address
is signed by only forty one persons; nine for whom were transient persons, and not inhabitants of the settlement.”
Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from 1784
to 1790,” sec. 75, 300-302.
86 For example, when describing how the Don Rafael Llovet, an “engineer in ordinary and Captain of the Royal
Army of Spain,” who arrived in British Honduras in January 1790, interacted with colonists, Despard wrote: “This
extreme strictness however was confined to this particular kind of infraction—as an instance of this I may mention
that Capt. Llovet gave me a private hint that he might perhaps be obliged to go out of the limits by water, in order
that if any people were fishing out of the limits I might caution them to come in that he might not find them.”
Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 282–83.
87 After Despard, the top vote getters were Matthias Gale (197), David Lamb (187), and Laurence Neighan (187).
The vote total for other notable colonists fell at: John Garbutt (177), James Bartlet (102), Richard Francis O’Brien
(102), Thomas Potts (99), James Usher (91), and Aaron Young (5) when the said poll finally closed. The vote count
is taken from “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790,” CO 123/9, 112, “State of the
Poll for the election of nine magistrates for the Bay of Honduras…”

32
The Events of Despard’s Superintendency
Initially appointed by the Colonial Office to mark out the new territorial boundaries in British
Honduras with local magistrates, Despard arrived at Saint George’s Key in the Bay of Honduras in March
1784 and was shocked by the brazen intransigence of local settlers. Despard first learned about the
colonists’ poor behavior from a colleague Captain James Cornwallis of H.M.S. Iphigenia, which had been
lying in port.88 As the settlement’s boundaries had yet to be marked out, the returning colonists technically
did not yet have the right to set up settlements. However, Cornwallis informed Despard that returning
British colonists had been “so imprudent as to land on the key, notwithstanding the remonstrances of one
or two Spanish officers…and even to build huts on the key, although it was directly contrary to the sixth
article of the treaty to occupy any of the Keys opposite to the district.”89 Shortly after this showdown, the
fort at Bacalar sent two Spanish soldiers to remove trespassing British colonists and “although they
continued on the key for some days for this purpose, [the Spanish soldiers] were obliged to return without
having succeeded; many of the people being so imprudent as even to insult them...”90 The Spanish having
no luck removing the settlers, once Captain Cornwallis arrived he “immediately sent his first Lieutenant
Mr. Daniel in his long boat to Bacalar, with a letter to the Captain General acquainting him with his
arrival and the purpose of coming to that country: to see that no offence be given by any of the inhabitants
before the arrival of the commissaries of both nations.”91 As Despard reported it, Cornwallis’ Britishness
88 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 3–6.
89 Ibid, 5.
90 Ibid, 5.
91 Despard did not record the name of the Spanish Captain General who arrived here. Military office Jose Merino y
Ceballos was appointed governor of Yucatan and “arrived in Yucatan to assume his duties in 1783,” and is the most
likely candidate for the captain-general here. Robert Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812 (Stanford,
Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1993), 162, http://archive.org/details/mayaspaniardinyu0000patc. The first
intendant who “served simultaneously as Yucatan’s first intendant and as governor of Yucatan from 1787 until his
death in 1792,” Don Lucas de Galvez found himself in the position next as “[d]enuciations against Galvez’
predecessor, Don Jose de Merino y Ceballos (r. 1783-1789) led to the ouster of the governor who awkwardly shared
authority over the province with Galvez in his first two years as intendant. The 1788, the faction of the cabildo of
Merida that opposed Merino y Ceballos had succeeded in ousting him, aided by the sudden disenchantment of the
governor’s most powerful ally, the bishop of Merida. Their efforts paid off in the form of a royal order recalling
Merino y Ceballos to Spain, written and signed on 13 October 1788.” Mark W. Lentz, “Assassination in Yucatan:
Crime and Society, 1792-1812” (New Orleans, LA, Tulane University, 2009), 21, 31. See the original entry in
Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 6–7.

33
had been enough in the eyes of the Spanish to bring to the settlement credibility and therefore more time
to comply as the Spanish “Captain General upon receiving the dispatches, … being satisfied that Captain
Cornwallis would as a British Officer, prevent any infringement of the treaty.”92 However, the British
Cornwallis fared no better effecting his will over the colonists, after he went “in person to the different
people on Saint George’s Key, and ordered them to depart; but finding that not complied with, two or
three days afterwards he was under the necessity of sending two boats well manned & armed, who
obliged the people to depart, by pulling down several of the houses and threatening to do so the
remainder.”93
It was only on May 14, 1784, when the Spanish Captain General arrived in the settlement with his
detachment and together with Despard, Cornwallis, and the other British commissioners that “we settled
the manner in which the lines were to be run, dividing ourselves and attendants into three points. Between
that time and the 27th of May, we together with the Spanish Officers, went over the lines of the district and
ascertained the limits.”94 And yet, even in the presence of the visiting Iberian officers, local settlers failed
to modify their behavior, Despard explaining that “for the few days [while] the Captain General was
there, the people were so imprudent as to roll out logs of Mahogany perfectly in his sight, which he
repeatedly took notice of, as being contrary to the treaty, which only gave permission to cut logwood and
other dying woods.”95 The Spanish officially turned over the newly outlined settlement on May 27, 1784,
and before “the Captain General’s departure he enjoined us to see those houses still remaining on the key
and also those on the south side of the River Belize pulled down, as soon as others could be built within
the limits.”96 One can’t help but wonder if Despard felt relief, as he left the Bay of Honduras for the
Mosquito Shore, later continuing on to England, that he didn’t have to stick around the settlement to try
92 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 6–7.
93 Ibid, 6–7.
94 Ibid, 8.
95 Ibid, 9.
96 Ibid, 8.

34
and enforce the Captain General’s request. It would have seemed obvious to him that, for a British official
to have any success at controlling local colonists they would have to partner closely with Spanish allies.
Once Despard arrived at British Honduras in April 1786 as Superintendent, he adopted a policy of
partnership with his Spanish counterparts to quell colonists’ abuses of the treaty’s terms while
simultaneously attempting to persuade his Iberian colleagues not to punish those same colonists too
harshly (if at all). As a major tenet of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles required the British empire to
relinquish settlements on the Mosquito Shore in exchange for keeping British Honduras, at the beginning
of 1787 Despard and his Spanish counterparts began to work together to ensure that an additional parcel
of land recently granted from King Charles III to British Honduras would go exclusively to Mosquito
Shore migrants—in the face of widespread opposition from the already established ‘Baymen’ colonists.
Guided by specific instruction from home secretary Lord Sydney that the new land was to be first given to
the Shoremen, Despard and his Spanish compatriots made themselves enemies to many of the Baymen by
refusing to modify their approach to enforcing the treaty on the colonial ground.97 Confrontations between
Despard, local settlers, and Spanish bureaucrats often devolved into games of chicken, with the colonists
fully aware that local officials were wary of acting against them without the crown’s approval.
98
97 In a letter written in June 1787, colonial secretary Lord Sydney informed Despard, “I received on the 14th of last
month your letter of the 23rd February inclosing a paper which had been presented to you, containing certain
resolutions of the principal Logwood & Mahogany cutters, residing within the Honduras Settlement, respecting the
disposal of the additional district granted by the late convention amongst his Majesty’s subjects and have been
obliged to evacuate the Mosquito Shore…His majesty feels an equal concern for the interests of all his subjects, and
is disposed, at all times, to listen to their reasonable applications, but in the present instance, His Majesty conceives
that the Mosquito Settlers, who have been obliged to relinquish their possessions ought first to be attended to,
especially in the disposal of those lands which may in some degree be looked upon as a consideration for their
settlements upon the Mosquito Shore, upon this ground, his Majesty has commanded me to instruct you, that the late
inhabitants of the Mosquito shore who may arrive at the Honduras settlement are to be accommodated with lands in
the additional district in preference to all other persons whatsoever. The next class of persons to be preferred are
those, who, though not inhabitants, have been possessed of settlements, and have been sufferers from the loss of
property upon the Mosquito Shore; and in case there should be sufficient lands for the accommodation of a greater
number of persons than those above described, his Majesty’s subjects who have removed with their families and
effects from the American Colonies, and others who have been settlers at Honduras, subsequent to the late Treaty of
peace, and whom you could not properly accommodate within the old district are to be put in possession of lands
within the new.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of
Honduras from 1784 to 1790,” 219–20.
98 In late March/early April, Spanish officer Major Don Rafael Breson came to the settlement. Despard describes
what came next: “immediately upon his arrival, and previous to his taking any steps, [the Major] waited upon me
and acquainted me with his instructions and said that however disagreeable it must be to us both, he was under the
necessity of insisting on my disavowing their conduct & complying with the orders mutually transmitted by both

35
Rather than directly attack the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, which could’ve suggested a
disloyalty—or at least disregard for their imperial overlord—local Baymen chose to center their
complaints regarding British Honduras in their communications with metropolitan allies and officials on
Despard himself and what they saw as his persnickety enforcement of the edict. Initially, when it wasn’t
clear how strict Despard would be in implementing the law, colonists complained to Despard himself
about specific treaty terms or specific Spanish officers to garner his assistance.99 Complaining colonists
likely hoped Despard would cast aside his Spanish partners to gain the goodwill of the settlement.
However, from the moment the Baymen first received word of Despard’s intention to distribute land to
‘Shoremen’ migrants, Despard himself became the focus on their ire.100
Although Despard claimed to have communicated to local settlers that the plan for land distribution
had been crafted by the Colonial Office itself, the Baymen’s initial arguments focused on what they saw
courts respecting the execution of the convention – he requested me to accompany him upon this occasion that I
might the better explain to them the natures of the 13th article of the convention, and the consequences of their
persevering in a violation of the same. He also authorized me to say, that if they would comply quietly and without
obliging him to use force, he would not pull down their houses, but suffer them to remain till the new territory was
delivered up; but such was the obstinancy of the people that notwithstanding all this could not be persuaded to leave
their houses, until he was obliged to threaten to turn them out by a military force – not however till he had twice
prorogued the time which he had expressly appointed them to evacuate the before mentioned houses at my particular
solicitation and request.” That same visit, Despard “took Mr. Bartlet aside, and informed him of the purpose of the
Major’s expedition, expressing at the same time a wish that as he was acquainted with those people he would go
over to them and endeavour to prevail with them to leave the houses, in order to prevent the disagreeable
consequences that might ensue, this officer’s orders being very strict, on which Mr. Bartlet said he begged to be
excused, observing that they were a parcel of vagabonds and Crackers, and that if his advice had been taken their
houses would have been destroyed according to the resolutions of the committee of 21st October 1786.” Edward
Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 42–43; 45.
99 In August 1786, Despard “received a letter from Messrs. Bartlet & Gale, as a committee of the inhabitants, dated
22d July containing the following complaints: 1. That the Spaniards were in the unremitting practice of decoying
and receiving runaway slaves. 2d. That the boundaries settled by the treaty were greatly too confined; and that it was
absolutely necessary that the limits in front be much enlarged, and include all the rivers &c. on both sides to their
sources within the limits; and also the inhabitants have a right of fishing all along the coast. 3. That it was a great
hardship to the inhabitants, that even in case of sickness they were not permitted to enjoy the pure air of Saint
George’s Key; and that their fishermen were prohibited to dry their nets on the keys, or a pilot to live on any of the
keys to pilot vessels into the harbours – and requesting me to use my good offices to discontinue the importation of
convicts to that country. This address apprear’d to me to contain a parcel of fictitious complaints one or two
excepted, and in some measure to be intended as an answer or justification of their conduct against the real ones
which colonel Savida had preferred to me.” Ibid, 30–31.
100 In his memoir, Despard explained how, after receiving a letter from Mosquito Shore migrants in October 1786, “I
thought it best to be candid with [local Baymen], and acquainted them that it appeared to be the ministers intention
and consonant to equity and justice that the settlers from the shore should have a preference in the new limits, they
have lost their all (except negroes) by giving up the shore.” Ibid, 34. Discussions between ‘Baymen’ and later
‘Shoremen’ regarding the distribution of local land began in February 1787 and would continue through the land’s
ultimate relinquishment in August 1787.

36
as Despard’s disrespect in failing to seek their opinion before instituting the plan. In the eyes of the
Baymen, their extended lived experience on the shore entitled them to review governmental plans,
claiming Despard erred using “the late proclamation…to make a division of the newly ceded district,
without consulting the inhabitants, who from their residence & former usage have always been conceived
to be the best judges of their own necessities, & have been uniformly allowed to legislate for
themselves.”101 In fact, the Baymen cast any imperial oversight over the settlement as inappropriate,
explaining “that this settlement has always been governed by its own laws & regulations which have been
universally deemed adequate, and that the interference of any individual is an infringement of their
rights.”102 In their view, Despard’s participation in enforcing the terms of the 1783 Treaty was
dishonorable to their status as Britons, even as they largely admitted to the truth of many of the
superintendent’s claims:
Censure implies criminality, but we are conscious of none, unless to resist the illegal acts of an
individual; to take arms in defense of our lives and properties against an armed banditti of people
of all colors, or to complain of the conduct of a man who never promulgated any authority be
criminal acts, if so – we plead guilty the while we do so we cannot repent, and will in all future
similar cases, while we live have recourse to the same measures.103
101 “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1775-1800,” CO 123/14, 46–49.
102 Ibid, 47.
103 The other major theme of the complaints in this letter was the Baymen’s characterization of the financial impact
the empire’s policy had on them. In this letter they make two veiled threats to leave the British empire should their
rights as British subjects, as they saw them, not be restored. The first: “The fate of this country and its inhabitants
depends upon you, and we trust that your respectability and consequence individually as well as collectively will
produce measures and procure freedom, hitherto refused to the voice of truth and the prayers of the oppressed; a
continuation of the same spirit will ultimately we trust produce such accommodation and security as the nature of
the settlement will admit of – But should we fail in this our last and greatest effort, we must submit to the hand of
power in the first instance, and however reluctantly seek a country and a government which will afford protection to
its most remote subjects. Englishmen can never broch the despotic government of an individual; we have lasted
tasted the sweets of liberty and hitherto have never forfeited our right and title to that invaluable blessing;” The
second: “Our constituents were then soured with the ill effects of our first application, which instead of producing
that ease and security which they expected only afforded matter of triumph to his Majesty’s superintendent, who
took great pains to publish and paste upon posts (for not a house or hutt was left to answer the purpose) the
approbation of his arbitrary and oppressive measures – They answered our applications to them on this subject by
saying that they found themselves in the situation of slaves, that they possessed nothing which they could call their
own. That this industry was chequed and that even if the rumour of a war then approaching should blow over, they
must quit a country where they were totally excluded from the natural rights of British Subjects.”

37
This passage is illuminating by demonstrating that, in the eyes of ‘the Baymen,’ it didn’t matter whether
Despard was dispersing the official orders of their government, Despard himself lacked legitimacy as a
representative, and therefore, they weren’t criminals for disobeying the empire’s wishes.
With his authority already deeply frustrated by the dominance of local magistrates, Despard’s ire
reached new heights as he watched the Baymen’s make efforts to defraud their newly arrived Mosquito
Shore neighbors, who were ostensibly British settlers entitled to the same rights and privileges as
themselves.104 Once they arrived in British Honduras, Shoremen began reporting complaints about the
Baymen to Despard. In Colonel Peter Hunter’s later account of this initial period, the Baymen admitted to
conflict between settler factions in the community.105 However, because Despard lacked the authority to
punish the Baymen for their behavior, he spent most of his time trying to help mitigate its impact on the
Shoremen colonists through collaboration with his Spanish counterparts.106 In an August 1787 petition to
104 Settlers from the Mosquito Shore arrived in British Honduras in two groups. The first group of 282 people
arrived on February 11, 1787. The second group arrived on June 25, 1787. Colonel Edward Marcus Despard,
“Despard’s Narrative,” 38. From the total, Despard recorded 533 free persons and 1674 enslaved persons. Despard
failed to distinguish between the ethnic background of free persons so the number of “white men, free men of
colour, & negroes” was 263, the number of free women, 155, and the number of free children, 115. Despard
characterized the enslaved emigrants by age, recording 770 men, 520 women, and 384 children.
105 Hunter’s account explains how the “magistrates according to custom, held the Quarterly Court on the 27th May
1788, when Mr. Gale, (one of the magistates) produced a paper signed by fifty of the inhabitants, which was read in
open court, signifying their entire disapprobation of the representations made by the committee of correspondence in
the letter addressed to certain merchatns in England, dated the 19th of April preceding; they stated that the said letter
was rather to be considered as expressing the private sentiments of individuals than the sense of the community in
general, that it had been written in a very private manner, and with a view to selfish ends, than the general good of
the people; and that they considered the community of correspondence to have forefeited the confidence of the
people by such a proceeding…An address was presented to the members of the community who had signed the
latter of the 19th April, subscribed by 28 of the Inhabitants and dated the 29th May 1788, declaring their full
approbation of their conduct, and the confidence, reposed in them by the public, that the notification was calculated
to promote a faction in the community and exhorting them to persevere as guardians of the rights and privileges of
the people.” Narrative of Public Transactions... “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State,
1790,” CO 123/9, 132.
106 Despard expressed an explicit warning to the magistrates in August 1787 to stop interfering with the livelihoods
of settlers of color. Despard writes,“[b]efore their departure…I thought it proper to mention to these gentlemen, that
I had received frequent complaints from many of the inhabitants of the Mosquito Shore, and other new settlers,
particularly the People of Colour, of the frequent insults, which they received from them, and the hardships the were
put under from the partiality of their laws, by which they found themselves entirely excluded from the privileges of
British Subjects, and from the means of making a livelihood, and of even having a house to live in, and that they
were so grossly abused by persons in the Character of magistrates as even to have common walking sticks forcibly
taken out of their hands and thrown into the river, when they were walking peaceably along the streets.” Edward
Marcus Despard to Lord Sydney, August 24, 1787, in “Jamaica: Original Correspondence, Secretary of State,” CO
137/50, 497-513. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

38
the Superintendent, local Shoremen directly attributed local gains to Despard’s work with the Spanish,
explaining, “we whose names are undersubscribed, late inhabitants of the mosquito shore, and others now
inhabitants of Honduras, take the earliest opportunity of congratulating you, ourselves and the country in
general that through the great exertions made in conjunction with the commissioners from the court of
Spain.”107 The authors of the petition went out of their way to compliment Despard for his egalitarian
impulses which they saw as directly connected to improving their quality of life in the settlement:
We beg leave to return you our grateful acknowledgements for your particular attention in
securing the situation for houses…We have likewise to add our particular thanks for the notice
you have been pleased to give of accommodating us with logwood and mahogany works whereby
we be enabled with honest industry to acquire support for ourselves and families. And upon the
whole we flatter ourselves, that under your just and impartial superintendence, we shall in a short
time be able to get the better of our losses and misfortunes in being obliged to quit a country in
which we were comfortably settled.108
The Shoremen’s vocalization of their imperial obligation to leave the Mosquito Shore settlements is
important because it shows that the Shoremen did perceive themselves as being personally obligated by
their connection to the British Empire in a way that local Baymen did not. What the Shoremen likely
didn’t expect when they left the Mosquito Shore was that the empire itself wouldn’t demonstrate the same
loyalty towards their group when they came into conflict with the populations the empire deemed more
valuable.
Despard was most disturbed by what he saw as the Baymen’s deliberate efforts to trick the Shoremen
into breaking the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles. For example, Despard was contacted by
107 late inhabitants of the mosquito shore, “Untitled Petition to Edward Marcus Despard” (Petition, Belize Point,
British Honduras, August 16, 1787), CO 137/50, 565-567. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
108 late inhabitants of the mosquito shore. The letter was signed by 82 settlers. The signatories were: Issac Costin,
Thos. Clark, Thos. Cooper, John Humphreys, Levi Humphreys, John Nesser, John Neal, John Neal for Lydia Allum,
George Pitt, Richd. Power, Thos. Bowen, Jacob Hover, Marias Bellisle, James Gladding, Edward Vernon, George
Gladding, Basil Jones, Steven Stan, Mary Burk, Abnor Morton, Mary Jackson for William Jackson, Stephen Winter,
Ja. Bannantine, David Lamb, William Pitt, David Longsworth, Thos. Bramwell, Elizh. Williams, Wm. Gordon,
Thos. Price, John Reily, John Jonoston, Henry Jonoston, Josiah Greenhill, George Lovell, David Molenborough,
John Smith, Wm. Dingaderry, John Buttrick, Edward Dempsey, James Scurry, Lewis Harris, Jun., Benjamin Parker,
Joseph Dill, Marg. Miller, William Ford, David Evens, Absm. Bull, Sam. Harrison, Dan. Dewalt, George R. Savery,
John Clappert, John Godfrey, Thos. Farrell, David Evans for Mary Goffe, John Allum, Margt. Redground, George
Crawford, Thos. Whitehead, Able Taylor, Susannah Pitt, David Winter, Barney Nisbett, Abraham Dixon, Joshua
Jones, Richd. Jonoston, David Davis, John Jones, George Jeffreys, Eleanor Karhook, Sarah Hopkins, Charles
Jeffrey, James Rigby, Jeremy Burton, William Hollingsworth, Benj. Allum, Jacob Revert, Ur. Trapp, Lewis Harris
Sn., Henry O’Neal, and Richd. Young.

39
Shoreman Dr. John Wagner in October 1787, who reached out to him in a panic after Captain “Valentine
and some other Spaniards” declared his home to be out of boundaries.
109 Likely as a result of his own
lived experience with the local Baymen, Despard initially seemed suspicious of Wagner’s claims of
ignorance and was only willing to commit to Wagner that, “should the Spaniards improperly molest you
or destroy your house, if really within the limits, you may depend upon my obtaining for you the most
speedy & ample satisfaction.”110 However, after sending out a deputy to confirm that Wagner was indeed
outside the limits, Despard’s came to believe Wagner’s claims, that “he was led to take this improper step
from the misinformation which he received.” Likely seeking to emphasize the distinction between
Wagner’s behavior and the ongoing intransigence of local Baymen, in his message to the Spanish
Governor Rosada, Despard sought to emphasize that Wagner had not been motivated “from any
inclination to do a thing which is repugnant to the 6th article of the treaty of peace, or to the late
convention.”111 Despard further requested, as Wagner’s trespassing was unintentional “your permission
[for him] continuing there for a short space of time, till he can build houses for the accommodation of
himself his family, and workmen within the limits; and which he has now my orders to do without loss of
time.”112 The Wagner incident shows that Despard and his Spanish partners understood the intransigence
of local colonists aligned to the British empire to be occurring on a spectrum even as the furthest the
international duo’s were comfortable in going was only to grant extensions to colonists outside of the
limits rather than amnesty.
Despard also frequently met with colonists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear in
private, but those supportive voices were rarely willing to express that approval publicly. After a
109 Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from
1784 to 1790,” 192–93, No. 106: John Wagner to Edward Despard, October 10, 1787.
110 Edward Marcus Despard, 193, No. 107: Edward Despard to John Wagner, October 13, 1787.
111 John Wagner was a free white man who originally came to British Honduras from the Mosquito Shore. In his
1790 Census, Colonel Peter Hunter declared Wagner to be a “cutter of wood, [but] possessed of less property.”
Within a total household of 26 people, at least 9 were free people of color—including 5 women and three male
children. We do not know if Wagner was the father of these children but their freed status indicates that they may
have been. Within his memoir Despard makes passing references to a “Doctor” John Wagner who could be the same
man. Ibid, 386; No. 110: Extract Letter 9 December 1787, Despard to Rosado.
112 Ibid

40
community meeting in February 1787, Baymen Richard Hoare, “went out along with me who entering
into conversation with me observed, that it was extraordinary the people of the Bay should think it hard
that the settlers from the shore should occupy the whole of the new limits.”113 Hoare’s willingness to
accept ‘Shoremen’ migrants was primarily motivated by economics as he added “that when the works
were divided among the shore people, as many of the poorer sort might not have strength sufficient to
carry them on it would in these cases be in the power of the Baymen to purchase them from them.”114
Hoare’s idea insinuates that, even as he knew the Shoremen migrants were leaving their former
communities on the Mosquito Shore forever, he didn’t truly envision them as becoming part of British
Honduras.
Over time, the settlement became so hostile to many migrants that they sought ways to leave British
Honduras.115 In March and April of 1789, Despard wrote his Spanish counterpart regarding how “a
number of the people from the Mosquito Shore…had resolved to return to the Mosquito Shore, and had
113 As Hoare was one of the co-commissioners appointed to survey the settlement limits with Despard in the summer
of 1784, it is likely he was phenotypically white. Richard Hoare was a Shoreman turned Bayman who brought at
least 25 enslaved people with him from the Shore to Honduras in October 1786. A few short years later in March
1791, he was listed as owning 67 people. Colonel Peter Hunter identified him as being a “cutter & exporter of wood,
possessed of considerable property,” in his 1790 census. Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 33–34.
114 Ibid
115 Despard corresponded about finding new homes for Shoremen colonists with Jamaica’s governor Alured Clarke.
Two key quotations from letters written in May 1789 characterize Despard’s state of mind at the time. First, “Since I
began to write this letter I have been more particularly informed of the intentions of the people of colour; and I find
that one and all of the them certainly are resolved to leave the country, and go to the mosquito shore, and has, as I
have reason to believe, very soon. It is much my wish to prevent this. As they possess a considerable negro
property; but in my present situation I know but of one way to prevent it, which would be to declare their negroes
free, and assure them of lands in the Bahama islands and six month provision; but I should not be warranted to give
them any such assurance, neither is it a measure which I could in humanity adopt in any case.” (Emphasis mine) It is
notable that Despard sees these colonists as an asset. Second, “I also think it proper to acquaint your Lordship that a
number of people of colour, finding that their little plantations are now partly and will be soon totally destroyed,
have, as I hear, formed a resolution of leaving this settlement and going to the Mosquito Shore. However, I am of
opinion, that if they were satisfied, that they could be accommodated with land’s in your Lordship’s government,
and receive six months provisions from the King, that it would be no very difficult matter to divert them from their
present purpose. As these people possess from three to thirty slaves each, from this and every other
circumstance respecting their situation they are very fit for the culture of cotton, and would upon the whole, I
am confident, prove a very valuable acquisition to your Lordship’s government, provided you have still
remaining land to dispose of, sufficient for their accommodation. I cannot say with any certainty what this
number may be, but I think will be between four and five hundred, the slaves.” (Emphasis mine) These letters to
Governor were written on May 26 & 27, 1789. “Jamaica, May 1789 to October 1790: Despatches,” CO 137/88, 53–
54; 45-48; Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean, Despard to Clarke, Bay of Honduras to Jamaica, May 26, 1789;
Despard to Clarke, Bay of Honduras to Jamaica, May 27, 1789.

41
actually sent some people to enquire, as I suppose, upon what footing they could be received as Spanish
subjects and regain their possessions.” Notably, Despard was open to the idea of these settlers changing
imperial allegiances explaining, “I had reason to believe that this augmentation might be obtained…. from
the conversation I had with Colonel Grimarest and many other Spanish officers, I was assured that they
would support my applications on this subject.”116 Through his correspondences, Despard succeeded in
securing the additional right for British colonists to cultivate gardens for provisions as well as the right for
a ship’s pilot to remain stationed at local keys.117 Since he continued to work on their behalf, it didn’t take
long until the Baymen began to perceive Despard and the Shoremen as being improperly aligned and the
local magistracy sought to use every power it possessed to prevent any gains for pro-Despard colonists.118
In August 1787, Despard and Colonel Grimarest succeeded in distributing plots of land to newly
arrived Shoremen, but the community paid for it by subsequently enduring authoritarian rule from the
local magistracy, the closest thing British Honduras had to a government.
119According to Despard, the
Bay’s magistrates, who were mostly elite Baymen, operated with an “inconsistency… difficulty of
keeping them within rules and…are governed by self-interest.” 120 An April 1788 incident signifies how
secure some members of the magistracy felt in their positions. Surveying the settlement, the Captain Don
116 Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 139.
117 “In the Month of April 1788, Captain Don Baltazar Rodriguez de Truxillo arrived in the settlement as
Commissary appointed by the Captain General of Yucatan to visit the district in terms of the 4th and additional
article of the convention. Upon this gentleman’s arrival at the Haulover, I mentioned to him the permission granted
by Colonel Grimarest respecting gardens; and for a pilot to reside on one of the keys – he declared he was totally
ignorant of any thing of that kind; but as he had the greatest confidence in what I told him, he would shew every
indulgence in that respect that the he could consistently with his instructions.” Ibid, 118–19.
118 Shoremen directly attributed positive gains in the settlement to Despard’s work on their behalf. The Shoremen
who authored an August 1787 petition went out of their way to compliment Despard for his democratic impulses
which they directly connected to their quality of life explaining, “[w]e beg leave to return you our grateful
acknowledgements for your particular attention in securing the situation for houses…We have likewise to add our
particular thanks for the notice you have been pleased to give of accommodating us with logwood and mahogany
works whereby we be enabled with honest industry to acquire support for ourselves and families. And upon the
whole we flatter ourselves, that under your just and impartial superintendence, we shall in a short time be able to get
the better of our losses and misfortunes in being obliged to quit a country in which we were comfortably settled.”
119 When colonists got wind of the potential abolishment of the local magistracy they tried to paint the group as
minor and unofficial, writing in a letter to Despard that: “the regulations made from time to time amongst us were
merely local and calculated for the general good of the people without any views or intention of framing what may
be deemed a civil establishment.” Public and Signed Letter to Edward Despard, May 30, 1789 in “British Honduras,
10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 94–96. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
120 Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from
1784 to 1790,” 169.

42
Baltazar Rodriguez de Truxillo “observed that his people were very much exasperated at Mr. Armstrong
for having some time before caused some Spaniards to be tied up and flogged, accusing them of having
pulled a few bunches…in his plantain walk as they were passing along the river.” 121 However, what most
shocked the Spanish now was when they approached the property they saw “that Messrs. Hoare &
O’Brien armed their negroes.”122 By arming enslaved peoples themselves, rather than through some state
or political organization (which did occasionally occur throughout the West Indies), Hoare and O’Brien
demonstrated that at the time of Grimarest’s survey their greatest concern was over a potential loss of
property and territory.123 The fear of enslaved rebellion was just as prominent in British Honduras as in
the rest of the Caribbean, and perhaps more so due to the established history of enslaved peoples fleeing
to welcoming Spanish territory, so we can expect that Hoare and O’Brien were aware of the potential risk
to their own physical and economic safety that personally arming the enslaved people they held in
bondage could present to their physical persons. However, Hoare and O’Brien’s actions suggest that, even
if they were afraid, they feared loss of property and territory more than they feared facing violence.
Despard was especially annoyed by the actions of colonists during Grimarest’s visit:
although [the Colonel] had been at the rivers mouth several days, and it was universally known to
be his intention to go up the river in order to see the new limits marked out….yet many of them
had not the precaution to remove their people from the north side of the river…to the
south…although I had privately hinted to several people…that if they did not do so it might be
attended with the most serious consequences to them.124
Despard simply didn’t understand colonists overt disregard for the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles
especially when he felt he had given them the ability to comply. When the Spanish Lieutenant Don Juan
121 The full name of Mr. Armstrong here is not clear. Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 119–20.
122 The Hoare here is likely Richard Hoare. It is not clear who the O’Brien here is. It is most likely that it is either
Richard Francis O’Brien or William O’Brien, a pair of Baymen that Despard described as brothers in his memoir
addressed to William Grenville. Ibid, 114; 120.
123 See Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979); Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical
Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Maria Alessandra Bollettino, “‘Of Equal or of
More Service’: Black Soldiers and the British Empire in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Slavery &
Abolition 38, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 510–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2016.1251057; Gary Sellick, “Black
Skin, Red Coats: The Carolina Corps and Nationalism in the Revolutionary British Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition
39, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 459–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1489765.
124 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 38.

43
Bautista Gual arrived in May 1789 to follow up on Truxillo’s survey, he specifically cited Hoare and
O’Brien’s actions as being behind his request that Despard appoint a commissary to accompany him
during his trip, “particularly enforcing the necessity of it from the circumstance of Messrs. Hoare &
O’Brien having last year embodied and armed their negroes as before mentioned.”125 Spanish officials
continued surveys, as well as Despard’s tacit endorsement of those examinations by sending deputies
representing himself and therefore, the British empire, demonstrate that the officials from both nations
understood that, if they didn’t occasionally clear those outside the limits designated by the 1783 Treaty of
Versailles, they couldn’t rely upon local colonists to abide by their imperial obligations.
Over the three-month period that Gual surveyed the settlement, Despard sent his sometimes
assistants James Bannantine and John Garbutt to accompany Gual to advocate for the colonists when
appropriate and to represent Despard’s office.126 In their dossiers to Despard, Bannantine and Garbutt
recounted confrontations between Gual, his Spanish coterie, and the various Hondurans of English
descent that occurred while they surveyed the settlement together. Even as Gual was much stricter in his
enforcement of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles terms than his other Spanish predecessors had been, there
were still instances in which English colonists received reprieves from punishment which they deserved
according to a strict interpretation of the treaty.
127 Bannantine and Garbutt didn’t hesitate to inform
125 Don Juan Bautista Gual to Edward Marcus Despard, May 8, 1789 in “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789,
Original Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 12–15.
126 John Garbutt was a free white man who Peter Hunter identified as being a “cutter of wood, possessed of less
property.” Garbutt lived in household of 17, including 14 enslaved people. Notably, two other white people lived in
the household, a woman Marg. McKenny, and a man, Fras. Garbutt. In his publication regarding Despard’s
Superintendency, Bannantine writes regarding Don Juan Baptista Gual’s visit, “The writer of this memoir
accompanied Mr. Gual in his visit, in the capacity of British Commissary, and had many opportunities of witnessing
the mildness with which that officer, who was one of the most amiable and accomplished young men he has ever
seen in any country, executed his commission.” Bannantine, Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard. By James
Bannantine. His Secretary, When King’s Superintendent at Honduras, &c, 20–21, note. I have not been able to find
more information about Bannantine’s background but he was described in Peter Hunter’s report as being “men of no
property in the service of wood cutters. Bannantine doesn’t include information about his personal background in his
book on Despard.
127 Here are a few examples from Bannantine’s May report: “Upon another of the same parcel of keys we found a
hutt possessed by Thomas Lascelles and a small vessel which the people were employing in building or rather
raising upon a Canoe. Lacelles himself was not at the place but a man who lived there being asked by Senor Gual
their business there, answered that they employed themselves fishing. To this senor Gual said that it was permitted
to the English inhabitants to fish upon the… British limits and to carun vessels at the South Triangle but not to make
any establishment upon the keys, that altho’ the work they were doing upon [the] small vessel was not strictly
careening yet they may stay there until it was finished, and that immediately after they must quit the key;” “About

44
Despard of the specific names of British colonists who had property outside of the limits taken down.128
When those names became public, although merely the very first real consequences local colonists had
suffered since 1783, local Baymen magistrates seized on the Spanish Gual’s actions to populate their
latest round of accusations against Despard to be sent to their metropolitan allies. The colonists’ charges,
in combination with the actions Gual and Despard took to shutter the local magistracy during that same
visit, ultimately resulted in Despard’s removal from the superintendency.
Although local colonists tried to paint Despard and Gual’s decision to shut down the local magistracy
as impulsive, Despard had long sought to avoid taking any overt actions against this elite group of
Baymen. Even in this instance, when Gual first contacted Despard about the possibility of dissolving the
committee in May, Despard succeeded in staving off its destruction until November.129 During that
noon we reached a hull and a very small plantation of plantains belonging to William Dingaderry—Senor Gual
mentioned this as an infractions and said that he must order it to be cut down. I represented to him that the plantation
was very trifling, that the owner was a poor man, who had no other subsistence except the few plantains he
cultivated, and that if the plantations of this poor man and others in a similar situation were destroyed, they would
have nothing in the world left to live upon, and used every argument which with decency and propriety I could to
induce him not to destroy this and the other small plantation of the poor people, but he assured me that however
painful it was to his own feelings his orders were so very strict that he could not give the smallest indulgence, but
must order every plantation of whatever kind and to whoever belonging to be destroyed, and he therefore required
that I should give my consent that his sailors should cut down the said plantation, which finding his orders so
positive I thought it my duty to grant, and the Spanish sailors cut down the plantains trees;” “When at the mouth of
the river Senor Gual made two copies of a repot of the plantations cut down, which at his request I certified, one of
these reports kept and the others accompanies this. And I think it necessary to add to what had been then and here
before mentioned that Senor Gual was particularly attentive that his sailors should not carry away any of the
plantains cut within British limits.” For Bannatine’s full account see: “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789,
Original Correspondence” CO 123/8, 31-36, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
128 Three reports were sent to Despard. The Bannantine report written on May 18, 1787, lists the following
transgressors: William Dingaderry, William Tucker, Heirs of Robert English, Aaron Young, and McLachlan
McGillivray. In the first Garbutt report, written on June 16, 1789, listed the following transgressors: Bramwell,
Phineas Parker, James Gordon, David Lamb & Thomas Bath, Benjamin Garnett & Comp., Jackson, Bartlet, Gall,
O’Brien, Bartlet & Usher; In the second Garbutt report, written on July 6, 1789, lists the following transgressors: the
widow Nelly Burrell, Robert Fox, and Campbell. Although this list of persons was fairly numerous, when
considered in the context of British Honduras’ total population, it was a relatively small share of colonists who had
been censured by the scouting parties.
129 The final shuttering of the magistracy occurred on November 25, 1789 after “James Usher…published an address
to the public…in justification of his conduct, in which, some very violent and intemperate animadversions were
made on the court of appeal, and court of ordinary as being illegal and oppressive. A warrant signed by Colonel
Despard and seven Judges and Justices of the court of appeal and police was issued against James Usher on the 15th
November for having published a false, scandalous, and seditious libel, in an address to the public, dated the 13th of
November; tending to disturb the peace of the community, overturn the police, and bring the courts of the district
into an ill opinion, hatred, and contempt with his Majesty’s subjects. The same day he was apprehended and
detained in custody by the Provest Marshal, until the 17th November, when he was admitted to bail. The Quarterly
Court under the new system of police commenced the 24th November 1789. Next day indictment was laid before the
Grand Jury, presenting James Usher as the author and publisher of our false scandalous and seditious libel…Upon

45
months-long delay, Despard sought to secure the petitions of local signatures to demonstrate that most of
the settlement supported his leadership.130 Despard likely did so in the case that, if he ultimately had to
dissolve the magistracy, he could make the argument that it's removal was supported by the majority of
the settlement.
The events leading towards the magistracy’s demise began when Gual wrote Despard in May 1789
“complaining of the body of magistrates established in this country, at being a very great infraction of the
seventh article of the convention, and calling upon me formally to annul and extinguish that body.”131 In
response to Gual’s request, Despard had written out and published at public locations throughout the
settlement “an advertisement…containing a copy of the 7th article of the convention an extract of your
Lordship’s letter to me of the 31st July 1786, enjoining a strict observance of the said convention and a
translation of Sr. Gual’s letter of complaint.”132 By choosing merely to copy out the text of others for this
official communication, Despard’s message seems to be at a minimum, wildly overoptimistic because it
assumed that following the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles was meaningful to local colonists of
British descent and would be motivated to ensure compliance. However, Despard’s frustration that
“advertisement however was paid no attention to: but on the contrary the persons who assumed the
character of magistrates continued the same day to hold their court in the very house where my
advertisement was posted up,” seems entirely too predictable for the Superintendent to claim any sincere
belief that he thought colonists would abide by his placard.133 However, this method provided Despard
cover from all sides: he didn’t anger the colonists by making a direct order, he provided colonists with
this indictment the Grand Jury returned a verdict Ignoramus:--whereupon Colonel Despard immediately published
an advertisement dated in the afternoon of the 25th November 1789, declaring the present system of police, and all
offices held under the same, to be from that moment annulled, extinct, and void.” “Narrative of the Public
transactions...” in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790,” CO 123/9, 134.
130 The appendix Despard prepared for the Home Office included 151 separate items and including journal extracts,
letters, letter extracts, affidavits, advertisements, petitions, meeting minutes, and more. Edward Marcus Despard,
“Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from 1784 to 1790,” CO 123/11.
Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
131 Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, July 10, 1789 in “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original
Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 4.
132 Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, July 10, 1789. Ibid, 5.
133 Ibid

46
enough notice for them to dissemble their works should they want to (at least according to him), and he
correctly attributed the origin of concern regarding the magistracy to the Spanish rather than himself.
When this first public announcement failed, Despard followed up on May 30, “inclosing a copy of
the said advertisement to then magistrates viz. messrs. James Barlet, Thomas Potts, Matthias Gale, James
Usher, James Dundrige Yarborough, Richard Francis O’Brien, John Garbutt and Aaron Young.”134
Simultaneously, that “same day Messrs. Potts and Gale waited upon me with a letter signed by…77
persons inhabitants and transient persons in which they represent the fatal consequence which must ensue
from a want of the means of deciding differences, and requesting of me to promulgate some other system,
whereby the settlement might be governed agreeably to the spirit of the British Constitution.”135 However,
rather than accepting this letter for the olive branch that it was, Despard asked for a more explicit
declaration, imploring the group that “should in the most formal and publick manner declare their court
dissolved, and the body of magistrates annulled and extinguished, and promise that they would not in
future act as magistrates contrary to the 7th article of the convention.”136 Unfortunately, Despard wrote
Lord Sydney “of these gentlemen Mr. Gale alone fully complied with my requisition by a publick notice
of the 3rd June.”137
The Superintendent’s claim may not have been exactly true. In the same sentence, Despard makes
clear that some of the magistrates had “published a notice the same day declaring that they had
relinquished their office of magistrates, which they communicated to me in a letter.”138 But again, “as I
did not consider the above letter and notice of these gentlemen sufficient I wrote a letter of the 4th June
1789 to Messrs. Potts and Gale…that I should be equally satisfied if the inhabitants…would shew it to be
134 In Colonel Hunter’s account of Despard’s superintendency, he offers the following explanation for why the
Baymen failed to follow the superintendent’s requests: “This advertisement seems to have been considered by the
magistrates as merely official on the part of Colonel Despard and calculated to prove to the Spanish Commissary
that such courts were not established by Government; they therefore proceeded with the business before the court.”
“Narrative of the Public Transactions...” in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790,”
CO 123/9, 133.
135 Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, July 10, 1789 in “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original
Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 5.
136 Ibid
137 Ibid
138 Ibid, 5–6.

47
the general sense of the community [to] formally declare the dissolution of the court and magistrates.”139
Following this letter:
a general meeting was held of the inhabitants, the 5th June, when they declared in the most formal
manner, that, from the date of my former requisition, they considered the magistrates and court
dissolved, and promised that they would both in future not act contrary to the convention. This
resolution, signed by 89 persons inhabitants and transients having been delivered to me by
Messrs. Potts and Gale, I by a letter of the 7th June desired these gentlemen to inform the
inhabitants, that upon the 10th of June I would, in compliance with the request of the community,
in their address of the 30th May, lay before the publick a plan of police for the regulation of the
settlement.140
Despard had been waiting for what he termed a ‘plan of police,’ that is, a document that gave him
authority to enforce rules in the settlement, since he first came to the British Honduras—but now the time
had come for him to take the matter into his own hands.141 Despard:
sent [a] letter to Messr. Gale & Potts, with a plan of police for maintaining tranquility and good
order in the district to be laid before the community…I published an advertisement informing the
community that copies of my proposals were left for five days at three different houses, in order
that the inhabitants might signify their approbation or disapprobation thereof.142
After local colonists had time to review his plan, Despard “received two letters…from Mr. Laurence
Neighans, chairman of a general meeting of the inhabitants, returning me these proposals with the
subscription of 130 persons testifying their assent, and without any signatures of disapprobation.”
143 Local
approval wasn’t universal as Despard, “also received a letter of 13th June from Mr. Potts with certain
objections to the above proposals signed by 24 persons,” but “I returned an answer to Mr.
Potts…informing him that as a very great majority of the inhabitants had signified their assent to my plan,
I could not pay attention to the partial objections of a few individuals.”144 Still hesitant to dissolve the
local magistracy but primed with this ‘plan of police’, Despard finally pulled the trigger on the
139 Ibid, 6.
140 Ibid
141 Despard wasn’t the first colonial official to suggest a plan of police for British Honduras to the imperial
government. In fact, the Baymen’s commercial agent Robert White had sent Lord Frederick North, the secretary of
the home department, his own particular “outlines of a provincial government applicable to the Mosquito Shore” all
the way back in September 1783. Memorial from Robert White to Lord Frederick North, September 3, 1783 in
“British Honduras, 1779-1783, Original Correspondence” CO 123/2/2, 282–99, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
142 Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, July 10, 1789 in “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original
Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 6–7.
143 Ibid
144 Ibid

48
abolishment of the magistracy in November 1789 after his attempt to prosecute local settler James Usher
was undermined by a local grand jury.145 At a minimum, Despard’s extensive efforts to document the
lengths he went to ensure the community’s approval to implement the plan of police communicates both
that the Superintendent understood he was transgressing the traditional boundaries of his own authority
and that he sought to communicate to imperial officials that he was operating with the support of the vast
majority of the settlement.
When Despard faced this governmental crisis in British Honduras during the summer of 1789, in
London at Whitehall’s Home Office, his professional actions were already under review. As ‘Baymen’
colonists kept up their pressure campaign against Despard, the attitudes of specific secretaries towards
British Honduras greatly impacted their bureaucratic instructions to the superintendent. During his time as
superintendent, Despard worked under two home secretaries: the first, was Thomas Townshend, Lord
Sydney, who was Home Secretary from December 1783 to June 1789. The second was William Grenville,
Home Secretary from June 1789 to April 1791.146 Although Despard had kept Lord Sydney’s Home
Office abreast of his conflicts with local settlers from the very beginning of his superintendency, it was
William Grenville’s Home Office that made the decision to remove him once the professional and
political allies of Honduran colonists in the United Kingdom escalated their behavior on the colonists’
behalf.147 In the eyes of metropolitan officials, the role of local colonial administrators was to handle
problems on the ground so that the metropolitan office didn’t have to. But by the end of the decade,
Despard’s rigidity had become the office’s problem. Notwithstanding Despard and his Spanish
counterparts’ accurate interpretation of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, as well as following Sydney’s
explicit instructions for land distribution, Grenville removed Despard because keeping him
145 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 274–81.
146 Ian K. R. Archer, “Townshend, Thomas, First Viscount Sydney (1733–1800), Politician” (Oxford University
Press, May 2009), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27636; P. J. Jupp, “Grenville, William Wyndham, Baron
Grenville (1759–1834), Prime Minister” (Oxford University Press, May 2009),
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11501.
147 Although the home secretaries themselves changed, an undersecretary in the Colonial Office, Evan Nepean,
worked in the department from March 1782 until 1794, and served as a bridge between the two administrations.
Elizabeth Sparrow, “Nepean, Sir Evan, First Baronet (1752–1822), Politician and Colonial Governor” (Oxford
University Press, May 2009), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19894.

49
Superintendent would only guarantee continuing exchanges between the office, colonists, and their
metropolitan allies at a time when the office likely had larger priorities.
148
Although the ongoing plot to recall Despard had begun in the fall of 1787, local Baymen’s efforts to
have the superintendent removed redoubled during the summer of 1789 in reaction to Despard’s abolition
of the magistracy and Gual’s destruction of local property that lay outside the British boundaries. In the
eyes of the Home Office, Despard’s decision to dissolve the local magistracy without first asking
permission from the department was fundamentally unacceptable. Evan Nepean wrote Despard a ‘private
& secret’ letter on October 2, 1789, explaining to him the reaction to his actions within the department.
Nepean shared that “Mr. Grenville…expressed his great surprize, that you had, under your own authority,
after abolishing the old system of police and magistracy, on the representation of the Spanish commissary
because it was contrary to the convention that such authority should be exercised without the concurrence
of the court of Spain…”149 In an unsigned draft of a letter to be sent to Despard on November 10, 1789,
the author wrote:
It would have been much more satisfactory to me, if I could have deferred taking any decisive
steps…till I had received from you such a particular account of the grounds on which you have
acted, as might have been expected to accompany your first notification of those proceedings; --
But on considering the actual situation of the settlement, I feel that I should not discharge my
duty, if I did not recommend to his majesty to suspend you from your office of superintendent and
to confer that commission for the present on Colonel Hunter…150
The author sought to communicate to Despard that the magistrates weren’t being given a pass on poor
behavior, stating that Despard’s “warmth of temper which has appeared in so many of your proceedings
might in some degree be excused by the conduct of the settlers, which I am far from considering as
unexceptionable” and yet “I am at a loss to account in any satisfactory manner, for the steps which you
148 Within a month of being appointed Home Secretary, William Grenville had to respond to the outbreak of the
French Revolution when the Third Estate swore the tennis court oath on June 20, 1789. Simultaneously, much of
William Grenville’s attention during the summer of 1789 was spent working with Jamaica’s government Alured
Clarke to insist that several enslaved people who had fled Jamaica and landed in Cuba be returned to the British
colony.
149 Evan Nepean to Edward Marcus Despard, October 2, 1789, in “British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original
Correspondence,” CO 123/8, 148-151. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
150 Whitehall to Superintendent Despard, November 10, 1789. Ibid, 201–2.

50
have taken with respect to the late visit of the Spanish Commissary, or for the evident irregularity of the
whole of those proceedings…”151 Despard’s initiative was especially problematic:
But your abolishing the existing system would have been improper, supposing even that the
complaint had been regularly made, that it had been well founded, and that you authority had
extended to a decision upon it because it was evidently impossible that the settlement could
subsist without some system of this sort, and because the establishing a new one, by your own
authority, or by the consent of a majority of the settlers, must be equally, liable to the object on
which you declared the former to be illegal; and had, in addition to that, the informality of being
constituted by an authority wholly incompetent to such an object.152
Predictably, the Home Office’s position was that all issues in the settlement should have been referred up
the diplomatic chain to the monarch:
If Don Juan Baptista Gual conceived these plantations to be contrary to the spirit of the
convention, it would have been his duty to have reported the matter to the governor, by whom it
might have been communicated to his court, in order that proper representations might be made
upon the subject to his majesty, who had bound himself to provide for the due execution of the
convention, within the limits assigned to his subjects.153
While this might have been the more traditional approach undertaken by colonial officials, the author’s
instructions to Despard failed to grapple with the lengthy timeframe that accompanied that stance, and
ignored the community was in crisis in the present. This message also ignored the fact that the local
magistrates had undoubtedly taken advantage of the bureaucratic standards Despard was held to by the
British Empire, in order to propagate their own illiberal rule. The Colonial Office decided to send
Despard’s replacement, Colonel Peter Hunter, to the settlement with an order for his removal. Despard
left British Honduras for London in June 1790 proclaiming that he would return to the settlement
vindicated from ‘the Baymen’s’ charges. He never did.154
151 Ibid, 203.
152 Ibid, 205–6.
153 Ibid, 204.
154 In his memoir of Despard’s superintendency, Bannantine details what happened after the superintendent left
Honduras: “On [Despard’s] arrival, he did every thing in his power to promote the investigation of his conduct; but
whether Ministers had then discovered that they had been misled, and did not choose to acknowledge it, or whatever
else was the cause, all his efforts were in vain; and after two years constant attendance upon all the departments of
Government, he was at last told that there was no charge against him worthy of investigation—that his Majesty had
thought proper to abolish the office of Superintendent at Honduras, otherwise he should have been reinstated in it.—
But he was then, and on every occasion, assured that his services were not forgotten, and would receive their reward.
It may be also proper to mention, that his attempts, for nearly these eight years, to get his accounts with Government
settled have been equally fruitless and unsuccessful, although he has claims to a large amount.” Bannantine,

51
Conclusion: The Empire’s Choice
Despard’s term as Superintendent of Honduras and the Colonial Office’s decision to remove him
from the post in spite of his punctilious observance of the 1783 Treaty are revealing episodes for
understanding the realities of imperial governance in the British Caribbean during the early age of
revolutions.
Despard’s own actions and decisions reveal the existence of a group of imperial administrators who
saw cooperation, not conflict, as the key to colonial governance. Despard believed that his job was to
implement the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, which meant both respecting Spanish sovereignty
and treating all colonial subjects even-handedly. Since he first arrived in British Honduras, Despard’s
major concern had been to ensure that the colonists complied with the terms of the 1783 Treaty of
Versailles. By working to eliminate all settler conflict over the treaty’s terms, Despard believed that he
had painstakingly performed his duty as Superintendent. A key element of this collaborative approach was
treating all colonists even-handedly. In British Honduras, Despard sought to craft a settlement in which
local colonists’ civic identity as members of the British Empire formed a bridge between colonists of
differing races. For years, Despard and his Spanish counterparts worked together to try and mutually
enforce the terms of a political treaty that they saw as benefitting both empires without giving preference
to white colonists. A group of multiethnic and multiracial colonists supported their international
partnership. This willingness to discipline all colonists in the same way, irrespective of the race or ethnic
background, would give Despard the mark of a radical in some quarters.
However, what Despard failed to understand was that, in the eyes of the Colonial and Home Offices,
his job was less to eliminate settler dissent than to confine that dissention to the Bay of Honduras. Once
the Colonial Office had to endure a pressure campaign from the Baymen’s allies in the United Kingdom,
Despard no longer served any purpose as Superintendent and in fact, in their view, had made their work
Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard. By James Bannantine. His Secretary, When King’s Superintendent at
Honduras, &c, 27–28.

52
harder—the exact opposite of what a good bureaucrat was supposed to do.155 Furthermore, Despard’s
exactingly equal treatment of all British subjects in the Bay of Honduras proved to be less congenial to his
superiors than he seems to have suspected it would be. While the Colonial Office would undoubtedly
have preferred that all colonists follow the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, it became clear that the
government in London did not share Despard’s view that all colonists’ failures to obey were of the same
gravity. They were far more inclined to give credence to the word of wealthy, white planters, with
powerful connections in Britain, than they were to other subjects whom Despard tried to protect.
Despard’s failure as Superintendent, however, cannot merely be blamed on his misunderstanding of
his role; there were structural elements in play as well. The Superintendent job was poorly defined and he
had little to no authority to enforce his orders on the settlers.156 There was also no agreement between
local colonists and the Home Office about what form British Honduras’ local government should take.157
155 Bannantine also attributes the superintendent’s dismissal to changes of personnel in the Colonial Office. When
Despard began his superintendency he was under the secretaryship of Lord Sydney but, according to Bannantine,
“[w]hen Lord Grenville came into office as one of his Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, these memorialists
renewed their attack, and knowing his Lordship to be ignorant of the state of Honduras, and its people, presented
several memorials to him, filled with the most audacious lies, and charging Colonel Despard with the grossest
injustice, tyranny, and oppression.—The same persons who had before solicited his appointment, on account of his
abilities, knowledge and attention to their interests, his mild, equitable, and conciliating deportment, and his steady
and able discharge of his duty, had now the barefaced impudence to style him the ‘barbarous commanding officer of
Honduras,’ and to state him as guilty of all the enormities their fertile fancy could invent. It had, however, the
desired effect. Lord Grenville thought such charges demanded investigation, and in the mean time suspended
Colonel Despard from his office, leaving it in his option either to remain at Honduras or return to England.”
Bannantine, 26–27.
156 Historian Mavis Campbell explains, “Despard was not given the usual title of ‘governor’ or ‘lieutenant-governor’
as with a regular colony, since Belize was only a ‘settlement.’” Mavis C. Campbell, “Naming and History: Aspects
of the Historiography of Belize,” The Journal of Caribbean History 43, no. 1 (2009): 78–79. Crucially, historian
Matthew Restall, while discussing the creation of British Honduras’ boundaries, argued that the vagueness did
specific work for the British empire—even if not for the superintendent himself: “In other words, the British
authorities deliberately refrained from giving the settlement a clear, permanent, official name. That vagueness
influenced and was reflected on maps, with the loggers themselves no more consistent; official policy, cartographic
choices, and local practice all reinforced each other.” At a bare minimum, by keeping the boundaries of British
Honduras vague, the empire retained plausible deniability over any of the settlers’ infractions. Matthew Restall,
“Creating ‘Belize’: The Mapping and Naming History of a Liminal Locale,” Terrae Incognitae 51, no. 1 (January 2,
2019): 22, https://doi.org/10.1080/00822884.2019.1573962.
157 The legitimacy of local laws in British Honduras is a key theme of this story. Although the Colonial Office did
not consider any established government to exist on British Honduras, in 1783 Baymen colonists chose to continue
using laws established by the community prior to the 1779 removal of colonists. These prior laws were usually
referred to as “Burnaby’s code,” tying them to British Admiral William Burnaby, who spearheaded the creation of
laws for the Bay of Honduras in 1775. Tim Soriano, “‘The Peculiar Circumstances of That Settlement’: Burnaby’s
Code and Royal Naval Rule in British Honduras,” Law & History 7, no. 1 (2020): 59–88.

53
Despard had noted these issues at the beginning of his appointment and sought clarification from the
Governor of Jamaica—to no avail.
158 Writing to Lord Sydney in the summer of 1789, Despard’s direct
supervisor, Alured Clarke, the Governor of Jamaica, explained that he had thought a “plan of police may
have been established for the interior management and quiet of the district under [Despard’s] care; but
from the complaints now made…I am a little apprehensive that such regulations as we had reason to think
would be framed at home, have not yet been sent to him.”159 Clarke’s comments illustrate both how much
trust the Governor and Despard had put in the imperial government, even as they had waited years for the
‘plan of police’ to materialize, and how troublesome these officials found the Superintendent’s distinct
lack of governmental authority over British Honduras.
Yet as much as Despard despaired of his role’s formlessness and relative lack of authority, there is
reason to think that this was precisely what metropolitan officials had intended. In line with the
ambiguous nature of British Honduras’ settlement, the Superintendent position had just enough power to
be designated the person in charge, i.e. the person responsible for keeping local order, but not enough
power to see their orders obeyed, by being placed under the Governorship at Jamaica. Additionally, the
community’s proximity to Jamaica, as well as the ongoing financial links between the two places, served
to heighten local colonists’ disinclination towards obeying Despard’s rule.160 The superintendent had all
the responsibility, but very little of the necessary authority. This imperial structure, or rather, lack of
structure, would be a persistent feature of British colonial governance in the Caribbean during the age of
revolutions. It would play a critical role in enabling the creation of inter-ethnic and trans-imperial
communities and—as it had been in Honduras—an enduring cause of friction between colonists and the
imperial administrators who were charged with managing them.
158 In a letter written to Lord Sydney in December 1785, Despard described communication he’d had with Jamaica’s
Governor Alured Clark and that “General Clarke seems to think he cannot without authority from home establish a
police or government for the Bay and it would be useless for me to go there until a police is formed. I must once
more intreat your aid in having this difficulty set aside.” Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, December 3, 1785 in
“Jamaica: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 3 Dec 1785 Dec 3 - 8 Nov 1787,” CO 137/86, 3–4.
159 Emphasis mine. Alured Clarke to Lord Sydney, Aug. 9, 1789 in “Jamaica, May 1789 to October 1790:
Despatches,” CO 137/88, 43–44.
160 Nadine Hunt, “Expanding the Frontiers of Western Jamaica through Minor Atlantic Ports in the Eighteenth
Century,” Canadian Journal of History 45, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 485–501.

54
CHAPTER TWO
This colony isn’t big enough for the two of us:
Baymen versus Shoremen in colonial British Honduras
Even as Superintendent Edward Despard was working cooperatively with his Spanish counterparts in
an effort to forge an inter-imperial order in British Honduras, the settlers within the colony were
profoundly divided about the importance they attached to shared subjecthood as opposed to racial,
economic and ethnic difference. The internal struggles among colonists reveal a great deal about how this
group of British colonists envisioned their relationship to the British empire, and the limits of their loyalty
when it conflicted with local interests.
The first group of settlers in British Honduras, ‘the Baymen,’ objected to the growth and
advancement of their vulnerable community—even at the explicit request of their imperial government—
because they valued their British national and imperial sovereignty only to the extent that the empire
preserved their political and economic dominance in the settlement.
161 The ambivalent gaze with which
the Baymen viewed their motherland can best be seen in the way the Baymen responded to the dutybound importation of a second group of British colonists from the Mosquito Shore in what is now
Nicaragua to British Honduras in 1787. As a provision of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles between England
and Spain, settlers from the Shore, hereafter termed the ‘Shoremen’, were transported to British Honduras
in two large throngs, where they were given land that ‘the Baymen’ had previously hoped would become
their own property.
161 It is difficult to know the full demographic scope of the Baymen collective. However, a document from
September 1782, in which their commercial agent Robert White sent “a list of the several accounts of loss, sustained
by the British settlers at the capture of Saint George’s [C]ay by the Spaniards, the 15th Day of September 1779,
agreeable to the proceeding accounts examined…by the committee of the inhabitants of the Bay of Honduras chosen
and appointed for that purpose at Kingston in the island of Jamica, the 13th Day of September 1782,” lists the losses
claimed by 96 colonists resulting from Spanish seizure in 1779, including separate entries for men, women, and
financial corporations. The claims from many of the colonists Edward Despard would go on to challenge during his
Superintendency including, William and Francis O’Brien, Thomas Potts, Richard Hoare, ‘Hoare & Potts,’ James
McAulay, Richard Armstrong, ‘Alexander & Bartlet,’ and James Bartlet himself, are specifically listed here. “A List
of the several accounts of loss, sustained by the British settlers at the capture of St. George’s Kay by the Spaniards
the 15th Day of September 1779, Agreeable to the proceeding accounts examined...by the committee of the
inhabitants of the Bay of Honduras chosen and appointed for that purpose at Kingston in the island of Jamaica, the
13th day of September 1782. In Jamaica currency,” in “British Honduras, 1779-1783, Original Correspondence,”
CO 123/2/2, 83–85.

55
Even more offensive to the Baymen than the loss of their entitled property was who had received
their property settlements. The settlement’s superintendent, Edward Despard, calculated 2207 individuals
came from the Mosquito Shore settlements to live in British Honduras.162 Within that number, Despard
calculated 533 were free persons and 1674 were enslaved by others. Notably, when Despard detailed the
number of free persons sent from the Mosquito Shore, he failed to separate free individuals by racial
phenotype. The number of “white men, free men of colour & negroes” was 263, the number of free
women, 155, and the number of free children, 115. Despard calculated the number of enslaved people
forcibly brought to British Honduras as 770 “negro man slaves,” 520 women, and 384 children.163 Once
the Shoremen arrived in Honduras, the Baymen quickly developed a partnership with a select few of the
new immigrants—colonists who were sympathetic to the Baymen’s interests and who likely had spotted
the opportunity to rise quickly through the social ranks of British Honduras. Together this mixed group
sought to destabilize ‘the Shoremen’ who had recently emigrated from the Mosquito Shore to Honduras—
even as those new colonists were ostensibly fellow compatriots to whom they owed an explicit duty—to
preserve the Baymen’s political, economic, and racial dominance over the new arrivals.
The Baymen demonstrated after the Shoremen’s arrival in 1787, that at least some of these original
colonists believed colonists from the Mosquito Shore were not deserving to receive the same privileges
from the 1783 Treaty of Versailles because the Shoremen’s racial, economic, and political diversity made
them illegitimate colonists. However, rather than simply basing their argument on their own racial beliefs,
which were undoubtedly white supremacist, many attempted to bolster their argument using a historical
narrative that claimed British colonialism as an explicitly white tradition and therefore, local communities
had an obligation to continue the larger historic policies of the British Empire. This gesture towards
162 Settlers from the Mosquito Shore arrived in British Honduras in two groups. The first group of 282 people
arrived on February 11, 1787. The second group arrived on June 25, 1787.
163 Historian of Belize Nigel Bolland describes how “[i]t is clear, then, that while most of the Mosquito Shore
settlers owned no slavers or very few, some of them owned large numbers. From [my] estimation, there were fewer
than forty ‘large’ settlers from the Mosquito Shore, but they were bringing to the Bay over 1,200 slaves, or almost
three-quarters of the total.” Bolland, “The Social Structure and Social Relations of the Settlement in the Bay of
Honduras (Belize) in the 18th Century,” 24; Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 240–41.

56
historical tradition was necessary because, although property holders in British Honduras had mostly been
men of European descent, many communities, families, and households in the settlement were explicitly
multiracial. This meant that, even as the Baymen claimed a historical tradition which they argued should
limit certain rights and privileges to themselves only, they were living in a wider colonial world which,
unlike its neighbor Jamaica, had never had enough governmental infrastructure to practice white
supremacy on a large scale. It would probably have been unimaginable to the Baymen, as they languished
in a Havana prison years earlier, that the first governmental official the settlement would be gifted with
would be a man who seemed to have no larger commitment to the enlargement or even maintenance of
white supremacy itself.
The Honduras Baymen viewed local superintendent Edward Despard’s commitment to British
settlers of European descent as insufficient because, by working in close partnership with local Spanish
representatives of their imperial government to ensure that the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles were
enforced equally amongst all settlers, they saw the Superintendent as putting his finger on the scale in
favor of Mosquito Shore immigrants rather than the Baymen. The Baymen did not object to the notion of
settlers’ privileges being organized in a caste-like system where different classes were entitled to different
political or social rights—what they did object to was their perception that the Baymen were no longer the
class in British Honduras receiving the greatest power and privileges. By favoring the largely mixed-race
Mosquito Shore immigrants over the Baymen, the Baymen claimed that Despard and his Spanish
counterparts’ actions were imbued with a delegitimizing racial equalitarianism, which absolved them of
their responsibility to follow their orders, while simultaneously imbuing the ‘the Shoremen’ with a
delegitimizing foreignness which absolved the Baymen of their responsibility to their fellow countrymen.
The choices made by ‘the Baymen’ after the arrival of Mosquito Shore settlers in British Honduras in
some ways appear to defy logic when considering the traditional historiographies within imperial,
Atlantic, and Caribbean history focused on white Caribbean colonists in the eighteenth century. Most
scholars who study life in the British West Indies during the Age of Revolutions agree that white
slaveholding colonists were experiencing omnipresent concerns about the violence they might face if

57
local enslaved populations launched insurrections. However, in the case of British Honduras, we have
numerous examples of local Baymen repeatedly refusing infusions of additional population into the
community which would have had the unambiguous result of providing more manpower for the
community if a violent insurrection were ever to occur. Although most immigrants coming from the
Mosquito Shore were people of color, they were also largely slaveholders and relied on the generalized
authoritarianism that was necessary alongside the ownership of human beings.
However, the wide racial difference of the Shoremen immigrants is insufficient for explaining why
the Baymen rejected them from the settlement as historiography has frequently demonstrated that during
the Age of Revolutions white colonists were so concerned about potential violence that Caribbean
communities were willing to make unexpected choices like signing treaties with maroon communities or
arming enslaved people in order to preserve their physical safety.164 Additionally, throughout the wider
Caribbean, particularly in colonies with Catholic histories, slaveholders of color frequently operated
alongside white slaveholders when their economic interests were threatened. There would be no reason
for the Baymen to suspect that the Shoremen wouldn’t ere on the side of protecting slaveholder rights
once they arrived at British Honduras.
The magistrates’ rejected the Shoremen because their north star was continuing local Baymen’s
maintenance of their perceived right to dominate over the settlement, a right that they valued more than
their imperial connection with fellow colonists or the British metropole. The Baymen’s choice to reject
additional colonists from the Mosquito Shore makes sense if the Baymen were in fact, not as concerned
about their physical safety as they purported to be in their communications, or if the Baymen were more
concerned about something other than their physical safety that they felt the Shoremen threatened but felt
uncomfortable declaring that something openly.
The Baymen’s rejection of additional colonists for British Honduras reflects their perceiving
distinguishing classifications within the category of British colonial settler. Their choice to reject the
164 This is also suggested by the fact that most households in British Honduras were multiracial.

58
Shoremen suggests that, from the Baymen’s perspective, the imperial allegiance shared by the two groups
of colonists was an insufficient reason to accept them into their community. Likewise, the Baymen’s
actions suggest that they also considered the shared experience of slaveholding an insufficient reason to
accept the Shoremen into the settlement. However, after they failed to prevent their introduction into the
community, the Baymen’s choice to align themselves with certain migrants from the Mosquito Shore—
that is white colonists who were conspicuously less-wealthy than some of their mixed-race neighbors—
suggests that, for the Baymen, a quasi-hierarchy of priorities existed which governed some of the choices
they made regarding the settlement. When faced with an opportunity to ally with new colonists in the
beginning of the Age of Revolutions, the Baymen opted to join forces with those who shared their racial
interests rather than those who shared their economic interests.165
What is most disconcerting, from the vantage point of this historian, is that the significantly smaller
population of Baymen and their few Shoremen allies were able to successfully remove the superintendent
Despard over the objections over the much larger population of Despard and his own Shoremen allies.
They were successful because the Baymen and their Mosquito Shore partners had access to economic
allies in the United Kingdom who could advocate for them with the Home Office. The Shoremen’s only
friend in power was Superintendent Despard.
The chapter’s first section focuses on life in British Honduras after the imprisoned ‘Baymen’ left
Cuba and tracks their efforts to subvert the forthcoming arrival of ‘the Shoremen,’ even though British
Honduras absorbing the Mosquito Shore settlements was a key provision of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles.
The second section of the chapter details what quotidian life looked like in British Honduras and
discusses the methods used by ‘the Baymen’ to dominate ‘the Shoremen.’Whereas in the first chapter we
165 This finding is different from what we will see occurring among colonists in other areas of the British West
Indies at the same time. Rather than siding with those who shared their racial or ethnic interests, as in British
Honduras, we see colonists siding with those who aligned with their economic interests. What accounts for the
disparity? As an extractive economy in which one’s economic success was largely defined by how much land one
was able to acquire, it could be that British Honduras in at the end of the eighteenth century resembles the British
empire of the seventeenth century and therefore was more interested in preserving racial boundaries. However, in
the case studies of Dominica and the 1801 British military campaign that we will study in later chapters, we see a
softening of racial boundaries as a direct result of what occurred to some British West Indian colonists as greater
economic and political incentives.

59
examined Superintendent Edward Despard’s communications with the Colonial and Home Offices, this
chapter shifts the focus to the Baymen’s efforts to pressure their economic allies in the United Kingdom
to have their superintendent Edward Despard removed. Despite Despard having greater community
support, both from ‘the Shoremen’ and from his Spanish partners, it was because ‘the Baymen’ had
economic support in the metropole that stakeholders had the power to leverage their social and economic
capital with metropolitan officials and effect Despard’s removal.
Before the Shoremen arrived
Not long after the captured Baymen were released from imprisonment in Havana in 1783, the settlers
who intended to return to British Honduras met together in Jamaica to discuss the soon-to-be
reconstituted settlement. At their first meeting on August 18, 1783, a group of ‘34 inhabitants,’ passed
three resolutions regarding the settlement at the Bay of Honduras. The next year in British Honduras, on
June 12, 1784, after the commissioners appointed to mark out the boundaries of the new settlement had
done so, the Baymen met again at the mouth of the Belize river where “Major Hoare acquainted the
inhabitants that the purport of the meeting was to make known to them the proceedings that had passed
between the governor of Yucatan, and H.M. Commissaries, appointed to receive the land allotted to the
settlers agreeably to the 6th article of the Treaty of Paris.”166 This official notification and transfer of the
settlement to the ‘Baymen’ means that the vast majority of colonists absolutely knew what behavior was
expected of them moving forward. Afterwards ‘the Baymen’ met to “frame regulations for the internal
peace & security of the inhabitants & their property.”167 These regulations were signed by 28 of the
166 Major Hoare here is likely Richard Hoare, who was also appointed as a commissioner with Edward Despard.
Hoare was a Shoreman based at Black River and would move to British Honduras in later years.
167 At the meeting, “the following resolutions were agreed upon: 1st. That the Laws & Regulations of 1765 be
continued in full force, & that such additions be made thereto, as soon as convenient, by the content of the
inhabitants as may appear necessary. 2d. That the former Bay Inhabitants be reinstated in their respective
possessions, and that all persons who shall possess themselves by force of any such property shall be dealt with
according to the original laws, and that the inhabitants shall at the requisition of the magistrates, assemble, & assist
to the utmost of their power in the redress of all such injuries. That Major Hoare and four others be appointed
Magistrates for the administration of justice, with power and authority to act as such ‘till the new election takes
place, or Government shall nominate others in their stead. That one magistrate and five inhabitants shall be
sufficient to form a Jury for the trial of such causes as may occur. 3. That all business be transacted & kept in

60
‘principal’ inhabitants of British Honduras. By passing resolutions prior to the arrival of the Mosquito
Shore immigrants, the Baymen communicated they felt their interests to be more important than the
interests of forthcoming settlers. The content of their specific resolutions, which mostly speak to their
economic interests, communicate that the Baymen were motivated primarily by their financial interests
and made no special provisions to address the needs of their forthcoming new neighbors.
Prior to the arrival of ‘the Shoreman,’ ‘the Baymen’ also rejected another group of potential British
settlers from joining their community. In July 1784, a ship Mercury, launched from the United Kingdom,
landed at British Honduras to deposit a group of convicts on the peninsula to be colonists in the newly
reconstituted settlement.168 Despite the disembarking convicts initially being given direction to set up
personal works, “after they had, in consequence of this advice, cleared ground & erected some houses at
the Haulover, the Magistrates called the people together when they came to a resolution…to reembark the
convicts, and that none should be disposed of, under the penalty of £100 on the purchaser as well as the
seller.”169 By threatening not merely the convicts themselves, but any area colonist who might be inclined
to sell to them, the Magistrates showed both that they suspected some colonists might be inclined to sell
to convicts and that £100 as a fine was enough to prevent those sales from occurring. After protesting that
they had been the victims of some of the local Baymans’ efforts to hoodwink these convicts, their
representative “Mr. Hill endeavored to prosecute [a] Mr. Jones before the magistrates for the before
Jamaica currency. 4. That the magistrates for the time being, or any two of them, with such of the inhabitants as they
may think proper, be a correspondence for the transaction of all public business. 5. That the established price of log
mahogany be £15 per 1000 feet. Logwood…chipped…6/ton….unchipped…4/ton. To continue ‘till 1775. 6. That the
laws respecting the payment of transient debts continue as formerly established, which in particular prescribes 14
days notice to be given to such inhabitants of whom complaints may be made. 7. That the above resolutions with
such additions as may be found necessary continue in force. Signed by 28 of the principal inhabitants (the
magistrates included) & directed to be circulated that the rest of the inhabts. Not present might be requested to
subscribe thereto.” “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1775-1800,” CO 123/14, 42–
44.
168 Despard provides further context in his memoir: “In the beginning of 1784 Government, having come to a
resolution to send out some convicts to North America, contracted with Mr. George Moore, Merchant in London for
that purpose, and being refused admittance in the American States they were carried to Honduras, together with a
cargo of £ 2000 value, in the ship Mercury.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 182–83. For one of
the Baymen’s accounts of these events see: “Intelligence for the Right Honorable Lord Sydney His Majesty’s
Principal Secretary of State...Being Extract of a Letter from Major Richard Hoare...12 September 1784 in “British
Honduras, 1784-1785, Original Correspondence” 84–85, CO 123/3, Adams Mathew Colonial Caribbean.
169 Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 185.

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mentioned act of injustice: but upon applying to the magistrates in court (Messrs. Potts and McAulay) for
a warrant, it was refused.” If Hill had been expecting a warm welcome, he must have been shocked at:
Mr. McAulay telling him from the bench, that he should neither have law nor justice while he
staid in the country; that he was a damned old rascal, and if it was not for his years he would
break his head. Upon Mr. Hill’s representing that he was a British Subject and entitled to the laws
of his Country: and that these convicts were sent out by the King’s orders in virtue of an act of
Parliament.
170

In response, “Mr. McAulay said that the people of Honduras had nothing to do with the King of Great
Britain; that they were an independent people; and no act of parliament was binding on them; and they
cared no for more an act of Parliament than a piece of brown paper.”171 Following up with Jamaica’s
governor Alured Clarke in December 1786, Despard wrote that although he had been “well informed” that
word had been passed to the King regarding the magistrates’ rejection of the convicts, “this censure has
not as yet found its way here: a circumstance which I cannot but deplore, as the silence of the minister is
triumphantly construed into a tacit approbation of their conduct by the ringleader of that unwarrantable
act.”172 By using the phrase ‘triumphantly construed’ Despard demonstrates that he understood British
Honduran magistrates sought to exploit the natural distance between their settlement and their metropole
when it suited their own purposes by characterizing imperial silence as assent—even as they undoubtedly
knew months would separate any incident from imperial feedback.
At a minimum, ‘the Baymen’s’ refusal to accept these convicts, as well as the various statements
made by local magistrates about the lack of connections between British Honduras and the British empire,
170 Italics mine. The magistrates likely referred to here were probably James McAulay and Thomas Potts. Potts was
a free white man who often served as a magistrate in British Honduras and was classed by Peter Hunter as a “cutter
& exporter of wood, possessed of considerable property.” Potts lived in household of 65 individuals including six
freed people of colour, two of whom were children, and at least 8 enslaved children. Three of the freed people of
colour were named Catherine, Kitty, and Robert Potts. Their surnames and free status suggest that they had a
familial relationship with Potts. However, two other free white men lived in the household, Charles Briton and Sol.
Weatherly, so it is possible that they were the fathers of Kitty and Robert. In the early pages of his memoir Despard
identified Potts as “one of the settlers was the ringleader of this unwarrantable attempt [to disobey the terms of the
1793 Treaty of Versailles]…and had written several letters to the Captain General, endeavouring to justify his own
conduct, as well as the behavior of those who were influenced by him.” Edward Marcus Despard, 5–6; 184–85. I
have been unable to find many demographic identifiers for James McAulay although his actions strongly suggest
that he was phenotypically white.
171 Italics mine. Ibid, 184–85.
172 Edward Despard to Alured Clarke, December 1, 1786 in “Jamaica: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 3
Dec 1785 Dec 3 - 8 Nov 1787,” CO 137/86, 222–25.

62
demonstrate a remarkable boldness. The fact that the magistrates felt confident enough to reject the
convicts, even as they came at the behest of the imperial government, show that they didn’t believe it was
likely they would face major consequences from their government for their intransigence. Although it is
impossible to know if the magistrate McAulay really felt that there was no connection between British
Honduras and King George when he sent off the convicts, that he felt confident enough to denigrate the
settlement’s connection to the British empire is revealing both that he and his peers were comfortable
strategically deploying their imperial allegiance in ways that best suited them and that they felt confident
enough that, should news of their impolitic reach the metropole, they could express plausible deniability.
The next year the Home Office decided to try again, instructing Despard, who described in his memoir
how:
Government…thinking that as I was by this time appointed superintendent it might be in my
power to prevent a repetition of the former conduct of the magistrates & inhabitants, again agreed
with Mr. Moore in 1785 to carry out a small number, which were accordingly sent out in the ship
Fair American, which arrived at Jamaica in the end of the year.
The superintendent explained that during a visit to Jamaica “Mr. Moore’s agents … delivered me an
official letter from Evan Nepean…desiring that they should be landed, and that I should as far as
consistent with the interests of the settlement give Mr. Moore’s agents all the assistance in my power to
execute their constituents orders.”173 Despard then:
wrote to the Magistrates of Honduras upon the subjects of these convicts; And as I knew the
opposition which had been made to the landing of the Mercury’s cargo, I considered it necessary
to remind them that in so far as related to the permitting the convicts to be landed, the Ministers
injunctions were absolute and unconditional; and at the same time I pointed out in the strongest
manner that I could how much it was their duty and real interest as far as possible to forward and
assist the views of government in business, even if this measure should appear rather against the
interests of the settlement.
174
Although he wrote with conviction, Despard himself seemed to suspect that his public messaging
wouldn’t be sufficient at changing the magistrates’ views because “fearing that these convicts might share
173 At the time of this writing, Evan Nepean was an under-secretary of state in the Home Office. Edward Marcus
Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 85–86; Sparrow, “Nepean, Sir Evan, First Baronet (1752–1822), Politician and
Colonial Governor.”
174 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 86–88.

63
the fate of their predecessors,” he [wrote] privately, “to some individuals of [the Magistracy], and
represented to them that altho’ this measure might at first sight appear to them to be prejudicial to the
interests of the settlement…I recommended…strongly to receive these people.” 175 The Superintendent
attempted to address what he imagined to be the magistrates concerns regarding the convicts, stating his
view that “if it should turn out to be against the interests of the country I had no doubt but it would be
discontinued on a proper representation to Government.”176 Despite Despard’s pleas “the positive orders
of Government and my endeavours, the magistrates and inhabitants would not suffer one of the convicts
to be landed.”177
The refusal to accept the convicts the second time, even with Despard’s added advocacy, again
shows the Baymen’s’ confidence that they would not face consequences for disobeying imperial orders.
However, at least with this second refusal the Baymen adopted an actual argument against the convicts’
disembarkation. Editorializing his account from a vantage point of several years later, Despard added:
here it may not be amiss to consider the reasons assigned by the Magistrates for these violent
oppositions to the landing of Convicts. In the address to me of 27 July 1786 they state: ‘that these
desperate people had almost subverted the course of justice; that they have ruined the morals of
our servants, and have been the cause of frequent tumults and desertions.’ Upon a diligent search
of the records, as well as an enquiry among the inhabitants, and my own experience since May
1786, I can with confidence say, that there has been no instance of any of these people either
being the cause of tumult in the country or even endeavouring to subvert the court of justice.178
175 Ibid
176 Despard’s statement here is indicative of his political naivety. Ibid.
177 Despard’s quote continues, “not only so, but they also prevented some indented servants Mr. Moore had sent out
from being landed putting them on the same footing with the convicts.” This statement suggests that in Despard’s
perspective, indentured servants had a right to be treated better than convicts. Ibid, 88.
178 Despard continued later in his account to add, “[t]hat the morals of the convicts were not really the objection is
evident from two circumstances—1
st: There appears to be no pretence of an objection of the same kind against the
indented servants carried out in the Fair American; and yet there is the same prohibition of their being landed as the
convicts.—But 2nd: the fictitiousness of this reason will be still more evident upon a consideration of the state of
those virtuous servants, the fear of whose morals being contaminated so much engaged the attention of the
magistrates. In the great rebellion of slaves in 1762 in Jamaica, the principal ringleaders were executed: and the rest
were banished to Honduras where they were eagerly purchased—and these negros some years afterwards so far
shewed a continuance of their dispositions as to create a rebellion in the Bay, and murder a considerable number of
inhabitants (sixteen to the best of my recollection) when it was found necessary to put several of the ringleaders to
death by burning, gibbeting, & other methods of torture at Saint George’s Key; A considerable number of this
description of slaves are still in the country; and of the negroes since purchased and imported into the country (the
Mosquito Shore negroes excepted) I take upon me to say, that seven out of ten have been transported from Jamaica
& the other islands for their crimes, either by their masters or the sentence of the law—in a word it is notorious that
Honduras is at this hour the mart for every black villain that is transported from the British Islands.” Ibid, 82–91.

64
Whether any of the Baymens’ claims of community tumult were truthful is impossible to know but, given
their strength in sending the convicts away as well as Despard’s failure to find corroboration, ‘the
Baymen’ likely used any potential fear of violence or disorder from the convicts’ incorporation into the
community as a strawman argument for their removal and instead were more motivated to preserve their
continued dominance over their small patch of the British Empire.
The long-foreshadowed immigrants from the Mosquito Shore came to British Honduras in two
convoys: a first group of 282 individuals arrived on or about February 11, 1787, and a second group
arrived on June 25, 1787.
Shortly after the first group arrived, the Baymen held a meeting on February 21, 1787, at which they
discussed Despard’s stated intention to disperse the new parcel of land only to Shoremen. Using the
recorded attendance, we can determine that at least two Shoremen attended the February meeting.179 In
March 1787 a group of local settlers followed up that meeting by sending Despard a petition in which
they attempted to persuade him to not enforce the Colonial Office’s order to disperse the new parcel of
land by evoking the superintendent’s sympathy.180 The authors used three arguments. First, they claimed it
“must prove of the utmost prejudice to the Inhabitants of this County with them if they on the other hand
are not permitted to enter into the possession of the new district conformable to the terms expressly
mentioned in the 12th and 13th articles of the late convention.”181 Second, although they failed to
acknowledge that they had been breaking the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles from almost the first
moments it came into force, they had already purchased a “large supplys of provisions, implements…and
179 For the full list of meeting attendees see Copy of Meeting Minutes from meeting on February 21, 1787 at the
House of James Sullivan Esquire in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790,” CO
123/9, 174–75. John Leith and John Gordon are the identified Shoremen. Richard Hoare also attended this meeting
and had moved from the Shore to British Honduras earlier than the mass migration of Shoremen migrants.
180 This letter was signed by: Samuel Wright, James Vallintine, Thomas Potts, Walter Watkins, Matthias Gale,
James Bartlet, William Beaty, Laurince Neighan, Richard Armstrong, Benjamin Garnett, John Garbutt, William
O’Brien, George Schively, Edward Davis, James Sullivan, James Seddon, Simon McKenzie, George Nauger, James
Cunningham, John Leith, Moses Easton, William Tucker, John Dean, Charles Hamilton, William Gale, William
Dingaderry, James Gordon, George Tompson, and Luke Teeling. No. 9, “The Memorial and Petition of His
Britannick Majesty’s Subjects residing in and settled there...” in “British Honduras: Narrative of Public Transactions
by the Magistrates,” CO 123/12, 73-75.
181 Ibid

65
lastly engaged shipping to carry off the wood cut by them, that if they are prevented in proceeding in this
necessary and legal business…their workman must stand idle, the ships be disappointed in getting their
loading and the Merchants and wood cutters be inevitably ruined.”182 Finally, they asserted that these
conditions were “contrary both to the express letter and spirit of the Convention and to the good faith
which both Kings have pledged to each other for the due performance thereof,” and therefore Despard
really didn’t need to enforce them.183
After the second group of Shoremen arrived, on June 30, 1787, the entire settlement held elections
for the local magistracy. On July 23, 1787, a group of mixed company colonists met in the settlement “for
the purpose of revising the former laws and regulations of the country and for forming such new
regulations as the increased state of population makes necessary.”184 At this meeting the ‘Old Baymen’
and the Mosquito Shore immigrants agreed that “some Mosquito Shore Inhabitants should be put up as
Candidates in addition to the former candidates for the Bay.”185 Three white migrants from the Mosquito
Shore, namely Aaron Young, John Wagner, and James Usher, all recently arrived from the Mosquito
shore, were elected.
186 By recruiting white immigrants from the Mosquito Shore, the Baymen of British
182 Ibid
183 Ibid
184 The magistrates that were present at the meeting on July 23, 1787 were: Thomas Potts, James Sullivan, Matthias
Gale, Aaron Young, James Usher, Edward Davis, John Wagner, and James Bartlet (8 men total). The inhabitants
who attended this meeting are listed as: Richard Hoare, John Dean, Absolom Bull, William Usher, Thos. Jackson,
Thos. Bourke, Benja. Garnett, Thos. Paslow, Laurence Neighan, R. B. Sandwith, Eman. Swasey, Robt. Perry, John
Luth, James Seddon, John Neal (a free man of color), Richd. F. O’Brien, Luke Teeling, Thomas Robertson, William
Tucker, Henry Maskall, George Dodd, Peter Henry, Basil Jones, Hugh Wilson, C. H. Brokier, Chas. Hamilton, John
Curry, J. Burton Mercer, Mala y Hayes, Cha. Pitt Gapper, James Bannantine, George Moodie, Robert Douglas,
Colin Cambell, Thos. Clark, Thos. Graham, James Hewm, John Gordon, John Potts, Isaac Costin, Phineas Parker,
Daniel Dewalt, John Humphreys, J. Pitt Lawrie (a free man of color), Levi Humphreys, J. D. Yarborough, Edwd.
Neighan, Will Beaty, George Nauger, Thos. Catto, Ed. F. Hill, and Chas. Ed. Dowdale. Edward Marcus Despard,
“Despard’s Narrative,” 78–85.
185 “British Honduras: Narrative of Public Transactions by the Magistrates”, 18-19. The results of the election held
“at 12 o’clock precisely the 30th day of June 1787,” were: James Sullivan (37 votes), Thomas Potts (41 votes),
Matthias Gale (42 votes), William O’Brien (35 votes), James Bartlet (40 votes), Aaron Young (24 votes), Edward
Davis (27 votes), James Usher (23 votes), John Wagner (26 votes), John Garbutt (15 votes), John Thomson (17
votes), Richard Armstrong (16 votes), Allan Kirkpatrick (6 votes). The men elected were: Matthias Gale, Thomas
Potts, James Bartlet, James Sullivan, William O’Brien, Edward Davis, John Wagner, Aaron Young, and James
Usher. No. E: Election results in “British Honduras: Narrative of Public Transactions by the Magistrates,” 77.
186 Aaron Young was a free white Shoreman who lived in a household of 19 in which he was the only white person.
Of the 18 enslaved people in the household, 11 were men, 7 were women, and 3 were children. James Usher was a
free white Shoreman who brought 40 enslaved people with him from the Mosquito Shore. In 1790, Colonel Peter
Hunter recorded Usher as living in a household of 42 people, including 5 free men, one of whom was William

66
Honduras successfully retained their political, economic, and racial advantages in the colony while
simultaneously appearing to give representation to their new neighbors. However, as the new white
shoremen magistrates had a much greater incentive to align themselves with the Baymen rather than the
Shoremen (who were largely wealthier and more racially diverse than they), after their election their
representation of their constituents was virtually nil. Although they might not have intended to align
themselves with the Baymen initially, it wasn’t long before Wagner, Young, and Usher were actively
working against Despard and their compatriot Shoremen.
The Baymen Intimidate the Shoremen
The Baymen did not waste any time in exercising their domination over the Shoremen. Hunger
struck the newly-arrived Shoremen in short order, as a result of the Baymen’s eagerness to speculate.
Despite the Superintendent’s advocacy for them, in ensuring that they received the tracts of Honduran
land due them, the Shoremen were not able to use that land effectively. In September 1787, a hurricane
struck the settlement upon “which most of the houses and hutts at the river's mouth were destroyed, and
every vessel in the settlement (both the foreign ships and country crafts) either lost or so disabled by the
storm as to prevent them from going to sea without considerable repairs.”187 According to Despard,
Baymen magistrates James McAulay, James Bartlet, Richard Hoare, Thomas Potts, and William O’Brien
then capitalized on the disaster by “buying up all sorts of provisions which they could in the country, the
better to create a monopoly, [&] excited the general indignation of the inhabitants.”
188 The speculating
Usher, a white male child and presumably Usher’s son, and 7 enslaved children. For further background on John
Wagner see chapter one, note 111.
187 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 99.
188 Attempting to connect the civil and political rights of Shoremen to their level of support for local magistracy
candidates certainly looks like an attempt to intimidate them. Either they abandoned their own interests and voted
for the magistrates—but ostensibly keep their rights—or refused to vote for the magistracy candidates and accept
that they might lose further rights. Based on their turn-out it certainly looks like the Shoremen sought to
communicate that they did not endorse the local candidates. Further resulting from this cohort’s actions, Despard
“upon the 19th of September sent a boat with letters to the Captain General of the Province of Yucatan, and the
Governor of the Fortress of Bacalar, requesting permission for the British inhabitants to purchase such at Bacalar
during the scarcity.” The ongoing issue regarding the scarcity of food in the settlement also resulted in Despard
working in cooperation with his Spanish counterparts to secure additional plots of land in the settlement for colonists
to grow provisions for themselves. In January 1790, Don Rafael Llovet “engineer in ordinary” and captain in the

67
collective “furnished their goods to the small settlers, who were not able to import their own
supplies…this interference of strangers was as hurtful to their interests as it was beneficial to the
settlement in general.”189 Despard failed to see the Baymen’s logic behind extorting their fellow colonists,
because he believed the group’s primary interest to be in fostering community accord rather than their true
interest, which was to continue to rule the settlement as their own private fiefdom. According to Despard,
rather than seeking to open up economic trade to the settlement, local Baymen sought to constrict it:
magistrates institut[e] what they call a transient tax of two of two and a half percent on all goods
imported by ship masters and other transient persons, altho’ they themselves never paid any tax
either for goods imported by them or on any other account. The better to enforce the payment of
this tax the magistrates of their own authority, and without any consent of the inhabitants of the
4
th September 1788, published an order that all masters of vessels should on their arrival enter
into bond with sufficient security ‘to comply and abide by the laws and regulations which shall be
in force in the Bay of Honduras.’190
The price of flower was still so high in November 1788 that Despard “granted permission to some small
vessels to carry the produce of this country to the United States of America, in order to enable them to
purchase some supplies.”191 Writing to Lord Sydney, Despard cast the decision to allow colonists to ship
produce to North America as made necessary “in a great measure by the improp[er] practices of some
individuals here who have endeavoured by the well known tricks of the trade, by every means in their
Royal Army of Spain arrived, being commissioned by the Captain General of Yucatan…to lay out the
gardens…Upon Capt. Llovet’s arrival I called the people together to consider what would be a sufficient quantity of
ground to be allotted for each person in a family; and at a meeting of the 25th January they resolved that two acres of
ground would be necessary for each person in a family – This I represented to Captain Llovet but I soon found that
he had it not in his power from his instructions to allow near such a quantity: that the utmost he could give, and what
he said was his ultimate resolve was about 500 square yards for each person. I communicated this to the inhabitants
on the 2nd of February, at the same time advising them at all events for the interest of themselves and the settlement
to accept of what was offered in the mean time; and that I meant immediately to send an express to the Captain
General, and use every argument in my power to induce him to comply with their request of two acres a head, or get
a much extension of the plan laid down by Captain Llovet at possible. On the same day…a meeting was held upon
this business when Messrs. Bartlet, O’Brien &c. had the address to persuade the meeting to resolve not only quantity
of land proposed was too small but also ‘that they beg leave to decline accepting of the present offer and that the
business may remain in a suspended state until his Majesty’s superintendent should receive the ultimate
determination of the Captain General.” Ibid, 103–4; 282–85.
189 The Mr. Dyer referred to here is George Dyer of Dyer, Allen & Co., one of the magistrates main economic
correspondents in the United Kingdom. Perhaps related to the launch of this speculative business beginning in
“October 1787, until Col. Hunter’s arrival of the 12th of April 1790, [Despard] kept a particular account of the
imports and exports of the settlement which I regularly transmitted to the proper board.” Ibid, 242, 245.
190 Emphasis in original. Ibid, 249–50.
191 Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, November 20, 1788 in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary
of State, 17 Nov 1788 - 30 Sep 1789” (Correspondence, November 17, 1788), 10–11, CO 123/7, Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.

68
power to monopolize the trade of this country.”192 By targeting the imports coming to British Honduras,
as well as simultaneously grabbing up all local provisions, the Baymen showed that they sought to make
life for the Shoremen in the settlement an untenable as possible, even as they blocked Shoremen’s access
to essential goods from any standard colonial route.
The Shoremen also suffered from the Baymen’s willingness to use local institutions against them
with a total disregard for their personal views. Although the level of enthusiasm with which they had been
elected was unclear, the magistrates didn’t hesitate using local power to assert control over the
community. On July 23 and 24, 1787, while the magistrates and some local inhabitants met together at the
Belize river’s mouth, they selected 13 “persons to be chosen by ballot from the Body of the settlers now
present to frame such laws and regulations as may be necessary: to revise the old laws and to ascertain the
bounds of works.”193 The committee drafted 22 resolutions.194 Once those laws and regulations were
framed they were then to be “laid before the community and if approved they shall be considered as laws
binding as well on the present inhabitants as all others who may hereafter become settlers.”195 After a few
192 The word improper is cut off in the manuscript and only “improp” is legible. I think it’s likely that improper is
the correct word here.
193 The colonists elected to this committee were: William O’Brien, Richard Hoare, Laurence Neighan, James Bartlet,
James Usher, John Wagner, Matthias Gale, Aaron Young, Thomas Graham, Luke Teeling, James Sullivan, Thomas
Potts, and Edward Davis. See No. 11: Court House, Belize Rivers’ Mouth, 24 July 1787 in “British Honduras:
Narrative of Public Transactions by the Magistrates,” 80–87. In his memoir, Despard explains how in the summer of
1788 from “the 23rd July to the 4d Aug. the gentlemen of the before mentioned legislative committee continued
enacting laws; but these they thought proper to conceal from me. I however got a copy of them by accident.”
Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 71–72.
194 Many of these resolutions sought to reverse the policy that colonel Despard and his Spanish counterparts had
been employing during his superintendency including resolution 6, “That such persons as are deemed residents and
who formerly possess lots on St. George’s Quay, shall now enjoy them in the same state as formerly…”; resolution
7, “That a committee be appointed to dispose of and sell at public vendue such lots as have been claimed or are
ascertained but whose proprietors are deemed non residents…”; resolution 8, “That a committee be appointed to lay
out such lots [i.e. the ones appropriated by resolution seven] and to dispose of them to such persons as they think
most in need or best intitled to them…”; Resolution 15, “That all vacant or dormant Mahogany works and logwood
works, the property of estates or absentees who are represented here, be disposed of agreeable to the 6th resolution
respecting St. George’s Quay;” resolution 19, “That the future juries of this settlement consist of not less than eight
freeholders and that their verdict be unanimous and not as heretofore by majority…”; and resolution 22, “that no
foreigner who is not denizen shall in future directly or indirectly hold any Mahogany or Logwood works in the
settlement.” The committee also explicitly grandfathered in James Bartlet and William O’Brien “having held
exclusive possession of a certain lagoon and creeks….which they have heretofore been at great expence to establish
it is considered but justice to them that their limits should extend across…and that every other settlement shall be
subject to here regulations…” No. 11: Court House, Belize Rivers’ Mouth, 24 July 1787 in “British Honduras:
Narrative of Public Transactions by the Magistrates,” 80–87.
195 Ibid

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edits, a large number of colonists endorsed the resolutions.196 However, since the number of actual
meeting attendees was quite scant, and as the magistrates sought for their actions to appear legitimate in
the eyes of the settlement, local Baymen sought to have the resolutions endorsed by more colonists.197
Superintendent Despard explained they accomplished this by sending a “clerk of the court…among the
inhabitants with a copy of them to sign.”198 However, Shoremen claimed those requests for their
signatures also came with intimidating demands that if those settlers didn’t endorse the new laws they
would lose access to governmental protection. Despard contended that:
at the same time every art was made use of to oblige them to this – they were told that they
should have no redress for injuries; but that other would be suffered to prosecute them – that no
person should either sell them necessaries or purchase any articles from them—they went even so
far as to threaten to banish them the country.199
The superintendent proclaimed that these “regulations [had] a very specious appearance and were
calculated as much as possible to blind the people from the shore and make them believe that it was the
intention of the Baymen to admit them to a full participation of all the benefits granted by the Treaty and
Convention.”200
The Shoremen magistrates acted hand-in-glove with their Baymen partners to try and wrest control
of the land back under their domain. An August 1787 confrontation between the magistrates and a new
shoreman of color, Joshua Jones, demonstrates how linked the representatives of the two settler
constituencies had become by that point. After instructing David Lamb, a surveyor and recent migrant
196 The following amendments were made to the drafted resolutions: An amendment of the 9th resolved, that no
person who is not actually possessed of four able negro men slaves shall be intitled to a Mahogany work in any of
the River’s without leave first had and obtained of a majority of the magistrates or more, whenever application many
be made. As an amendment in the 10th resolve, resolved unanimously that no person shall possess more than two
mahogany works in any river, let him be possessed of what number of negroes soever. As an amendment to the 18th
resolve, resolved that a majority on juries shall take place in all actions laid for a sum under one hundred pounds and
that juries shall be unanimous in sums of an hundred pounds or more and in contested and criminal actions.” Ibid
197 The colonists who were listed as being present at this meeting were: Thomas Jackson, ?. L. Thompson, R.B.
Sandwith, Edward Gautir, Peter Henry, Thomas Remington, Ben Garnett, John Dean, Thomas Davis, R. F. O’Brien,
William Usher, James Seddon, William Beaty, W. Watkins, C. Hamilton, James Vallentine, Thomas Catto, James
Hewm, J. Brestow, H. Moodie, Wm. Muckleheany, John Lawless, Ger. FitzGibbon, George Nauger, John Wilton,
William Tucker, John H. Smith, Thomas Bramwell, Jonathan Card, Allan Kirkpatrick, E. F. Hill, George Dodd
Dewolt, A. Cunninham, David Evans, John Neal, A. M. Laws, C. E. Dowdale, L. Mayer. Ibid.
198 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 71–72.
199 Ibid
200 Ibid

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from the Mosquito Shore, to mark out plots of the newly released land, English Superintendent Despard
and Spanish Colonel Grimarest ordered the plots distributed using a lottery. Despite having imperial
sanction by being formally laid out by a surveyor and approved by the superintendent, once the plots were
distributed to residents, British Honduras erupted into conflict.201 The most prominent incident concerned
the home of Joshua Jones.202 On August 18, 1787, after Jones drew lot no. 69 in the lottery at ‘New Town’
in British Honduras, at about six in the evening a group of magistrates arrested Jones.203 The “crime” for
which had been arrested was “pulling down the cook room of Aaron Young.”204 As Aaron Young, one of
the settlement’s newest magistrates representing the Mosquito shore had already claimed that land for
himself, his fellow magistrates couldn’t abide such a humiliation against their member to stand.205
201 Lamb had to endure commentary from settlers while he marked out the plots. While laying out the land, the
appointed David Lamb “was waited upon by [Magistrates] Mr. William O’Brien and Mr. James Bartlet; who told
him that they had long before cleared land there which they declared they would distribute to such of their friends as
they thought proper, denying that [Despard] had any power or authority whatever to distribute these lotts.” Once
Despard was present at the jobsite “The first day...I was there waited upon by Messrs. Bartlet, Potts, Tealing, Davis,
Neighan, Young, Sullivan, & Graham, who came as they said as a committee and appointed by the inhabitants, to
remonstrate with me upon the impropriety of my conduct in this distribution of the lotts…” In a letter to Lord
Sydney, Despard explained what happened next. “[They] who came (as they said) as a committee, and appointed by
the inhabitants to remonstrate to me, upon the impropriety of my conduct, in this distribution of the lotts, and by that
means, as one of them was pleased to express himself of setting The King’s Subjects by the Ears. I requested them
to shew me their [emphasis mine] authority: this they did not chuse to comply with, observing that it would be
exceedingly difficult for them to collect the names of the persons by whom they were authorized, they being so
much dispersed. I observed that I could not altogether give credit to their assertions, as it was, in my opinion, as easy
to collect Proper Names, as their Sentiments, but at any rate, until they produced me such authority in writing, I
could not have any further conference with them upon the subject.” Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, August 24,
1787 in “Jamaica: Original Correspondence, Secretary of State,” CO 137/50, 497–514.
202 The incident with Jones is universally mentioned in scholarly works about Despard. Jay, The Unfortunate
Colonel Despard, 166–68; Conner, Colonel Despard, 95–104; O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial
Society : Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 35–36,
http://archive.org/details/formationofcolon0000boll; Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra, 270–72.
203 In 1791 Jones was listed as owning 8 laboring individuals including 2 enslaved men, 3 enslaved women, and 3
enslaved children.
204 Aaron Young was a recently elected Magistrate who migrated to British Honduras from the Mosquito Shore. In
the list of Mosquito Shore settlers given to Jamaica’s Governor Alured Clarke prior to their migration to British
Honduras, Young is listed as owning 43 enslaved people but in the census taken in 1791 he is listed as owning 18
enslaved people. No. 43, Narrative of Mr. William Usher upon Oath Colonel in Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,”
179–85.
205 In his Aug. 24 letter to Lord Sydney, Despard detailed how Aaron Young confronted him after Jones was given
the lot explaining, “Mr. Young came up to oppose [Jones being given the lot], threatening violently the vengeance of
the Magistrates to whom he would apply for redress. This I consider the more unwarrantable in Mr. Young, as I
recollect perfectly, that he came to this country from the mosquito shore some time in February last, just about the
time of my publishing a letter from your lordship wherein I had your particular instructions to me that the
convention was strictly adhered to and observed, notwithstanding which, and my repeated remonstrances on the
subject, and utmost exertions to the contrary, Mr. Young took possession of this piece of ground, and built a house
upon it as did several others who followed his example by building houses upon and possessing lotts adjoining. In

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Descending upon Jones en masse, a group of five colonists declared Jones under arrest.206 In his statement
taken under oath, Jones described how next, with this gang of men encircling him, Davis said, “Sir, you
must go away with us.”207 When Jones asked if he could enter his house to retrieve his jacket before they
departed to which James Usher responded “that if he offered to go into the house he would blow his
brains out.”208 Once the arresting mob reached the court house “they put irons upon [Jones’] legs, and
handcuffs on his arms, and kept a guard of about a dozen of armed men over him all night.”209
A trial got underway at the courthouse around eight the next morning.210 The authoritarian group’s
numbers had increased during the night as “notice was sent off to the masters of the different vessels in
the harbour to request their attendance.”211 A group of colonists of color, led by Richard Joneston and
John Neal, stood vigil at a nearby home. Shortly after the meeting began Despard arrived accompanied by
white colonists David Lamb and James Bannentine. Speaking with the group of people of color
assembled outside, “Colonel Despard told the people waiting there that he would go to the Court House
that they behaved in such a refractory manner, as to lay Colonel Grimarest, who was then in the neighborhood,
under the necessity of dispossessing them, by a military force, and continuing the same there, until the 8th of July,
when the possession of the then ascertained parts of the new limits was delivered up to me. Jones being in
possession of this lott, pulled down the shed which Mr. Young had built upon it for a kitchen, and I returned home to
my house at the Haulover.” Edward Despard to Lord Sydney, August 24, 1787 in “Jamaica: Original
Correspondence, Secretary of State,” CO 137/50, 497–514.
206 In his statement made under oath, William Usher explained that he did not know Joshua Jones prior to this
interaction. There is no greater testimony to the power of white skin in the colonial Americas than the fact that
Usher happily acquiesced to Edward Davis’ request that he help him detain the unknown Jones. Usher explains,
“Upon my near arrival to the house of James Bartlet, I was met by the late Edward Davis, who asked me if I knew
Joshua Jones, I answered I did not nor did I know the house he lived in at New Town; the said Edward Davis
informed me that a Warrant was or would be granted against the said Joshua Jones for pulling down the Cook Room
of Mr. Aaron Young who lived on the south side of the River Belize and requested I would attend him with several
others to apprehend the said Joshua Jones which I accordingly did.” See No. 43, Narrative of Mr. William Usher
upon Oath in Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 179–85. However, as William and James Usher, and Edward
Felix Hill were all white male settlers recently arrived from the Mosquito Shore, it seems suspicious that William
Usher claimed to not know Jones.
207 No. 48, Extract Deposition of Joshua Jones in Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, Appendix to “Despard’s
Narrative,” 214–17.
208 Ibid
209 Ibid
210 No. 43, Narrative of Mr. William Usher upon Oath in Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 179–85.
211 Usher was impressed by the participation of the sailors explaining, “it was much observed that the Masters of
Vessels were as much interested in the business as the inhabitants, for if the business of the country was impeded
they could not get their vessels loaded in consequence. I presume was the occasion that many of them did attend. I
think some of their mates with them to prevent the prisoner being rescued.” Ibid.

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and see what could be done in the business and begged that none of them might follow him.”212
Physically blocking Lamb and Bannentine’s entrance into the building, the mob’s ringleader, Davis, said
that “the superintendent was welcome to come in but none of his Myrmidons.”213 Still seeking to support
the Superintendent, Lamb and Bannentine “placed themselves at the outside of the house where they had
an opportunity of looking through and hearing and seeing all that was said or done within, as well as if
they had been in the inside, the said court house being only a poor hut slightly built of small palisades.”214
Despard entered the room and positioned himself beside the detained Jones. Armed with his personal
correspondences for evidence, the superintendent tried to defuse the situation by explaining his decision
logically rather than appealing to settlers’ emotions. The distribution of newly available land in British
Honduras to immigrant Shoremen exclusively was merely temporary, Despard explained, and was only
ever intended to last until the King’s preference was known.215
What happened after the Superintendent’s explanation is disputed: Despard’s account sharply
diverges from the racialized claims made by the Baymen in their correspondence.216 Despard’s memorial
account ends hastily with him claiming all that occurred next was the agreement of a few other colonists
with magistrate Bartlet that they hadn’t known about the correct text of the advertisement.217 When
narrating these same events three years later, on the contrary, Colonel Peter Hunter wrote that Despard
212 ‘No. 44. Affidavit of John Neal and Richard Jonoston and Geo. Crawford’ in Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,”
95–98.
213 ‘No. 43. Narrative of Mr. William Usher upon oath.’ British Honduras: Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 179–
185.
214 No. 45, Affidavit of James Bannantyne respecting the proceedings of the 19th of August 1787 in Appendix to
“Despard’s Narrative,” 193–207.
215 Despard’s explanation here seems specious. It seems like the King’s decision was already known due to the
instructions sent by Lord Sydney telling the Superintendent to give land exclusively to the Shoremen was a decision
that had come down from the Colonial Office in London.
216 Resulting from claims made by the Baymen, Despard spent a significant portion of his memoir attempting to
prove that the Baymen’s claims that local people of colour had been violent in response to Jones arrest. Despard
wrote Grenville that, “1. In the complaints made against me in your Lordship’s office, both in Mr. Bartlet’s letter of
27 August & Mr. White’s memorial of 23d February, it is asserted that, ‘the men of colour threatened to rescue
Jones that night at the peril of their lives. No rescue however took place but next day being the 19th of August about
7 in the morning a few white people of the very lowest class, with a number of mustees mulattoes and free negroes
assembled in the streets under arms to the terror of the more peaceable inhabitants.” To support his position of the
Jones event, Despard secured several petitions from colonists with their version of the events. Colonel Edward
Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 79–96.
217 Ibid, 54–55.

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had “demanded to know upon what account Jones had been committed, on being informed of the cause,
he replied that Jones had acted agreeable to his orders, that he himself was authorized by his instructions
to proceed in the manner he had done, and that he would persevere in carrying into execution the plans
which he had made public.”218 Hunter’s account continued, “many long debates took place…respecting
the rights of the people…and the authority claimed by Colonel Despard as Superintendent…Despard
made an attempt to liberate Jones, but was prevented by some of the people upon which, he declared them
to be out of his Majesty’s protection, and departed.”219 William Usher, in his version of the story,
described how Despard “enquired of the prisoner what he did there or by what authority he was kept
there, he answered that he was brought there by Order of the Magistrates for putting down the shed or
cook room belonging to Mr. Aaron Young. The Superintendent then asked him, if he had not acted by his
orders, he said he had.”220 Usher continued,
[t]he Superintendent then putting his hand upon the prisoner’s arm or shoulder, said, in the King’s
name I discharge or release this man. Mr. Bartlet on the other side said in the name of the people,
I detain him, or words to that effect and upon the Superintendent putting his hand upon the
prisoner some person or persons called to arms and some other called out ‘turn him out’ meaning
the Superintendent, and the Superintendent then left the place.221
Despard’s compatriots, Lamb and Bannentine who had been crouched outside the court’s window heard
“the Superintendent further [declare] that by their various infractions of treaty they forfeited all claim to
his Majesty’s favour and protection, and to the rights of British subjects.”222 In response to which “James
Bartlet said, that used as they were, and drove (as he expressed it) by a parcel of negroes and mulattoes,
they no longer desired or could live as British subjects.”223
218 Colonel Peter Hunter was the official sent to replace Despard and he interviewed the interested parties in the
Jones affair to determine exactly what had occurred. Peter Hunter, “Narrative of the Public Transactions Which
Have Happened in the Bay of Honduras since the Convention of 1786...,” CO 123/9.
219 Notably, Hunter’s account here suggests that the rationale expressed by the Baymen here continues in the
tradition of claiming that colonists alone should be in charge of designing local government. Ibid.
220 ‘No. 43. Narrative of Mr. William Usher upon oath.’ British Honduras: Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 179–
185.
221 Ibid.
222
No. 45, Affidavit of James Bannantyne respecting the proceedings of the 19th of August 1787 in Appendix to
“Despard’s Narrative,” 193–207.
223 Bartlet’s statement here goes to the heart of the argument regarding why the Baymen chose to reject additional
settlers from their settlement. Bartlet’s claim speaks to the magistrates true racial reasoning behind the removal of
Jones from his property. The magistrate claims that, by being ‘forced’ to respect the rights of fellow colonists of

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We cannot know whether Bartlet did in fact disavow the settlement’s connection to the British crown
if the Baymen continued to live amongst “a parcel of negroes and mulattoes.”
224 However, as the
quotation comes from Bannentine’s account, and as Lamb and Bannentine were at the courthouse in
support of Despard, it makes logical sense that, if Bartlet did say it, they wouldn’t seek to conceal or
cover up his dishonorable comment in the way that other ‘Baymen’ might have had an interest in doing.
However, as Bartlet’s comment strong resembles the aspersions cast at disembarking convicts years
earlier by magistrate McAulay, it stands to reason that, even if the precise verbiage reported by
Bannentine might not have been expressed by Bartlet, he probably said something within the spirit of the
comment. At a minimum, Bartlet’s comment expressing that the Baymen “no longer desired or could”
live as British subjects once again displayed a confidence among the colonists that they as a group would
not face significant consequences for making such a treasonable remark. These comments also indicate
that Despard’s appeals to the Baymen’s duties and obligations as colonists of the British empire, a concept
so clearly potent for himself, weren’t particularly meaningful or even persuasive to the Baymen.
Joneston reported that Neal and Crawford, along with other colonists of color, had been waiting in a
neighboring yard for about an hour when “Colonel Despard, together with Messrs. Lamb and Bannatine
returned…[and] told the people…that he had done everything in his power to release Jones, but without
effect, and advised them to disperse and go home, and continue peaceable until the King’s pleasure should
be known…which they immediately did.” In a letter to Lord Sydney, Despard explained what happened
to Jones next. The magistrates, after having “refused absolutely to release Jones…I find they did soon
after my leaving the place, not however until he found security for his future good behavior in the sum of
£500.”225 Notwithstanding the obnoxiousness of the Baymen’s initial refusal to release Jones only to do so
color, the group “no longer desired or could live as British subjects.” The magistrates here seem to be saying that
they associate the right to dominate others as being an inherent provision of their Britishness. Once they lost the
ability to dominate the settlement, these magistrates claimed they no longer had an obligation to their fellow
imperial colonists and indeed, no longer had an obligation to King or Parliament. Ibid.
224 Ibid.
225 This bail, aside from being improper because Jones had done nothing wrong, seems explicitly gratuitous. Edward
Despard to Lord Sydney, August 24, 1787 in “Jamaica: Original Correspondence, Secretary of State,” CO 137/50,
497–514.

75
after Despard left, the fact that they were able to elicit such a large sum from Jones as a bond is
noteworthy, first because Jones was actually able to pay it, and second because the bond’s existence
makes the whole event look like a grift for monetary gain.
Jones’ arrest, which clearly rattled the settlement so much that we have several accounts of it
prepared from multiple points of view, was a decisive moment for the Baymen. Jones’s arrest signified the
actual transition of land to the Shoremen and a moment when the British superintendent actively stepped
in to support a person of color over the interests of a white colonist. For the Baymen, this moment
represented a hard line which when passed, eliminated any possibility that they might be able to work
with Despard.226
Over the next year, the courthouse continued to serve as a key site in the ongoing power struggles
between the Baymen and the Shoremen, two groups ostensibly entitled to the same rights and privileges.
226 Local settler George Bogle wrote magistrate James Bartlet to describe his impression of the Jones incident. “I am
exceedingly sorry for the step that was taken last night, of taking a man into possession, and putting him in irons
(which I understand is the case) for executing the orders of his Majesty’s Superintendent, if those orders are unjust
he the Superintendent is surely amenable, though not perhaps in this country, but be the order right or wrong in
cannot be supposed that Colonel Despard will calmly see a person confined, much less punished, for acting
agreeable to his orders, provided he gave such. I will not admit of the idea, that if could be productive of any bad
consequence to allow the Superintendent to go on with his intentions respecting the opposite bank, as I am informed
that Mr. Young and Mr. Cattos, are the only two lots in dispute and particularly as a vessel is daily expected which
will bring such instructions, we are given to understand, as much set every thing to rights, and put it out of the power
of either party to injure the other, thus situated of two evils surely the least ought to be chosen on the one hand by
making a small sacrifice the propriety or impropriety of which cannot be long undecided, you put a stop and entirely
prevent the smallest chance of any mischief happening, but on the other hand by persisting in keeping in
confinement or bringing to trial the person in question, you are with open eyes doing a thing which you are well
aware will most likely be the means of creating riots and disturbances which when once begun, you well known,
there is no saying what length they may be carried—Being singularly situated from having access to both parties
concerned in this disagreeable business, I conceive it as an incumbent duty, to give them both my sentiments—I
shall not conclude without again observing that if the person in question has been acting agreeable to Colonel
Despard’s orders, and for doing so has been confined, it ought not to be expected, that on Colonel Despard’s coming
down he will for a moment allow him to remain so—I therefore cannot help declaring now, and always will, that the
people by whose orders the man has been confined, have wantonly taken steps which they must know will most
likely be the cause of bloodshed and mischief—I have no disburdened myself of my duty to the one part, and I
should be happy if I could think it would be in any degree the means of preventing an impending danger and of so
serious a nature. It is a most unfortunate circumstance that matters have come this length as I am well informed the
infractions to Mr. Young’s house (which has been the cause of it all) is of the most trifling nature and not of the
value of five shillings, and which was beyond the line of the lot that Gentlemen who have interested themselves,
ought to be acquainted with this. I wish with all my heart that matters may be conciliated and am always…” No. 51:
George Bogle to James Barlet, August 1787 in Appendix to “Despard’s Narrative,” 113–114. Unfortunately, I
haven’t been able to find demographic information for George Bogle but his comfort in expressing disagreement
with the magistrate James Bartlet suggests that he is white.

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The courthouse itself represented the British empire and by making legal filings the Shoremen sought to
assert their rights as British subjects. Aware that the Shoremen made up the vast majority of the
settlement’s population, in a court session of May 1788 petitioners expressed their dread that if
“[the magistrates] continue to assume powers of acting from themselves only, in the name of the
people at large, and powers not intended to be delegated to three or four individuals, they may by
similar strides soon establish themselves into a small democracy more dangerous to the general
welfare of the country than any system of government whatever.”227
Petitioners explained any prior approval of the magistrates had been rooted in their assumption that “the
conduct of all the gentlemen chosen to act as a committee for the public would thro’ the whole of the
business be conformable to the spirit of patriotism manifested at the first public meeting.”228 Boldly
contrasting themselves with the self-interested ‘Baymen,’ Shoremen explicitly connected their assent to
rules moving forward to the rights and privileges of British citizenship more broadly:
as we consider it our duty to demean ourselves always with loyalty and submission to the will of
our sovereign, placed by providence as guardian of a constitution the most free in the world so we
cannot by any actions of ours forfeit our title to the rights of British Subjects or our claims to the
future protection of Government.229
In the eyes of the Shoremen, if they accepted the rules drawn up by their fellow colonists, they would be
demeaning themselves as members of the British empire.230 The Shoremen’s accused posted a public
response in June of 1788. The magistrates weakly argued that they:
227 This statement was signed by: Matthias Gale, Laurence Neighan, Thomas Graham, J. D. Yarborough, Thomas
Catto, Lachlan McGillivray, Thomas Bramwell, Lewes Meye, Thomas Martin Philips, Absolom Bull, Colin
Campbell, John Dean, Patrick Dean, William Tucker, Henry Jones, Marshall Bennett, George Tompson, Thomas
Remington, William Tillitt, George Schively, William Gale, Thomas Davis, Edmond Neighan, James Cunningham,
Patrick Carey, Emanusel Swasey, George Moodie, John Garbutt, Thomas Rogers, Charles Hamilton, George
Nauger, James Pitt Laurie, Henry Maskall, Richard Swelling, Phineas Parker, Walter Watkins, Joseph Townson,
Philip Vauden, David Lamb, John Barton, John Thomas, Benjamin Parker, John Humphreys, Steven Stan, Marcus
Belisle, Jacob Hover, John Nicolson, John Neal, Jonathan Card, William Usher, William B?, Noel Todd, David
Evins, Thomas Robertson, Jesse Hunt, Alexander McLaws, Issac Costin, Samuel Wright, William usher by desire of
Stephen Winter, Thomas Cooper, Henry Stenner, Nehemiah Gale, John G?, William White, and Patrick Waldron.
No. 18: Copy of notification presented in Court 27th of May 1788 in “British Honduras: Narrative of Public
Transactions by the Magistrates,” 119–21.
228 Ibid
229 Ibid
230 This sentiment was even more widespread in the settlement. In a June missive, some Shoremen colonists
followed up with Despard explaining that since they presented their petition in court they had gained even wider
support as “our conduct in taking these steps has been so far the true sense of the public, that we have obtained
fourteen more signatures – so that the whole number of inhabitants who have by such signatures given their
approbation of our proceedings, and their utter detestation of the sentiments expressed in the letter of the 19th April
are 65 ~ and we with truth assert that the private illiberal and unjust sentiments and declarations set forth in that

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declame every idea of arrogating to themselves the exercise of any unconstitutional powers; they
conceive they have done everything consistent with the trust expressed in them by the public;
whose confidence approbation and support it has ever been their wish to obtain and preserve if
they have in any part of their duty been guilty of errors, they do not proceed from design or a
disposition on the parts to promote those divisions and distractions which must ever operate to the
prejudice of a community.231
The magistrates’ statement claiming there had been an equal advocacy for all British Honduras strains
credulity and the more logical explanation for their brazen lie is simply that they sought to defer the
resolution of any conflict until after Despard had been removed. Tensions in the Honduras’ courthouse
between the Baymen and Shoremen furthered towards the end of 1788, when in November 1788, during a
local trial:
the Jury being desirous of having a particular evidence examined, which Mr. William O’Brien,
one of the magistrates having refused, and the jury persisting in their request, a violent altercation
took place between Mr. O’Brien and the foreman of the jury; in which among other things Mr.
O’Brien threatened to take him by the shoulders and turn him out of doors. This conduct of Mr.
O’Brien so much excited the indignation of the people in general that he and his colleagues found
it necessary to throw up their offices.232
After a Shoremen Noel Todd informed Despard of an insult purportedly made about him during that
incident, Despard held a meeting on December 5, 1788, where he “brought a charge before the public
letters have so far rous’d the minds of the generality of the inhabitants who scorn the idea of being misrepresented.
This letter was signed by Matthias Gale, John Garbutt, Laurence Neighan, George Tompson, James D. Yarborough,
Henry Jones, and George Nauger, Marshall Bennett. Letter to Edward Despard in “British Honduras:
Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 31 Oct 1787 - 1 Nov 1788,” CO 123/7, 259–61.
231 As all of the magistrates lived in multiracial households, it is quite possible that they believed themselves when
they claimed they were not operating from prejudice. However, it is more likely that, prior to Despard’s
superintendency, it would never occurred to the magistrates that fellow colonists of color might be placed on the
same political and civil level as themselves.” Ibid, 279–80.
232 Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 209. For more context on the event, in No. 136 of Despard’s
appendix. In it, “Noel Todd, woodcutter, maketh oath that in November Court 1788 he had three actions respecting
the works occupied by him in the new river, one with Mr. Thomas Potts, one with Dr. John Wagner and one with
Frederick Wallace, all of which were given against this deponent, as he conceived improperly that some short time
afterwards he spoke to Richard Armstrong esquire then one of the magistrates upon the subject, and as to his
obtaining a rehearing of these causes which Mr. Armstrong said he thought it was very proper he should have—That
afterwards on or about the 4th day of December last this deponent mentioned the matter to James Bartlet Esq. then
also one of the magistrates, when that Gentlemen told him that he did not wish to have anything to do in the matter:
This deponent then said that if the magistrates would not grant him a rehearing he must apply to the superintendent
upon which Mr. Bartlet said, ‘What you mean to frighten us with that Bugbear.’ And thereupon this deponent
went away; And this deponent further saith, that at the trial of one of the above actions, (He believe’s Pott’s)
Richard Hoare esq. publickly said in the Court house, that if this deponent had forty actions he should lose every one
of them. (emphasis mine)” Edward Marcus Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of the Public Transactions in the
Bay of Honduras from 1784 to 1790,” 424–423. Bartlet’s insult of Despard ‘bugbear’ is likely a reference to
buggery.

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against James Bartlet…for making use of certain expressions which he conceived were derogatory to his
Majesty’s dignity and highly disrespectful to him as his representative.”233 Defending himself, Bartlet
himself claimed “that nothing derogatory to his Majesty’s Dignity or disrespectful to his representative in
this settlement was either meant or intended…and the publick accordingly do unanimously acquitted
James Bartlet esquire from the said charge.” Likely bad enough for Despard that Bartlet was acquitted,
the public also did “hereby declare the said accusation brought by Noel Todd against James Bartlet
esquire to be futile and malicious and calculated to widen the unhappy breach which has so long subsisted
between a part of this community and his Majesty’s representative.”234 This jury’s choice to publicly
chastised Todd here, as a free white Shoreman, is notable both as to whether Todd’s whiteness elevated a
desire among the Baymen to punish him for running to Despard with Bartlet’s insult and because in a
community of limited white men, the jury was okay with potentially alienating one. Ultimately, Todd’s
prosecution shows the magistrates’ primary desire to maintain their vice-like grip on the settlement.
Economic Partners
After the Jones’ incident in August 1787, when it became clear to local magistrates that Despard
would remain firmly on the side of the Mosquito Shore immigrants, the Baymen of the magistracy began
233 Shoremen Noel Todd was a free white man classified in 1790 as a small wood cutter. Colonel Peter Hunter
recorded that Todd was the only white man who lived in a household of 15 individuals, 5 in total who were free and
10 who were enslaved. Within that household were 4 children, two of whom were free and two of whom were
enslaved. The following list of settlers were listed as being “present at the above public meeting on 5th December
1788”: Thomas Potts, Richard Armstrong, Laurence Neighan, James Bartlet, Thomas Davis, Jas. D. Yarborough,
John D. Thomson, James Usher, Thos. Graham, Matt. Gale, Peter Humphreys, Eman. Swasey, David Lamb, Patrick
Dean, James Seddon, George Tompson, C. P. Gapper, Andrew Cunningham, John Ewing, John Neal, William
Usher, Thomas Catto, George Dodd, William B?, Henry Jones, Joshua Gabouret, James Hutchinson, William Keir,
Thomas Bourke, John Lawless, Marcus Belisle, Issac Hunt, Edward Hughes, Hugh Bogle, Joseph Everit, Absolom
Bull, William Jackson, James Mayne, Thomas Finlay,James Pitt Laurie, Houston Maxwell, Edward F. Hill, Daniel
Hill, Joseph Nelson, Phineas Parker, Stephen Stan, William M., Edward D?, Issac Costin, James Hewm, Rodrick
McKenzie, James THOMSON, Marshall Bennett, John Trott, Adam B?, Colin Campbell, George Hewlett, Jos.
Stoddart, William Beaty, William Hilton, John Hart, George Schively, George Moodie, Jos. Robinson, Robert
Douglas, Jos. W., J. F. Throckmorton, Capts. Byson, Murro, and Brown, James Gladding, Abm. Derixon, Robert
Kaye, John Wagner, Ger. Fitzgibbon, William Tedder, Thomas Remington, Samuel Harrison, and John Garbutt.
‘No. 22: Minutes of a public meeting held at Balize River’s Mouth the 5th Day of December 1788 in consequence of
an invitation from Colonel Edward Marcus Despard his Majesty’s Superintendent’ in “British Honduras: Narrative
of Public Transactions by the Magistrates,” 128.
234 Ibid

79
to bypass the Superintendent and assert their influence in the metropole in order to have him removed
from British Honduras. The committee did this by writing as a group to their economic partners in the
United Kingdom.
The intensity of the Baymen’s accusations against Despard escaladed rapidly after the Jones
incident.
235 At first, they limited their negative comments merely to criticisms of the Superintendent’s
behavior. For example, in August 1788, Baymen Richard Hoare wrote to his business partner Robert
White expressing his frustration that Despard “resign[ed] to the Spanish officer any right we might have
to raising provisions and consequently it must follow that the old settlers sooner or later must lose their
valuable grounds, which many of them were made in the former settlement and only cleared out and
improved when we took possession of this country in 83.”236 Hoare’s comments here demonstrate how so
much of the Baymen’s frustration was about their desire to retain specific privileges over other colonists.
It is clear that Hoare saw the role of Superintendent as someone whose job was to advocate for British
colonists:
this blessed convention which was to increase our privileges and enlarge our boundaries deprive
us of the greatest blessing that could possibly be enjoyed and…here I cannot help expressing my
astonishment that a King’s Officers should so lamely resign so valuable a point, without
construing the convention to the contrary and insisting that the matter should be explained by
their respective courts not even one inhabitant was consulted on this important matter nor given
to understand wither their grounds where to be given them or destroyed.237
235 For example, in a November 1789, a group of Shoremen colonists wrote to Robert White, the supposed
representative of the colony in the metropole and expressed “we think it proper to observe that in many particulars,
especially in your letter to Mr. Nepean, you have given a misrepresentation of facts. We take the liberty of advising
you in your capacity of agent of this country to observe two points. In the papers which you present to his Majesty’s
ministers to make use of a respectability of language and 2d. to have a strict adherence to truth.” This letter was
signed by Matthias Gale, Henry Jones, Marshall Bennett, David Lamb, John Garbutt, Sam. Harrison, Laurence
Neighan and Despard himself. This language used by the colonists here seems to be urging White to maintain some
level of bourgeois respectability in their communications with the Home Office and one can’t help but wonder if
Despard had rubbed off on them. “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State, 1790,” 20–21; A
group of settlers at British Honduras to Robert White, Bay of Honduras, Nov. 8, 1789. Further evidence exists that
Despard, at least believed he had been misrepresented expressing to William Grenville in the opening of his memoir
that, “especially as from the numberless misrepresentations made to your Lordship and his Majesty’s other ministers
of my conduct and of the affairs of the settlement in general, it becomes necessary for me to establish the falsity of
these assertions in the fullest manner.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 1–2.
236 Richard Hoare to Robert White, August 25, 1788 in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of
State, 17 Nov 1788 - 30 Sep 1789,” 162.
237 Ibid

80
In the eyes of the Baymen, Despard and his Spanish counterpart’s agreement was inherently suspect, and
therefore Despard lacked the legitimacy to restrict their rights.
The Baymen’s language escalated further once Despard shut down the local magistracy in the
summer of 1789. The Baymen sought to cast the settlement as collapsing and specifically sought to
connect that failure to the Superintendent himself. In May 1789, local magistrate Matthias Gale wrote his
business partner George Dyer in an apocalyptic vein: “I assure you that it is my real belief in a very little
time, that this settlement will be reduced one half in number by Xmas…one means in part is the power
the superintendent expects from government.”238 In late 1789 and early 1790, when Despard had been
dismissed but the Baymen didn’t know it yet, the Baymen’s communications with their allies in London
became positively apoplectic.239 Afraid that they hadn’t gone far enough in their claims to get the
Superintendent removed, the Baymen escalated their language in the most extreme ways they could:
connecting Despard’s Superintendency to supposed racial violence against white colonists in the
Settlement as well as any potential financial loss those same colonists might experience should the
enslaved people they held in bondage become involved or self-emancipated.240 The Baymen’s claims
must have had an impact because in a October 1789 meeting held at the London Tavern, the committee of
merchants trading to Honduras adopted their language:
Resolved unanimously that it is the opinion of this meeting that no Harmony can possibly subsist
or any wholesome regulations be carried into effect in Honduras Bay under the superintendency
of Edward Marcus Despard, Esq…which the said code of laws gives to his Majesty’s
238 Matthias Gale to George Dyer, May 26, 1789 in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary of State,
17 Nov 1788 - 30 Sep 1789,” 165–67.
239 “It should seem that Mr. Despard…to form a new code of laws in [place of the Burnanby code] but wishes to
create one himself which is totally inapplicable to the small disposed settlement of Honduras & if carried into effect
may form a complete system of tyranny… I hope you know enough of me to believe that I am incapable of asserting
what is not true & as the dispatch which I send may require some degree of credit, it behooves me to say that the 24
persons who signed the first objection to Mr. Despard’s system of police are the greatest proportion of people of
character & property who appear to have been at the river belize at the time & that several of them in respect to
Birth Education abilities & character are no way inferior to Mr. Despard except that the Superintendent bears his
majesty’s commission.” George Dyer to Evan Nepean, August 27, 1789 in “British Honduras: Correspondence,
Original. Secretary of State, 17 Nov 1788 - 30 Sep 1789,” 184–85.
240 Possibly also impacting the Baymen’s actions here, Despard notes that in July 1789 "A combination had been
discovered among some slaves belonging to Messrs. Neighan, Garbutt, Remington and others to desert to the
Spaniards, Mr. Neighan of the 26th July 1789 of his own authority called a general meeting of the inhabitants at
which thirty two persons attended; who made a resolution immediately to destroy all the dories in the country by
which negroes could make their escape.” Edward Marcus Despard, “Despard’s Narrative,” 305–6.

81
superintendent are subversive of every right dear to a British subject and the arbitrary use already
made of them in the appointment of people unfit for the offices they fill…[and] the establishment
of such regulations afford not a shadow of Hope that the principal settlers will enjoy any comfort
under such a government.241
This meeting’s resolutions, found in the records of the government, represent a direct link between the
Baymen’s untrue claims and Despard’s ultimate removal.
Once the Baymen’s economic allies began to receive communications from their partners in
Honduras they began to parrot the colonist’s talking points in their own communications with the Home
Office.242 Some of the local Baymen also returned to the metropole in 1789, at least partly to help press
their claims.243 On the receiving end of this letter writing campaign, the Baymen’s allies, but particularly
Robert White and George Dyer of Dyer, Allan, & Co., launched a pressure campaign via correspondence
with the imperial Home Office. Initially, those interested in the Honduran merchant trade advocated for
themselves simply through correspondence but, as the situation became more desperate for the Baymen,
their associates began to show up at the Colonial Office in person.244
The Honduran merchants enjoyed little favor while Lord Sydney was the colonial secretary.
However, in June 1789, William Grenville became the new undersecretary and Evan Nepean, an
undersecretary in the Colonial Office since 1782, filled him in on what had been happening in British
241
‘Extract: At a meeting of the merchants trading to Honduras Bay held at the London Tavern, 1 Oct., 1789’, in
“British Honduras, 10 Jul - 4 Dec 1789, Original Correspondence,” 140–41.
242 George Dyer’s message to Evan Nepean here shows just how quickly claims passed from the Baymen to their
economic partners and then to the Home Office: “I am extremely sorry to inform your grace that by letters just
received from Honduras dated the 27th of May the Spanish Officers unacquainted with the good disposition of both
courts had began to cut down some plantation walks which were sown last year & as the inhabitants were in great
distress for want of provisions the most serious consequence may be expected from a resistance of the negroes.”
George Dyer to Evan Nepean, July 28, 1789 in Ibid, 126–27.
243 The Baymen Richard Hoare left Honduras at some point in May 1789. Fellow magistrate Matthias Gale wrote in
his communication to George Dyer in London that, “Hoare went home in the Alliance which sailed last week.”
Matthias Gale to George Dyer, May 26, 1789 in Ibid, 165–67. In a August 1789 message from George Dyer to Evan
Nepean, Dyer wrote: “Major Hoare, Mr. Potts, & Myself want to pay our respects to you on subject of the inclosed
letter the day before Mr. Hoare left town, but my illness prevented it. When last I had the pleasure to see you, I had
not in my possession the abstract of the letter recently received from Honduras… on part of the principal settlers. As
Mr. White had my authority to shew these papers to you in confidence, I have no doubt you must have seen them
but be this as it may affairs seem to be drawing to such a crisis that at any rate Mr. Despard’s recall appeared
absolutely necessary.” George Dyer to Evan Nepean, Aug. 19, 1789 in Ibid, 171–72.
244 In a letter from George Dyer to Evan Nepean he thanks William Grenville for the audience the secretary had
recently held with “the committee of Honduras merchants.” George Dyer to Evan Nepean, Oct. 1, 1789 in Ibid, 138–
39.

82
Honduras. 245 Grenville’s October 1789 choice to recall Superintendent Despard, rather than reflecting
any larger principles or ideological explanation for their change in policy, reflected an opportunity to
silence a longstanding annoyance.246 Funnily enough, the pestering nature of correspondence with Robert
White had previously helped Despard, because Lord Sydney was first appointed home secretary in
December 1783 and therefore had been following events in British Honduras closely ever since the
settlement reopened the next year. Although it is not obvious whose perspective regarding the settlement
Sydney believed, his choice to keep Despard in his position reflects that, at the very least, he regarded
both sides in the accounts as equally likely to be true. Nepean however, the gentlemen frequently tasked
with doing the actual corresponding with the Baymen’s economic allies, remained in his position now
under William Grenville. It’s possible that Nepean had long held the view that Despard should be
removed but what is more likely is that, due to the superintendent’s removal coinciding with the
beginnings of major continental events like the French Revolution and a year after The Society for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London, Grenville wanted to eliminate any unnecessary
problems. And in the eyes of the Home Office, anyone who was making their constituents contact them so
frequently was an unnecessary problem.
Conclusion
The conflict between Baymen and Shoremen in Honduras in the late 1780s exposes competing
visions among British colonists about the nature of their communities and their proper relationship to the
245 Sparrow, “Nepean, Sir Evan, First Baronet (1752–1822), Politician and Colonial Governor.”
246 Only a month earlier, Home Office secretary Evan Nepean had written in a September 1789 letter to George
Dyer, regarding Despard’s actions that, “I have laid before Mr. Secretary Grenville your letter to me of the 19th inst.
And the several papers delivered to me by your relative to the proceedings of Superintendent Despard, and I have
received his directions to acquaint you in answer thereto, that not having received from Colonel Despard any
communication either of the reasons which have induced him to require of the persons acting as magistrates in the
settlement that they should cease to take upon themselves that character, or of the nature of the regulations which are
stated to have been adopted by the inhabitants at his desire, Mr. Grenville does not feel himself sufficiently informed
on the subject to give any directions at present for abolishing those regulations or to propose to his majesty to
dismiss Colonel Despard from the office of Superintendent on account of his alleged misconduct in that respect.”
Evan Nepean to George Dyer, Whitehall, Sept. 23, 1789 in “British Honduras: Correspondence, Original. Secretary
of State, 17 Nov 1788 - 30 Sep 1789,” 221–22.

83
imperial government. For Baymen, the category ‘British settler’ that they claimed meant both the right to
exclusive privileges and the right to dominate others. The Baymen’s actions upon returning to Honduras
at first seem rather perplexing. On the one hand, they had more good fortune than many Caribbean
colonists who were displaced: they were allowed to return to Spanish territory, remain British subjects,
and ultimately faced no consequences for their frequent disregard of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles. They
also received compensation for damage to their property in 1779. Yet the Baymen’s actions regarding the
Mosquito Shore migrants, show that not only did the Baymen not feel fortunate—they felt cheated.
The fact that the Baymen continued to ask for further rights and privileges after the 1783 Treaty of
Versailles had already been settled—in fact, Despard was able to secure several additional benefits for the
Baymen—speaks to the community hierarchization which was inherent in the colonial project. A vast
scholarship has of course addressed the question of class and caste in the Caribbean.247 The events at
British Honduras suggests that settlers’ understanding of their Britishness and the Britishness of their
neighbors were deeply intwined with their view of their own class.
In the broadest sense, the evidence from British Honduras suggests that the Baymen viewed their
connection to the British empire from an essentially strategic and instrumental perspective. When it
served their purposes, like when they sought to prevent the Shoremen from being gifted tracts of land, the
Baymen emphasized their relationship with the British Empire. Conversely, when the Baymen sought to
reject a demand placed upon them, they didn’t hesitate to disavow the empire or even King George III. It
is impossible to know how connected the Baymen truly felt to the British empire. But the consistent
inconsistency with which they spoke about their empire in communication with others shows, at a
247 Christer Petley, “Plantations and Homes: The Material Culture of the Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Elite,”
Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 437–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.944031; Trevor
Burnard, “Et in Arcadia Ego: West Indian Planters in Glory, 1674–1784,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012):
19–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.636993; Petley, “Gluttony, Excess, and the Fall of the Planter Class
in the British Caribbean”; Soile Ylivuori, “Whiteness, Polite Masculinity, and West-Indian Self-Fashioning: The
Case of William Beckford,” Cultural and Social History, April 20, 2021, 1–21,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2021.1914882.

84
minimum, that they considered their connection to the empire only as valuable as what it had done for
them lately.

85
DOMINICA
Setting the Scene: Dominica before the French Revolution
When Britain retook possession of Dominica from France in 1784, vast connections already existed,
and would continue to exist, between local Dominican colonists and their neighbors in the French
colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint Lucia. Dominica’s physical location contributed to the
colony’s inherently multinational character. Dominica is the largest and northernmost Windward Island in
the Lesser Antilles Archipelago.248 The island is located between Guadeloupe, to the North, and
Martinique, to the South.249 The closeness of island colonies enabled inhabitants to regularly travel
between them.250
Often undocumented due to their ambiguous and usually illicit nature, traces of the connections
between disparate colonial populations can most publicly be seen in colonial newspapers, typically
concerning topics that transcended local geographic boundaries: trade, weather, and the self-emancipation
of enslaved peoples. Not merely occurring within newspapers published in Dominica, news items
exposing British colonists’ connections to the French West Indies often made their way into Caribbean
newspapers printed in British colonies while attributing their intelligence to Dominica. Conversely, news
reports regarding events on Dominica and other British colonies could also be found in newspapers
printed in the French West Indies, showing a bidirectional exchange of information between colonies.
248 Islands in the Caribbean can be classified into two groups: the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles. The
Lesser Antilles contains three collections of islands: the Leeward Islands, Windward Islands, and the Leeward
Antilles. Casey D. Allen, ed., Landscapes and Landforms of the Lesser Antilles, 1st ed. 2017, World
Geomorphological Landscapes (Cham: Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Springer, 2017), 1, 153,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55787-8.
249 Allen, 2.
250 The port of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe is 48 nautical miles from Roseau, Dominica. The port of Pointe-A-Pitre,
Guadeloupe is 60 nautical miles from Roseau, Dominica. The port of Fort-de-France, Martinique is 50 nautical
miles from Roseau, Dominica. The United States Government and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,
“Distances Between Ports” (Bethesda, Maryland: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 2001). In an extract of a
letter from Dominica written in September 1789 and printed in a November issue of The Bermuda Gazette and
Weekly Advertiser the anonymous author states: “As it is only six hours passage to Martinico, I shall go there to see
the execution…” “No. 308,” The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, November 21, 1789, Bermuda Digital
Library, Bermuda National Library. Although it is not possible to know which island ports this person intended to
sail from and into, we can use our measurement of distance and passage time from Roseau, Dominica to Fort-deFrance, Martinique to estimate the time it took to sail between other locations. With an hourly rate of ~ 8 nautical
miles per sailing hour we can estimate that it took 7.5 hours to sail between Pointe-A-Pitre, Guadeloupe to Roseau,
Dominica and 6 hours to sail between Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe and Roseau, Dominica.

86
Although in theory colonies in the West Indies were aligned with one nation only, in practice, the people,
ideas, and goods circulating within them were truly international.
Although no empire claimed formal ownership of the island until 1763, the earliest settlements on
Dominica can be traced to 1691.251 At the time of its seizure the island was ostensibly politically neutral,
but early records show a sizeable French population had existed there for some time.252 As no
governmental infrastructure existed with which planters could export their crops, the crops grown during
this period “were mostly likely exported to neighboring French colonies, whether as foodstuffs for slaves
on sugar estates or for supplying the large urban populations in Basse-terre, Guadeloupe, and in St. Pierre,
Martinique.”253 At the time Britain took possession of Dominica via 1763’s Treaty of Paris the population
of the island was reported to be 1,718 free settlers, 5,872 slaves, and “from 50 to 60 Caraib familys.”254
However, as this population had established settlements in a ‘neutral’ colony in which colonists had no
legal ownership over “their lands, [which] together with any ungranted [lands] in all of the islands, had
simply become the property of the crown.”255 Indicative of the crown’s desire to see land disbursed
quickly, in January 1764 the British Board of Trade proposed a uniform method of land distribution for
251 Anthropologist Stephan Lenik explains, “The first recorded settlement at Grand Bay dates to 1691, when…a free
person of colour from Martinique named Jeannot Rolle, with his family and slaves, founded a plantation and erected
a stone cross on the bay. More Catholic French settlers joined Rolle and built their own plantations in Grand Bay
Quarter. In 1747, French Jesuits from Martinique arrived, led by their financial manager, and later Superior, Antoine
de la Valette…Thus, Grand Bay was exploited by French-speaking planters reliant upon enslaved labour for over 70
years prior to Britain’s annexation of Dominica in 1761, which was followed by official colonization in 1763 when
the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years War.” Stephan Lenik, “Plantation Labourer Rebellions, Material Culture
and Events: Historical Archaeology at Geneva Estate, Grand Bay, Commonwealth of Dominica,” Slavery &
Abolition 35, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 511–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.944035.
252 Archaeologists Mark Hauser and Diane Wallman detail, “By 1729 the intensity of European settlement on
Dominica prompted Martinique’s governor to appoint a commandant. Based in Roseau, Dominica, the
commandant’s primary responsibility was to protect the island from English invasion and to oversee and protect
Martinique’s commercial interests. The commandant relied on indirect monitoring via planters to enumerate the
crops, populations (enslaved and free), and weapons at hand on the island. Enumerations taken in 1730, 1743, and
1753 document a dramatic increase in the number of enslaved laborers, first from 395 to 1,880, and ultimately to
3,530 individuals.” Mark W. Hauser and Diane Wallman, Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and
Economies at Morne Patate (Gainesville, UNITED STATES: University Press of Florida, 2020), 33,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=6354398.
253 Hauser and Wallman, 33.
254 Ibid, 35.
255 D. H. Murdoch, “Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire: The Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded
Islands, 1763–1783,” The Historical Journal 27, no. 3 (September 1984): 552,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00017970.

87
the newly ceded land to the King’s Treasury department. Save for Grenada, “each [ceded] island was to
be surveyed, divided into parishes, town sites laid out into town and pasture lots and the remaining
land…divided into plantations lots.”256 The treasury department set the limit for land purchases in
Dominica at 300 acres and required buyers provide “20 per cent down, 10 per cent in each of the next two
years, and then 20 per cent for the final three.”257 However, as historian Anthony Mullen describes, “The
pamphlets show that planters often bought adjacent land to their original lots (thus circumventing
restrictions on the limit of land to be owned by any one individual.” 258French colonists, or at least those
who self-identified as French, could not purchase land outright but could instead sign “leases of 14, 21,
32, and 40 years, with fines proportional to the length, and an option of 14 year leases renewable up to 40
years.”
259 The island changed hands again when “France regained Dominica from 1778 to
1784…[D]uring the occupation, the capital, Roseau, was burned, and delays in debt repayment caused
abandonment of some plantations once the French [government was] ousted.”260 In local judge Thomas
Atwood’s text, The History of the Island of Dominica, first published in 1791, Atwood estimated that the
total population of British inhabitants on Dominica was no larger than 600 but could only tell readers that
the “French inhabitants of Dominica are more numerous than the English.”261 In February 1791,
Dominica Governor John Orde recorded the islands’ population as: 2,000 white people, 500 free people of
colour, and 15,400 Black slaves.262 If sovereignty in the colonial Caribbean was determined by the will of
the people, Orde’s British authority was accepted by a largely French populace.
256 Murdoch, 556.
257 Ibid, 556.
258 Anthony Mullan, “A Web of Imperial Connections: Surveyors and Planters in Eighteenth-Century Dominica,”
Terrae Incognitae 48, no. 2 (July 2, 2016): 193, https://doi.org/10.1080/00822884.2016.1211356.
259 Murdoch, “Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” 556–60.
260 Lenik, “Plantation Labourer Rebellions, Material Culture and Events,” 512.
261 For the population of British colonists see page 209. For the population of French colonists see page 216.
Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica: Containing a Description of Its Situation, Extent, Climate,
Mountains, Rivers, Natural Productions, &c. &c., Together with an Account of the Civil Government, Trade, Laws,
Customs, and Manners of the Different Inhabitants of That Island, Its Conquest by the French, and Restoration to
the British Dominions (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013), 209–16,
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315033662.
262 Evan Nepean to Stephen Cottrell, May 2, 1791, “Sending Census Figures,” in “Dominica: Dispatches, 1730-
1801,” 13. CO 71/2, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean. Earlier population statistics come from Dominica’s French
period. “According to a 1730 enumeration commissioned by this commandant, there were 776 French, African, and

88
CHAPTER THREE
“Nearly the same people:”
Interethnic collaboration between Dominica and neighboring French Islands
In a December 1787 letter, Dominica’s British governor, John Orde, cautioned the imperial home
secretary Lord Sydney about “the peculiar construction of the Dominica assembly” and reminded him that
“the majority of election were French so connected & having such intercourse with Martinico,
Guadeloupe…as to be nearly the same people, and that the elected in general, were persons so connected
in trade or otherwise with that nation, as to be obliged to allow attachment to give way to interest.”263
Orde’s unease about possible interethnic collaboration between Dominicans of varying backgrounds,
stemming from Britain’s recent recapture of the Lesser Antilles island from France in 1784, must have
been a fairly common experience for colonial governors in the second half of the eighteenth century as
decades of island swapping between empires increasingly had imperial colonial officials supervising
multiethnic populations in the Caribbean.
In the wake of the American Revolution, and the Age of Revolutions that followed, British Dominica
was ripe for interethnic conflict—not merely because the population of the now British island was largely
of French ethnic descent—but also because longstanding contact with the nearby French islands of
Guadeloupe, to the North, and Martinique, to the South, meant that Dominicans of all sorts might retain
French informants and could inflict damage to the colony through overt or covert means. Orde’s
characterization of his local population as being “so connected & having such intercourse with Martinico,
Creole peoples on the island. There were also 412 Kalinago enumerated in this document. By 1743, the number of
French, African, and Creole peoples had increased to 3,030. By 1753 that number was 4,690. These documents do
not enumerate the number of Kalinago in the later years. It became a non category.” Mark W. Hauser, “Land, Labor,
and Things: Surplus in a New West Indian Colony (1763–1807),” Economic Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2014): 55–56,
https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12003.
263 The emphasis here is mine. The distinction between the electors and those elected here is crucial because
Dominicans of French descent were ineligible for serving in the local government. Describing the government’s
policy, historian Wallace Brown writes. “Both in 1763 and 1783 British policy was to attract British settlers while
retaining the French (so necessary for the economy) by respecting their religion and property, and by allowing them
to vote provided they knew English and took the oath of allegiance.” Wallace Brown, “The Governorship of John
Orde, 1783-1793: The Loyalist Period in Dominica,” Journal of Caribbean History 24, no. 2 (December 1990): 147;
For the original quotation SEE: John Orde to Lord Sydney, December 18, 1787 in “Dominica, 28 Nov 1787 - 4 Oct
1788, Despatches,” 31–34, CO 71, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

89
Guadeloupe, as to be nearly the same people,” makes evident the extent to which he saw local British and
French populations as imbricated in the early days of his administration.264 What is surprising, however,
considering Orde’s pronounced political concerns and the documented French invasions of the island in
1795 and 1805, is that colonial Dominica would leave the British empire only in 1978. Over centuries,
this largely French colony, surrounded by neighboring French colonies, and legislated by those who were
“nearly the same people,” remained solidly British.
Retaken by the British Empire in 1784, Anglo governance of the Leeward Island was ultimately
successful because local government treated Dominica as a de facto member of the nearby French West
Indies even as it simultaneously claimed British status. Conscious of the extent to which British
Dominicans were outnumbered by Dominicans of French descent, British governors accepted that local
officials couldn’t prevent interethnic interaction on the island. However, more consequentially, local
leaders also accepted that they couldn’t prevent contact between Dominica and its French neighbors,
Martinique and Guadeloupe. By examining the correspondence between British officials in Dominica and
neighboring French counterparts against the backdrop of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions,
we can see that officials stationed in the Caribbean understood Dominica as being part of a singular
cultural, economic, and physical ecosystem that included the French West Indies. Authors from other
Lesser Antilles colonies, both French and British, frequently emphasized in their correspondence an
ongoing expectation that events in neighboring island colonies would naturally spill over colonial borders
and impact other colonies. In the eyes of appointed imperial officials in the Lesser Antilles at the end of
the eighteenth century, the natural expectation for colonial crossover conflict required multiethnic
colonial officials to maintain close working relationships with those in charge of colonies which were
their purported rivals—even if it sometimes went against the wishes of the larger British imperial project.
In light of their determination to treat Dominica as a de facto French colony, after the French
Revolution began in 1789, roughly five years after Britain took possession of Dominica in 1783, the
264 The emphasis here is mine.

90
island’s British government, from its seat in Roseau, partnered with royalist French counterparts on
Martinique and Guadeloupe, as well as Dominicans of French descent and worked together to use their
influence to coax the British government into capturing the French West Indian islands of Martinique,
Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia in order to save their colonists from the scourge of political
republicanism.265 As historian Laurent Dubois aptly put it: “Colonial administrators in the revolutionary
French Caribbean confronted…the dilemmas of a Republican imperialism in which colonial exploitation
had to be institutionalized and justified within an ideological system based on the principle of universal
rights.”266 The story of collaboration revealed here shows that one way for French colonial administrators
to resolve this dilemma was to partner with neighboring royalists.
As republican colonists stirred up trouble in Martinique and Guadeloupe, local colonists who
identified as royalists seemed to prefer the idea of placing their colonies under a new monarch rather than
taking their chances under government by a French Republic. In order to effect this political goal, in
solicitous communications with British authorities, prominent French Royalists presented an argument for
British seizure of the island on two grounds: first, they claimed that colonists of French descent in the
Lesser Antilles largely wanted that seizure to occur, and second, that the shared experiences of Caribbean
colonial life, in particular the practice of slaveholding, provided an opportunity for shared understanding
between former rivals that could lead to the successful incorporation of French planters within the British
colonial empire. These findings suggest that at the end of the eighteenth century, French royalists largely
preferred the prospect of living under the British throne with British neighbors rather than with French
265 The foundation for this flexibility may have been sown years earlier when British officials dispatched to work on
Dominica after it had been newly ceded to the British empire, “led to the selective and opportunistic application of
British and French law by men on the ground in these new colonies on the basis of local and regional needs.”
Historian Heather Freund argues that these actors were motivated by a dual desire to “gain property for British
settlers and [retain] French inhabitants.” Heather Freund, “When French Islands Became British: Law, Property, and
Inheritance in the Ceded Islands,” in Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: “The King Is
Listening,” ed. Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, and Matthew Gerber, Routledge Research in Early Modern
History (New York, NY Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 307.
266 Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804
(Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3–4,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=4321925.

91
republicans and indicates that, for some French royalists, personal political leanings trumped any ethnic
attachments to their fellow countrymen.
Because interimperial communications between colonial governors and governmental officials in the
Lesser Antilles demonstrate the utilitarian partnership that existed between these purported ethnic rivals,
manuscripts from the Home Office at the UK National Archives form the core of this chapter. However,
due to these documents’ narrow scope, I supplemented them with contemporaneously published materials
focused on Dominica printed in the Caribbean or the United Kingdom. Additionally, a series of paintings
which took life on Dominica and St. Vincent for their subject, created by Italian-born painter Agostino
Brunias who accompanied William Young, the man dispatched by the British Colonial Office to first
oversee the plotting out of the newly ceded lands in 1764, visually speak to everyday lives on the island at
the time. Additionally, to compensate for the lack of a written record offering a granular account of the
everyday events and actions of colonists of French descent in Dominica, I use recent scholarship authored
by anthropologists studying early communities in Dominica to further buttress arguments originally based
in textual or secondary source evidence.
This chapter has a tripartite structure. To support the argument that British officials treated Dominica
as a de facto French colony, it is necessary to demonstrate just how extensive the links were between
Dominica and its’ French neighbors both before and after Britain retook the colony. The first section
focuses on the various forms of quotidian intercourse between Dominicans of all ethnic groups as well as
the wider French Antilles. The sheer extent of the interchange between these communities was likely a
direct contributing factor in British officials’ choice to treat Dominica as a de facto French colony. The
chapter’s second section turns to the collaborative relationship that developed between British officials in
Dominica and French royalists in the neighboring French Antilles in the wake of the outbreak of the
French Revolution, and their mutual quest to see Britain capture Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint
Lucia. The third and final section focuses on France’s last attempt to recapture Dominica, in June 1795.
France’s failure to recapture the island is significant because it represented, at a minimum, an opportunity

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for many colonists of French ethnic descent to be reconnected with the French Empire—an opportunity
that the colonists largely rejected.
Interethnic Intercourse
Trade was one key mode by which colonists formed connections with ethnic others in the Lesser
Antilles. Trade policy on Dominica was inconsistent and the British empire had begun experimenting
with its’ financial policies in the spring of 1766 when Parliament passed the first Free Port Act.267
Opening up free trade in specific ports went against the Navigation Acts which had been guiding
commerce in Britain’s colonies since 1651.268 In the eyes of the empire, the free port act opened up an
opportunity to bring increased revenue into the realm by “ruin[ing] the economies of its rivals and
transforming these foreign realms into dependent markets and supply depots, extending Britain’s revenue
and commercial empire. Free ports could shackle foreign subjects to the British economy, just as military
acquisitions had done before.”269 The hope of the empire was that the “flood of British imports would
make these foreigners loyal customers of British manufactured goods and slaves, economically dependent
upon Britain (which could shut off all trade during wartime). They would produce the raw materials and
specie that Britain desired. They would become British imperial subjects in all but name.”270
Roseau in Dominica was one of the original free ports selected by the British Empire in 1766 and
functioned as a free port intermittently. In his contemporaneous history of the island, local colonist and
judge Thomas Atwood discussed the impact of the free port act on Dominica. Crucially, Atwood
distinguished between the economic benefits that he saw as going to the British empire from the benefits
he saw going to Dominican colonists. Demonstrating both that Dominican colonists had an explicit desire
to conduct business with foreigners, and a desire for that business to be unregulated, Atwood explains,
267 R. Grant Kleiser, “An Empire of Free Ports: British Commercial Imperialism in the 1766 Free Port Act,” Journal
of British Studies 60, no. 2 (April 2021): 335, https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2020.250.
268 Kleiser, 335.
269 Ibid, 337.
270 Ibid, 348.

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“Roseau is however a free port, but its being so at present is rather a disadvantage to the inhabitants…and
is besides under and subject to so severe regulations and restrictions, that foreigners are deterred, rather
than encouraged to trade thither.”271 According to Atwood, foreign vessels were frequently seized at
Roseau illegally.272 Atwood emphasized that he disagreed with the specific policy chosen at Dominica to
ensure that foreign vessels could only enter the island at the port of Roseau as he saw commercial
interaction between colonists of British descent and foreigners as a positive good for many Dominicans:
“This is a most extraordinary, as well as a dangerous regulation, and has several times been very nigh
proving fatal to both foreigners and inhabitants of the town.”273 In Atwood’s view the restrictions to
Dominica’s trade prevented new colonists from settling “whereby the English subjects of this island are
reduced to near half the number that were in it, shortly after the restoration.”274 Likewise Atwood claimed
that “the generality of [English subjects on Dominica] at present seem disposed to quit it, by reason of
their trade, and other disadvantageous circumstances which they labour under.”275
Dominican colonists’ desire to trade with foreign colonies wasn’t merely based in a desire for profit,
it was also based on practical needs. A major trading concern of Dominicans, as the island relied on
imports for foodstuffs, goods, and materials, was that “necessities [in Dominica] would become
disastrously scarce.”276 We can see how linked the local economies of the Lesser Antilles were in an
October 1784 issue of The Barbados Mercury when a source from Dominica shared, “[w]e hear from St.
Pierre, Martinico, that the government has caused very strict and general searches to be made into all the
stores and baker shops in that town, for English and American flour, all of which, amounting to about
271 Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica, 276–77.
272 Atwood gives an example of one of these seizures: “Many of the seizures made in this port have been perfectly
illegal; as in the case of a French Vessel named the Pearl, which having only touched at an out bay in distress for
water, was seized, brought to Roseau, and there condemned and sold, with a valuable cargo of sugar. This
proceeding was however, by an appeal of the owners to the admiralty court in England, greatly reprehended; and the
Court adjuged the vessel and cargo to be restored, with full costs and damages, to be paid by those who had been
guilty of making so very illegal a seizure.” Atwood, 278.
273 Ibid, 279.
274 Ibid, 281.
275 Ibid, 281.
276 Alice B. Keith, “Relaxations in the British Restrictions on the American Trade with the British West Indies,
1783-1802,” The Journal of Modern History 20, no. 1 (1948): 8.

94
3000 barrels, have been seized and confiscated.”277 These public notices, while on their face merely
announcements of local happenings, also kept Dominican colonists of French descent abreast of the
circumstances of their extended family members while simultaneously warning colonists who participated
in illegal trade to be on alert.
Because Caribbean colonists who held slaves in bondage understood that enslaved persons would
assert their right to freedom whenever they found opportunities to do so, slave holders frequently sought
to recover self-emancipated enslaved persons in colonies that they did not themselves live in. These sort
of cross-colonial searches were common enough that in a notice looking for the owner of a “new negro
man” in a March 1788 issue of The Dominica Royal Gazette the author didn’t appear to find it strange
that the man they had captured could not “speak either French or English.”278 Public notices in
newspapers both drew attention to the movement of enslaved peoples between colonies and also served to
warn slave holders to be on alert for any signs of violent insurrection. For example, in an April 1786 issue
of The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, a letter from Saint Eustatius detailed a local murder
committed by an enslaved person with the author expressing that “Mr. Chadwick purchased the above
negro last week from an American Captain, who brought him from one of the French islands: he cannot
speak a word of English, and it is imagined he is one of the Dominica runaways.”279 Although we do not
know the ethnic heritage of this missive’s author, we can see in this colonist’s message that the author
277 The passage also served to warn the separate French colony of Guadeloupe, continuing: “It is apprehended the
same thing will take place at Gaudaloupe [sic] where the seizures would prove much more considerable, as that
colony has a great facility of importation, and as from the former scarcity of French flour the merchants there were
induced to import large quantities from other countries. The masters of the vessels that arrived soon after from
France, seeing the market overstocked and their own flour without demand, were obliged to have recourse to
government, for a prevention of the contraband trade, and in consequence of their application ‘tis though the above
seizures were made.” Barbados Mercury and Bridge-Town Gazette. “Vol. 1, No. 1598.” October 9, 1784. Digital
Library of the Caribbean. Barbados Archives Department.
278 The Dominica Royal Gazette. “Vol. II, 1788-04-06.” Found in “Dominica, 28 Nov 1787 - 4 Oct 1788,
Despatches,” CO 71/14. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
279 Advertisements like this one show the fundamental contradiction at the heart of slavery and the way that personal
histories made the purchasing of previously owned enslaved peoples fraught for colonists in the Lesser Antilles—if
enslaved peoples were merely commodities as slaveholding ideology purported them to be, then their previously
lived experience shouldn’t impact their lives in new colonies. However, slave holders in the Lesser Antilles
understood that enslaved peoples were human beings who absorbed and responded to the world around them. The
Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 120.” April 26, 1786. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda National
Library.

95
didn’t view the purported Frenchness of the enslaved person owned by Mr. Chadwick, being totally fluent
in French, as incompatible with an origin in British Dominica. As colonists increasing worried about the
spread of political republicanism, Caribbean newspapers frequently published anecdotes which subtly
suggested to slave holding colonists that they should remain vigilant in case a human being they owned
carried germs of enslaved insurrection.
The Italian born artist Agostino Brunias completed a series of works focused on Dominica and St.
Vincent “probably in the later 1760s.”280 The original purpose of the pieces was to attract colonists to
newly ceded British islands.281 Although he left the island for a period to sell his words, Brunias
eventually settled in Dominica before dying in 1796.282 As art historian David Bindman summarizes
succinctly, that Brunias “returned to the Caribbean suggests either that he was not particularly successful
in London, or that he valued personal ties in Dominica, and his privileges as a white man on the island, or
a combination of the three. It seems clear that…he came to see Dominica as his home.”283
280 David Bindman, “Representing Race in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean: Brunias in Dominica and St Vincent,”
Eighteenth - Century Studies 51, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 6, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2017.0044.
281 Sarah Thomas and Natasha Eaton, “Swollen Detail, or What a Vessel Might Give: Agostino Brunias and the
Visual and Material Culture of Colonial Dominica,” Atlantic Studies 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 66,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.1930773.
282 The painter “sought actively to sell his paintings and prints in London during the years from c. 1775 to 1784,
broadly during the period of renewed French rule, trying where possible to reach wealthy British people with
Caribbean interests.” Bindman, “Representing Race in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” 6–7.
283 Bindman, 7.

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284
Figure 1. A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica, Augustino Brunias, 1779
Several of Brunias’ prints are useful for thinking about interethnic interaction on Dominica in the late
eighteenth century. The first is A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of
Dominica which depicts two Black men sparring, and a crowd of varying colors watching. Although
Brunias titled the piece in such a way that made certain both ‘English’ and ‘French Negroes’ were present,
visually, there is no distinguishing marks between the two men. It is impossible for the viewer to know
which man was French and which man was English. This suggests that for Brunias, it wasn’t important
for the viewer to be able to distinguish between the painted figures, it was enough that the figures
themselves understood the differences between them. And yet, the lack of distinguishing characteristics
between the two figures suggests that there may not have been very much difference at all.
284 Augustino Brunias, A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica, 1779,
Stipple engraving and etching with hand coloring on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper, Sheet:
11 5/8 × 13 7/8 inches (29.5 × 35.3 cm), Image: 8 15/16 × 12 3/4 inches (22.7 × 32.4 cm), 1779, Paul Mellon
Collection, Yale Center for British Art, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:43125.

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Visual clues exist within Brunias’ pieces that further speak to the cultural intermixture between
Dominicans of French and British descent. Not only do his many market scenes speak to the robust
commerce occurring at Roseau, the figures within them also demonstrate the ongoing French influence on
Dominicans. For example, scholar Beth Tobin tracked how in “Linen Day, Roseau, Dominica—A Market
Scene, Brunias has captured nineteen different ways for wearing head coverings, from simply tied
kerchiefs of white cloth to elaborately draped and intricately tied calico and madras turbans. The cloth
used frequently in these turbans was calico and muslin imported by the British from India, though some
turbans were made of silk imported from Martinique.”285 Notably, as art historian Kay Kriz describes in
her examination of Brunias’ works, “[o]ne of the arguments…made in 1763 for turning Roseau into a free
port was that the British would be able to undersell the French and Dutch in printed linen and cotton,
which were worn by ‘the fair Creolls [and] their servants, who imitate their mistresses.’”286 As Kriz
explains, “[t]hroughout the Caribbean, Sunday markets were well known as places for free women of
color to display their finery…Whether newly immigrated from the French colonies, or the progeny of
French Dominicans and African parents, the Frenchness of Brunias’s mulatto women further enhances
their foreign-ness and fashionability.”287 Although he infrequently indicated the ethnic attachments of
painted figures in the titles of his works, in works like French Mulattresses of St. Dominica in their
Proper Dress and French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman the sole characteristic which
seems to denote the womens’ Frenchness are their headdresses. 288
Contact between foreigners in Dominica wasn’t merely confined to commerce. Prior to 1789’s
French Revolution, colonial newspapers documented approved social contact between British and French
colonial officials. A December 1786 issue of The Bahamas Gazette printed an account of the travels of
285 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 160.
286 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840
(New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2008), 37–
69.
287 Kriz, 37–69.
288 Mia L. Bagneris, Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2018), 138–39.

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Prince William Henry, the Duke of Clarence, who was the third son of King George III, who had served
in the West Indies navy.289 After first detailing the prince’s recent visit to St. Vincent’s, the editor shared
that “His Royal Highness, we are informed, means to visit all the West-India-Islands. It is said that Count
Damas sent a very polite invitation to him to visit Martinico. Compte Dillon arrived some time ago at
Martinico.—He is to have the Government of Tobago.”290 In an August 1787 issue of the same
newspaper, the editor detailed the story of a trip taken by French officials to Roseau in Dominica
explaining how “His Most Christian Majesty’s Frigate La Raillieuse, M. le Comte de Grasse Commander,
arrived in Roseau Road last Thursday morning, with E. le Baron de Clugnie on board, on a visit to his
Excellency Governor Orde.”291 The account explained first that the Baron “was received by Captains
Brereton, Du Ravines, Drossier, &c. by whom he was conducted to Government-house, escorted by a
detachment from the 30th regiment,” and later that, “after dinner, many loyal toasts were given, and
salutes exchanged by the Fort and the Frigate. His excellency, at eight in the evening, went on board, and
got under sail for Guadeloupe.”292 It is quite possible that this trip to Dominica was Orde’s attempt to
reciprocate hospitality he had already received from his neighbors—because as early as December 1784
Orde had written Whitehall and “having been visited by the French governors of Guadeloupe and
Tobago…I have received the most friendly, and indeed most pressing invitations from the different
governors, (particularly from the Baron de Clugny ) to visit the French islands.”293
In addition to social contact, British officials in Dominica and neighboring French officials
frequently communicated with each other to resolve intercolonial conflicts, to prevent local issues from
spreading to other island communities, or to ask for their assistance. Less than a year after taking
289
“Clarence, Duke of (Prince William Henry)” by Joseph F. Callo and Alastair Wilson, Who’s Who in Naval
History, (Routledge, 2004), 68, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203013519.
290 The Bahama Gazette. “Vol. III, No. 124.” December 16, 1786. Digital Library of the Caribbean. University of
Florida.
291 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 186.” August 4, 1787. Bermuda Digital Library.
292 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 186.”
293 Orde finishes his statement with “but none have I [accepted], nor will I, until honored with your…consent.” I
have not been able to determine whether Orde made the trip but if he did, it makes sense that he would reciprocate
that hospitality. John Orde to Whitehall, Dec. 28, 1784. In “Dominica, 1784-1785, Despatches,” 55–56. CO 71/9.
Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

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repossession of Dominica, in October 1784 Governor Orde reached out personally to Claude Damas, the
Governor of Martinique, to help resolve an incident in which a “French Armed Brigantine” captured the
British sloop Philippa.294 Forwarding along to Damas the “memorial…presented to me from the House of
Chollet & Bourdieu principal merchants in this island,” Orde appealed to the “friendship so recently reestablished between his most cherished and Britannic Majesty” to persuade Damas to release the ship.
However, Orde also subtly hinted that should Damas choose not to release the ship, he could return the
favor: “especially when French vessels under similar circumstances are daily allowed to stand close to our
coast and in many instance even to anchor.” Damas secured the ship’s release almost immediately.
In May 1788, Governors Orde and Damas corresponded about the forced impressment of British
sailors on French ships.295 The sworn affidavits from local complainants testifying to their experience
demonstrate how well-traveled British colonists could be within the region. English-born sailor, George
Hall, beginning in April 1787 traveled from England to Antigua to Virginia back to Antigua “where
understanding a brother of his was then at Dominica he took passage in a vessel belong to Mr. Barry, the
name of which he does not recollect, to Guadeloupe & from thence…he went on board a schooner called
the Ranger Capt. Lamb, belonging to Saint Eustatius for Dominica,” all occurring before his sworn
testimony in May 1788. Another British sailor, John Oake had “left Great Britain in the year 1786… he
sailed in the sloop Lucy to St. Eustatius and Saint Bartholomew where the sloop being sold, he ship’d
himself on board a Swedish sloop called the Dolphin bound on a trading voyage to Saint Eustatius &
Guadeloupe,” where he was forcibly impressed onto the French ship the Favourite. Although Oake
protested that “he was a British Subject, not compellable to do duty on board any French ships…he was
obliged to submit & did work as a seaman on board for near a month during which time the Favorite
sailed to Martinico, Saint Lucia, & St. Margarite & returned to Martinico.” This international incident, in
addition to showing the cooperation between Dominica and Martinique’s neighboring governors to
294 John Orde to Claude-Charles de Damas, October 8, 1784 in “Dominica, 1784-1785, Despatches,” 24, CO 71/9,
Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
295 John Orde to Claude-Charles de Damas, May 27, 1788 in “Dominica: Dispatches, 1730-1801,” item 34, CO 71/2,
Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

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resolve issues, demonstrates just how commonplace travel between colonies in the Antilles could be,
irrespective of ones’ imperial allegiance.
Although Dominica was brought back into the British Empire in 1783, the historical development of
the settlement as well as its proximity to neighboring colonies Martinique and Guadeloupe resulted in
creating a locality where colonists of varying ethnic descent, who were sometimes aligned to different
empires, frequently interacted. These intercultural interchanges could be economic, social, or
bureaucratic. Fraternization between colonists of French and English descent on Dominica took place at
all levels of social strata and included planters, merchants, governmental officials, and enslaved
individuals. Intercultural relations between colonists of French and English descent were intrinsic to
Dominica’s community at the end of the eighteenth century.
British—French Collaboration
Concerned about the era’s burgeoning political upheaval, the communication and cooperation
between Dominican and French officials strengthened after the outbreak of the French Revolution in the
metropole in the summer of 1789. We can see the impact of the revolution on the French West Indies in
the June 1790 communications sent from Martinique’s governor Damas to Dominica’s Lieutenant’s
Governor James Bruce, who was filling in for Orde’s top spot while the governor left the island. Damas’
message sought to warn Bruce that as “many of the bad subjects could seek refuge in Dominica, I pray
your excellence keep an eye on anyone passing through without a passport signed by me,” and expressed
that it was his wish that the Lieutenant Governor send him their names as “my request concerns the
tranquility of all the colonies.”296 The very next day Bruce returned his letter telling Damas, “I had with
pleasure heard that you had put a stop to those shameful outrages…I have not heard of any of the Banditti
having arrived here…Your excellency may rest assured it will afford me particular satisfaction to comply
296 “Copy of Letter from the Viscount Damas to Lieutenant Governor Bruce,” June 15, 1790, in “Dominica, 1788-
1790: Despatches and Miscellaneous,” 72. CO 71/17. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean. Document originally
written in French. Translation by the author.

101
with your request, as far as the laws of my country will permit me.”297 In a July 1790 follow up exchange,
Damas sought permission to publish Bruce’s kind letter in the colony to which Bruce responded that
“your excellency’s request…is too flattering for me to refuse my consent.” Bruce thanked Damas for his
choice of messenger expressing “my best thanks in conveying those sentiment through Mr. Fagan, &
giving me an opportunity of being acquainted with a sensible well-bred gentleman, who merits every
attention I can show him.”298 After forwarding this friendly exchange back to the metropole, Bruce was
politely chastised by Whitehall for his warm support, as we can see in a draft message prepared for Bruce
in October 1790 that “[t]hough these may be no objection to your giving the Governor of Martinique the
information he desires yet in any communication on this head, you will do right to avoid appearing to take
any part in what passes in the French islands.”299
Another incident in which Damas and Bruce worked together came in September 1790, when, antiroyalist colonists took possession of Forts Bourbon and Royal, Damas personally forwarded Bruce a copy
of the decree recently passed by the Martinique assembly to open the colony’s ports and asked the
Lieutenant Governor to look the other way at increased travel going to and from Martinique.300
Discussing the matter in correspondence with Home Secretary William Grenville, Bruce described how
“the Patriots, as they call themselves, marched in order of Battle to attack Mr. Damas about 1500 or 2000
of them, but they were repulsed with the loss of, I believe about two hundred…most of the military at
Guadeloupe & a number of volunteers are gone over to assist the patriots at Martinico.”301 Bruce
responded to Damas’ letter with his message that “it will make me very happy to hear that all dissentions
are at an end & that you have been able to restore…peace & tranquility,” suggesting that he saw Damas’
government as key to Martinique’s “peace and tranquility.”302
297 “Copy of a Letter from James Bruce to Viscount Damas,” June 16, 1790. Ibid, 73.
298 “Copy of a Letter from James Bruce to Viscount Damas,” July 2, 1790. Ibid, 75.
299 William Grenville. Letter to James Bruce. “No. 11. Draft.,” October 1790. Ibid, 120.
300 Claude Charles de Marillac, vicomte de Damas. Correspondence to James Bruce, September 18, 1790. Ibid, 159.
301 James Bruce. Letter to William Grenville. “No. 3,” October 10, 1790. Ibid, 157.
302 “Copy of a Letter from James Bruce to Viscount Damas,” September 23, 1790. Ibid, 160.

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Perhaps hoping to communicate to Grenville the extent of the neighboring fracas, Bruce took the
time to described how “the officer who brought Mr. Damas’s letter was here and hired a small vessel to
carry him to a Port called La Trinity, near where Mr. Damas, the Governor, was with his camp, when he
got near to the Bay, she was boarded by an armed brig, and the officer & servant forcibly taken out of her
& carried prisoner on board the brig.”303 Knowing Orde was on his way to retake the colony’s helm,
Grenville sent his feedback on Bruce’s actions to the governor himself rather than the lieutenant,
reinforcing that, “[a]s I had an opportunity to of conversing with you previous to your departure upon the
line of conduct which should be observed towards the Foreign islands,” referencing a conversation the
two men had apparently while Orde was on the mainland, “I have no doubt that you will observe the most
perfect impartiality towards all parties in those islands, and particularly avoid any thing that may have the
appearance of interfering in their transactions.”304 While it is impossible to know whether Orde had
communicated Whitehall’s policy towards Dominica’s French neighbors to Lieutenant Bruce before he
left the colony, we can infer that, at a minimum, Whitehall’s message to Orde here suggests the office
certainly didn’t view Bruce as following their policy.
The potential for dangerous local fallout from Martinique’s internecine conflict became even more
apparent to Dominican stakeholders as 1790 turned into 1791 and Dominica’s longstanding maroon
community launched an insurrection in partnership with other rebelling self-emancipated Black
Dominicans. Although the political atmosphere might have been responsible for sparking the
insurrection’s fire, it was Governor Orde’s return to the island that turned it into a blaze. The beginnings
of the ‘New Year’s Day Revolt,’ as it came to be called, began when a rumor spread among enslaved
Dominicans that upon Orde’s return, he would be bringing news of a new colonial policy to grant the
island’s enslaved a reduced work schedule.305 When those events didn’t come to pass “Orde visited the
affected estates, remonstrated with the slaves, and satisfied himself that they were quiescent and content.
303 James Bruce. “No. 3,” Ibid, 157.
304 William Grenville to John Orde. “No. 2,” December 16, 1790. Ibid, 174.
305 Lenik, “Plantation Labourer Rebellions, Material Culture and Events,” 511–13.

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But at 10:00 P.M. on January 20, the slaves rose up in revolt and had to be suppressed by detachments of
the 30th Regiment.”306 The revolt was born from an alliance between the island’s maroon population, led
by Chief Pharcelle, and local enslaved people, who would come to be represented by Jean Louis
Polinaire, an enslaved “mulatto” man originally from neighboring Martinique.307 In a January message to
Grenville, Orde explained to the secretary that:
The negroes who until lately had conducted themselves generally well seem now to have changed
their conduct & views, a general emancipation seems to be their end & aim and 80,000 of those
people, with arms in their hands in a divided community, and determined on their purpose will
with difficulty be baffled.
308
An unsigned letter extract from Dominica, written later that month explained, “[t]his island has lately
been disturbed also by a considerable number of slaves from different estates that have mutinied
assembled in the mountains…led it is supposed to this by the dangerous example among our
neighbours.”309 These statements demonstrate that Dominicans directly attributed the source of their local
conflict to the events occurring across the Lesser Antilles.
Explicit cooperation between Dominican officials and French counterparts in reaction to the
dangerous political expression inspired by the ongoing French Revolution began in September 1790,
when Martinique’s royally appointed Governor Damas was briefly forced out of his post by rebelling
colonists. Writing to Secretary Grenville, Dominica’s Lieutenant Governor James Bruce expressed how
the governor had come to Dominica for assistance explaining that the Governor had been “obliged to
retire into the country with the company of Grenadiers who they could not gain over …the armed Brig
came to Roseau for permission to wood & water they being totally unprovided…I gave the Capt.
Permission to come to an anchor & to get every thing he wanted.”310 During their visit Bruce learned that
306 Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Cornell paperbacks, 1. print
(Ithaca, NY.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009), 225.
307 For the full details of this alliance see Neil C. Vaz, “Maroon Emancipationists: Dominica’s Africans and Igbos in
the Age of Revolution, 1763–1814,” The Journal of Caribbean History 53, no. 1 (2019): 43–44.
308 John Orde to William Grenville. “No. 7,” January 8, 1791. CO 71/18. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
309 Letter to William Grenville. “Extract of a Letter from Dominica,” January 26, 1791. CO 71/21. Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.
310 James Bruce. Letter to William Grenville. “No. 2,” September 12, 1790. CO 71/17. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.

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“[e]verything both in Martinico & Guadeloupe is anarchy & confusion, the Merchants here complain
much that they cannot recover the large sums that are due to them in these islands. Several of the richest
families are come over here until matters are settled.”311 In addition to showing Bruce saving Damas in a
moment of political peril, this missive is illustrative of just how linked the personal economy of
individual colonists could be at this moment in the eighteenth century, even across international colonial
borders. Bruce’s reference to members of the “richest families” choosing to migrate from Martinique to
Dominica at that time suggests that wealthier colonists preferred living under a royalist government.
Merchants’ fears seem to have been warranted as the impact on British trade from the outbreak of
conflict in Martinique and Guadeloupe quickly showed itself in Dominica. Not long afterwards, in
January 1791, Dominica’s governor John Orde prepared a message for Grenville describing voluminous
amounts of contraband sugar in Dominica. “From the report of his Majesty’s Collector,” wrote Orde, “...it
appears that, the clandestine production of French sugars has lately increased to an astonishing degree, so
much, as nearly to double the quantity produced in the island, or in other terms to make the whole export
amount to about 6000 Hogs when the total growth does so exceed 300 Hogsheads.”312 Orde argued to
Grenville that it would be very difficult to prevent both the importation and exportation of illegal sugar
and unless he received extra help “it will be impossible, under any circumstances, to carry the revenue
laws into execution in this island.”313
Fresh off his return from the metropole in January 1791, Orde took on the role of war correspondent
to the Home Office and passed along his assessment of the mood in neighboring islands. Orde gave this
trenchant assessment of Martinique’s conflict:
In the commencement of this business there were only two parties, one favouring the views of the
merchant, the other the interests of the planters…But unfortunately there has lately from the two
arisen a third, composed of revolted troops & of a rank (to be found in all countries) who fatten
upon anarchy, who seem determined to prevent present reconciliation, & to threaten a duration &
311 James Bruce. Letter to William Grenville. “No. 2,” September 12, 1790. CO 71/17. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
312 John Orde to William Grenville, “No. 8,” January 8, 1791, CO 71/21, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
313 Ibid.

105
extension to those mischiefs greater than was foreseen in the first instance, & which cannot now
well be prevented.314
Orde’s characterization of this third group indicates that members of this “third” group can be found
everywhere, irrespective of nationality, and that their attachment is largely one of attitude rather than
economy. Orde blamed this third group for the conflict’s continuance, explaining that “general amnesties
have been offered on each side but this third order has prevented the success of the former, and have
shewn the utmost contempt for the latter.” 315 It is at this moment that Orde dropped his first hint to the
Home Office that he thought the conflict on Martinique might have some benefit to Britain:
Individuals [of this third faction] have gone so far as to intimate an intention to possess the island
independent of France, and when threatened with troops from Europe have declared their
satisfaction in the account, founded on a certainty that they would join them the instant they out
foot on shore, (which without great care I really believe would be the case. The spirit that exists
in this new order of Patriots is not to be conceived & the success that attends the propagation of
their doctrines seems only to be equally by the hardiness + industry with which they endeavour to
spread them.)316
Orde leading suggestion here, that should this third faction seize Martinique for themselves they would
undoubtedly be reinforced by troops from France, essentially communicated to Grenville and the Home
Office that there would be many French colonists in that colony who would have preferred to be under the
rule of a monarch and yet, through no fault of their own, would be trapped in a colony governed by
French republicans. Along with this January 1791 letter Orde sent to Whitehall a petition signed by six
Martinican refugees then in Dominica that explained their own account of events in Martinique.317 Like
the colonists of British descent we will meet on Saint Christopher in this dissertation’s sixth chapter, Orde
sought to cast a military invasion with the gloss of colonial benevolence.
As colonists in the French Antilles continued to grapple with how much the French Revolution in
France might change their Caribbean communities, the impact of that struggle was felt on Dominica. In
February 1791, after the act’s initial passage in October seemed to fall flat, John Orde reissued a
314 John Orde. Correspondence to William Grenville. “No. 7.” Correspondence, January 8, 1791. CO 71/18. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
315 Ibid
316 Ibid
317 Ibid

106
proclamation which stated that “it shall not be lawful for any foreigner or foreigners, who shall be or who
may arrive at this island, to remain longer than forty days without obtaining the permission in writing of
the Governor or Commander in chief for the time being under such pains & penalties as are contained &
mentioned in the said act.”318 When considering the short distance and frequent contact between
Dominica and neighboring islands, the proclamation’s grace period for foreigners of forty days seems
laughably permissive and is perhaps why “many foreigners both before & since the publication of the said
act have arrived at & remain on this island without conforming to the regulation thereby made &
required.”319 The governor then “thought fit, by this my proclamation made by & with the advice of His
Majesty’s Council, to warn all foreigners to conform themselves strictly to the aforesaid regulation &
direction of the law.”320 As Orde’s words represented the full force of the British Empire, it seems odd that
the governor could only bring himself to proclaim a “warning” to incoming migrants that they ought to be
following the law.
When given the opportunity, Orde pushed for Britain to take a more aggressive posture towards the
French colonial islands. When Orde took up the cause of French colonists again in correspondence with
the new Home Secretary, Henry Dundas, in a September 1791 letter, he subtly pushed for their capture.
Fulfilling his role as informant, Orde first informed Dundas that “[t]he aristocratic or rather King’s party
(tolerably supported by both army & navy) is so strong in [Martinique and Guadeloupe] that the Patriots
however disconcerted are obliged to be silent.”321 Referring next to the impact of rumors regarding the
French King on the French islands Orde postured that “it only seems to have made them more anxious for
Independence of France and Connection with Great Britain, in which I have reason to believe the
Majority so serious that I think the most distant overtures would be readily snatched at by them.”322
318 John Orde. “Proclamation,” February 9, 1791. CO 71/2. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
319 Caribbean colonists of all imperial allegiances frequently interacted with the law in a way that tested the
boundaries of sovereignty. We cannot know exactly what happened with the foreign colonists coming to Dominica
during this period but giving visitors a period of 40 days to stay on the island gave foreign colonists an infinite
amount of wiggle room to work with if they wanted to evade traditional authorities.
320 John Orde. “Proclamation,” February 9, 1791. CO 71/2. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
321 John Orde. Correspondence to Henry Dundas. “No. 53.” Correspondence, September 2, 1791. CO 71/21. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
322 The news Orde is likely referring to here is the arrest of King Louis XVI. John Orde. Ibid.

107
Although impossible to know the accuracy of Orde’s claim, the British governor sought to paint a picture
in his official communications of French colonists simply eager for King George’s leadership.
When conflict began to bubble again in the neighboring French West Indies, Orde’s military
reconnaissance with the Home Office belied his personal inclination towards the cause of the royalists. In
a June 1792 missive Orde explained how:
Since my last the island of Martinico was very near being reengaged in all the horrors of Civil
War. Whether the matter to which I allude originated in any design of the Patriotic Party, or
whether it was a fine wrought scheme of Mr. Behague to rid himself of the troops he could no
longer control as he wished, I cannot well determine; but I am inclined to believe the former, as
attempts had certainly been made to gain the Free People to the Patriot party, by subscribing
voluntarily to the late degree in their favor, and as that Party certainly thought they had succeeded
in their plan.323
After describing the way that “Mons. Behague has succeeded in restoring the Tranquility of the Island for
the present,” Orde provided the Home Office with his own assessment that “Martinique and Guadeloupe
have lately petitioned Government that no more troops may be sent amongst them and I am confident in
the belief, should land forces arrive…that they will be sent back again and not allowed to disembark.”324
Although Orde undoubtedly knew that a significant contingent of French colonists living in the French
islands were in fact supportive of the French Revolution, he actively sought to equate the views of
Behague’s government with the feelings of French colonists more generally—a position he would have
known would only help to increase imperial interest in capturing the neighboring islands.
In a separate letter sent the same day to Dundas as well, Orde focused specifically on the impact
events on Martinique had on Dominica. Orde expressed that “events which have lately happened in the
foreign islands in our neighborhood…have however forced in upon us here a swarm of people of the most
desperate character (as well as an infinite number of others of a less exceptionable descriptions) who
possibly may prove troublesome guests.”325 To address the recent migrants Orde “thought it most political
to leave them unnoticed by any public measure, and to limit my concern about them, whilst they remain
323 Ibid
324 Ibid
325 John Orde. Letter to Henry Dundas. “No. 88,” June 13, 1792. CO 71.

108
quiet, or until I am favored with your orders, to a secret though vigilant attention to their conduct and
movement.”326
Notably, Orde also took the time to float his idea that the British empire ought to take advantage of
the local confusion financially, by bringing Dundas’ attention to the ongoing price of sugar. Orde claimed
that since France declared war on Hungary and Bohemia the price of sugar “had fallen above thirty
percent, and the danger of sending to France so materially increased that the Planters do not now ship a
grain for that Kingdom in their own account,” and therefore Dominica’s merchants could take advantage
of this by buying up sugar from planters of French descent.327 Orde continued with advice that:
Should His Majesty’s Government wish…to gain the benefit of Carriage without the risk of
contraband (which I know always alarms the planters) I think it may easily be effected by
amending our Free Port Act in such a manner as will in the first place certainly identify the sugar
made here, and in the second admit foreign sugar to come in as such, in any bottom free from
colonial duty.
328
The Governor’s eagerness to take advantage of the financial opportunity he saw in front of him, even if
that opportunity might also benefit neighboring colonists aligned to the French empire is illustrative of
exactly what Orde perceived the role of colonial governor to be: someone who worked to assist planters
and move product in and out of the colonies. Knowing that he was overstepping his role by suggesting
rather than implementing policy, Orde emphasized to Dundas:
I…make apologies to you for troubling you so often with new matter…but as this island is
singularly situated, and as this is an uncommon moment, I am satisfied you will excuse
it…everydays experience convinces me more and more that this island is wonderfully calculated
for a commanding post and great commercial advantages.329
As a British colony surrounded on both sides by islands aligned to the French, Orde’s belief that
Dominica’s “singular situation” could bring “great commercial advantages” to the British Empire
326 Ibid.
327 Emphasis in Original. Ibid. In the postscript to this letter Orde emphasized that there officials representing other
nations who would likely try to fill this gap, expressing, “Dutch, Danes, and Swedes will carry all the French sugar,
sent home as foreign if we do not – Letting it come in Foreign bottoms, without paying the colonial duty will give us
the greatest part; and letting it come in Foreign Bottoms with paying the Duty, will give us still perhaps a good deal.
The port of Nassau is too far off to be used by those islands.”
328 Ibid.
329 Ibid.

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naturally seems to suggest that he envisioned Dominica as a gateway to the French Empire broadly and
perhaps France’s economic allies in Europe.
Events in December 1792 brought France’s ongoing Revolution directly to Dominica’s shores. Once
Governor Orde left the island for good in early December 1792, Lieutenant Governor James Bruce
became the highest-ranking official in Dominica. Not long after he took command of the British island,
Bruce was forced to weigh in on French national politics when the French frigate Félicité anchored at
Roseau. The ship’s captain, coming to meet with Bruce:
addressed me in the following words, as nearly as I can remember, in the presence of Lieutenant
Colonel Myers commanding his Majesty’s troops here, and my own secretary. He said he
commanded the Frigate the Felicité belonging to the French Republic, by whom he was sent to
announce to the French colonies, that the National Convention had declared France a
Republic…that on his coming to Martinico he was not permitted to come to anchor, and hearing
that the French islands were all in Rebellion, he had come here for leave to Rest and Refresh for
his ship’s company, in the name of the Republic of France.330
Fully understanding the danger the Felicite’s arrival presented to the ethnically and imperially mixed
colony, Bruce appeared to seek a middle way in his response to the French captain. First, regarding the
newly existing French government, Bruce took the willfully challenging position that, “I told him that I
knew of no such Republic, but that the British Court taking no part whatever in the differences in France,
he might remain to rest and refresh his people.” However, even as Bruce felt his obligation to political
neutrality required that he allow the French captain safe passage, he felt it necessary give the captain the:
restriction, that he was to have no communication with the French who had come here from the
different islands to which he very readily agreed, but said he wished to consult with those here
who respected the Flag on board his ship what measures were best for him to take in his present
situation: my answer was, that I would by no means permit them to go on board to hold any
consultations - that I was determined to preserve a strict neutrality, and that if I found them do
any such thing, I should send every one of them to the colonies from whence they had come. He
made answer he should always comply with the laws of the country under whose protection he
might be.331
Bruce’s instructions here betray the reality of what it was like for colonial governors to supervise
populations of colonists that had previously been aligned to other empires around the turn of the
330 James Bruce. Correspondence to Henry Dundas. “No. 5.” Correspondence, December 21, 1792. CO 71/24. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
331 Ibid.

110
nineteenth century: the political imaginaries of sovereignty enabled inclusion of these new populations
into colonial polities but their prior allegiance would always cast a suspicion over their actions.
Undoubtedly, Dominican officials wanted to believe that the colonists of French descent living on
Dominica would be loyal to the British Empire. But they also did not want to give them any unnecessary
opportunity to prove that loyalty by enabling free intercourse between them and the arriving sailors of a
warship belonging to their former sovereign.
Although Bruce feigned surprise at the ship’s arrival, Martinique’s Governor Behague had written
Orde weeks earlier warning him about the Felicité’s plans and asking him not to allow the ship’s to dock
in the spirit of the “common interests of this archipelago.”332 Although he was perhaps hesitant to prohibit
the frigate from touching land purely in response to Behague’s wishes, hearing that the captain was failing
to abide by the terms Bruce had given him, the Lieutenant Governor “sent for Lieutenant Colonel Myers,
to consult with him what was best to be done, when he agreed with me, that it was highly proper to
preserve quiet in the colony…and we thought it best to send a polite message to the captain by an officer”
asking for them to depart.333 The Felicité’s departure came to pass only after several days, but not before
leaving behind a Frenchman named Devers in order to print a series of revolutionary publications. Bruce
closed out the letter with his assessment that “it is impossible for me to say what number of French are
come here, but every House and Hutt are full of them. Among which are the principal merchants of the
town of St. Pierre’s in Martinico.”334 Fittingly then, not soon after this characterization Bruce received
word from Whitehall, dated January 5, 1793, that the “King’s servants, having taken into consideration
the great number of foreigners resident in the island of Dominica…have therefore received his majesty’s
command’s to order the 69th Regiment to be conveyed from Ireland to Dominica without loss of time.”335
332 Translation by the author. Jean-Pierre-Antoine, comte de Béhague de Villeneuve. Correspondence to John Orde,
December 5, 1791. CO 71.
333 Bruce noted in his message to Dundas that “As further proof of [the captain’s] bad conduct, and not keeping his
promise of having no communication with the refugees, I inclose a hand-bill published immediately after his
departure.”
334 James Bruce. Correspondence to Henry Dundas. “No. 5.” Correspondence, December 21, 1792. CO 71/24. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
335 Henry Dundas. Letter to James Bruce. “No. 1,” January 5, 1793. CO 71.

111
A few days later, Bruce issued his own local proclamation “commanding every such Foreigner as hath put
or caused to be put his signature to such inflammatory Hand-Bill or Hand-Bills to depart from this our
Government of Dominica within the space of three days from the date of this our royal Proclamation,” but
undercut his own authority by merely declaring that “we do hereby require all magistrates and all other
our loving subjects to be aiding and assisting in carrying this our proclamation into due execution under
the pain of our highest displeasure..."336 Although his 3-day grace period was more strict than Orde’s 40-
day reprieve had been, Bruce’s empty threat that local colonists might face his government’s “highest
displeasure” if they didn’t assist the island in carrying out his proclamation certainly did nothing to
incentivize colonists to betray their fellow islanders.
The eviction of Martinique’s royalist regime from power by French republicans in January 1793
resulted in the British empire’s ultimate decision to try and seize control of the French West Indies.337
Indeed, even as Bruce was writing to Martinique’s new republican governor, General Rochambeau,
assuring him that “having no orders from my King respecting the French Republic I shall continue to
adhere to the strict neutrality that has been adopted by his Majesty,” Dominica was quickly becoming a
frontline theater for royalist collaboration.338 French royalist officials Louis-Francois Dubuc, Louis De
Curt, and the Baron de Clairfontaine, commissioners named by the colonial assemblies of Martinique and
Guadeloupe, went to London where in February 1793 they prepared ten propositions for the British King
with their request that the King seize their isles.339 Dundas formally accepted their terms a few days
later.340 That same month we can see that Whitehall prepared for Bruce a draft message instructing
Dominica’s governor to act as an intermediary for the commissioners and “forward by some confidential
336 James Bruce. “Proclamation.” Dominica, January 8, 1793. CO 71/24. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
337 William S. Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique
and Guadeloupe, 1789-1802 (Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 139–40.
338 James Bruce. Correspondence to Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, February
24, 1793. CO 71/24. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
339 Louis-Francois Du Buc, Louis De Curt, and Baron De Clairfontaine. Correspondence to H.R.H. King George III.
“Propositions Made to His British Majesty by Messrs. Du Buc, De Curt and De Clairfontaine, Commissioners.”
Correspondence, February 15, 1793. CO 318/11. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
340 Henry Dundas. Letter to Messrs. Du Buc, De Curt, and Clairefontaine. “Copy.,” February 19, 1793. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

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channel the inclosed packet for M. de Merle, as well as that for Messrs. D’Arrot, Des Noyers, Bonnier,
and Alloron, French officers…you will probably know where they may have taken refuge.”341 A few
months later, a group of royalist colonists also used Bruce to pass along “a petition…from a number of
the most respectable inhabitants of the island of Guadeloupe, with an account of a most horrid massacre
which happened between the night of the 20th & 21st inst. Signed by four gentlemen of considerable
property who made their escape in an open boat.”342 Clearly, Dominica had a reputation among suffering
French colonists as a place where they might obtain safety.
Now that the British empire had officially decided to seize the neighboring French West Indies,
beginning in January 1793 Dominica became a gathering place for the King’s forces. Bruce lost no time
writing the Major General Cornelius Cuyler, then on Barbados, requesting additional troops for Dominica
explaining that:
The very great number of foreigners who have come to this government from the different
islands, but particularly from Martinico, amount in all, it is computed, to be near four thousand,
and, whose daring Behavior of late leaves but little room to think that if any change should take
place in the sentiments of our court, respecting the disturbances in France, or any other
unforeseen accident that they might prove more dangerous to our safety.343
Bruce emphasized the unique circumstances of his island for Cuyler stating “your Excellency will also
permit me to remark the very great different in the situation of this island (so very near to Martinico &
Guadeloupe) and the other British islands here; as well as that the greater part of the inhabitants are
French, and connected with those in these islands.”344 Coincidentally, the King’s secretary Dundas had
composed their own instructions for Major Gen. Cuyler earlier that month explaining that:
the King’s servants having taken into consideration the great number of Foreigners now resident
within His Majesty’s West Indian islands, particularly on Dominica…are of the opinion that it is
high expedient in the present posture of affairs to provide against the evil consequences which
may result therefrom; I have therefore received His Majesty’s commands to order…regiments to
be sent to the Leeward islands with all possible dispatch…For this purpose it is deemed highly
necessary that you should repair in person to Dominica, in order to consult with his Majesty’s
341 UK CO Office. Letter to James Bruce. “Draft. Secret.,” February 1793. CO 71/24. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
342 James Bruce. Correspondence to Henry Dundas. “No. 30.” Correspondence, April 28, 1793. CO 71/24. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
343 James Bruce. Correspondence to Cornelius Cuyler, January 12, 1793. CO 318/11.
344 Ibid.

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Government on the best means of enforcing such steps as it may be found requisite to take for
obliging the foreigners there to leave the islands and to the better execution of which your
presence cannot fail materially to contribute.345
Dundas also ordered Cuyler to directed His Majesty’s’ militia company of Black Dragoons to be sent to
Dominica to help build fortifications.346 Once Cuyler arrived in Dominica, he “ordered two flank
regiments under the 15th regiment under the command of Lieut. Colonel Meyers to reinforce the garrison
and to remain there until the arrival of his majesty’s 69th regiment.”347 At the beginning of March 1793,
Lieutenant Colonel Myers had 461 rank and file soldiers beneath him, only 409 of whom were fit for
duty.348
Although the British empire had decided to try and seize the French West Indies, Whitehall first
advocated for a more subdued approach towards the military gambit. Rather than launching a full-scale
invasion, Whitehall opted to employ the king’s forces already stationed in the Caribbean. After
Martinique’s Governor Behague fled the island, the deposed official retired to British St. Vincent’s where
he provided military reconnaissance to his contacts in London.349 Based on Behague’s information,
Whitehall appointed Major General Thomas Bruce to lead the forces already stationed in the West Indies
in an operation to take French colonies for the British crown.350 In partnership with General Cornelius
345 Henry Dundas. Letter to Major General Cuyler. “No. 1. Draft.,” January 2, 1793. In CO 318/12. Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.
346 Henry Dundas. Letter to Major General Cuyler. “No. 3,” January 21, 1793. Ibid.
347 Major General Cuyler. Letter to Henry Dundas, February 20, 1793. Ibid.
348 “General Monthly Return of His Majesty’s Forces, Commanded by Lieut. Colonel William Myers 15 Foot on the
Island of Dominica,” March 1, 1793. CO 71.
349 Henry Dundas. Correspondence to Thomas Bruce. “Secret.” Correspondence, March 18, 1793. CO 318/12. Adam
Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
350 Major General Thomas Bruce was a Scottish M.P. born in 1738 who had “entered the army and served in India
during the war of American Independence.” It is unlikely that Thomas Bruce was related to James Bruce, the
Lieutenant Governor of Dominica, but it is possible that the two could have been related—especially as James
Bruce’s lineage is likely traced to Scotland. R. G. Thorne. “BRUCE, Hon. Thomas (1738-97).” The History of
Parliament, 1986. http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/bruce-hon-thomas-1738-
97.; Henry Dundas. Correspondence to Thomas Bruce. “Secret.” Correspondence, March 18, 1793. CO 318/12.
Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.

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Cuyler, Bruce and the king’s troops first captured Tobago in April 1793 and appointed a new British
government to govern the French colony.351
A key element behind Britian’s secretive attempt to take Martinique was the fundamental assumption
that the island’s colonists would assist British forces upon their arrival. The Generals Cuyler and Thomas
planned their invasion into Martinique from Barbados using information from sympathetic French
colonists, for example, “Mons. Gemet who commands the royalists acquainted Admiral Gardner that if
we could bring down a force consisting of 1800 men we might take possession of the island, [but] if on
the contrary we could give them no assistance they must in a short time quit the country.”352 The British
officials decided “it appeard that the royalists being much elevated with their late successes and with the
continuance of their fleet on their coasts a very inconsiderable force would be more likely to succeed than
a great one hereafter.” 353 Major General Bruce informed Dundas that:
from these considerations we came to a resolution to offer them such assistance as we had in our
power provided they could point out sufficient grounds on which we might form a reasonable
probability of success but being very desirous of obtaining still further information Lieutenant
Colonel Myers…and Captain Fiddes of the engineers were dispatched to Martinico, I expect their
return in a few days and if their report justifies the attempt we shall immediately embark the few
troops we have.354
Showing himself to be realistically-minded leader, General Bruce expressed to Dundas “[w]ith this small
force I am not very sanguine in my expectations but knowing the great advantage that the nation would
derive from the acquisition of Martinico I was anxious to exert every means that could give any chance of
success.”355 Once Colonel Myers returned “their reports prove that there is no probability of the
contending parties coming to any amicable agreement amongst themselves. It is true the royalists have
established themselves in a variety of different posts and generally get the better in any attacks the enemy
351 Major General Cuyler. “Appointments to Places under Government Made by His Excellency Major General
Cuyler Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Forces, Etc.,” April 15, 1793. CO 318. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
352 Major General Thomas Bruce. Letter to Henry Dundas, May 25, 1793. CO 318. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
353 Ibid.
354 Ibid.
355 Ibid.

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make upon them.”356 The British military leaders were assured by informants from the French islands that
they would be welcomed. As Major General Bruce wrote to Dundas in June of 1793:
Mons. Du Buc is not yet arrivd but three gentlemen came here last night as deputies from the
colonial assembly by whose authority he was sent to England. They state that their friends are
now in arms in daily expectations of our support that if they find we decline giving them any
assistance at this juncture they will be under a necessity to quit the country and leave their estates
and plantations entirely at the mercy of the republicans who will not fail to take the advantage of
their absence and completely to secure the island in the interest of that party. That if on the other
hand we will grant them only 800 men there are a great number of people who are ready to join
them by which means their strength will be increased so as to enable them to support themselves
in the country till after the hurricane months when in all probability we might be able to come in
such force as might ensure to us the surrender of the island. They assure us that the Town of St.
Pierre will be easily got possession of and that the merchants who reside there having a great
influence in the island may be able to procure the surrender of it.357
Notably, Major General Bruce understood that his French partners had a vested interest in exaggerating
the amount of support the British empire might expect from Martinique’s colonists and that the reality on
the ground might be different. “These are the arguments they advance,” Bruce explained to Dundas
although “we are not entirely convinced by their arguments [we are] fully persuaded that if the royalists
are absolutely forced to quit the island it will be impossible to make any attempt upon it but with a very
considerable force, and being now able to furnish the numbers…the troops will embark tomorrow.” Major
General Bruce’s comments here again gesture towards some British imperial officials perceiving an
obligation to protect Caribbean colonists aligned with other empires, or at least, felt comfortable using
this rationale as an excuse for capturing rival populations.
Once the invasion was underway, Major General Bruce’s suspicions were confirmed. In his update to
Dundas, Major General Bruce explained that the troops “embarkd accordingly on the 10th and arrivd off
Cape Navire on the 11th. Mons. Grimat who commanded the royalists immediately proposd an attack
upon the town of Saint Pierre…and that influence of the merchants there was such as would procure the
rest of the island.”358 Bruce next “orderd the 21st regt. To land on the 14th at Cape Navires…and I landed
356 Major General Thomas Bruce. Letter to Henry Dundas, June 8, 1793. In CO 318/12.
357 Ibid.
358 Major General Thomas Bruce to Henry Dundas, June 23, 1793. In “Military Despatches, 1790-1793,” CO
318/11, 293–303

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the rest of our forces on the 16th and joined him at very strong post within about five miles of St.
Pierre.”359 However, once it became clear that their mission wouldn’t meet success:
As the royalists would certainly fall sacrifice to the implaceable malignity of the republican party
as soon as we quitted the island it became in a manner incumbent on us in support of the national
character to use our utmost exertions to bring these unhappy people from the shore and altho’ the
necessity of impressing such vessels as could be found and the purchasing provisions from the
merchant vessels attending the army will incur a great expence I have ventured upon it trusting to
the generous and humane disposition exhibited by the nation on all similar occasions and being
perfectly assured of finding in you an advocate for rescuing so many unfortunate persons from
certain death.360
That Major General Bruce felt an obligation “in support of the national character” to carry away French
colonists who wanted to live under a royalist government showed that he perceived his role to be under
higher humanistic obligations than simply national or political rivalry. Like his fellow British official
Edward Despard in British Honduras, Major General Bruce seemed invested in saving French colonists
irrespective of their racial phenotype writing Dundas that “besides whites…were a number of Blacks
whose situation was equally perilous. I have distributed them amongst the islands in the best manner that
the shortness of time would admit and to render their residence in the islands as little inconvenient as
possible.”361 It’s unclear exactly which inconvenience the military leader was trying to avoid, but it stands
to reason he wouldn’t have distributed these particular colonists of French descent into British colonists if
he perceived them to be physically dangerous.
Major General Thomas Bruce ultimately felt that the strength of French assistance on Martinique had
been overstated by French officials and that the island wouldn’t simply be handed over to the British
throne.
362 Bruce wrote Whitehall in July that:
from the late unsuccessful attempt on the island of Martinico I apprehend there is no probability
of our getting possession of it by consent of the inhabitants all those friendly to the old
constitution have been forced to abandon it and the power is now completely in the hands of the
republicans and they have strengthened their authority much by admitting into their councils and
all the rights of Government the people of color, this body of people is numerous and will be most
359 On the same page Bruce estimates that “The British Troops consisted of the Grenadiers, Light Infantry, and
Marines fromo the Fleet with the Carolina Black Corps. Amounting in all to about eleven hundred men. Mons.
Grimat’s corps was said to be about eight hundred men. Ibid, 295.
360 Ibid, 293–303.
361 Ibid.
362 Ibid.

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steady in maintaining the present constitution from a conviction that a change must annihilate
their political existence.363
In a separate message written to Whitehall the same day, Major General Bruce asked to be relieved from
command of the King’s troops stating, “[p]ermit me to observe that I never was on service in this country;
and therefore quite unacquainted with the nature of it, and that since my arrival here my health has been
so much affected by the climate.” Notably, the Major General shared he felt the situation regarding the
French colonies “requires a long residence and local knowledge to carry on the operations with any
prospect of success.”364 From Bruce’s perspective, an official with local knowledge might have better luck
parsing the nuances of the local French-speaking population.
After Britain’s minor campaign to take Martinique failed, Governor James Bruce worried about the
impact on Dominica. The governor, “apprehensive that now the fleet has left Martinico some attempt will
be made against Dominica. [Major General Thomas Bruce] sent him all the force [he] could spare at
present which added to the troops now in the island to about 750.” 365 The Governor explained to the
Major General Bruce that Dominica’s “local situation between Martinico and Guadeloupe renders it ten
thousand times more exposed than any other of His Majesty’s islands in the West Indies…the
depredations we are exposed to can be done in one night the distance is so short.”366 With their chosen
system in place, most Martinican republicans who had been staying in Dominica returned home.
Conversely, many Martinican royalists left the French West Indies and settled in Dominica under the
reign of King George III. Dominica had so many royalists that in July the 60th Regiment of Dominica’s
Militia was sent to try and take Martinique. According to the anonymous author of Confiscation
considered; or doubts on the propriety of plundering our friends:
it was…well known to the Ministry, from the information of agents, commissioned by the islands
with whom the attack was concerted, that the British army might depend not only on the
363 Major General Thomas Bruce. Letter to Henry Dundas. “Private.,” July 10, 1793. CO 318. Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.
364 Major General Thomas Bruce. Letter to Henry Dundas. “Private. 2.,” July 10, 1793. CO 318/12. Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.
365 Major General Thomas Bruce. Letter to Henry Dundas, June 23, 1793. CO 318. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
366 James Bruce. Letter to Major General Thomas Bruce, June 20, 1793. CO 71/25.

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assistance of the planters, but, also, of many of the military and navy, who, persisting in their
loyalty to their sovereign, had been obliged to leave the French islands, and take refuge in those
of the English.367
And yet, even with the assistance of Martinique’s “French planters, and the military who had been
promised, faithful to their engagement, presented in great numbers to support and cooperate with us,” the
invading militia troops couldn’t pass the French troops led by General Rochambeau.368 Confiscation’s
author also insisted that support for the British on Martinique was likely even greater than what had been
shown during the invasion, stating: “It has been observed before…that a great many of the French
inhabitants of Martinico, who were in the English islands, were desirous of joining our army, and of
contributing to toward the reduction of the island.” The author laid the blame at the feet of imagined
imprudent officials who had rejected these voluminous French volunteers and therefore “there is great
reason to presume that such of them as remained at home at the time of the attack, and had any property,
were well-wishes to us, and secretly, if not openly abetted our cause; which was their’s also; property
having long been with them, as in the month country, a title to proscription.” However, the author
understood that “besides the positive evidence which may be produced of their favourable disposition
towards the English, we have the strongest negative proof of their not acting with the defense of the
island.” This strong negative proof would soon be visible on Dominica itself, as Dominicans of French
descent chose to reject invading French forces.
The poor French royalists who had been left behind on Martinique became a subject of sympathy
throughout the British West Indies. In a July 1793 issue of The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser
the editor wrote:
It is a truly lamentable circumstance for the aristocratic party of Martinique, that the British ships
and troops have been withdrawn from that island, as many thousands of them have in
consequence been obliged to seek refuge in Dominica and other places, to avoid being put to
Death, which must inevitably have been their fate, as a dreadful slaughter it is said took place
since their departure, amongst those who could not find means to make their escape. There are
367 Confiscation Considered; or Doubts on the Propriety of Plundering Our Friends (London: printed for J. Owen,
No. 168, Piccadilly, 1795), 4, http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CW0106087630/ECCO?sid=bookmarkECCO&xid=ba5f68d6&pg=1.
368 Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies, 154.

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such a prodigious number of French families in Dominica, that it has raised the price of every
article of life to a most alarming height.369
Although the author of this passage wasn’t happy about the inflation this influx of new residents brought
to Dominica, they were undoubtedly sympathetic to their plight and saw their community as providing
refuge to a targeted class.
As the initial attempt to take Martinique in June had failed, Whitehall decided to devote greater
military and financial resources to the task by appointing Captains Charles Grey and John Jervis
commanders in November 1793.370 Citing information received from Dominica in February 1794, the
editor of The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser noted that the would-be British invaders had
prepared the text of a “manifesto and supplement…published in the French Language for the purpose of
Promulgation in Martinique,” after a successful invasion.
371 The proclamation took a paternalistic tone
towards its readers, explaining that the King had been motivated to protect local colonists:
His Majesty moreover taking into consideration how notorious it is that the aforesaid convention
and its adherents…have conceived the project of entirely destroying all the French colonies in the
West Indies—a plan they have executed in some parts by circumstances of the most horrid nature,
and by means the most criminal and detestable, and that they have at the same time manifested
similar intentions against his possession of his majesty in the same quarter of the world.372
In this message, Captains Grey and Jervis adopted a posture which assumed their invasion was welcomed
by all colonists, even though they undoubtedly knew that there were French resistors. The proclamation
continued that:
we solemnly promise, grant, and guarantee to all those who avail themselves of this invitation,
and will submit themselves peaceably and quietly to the authority of His Majesty, personal
security and full and immediate enjoyment of their lawful possessions, conformably to their
ancient laws and customs, and upon the most advantageous terms; excepting only, those persons
who exportation from the island seems to be requisite for its peace and security, and even to those
369 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 495.” July 13, 1793. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
370 Willyams, Cooper. An Account of the Campaign in the West Indies in the Year 1794 : Under the Command of
Their Excellencies Lieutenant General Sir Charles Grey, K.B., and Vice Admiral Sir John Jervis, K.B., Commanders
in Chief in the West Indies : With the Reduction of the Islands of Martinique, St. Lucia, Guadaloupe, Marigalante,
Desiada, &c., and the Events That Followed Those Unparalleled Successes and Caused the Loss of Guadaloupe.
London: Printed by T. Bensley for G. Nicol, B. and J. White, and J. Robson, 1796.
http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0105017409/SABN?sid=primo&xid=d107d8e3&pg=1.
371 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 532.” March 29, 1794. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
372 Ibid.

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persons we promise (whatsoever may have been their conduct) to furnish them the means of
transport to France, or to any other place they may desire, that may not be prejudicial to his
Majesty’s service.373
Notably, Grey and Jervis’ proclamation concluded with a promise of opening (or legalizing) commercial
relations between the captured islands and the rest of the British empire: “on the re-establishment of
peace, Martinique shall enjoy all the rights and privileges of trade possessed by the British West India
colonies.”374 Imperially sanctioned trade between Martinique and Dominica was undoubtedly appealing
to colonists on both sides of that relationship.
After Britain’s invasion of Martinique, rumors circulated throughout the region of the situation of
colonists who had previously fled the island but who had now returned to their prior homes. A source
attributed to Dominica informed the wider British West Indies that the situation was not as bad as might
have been feared:
Numbers of the emigrants are already returned to their habitations, and many have found them
neither burnt or destroyed, or even damaged, as had been reported; and it would be a pleasing
consequence, if such unhoped for blessing would calm that rancorous animosity which seems to
rage in the returned emigrants who remained, as they are now equally objects of the British
protection.375
Scholars cannot know the accuracy of rumored reports like these. However, this Dominican source’s
reaction to this coverage, which was an aspirational hope that French Caribbean colonists might heal
internal divisions under new British parentage, demonstrates that this colonist felt that French colonists
373 Ibid.
374 Ibid. Notably, in a later issue of the same newspaper the editor printed “a report is in circulation, which we are
afraid will prove true, that eight very respectable planters, who had returned to Martinique from Dominica, in
consequence of Sir Charles Grey’s permission signified to them, had been most inhumanly murdered, after taking
possession of their respective estates.” It is not clear whether or not this event actually occurred but the copy
gestures towards the unhappiness some in the British West Indies felt at Martinique being quickly left by the
majority of the British forces. The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 536.” April 26, 1794. Bermuda
Digital Library. Bermuda National Library.
375 This anecdote continues with “Monsieur—---, an Emigrant, returned to his estate at Trinite, walking near his
dwelling-house, saw an inhabitant who had remained there, passing by mounted on a horse, he immediately knew to
have been his own; he stopped the rider and demanded his horse; the latter professing himself happy at the emigrat’s
return, and that he had it in his power to restore the horse in such excellent condition, dismounted, and was obliged
to walk to his own house at a considerable distance; the owner mounted, made several visits, relating the adventure,
and returned home—the next morning early he ordered that his horse should be brought to him, but on entering the
stable, it was found dead: it had been stabbed with bayonets.” The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No.
537.” May 3, 1794. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda National Library.

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ought not to let political divisions overtake their individual island community, saw a place for French
Caribbean colonists within the British empire, and finally didn’t perceive their support for neighboring
French colonists as inconsistent with their identity as colonists aligned to the British empire. From
Martinique, the British forces then launched their further successful attacks on Guadeloupe and Saint
Lucia.
Dominicans reject French Capture
On June 4, 1795, when the French made one of their last attempts to retake Dominica, Dominicans
of British descent likely felt fear as they wondered whether Dominica’s significantly larger population of
colonists of French descent would offer up their island to the empire to whom they bore ‘true’
allegiance.
376 Those terrified Dominicans were likely delighted when the assistance the French invaders
received proved to be limited to small group of colonists in the Colihaut area of the island. Whether most
Dominicans of French descent actively supported continued British rule or simply chose to look the other
way at the French invaders is impossible to know, but when the dust settled it was clear that most
Dominicans of French descent hadn’t assisted the invaders. At a minimum, we can understand the failure
of Dominicans of French descent to fully rise up to assist the French invasion of 1795 as a disinclination
to alter their status quo. Perhaps colonists felt that new French leadership, especially in light of the French
Revolution, would be unpredictable while the local British leadership was more of a known factor.
However, the most reasonable explanation for the failure of Dominicans of French descent to assist
French invaders is that, for all intents and purposes, they felt they already were living in a French colony:
they had access to French goods and extended family relationships in the French Antilles. Why risk it?
376 This attack wasn’t a surprise to the Dominican government. In a June issue of the Bermuda Gazette, prior to the
attempted invasion, the editor printed: “By authentic accounts from Dominica, we learn that they daily expect a visit
from the French; but the greatest vigiliance is used by Governor Hamilton in making every part as strong as art can
make it. On the Governor’s calling out such of the French inhabitants who had taken the oaths of allegiance, to
perform duty, about one half laid down their arms in the field, in consequence of which he had them taken up, and
sent to Martinique for great security, but the Governor of that island refused to receive them, and they were sent
back, which obliged Gov. Hamilton to put them in goal [sic] where they now remain.” “No. 594,” The Bermuda
Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, June 6, 1795, Bermuda Digital Library, Bermuda National Library.

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Details of the attack became available throughout the British West Indies via newspapers, and in a
September issue of the “Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser” the edition’s editor printed a letter
from Dominica that had been sent to and published in Saint Kitts describing the invasion in full detail.
The anonymous Dominican wrote “[o]n the evening of the 4th of June, news came to Town, of the enemy
having landed...which alarmed the inhabitants very much, particularly so as there was every reason to
suppose a number of the French inhabitants would join them.”377 “During this period,” the author
continued “the inhabitants in town continued in serious alarm, which was increased by hearing that most
of the French Planters from [Colihaut] Quarter having gone to join them.” 378 Luckily, however, for the
defenders, the government was prepared:
the Governor sent different parties into the country, to prevent the [Colihaut] Planters from
joining the Brigands, which was happily affected, and those vagabonds finding their friends had
been obliged to surrender, sued for terms (but with arms) which was not granted 130 of them are
now prisoners; some of the ringleaders have suffered, and others will share the same fate---about
430 of the Brigands are prisoners, 50 or 60 killed and wounded, and some few fled to the woods.
There are only 15 of the Regulars and Militia killed and wounded.379
Robert Browne, a man who had himself been a member of Dominica’s militia during the French attack,
published his detailed account of the invasion in December 1795. In his remarks Browne speaks to the
uncertainty many colonists felt regarding the loyalties of French Dominicans:
The several parish independent companies may muster about 400 men, but as the island is
principally inhabited by French planters, many of whom were suspected of disaffection, those
who were loyal, were not even equal to keep the disloyal in subjection: tho’ some French planters,
it must be observed did step forward with increased alacrity & zeal in proportion to the tardiness
377 We cannot be certain to which group of French people the author of this note is referring. At the time of the
attack there were five distinct groups of French residents on Dominica: the resident French, who had been living on
the island prior to British seizure; French royalist emigres who had come to the island in the wake of the Republican
takeover of Martinique; French republican emigres who, fleeing the Royalist government of Martinique had come to
Dominica but who for whatever reason, had not returned to Martinique upon its’ republican takeover; multi-ethnic
and multi-lingual enslaved laborers who were brought to Dominica against their will in order to generate wealth for
their ostensible owners; and finally, French people of colour or self-emancipated enslaved people who joined the
established Dominican Maroon community or maintained their own self-marronage in Dominica’s woods. “No.
609,” The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, September 19, 1795, Bermuda Digital Library, Bermuda
National Library.
378 Colihaut, presumable named for its elevation, was a community on the Western side of Dominica in the Parish of
Saint Peter. To the north of the community lies Prince Rupert’s Bay, as well as the new barracks recently built there
to house the King’s troops. Roseau, the capital of Dominica, also is on the west side of the island but is separated by
the counties, Saint Joseph and Saint Paul. Jefferys, The West-India Atlas, 92. “No. 609,” The Bermuda Gazette and
Weekly Advertiser, September 19, 1795, Bermuda Digital Library, Bermuda National Library.
379 Ibid.

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of many & the perfidious duplicity of others of their countrymen. A corps of 70 emigrants, had
also been embodied & well disciplined, under the command of the Marq. Du Barraille... 380
However, Browne may be referring to non-elite Dominicans of French descent as he followed up
explaining that at the time of the attack all hands were needed:
and of none more than of those, who possessing lucrative employments were exempt from Militia
Service; they readily came forward on this occasion & were as readily joined by those whose Age
&c. entitled them to the same exemption. They formed a [c]orp of 40 volunteers, of which
Governor Hamilton, did them the honor to accept the command.381
These planters, even with their French descent, knew the politically correct choice in that moment was to
flatter the British Governor Hamilton by requesting his leadership.
It is impossible to know precisely how many Dominicans of French descent rose up to support the
unsuccessful uprising at Colihaut, but it is possible to estimate how wide their revolt spread. The first
rumblings of the county’s potential disloyalty came early in June:
it was suggested, that the Militia of the Saint Peter’s Parish, which was composed of above 100
active young men, could furnish a respectable body of Volunteers for that Service; & Lt. Colonel
Flavey was ordered thither to raise a Corps of 50 men; but his first report on making the attempt
shewed, that no dependence could be placed on the inhabitants of that Parish, and his report was
attended with such proofs of their suspicious conduct, that he received orders on the 15th of June,
to disarm the disaffected and to burn every petitaugre.
Browne describes how in the course of the 3 successive days, 108 Dominicans of French descent
surrendered: “those, with the 14th who came in at du Blanc, the 16 got off in the Petitauger, & 10, or at
most 12 who had fought safety in flight & were still in the neighboring Woods, form the total of the
Colyhaut Rebels, now completely subdued, by the ably directed activity and zeal, of our fellow citizens in
arms.”382
After the invasion and revolt had been successful repelled, the Government at Roseau began their
proceedings again rebel Dominicans who had assisted the French during the attack. The punishments
380 Robert Browne, A Diary of the Defence of the Island of Dominica, against the Invasion of the French
Republicans, & the Revolt of the Dominicans of the Quarter of Colyhaut, in June 1795 ([Dominica W.I.? : s.n.],
1795), http://archive.org/details/diaryofdefenceof00brow.
381 Ibid.
382 This figure fails to account for the Rebels who had managed to escape: ”As [Captain Pritchard and his party]
were approaching the town, they perceived a large petitaugre full of people pushing off from a small distance on the
other side of the river, which, it afterwards appeared, had on board Rapheael Dupre, Meltz, & 15 or 16 of the most
notorious Rebels and French Republican Agents in the quarter.” Ibid.

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dispensed at trial ranged from death by hanging, to lifelong banishment, to whip lashes. However,
Governor Hamilton occasionally intervened in sentencing to offer a measure of clemency:
The rest, were sentenced to be exiled &ca. But [His Excellency] was afterwards pleased to order,
that Roger Bellair, Victor Roger, & Renault son of Renault Biolant should find security, in the
sum of 300l. Sterling, each, that they shall depart this island and not return thereto, during the
space of 3 years appertaining to the French Government, and that they shall not, during the terms
of their exile, concert any plan, to the detriment of the English government, or in any matter favor
the enemies of the British government. 383
One wonders why Governor Hamilton limited these punishments’ terms to only three years (surely hatred
has no expiration), but perhaps he thought that these lesser insurrectionists might be willing to warm up to
British sovereignty on Dominica after they had an opportunity to constrain their rebellious impulses.
Conclusion
The story of the Franco-British tug-of-war in Dominica from the period from 1783 to 1795 lays bare
the fundamental fiction that is at the center of much of the historiography of the Caribbean and Atlantic
world. That fiction is that any colony, but a geographically precarious colony as Dominica was, could be
possessed by a single country. The imperial allegiances of West Indian colonies in the late eighteenth
century were largely products of the individuals who called them home, the commerce conducted within
and with them, and the choices made by their leaders. By all three metrics, Dominica should be
considered both a French and British colony.
The reality of Dominica’s true binational allegiance is what likely motivated Dominica Governors
John Orde and James Bruce to assist French royalists in neighboring colonies after the French Revolution
in Europe. Knowing that the communities in Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe affected each other,
the Dominican governors and French royalist leaders sought to work together to adjust to the region’s
new political realities. The relationships forged through Dominica directly led to Britain’s choice to seize
the French Antilles.
383 Ibid.

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However, just because Dominica’s Governors aligned themselves with French royalists, didn’t mean
that all other Dominicans of French descent identified in the same way. What will become clear in the
next chapter is that many Dominicans of French descent also identified as political republicans. Hybridity
in Dominica in the Age of Revolutions wasn’t merely confined to ethnicity.

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CHAPTER FOUR:
A colonial hypothesis:
Creole-Royalists and Creole Republicans
While neighboring Caribbean colonists of French descent in Martinique and Guadeloupe contended
with the impact of France’s Revolution in their island communities, two Dominican newspapermen
peacefully coexisted on the multiethnic island: the British John Lowndes and the French Sextius
Buffardin. These professional rivals’ coevolution reflects the ways conflict between European ethnic
groups in the Lesser Antilles was beginning to soften at the same time longstanding political norms were
being challenged by the explosion of a new revolutionary republicanism erupting from the new French
and American Republics.
384Although the publisher of the bilingual (but primarily English-language)
language Charibbean Register; Or Ancient and Original Dominica Gazette, on July 24, 1790 Lowndes
also launched the French language Courrier Des Petites Antilles and from its perch in Roseau worked to
spread the cause of republicanism throughout the Antilles. A member of a seasoned creole family,
Lowndes had frequently stuck his thumb in the eye of the British Governor John Orde’s administration,
most notably by printing the anonymous and polemical Letters of Junius Minor, &c., a “complete history
of the administration,” which had called for the Governor’s removal.385
384 Concurrently, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was experiencing a “media revolution,” from the island
having one newspaper in 1789 to more than a dozen in 1793. As historian Jeremy Popkin explains, “By helping to
break down traditional authority the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against
white rule by Saint-Domingue’s free people of color and its slave population possible.” It stands to reason that some
of the themes present in Saint-Domingue’s newspapers were also present on Dominica, Martinique, and Guadelupe.
Jeremy D. Popkin, “A Colonial Media Revolution: The Press in Saint-Domingue, 1789-1793,” The Americas 75, no.
1 (January 2018): 3, http://dx.doi.org.libproxy1.usc.edu/10.1017/tam.2017.95.
385 Lowndes’ great-grandfather had immigrated to the Western Hemisphere where first, he went to Saint Kitts, the
place he met his wife Ruth Rawlins a member of “a numerous and influential family long established in the island,”
and then moved with her and their three children to South Carolina where the Lowndes name remains prominent.
Ruth, accompanied by her oldest son William Lowndes, returned to Saint-Kitts after the death of her husband. On
the island William married Mary Taylor and they had two children, Mary and John Taylor. John Taylor Lowndes
would marry, presumeably an islander but it is unknown, and had three children, the first of which is John Lowndes,
our printer. George B. Chase, “The Lowndes Family of South Carolina.: A Genealogical Sketch.,” The NewEngland Historical and Genealogical Register (1874-1905) (Boston, United States: American Periodicals Series II,
April 1876).No extant copy of the Junius Minor pamphlet exists. However, an advertisement for the pamphlet can
be found in this issue of The Barbados Mercury. Barbados Mercury and Bridge-Town Gazette. “Vol. III, No. 1788.”
March 8, 1788. Digital Library of the Caribbean. Barbados Archives Department.

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Lowndes’ publishing colleague, who had once been the publisher of the Gazette de Sainte-Lucie,
Sextius Buffardin had fled Martinique in March 1791 and landed in Dominica where he printed his own
republican-leaning Le Furet colonial et Réviseur universelle from April 1791 until Summer 1792.386 In
issues of Le Furet Coloniale, Buffardin covered Dominican events as well as ongoing events in the
French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia. Both political republicans, the absence of
imperially specific language in the title of their French language newspapers demonstrates how these
colonial editors sought to cast a wide net for readers using a shared ideology rather than geographic
borders. The title of Buffardin’s journal similarly espouses the colonial relationship as its raison d’être
rather than an affiliation with one colony over another. Cheering on republican revolutionaries, Lowndes’
Courrier’s debut issue in July 1790 focused on the immediate conflict between republicans and royalists
occurring in nearby St. Pierre, Martinique, which had occurred largely in reaction to the ongoing
revolution in France, and to address which the royalist governor of the colony had recently suspended
local government.387
Contrastingly, the perspective of colonists in Dominica who watched the growth of republicanism in
neighboring islands warily and who instead preferred the reestablishment of France’s monarchy came
through publications like the government-endorsed Mrs. Browne’s Roseau Gazette Extraordinary, which,
although printed primarily in English, also included French language entries for readers of French
descent. For readers within Dominica, a publication being printed in the language of ones’ ethnic origin
was no longer a clear indication of what political views they might find inside.
After the outbreak of the French Revolution, the colonial populace on Dominica coalesced into two
large ethnopolitical groups divorced from any specific imperial affiliation but that instead used shared
political ideologies and their mutually lived experience as creole colonists to form sociopolitical bridges
across the islands, freeing themselves from a personal obligation to endorse the actions of their specific
386 In 1793, Buffardin would be found in Guadeloupe publishing the Guadeloupe ou Journal politique de la Pointeà-Pitre. Alain Nabarra, “Sextius Buffardin,” Voltaire Foundation, Dictionnaire des journalistes, accessed April 21,
2023, https://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/130-sextius-buffardin.
387 Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies, 89–90.

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empires.388 Hyphenated to show how linked colonial practice and political ideology had become in the
region, I term these groups Creole-Royalists and Creole-Republicans. The existence of these two large
ethnopolitical groups on Dominica shows that, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, ethnicity and
ethnic identity were, at least, less effective—but probably also less meaningful—as group unifiers across
imperial groups in the colonial Caribbean than Caribbean colonists’ class or political identities.
As was routine in many British West Indian colonies, Dominica’s imperially placed governors
frequently engaged in power struggles with the local elected government, and political factions on the
island tended to adopt either a pro-Governor or anti-Governor stance.
389 In fact, although calls for
Governor John Orde’s removal had reached a fever pitch even before the beginning of the French
Revolution in the summer of 1789, afterwards, when the Home Office ultimately decided to leave Orde in
place, local political feuds on Dominica mapped on to the Creole royalist-republican binary. As the King’s
representative, Orde, and the later James Bruce administration, came to stand in for the larger creoleroyalist position while the government’s critics mapped onto the creole-republican position. This means
that discussion of local events in Dominica in partisan sources like colonial newspapers often showcased
a kind of doublespeak, intended to subtly push either a republican or royalist line. However, just because
a colonist espoused one perspective didn’t mean that their perspective couldn’t change—as political
conditions in the Lesser Antilles tended to change rapidly, members of Dominica’s Privy Council and
House of Assembly, many of whom who had already lived through French governance, strategically
388 The history of the term creole is complex and long. Stated briefly, we can understand two distinct historical
meanings of creole as being in play in the Colonial Caribbean. Initially, the term creole referred to someone who had
been born in the Western Hemisphere rather than in Europe. In this way, to be creolized, meant that someone was
fundamentally changed by the physical environment around them—whether by born within it or, as often happened,
when good upstanding Englishmen spent too long in the new world. The second definition of creole, which refers
more specifically to the complex lived experience of individuals of African descent within the Western Hemisphere,
is worked out through the scholarship of scholars like Melville Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, Sidney Mintz, and
Ira Berlin. In this project I use the first understanding of creole, that is, as someone who has been permanently
changed by their lived experience in the ‘new world’ because whether an individual was creolized would have been
easily apparent to other islanders based on the individuals’ manner rather than their personal phenotype.
389 For a summary of Orde’s governorship and these tensions see Brown, “The Governorship of John Orde, 1783-
1793.”

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flirted with creole-republicanism or creole-royalism depending on the way they perceived the winds were
blowing.
Although there were no doubt ideological stragglers on either side, whether a colonist leaned creolerepublican or creole-royalist was primarily indicated by their economic interests. As individuals who held
other human beings in perpetual bondage, slaveholding colonists had a natural interest in preventing the
spread of a philosophy like republicanism, which advocated for the abolishment of the aristocracy. They
tended to lean towards creole-royalism. Owning enslaved people didn’t necessarily indicate that one
leaned royalist but it is almost certain that the greater number of people someone held in bondage, the
more likely an individual would be to sing the praises of monarchism. Crucially, owning enslaved people
didn’t necessarily mean that one had a European phenotype: slaveholders of color, particularly in the
French West Indies, formed a large portion of the creole-royalist camp.
Colonists who tended to lean creole-republican were those who had a vested interested in the
expansion of economic and political privileges for themselves. They included such diverse groups as
commercial merchants, craftsmen, sailors, day-laborers, and enslaved people. As Caribbean colonists
whose financial and political interests had long been sacrificed to the insatiable needs of the planter class,
the language of republicanism gave colonists outside the planter class a specialized parlance with which
to advocate for their unique position in the colonial community.
By subtly siding with either the creole-republican or creole-royalist position, Dominican colonists
gave themselves political options should imperial conditions in the colony change, while preserving their
present safety under the colony’s status quo. These worldviews were constructed by blending one’s
colonial identity with political philosophy. Together, colonial identity, in the form of shared lived
experiences and regional practices, coupled with the political ideologies of royalism or republicanism
served as bridges by which unaligned colonists could be brought into alignment with those outside their
empire so long as they shared the same doctrinal views. Conversely, colonists’ new emphasis on
ideological perspectives meant that, although other colonists may have shared their ethnic origins, a
shared ethnic background no longer naturally suggested shared political philosophies. This argument

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suggests that, towards the end of the eighteenth century, living among those who shared their ethnicity
became less valued by Dominican colonists and living among those who shared their political and
economic views became more valued by Dominican colonists.
Although individual Caribbean colonists wouldn’t have identified themselves as such, the categories
creole-royalists and creole-republicans are useful for thinking about communities in the Lesser Antilles at
the end of the eighteenth century, as the terms reflect both the omnipresent ethnic hybridity in the region
and the ways in which identities can be adopted or changed over time for a variety of reasons. The terms
creole-republican and creole-royalist speak to the ways in which Caribbean colonists in the Lesser
Antilles during the last decade of the eighteenth century became less overtly attached to their specific
ethnic identities and more attached to a generic ‘creole’ identity inseparable from the figure of plantation
owner. Although Dominica was not the first colony to have a multiethnic populace, due to the political
context of the Age of Revolutions as well as the island’s geographic circumstances, it was the setting for
the emergence of this new type of colonial identity in the late eighteenth century.
Based exclusively on contemporaneously printed public documents, this scholarly corpus is
representative of the colonial experience in Dominica for a narrow slice of the last decade of the
eighteenth century. Confining the chapter’s scope to the 1789-1794, contemporary newspapers printed in
Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe serve as the backbone of this chapter. The successful integration
of colonists of British and French descent into the singular category of Dominicans presents us with a
unique challenge when it comes to the interpretation of evidence. Once the British Empire captured the
island, colonists of French descent became “new subjects of the British government.”
At the time of the island’s 1783 seizure, Dominicans of French descent made up much of the island’s
population. Yet, British Governor John Orde and his administration did not distinguish between
Dominicans by their ethnic background in public correspondence.390 When writing publicly to
390 Although it is impossible to know for certain, a few clues exist that we can use to detect a colonists’ potential
ethnic background. First, if someone is listed as Catholic, it is more likely than not that they are of French descent or
had married into a French family. Second, an individual’s economic choices often corresponded to their ethnic
background. The printed text References to the Plan of the Island of Dominica, which lists the individual plots of

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Dominicans, John Orde and others addressed them singularly as Dominicans. However, the Government’s
requirement that official notices be printed in both French and English, the bilingual nature of the island’s
newspapers belies the transnational character of the populace.
Therefore, when examining sources from this period, one must read against the grain to ferret out the
passages which speak to the dynamic between French and English colonists in Dominica during the last
decades of the eighteenth century. Even though this chapter constrains its’ analysis to Dominica in the
years 1789 to 1794, from the initial outbreak of the French Revolution to the British campaign to seize the
French West Indies, there are reasons to speculate that creole-royalist and creole-republican communities
may have been existed throughout the Caribbean during, and even after, this same period. It cannot be
forgotten that concurrent to events on Dominica, French, Spanish, and British forces were also fighting
against the Haitian Revolution in Saint-Domingue. Reacting to that revolution, many colonial refugees of
French descent emigrated to new homes in the Western Hemisphere, including key places like New
Orleans, Baltimore, and Kingston.391 If creole-republicans and creole-royalists emerged on Dominica at
least partly from the intermixture of Caribbean colonists of varying ethnic descent, it stands to reason that
they could have emerged elsewhere.
It makes logical sense, as the philosophies of creole-royalists and creole-republicans were
fundamentally opposed to each other, that colonists who aligned with each group tended to not want to
live with the other. One phenomenon which demonstrate the scope and robustness of Dominica’s creoleroyalist and creole-republican communities in the last decade of the eighteenth century is how linked the
physical movements of these groups were to political events in Dominica and surrounding islands. Most
importantly, by taking this approach we see that movements of creole-royalists and creole-republicans
were themselves linked, in that, when royalists were in power in the French West Indies, creoleland sold by the British Government on the island beginning in 1763 as well as which freeholder held the property,
is a very useful resource for finding French freeholders on the island. As the book separated properties that had
been sold outright from properties that had merely been leased (which almost exclusively went to French residents),
the names of French leaseholders provide leads which might help make other island Frenchmen visible.
391 Dessens, “Saint-Domingue Refugees”; Brasseaux and Conrad, The Road to Louisiana.

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republicans made their way to Dominica, and conversely, when republicans ruled in Martinique,
Guadeloupe, or Saint Lucia, creole-royalists flocked to the Dominica’s royalist safehaven. However,
because discussing events in this way tends to divorce actors from their choices, this analysis is decidedly
impersonal and more demonstrative of the feelings, ideas, and beliefs of groups in the colonies rather than
telling us important things about the philosophies of individual colonists.
The Migratory Dance of Creole-Royalists and Creole-Republicans
Although news of the France’s rebellion wouldn’t reach Martinique until September, the outbreak of
the French Revolution in the summer of 1789 was immediately perceived as a threat by creole-royalists
on Dominica due to the island’s proximity to the French West Indies and the frequent interaction between
local colonists. Dominicans’ concerns about the French Revolution’s impact on the colony show prima
facie their understanding that the conditions of their island were directly impacted by events in France—
even though it was ostensibly now attached to the British throne. The Governor’s brother, Thomas Orde,
who had himself been sent reports of the Revolution’s impact on Martinique, forwarded the messages he
had himself received to his brother explaining that, “as I think you may wish to know what effect the
Revolution in France has upon the inhabitants of their islands in this part of the world”392 The concerning
account sent to Orde detailed how an emboldened collection of merchants and soldiers, republicans,
succeeded in intimidating a series of island officials to wear a republican cockade. Crucially however, the
author of the account seemed to suggest that officials in Martinique felt they had reason to hope that the
republicanism might blow through the island quickly, describing the “masquerade, & illumination which
has been the whole occupation of all orders of people for some days past. A very respectable merchant
here was obliged to ask pardon on his knees in the public street, for some disrespectful words he was
392 They do not refer to themselves as siblings in these letters but based on what we know about their family and
background, it is likely these were the brothers’ corresponding. Kelly, James. Powlett, Thomas Orde-, First Baron
Bolton (1746–1807), Politician. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20811;
Matthew, H. C. G., and B. Harrison, eds. “Orde, Sir John, First Baronet.” In The Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, ref:odnb/20810. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20810.

133
charged with having uttered on the subject of the cochade.”393 The fear of republicanism suggested by the
French author’s account, as well as their recipient, indicates that they were likely creole-royalist. At the
time he received the letter, Thomas Orde was living in Ireland, where he had first been dispatched to serve
as chief secretary to the viceroy of Ireland, Charles Manners, the duke of Rutland.394 In this role Orde
worked to further promote commercial links between Ireland, another predominantly Catholic colony, and
the British empire. It stands to reason that Thomas Orde, who saw a future in the British empire for Irish
Roman Catholics, presumably could envision the inclusion of French Catholics as well.
Dominica’s Lieutenant Governor, James Bruce, who had been deputized to take charge of Dominica
during Orde’s furlough, was forced to confront the spread of republican ideas to the colony that same
month, in September 1789. Bruce wrote to home secretary William Grenville that “a gentleman of the
island came to inform me that a very considerable insurrection had happened amongst the negroes at
Martinico…the reason they give is that as all the English negroes are to be made free they have a right to
be the same.” Bruce doesn’t explain how enslaved people in Martinique came to believe this but instead
focuses on how to prevent the false claims from spreading to his own colony. Remarking that, “I shall use
my best endeavours by recommending to the magistrates & planters to be vigilant and have parties along
the part of the island, where it is more likely they may land…I shall only add that I shall pay the strictest
attempt to prevent any mischief in this colony,” Bruce’s letter demonstrates both that he understood how
linked Dominica was to Martinique but that he was largely powerless to prevent emigration from its
neighbors’ shores.395 Additionally, Bruce’s informant, “a gentleman of the island,” who may have been of
French or English descent, must have gained knowledge of what was happening in neighboring
Martinique in some way: was it through relatives? Friends? Commercial contacts? At a minimum, we can
393 Thomas Orde. Correspondence to John Orde, September 27, 1789. CO 71/17. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
394 James Kelly, Powlett, Thomas Orde-, First Baron Bolton (1746–1807), Politician, vol. 1 (Oxford University
Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20811; Roland Thorne, “Manners, Charles, Fourth Duke of Rutland
(1754–1787), Politician” (Oxford University Press, January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17950.
395 James Bruce. Correspondence to William Grenville, September 8, 1789. CO 71/16. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.

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surmise that as Bruce’s informant’s informant had a vested interest in preventing the spread of a
revolutionary ideology and was therefore likely creole-royalist.
Although Dominican governmental officials were firmly on the side of creole-royalists, a March
1790 attack on a local customs official, stemming from a supposed charge of him laying inordinate taxes
on merchants, shows no shortage of republican fervor existed in British Dominica at this time. In a public
proclamation prepared by the Lieutenant Governor, Bruce described how:
a riotous assembly of people met together in Town of Roseau for the purpose of Tarring and
feathering, beating & otherwise inhumanely treating one John Blair on … [he] had given
information to some or one of the Officers of his Majesty’s Customs of the unlawful importation
of prohibited & uncustomed goods into this colony.396
If Bruce’s characterization of the mob’s motives is accurate, then we know a sizeable group of
Dominicans actively sought to prevent the government from gathering an accurate account of the goods
crossing into or exiting the colony. These rioting colonists must have felt enough of a vested interest in
ensuring the continuance of commerce between Dominica and neighboring colonies against the wishes of
the local government that they were willing to resort to violence. Blair was spared from the mob, who
“would in all probability have inhumanely murdered [him],” after the military intervened.397 The
Lieutenant Governor offered a substantial reward to encourage assistance:
a reward of one hundred pounds current money of the said island to any person who will give
information, so as to convict one or more of the said offenders—and if such person giving
information shou’d have been concernd in the aforesaid outrages, I do hereby over and above the
said reward promise to informer His Majesty’s most gracious pardon.398
At first it appears strange that Bruce publicly touted his willingness to pardon members of this mob if
they assisted the government. But the Lieutenant Governor’s actions make sense when we consider that
Dominicans of French descent significantly outnumbered Dominicans of British descent. At this early
moment after France’s Revolution, the Lieutenant Governor was likely wary over whether republicanism
would be attractive to Dominican colonists of French descent.
396 James Bruce. “Proclamation.” Proclamation. Dominica, March 28, 1790. CO 71/16. Adam Matthew Colonial
Caribbean.
397 Ibid.
398 Ibid.

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News of the republican mob’s attack on the customs officer in Dominica was disturbing enough to
some Caribbean colonists that notice of the event made its way into several area newspapers. For
example, the attack made its way into Jamaica’s Daily Advertiser when an extract of a letter from
Dominica conveyed that “[e]very kind of business is dull here at present, owing principally to the
confusion that reigns in the neighboring French Islands, and the shackles laid upon trade by our worthy
collector, however we hope this will not last long.”399 In The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser the
editor printed, sourced from Antigua, an announcement of the bounty offered for information:
We find that the Lieutenant Governor of Dominica, has issued a Proclamation offering a reward
of One Hundred Pounds…any person, who will give information, that will lead to the conviction
of one, ore more, of the party concerned in tarring, feathering, inhumanly beating, and dragging
about the streets, Mr. John Blair of that Island, upon suspicion that he had given information to
the officers of the customs, of the unlawful importation of prohibited goods.400
The Lieutenant Governor’s chiding of local colonists over Blair’s assault likely didn’t have too strong an
impact because later that year in December 1790, another Dominica customs officer, Richard Wells,
detailed in a report an angry confrontation he had with a local colonist, Mr. Cullimore. According to
Well’s account, Mr. Cullimore claimed “the custom house officers were particularly hard or severe on him
& that I might as well at once rob him, or set his store on Fire.”401 For Dominicans like Mr. Cullimore, the
importance of any imperial justification for commercial regulation was secondary to their own personal
399 Emphasis in the original. The Daily Advertiser assured it’s readers that “the following fracas is of so ridiculous
and improbable a nature, that we should not give credit to it, were it not substantially authenticated with the names
of the parties in one of the Irish papers.” The Daily Advertiser. “Daily Advertiser Collection.” April 22, 1790. Daily
Advertiser. British Library.
http://www.18thcjournals.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Daily%20Advertiser#Snippits.
400 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 335.” June 19, 1790. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
401 This confrontation escalated later when Mr. Cullimore and his friend Mr. Collins, personally showed up at Well’s
home. According to Well’s account “in the evening of the same day about 6 o’clock, [Mr. Collins] came to my
house and called me to him at the door, as he wished to speak to me as he again came for an answer to Mr.
Cullimore, I persisted in replying I would give him no answer, He then told me (shaking a horse whip in his hand)
that he would make me answer with a horse whip, and went away about one hour afterwards he came a third time in
company? with Mr. Cullimore to my house and ordered my servants to call me down stairs. Mr. Barker, a friend of
mine being with me, I desired him to go to the gentlemen & say I was busy, he did so, when they retired, calling at
my door loud enough to be heared [sic] by me upstairs, he is a coward, a damned rascal, & making use of language
of that sort…” To see Wells’s full report for Dominica’s Custom House examine, Richard Wells, “Custom House
Report,” in “Dominica: Original Correspondence, Secretary of State: Despatches,” 30-31, CO 71/18, December 13,
1790.

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financial comfort. Like British Honduras’ Baymen, Dominicans like Mr. Cullimore seemed to view their
relationship with their sovereign as more about what the empire could do for them rather than what they
could do for the empire.
After Martinique’s initial revolutionary tumult began in September of 1789, in reaction to the
outbreak of the French Revolution, the first wave of migrants made their way to Dominica. Unexpectedly,
these first emigrants were creole-republicans who were unhappy that French royalists had managed to
remain in power in the French West Indies. After the creole-republicans arrived in the island, British
publisher John Lowndes began to cater to their interests. In a May 1790 issue of the French language
Gazette de Sainte-Lucie another publisher J.B. Thounens printed an advertisement for “A collection of
patriotic pieces & letters has just been published & exhibited for sale, at Mr. Lowndes, Printer at RozeauDominique, in which one will notice a clear & impartial analysis of the colonial constitution of the
English islands, in comparison with the national constitution of the Metropolis.”402 We cannot know for
what purpose Lowndes created this printed comparison of colonial governments but it stands to reason
that one possible motivation might have been a desire to create a resource useful to creole-republicans.
The publisher Thounens further editorialized in the advertisement that the “work, translated into French
for the usefulness of Franco-Anglais, who do not understand the national language, can be, at this time, of
great help to the French Colonies, who are looking for documents to achieve the perfectibility of a new &
better colonial regime.”403 Thounens invocation of ‘Franco-Anglais’ here, as well as raising the possibility
that colonists who identified as being attached to the French empire might not have the ability to speak
French, demonstrates the hybridity that even contemporary actors recognized was possible for ethnic
labels in the colonial Caribbean.
The existence of this advertisement itself suggests several conclusions. First, Lowndes felt there was
enough of a market in Dominica and the surrounding islands for a paper product like this one to go
402 Gazette de Sainte-Lucie. “Vol. III, No. XX.” May 18, 1790. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département
Philosophie, histoire, sciences de l’homme, FOL-LC12-31. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32780617w.
403 Ibid.

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through the expense and labor of having it printed. Second, we can infer that Thounens had enough of a
relationship with Lowndes, an ostensible rival, to gift his competitor’s product publicity in his own
newspaper—a notice which had the tone of an endorsement.
Further clues indicating the surge in creole-republican activism within the French Antilles could also
be found in English language newspapers throughout the British West Indies. For example, in a March
issue of Jamaica’s Daily Advertiser local colonists learned from “the Friendship, Thorpe, which arrived
from Bristol and Dominica… that in consequence of the dissentions originating with a certain class of
people, having increased to an alarming decree, a large reinforcement of troops had been sent from
Dominica to Guadeloupe.”404 This quotation emphasizes both that this disorder was considered to be
resulting from a select group of French colonists rather than all Frenchmen inherently and assumes
Dominican officials felt an obligation to assist the Guadeloupean government in their struggles against
said select group. If it occurred, at a minimum we can understand the gesture of sending troops as being a
sign of goodwill, a de facto announcement that any larger conflict between the two colonies would cease
while Guadeloupe faced the local intransigence of creole-republicans.
It is likely that Dominica itself was home to a large group of creole-republicans by July 1790. That
month Lowndes began publishing his creole-republican French language Courrier Des Petites Antilles in
Roseau. Describing the paper’s ethos it its first issue, Lowndes promised to “elevate above all other
human considerations, with the support of liberty, we promise to tell the truth, to oppose all enemies to
the public cause, everything that inspires bad conduct, and terrify them, forever.”405 The patriotic nature
of Lowndes’s prose speaks for itself. Likely reflecting aspirations rather than reality of Dominica,
404 It is not likely that this news item was accurate—no British troops were sent by Dominica’s government to
Guadeloupe. However, the content itself, whether wishful thinking or not, shows that Jamaican colonists didn’t
consider the thought of British Dominica assisting French Guadeloupe to be outside the realm of political
possibility. The Daily Advertiser. “Daily Advertiser Collection.” March 23, 1790. Daily Advertiser. British Library.
http://www.18thcjournals.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Daily%20Advertiser#Snippits.
405 Translation by the author. Courrier Des Petites Antilles. “No. 1.” July 24, 1790. Ville de Nantes - Bibliothèque
municipale : Frank Pellois ; cote du document. https://cataloguebm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0001.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail.

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Lowndes powerfully declared that “today, men know their rights. They can distinguish between their
benefactors and tyrants. The reign of lies is over, and the important no longer impose their ambition.”406
The contents within the journal tells us much about who Lowndes expected to be reading it: in
addition to reporting on revolutionary events in France, Lowndes began reserving sections for Martinique
and Roseau the very next month.407 Lowndes may have had an active community of informants in
Martinique, as suggested by how quickly he was able to report on events in the neighboring island.408 If
Lowndes didn’t use human sources from Martinique he likely acquired the information using one of two
methods, both of which speak to the high level of French and British intermixture on Dominica. The first
method would be that Lowndes relied on sources from Dominica who either had firsthand knowledge of
events in the French West Indies or who had learned it through word-of-mouth. The second option is that
Lowndes himself procured physical copies of foreign newspapers either by traveling himself to
neighboring colonies or by procuring copies of foreign papers in Dominica. At the very least we know
that Bruce was going out of his way to procure information about what was occurring in the French
Antilles and France itself for newspaper readers in his British colony.
In the Courrier’s second issue, Lowndes continued spreading creole-republican ideology writing
radical statements like “the chance of place, whether of birth or fortune shouldn’t debase someone: under
a humble roof sometimes lies a philosopher who scrutinizes mankind in one place; he never forgets that
titles don’t stop people from being silly or mean.”409 Later that same issue Lowndes published an epitaph
dedicated to a redacted “M. de P—G—n,” which declared “Cry, people of colour, cry aristocrats, today
406 Ibid.
407 For the first Martinique section see “No. IV,” Courrier Des Petites Antilles, August 14, 1790, Ville de Nantes -
Bibliothèque municipale : Frank Pellois ; cote du document, https://cataloguebm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0013.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail; For the first Roseau section see “No.
V,” Courrier Des Petites Antilles, August 21, 1790, Ville de Nantes - Bibliothèque municipale : Frank Pellois ; cote
du document, https://catalogue-bm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0020.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail.
408 For example, Lowndes was able to print a letter from Martinique dated September 3 in his September 11 issue of
the “Courrier.” Although that may seem inconsequential in the present era, many steps had to be taken to get a that
letter (or its copy) to Lowndes that quickly.
409 Translation by the author. Courrier Des Petites Antilles. “No. II.” July 31, 1790. Ville de Nantes - Bibliothèque
municipale : Frank Pellois ; cote du document. https://cataloguebm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0008.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail.

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you have lost your strongest support.”410 This quotation is notable because, by casting ‘people of colour’
and aristocrats as being on the same side of the issue, Bruce essentially casts them both as creoleroyalists. Bruce likely wasn’t referring to all Dominicans of color—racial intermixture on the island was
simply too prominent—but rather to elite slaveholders of color. The newspapers’ third issue opened with
Lowndes declaration that “freedom of commerce, conscience, writing, and speech…men in town, these
are our rights.”411 In the next issue Lowndes ran a separate, “Letter to the aristocrats” directed to the
Martinique’s colonial assembly, vowing that a “hand of vengeance will soon be punishing your
villany.”412 Clearly, creole-republicans on Dominica had a mouthpiece in John Lowndes’ Courrier.
When Dominica’s Governor John Orde returned to the island in November 1790, he met a populace
even more politically engaged than it had been when he’d left roughly a year before. Upon his arrival
Orde also likely learned of the existence of the island's new republican-leaning newspaper, L’Ami de la
Liberte, et L’Ennemi de la License, printed by French West Indian publishing magnate Jean Baptiste
Thounens.413 Late in October “a numerous and respectable” group of freeholders had met at Mr. Ving’s
Tavern in Roseau and discussed the state of the colony. This meeting had culminated in their drafting and
410 Ibid.
411 Translation by the author. Courrier Des Petites Antilles. “No. III.” August 7, 1790. Ville de Nantes -
Bibliothèque municipale : Frank Pellois ; cote du document. https://cataloguebm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0012.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail.
412 Courrier Des Petites Antilles. “No. IV.” August 14, 1790. Ville de Nantes - Bibliothèque municipale : Frank
Pellois ; cote du document. https://cataloguebm.nantes.fr/ark:/73533/Nantes_13580/v0013.simple.selectedTab=thumbnail.
413 Thounens, a Frenchman by birth and a creole by marriage, had been living in the Lesser Antilles since the early
1770s. He married his wife Julienne Redort in Saint Lucia and she was originally from Saint Vincents. As one of his
children was born and named in honor of the island of Saint Croix, it is likely that he spent some time there as well.
Thounens intermittent publications around the turn of the nineteenth century also included Saint Lucia’s Gazette de
Sainte-Lucie and Martinique’s Gazette de la Martinique (and later, after the British seized the control of the island
the Official Gazette of Martinique). Starting in 1789, Thounens also briefly ran a local ferry service that traveled
within the lesser Antilles. According to the Journalists’ Dictionary from the Voltaire Foundation his “‘boat, very
thin sailboat of port of about thirty tons’, left on Tuesday from Castries to approach Martinique (Saint-Pierre),
Dominica (Roseau) and Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre), from where it left on Friday to make the opposite way and be
back in Saint Lucia on Monday. He took passengers and cargo ‘to all these places on the way back and forth.’ The
establishment of this service was also a means of ensuring and increasing the dissemination of the [Saint Lucia
Gazette] which appeared on Tuesday, the day of departure of the ship: ‘MM. subscribers to the Gazette of Saint
Lucia who reside in the neighboring colonies can be assured of receiving regularly all the numbers, as they leave the
press, the liner being under the orders of the printer’” Alain Nabarra, “Thounens, Jean Baptiste,” Voltaire
Foundation, Dictionnaire des journalistes, accessed October 3, 2022, https://dictionnairejournalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/772-jean-baptiste-thounens.

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printing publicly in another Dominican newspaper, Gallagher’s Weekly Journal and Charibbean
Advertiser, a series of resolutions representing their views.414 The freeholders appear to have met together
in anticipation of November’s upcoming elections for members of the House of Assembly.415 This
meeting was likely attended by colonists of both British and French descent.416 The meeting’s seventh
resolution called for unity between propertied colonists of both French and English extraction:
it be recommended to the French and English proprietors of this colony, to associate together for
the support of their common Liberties and Interests, and particularly to obtain redress against the
oppressive tenures under which they hold their lands...” Statements like this one show that ethnic
differences among freeholders was not a major cause for concern among them. Instead, the major
differences between peoples in the island were economic as freeholders of the parishes of Saint
George, Saint Luke, Saint Paul, and Saint David who also held their own meeting on November 1
declared in their second resolution that the meeting acknowledges that “the LANDED
INTERESTS of this Colony are not altogether connected with the Principles upon which the
COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY of the Town depends: That therefore it would be injurious to the
Planters to adopt the Sentiments of Town, with respect to Elections at large, or to be influenced
by their Example.417
These passages suggest that at this moment on Dominica, colonists perceived class differences—and the
ideological commitments that came with them—to be more important than ethnic ones.
The creole-republican wave of emigrants to Dominica from the French Antilles experienced a surge
in the fall of 1790 when, after briefly seizing control of Forts Bourbon and Fort Royal in Martinique,
rebelling creole-republicans were defeated by the official governmental forces. Presumably disappointed
by their failure to seize control of the island, or perhaps seeking to evade punishment for their
participation in the revolt, many creole-republicans opted to now leave for Dominica. In a December
1790 issue of Jamaica’s Daily Advertiser readers were informed that “[t]en thousand disciplined blacks
414 We do not know how many freeholders attended this meeting. However, the printed message is attributed to the
signature of “45 Freeholders.”
415 I suspect this to be true for two reasons. First is the close timing between the Tavern meeting and the next
election during the first week of November. Second, in the first resolution printed by this group the author’s preface
their statement with the phrase: “That it is the unanimous [emphasis in original] determination of this meeting, to
give their Votes for Representatives in the House of Assembly, to such Candidates only who...” The group’s
statement suggests that the resolutions expressing their opinions were printed, at least in the mind of the meeting’s
attendees, for the benefit of candidates upcoming election.
416 Several clues in the newspaper fragment sent by Governor Orde to the Colonial Office suggest that this meeting
was populated by Dominicans of both French and English descent. The most apparent is that the group ordered its’
resolutions to be printed in both French and English.
417 The uppercase letters used for emphasis here are reproduced from the original newspaper source.

141
have joined the Military in Martinique; the inhabitants are flying by hundreds to the neighboring islands,
in apprehension that ‘ruthless ruin’ will be the lot of all who remain.”418
Oddly however, opportunities for crossing local borders throughout the Antilles increased because in
reaction to “the situation [Martinique] finds itself in by the revolt of the soldiers who have seized the forts
and port of Fort-Royal,” the Martinique assembly opened the ports of Trinité, Marin, and “generally all
the coves of the colony to strangers, being admitted there with all sorts of goods and able to load all
colonial provisions; These boats are equally allowed, under the French flag, of disbursing sugar, coffee,
etc. to carry them in foreign islands and to bring back all sorts of goods.”419 By granting safe passage to
“strangers” in this moment of heightened tension, the Martinique assembly showed it was willing to risk
possible collaboration between visitors and rebels in order to receive the basic goods and necessities the
community needed.
It is possible to see the influence of creole-republicans on Dominica when over the Christmas
holidays of 1790, an insurrection began among enslaved people on Dominica based on a purported rumor
that Governor Orde had returned from Britain with the power to emancipate them, but that “on
communicating it to the Assembly, they would not hear of it” and the plan was eventually jettisoned.
Although the rumor was not accurate, the fact that enslaved people on Dominica believed it possible
shows that news about the increasing political fights for republicanism in the Western Hemisphere were
reaching their communities. Alternately, it seems just as possible that the rumor could have been dreamed
up by creole-royalist planters fearing the impact the increase in local republicans may have had on those
they held in bondage. A committee of correspondence in Dominica wrote to the colony’s agent in Britain
and described how during the insurrection “several… French Planters, to windward, had abandoned their
Estates…some of them had their whole gangs in rebellion.”420 News of the insurrection spread to other
418 The Daily Advertiser. “Daily Advertiser Collection.” December 14, 1790. Daily Advertiser. British Library.
http://www.18thcjournals.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Daily%20Advertiser#Snippits.
419 Translation by the author. “Extract of the deliberations of Martinique’s Colonial Assembly.” September 11, 1790,
P. Richard and Co. edition. CO 71/17. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
420 Correspondence, Dominica Committee of. Extract of a Letter from the Committee of Correspondence in
Dominica, to the Agent, W. Knox, Esq., Dated February 15, 1791, 1791.

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British colonies. In a February 1791 issue of The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, the editor
published a notice of the revolt: “by the last accounts from Dominica, we learn that a revolt had taken
place among the negroes of several plantations in that island at the instigation of some French Mulattoes
and other people of Colour from Martinique.”421 This characterization suggests that any disorder among
enslaved people on Dominica lays at the fault of inciting individuals from neighboring colonies. In March
1791, the committee of West India Planters and Merchants, operating in London, published an open letter
to the home secretary William Grenville specifically attributing the contemporaneous insurrection of
enslaved people on Dominica to dangerous ideas that had been spreading throughout Europe. “That,
although the Revolt in question, at Dominica, is a present stifled,” the planters wrote, “yet the principles
are not stifled upon which it is understood to have taken place, nor are they confined to Dominica…That
your memorialists…claim, as British subjects, that the most prompt and ample protection may be afforded
them against the present urgent dangers.”422 It is not clear exactly what policy the planters believed could
prevent the spread of republican ideology.
The relationships between creole-republicans and creole-royalists on Dominica in 1791 mapped onto
the already existing division between Dominican officials in power and members of the local government.
Having already failed in earlier attempts to have British Governor John Orde removed and once the
Governor returned to the colony, representatives from Dominica’s House of Assembly began the work of
laying a paper trail against the governor. In March 1791, representatives from Dominica’s government
sent their complaints about Governor Orde to the island’s commercial representative, William Knox.
Knox had a long career dealing with Britain’s American colonies first as a colonist with “six years’
residence in George…where he was provost marshal and a member of the council,” and second in
England “as a colonial ‘expert’ and his pamphlets defending British imperial policy in America eventually
421 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 371.” February 26, 1791. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
422 Diary or Woodfall’s Register. “Advertisements and Notices.” April 11, 1791. Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Century Burney Newspapers Collection. https://link-galecom.libproxy1.usc.edu/apps/doc/Z2000298075/BBCN?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-BBCN&xid=36422468.

143
won him the appointment as undersecretary of state in the American Department” through 1782.423 A
slaveholder himself, “Knox also volunteered advice and provided expert information to proslavery forces
in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons.”424 The members of Dominica’s House of
Assembly “having taken into consideration how essential it is for the interest of our constituents and for
the happiness and welfare of the colony in general that every possible measure should be pursued to
obtain the removal of Sir John Orde Baronet from the Government of this island,” sent four resolutions
calling for Orde’s removal to Knox.
425 Justifying their unusual message, the signatories claimed they were
unable to conduct business properly because the local government was prorogued specifically “so as to
impede the bringing to maturity any complaint against Sir John Orde in the manner prescribed by His
Majesty’s Secretary of State.”426 Referring to earlier attempts to remove Orde, which had been deemed
insufficient by the Home Office, the house members ended with a resolution designed to throw their full
weight behind it:
we will as the representatives of the people of this country support their petition to the throne for
the removal of Governor Orde by all the means in our power and that we will, whenever we are
suffered to meet as a House of Assembly adopt these several resolutions and confirm them by
entering them on the Journal of the House before we do any other business. 427
Like the Baymen in British Honduras, it seems that some Dominican representatives felt comfortable
wielding their power to block the implementation of imperial wishes in their local communities.
One political incident, when Governor Orde attempted to expel Dominican colonist Alexander
Stewart from the government, shows the extent of the division between the Governor and local elites.
Stewart’s petition for the King, sent by way of Dominica’s commercial representative, William Knox,
presented the petitioner in a positive light, as a loyal and longstanding subject of the King on Dominica:
423 Leland J. Bellot, “Evangelicals and the Defense of Slavery in Britain’s Old Colonial Empire,” The Journal of
Southern History 37, no. 1 (February 1971): 26, https://doi.org/10.2307/2205918.
424 Bellot, 35.
425 Members of Dominica’s House of Assembly. Resolutions against Governor Orde to William Knox, March 8,
1791. CO 71/21. Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
426 Ibid.
427 This message was signed by: Simon Fraser, Thos. Anketell, Chas. Winstone, W. Arnold, J. Bruce (possibly the
Lieutenant Governor?), Wm. Eyre, Thos. Rainy, Robt. Brade, Willm. Webb, J. Brush, Houlton Harries, and Alex
Machlachlan.

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your petitioner is a native of Great Britain, and is descended from a family that has ever shewn
the most inviolable attachment to your Majesty’s illustrious family and government. That your
petitioner has resided in this colony upwards of twenty-six years, and has expended very
considerable sums of money in cultivation of lands in this island, to the very great loss of himself
and his friends.428
Stewart’s longstanding residence of the island practically guarantees that he had deep connections to the
local French community. He certainly didn’t move when the island was captured by the French. In his
petition Stewart claimed that although he had “been a member of the council of Dominica since the first
establishment of a legislature…he has lately been suspended from the legislative council…with the
advice and consent of the privy council, and without affording your petitioner any reason on which the
suspension was grounded.”429 Stewart’s period out of government was fairly short and in October 1791,
Dominicans held a well-documented party after Orde received instruction from the Colonial Office to
reinstate Stewart. The political victor and his supporters held a dinner in his honor at Mr. Johnston’s
Tavern. According to the account published by the newspaper, “a very elegant entertainment was provided
at Johnston’s Long-Room, where a very large number of the most respectable inhabitants (French as well
as English) had the honor of dining with Mr. Stewart, and the day was spent in the utmost myrth and
harmony.” The newspaper also published the 12 toasts drunk by the group. The first three toasts, to the
King, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen respectively, reinforce that this group were likely creoleroyalists. Even as Dominican elites engaged such vigorous conflict with their Governor, they didn’t
entertain creole-republicanism.
The toasts trilled by Dominican elites at this dinner signify the groups’ wider political and social
aspirations for the colony. Crucially, the colonists took time to toast for “An eternal Concord between the
old and new Subjects, and may there exist between them no other distinction but that due to merit and
virtue." Notably, as this group contained Dominicans of both French and English descent, the bifurcation
referred to in this toast is instead between old and new residents rather than indicating ethnic difference. It
428 Alexander Stewart. Letter to H.R.H. King George III. “The Humble Petition of Alexander Stewart, Member and
President of the Legislative Council of the Island of Dominica,” January 25, 1791. CO 71/21. Adam Matthew
Colonial Caribbean.
429 Ibid.

145
stands to reason that Dominican colonists in general had an interest in reserving local power for the
longest and most experienced residents—so why would Dominicans like our toasters seek to eliminate the
distinction between old and new residents? These Dominicans, who were probably creole-royalists, likely
presumed that the emigrants from the French Antilles overall also leaned creole-royalist, and therefore
hoped that original Dominicans might make use of the new Dominicans’ political power to subvert local
creole-republicanism. The mixed group’s desire to see differences between them eliminated can be seen in
the song lyrics to the “little effusion of…fancy and friendship” which was apparently composed during
“the course of the evening”: “Here let union and concord, and Friendship be found, No distinction of
Nation or Int’rest we know.” Truly fascinating if these lyrics were genuinely expressed by these
partygoers spontaneously, their aspiration that the community find no distinction between Dominican
colonists regardless of nation or interest suggests that for these creole-royalists, they hoped or believed
the elimination of local community difference might have the impact of making the colony safer. This is
striking considering the region’s political atmosphere.
A second wave of refugees from the French West Indies to Dominica sprang from a December 1792
international incident when Martinique’s royalist Governor Behague refused entrance to the ship Félicité,
sent by the new French Republic, into the colony. Although creole-royalists remained in power in
Martinique temporarily, the Félicité’s attempted landing confirmed that their homeland would not be
reinforcing creole-royalist rule and alerted them that their time in power was coming to a close.430 The
Félicité was captained by Jean-Baptiste-Raymond Lacrosse and had been sent to French West Indies in
order to “deliver official dispatches announcing the National Convention’s proclamation of the French
Republic.”431 Prior to his journey, Lacrosse told the new Minister of the Navy, Gaspard Monge, that he
was “proud to be the first who will speak to the royalists, in the name of the French people, the republican
430 Creole-Royalists had been sitting pretty in Martinique’s seat of power ever since the French General
Rochambeau arrived to reinforce royalist rule in Martinique in June 1792.
431 Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies, 143.

146
language.”432 However, when the captain wasn’t able to deliver that message to his target audience,
Lacrosse instead docked at Roseau.
As a representative of the French Republic, Lacrosse was immediately embraced by the many creolerepublicans living on Dominica. Once the Félicité anchored itself in the harbour “[i]mmediately boats and
canoes, filled with refugees from French colonies, surrounded the frigate.”433 Although Lacrosse initially
promised Governor Bruce that he wouldn’t fraternize with refugees from the French islands, after
evidence emerged that he was failing to abide by that promise, Bruce ordered the captain from the island.
When the Felicité left it went with an additional “fifty patriot volunteers” aboard her. 434 Despite being
asked to leave Dominica, Lacrosse ordered his aide, Dever, to stay behind on the island “to supervise the
printing and distribution of a broadsheet entitled The Last Means of Reconciliation between the Mother
Country and the Rebel Colonies.”435 That this overt ideological creole-republican propaganda intended for
the French Antilles was printed in British Dominica indicated that it’s authors either believed many
colonists from the French Antilles would make their way to Dominica or that the documents themselves
would be transmitted to neighboring French islands. Dever’s message sought to appeal to rebelling
planters specifically through their economic interests. He sought to assure “them that the Republic had no
intention of abolishing slavery. Lacrosse linked this promise…with the guarantee that the Republic would
ensure free-coloured equality but insisted that both were at risk if planters and gens de couleur backed the
[creole-royalists].”436 Undoubtedly also a message to creole-royalist planters on Dominica as well as in
Martinique and Guadeloupe, we can assume that one of the reasons Devers and Lacrosse were working to
discourage relationships between creole-royalist planters and people of color is because such connections
were becoming increasingly apparent.
432 Quotation originally found in Cormack, 143.
433 Cormack, 144–45.
434 The Felicite left Roseau on December 4, 1792.
435 Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies, 145.
436 Cormack, 146.

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Shortly after the Félicité’s ejection from Roseau, evidence of the ship’s impact on colonists in the
French Antilles began appearing in colonial newspapers. In a January 1793 issue of The Bermuda Gazette
and Weekly Advertiser, using information sourced from Antigua, the editor observed that “[w]e learn from
Dominica, that the disturbances in the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, are so extremely great, that
eighteen hundred families have lately fled there from thence for safety, and that there are no houses in that
island but what are rented at a most extravagant rate.” 437 Because Martinique’s royalist government was
facing eviction, we cannot know if those fleeing the French islands for Dominica were creole-republicans
attracted by Lacrosse’s arrival or creole-royalists fleeing from the oncoming republican invasion. Later in
that same news item, the author added that “[t]he Blanche sailed on Sunday last for Dominica, where, we
understand, there are upwards of 5 thousand Emigrants from the French islands.”438 In a February 1793
issue of The New York Journal, the editor published an letter from a Dominican of French descent that
had been sent to a colonist on Saint Eustatius. The author reported that “[c]onsternation reigns in
[Martinique]; all the inhabitants, except the known aristocrats, wish to get away, but I doubt whether they
will be permitted.”439 That same month, the Yorkshire Leeds Intelligencer printed a November 1792 letter
from Dominica, which explained that after France tried to send troops to the French West Indies, “[t]his
has occasioned a great number of families to fly to this island for refuge, they flock here daily, as well as
to all the other English islands.”440 Although ambiguous whether or not Dominica provided refuge for
creole-royalists, it is likely that those fleeing to the island leaned creole-republicans, because it was only
on January 18, 1793, that Governor James Bruce published a French language proclamation addressing
the influx from the French islands. We know that Dominica had previously received many emigrants of
French descent, so Bruce’s words here seem to indicate he saw French emigrants as having the potential
to bifurcate into friend or foe. In his public missive Bruce detailed his “knowledge that a great number of
437 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 471.” January 26, 1793. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
438 Ibid.
439 The New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register. “Extract of a Letter from a French Gentleman in Roseau
(Dominica) to a Gentleman in St. Eustatia.” February 2, 1793. America’s Historical Newspapers.
440 Leeds Intelligencer. “Leeds, February 11.” February 11, 1793. British Library Newspapers.

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strangers from different islands, and principally from Martinique, are installed in Dominica without
permission from our governor.”441 Even though French emigrants had already come to the island it was
only recently that “many of these strangers had published in our island some inflammatory posters,
tending to trouble the minds of our government and corrupt the mores of our citizens,” and as such, Bruce
asked that all strangers who had affixed their signatures to these writings to leave the island within three
days.442 The entrance of the Felicité into this small trio of islands had the effect of strengthening the
division between creole-royalists and creole-republicans.
As the waves of colonists of French descent streamed into Dominica, news suggesting that creoleroyalist emigrants sought to have their islands taken by the British empire began appearing in newspapers.
In a June issue of London’s Star and Evening Advertiser, the editor printed a letter from Dominica, dated
April 14 which asserted that “‘Everything is quiet here. The greater part of the French in the islands are
anxiously watching for the arrival of the British fleet, which will easily make a conquest of the French
islands, as most of the inhabitants will join them.” 443 In this item, as in others, we see British Dominicans
dividing French-speaking colonists into two classes or groups. The author’s belief that the “greater part of
the French in the islands” sought to have their islands captured by the British crown shows they
considered this group to be creole-royalists.
As discussed in the previous chapter, some officials from Martinique who identified as royalists
partnered with Dominican governmental officials out of their mutual concern regarding the spread of
republican ideology in the broader region. This second wave of refugees from the French West Indies,
those who subscribed to a creole-royalist philosophy, swelled when Martinique’s royalist Governor
Behague was ejected from the island in January 1793 and sailed “for exile in the British colony of St.
Vincent.”444 This stream of immigration grew further after Major General Thomas Bruce’s first attempted
441 Translation by the author. James Bruce. “Proclamation.” Mrs. Browne’s Dominica Gazette, January 18, 1793. CO
71.
442 Ibid.
443 Star and Evening Advertiser (1788). “News.” June 7, 1793. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney
Newspapers Collection. http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/Z2001431304/BBCN?sid=bookmark-BBCN&xid=ec678818.
444 Cormack, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies, 152.

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seizure of Martinique in April 1793 failed. Though unable to take the island, he facilitated the transport of
French colonists who wanted to leave Martinique to go to British colonies. Dominicans helped to plan
another failed British invasion a few months later, in June; in its aftermath, royalists on Martinique who
had been hoping for a quick British takeover decided to cut their losses and move to Dominica. After the
French Republic declared war on Holland and England in the early days of 1793, the British empire sent
an initial convoy under Admiral Alan Gardner to the West Indies.445 In the first several months of 1794,
British Navy Captains Grey and Jervis captured the French West Indian islands of Martinique,
Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia in quick succession.
A detailed account of Britain’s 1794 seizure of Martinique, printed in a March issue of The Bermuda
Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, offers a clear view of the extent of the creole-royalist exodus from the
French island. The newspaper’s editor, J. Stockdale, choose to reprint a “Letter from a French Gentleman
in Dominica to a Gentleman here…translated from an elegant French original.”446 In that letter, the
French Dominican author expressed how the British victors in Martinique had communicated with the
Antilles region more broadly:
English commanders had issued a proclamation prohibiting the Emigrants from returning until the
conquest of the island should be complete; but being since touched with the devastation and
calamity of the Colony, they have recalled that article, and have written to the Governor of
Dominica to suffer the proprietors to return, and assuring them that they shall find the utmost
safety and protection; they have even sent many vessels to carry over those Emigrants who have
it not in their power to pay their passage…I cannot express the great joy of the Emigrants on their
return to their long desert[e]d homes, there remain here only the ladies that do not wish to return
to Martinique until Fort Bourbon surrenders.
This account demonstrates both that creole-royalists had left Martinique for Dominica while the creolerepublicans were in leadership and that they had no problem returning to a Martinique managed by British
officials—so long as they were creole-royalist. Although it is impossible to know whether the later public
speculation that “eight very respectable Planters, who had returned to Martinique from Dominica, in
445 Laughton, J. K., and Christopher Doorne. “Gardner, Alan, First Baron Gardner (1742–1808/9), Naval Officer and
Politician.” Oxford University Press, January 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10371.
446 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 529.” March 8, 1794. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.

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consequence of Sir Charles Grey’s permission signified to them, had been most inhumanely murdered,
after taking possession of their respective estates,” was indeed accurate, this existence of the event as
rumor alone demonstrated the extent of the anxiety over the creole-royalist and creole-republican
divide.447
Further existence of interethnic anxiety split alongside royalist and republican lines can be seen in a
May 1794 issue of a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper, that printed a report from Dominica.
448 The
author shared a story that he believed would demonstrate “how little hope there is of a reconciliation, and
how little reliance there is to be placed on the influence of the just threats and beneficent offers held forth
in the manifesto of the British commanders in chief.” In this story, a nameless emigrant returns home and
immediately becomes enmeshed in political conflicts on the island:
returned to his estate…walking near his dwelling-house, saw an inhabitant who had remained
there passing by on a horse he knew immediately as his own; he stopped the rider, and demanded
his horse; the latter, professing himself happy at the emigrants return…dismounted, and was
obliged to walk to his own house…—the next morning early [the emigrant] ordered that his horse
should be brought to him, but on entering the stable it was found dead—it had been stabbed with
bayonets.
This incident, whether accurately reported or not, says a great deal about the social and power dynamics
between creole-royalists and creole-republicans in the region. The unnamed emigrant, presumably a
creole-royalist who had previously fled to Dominica to escape creole-republican governance, had returned
to Martinique because he felt safe enough now that Britain was in control of the island. And yet, on a
social level, when that emigrant tried to assert his individual property rights with a creole-republican
neighbor, he met with limited success. Stories like this one continue to show that Dominicans from afar
perceived differences within colonists of French descent—and this Dominican found the creole-royalists
to be the victims of violent creole-republicans.
447 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 536.” April 26, 1794. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.
448 “Rosseau, (Dominica) Feb. 22,” Providence Gazette, May 31, 1794, America’s Historical Newspapers. This
report appears to be a reprinting, or at least sourced from “No. 537,” The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser,
May 3, 1794, Bermuda Digital Library, Bermuda National Library.

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For this brief period, creole-royalists were in complete control of this region of the Lesser Antilles.
While they possessed it, the creole-royalists in power sought to assert their dominance over the French
Republic. In July 1794, Bruce followed up his previously ineffective proclamations, which “forbid and
probit foreigners of every description from landing” on Dominica, to now “require all his Majesty’s
Subjects to give [n]otice at the Government House, of any foreigner or foreigners of any description, who
attempt to land on any part of this island, or who now are living and residing therein.”449 In an extract of a
letter from Danish Saint Croix published in another newspaper, the author observed that this and similar
regulations were being enforced: “a gentleman just from Dominico” reported “that by instructions
received at all the British Islands from England, all vessels passing or repassing to or from French islands
are taken and condemned… that these orders were promulgated at Dominico, by being read in the public
market by authority.”450 This uniform era of creole-royalism was, however, short lived: the French
Republic succeeded in recapturing Guadeloupe in June 1794 and Saint Lucia in June 1795.
451 After the
attempted French invasion of Dominica in June 1795, whose Governor as recently as May had “been
much employed…examining a white man and a mulatto his accomplice, both of the Bellevue Quarter,
taken up on the strongest suspicion of being confederated with others, in endeavoring to incite both
whites and coloured People, in that neighbourhood, to join the enemy in case of them landing to attack
this island,” the toleration for creole-republicans on Dominica declined dramatically.452 But luckily for
Dominicans who aligned with the creole-republicans, with the French Republic now in control of
Guadeloupe and Saint Lucia, creole-republicans had their own refuge.
449 James Bruce, “Proclamation” in Mrs. Browne’s Dominica Gazette, July 11, 1794 in “Dominica, 1793-1794:
Despatches and Miscellaneous,” 135, attachment to no. 65, CO 71/26.
450 “New-York, March 14,” Daily Advertiser, March 14, 1794, America’s Historical Newspapers.
451 For notice of the French recapture of Guadeloupe see The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 554.”
August 30, 1794. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda National Library.
452 The Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. “No. 594.” June 6, 1795. Bermuda Digital Library. Bermuda
National Library.

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Conclusion
Dominican colonists had a choice to make in the revolutionary summer of 1789: did they personally
believe in the monarchial system of government to which their colony was tied or were they open to
adopting the newly developing paradigm of political republicanism emerging from the United States and
France? Although this wasn’t the Western Hemisphere’s first major revolution, the political eruptions of
France in 1789 hit Dominicans open to these new democratic ideas with a geographic proximity that the
prior revolution hadn’t: there was, after all, a considerable difference between the logistical preparations
needed to leave Dominica for North America, as opposed to the much easier choice to leave Dominica for
neighboring Martinique or Saint Lucia.
As is typical in societies undergoing a fundamental transformation, some Dominicans adopted these
new political ideas, and some did not. However, what becomes clear from examining the events during
the period 1789-1794, as Dominica began to experience waves of emigration from neighboring French
islands, was that the ethnic background of Caribbean colonists didn’t accurately predict their political
persuasion. The atmosphere on Dominica was such that some colonists of British descent, such as
publisher John Lowndes, felt confident expressing support for rebelling French colonists and openly
taunting the local Dominican government. Simultaneously, Dominica itself was seen by some as a place
of refuge to the many colonists of French descent fleeing Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia, who
wanted to remain under royalist rule.
Although they wouldn’t have classed themselves as such, from 1789 to 1794, colonists living in the
region of Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe coalesced into two large ethnopolitical groups I call
creole-royalists and creole-republicans. The gateway to these identities was built from Caribbean
colonists’ sympathy with neighboring ethnic ‘others,’ a sympathy grounded in shared lived experiences,
mutual economic interests, and alignment of political ideologies. Dominican colonists’ compassion for
ethnic others formed a bridge of mutual understanding, which enabled ethnic identity to be deemphasized
while the shared experiences of colonial life were increasingly given greater significance. For Dominican
colonists at the turn of the nineteenth century, any hesitation or difference they might have felt towards

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fellow colonists due to their varying ethnic backgrounds seemed to become largely meaningless when
they were forced to contemplate the ongoing spread of rival political ideologies throughout the region.
It is important to keep in mind Dominican colonists’ growing deemphasis on ethnic difference as we
next turn our attention to the British Empire’s seizure of colonies aligned with the Danish and Swedish
empires in 1801. While studying these inherently multiethnic and multiracial colonies, which relied on
emigration from neighboring West Indian colonies for settlers rather than colonists from Denmark or
Sweden, we will also see a deemphasis on key distinctions between Caribbean colonists of varying ethnic
backgrounds—only rather than dealing in the heady realms of ideology, as in Dominica, these colonists’
concerns were all practical. In our study of the British seizure of the Danish islands we will see the ways
in which the collection of military prizes, an act dependent on an empire’s interpretation of its colonial
obligations, was challenged by the increasingly nationless understanding of colonial capital at the turn of
the nineteenth century. Likewise in our examination of a 1801 conspiracy formed between colonists of
British descent on Saint Christophers and colonists of Dutch descent on Saint Eustatius, we find colonists
who sought to build economic links between their two communities because they believed they would
accrue mutual benefits from increased economic activities between the two locales—even as the trade
itself was illicit. It is interesting to see how at the turn of the nineteenth century, even as the Caribbean
region maintained a political structure which from the outside saw colonists as being aligned to their
ethnic homelands, the colonists within those colonies increasingly saw the ethnic distinctions between
them as less significant than the mutual benefits that might come to Caribbean colonists if they worked
together or the mutual harm that might come to them if they did not.

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1801 WEST INDIES CAMPAIGN
Setting the Scene: A Quick Military Campaign
In early January 1801, the British government, under the administration of Prime Minister William
Pitt, directed Lieutenant General Thomas Trigge to take possession of the Danish colonies, Saints
Thomas, Croix, and John, as well as Sweden’s colony, Saint Bartholomew. The military directive
contained the specious justification behind the military order, that “information [had] reached [Britain]
which leaves no doubt that the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, & Petersburgh have agreed to revive
the principles of the armed neutrality of the year 1781.”453 In addition to capturing the colonies, Trigge
was instructed to seize “all ship’s stores, or public property of any description, belonging to Russia,
Denmark, or Sweden which may be found in the said islands.”454 However, another message sent to
Trigge that same day betrays the administrations true motivation, “that his Majesty from…anxiety to
avoid coming to open war with Denmark & Sweden, is still willing to entertain a hope that the display of
the vigorous and decided measures he is compelled to adopt against their trade & colonies, may still
induce them relinquish their present engagements with Russia, & to give such security as his Majesty may
deem necessary, for their observance of a system of neutrality consistent with maritime rights of this
country.”455 Remarkably, with Pitt’s resignation just two months later, supervision over the already-inprogress Danish military expedition quickly fell to new Prime Minister, Henry Addington and his war
secretary, Robert Hobart.456
453 Historian Rasmus Glenthøj explains that “At the turn of the nineteenth century, Scandinavia consisted of two
composite states of Denmark and Sweden. The Danish state comprised the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the
Danish Duchy of Schleswig, the German Duchy of Holstein, the North Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroe
Islands and Greenland, and overseas colonies in the West Indies, the East Indies and the Gold Coast. In total, a
population of 2.5 million people. The Swedish state consisted of Sweden proper, Finland, the Duchy of Swedish
Pomerania in Germany, the Hansa town of Wismar, and Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean. All in all, a total
population of 3.3 people.” Rasmus Glenthøj, “War Aims: Scandinavia,” in The Cambridge History of the
Napoleonic Wars, ed. Michael Broers et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 427. No. 1 in
“B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military Commanders.”
(October 1800), 83-88, Downing Street to Trigge, January 14, 1801.
454 Ibid.
455 No. 2 in “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military
Commanders.,” 89-92, Downing Street to Trigge, January 14, 1801.
456 J. E. Cookson, “Addington, Henry, First Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844), Prime Minister” (Oxford University
Press, May 2009), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/150; Roland Thorne, Hobart, Robert, Fourth Earl of

155
The island colony of Saint Bartholomew rests near the top of the Lesser Antilles archipelago in the
Caribbean Sea. Shaped like a v, the island’s largest town, Gustavia, is blessed with an exceptional natural
harbor.457 The island had only recently come under Swedish control. Taking advantage of the negotiations
that came with the end of the American Revolution, Sweden exchanged trading rights in their
metropolitan port of Gothenburg with France for ownership over the island. The Swedes would eventually
possess the island for nearly a century.458 However, the change in sovereignty didn’t necessarily impact
the ethnic and cultural makeup of the colony due to the colony’s long reliance on a multiethnic
population. Not blessed with especially productive soil, at “the transition from French to Swedish
governance, a local population of 700 French farmer settlers and their slaves were already using most of
the land on the island for subsistence farming.”459 Instead, Sweden decided to focus the island’s economy
on attracting “merchants and capital from the surrounding islands, to make the most of an acquisition of
questionable value.” 460 This was done most effectively by making Gustavia a free port and granting “any
Swede or foreigner” the right “to carry on trade with St. Barthelemy.”461 In addition to the use of
economic incentives, the island’s population was boosted from its’ fairly simple procedure for extending
citizenship to foreigners.462 By the time the British seized the island in March 1801, Gustavia had
Buckinghamshire (1760–1816), Politician, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004),
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13396.
457 Allen, Landscapes and Landforms of the Lesser Antilles, chap. 5: Saint Martin/Sint Maarten and Saint
Barthelemy.
458 Sweden ruled Saint Barthelemy from 1784 to 1878. Allen, 56.
459 Han Jordaan and Victor Wilson, “The Eighteenth-Century Danish, Dutch, and Swedish Free Ports in the
Northeastern Caribbean: Continuity and Change,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800, ed. Gert Oostindie and
Jessica V. Roitman, Linking Empires, Bridging Borders (Brill, 2014), 280,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h3c9.17.
460 Jordaan and Wilson, 280.
461 Ibid, 283.
462 “In order for foreigners to become a naturalized Swedish or Danish subject by settling in Gustavia or Charlotte
Amalie, they had to make a cash payment and sign an oath of fidelity and allegiance. St. Barthelemy had a
differential scale for payment for naturalization and burgher rights. For merchants who wanted to be able to sail their
vessels under Swedish colors, a one-time payment of 100 pesos was necessary. For settlers who wanted to support
themselves by crafts or other business ventures within the town limits, 16 Spanish dollars was required. For the right
of simply being a Swedish subject and the right of a residence in Gustavia, only one dollar was to be paid. These
scales were a clear reflection of both the ambition to attract merchants who carried substantial capital and the desire
to make it easy to provide settlement for the much-needed mariners and craftsmen who were the bulk of the
workforce.” Ibid, 301–2.

156
experienced an explosion of growth.463 After the end of the Napoleonic Wars “the colony’s economy
entered a sharp and continual decline from which it would never substantially recover.”464
Denmark’s trio of small islands, also settled at the top of the Lesser Antilles, were quite different
communities from typical British Caribbean colonies at the turn of the nineteenth century.
465 Although
traditional monocrop agriculture existed on each colony, the trio’s local economy was primarily based in
trade, helped by the fairly open trading policies of the Danish empire, which granted Danish merchants
permission to sell international goods in the Danish West Indies, as well as by the mountainous terrain of
the region.466 Facing a lack of interest in colonization from their own subjects in Europe, from the
empire’s earliest days in the region, Denmark encouraged colonists from neighboring islands to settle
among them. This welcoming policy had the effect of coloring these colonies with distinct foreign tints:
colonists of Dutch descent represented the largest share of the population in Saint Thomas and Saint John
and colonists of English descent predominated on Saint Croix.467 However, although immigrants to the
colonies were largely of European descent, most of the island populations were made up of enslaved
463 “The Swedish judge Johan Norderling wrong to the Board of Directors of the SWIC in July of 1795 detailing the
recent growth of Gustavia. He wrote, ‘The amount of houses are now nearly doubled, some of them quite beautiful,’
and went on to comment that, ‘All trade in St. Eustache is ruined, all warehouses at the present closed, and the
weathier houses gone away, some here, some to other islands.’ Indeed, supporting Norderling’s assertion of the
transformation of Gustavia, it is clearly evident from town maps drawn out in 1791, 1796, 1799, and 1800
respectfully, that the expansion of Gustavia was considerable during this time. In 1791, the town was composed of
133 buildings, while in 1796 this figure had nearly trebled, and in 1800 the town could boast over 600 separate
buildings ranging from the largest warehouse to the smallest cooking shed.” Ibid, 300.
464 Francine M. Mayer and Carolyn E. Fick, “Before and after Emancipation: Slaves and Free Coloreds of Saint‐
Barthélemy (French West Indies) in the 19th Century,” Scandinavian Journal of History 18, no. 4 (January 1, 1993):
252, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468759308579261.
465 After being granted a charter by the Danish throne, the Danish West India Company opened settlement to Saint
Thomas in 1671 and Saint John in 1717. The Danish crown purchased the island of Saint Croix from France in
1733. N. A. T. Hall and B. W. Higman, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies : St. Thomas, St. John and St Croix
(Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1992), 1;11,
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=250661&authtype=sso&custid=s8983984.
466 Erik Gøbel, “Danish Shipping Along the Triangular Route, 1671–1802: Voyages and Conditions on Board,”
Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 2 (May 1, 2011): 135–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2011.564065;
Svend E. Green‐Pedersen, “Colonial Trade under the Danish Flag,” Scandinavian Journal of History 5, no. 1–4
(January 1, 1980): 93–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468758008578968.
467 This multiethnic character was present on Saint Croix from the beginning. Historian Neville Hall explains that
after purchasing Saint Croix from “the French [the Danish Empire] inherited some 50 English families to whom
Governor Moth gave every encouragement to remain.” Hall and Higman, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies :
St. Thomas, St. John and St Croix, 11. Hall also quotes the work of one Christian Martfeldt when he writes,
“Christian Martfeldt visited both St. Thomas and Saint John in 1765, he observed that Danes numbered less than
half the Dutch population.” Hall and Higman, 11.

157
peoples of African descent.468 The greatest concentration of enslaved peoples as well as free Black
colonists were in the bustling urban areas like Saint Thomas’s Charlotte Amalie and Saint Croix’s
Christianstadt and Fredericstadt.469 The commercial development of these urban areas reflected the
economic opportunities that came from Denmark’s trading policy.470
Unlike other nations that sought to maintain control of colonies in the imperial Caribbean, the
Northern European powers, Sweden and Denmark, adopted a policy of military neutrality. As opposed to
British colonies, which successfully defended themselves from external attack at least in part by
projecting the strength of the mighty British empire, political neutrality left the colonies without the
military or imperial resources necessary to repel a foreign invasion. These kingdoms’ military neutrality
and open trading practices greatly boosted Danish shipping during the French Revolutionary wars when
other European empires’ hands were tied by treaties.471 The Danish islands, aided by the colonies’ liberal
trade and immigration policies, frequently served as a home base for privateers aligned to many nations.
In 1795, for example, “a visitor to Saint Thomas noted that several privateers were operating out of the
Danish island under the French flag, but on their crews were only fifteen to twenty Frenchmen, the rest
being Italians and Danes together with sailors he described as ‘people without a fixed place of
residence.’”472
468 In 1797, the closest year to the 1801 British invasion for which data is available, the population of enslaved
peoples in contrast with white colonists on the Danish West Indies was: St. Croix: 25, 452 enslaved & 2,223 white;
St. Thomas: 4,769 enslaved & 726 white; St. John: 1,992 enslaved & 113 whites. For the full dataset see Hall and
Higman, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies : St. Thomas, St. John and St Croix, 5.
469 In 1797, the closest year to the 1801 British invasion for which data is available, shows that Christianstadt in
Saint Croix had a population of 2,998 enslaved, 973 Freedmen, and 1,085 whites making the city’s enslaved
population equal to 17.5% of the island’s total population. Additionally, in 1797, Charlotte Amalie in Saint Thomas
had a population of 1,943 enslaved, 239 Freedmen, and 726 whites.
470 Historian Pieter Emmer explains how for the “Danes, the inter-Caribbean slave trade to foreign colonies was
more important than the slave trade to foreign colonies was more important than the slave trade to their own
possessions, and the Dutch also sold a relatively large percentage of their slaves to buyers from non-Dutch
colonies.” Pieter Emmer, “Slavery and the Slave Trade of the Minor Atlantic Powers,” in The Cambridge World
History of Slavery: Volume 3: AD 1420–AD 1804, vol. 3, The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 454, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521840682.
471 Pierrick Pourchasse, “Danish Shipping in the Mediterranean during the Revolutionary Wars (1793–1795),”
International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 165–79,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0843871415624175.
472 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 244.

158
Once dominion over the captured territories had been established, General Trigge turned his attention
to the commercial needs of the colonists living in his empire’s new possessions. As in many Caribbean
communities, planters and merchants in the new colonies represented powerful local factions whose
financial interests didn’t necessarily always align. However, plantation agriculture and the planter interest
overall were significantly less prominent in the Danish and Swedish islands. “It is to be observed,” Trigge
wrote Dundas “that these islands have been principally supported by the communication they have carried
on with the Spaniards.”473 Therefore, one of the first steps Trigge took was to establish customs houses to
regulate the commerce flowing in and out of local ports.474 However, in negotiating the terms for
surrender of Saint Thomas and Saint Croix, it was acknowledged, Trigge wrote Dundas, “that a trade for
provisions and other indispensable supplies shall be permitted with the Spaniards from the main and Porto
Rico.”475 “This trade, though contrary to law,” Trigge continued, “seems in nowise prejudicial to the
mother country and certainly holds forth many advantages to the islands which possess it…[Saint
Thomas] makes but little sugar…and would therefore feel with more severity the loss of the trade.”476
Trigge’s view that enabling trade between the Danish and Spanish islands didn’t negatively impact the
empire is noteworthy because another general might have instead viewed the Danish islands as a captive
market that could be turned into a financial windfall for the empire. Trigge declared, with “respect to
Saint Bartholomew’s,” that it “possessed no other advantage than what it derived from being a neutral
port, which made it a place of some trade but now being deprived of that; it must dwindle into
insignificance. The island is perfectly barren and without water, affording no one comfort or even
necessary of life.”477 Trigge characterized Saint Croix as possessing “the most considerable trade and
being of the greatest consequence.”478
473 Green‐Pedersen, “Colonial Trade under the Danish Flag.”
474 Trigge described his actions regarding local trading in No. 17, “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward
and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military Commanders.,” 198–201. Thomas Trigge to Henry Dundas, April 12,
1801.
475 Ibid.
476 Ibid.
477 Ibid.
478 Ibid.

159
Although Danish Caribbean colonies did contain their own planter gentlemen, Danish colonies’
economies largely functioned as service economies to support the regional focus on plantation slavery.479
As in Cap Français, a town on nearby St. Domingue that also lived largely from a service economy,
Danish “middling retailers and creditors were subject to the same economic shifts and downturns that
affected the fortunes of their wealthy planter clientele.”480 However, as historian Jacob Price explains,
“often ‘cash purchases’ were in fact paid for in colonial commodities or bills of exchange. The bill, in
turn, might be drawn against a credit balance of the planter with a metropolitan merchant but, more likely,
was a claim against the anticipated value of commodities shipped to market but not yet sold or even
landed when the bill was drawn.”481 In order to keep commerce flowing, the local economies of all free
colonists were dependent upon each other.
Representatives of the Danish and British crowns met together in London in December 1801 and
formed an agreement which was to end the seizure of the Danish islands. The Danish diplomat, Ernst
Frederik Walterstorff wrote war secretary Robert Hobart a letter which summarized their agreements:
“that any additions made to the fortifications in the Danish West India colonies during the time that those
islands have been occupied by the British troops, as also all Barracks constructed in those islands shall be
delivered to the Danish government, and that every property belonging to his Danish Majesty shall be
restored, except such provisions as were found in his Danish Majesty’s magazine’s, and which have been
consumed by the British troops.”482 The only income the British empire was allowed to retain were the
“revenues that have been collected of the Danish islands…It is however understood that out of said
479 The idea of service economies is developed in Trevor Burnard and Emma Hart, “Kingston, Jamaica, and
Charleston, South Carolina: A New Look at Comparative Urbanization in Plantation Colonial British America,”
Journal of Urban History 39, no. 2 (March 2013): 222, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211435125.
480 Meredith Gaffield, “Trust, Obligation, and the Racialized Credit Market in Prerevolutionary Cap Francais,” in
Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: “The King Is Listening,” ed. Nancy Christie, Michael
Gauvreau, and Matthew Gerber, Routledge Research in Early Modern History (New York, NY Abingdon:
Routledge, 2021), 196.
481 Jacob M. Price, “Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic
System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 294.
482 “B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Papers and Correspondence on Danish and Swedish
Claims for Compensation for Losses at St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Thomas.” (1806 1801), 23–27, Ernst
Walterstorff to Robert Hobart, December 10, 1801.

160
revenues are to be deducted certain expences for the public service in the islands…such as for the
administration of justice, the public persons, and the repairing of the high roads which have been
heretofore defrayed out of the head and ground taxes.”483 Also “no property belonging to persons subjects
of France, Spain, or Holland, who actually had obtained Danish Burgher briefs previous to the British
troops taking possession of the Danish islands, to be considered as captured property.”484 Taking up earlier
Walterstorff’s suggestion that “nothing more would effectually contribute towards a speedy and
satisfactory arrangement than if his British Majesty’s ministers were to appoint a competent person to
embark from hence as a commissioner for the purpose of delivering up the Danish Majesty’s
commissioners and also to regular the affairs which are the subject of the instructions,” the King
appointed the Englishman Henry Swinburne “commissioner…for carrying into effect the restitution of the
Danish Islands in the West Indies.”485 Although English, Swinburne was an extensive traveler who spent
much time in France and Italy and, after marrying into a family with West Indian connections, was
himself a West Indian landowner.486
The efforts to formally end Britain’s military 1801 campaign against the Danish and Swedish islands
progressed quickly. Commissioner Swinburne first arrived in Martinique in February 1802 and followed
on to Saints Croix, Thomas, and John to release all British troops from the captured islands in short
succession. Although the 1801 Trigge military campaign was short-lived, for the purposes of this
dissertation, it is a useful backdrop for two microhistories that demonstrate the extensive connections
between foreign Caribbean colonists and the British Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century.
483 , Ernst Walterstorff to Robert Hobart, December 10, 1801 in “B. West Indies and South America. x.
Miscellaneous. Papers and Correspondence on Danish and Swedish Claims for Compensation for Losses at St
Bartholomew, St Croix and St Thomas.,” 23–27.
484 Ibid.
485 Walterstorff makes this claim in Ibid. Robert Hobart appoints Henry Swinburne in Downing Street to Henry
Swinburne, December 17, 1801 in “B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Papers and
Correspondence on Danish and Swedish Claims for Compensation for Losses at St Bartholomew, St Croix and St
Thomas.,” 29–38.
486 H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds., “Swinburne, Henry,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ref:odnb/26837, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26837.

161
CHAPTER FIVE:
The British Empire fails to feather its nest:
Saint Croix, banking, and the big picture.
The British occupation of the Danish islands at the turn of the nineteenth century was a strain on the
finances and time of the metropolitan government because the King’s administrators didn’t understand
how financially imbricated Caribbean colonists had become with global capital and therefore
underestimated how easy it would be to both extract (and ultimately keep) funds from Danish Caribbean
colonists. In addition to taking control of the colonies’ governments, General Thomas Trigge had been
instructed by Henry Dundas to seize “all ship’s stores, or public property of any description, belonging to
Russia, Denmark, or Sweden which may be found in the said islands.”487 However, Dundas also
instructed Trigge to respect private property:
induce as much as possible, the Planters and inhabitants not to take an active part against His
Majesty’s Forces, you will, if it should appear necessary, take some public mode of declaring to
them that all private property not taken afloat, or liable to seizure in the ordinary practice of war
will be respected, & that after the surrender of the island their laws, customs, & religious usages
shall not be infringed & that they shall partake of all the commercial advantages enjoyed by the
Dutch and other Settlements now under His Majesty’s Dominion in that quarter of the world.488
Dundas’s instructions are illustrative of how necessary the empire viewed it that, for the military seizure
of colonies ruled by other empires to hold, invaders had the support of local colonists. Dundas’ request
that Trigge emphasize with captured colonists the commercial benefits that might come to them from
British sovereignty shows what he believed might be most the appealing argument with local colonists.
And yet, Hobart’s suggestion that captured colonists might be appeased merely because local private
property would remain undisturbed reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the concrete ways that
Caribbean colonists financed their economic operations at the turn of the nineteenth century. 489
487 No. 1 in “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military
Commanders.,” 83-88, Downing Street to Trigge, January 14, 1801.
488 Ibid.
489 Historian Jacob Price nicely explains how planters worked with credit in Price, “Credit in the Slave Trade and
Plantation Economies.”

162
Instead of being the quick cash grab the metropolitan office envisioned, when British troops
descended into the Danish West Indies, they met financially sophisticated colonists who finances were
deeply imbricated with international sources of capital. By now long practiced in the colonial art of
financing on credit, the records obtained during the 1801-1802 Danish islands occupations show that to
achieve a certain level of financial success and comfort in the Caribbean colonies, many West Indians
embraced a flexible economic internationalism that enabled them to selectively collaborate with foreign
partners. As historian Pieter Emmer explains, “the Dutch and Danish Caribbean were able to attract
capital from non-nationals like no other area in plantation America. The Dutch invested in the Danish
Caribbean and British investors bought property in both the Dutch and Danish colonies.”490
Understanding this guarded economic multiculturalism, which occurred against a backdrop of the French
and Haitian revolutions, will help scholars further understand the way Caribbean colonists worked to
meet the rapidly changing conditions in the West Indies while attempting to preserve the status quo of
their power and influence in the metropole.
Although this chapter is focused on the seizure of the Danish colonial islands in 1801 and 1802
broadly, most of the documentary evidence comes from Saint Croix. Saint Croix, the largest and most
developed of the Danish islands, produced the most paper. This chapter’s argument is based almost
entirely on governmental sources. I rely primarily on correspondence among key figures held by the
British War and Home Offices. I have supplemented these documents with English language sources I
located in the West Indian collections of the Danish archives, the Rigsarkivet. The historical timeline for
this chapter is very short, beginning in January of 1801 and ending in June of 1802 and will closely
follow the chronology of events that took place during and just after the British seizure of the Danish
islands.
490 The passage continues, “In both the Dutch and Danish Caribbean, the majority of the planters were foreign
nationals. The international character of the Dutch and Danish plantocracy is also reflected in the destination of
some of the plantation produce. Sugar from the Danish Antilles was sometimes shipped to Amsterdam, and the
British planters in the Dutch colonies probably marketed some of their produce in London.” Emmer, “Slavery and
the Slave Trade of the Minor Atlantic Powers,” 473.

163
The British Occupation of Saint Croix
Seizing five islands in less than a month, all accomplished with very little bloodshed, the terms for
surrender agreed to by Trigge, his second in command, John Duckworth, and Danish Governor General
William Anthony Lindemann hint at the larger financial aims of the British invaders. When Saint Croix
was first surrendered, Lindemann initially proposed that “all the inhabitants of this island present and
absent of every denomination…remain in full and uncontrolled possession of their property of every
description, and they shall meet with no impediments in the administration thereof,” but Trigge and
Duckworth were only willing to agree that “property of all inhabitants will be respected; except of the
French, Spanish and Dutch who have become residents since the 1st January 1794.”491 However, Colonel
Francis Fuller, the soldier left in charge as governor of the Danish islands in April 1801, was forced
during his tenure to confront the fact that in spite of Hobart’s instructions to narrowly extract from
colonists the payments due to the Danish crown, the reality of economic life on the ground in the Danish
colonies meant that it was impossible to sever public funds from private, or Danish funds from the funds
of other empires.
Since the middle of the previous century, the increasingly multiethnic populace of the Danish islands
had largely been underwritten through the Danish West India Company, who equity was later bought out
by the Danish crown, or Dutch banking institutions. Historian Neville Hall explains that in the “two
decades after 1754, upwards of 15 million guilders were lent to Danish plantation owners.” However, “as
the ‘Dutch Loans’ rose in the 1760s and 1770s, planters, in order to service their debts, were obliged to
ship more and more sugar to Holland at the expense of Copenhagen refineries. To cauterize the
hemorrhage the crown stepped in and bought the ‘Dutch Loans’ in 1786, adding thereby to the
indebtedness acquired from the Danish West India company.”492 Although Lindemann asked that
“inhabitants in His Majesty’s Loss, shall not be compelled to make any payment…as long as the Colony
491 See Articles of Capitulation proposed by Governor General Lindemann to their Excellencies General Trigge and
Rear Admiral John Thomas Duckworth Commanders of His Britannic Majesty’s Forces in “B. West Indies and
South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military Commanders.,” 176–79.
492 Hall and Higman, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies : St. Thomas, St. John and St Croix, 20.

164
continues subject to his Britannic Majesty,” Trigge and Duckworth responded that “inhabitants concerned
in his Danish Majesty’s Loan must make their payment to his Britannic Majesty as they become due.”493
Now that he oversaw the island, it fell under the aforementioned Fuller’s purview to determine exactly
how much financial restitution was due to the British crown and exactly which colonists would be
required to pay it.
The terms for the articles of capitulation for the surrender of Saint Croix demonstrate the British
invaders’ primary interest in acquiring capital for the British crown, rather than in permanently
incorporating the colony into their empire. As had become the trend since Britain took Quebec from the
French empire in 1760, the largely protestant British granted religious liberty to local congregations.494
Similarly, “the Danish Laws and the special Ordinances of [Saint Croix], shall remain in full and
uncontrolled vigour and execution as hitherto, & justice be administered by the persons now in office.”495
The very first issue of the English language Saint Croix Gazette contained the list of all local civil
officials who were to remain in their jobs.496 The articles also determined that free people of color “shall
continue to enjoy their freedom and property, and in every respect to be considered on the same footing as
the other inhabitants.”497 The British invaders clearly weren’t interested in fundamentally altering these
captured communities.
Crucially, to carry out the financial bookkeeping required to seize the property to which the British
empire believed it was entitled, Trigge and Duckworth called in West Indian partners. To execute
transactions related to the Danish and Swedish debt, Trigge appointed Martinicans William Smith and
John Gay, hereafter referred to primarily as Smith & Gay, as “His Majesty’s Agents…for the management
493 “Vol. 1, No. 2,” The St. Croix Gazette, April 8, 1801.
494 The British choice to embrace French Canadians, including a British secretary of state expressing “the hope that
British troops would avoid offending local religious sensitivities,” was a departure from prior state policy. Just a few
years earlier 1755 the colonial population of French Acadians had been forcibly removed from Nova Scotia in
Canada. Stephen Conway, “The Consequences of the Conquest: Quebec and British Politics, 1760-1774,” in
Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2020), 144–45.
495 “Vol. 1, No. 2.” The St. Croix Gazette.
496 “Vol. 1, No. 1,” The St. Croix Gazette, April 4, 1801.
497 “Vol. 1, No. 2.” The St. Croix Gazette.

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of…sequestered property”498 We do not know the ethnic background of Smith or Gay, but given that they
operated out of British Martinique, they must have had extensive contacts with colonists of French ethnic
origin. Saint Croix commandant Fuller appointed local burgher William Armstrong, the Irish soldier
Thomas Arbuthnot, and the aforementioned John Gay to do the same for “all persons holding mortgages,
owing debts or having money or effects of whatsoever kind or description belonging to the Dutch
republic, or the subjects thereof, wherever residing.”499 Describing his state of mind upon accepting the
appointment, Armstrong wrote Secretary Hobart that was motivated to use his local knowledge to help his
fellow colonists evade mistreatment:
I was influenced to accept of this appointment from the considerations that the amount…the
worst species of treatment as far at least as property was comprehended was expected by the
generality of the inhabitants and… it was indeed feared that their estates might be brought to
auction for the arrears due and perhaps sold for a fourth or even a fifth of their real value. I
therefore conceived that from my knowledge of local circumstances I might have it in my power
to influence the other agents and the commandant and by that means render essential service to
the colony.500
Although it is impossible to know the sincerity with which Armstrong wrote these words, it is illustrative
that he seemed to equate colonists not receiving the full value of their property with “the worst species of
treatment.”
To collect local debts for the British empire’s coffers, Colonel Fuller’s collectors first had to confront
the unpredictable nature of the local economy. In the very first issue of the Saint Croix Gazette, a
proclamation asserted that “the scarcity of silver coin in this island, [had] rendered it necessary to resort to
the medium of Paper Money.”501 Trigge explained, in a June 1801 letter to Hobart, that “it was customary
498 “Vol. 1, No. 1.” The St. Croix Gazette.
499 The quoted passage appeared in “Vol. 1, No. 3,” The St. Croix Gazette, April 9, 1801. Biographical information
for Thomas Arbuthnot can be seen in A. J. Arbuthnot and S. Kinross, “Arbuthnot, Sir Thomas (1776–1849), Army
Officer” (Oxford University Press, September 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/613.
500 There is an interesting story to be told in understanding William Armstrong. He and fellow colonist of British
descent Peter Appleby were imprisoned and punished for their work with the British invaders after they had all left
the island. This quote comes from a petition Armstrong wrote secretary Hobart trying to get his assistance in July
1802. See William Armstrong to Robert Hobart, July 25, 1802 in “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-
1804: B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St
Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for Shipping Seized There” (1804 1801), 211–
14, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean.
501 “Vol. 1, No. 1.” The St. Croix Gazette.

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with the Danish Government generally to receive produce in payment.”502 Regarding the amount due, in a
January petition from “planters and agents of the island of Saint Croix” to Denmark’s Ambassador to
Britain, Count Wedel-Jarlsberg, the authors claimed that appointed financial Commissioners had provided
“such sums as by statements of their own making they supposed the planters to be indebted to his Royal
Majesty, and which in many instances they made considerably more than was justly due.”503 The
petitioners also claimed that “from some of the planters they received cash or bills of exchange to the
amount of the debt so demanded. From others they took sugars at a certain valuation. And others again as
a supposed favour were permitted to ship to Great Britain the quantity which was supposed necessary.”504
This initial collection method, which emphasized self-reporting, must have been unsuccessful because by
June British commandant Fuller appointed local colonists Niels Hoftued, Peter Appleby, and Thomas
Elliott to act as a court and “pass sentence against such debtors which sentence shall have full force to be
executed and levied.”505 As Niels Hotued already held the appointment of “Upper Judge of the Island,”
and was appointed to stay in his post after the British seizure, the court was held “at Judge Hoftued’s
house every Tuesday and Friday from eight till twelve o’clock.”506
As the debts the commissioners sought to collect were directly tied to loans that had been originally
given by Danish and Dutch sources, English language documents found in possession of the Danish West
Indian Debt Liquidation Commission on St. Croix provide corroborating accounts of their payments to
British commissioners. Frequently asking for additional time to pay their debts or a reduction in the total
number of the debt attributed to them, many colonial accounts provide a wider window into local
circumstances as well as the financial conditions of Saint Croix’s families. Although the contents of
502 No. 6, “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military
Commanders.,” 263-265, Thomas Trigge to Robert Hobart, June 14, 1801.
503 Petition to his Excellency Count Wedel-Jarlsberg “B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Papers
and Correspondence on Danish and Swedish Claims for Compensation for Losses at St Bartholomew, St Croix and
St Thomas.,” 93-96, Signed London, January 15, 1802.
504 Ibid.
505 By Brigadier General Francis Fuller to Judge Hoftued, Peter Appleby, and Thomas Elliott, June 10, 1801 in “B.
West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Papers and Correspondence on Danish and Swedish Claims for
Compensation for Losses at St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Thomas.,” 183-185.
506 The quotation comes directly from Fuller’s letter appointing the court. The continuing appointment of Niels
Hoftued can be found in “Vol. 1, No. 1.” The St. Croix Gazette.

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individual missives vary, the letters considered en masse show in general many colonists on St. Croix
were extremely financially literate and very involved in the daily running of their estates. “[The debtor]
may have to pay to the King about…say 2000 pieces of eight which he is ready to pay to the
commission,” wrote a Mr. Rodgers from Christianstadt in April 1801, “but in the mean time he wishes to
pay some debts arising from supplys [sic] for his estate and begs leave for permission to pass 40 hhds
sugar, which he has now an opportunity of disposing of.”507 A petitioner MacEvay asks to send “to New
York 20 hhds of sugar to pay some demands that stand against him there” rather than making a payment
on the Danish loan.508 In another letter from Samuel Foster, which bears the signatures of approval from
commander Fuller in the margins, the author “represents…he is not in arrears to his Majesty’s Loan and
as his Estates requires a considerable supply of provisions from America for the support of same, he
requests you will grant him permission to ship sugar…to procure the necessary.”509 These examples
demonstrate that many colonists on Saint Croix understood that their own financial situations rested
within a vast financial web and that to be in the plantation business required a certain amount of financial
push and pull.
The letters from Saint Croix’s colonists to the Commissioners of the Royal Loan of Saint Croix also
show that they were able to elicit sympathy from local British occupiers by sharing their financial
struggles. For example, a pleading letter from one P. H. Robinson, in which he noted “the heavy
demands…my mother Mrs. Mary Turnbull has to pay to the Dutch loan,” as well as “the depreciated price
of sugars,” and a bad harvest “occasioned by the incessant rains,” led the British commissioners to accept
that year just one third of what was nominally owed to the Danish King.510 Colonist Elizabeth Maas wrote
a flattering petition directly to Francis Fuller, evoking his “well known character for humanity,” and
requested a significant reduction in her payments on account of “ the unfavorable weather… added to the
507 Christianstadt, April 25, 1801. Rodgers. No. 5, d. in “The West India Debt Liquidation Directorate, West Indian
Debt Liquidation Commission on St. Croix Letters Received, Journalised,” http://www.sa.dk/aosoegesider/en/billedviser?epid=20201523&q=%2Fao-soegesider%2Fen%2Fbilledviser.
508 St. Croix, April 25, 1801. Michl. MacEvay. No. 8. in Ibid.
509 St. Croix, April 29, 1801. Samuel Foster. No. 17, b. in Ibid.
510 August 10, 1801. Signed P. H. Robinson. No. 199. In Ibid.

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singularly calamitous and desolating drought which this colony unfortunately experienced, together with
the exorbitant prices of provisions this year.” She was rewarded with a one third reduction in her
payment.
511 One petitioner, Millan, earned the same reward after he wrote the British Commissioners of
“being considerably indebted for supplies to my estate and the cultivation of the same in the last three
year[s] which had not in my power to avoid in consequence of my estate being under the embarrassment
that raised by the failure of the croup & the bad sale of produce in the later years.”512 Because many of the
members of the Commission were military officers who had long records of service in the Caribbean,
they understood the existential issues these colonists faced and were sympathetic to their needs. They
understood as well that these problems were not specific to these colonies, but were indeed a part of the
environmental and cultural landscape of the Caribbean region more broadly.
Though the War Office had ordered Trigge and Duckworth to not take the spoils to which they would
have traditionally been entitled, the efforts of the Commissioners to collect local payments on the Dutch
and Danish loans ultimately set off alarm bells in banking houses across Europe—and eventually led to
Britain relinquishing the captured Danish islands. Representatives of these banking houses, once aware of
Britian’s choice to seize the Danish and Swedish islands, began applying their own social and economic
pressure through correspondence with the King’s administration. In August 1801, major British banker
Francis Baring wrote Robert Hobart on behalf of Herman Albrecht Insinger “one of the most respectable
merchants of Amsterdam & the Trustee or manager for loans advanced to several of the planters in the
island of St. Croix.”513 In 1779, Insinger, along with Paulus Prins, founded Insinger & Co., a Dutch
merchant-banking house whose capital was rooted in plantation slavery.514 That same year Insigner
became an agent for the Danish West Indies.515 Francis Baring himself came from a banking family, ING
511 St. Croix. July 1, 1801. Elizabeth Maas. No. 118. In Ibid.
512 St. Croix. July 7, 1801. Robt. Millan. No. 124. In Ibid.
513 Francis Baring to Robert Hobart, August 7, 1801. In “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804: B.
West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew, St
Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for Shipping Seized There,” 171-174.
514 Amsterdam. “1757-1805 Herman Albrecht Insinger.” Webpagina. Stadsarchief. Gemeente Amsterdam. Accessed
December 14, 2023. https://www.amsterdam.nl/stadsarchief/themasites/amsterdam-slavernij/1757-1805-hermanalbrecht-insinger/.
515 Ibid.

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Barings, which “[o]ver the European Wars, 1793 to 1815,…was probably was the most important issuer
of British government securities during a period when the state’s debt grew to giant proportions.” 516 Even
if Hobart wasn’t interested in what Francis Baring had to say, social and political convention would have
guaranteed that Hobart listened.
In addition to ING Barings, British administrators were also being contacted by the prominent Dutch
banking house Hope & Co., which owned much of Saint Croix’s debt, to see sums recovered. Curiously,
although the bank was based in Amsterdam, members of the Hope family had fled to London in 1794
when France invaded the Netherlands. Once in London, Pierre César Labouchère, one of the firm’s
partners, married Dorothy Baring, daughter of Francis. The elder Baring and Hope & Co. had previous
enjoyed a long history of working together, which only deepened after their families were joined.517 Now
they worked together to recover the sums of money to which their clients on Saint Croix felt entitled.
In their communication with the War Office, these financial stakeholders adopted the approach
which sought to cast any improper behavior at the capture of the Danish islands as uniquely the fault of
local British troops on the ground in the West Indies, not as a result of any defect in the instructions they
received. “We humbly conceive that the possession of St. Croix was an object of precaution rather than of
conquest,” Baring wrote Hobart, “in which we are justified on reviewing what was the actual conduct of
the British Government towards the vessels & property belonging to Danish subjects in this country.”518
Further seeking to divorce the consequences of the government’s decision to capture the Danish islands
from the decision makers, Baring appealed to Hobart in the name of the pride of British arms:
“We are…thoroughly persuaded it was the intentions of his Majesty’s ministers that neither the
inhabitants of St. Croix, nor any other person connected with them, should suffer any unusual
severity; nor that the lustre of His Majesty’s arms should be tarnished by the conduct of his
516 John Orbell, “The Historical Archives of ING Barings,” Financial History Review 7, no. 1 (April 2000): 91,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565000000056.
517 John Orbell, “Hope Family (per. c. 1700–1813), Merchants and Merchant Bankers” (Oxford University Press,
September 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/49405; John Orbell, “Baring, Sir Francis, First Baronet (1740–
1810), Merchant and Merchant Banker” (Oxford University Press, June 2021),
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1382.
518 Francis Baring to Lord Hobart, August 7, 1801. In “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804: B.
West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew, St
Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for Shipping Seized There,” 171-174.

170
officers towards the planters of St. Croix in a manner which the inhabitants of Amsterdam never
experiences from the arms of France in the worst times of anarchy and confusion.”519
Although undoubtedly overstating colonists’ claims of brutality, Baring’s comments illustrate that
colonists on Saint Croix perceived their financial health to be deeply connected to their physical survival.
Additionally, by describing the British seizure as causing harm towards “the inhabitants of St. Croix, [or]
any other person connected with them,” Baring saw the impact on financial holders to be roughly
equivalent to the impact on individual colonists. By widening the imaginary victim to include anyone
outside the Danish islands who held a financial stake in local operations, the bankers sought to effectually
made any concerns over political disagreement or nationalistic interests moot and instead to cast the act of
financial investment as a benign good entitled to every restitution.
The British banker representing Dutch and Danish capital also sought to accuse British forces of
overstepping traditional boundaries of colonial practice in their efforts to collect local payments. “We
have…seen letters from the island,” Baring wrote Hobart, “which mention that soldiers were sent to live
at free quarters on those plantations who were in debt to the loan, until the planters could deliver the
product which was demanded of them.”520 Additionally, “we beg leave further to observe, that money on
property, forced from a debtor in a foreign island, at the point of the British Bayonet never will be
considered by any creditor, nor admitted in any court of justice as a payment.”521 Although Baring had a
fiduciary duty to zealously advocate for his depositors, it is still arresting to see the ease with which
Baring adopted talking points that represented British soldiers in the worst possible light. Similarly
refusing to question the information London bankers had been given after receiving word from colonial
lawyer William Morgan on the ground at Saint Croix regarding events that “must involve the ruin of these
lately very flourishing colonies,” an administrator from Hope & Co. wrote Hobart, “the commanders in
chief have…have acted under a wrong impression, that by confiscating the means of the Danes to pay
their debts to the Dutch, they also liberated them from their obligations to do it, whenever they are able,
519 Ibid.
520 Ibid.
521 Ibid.

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the whole loss must therefore fall on the Danes as no force can violate or invalidate their engagements to
their creditors.”522
The most striking feature of the communications between financial stakeholders and the King’s
administrators is the bankers’ confidence in asserting their fiduciary claims. Not only were they
comfortable asserting that “Dutch property vested in the English funds is held sacred, & the dividends due
to proprietors resident in Holland, paid to them under the license of His Majesty’s Secretary of State,” but
they also displayed an expectation that their office “shall experience the indulgence of your lordship, for
the trouble we have occasioned, & that measures will be adopted without delay, to restore the property
together with the books, papers, & securities, to the parties to whom they belong.”523 Declaring the
“Dutch property vested in the English funds” to be “sacred,” Francis Baring had no problem seeing his
obligation as being towards his investors rather than the British empire. The Hope & Co. administrator
also “beg[ged] leave to mention, that a very considerable part of the Danish islands, as well as the debts
contracted in Holland belong to British subjects who were the earliest planters in the Danish islands.”524
Making this connection explicit, that British subjects had to engage with Dutch sources of capital to
successfully operate in the Danish islands, would have emphasized to the War Office just how impractical
it was to have undertaken a blanket seizure of property determined exclusively by the nation of the holder.
Displaying no desire to give their compatriots the benefit of the doubt, and asserting their fiduciary
duty towards their depositors, the British bankers representing Dutch and Danish capital de facto agreed
with Danish colonists’ accounts of the conquest and its aftermath, which had cast the invading forces as
overly harsh towards captured colonists. Receiving notice of the complaints “stating that Sir Francis
Baring and Messrs. Hopes have accused me of great severity in collecting the Dutch loan,” Saint Croix’s
commander Francis Fuller wrote to Lord Hobart in November to defend himself.525 Fuller claimed that
“the only instances of any coercion were in sending any officers party on the estates of Annaberg and
522 Hope & Co., to Lord Hobart, July 16, 1801 in “Ibid,” 135-141.
523 Francis Baring to Lord Hobart, August 7, 1801 in “Ibid,” 171-174.
524 Hope & Co., to Lord Hobart, July 16, 1801. In “Ibid,” 135-141,
525 Francis Fuller to Lord Hobart, November 1, 1801. In “Ibid,” 27-28,

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Shannon Grove, belonging to Messrs. Krause, which was adopted from these Gentlemen, and several
others having refused to make any payment unless exacted by military execution.”526 Although impossible
to know what actually occurred, it seems logical that colonists like Krause demanded that the military
execute their claim specifically because it then enabled them to charge those soldiers with overreach. Like
his fellow official, Edward Despard in British Honduras, Fuller seemed to possess a naivety which caused
him to accept colonists’ claims at face value. And yet now, after hearing how his actions were being
characterized by Danish colonists, Fuller claimed their true motivation was a desire “to exempt them from
being called on hereafter by the Dutch Commissioners for a second payment.”527 Most importantly, Fuller
sought to clarify, “no injury was sustained from the party being on the estate and it was withdrawn the
moment these gentlemen agreed to make their payments.” 528 Fuller didn’t seem to understand that it was
the payments themselves to which these colonists objected. At a minimum, we can understand Krause’s
willingness to delay making his payments for so long as a mark of his confidence that he wouldn’t face
serious consequences from British forces by doing so.
Saint Croix commander-in-chief Fuller sought to push back against what he saw as the false claims
of British severity against Danish colonists. Seeking to deflect another complaint, in one instance Fuller
offered the following account of the background to the events in question: “in the second instance a
serjeant and three privates were quartered on the estate…to prevent anything being taken from it previous
to its sale, which took place for the arrears, and installments due, and which Mr. Hope…insisted should
be paid up.”
529 As in the paragraph above, Fuller seemed to surmise that, because the initial act had been
sanctioned in some form, that the manner in which it had been carried out was protected. Fuller also
sought to emphasize that he was operating from motivations other than politics, for example he detailed a
case in which he had placed a “young lady in possession of [a] property.” He had done so, he explained,
“from a wish to do justice to an unfortunate girl, whose stepmother…refused her any kind of support and
526 Ibid.
527 Ibid.
528 Ibid.
529 The Mr. Hope referred to here is likely a member of the Hope family which ran the Hope & Co. banking house.

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whose harsh treatment was represented to me in the strongest terms by the most respectable merchants of
this island.”530 In this instance, as in others, Fuller sought to justify his intervention in private property
affairs as motivated by higher interests—in this case, the interests of a presumably helpless young
woman—and by asserting that his actions had been initiated not by himself but by private individuals, in
this case some of the island’s “respectable merchants.” Like the British colonists we will meet in the next
chapter, who used claims that the Dutch were pleading for their assistance to justify the seizure of Saint
Eustatius, Fuller cast himself as merely the obliging instrument of other local actors.
The seized produce standing as payments on the Dutch and Danish loans arrived directly on the
metropole’s shores with the question of what to do with the goods themselves. On June 4, 1801, the King
lifted the embargo on “all Russian, Danish, or Swedish Vessels then within any of the Ports, Harbours, or
Roads of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” after “the Government of Denmark has lately
manifested the most conciliatory Dispositions towards His Majesty.”531 However, despite the lifted
embargo, bankers Baring and Harman & Co. wrote Hobart together in September, there remained “many
other ships” that had arrived “laden with produce of that island; a considerable part of which we have
good reason to believe belongs to subjects of Denmark, debtors to our friends, or parties whom they
represent.”532 Surprisingly, however, the bankers requested not that the ships be continued to sail on but
rather that “instructions be given…to detail under the King’s lock, all produce of St. Croix, until
opportunity be afforded to ascertain to whom it really belongs.”533 The others claiming ownership were
London merchants Thomas Gudgeon and John Robinson. In a letter representing Trigge and Duckworth’s
account, Gudgeon and Robinson explained what they believed had happened:
planters urged their want of means to pay but in the produce of their plantations being sugar,
which to facilitate them, was directed to be received by [Messrs. William Smith and John Gay]
530 Ibid.
531 Numb. 15372 The London Gazette for the Year 1801 (Printed by Andrew Stahan, Printer-Street, Gough-Square,
London, 1801), 617.
532 Emphasis in Original. Francis Baring and Harman & Co. to Lord Hobart, September 25, 1801. In “St
Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804: B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous.
Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for
Shipping Seized There,” 191.
533 Emphasis in original. Francis Fuller to Lord Hobart, November 1, 1801. In “Ibid,” 27-28.

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and to be by them sold on the spot. This was in most instances found impracticable without great
loss owning to the price demanded by the planters being much greater than could be obtained.
Whereupon, the said commanders ordered [Messrs. William Smith and John Gay] to receive the
sugar & ship it for London to the consignment of the said Gudgeon & Robinson.534
Displaying a professional suspicion distinct from British military officials like Edward Despard and
Francis Fuller, the merchants Gudgeon and Robinson sought to cast whatever confusion had resulted in
the selling of Danish produce as coming directly from the planters themselves who had “urged their want
of means to pay.” In this retelling, British invaders went out of their way to be accommodating to the
needs of local colonists, even going so far as to sell at a loss, only for the colonists they had helped to
seek to rescind their payment once it suited them.
However, now that Gudgeon and Robinson sought to receive the sugar they had to compete with the
advocacy of local bankers for their Danish and Dutch clients. Advocating for their position, Robinson
communicated to John Sullivan, under-secretary for war and the colonies, that they were simply trying to
carry out the terms of the government’s own policy as “we have not done any act respecting this property
but in consequence of and agreeably to the orders of His Majesty’s Government…These sugars were
received at stipulated prices by the agents at St. Croix...”535 Unfortunately for their bottom line, Robinson
and Gudgeon didn’t know that the officials in the British empire had been working behind the scenes to
resolve the issue with the Danish crown. Discussing their financial competitors, Robinson claimed,
our brokers inform us that the persons who have agitated the representation to Lord Hawkesbury
proposed to them to become the purchases of those sugars…at which they hesitated not knowing
their solidity, hence we believe springs the true motive of the representation. If the proceeds of
those sugars should be as much as their value at St. Croix when received, which we believe will
be the fact, it is evidence that those interested in them cannot be injured provided His Majesty
should order such proceeds to be paid to them.536
534 Thomas Gudgeon and John Robinson, November 18, 1801. In “Ibid,” 195-197.
535 Nigel Chancellor, Sullivan, John (1749–1839), East India Company Servant and Politician, vol. 1 (Oxford
University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/63540; John Robinson to John Sullivan, November 26,
1801 in “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804: B. West Indies and South America. x.
Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for
Compensation for Shipping Seized There,” 199-201.
536 John Robinson to John Sullivan, November 26, 1801. In “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804:
B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew,
St Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for Shipping Seized There,” 199-201.

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Robinson’s comfortable assumption that the seized sugars from Saint Croix would retain their value on
Britain’s open market, although possibly an exaggeration or wishful thinking, reflects a great deal of
confidence in the traditional colonial economic system—a system that they might not have understood
was changing.
All these efforts from British bankers to claw back the payments made by colonists on the Danish
West Indies must have stung harshly amidst a political climate that emphasized cutting costs as historian
Robert Knight explains that “[f]inding a solution to the cost of the war against Napoleonic France became
the constant political task of the British government between 1802 and 1815.”537 An October 1801 letter
from Downing Street to the Governor of the Leeward Islands, reflects the mood: “His Majesty’s
Government has been frequently called to the subject of the very heavy expences incurred for the security
and protection of the West India Islands, and repeated injunctions have been given to reduce those
expences in the respective governments to the lowest possible scale.” 538 The governmental desire to
reduce expenditures in the West Indies undoubtedly influenced the empire’s quick appointment of Henry
Swinburne as the commissioner to end the British occupation of the Danish islands.
To put a formal end to the British occupation, Swinburne worked in close partnership with British
and Danish officials. First landing on Martinique, “Trigge and Rear Admiral Tofty have made all the
necessary arrangements for the evacuation of the Danish islands… I shall remain here with the Danish
commissioners two days longer to allow time for the operations.”539 Describing his relationships with his
colleagues, Swinburne wrote that “Sir Thomas Trigge has afforded me every possible assistance with
respect to Documents and Information; and I expect to carry with me almost every paper necessary for
explanation and have hitherto met with the utmost frankness and cordiality…with General
537 Roger Knight, “Funding War (2): Britain,” in The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. Volume 2,
Fighting the Napoleonic Wars, ed. Bruno Colson and Alexander Mikaberidze, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2023), 291.
538 No. 6, “Leeward Islands, 16 Jan - 26 Dec 1801; 10 Jun - 24 Nov 1808, Despatches” (December 16, 1801), 236-
237, CO 152, Adam Matthew Colonial Caribbean. Downing Street to Lord Lavington, October 13, 1801.
539 Henry Swinburne to Robert Hobart, February 1802. In “B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous.
Papers and Correspondence on Danish and Swedish Claims for Compensation for Losses at St Bartholomew, St
Croix and St Thomas.,” 105–7.

176
Walterstorff.”540 The Danish and British commissioners arrived off the shores of Saint Croix on February
13 but “Fuller not having embarked the troops nor being prepared to evacuate the island, General
Walterstorff remained in the frigate at sea and declined the invitation to land under the British colors.”541
After troops left Saint Croix, Swinburne and Walterstorff traveled to St. Thomas to remove the British
troops in control of that island and Saint John.542 On the departure of the British troops from those islands,
local colonists published a petition to “express their sentiments of your conduct distinguished by liberality
disinterestedness and wisdom, while entrusted with your important command.”543 The petition stated that
their signatures represented “most incontestable proof that all classes of people are actuated by the same
impulse and bear a testimony how far your honour has succeeded in creating one sentiment in the minds
of a public composed of natives of various nations collected in these islands.”544 It certainly appears like
officers appointed to the Danish islands subscribed to a Despardian-type internationalism.
After the British troops left the Danish islands, Swinburne remained behind to resolve and reconcile
the thorny financial issues with his Danish counterparts. After determining exactly what had taken place,
in March 1802 Swinburne expressed to the War Office that “after a long and troublesome investigation, I
have terminated the concern of the Dutch Loan which requires some detail to render it intelligible.”545
Inundated with figures, Swinburne described himself as “occupied in analyzing the numerous claims
brought in by Danish subjects that complain of losses by sea and land”—perhaps, like the Baymen in
British Honduras, local colonists in the Danish islands were comfortable asserting with asserting their
financial interests, even if that required slightly bending the truth.546 Even making the payments to close
the accounts was a challenge, as Swinburne encountered a series of colonial issues that impacted his
departure: first mutiny, next shipwreck, and finally, commercial delays.”
547
540 Ibid.
541 No. 3 in “Ibid,” 109–11, Henry Swinburne to Robert Hobart, February 16, 1802.
542 No. 5 in “Ibid,” 157–59, Henry Swinburne to Robert Hobart, February 21, 1802.
543 Proclamation to James Blair in “Ibid,” 161–65. February 21, 1801.
544 Ibid.
545 No. 9 in “Ibid,” 201–4, Henry Swinburne to Robert Hobart, March 15, 1802.
546 Ibid.
547 No. 15 in “Ibid,” 347–50. Henry Swinburne to Robert Hobart, June 28, 1802.

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Although Swinburne insisted to Hobart that “I do not upon the whole deem the British Government a
loser by the possession of the Danish islands,” his placating comment betrays his thinking that, even if he
personally felt otherwise, he suspected a reasonable person might look at the settlement terms and
perceive the British to be “losers.” Swinburne expressed this view “because His Majesty has received
upwards of three hundred thousand pounds duties on Sugars that would have gone to Denmark. He has
also had the wine duties regularly remitted to the custom house, the British vessels have had the freight,
our merchants the commission.”548 While Swinburne’s rationale might have passed muster with the Home
Office, from the vantage point of centuries later it seems illogical to conclude that the final amount of
wine and sugar duties obtained by the British Empire through their seizure of the Danish islands was even
equivalent to the costs borne by the empire in facilitating their invasion. Swinburne’s choice to emphasize
the benefits the capture gave to private enterprises reflect a mercantilist focus on the health of an entire
economic system that sought to work for multiple participants, rather than the views of a free trade
enthusiast, who might have bemoaned the empire’s failure to make any sort of profit.
The story of Britain’s seizure of Denmark’s West Indian islands, but particularly Saint Croix, is
useful for understanding how financially imbricated the colonial Western Hemisphere had become at the
turn of the nineteenth century. What a century earlier would have been a routine military seizure, with all
the rights and privileges that came with total surrender, by 1801 and 1802 had became largely an exercise
in financial futility for the British Empire. Even as Fuller’s handpicked commissioners from British
Martinique consistently negotiated smaller payments from local colonists than they had originally been
ordered to pay, the British envoys for the Dutch and Danish firms whose funds had been snatched from
their coffers cast the empire’s actions as harsh and unfeeling. That the British empire would ultimately
yield to such pressure, both from economic and political representatives of the Danes, shows that imperial
officials understood that it would ultimately cause the empire much more trouble if they backed their
dispatched forces in the West Indies than if they betrayed the men they had ordered to be there and laid
548 Ibid.

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the blame at their feet. The colonial world of the Western Hemisphere was a complex economic unit and
imperial officials weren’t daring enough to stick a spoke in its financial wheel.
The British Barings family’s professional and familial partnerships with Dutch and Danish capital
demonstrates how the international the concerns of the wealthy elite truly were around the turn of the
nineteenth century. The Baring family could have felt an obligation to back the actions of their empire but
instead they were happy to paint their compatriots as the unreasonable aggressors and foreign colonists as
the true victims. Paradoxically, by capitulating to the pressure from English and Danish figures, the
empire essentially endorsed that same view. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a new world was
coming into view in which the simple fact of being a subject of a particular empire did not mean that one
would not have deep financial interests in the colonies of rival empires or nations. Capital, as would
become increasingly clear over the next century, could be essentially nationless.
Caribbean colonists had long financed their economic operations on credit. William Pitt and others in
his administration certainly knew that prior to ordering Trigge and his forces to take the Danish and
Swedish islands. However the British empire in the aggregate did not seem to understand, prior to
ordering the invasion, which firms Danish colonists used to finance their operations and the very close
relationship that linked those firms with British capital. Presumably, if they had been aware of these tight
interconnections, Pitt’s administration might not have launched such a potentially expensive and
dangerous military operation for a predictably small prize.
The fact that the British empire ultimately chose to end the occupation of the Danish islands and
make a financial settlement is illustrative of whose voices the empire valued most around the turn of the
nineteenth century. When confronted by powerful petitioners, the War Office was remarkably quick to
accept the unflattering portrayals of British officers and soldiers that were forked over by Danish
colonists or their representatives, rather than trusting the assertions made by their own officers. The
government, it quickly became clear, was more reliably sympathetic to the broad metropolitan interests of
British bankers than to the very specific colonial interests of plantation owners. Hobart’s office sided

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against Martinique’s Smith & Gay’s merchandizing partners in England, even as they were only
attempting to carry out actions started by Whitehall.
From the vantage point of centuries later, it’s hard to believe that any British colonial official could
have expected the British occupation of Saint Croix and the other Danish islands to be a roaring success,
financial or otherwise. However, once the British made the choice to launch the invasion, it’s logical to
assume that the empire would both keep the captured prizes and endorse the actions of their military. In
fact, they did neither. After facing pressure from the British Barings family, whose finances were
intertwined with Dutch and Danish sources, the War Office instead dispatched Henry Swinburne to
retrieve troops from the Danish islands and pay local debts. It really does seem like the empire would
have been better off had they avoided the whole enterprise.

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CHAPTER SIX:
The Capture of Saint Eustatius:
Colonial Audacity at the turn of the Nineteenth Century
In April 1801, British forces captured Dutch Saint Eustatius despite not being ordered to do so by the
metropolitan government.549 Saint Eustatius’s economy centered on trade.550 The unauthorized seizure of
Saint Eustatius provides a window into the psyche of elite West Indian colonists of British descent at the
turn of the nineteenth century. Strains of trans-imperial authoritarian views had existed in the West Indies
since the onset of European colonization. The events around the 1801 capture of St. Eustatius reveal the
existence of a renewed sense of colonial confidence on the part of elites across imperial lines in the
Leeward Islands. Though local colonists of British descent knew enough not to boast openly of their true
aims, and to dissimulate in their communications with the governmental officials, their alliances
identification with elites elsewhere in the Caribbean had became increasingly overt by the turn of the
nineteenth century.
551
Although the British seizure of Saint Eustatius in 1801 was short lived, and the archival source base
concerning its’ occupation very small, the circumstances of the seizure itself as well as the colonial settler
aspirations for what might result from it illustrates one version of British West Indian elites’ imagined
futures around the turn of the nineteenth century, as they grappled with new republican conceptions of
nationality.552 The unauthorized seizure of Saint Eustatius was an attempt by elite West Indian colonists to
balance their own individual economic and political interests, which they saw as increasingly global, with
549 The British had previously seized Saint Eustatius “because of its strategic value to the American rebels during the
American Revolution,” in February 1781. Gert Oostindie, “‘British Capital, Industry and Perseverance’ versus
Dutch ‘Old School’? The Dutch Atlantic and the Takeover of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo, 1750-1815,”
BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 127, no. 4 (December 2012): 45, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgnlchr.8226.
550 As the historian Gert Oostindie artfully describes, “’Dutch’ players…were disproportionately active as brokers
connecting the various parts of the Atlantic across national colonial boundaries. An obvious case is Curacao. The
island acted as a commercial hub…The Dutch island of St. Eustatius…had a similar function, with a stronger
orientation towards the North American colonies.” Oostindie, 29.
551 Brian L. Moore, “Colonial Autocracy and Authoritarianism in the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean History 54,
no. 2 (2020): 275–95, https://doi.org/10.1353/jch.2020.0018.
552 Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean
World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

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the narrower needs of the British empire. By taking the island themselves, British colonists on Saint
Christopher’s hoped they could get everything they personally wanted without the empire being the wiser.
As taking Saint Eustatius was an unsanctioned seizure its paper trail is predictably small. Colonial
actors had a vested interest in keeping documentation of their usurpation small. Therefore, this
microhistory is rooted in a very small collection of documents found within the archives of the British
War and Home offices. It uses key facts from that source base to launch broader arguments about the
political, economic, and social interests of British Caribbean colonists around the turn of the nineteenth
century, ultimately using deductive reasoning and reasonable speculation to support my claims. My larger
claims for academic significance are supported by secondary source evidence. Appropriately, the structure
of the chapter will mirror the evidence. First, drawing on a handful of key primary sources, I will discuss
what West Indian colonists claimed in their communications with the metropole had happened in St.
Eustatius. Second, building upon those claims, I will argue what I believe to be the more likely version of
the events that led to Saint Eustatius’ capture, then explore what the island’s unauthorized seizure can tell
us about British colonial life in the West Indies at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The Claims of British West Indian Colonists
Lieutenant General Thomas Trigge’s logistical nightmare, which found him needing to properly
protect the British empire’s new possessions without enough troops, only increased in late April 1801
when he received notice that British troops had seized the Dutch islands of Saint Eustatius and Saba
without his direct orders. The genesis of the invasion instead had come from neighboring colonists at
British Saint Kitts, also known as Saint Christophers. In his explanation to Lieutenant General Thomas
Trigge, the man tasked with overseeing British troops in the Leeward islands, Robert Thomson, President
of the Saint Kitts Privy Council, explained that after receiving information that French forces had
evacuated the island of Saint Eustatius, the Council had ordered Richard Blunt, a Lieutenant Colonel in
the 3d. Regiment of Foot, to take 100 men “on board his majesty’s ship Arab, Captain Perkins, and take

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possession of the island.”553 However, Thomson’s explanation rings false when we consider it in light of
the message the Leeward Islands’ governor Ralph Payne, the Lord Lavington, had sent to the Home
Secretary, William Henry Cavendish Bentick, just days earlier. Lavington had complained to the
Secretary that “His Majesty’s subjects in this part of the world regret most sensibly that the island of St.
Eustatius has been permitted to escape the fate of [the recently captured Danish islands].”554 Employing
both stick and carrot, Lavington declared Saint Eustatius to be “most mischievously situated, at the
distance of scarcely three leagues from St. Christopher’s; capable of doing that and his Majesty’s other
Leeward island’s the greatest mischief, in a variety of views.” He also proposed a plan of attack: he was
sure, he wrote, that “the conquest of St. Eustatius would have been a very easy one.”555
In light of Payne’s comments, as well as Thomson’s somewhat specious claims of that French
soldiers had abandoned the island, local colonists from British Saint Christopher, in combination with
some neighboring Dutch colonists, conspired to take Dutch Saint Eustatius because they felt it would
benefit their personal local interests in recovering self-emancipated enslaved peoples and opening up
local trade routes.556 Passing along the notice of the empire’s new possessions, Trigge wrote to Dundas
that “I have only to add, that the officers charged with the conducting of this service, have acquitted
553 The Captain of the Arab, John Perkins, is the focus of Douglas Hamilton, “‘A Most Active, Enterprising Officer’:
Captain John Perkins, the Royal Navy and the Boundaries of Slavery and Liberty in the Caribbean,” Slavery &
Abolition 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 80–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1330862; No. 22, “B. West
Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military Commanders.,” 383-385,
Thomas Trigge to Henry Dundas, April 29, 1801.
554 David Wilkinson, “Bentinck, William Henry Cavendish Cavendish-, Third Duke of Portland (1738–1809), Prime
Minister” (Oxford University Press, January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2162. William Bentinck is
frequently addressed as the Duke of Portland in correspondence. During this period, the Leeward Islands containing
Antigua, Nevis, Saint Christopher’s/Saint Kitts, and Barbuda were governed by a single governor who was stationed
on Antigua. Governor Ralph Payne addresses his recipient as the Duke of Portland. No. 4, “Leeward Islands, 16 Jan
- 26 Dec 1801; 10 Jun - 24 Nov 1808, Despatches,” 94-96, Ralph Payne to the Duke of Portland, April 22, 1801.
555 No. 4, “Leeward Islands, 16 Jan - 26 Dec 1801; 10 Jun - 24 Nov 1808, Despatches,” 94–96, Ralph Payne to the
Duke of Portland, April 22, 1801.
556 It’s possible that the British empire’s choice to not instruct Trigge to seize Saint Eustatius was partially motivated
by ideas like “it is one part of the plan of France, to make the interests of America coincide with the ruin of England;
and to effect this nothing more is wanted than to open the French and Dutch West-India ports to the former, and
thereby furnish a plausible, and even just, grounds for such a discriminating system as will exclude our
manufactures, little by little, from the United States,” written by anti-Jacobin English author William Cobbett in his
William Cobbett and Henry Addington, Letters to the Right Honourable Henry Addington ... on the Fatal Effects of
the Peace with Buonaparté, Particularly with Respect to the Colonies, the Commerce, the Manufactures, and the
Constitution, of the United Kingdom (London: Published by Cobbett and Morgan, 1802), 107,
http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/U0104281214/MOME?sid=primo&xid=e8c7ed8b&pg=1.

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themselves with such judgment and promptitude as to merit and receive my entire approbation.”557 It
never seemed to occur to Trigge that Thomson might not be communicating honestly. Firmly ensconced
at his headquarters on British Martinique, Trigge now had to incorporate Saint Eustatius and Saba into his
strategic plan for the region.
Council President Thomson was more candid with his Governor than General Trigge. He informed
the governor that “a flag of Truce arriv’d here Yesterday, from the island of St. Eustatius, with intelligence
that the French had evacuated that island on the 16th instant; and with a private message from the Dutch
Commandant, that he, with the other inhabitants, were desirous of putting that island under His Majesty’s
Protection.”558 The message expressed that “no provisions were on the island, and that the inhabitants
must perish for want, unless very speedy relief was afforded them.”559 More pointedly, the letter sought to
entice its recipient with claims that “many of the Negroes, who had run away from hence, and were still
in that island, might be recover’d if immediate possession was taken of it.”560 Aware that he had far
overstepped his traditional authority, Thomson pleaded the pressures of time and urgency:
I could have wish’d very much to have given your Lordship the necessary information, and
reciev’d your commands, previous to my undertaking this business; but the pressure of the
occasion which would not admit of delay, and the importance of the acquisition in giving security,
from the local situation of that island, to the islands around, and also to their trade, I flatter myself
will justify me to your Lordship for the few steps I have taken as I should have expected to have
met your Lordship’s censure, if I had done otherwise, and the object had been lost.561
How truthful Thomson was being with Lavington when he claimed that he was at least partly motivated
by a fear of political reprisal is unclear. But the fact that he invoked such an eventuality certainly suggests
that he felt one might reasonably suspect retaliation should he have chosen not to proceed.
Despite the Council President transgressing his authority, Governor Lavington was also wholly
approving of Thomson’s choice to launch the invasion. In fact, now that it had occurred, the Governor
557 “Downing-Street, June 1,” Morning Post, June 3, 1801, British Library Newspapers.
558 Robert Thomson to Lord Lavington, April 25, 1801. In “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and
Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military Commanders.,” 112–13.
559 Ibid.
560 Ibid
561 Ibid

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seemed eager to capitalize upon it. “I have reason to believe,” the Governor wrote to the Duke of
Portland, “that with a very inconsiderable Force (such is the natural strength of the place) it might easily
be made, to bid defiance to every possible attempt of our enemies to repossess themselves of it, I doubt…
so valuable a post shall never without His Majesty’s Approbation return to its late masters.”562 Lavington
continued, drawing on his extensive local knowledge of the place and its features, to offer further reasons
why the capture had been an excellent idea:
the acquisition of this island is, from its’ situation, of the highest importance to all his Majesty’s
Charibbee islands, particularly to that of St. Christopher; from which its’ distance is not more
than three leagues. It has at times been the grand nest of the enemy’s privateer’s, and mart of all
the West Indies; and had it remain’d in the hands of His Majesty’s Enemies, it would probably
have inherited all the power of doing mischief to us, which was extinguish’d by the late capture
of St. Thomas.563
Surprisingly, in his response to Lavington, Hobart “congratulate[d] your excellency upon the surrender of
St. Eustatius, an event which is rendered the more desirable by the contiguity of that island to his Majesty
Possessions under your Government.”564 Notably, Hobart asked that Lavington “express to Mr. President
Thomson His Majesty’s approbation of the promptness and alacrity with which he took advantage of the
disposition manifested by the inhabitants to place themselves under our protection.”565 By embracing
Thomson’s narrative of the capture as a benevolent conquest, Hobart could set aside the Council
President’s glaring insubordination.
Although Thomson and Blunt’s narrative of the Saint Eustatius seizure rings false, it is necessary to
understand the official story that they sought to tell British officials in the metropole, because their
account contains hints both as to what the invaders hoped to accomplish with their unauthorized invasion
as well as what the invaders believed metropolitan officials would be willing to accept in the face of their
overt disobedience. The benevolent conquest narrative account is comprised of three claims. First, Dutch
562 No. 5, “B. West Indies and South America. Iv. Windward and Leeward Islands 1801: Various Military
Commanders.,” 109–10. Lord of Lavington to Duke of Portland, April 26, 1801.
563 Ibid.
564 Whitehall, To Lord Lavington, June 1801, Draft Message. In “Leeward Islands, 16 Jan - 26 Dec 1801; 10 Jun -
24 Nov 1808, Despatches,” 114-116.
565 Ibid.

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colonists from Saint Eustatius initiated the seizure by making the explicit request to Saint Christopher’s
Privy Council President Robert Thomson. Second, that the community of colonists at Saint Eustatius was
suffering and would continue to do so without British intervention. And lastly, that the seizure of Saint
Eustatius provided an economic opportunity for British colonists both in terms of trade and in giving
slaveholders an opportunity to recover self-emancipated enslaved peoples who had escaped to the Dutch
island. Each of these claims was intended to justify and indeed render seemingly necessary the capture of
the island. By painting Dutch colonists as requesting the invasion, British invaders could paradoxically be
seen as rescuing rather than subjugating their neighbors. Similarly, by describing life on Saint Eustatius as
being in various forms of fracas, the official narrative makes the suffering of colonists aligned with a
foreign nation a compelling enough reason for British colonists to rescue them.
Like the Dominican colonists, who had sought to aid their neighbors in the French Antilles as they
sorted out the practical effects of France’s revolution, British colonists on Saint Christopher saw their
Dutch neighbors as relative equals who should be shown compassion amidst struggle—not, as might have
seemed obvious, as rivals whose misfortune could be exploited. By describing the economic benefits
which might come to British colonists in the event of a local seizure, and which metropolitan officials
undoubtedly knew was extremely desirable to their colonists, Blunt and Thomson’s official narrative
made it harder for the War Office to deny their account because to do so would also deny their colonists
the possibility of economic restitution in the form of capturing self-emancipated enslaved people who
previously fled their forced servitude. Ultimately, the official account of taking Saint Eustatius places
British invaders in the role of sympathetic rescuers.
The fragmentary evidence that survives to testify to what actually occurred during the unauthorized
invasion and occupation of Saint Eustatius paints an ambivalent picture. In a December 1802 letter,
written by Richard Blunt in response to Lord Hobart’s “circular letter…requiring information
respecting…the island of Saint Eustatius, lately under [Blunt’s] command,” the author detailed what he

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called “the wretched state of the island at the period of it’s surrender to His Majesty’s forces.”566 Blunt
painted a dire picture of the situation in the island in his letter:
it would require a much abler pen to impression an adequate conception of the misery the
inhabitants then suffered, occasioned by seven years of the most unparalleled oppression,
exemplified in the universal plunder of their property, and almost total destruction of the town,
many of the houses of which were actually levell’d with the ground.567
Speaking to the economic health of the island, “as commerce alone ever rendered the colony important,”
wrote Blunt, “its opulence and revenue ceased with its trade. The merchants having dispersed among the
neutral islands.” In terms of income, the “tax on imports imposed by the council was barely equal to meet
the trifling expense necessary for the internal police. The Custom House could not produce any revenue
as the little consumption of the country was supplied altogether from St. Kitts.”568 To support his claims,
Blunt included within his letter to Hobart a copy of an address presented to him on his departure written
by local Eustatians. Speaking directly to Blunt, the petitioners wrote:
you found here sir, the wretched skeleton of a community, disjointed, oppress’d, and desponding,
the country wearing the appearance of diffidence and poverty, the towns depopulated, and that
which hitherto has been distinguished by its commerce, so effectually dismantled by the
calamities of savage war, to which the fates seem to have devoted it; and so desolated by the
havock which has prevailed for the last seven years, that there as not been one tenement left free
from marks of devastation.569
Although one ought to view such gushing claims with the suspicion that must always accompany flattery,
the petitioner’s message is notable because they seem to suggest a view that that imperial powers had an
obligation to ensure the continued functioning of Caribbean communities—even if it made no ostensible
economic or political sense from the empire’s perspective to continue sinking funds into the place. In the
eyes of Blunt’s petitioners, that a community existed on Saint Eustatius was sufficient reason to work for
the colony’s preservation. Notably, the locals commended Blunt that “notwithstanding the uncertainty of
his residence, [Blunt] made himself personally known to each individual ever whom he presides, by a
566 Richard Blunt to Lord Hobart, December 29, 1802. In “St Bartholomew, St Croix and St Eustatius, 1801-1804:
B. West Indies and South America. x. Miscellaneous. Dispatches from Commanders of Forces in St Bartholomew,
St Croix and St Eustatius. Claims for Compensation for Shipping Seized There,” 247-248.
567 Ibid.
568 Ibid.
569 Petition to Richard Blunt, Esq. Lieut. Col. In “Ibid,” 249-250.

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steady perseverance to promote the welfare of the people of St. Eustatius.”570 While some of Blunt’s
claims are likely true, especially when seen alongside the comments of local colonists, it is important to
remember that both sides of the Saint Eustatius plot had a vested interested in presenting the island at the
time of its capture as dysfunctional in order to solidify their narrative of benevolent conquest.
Although the British colonists on Saint Christopher’s in the late eighteenth century had not
experienced military seizure themselves in the recent past, they would have undoubtedly been aware of
the precarious nature of their communities as they watched their own empire seize neighboring islands
and the French empire work to maintain control of Saint-Domingue. With their empire actively at war, it
stands to reason that no British colonist living in the Caribbean could feel totally confident that the
conditions in local colonies would remain the same. Like the Baymen in British Honduras, the actions
taken by the British colonists on Saint Christopher’s to capture Dutch Saint Eustatius reflected a bold
eagerness to capitalize on the moment’s circumstances for their personal gain—because the future in the
Caribbean was always known to be uncertain.
Selfishness above Benevolence
Rather than being animated by the benevolent interests they sought to emphasize in their constructed
narrative, the more likely motivation behind the British invasion of Saint Eustatius was the self-interest of
wealthy Caribbean colonists. Although it’s possible that Thomson’s original claim of Dutch colonists
pleading for a British savior occurred: the all-too-convenient timing of the supposed plea, the documented
colonial desire to take the island, and the financial benefits which British colonists hoped to gain from
their occupation all make the formation of some sort of conspiracy among Caribbean colonists to be the
more likely explanation. It is possible that Thomson got the idea that the Dutch might invite them to take
the island in August 1797, when a local plot was uncovered within the 4th West India Regiment stationed
on the island whose eventual plan was to “invite the French to come and take possession of [Saint
570 Ibid.

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Christopher].”571 At a minimum, the documented existence of this prior plot, the characteristics of which
were closely aligned with Thomson’s claims, casts additional doubt on the veracity of his statements in
1801.
However, Robert Thomson’s longstanding history of political insubordination does lend credence to
the idea that he was the sort of official who might sanction the invasion of a foreign colony without direct
order. Thomson personally was quite provocative and could tolerate the discomfort of knowing that
others, and particularly others in power, were unhappy with him. For example, during the period at play in
this chapter, Thomson sought to ignore his own duty of obedience to his governor, the Lord Lavington.
Prior to the launch of the 1801 campaign against the Danish and Swedish islands, Thomson had been
temporarily serving as the Governor and Commander of Troops in the Leeward Islands since 1797.572 As
historian Elsa Goveia maps out in her classic Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands, the Leeward
Islands as an political entity was a collection of individual communities, each with their own local
government, but underneath one larger Captain-General or Governor in Chief.573 However, Thomson and
his replacement, Ralph Payne the Lord Lavington, clashed after Lavington’s arrival in February 1801
because Thomson refused to pay his replacement a customary portion of his salary for the time he had
been appointed governor but had not yet arrived in the region. 574 Writing to the Home Secretary,
Lavington was most agog at Thomson’s refusal to follow local tradition but especially furious at the
legalistic and slippery objections Thomson made, which asserted (regarding Lavington’s documentation
571 Meeting Minutes from the Saint Christopher Privy Council, August 20, 1797. In “Leeward Islands,
Correspondence, Original - Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 – 1813,” 111–12, Adam Matthews Colonial Caribbean.
572 Thomson inherited this position due to a series of unfortunate events. First, Major General Charles Leigh, the
man appointed Governor of the Leeward Islands left England in July 1796 to preserve his health. Therefore, as
Archibald Esdaile explained in a message to the Duke of Portland, as President of Saint Christopher, control of the
island fell to him while Leigh was away. Unfortunately, Esdaile died shortly thereafter in October 1796 and
“agreeable to his Majesty’s instructions the command devolved on [John Thomas]…as the eldest council of this
island.” Finally, after Thomas’ death in April 1797 “the temporary command of the Leeward Islands has devolved to
[Robert Thomson].” “Leeward Islands, Correspondence, Original - Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 - 1813,” 7–13;
67–68; Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Westport,
Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980), 73.
573 Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century, 69.
574 the Lord Lavington to the Duke of Portland, July 27, 1801. In “Leeward Islands, 16 Jan - 26 Dec 1801; 10 Jun -
24 Nov 1808, Despatches,” 155–59.

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of his claim) that “there appears to him ‘an obscurity in his majesty’s meaning in his instruction, which
wants elucidation,’ he declines to furnish me with any account of his of his official perquisites and
emoluments, before my arrival in my government.” 575 Indeed, Lavington detailed how Thomson “at first
wanted to establish a logic, that an officer who had never been present, could never said to be absent; and
that therefore the words, ‘during the Chief Governor’s absence,’ in my…instruction, could never apply to
an officer of this rank, previously to his arrival in the Government.”576 Even after providing Thomson
with a copy of his instructions, Lavington wrote, the subordinate officer remained only grudgingly
obedient:
I obtain’d from him no further reply, than that ‘his acquiescence upon this occasion would be a
very bad precedent; and that your Grace’s letter to me…appeared so contrary to the rule and
usage of this Government, that it could only proceed from the Want of Information, which he
should supply by a memorial to your grace.
577
Although Lavington had hoped to discuss the matter with Thomson when he made his first visit to Saint
Christopher, “I never was able to procure his attendance at the council during my continuance at that
island, (not even at the ceremony of my first convening the legislature,) although he was unable to
suggest any satisfactory reason for his refusal.”578 As happened earlier with Dominica’s Alexander
Stewart, the thorn in Governor John Orde’s side, Lavington was granted permission to suspend Thomson
from the local council, only for that permission to be revoked when the imperial “Government was
persuaded to reverse its decision…and an order-in-council was issued restoring him unconditionally to his
seat as a councillor at St. Kitts.”579 Thomson’s restoration to power certainly would have suggested to
local colonists that any imperial decision was negotiable as long as local colonists raised enough uproar. It
seems illogical, but like the Baymen of British Honduras, who were comfortable taking illiberal steps to
maintain their own social dominance, Thomson’s brazen intransigence wasn’t enough in the eyes of the
British Empire to justify true punishment.
575 Ibid.
576 Ibid.
577 Emphasis in original. Ibid.
578
Ibid.
579 Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century, 73.

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It was also while designated the temporary governor of the Leeward Islands that Thomson and the
governments that reported to him expanded the scope of their legal authorities beyond what had been
done in the past.580 Thomson was chief during the first session of joint legislature of the Leeward Islands
since 1777, “which opened its proceedings at Basseterre, the capital of [Saint Christopher], on the first
day of March 1798, [attended by] delegates from all the islands possessing a system of representative
government.”581 Historian Elsa Goveia notes that Thomson’s government “submitted to the Crown on
their behalf, an amelioration act, an act to free white Roman Catholics from their disabilities on the
islands, and the draft of an act for restricting the 4.5% duty in the Leewards.”582 In his letter transmitting
the Catholic legislation the home secretary, Thomson argued that this law, in particular, would be crucial
in ensuring the loyalty of the King’s Caribbean subjects. They were, he wrote, “very faithful and loyal
subjects, and highly worthy of the Privileges now intended to be conferred upon them.” He expressed
confidence that the bill would “tend to fix their attachment more firmly to Governments.583
Although it was certainly in the interests of Thomson and other slave holders in the Leeward islands
that Catholic colonists be incorporated into their local polity, as they believed increased European
population would work to bolster the white population from facing violence from enslaved people, he
failed to consider whether the metropolitan government would consider their inclusion to be in the
interest of the wider British empire. Thomson’s focus on the needs of his local community rather than the
empire is shown as well in his letter transmitting the legislation removing a local duty of 4.5%. He
580 Even an early history of Antigua states that “During the three years Mr. Thomson was governor, he visited
Antigua for about three days, in March, 1800, so that the Antiguans had not much of their commander-in-chief’s
society; but the council and assembly appear to have gone on very well without him, and framed some very good
laws.” Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and Its Inhabitants from the Time of the Caribs to
the Present Day, Interspersed with Anecdotes and Legends. Also, an Impartial View of Slavery and the Free Labour
Systems; The Statistics of the Island and Biographical Notices of the Principal Families. In Two Volumes.2, vol. 1
(London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street., 1844), chap. XI, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38788/38788-
h/38788-h.htm.
581 After this legislature was dissolved in March 1800 it wouldn’t meet again until 1816 when “the islands were
subdivided into two separate groups.” Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the
Eighteenth Century, 55–58.
582 Goveia, 57.
583 No. 18., Robert Thomson to The Duke of Portland, May 4, 1798. In “Leeward Islands, Correspondence, Original
- Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 - 1813,” 266–67.

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explained that this law “would prove a very great relief to his Majesty’s Leeward islands; which have felt
very great distress so much reduced by severe drought and other calamities, while every article of food for
the negroes and other plantation necessities could only be obtained at double their former value.”
Undaunted from facing imperial sanction by revealing illicit behavior, Thomson openly declared “these
islands [to be] wholly dependent upon foreign supplies, being destitute of those internal resources which,
the newer and larger islands enjoy from more favorable seasons.”584 With this language, Thomson worked
to cast colonist’s illicit actions as necessary and therefore, blameless. Neither of Thomson’s proposed
laws received the government’s sanction. Goveia describes how “the attitude of the imperial government
was, in this case, unfavourable to the idea of reciprocal sacrifice, and…the bargaining power of the
islands was not strong enough to secure them any substantial concessions. It is not surprising that the
islands turned back to their former individualism.” 585 These failed efforts at legislating are important for
understanding the unsanctioned invasion of Saint Eustatius just a few years later because, from the
perspective of local colonists, they had made public efforts to solve problems in their communities and
had been rebuffed by the government.
Robert Thomson’s history of communicating with nearby governors responsible for foreign islands
certainly lends credence to the idea that he or others might have conspired with foreign partners to launch
the invasion scheme. For example, in December 1797, Thomson issued a proclamation informing Saint
Christopher’s colonists, after corresponding with the Governor of nearby Saint Bartholomew, that they
should watch for fraudulent currency.586 The correspondence between Thomson and Saint Bartholomew’s
governor shows that, even if they weren’t aligned politically, they both understood that they had a mutual
584 No. 19, Robert Thomson to the Duke of Portland, May 4, 1798. In “Leeward Islands, Correspondence, Original -
Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 - 1813,” 268–69.
585 Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century, 59.
586 The full text being “Whereas a quantity of dollars made of copper and very neatly plated has been lately
discovered by His Excellency the Governor of Saint Bartholomew, which, he directed to be cut in two to prevent
their circulation, and transmitted some of them to me, which are to be seen at the store of Messrs. Mardenbrough &
Sharry in Basseterre, and a specimen of the same will also be sent to the Presidents of the different islands within
this government…All his majesty’s liege subjects, and other persons residing within my government, are called
upon to be aiding and assisting in the detecting of such Fraud and imposition upon the publick.” Proclamation,
December 28, 1797. In “Leeward Islands, Correspondence, Original - Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 - 1813,” 183.

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interest in working together to preserve the sanctity of the local market. Although not governmental
officials, in a private message sent to the Duke of Portland in July 1798, Thomson explained how he had
recently welcomed a conspiracy of French Royalist prisoners, who had escaped imprisonment in
Cayenne, French Guiana, and was sending them on to England under the care of Captain William
Grenville Lobb.587 In their own account of the adventure published soon afterwards, one of the French
prisoners, Jean Pierre Ramel, wrote that once they arrived in England and “took leave of Captain
Lobb…the officers lavished on us all possible attention; as if to convince us, the noble conduct of Captain
Lobb did not arise merely from his personal excellencies, but was the natural attendant and general
characteristic of the officers of the British navy.”588 Thomson’s eagerness to assist this crew, as well as the
enthusiasm of the British naval officers, suggests that British colonists were perfectly willing to collude
with foreigners, just as long as they perceived them as being politically aligned with themselves.
589
Rather than further exploring the invented narrative Thomson and others wished to tell, by probing
the implications from our suspected version of the Saint Eustatius invasion we can gain a more accurate
snapshot of interethnic relations within the Lesser Antilles around the turn of the nineteenth century. Most
crucially, if we accept the more likely account, then we must accept extensive collaboration had to have
taken place among British and Dutch colonists prior to the invasion itself. As Thomson’s constructed
narrative relied on the notion of a “Dutch invitation” to capture the island, it stands to reason that
invitation could have been extended by Dutch colonists behind the scenes or in a way that was different
than the melodramatic tale Thomson told. However, it defies logic to think that there was no collaboration
between British and Dutch colonists because it is unlikely Dutch colonists would have allowed an
587 Robert Thomson to the Duke of Portland, Marked as Private, July 28, 1798. In “Leeward Islands,
Correspondence, Original - Secretary of State, 10 Nov 1749 - 1813,” 305.
588 Jean Pierre Ramel, Narrative of the Deportation to Cayenne, of Barthelemy, Pichegru, Willot, Marbois, La Rue,
Ramel, &c. &c. ... From the French of General Ramel, ... (London: printed for J. Wright, 1799), 206, https://linkgale-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/apps/doc/CW0100244269/ECCO?u=usocal_main&sid=primo&xid=f113c655&pg=1.
589 In particular I’m referring to this group’s interactions with Colonel Thomas Hislop “commandant of the military
forces of his Britannic Majesty at the colonies of Berbice and Demerary, having heard of our arrival, came to
Berbice, and informed us, that General Boyard, commander in chief of the land forces in the Windward Islands, had
recently sent him orders to convey us to Martinico; and that, to defend us from privateers, Admiral Heslop [sic] had
dispatched a frigate…” Ramel, 200.

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uninvited invading force to remain on the island—and they certainly wouldn’t send off the invading force
with such a ringing endorsement of Blunt’s leadership. Although we can’t know for certain why these two
pockets of colonists decided to collaborate, we can deduce that they would have only done so if both sides
believed that there was much to be gained from Saint Eustatius coming under British control.
Though the specific individual relationships that led to the 1801 seizure of Saint Eustatius by forces
from Saint Christopher’s remain obscured, we can surmise that the recently heightened military history of
the imperial Caribbean had provided many opportunities for relationships between the two communities
to have been formed. Most significantly, it cannot be forgotten that the British empire had sanctioned an
invasion of Saint Eustatius twenty years earlier, in 1781.590 Although the British desire to interrupt Dutch
trade to the rebellious North Americans had been the rationale behind the island’s capture at that time, the
short seizure failed to effect that goal. “‘Neutral’ trade simply switched from the Dutch free port to the
neighboring Danish free ports of St. John and St. Croix.”591 Articulating a link between Saint Christopher
and Saint Eustatius, shortly after Admiral Rodney captured the island, he wrote to his prize agent, Sir
Philip Stephens, that “since the capture of St. Eustatius, three large Dutch ships from Amsterdam have
been taken, and carried into [St. Christopher’s]. As their cargoes consist of all kinds of naval stores, I shall
order them instantly up to English Harbour, Antigua, for the use of his Majesty’s fleet.”592 Another
possibility for intercolonial interethnic interaction would come from the fact that Rodney sent a
contingent of prisoners of war to Saint Christopher.593 Perhaps resolving these interethnic incidents, which
590 The duration of the British short seizure was from February 3, 1781 when the “Dutch West India Company’s
governor, Johannes De Graff,…promptly surrendered the island,” to November 26, 1781 when “St. Eustatius was
recaptured by 400 French and Irish troops.” Randolph Cock, “‘Avarice and Rapacity’ and ‘Treasonable
Correspondence’ in ‘an Emporium for All the World’: The British Capture of St Eustatius, 1781,” The Mariner’s
Mirror 104, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 265–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2018.1487673.
591 Cock, 277.
592 Rodney refers to Saint Christopher by it’s other name of Saint Kitts. Godfrey Basil Mundy, The Life and
Correspondence of the Late Admiral Lord Rodney (London : J. Murray, 1830), 14–15,
http://archive.org/details/lifeandcorrespo02rodngoog Admiral Lord Rodney to Philip Stephens, Esq., February 6,
1781; Roger Knight, “Stephens, Sir Philip, Baronet (1723–1809), Admiralty Official” (Oxford University Press,
January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26391; Kenneth Breen, “Rodney, George Bridges, First Baron
Rodney (Bap. 1718, d. 1792), Naval Officer and Politician” (Oxford University Press, January 2008),
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23936.
593 Mundy, The Life and Correspondence of the Late Admiral Lord Rodney, 33 Admiral Rodney to Aretas Akers,
Esq., Agent for the Prisoners of War, St. Christopher’s, Feb. 27, 1781.

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occurred directly because the British empire had captured Saint Eustatius, helped forge a bond between
colonists and officials moving between the two islands.
And yet, even as Admiral Rodney had been dispatched to prevent trading between Dutch colonists
and the Americas, upon his arrival he would find that illicit relationships already existed between
colonists on Saint Eustatius and the British empire. A trading entrepot that imported everything, historian
Vincent Enthoven determined that roughly 45 percent of the hides on Saint Eustatius came from Saint
Christopher from 1680 to 1780.594 Writing to John Laforey, the naval commodore at the English Harbour
dockyard in Antigua, Rodney expressed that “I have daily experience of iniquitous practices, and the
treasonable correspondence carried on by those calling themselves British merchants, settled in this
Dutch, and the neighboring islands.”595 Although we cannot know which particular Dutch colonists these
British merchants were collaborating with, scholars do know that “[a] few Dutch families dominated the
island’s economic and political life…The Heylinger, Doncker, De Windt, Lindesay, Markoe, and Cuviljé
families formed a closely knit oligarchy.” However we must remember, as Vincent Enthoven has also
shown, that these families had “family members settled in every corner of the Caribbean, not only on the
Dutch islands of Saba, St. Martin, Curaçao, and Aruba, but especially on the Danish West Indian
islands.”596 Whenever families scattered in the Caribbean they inevitably had many options to choose
from when deciding their new home. Charging that ongoing economic collaboration between Dutch and
English Caribbean colonists had already the assisted the rebelling American colonies, Rodney wrote the
commodore:
What will you say,…that English traitors were concerned in this scheme;…men who had once the
honour of being Englishmen…name themselves Dutch burghers? As such they are, and shall be
treated, and their whole property confiscated. Providence has ordained this just punishment for
the crimes they have committed against their country.597
594 Saint Christopher was referred to as Saint Kitts here. Victor Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates’: St.
Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680-1780,” Early American Studies 10, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 263.
595 Mundy, The Life and Correspondence of the Late Admiral Lord Rodney, 30 Admiral Rodney to Commissioner
John Laforey, Feb. 27, 1781; J. K. Laughton and Alan G. Jamieson, “Laforey, Sir John, First Baronet (1729?–
1796), Naval Officer” (Oxford University Press, January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15878.
596 Enthoven, “That Abominable Nest of Pirates,” 248.
597 Mundy, The Life and Correspondence of the Late Admiral Lord Rodney, 31 Admiral Rodney to Commissioner
John Laforey, Feb. 27, 1781.

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Rodney perspective here shows that he believed by engaging in illicit trading practices, Caribbean
colonists aligned with the British empire forfeited their rights as British colonists. In this way, by
expecting Caribbean colonists to obey the laws of the empire to be in a good standing, Admiral Rodney
resembles Edward Despard. What seems clear, especially considering the actions of British colonists on
Saint Christopher in 1801, is that, like the Baymen in British Honduras, Caribbean colonists aligned to the
British empire perceived that they had a right to step outside of their imperial boundaries while still
remaining members in good standing of their imperial communities.
Admiral Rodney would even go as far as to accuse collaborating colonists of desiring Britain’s
military failure. Writing to his prize agent again, Rodney expressed his view that the “blow the French
islands have received by…the capture of St. Eustatius, is most severely felt by them.” Perhaps it was in an
effort to reopen that trade which motivated local colonists to employ “[e]very trick that can be devised” to
try to retake the island “by a coup de main, and thereby recover the magazines of provisions and naval
stores.”598 Rodney told his colleague, Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, who was in charge of the fleet off
Martinique, that “news of the arrival of the French fleet…[was] fabricated with some very sinister views,
by some merchants at [Saint Christopher’s], in order to impede his Majesty’s servants.”599 Responding to
Rodney, Hood expressed his own suspicion that “I could not bring myself to give the smallest degree of
credit to the enemy’s arrival at Martinique, and concluded it was a tricking, rascally report of the [Saint
Christopher’s] gentry.”600 Describing the want of supplies in the French islands to his prize agent, Rodney
expressed that the “only danger is from the British islands, whose merchants, regardless of the duty they
owe their country, have already contracted with the enemy to supply them with provisions and naval
stores. My utmost attention shall be to prevent their treason taking place”
601 Clearly, British military
598 Emphasis in original. Ibid, 41–46. Admiral Rodney to Philip Stephens, March 6, 1781.
599 Ibid, 49–50. Admiral Rodney to Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, March 8, 1781.
600 Ibid, 50. From Sir Samuel Hood to Admiral Rodney, March 10, 1781.
601 Ibid, 55–56. Admiral Rodney to Philip Stephens, March 17, 1781.

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officials in 1781 did not trust some of the British colonists on Saint Christopher to place the needs of the
empire before their personal interests.
Although Thomson’s account in 1801 sought to cast the fear of Dutch colonists facing imminent
violence as being a major motivating factor in his decision to launch the unsanctioned invasion, there is
greater evidence to show that fear of violence was not a major concern for local colonists during the
unsanctioned invasion. We can see this in Thomson’s choice to appoint Blunt and Captain John Perkins of
the H.M.S. Arab as the island’s invading force. By choosing Perkins, a man of color born in Jamaica,
Thomson communicated that, at the very least, he wasn’t concerned about the optics of sending a mixedrace man to capture a colony of European colonists, a significant contingent of free Black colonists, and
many enslaved people.602 Although Perkins’s background is unclear, “he is described as a ‘mulatto’, the
child of a white father and a black mother, and if so it is highly probable that his mother was a slave.”
Jamaican law would have made the boy himself a slave, but there were opportunities to escape
enslavement that existed for enslaved children with white fathers who could use their financial or social
influence to improve their child’s station.603 With ongoing problems retaining mariners, losing them to
desertion or illness, “demands of naval manning and the recognition of the extent of black involvement in
the maritime economy of the region ensured a supply of skilled mariners were employed by the navy…By
the later eighteenth century…the widespread use of black mariners in the Caribbean were largely
uncontroversial.”604 Perkins himself had begun his naval career as child. While stationed on the ship
Boreas “Perkins was present at two crucial moments in the Seven Years War: the capture of Martinique in
1762 and then at the siege and capture of Havana later that year.”605 Perkins had also undergone capture in
French Saint Domingue in 1791 and ultimately escaped execution due to Britain’s diplomatic
602 The nearest population figures available to the 1801 capture date comes from 1790 when the population of Saint
Eustatius was recorded as being 2,375 whites, 511 free people of color, 4,944 enslaved people for a total of 7,830
individuals. Enthoven, “That Abominable Nest of Pirates,” 247.
603 H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds., “Perkins, John,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ref:odnb/50232, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/50232.
604 Hamilton, “‘A Most Active, Enterprising Officer,’” 83.
605 Hamilton, 84.

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negotiations. 606 Perkins was official given command of a “newly purchased schooner called the Spitfire”
by the Jamaica Station’s Commodore Ford in March 1793.607 Perkins also captioned the Marie Antoinette,
“part of the squadron led by Ford that took Port-au-Prince in June 1794 before Perkins was again
promoted to the 14-gun Drake in 1797 until it was taken out of commission in March 1799.”608 Perkins
received command of “the 24-gun Arab with 155 men” in September 1800. 609 From the typical
perspective of many white slaveholders, not only might Perkin’s role as Captain of the invading force
strike fear in the hearts of Dutch colonists, but the power that role gave him over white sailors potentially
had the potential to influence local enslaved people to assert their power. However, the realistic concerns
one might have dispatching Perkins were not enough of a concern for Thomson to appoint a different
vessel.
Although only one man, it is interesting to ponder Captain John Perkins as a representative figure for
the trade-off many slaveholders of color, or pro-slavery colonists of color, may have made at the turn of
the nineteenth century. In addition to his professional obligations, perhaps like Caribbean colonists of
British descent, Perkins was willing to support this slaveholder’s conspiracy to capture Saint Eustatius
because he hoped his assistance might benefit him personally in the future. Although Perkins may not
have been a slaveholder at the time he helped capture the island, he became one later as he focused on a
career as a planter after 1805.610 It does seem like Perkins was able to parlay his military success in 1801
into further economic and social status as “Lady Nugent, wife of [Jamaica’s Lieutenant-Governor] and
chronicler of social life during her time in Jamaica…included Perkins in her invitations to naval
officers.”
611 Perkins was a historical outlier due to his naval career, but he is representative example of the
606 Ibid, 80–81.
607 Ibid, 87.
608 Ibid.
609 Ibid.
610 The historian Douglas Hamilton adds that “Jamaica Almanacs for 1811 and 1812 record Perkins as owning the
Mounty Dorothy estate in Saint Andrews parish, along with, respectively, 23 and 26 slaves.” Ibid, 94.
611 “Captain Perkins” makes three appearances in Lady Nugent’s eponymous diary. Lady Nugent’s husband was
posted on Jamaica from 1801 to 1806. Frank Cundall and Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One
Hundred Years Ago (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 399,
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511784019; Hamilton, “‘A Most Active, Enterprising Officer,’” 93.

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sort of moral compromises other individuals of color who aligned with the planter class may have felt
forced to make during the Age of Revolutions.
Although British colonists on Saint Christopher sought to paint a simple picture of their 1801 seizure
as heroic colonists rescuing Dutch colonists from sheer neighborly benevolence, the unauthorized seizure
of Saint Eustatius instead shows that some colonists aligned with the British empire, those living in Saint
Christopher, perceived themselves to have interests in common with neighboring colonists aligned to the
Dutch empire and were willing to disobey explicit instructions from their imperial overlord in favor of
furthering their own local interests. The international group of colonies perceived their common interests
to be the preservation and institutionalization of slavery and the deepening establishment of colonially
favorable free trade. The willingness of British colonists to collaborate with the empire’s ostensible rivals,
and individuals of color like Captain Perkins, over the orders of their own empire seems to suggest that
British colonists at the turn of the nineteenth century living in the West Indies may have had either a
greater sense of loyalty towards neighboring Caribbean colonists who shared their own lived
experiences—regardless of those colonists’ ethnic background or imperial attachment—or that British
West Indian colonists around the turn of the nineteenth century felt no particular obligation to prioritize
the obligations towards the needs of the empire of which they were a part, at least when they perceived
those needs to be in conflict with their own.

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CONCLUSION
This dissertation is built upon three case studies that examine interethnic collaboration between
British West Indian colonists and colonists aligned with other empires during the late eighteenth century
and very early nineteenth centuries. These cases span the region and examine relations between British
colonists and colonists who had been under French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish sovereignty—all of the
European empires that held significant territory in the circum-Caribbean during this period. As such, this
dissertation offers a panoramic view of how the British Empire and its subjects interacted with all of the
other major groups of Europeans and their empires in the Caribbean during this era. The view we get is
necessarily partial: the case studies shed a bright light on specific locations and moments, which
necessarily leaves other places and episodes in shadow. But by selecting cases touching on all of the
major European powers, I have tried to avoid leaving any part of the region completely in the dark.
A number of common themes emerge from these three cases, spread out across the Caribbean and
spaced over nearly two decades, which reveal underlying features of the experience of colonists across the
region and the nature of empire there during the age of revolutions.
In the first instance, the three case studies show—as have other studies before this one—that British
colonist formed close political, commercial, and even social relationships with their near neighbors who
were under the authority of other empires. Yet what this dissertation shows is that this convergence among
island colonist populations was neither haphazard nor accidental. In case after case, we have seen that
British colonists made deliberate and even explicit attempts to deemphasize ethnic differences among
Caribbean colonists of neighboring colonies when doing so could serve their political or economic
purposes. In the second case study, we saw that Dominicans of French and English descent found ways of
relating to each other through the ideology of creole-royalism and creole-republicanism. In the third case
study, we saw that British colonists on Saint Christopher quite deliberately made the decision to come to
the aid of colonists of Dutch descent on Saint Eustatius.
Conversely, even as British West Indian colonists forged ties with foreign colonists with whom they
shared common interests and aspirations, they repeatedly turned away from a notion of common interest

200
based on shared subjecthood. In other words, British West Indian colonists repeatedly showed themselves
to be perfectly willing to treat their fellow subjects as de facto foreigners when it suited them. Thus, as we
saw in the first case study, colonists in British Honduras rejected the inclusion of the Shoremen into their
community. They treated the Shoremen, whom they considered to be racially distinct and potential
economic competitors, as rivals rather than fellow British subjects to be embraced. Col. Edward
Despard’s seeming inability to understand this attitude, in spite of the mountain of evidence in front of
him, was ultimately his undoing. Similarly, British colonists in Dominica did not hesitate to criticize
fellow colonists of British descent who embraced republican (or even reformist) political ideologies. The
shared bond of allegiance, it seems, did not carry much weight for British West Indian colonists during
the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries.
Looking “vertically,” at the relations between British West Indian colonists and the metropole, the
pattern that emerges from these case studies is one of considerable detachment, verging on disloyalty in
one direction and neglect in the other. As we have seen repeatedly, British colonists did not hesitate to
reject the commands of their imperial government—or indeed to attempt to deceive them. In the case of
Dominica, local colonial officials connected themselves closely with colonists who owed allegiance to a
rival empire, seemingly skirting their duty to the British Crown. In the case of British Honduras, this
tendency took the form of one group of colonists rejecting the empire’s efforts to have them share space
and resources with another group of colonists who were ostensibly their fellow subjects of the same
empire. And in the case of Saint Eustatius, we saw colonists prevaricating—if not outright misleading the
imperial government—in a effort to shape the outcome of imperial warfare in a way that was more to
their liking. The picture that emerges from these case studies is certainly not of a loyal community of
colonists. It is of a collection of colonial communities that were primarily looking out for themselves,
even in the face of direct orders from the imperial center.
Yet if colonists often proved to be disobedient, the empire just as often showed itself to be inattentive
or insensitive to local concerns. In British Honduras, even though the entire land debacle had begun as an
effort by the imperial government to compensate the Shoremen for their financial losses, the Home Office

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gave Despard so little power in his role as Superintendent that it all but ensured that conflicts that arose
would be unmanageable. The Home and Colonial Offices seemed to view Despard, one of the rare
officials who seems to have truly felt an obligation towards all British subjects (in this case, the Shoremen
and the Baymen alike) as more of a pest than the prize he was. Similarly, the imperial government was
quick to assert that British military officers and appointed commissioners had overstepped their orders in
the Danish West Indies, if that would help to resolve a sticky diplomatic situation. For the British imperial
government, loyalty seemed to go in only one direction.
In sum, these cases show that British colonists in the West Indies had a strong inclination to prioritize
inter-colonial relationships, and the political and commercial advantages that accrued from them, over
allegiance and obedience to the metropole. The overall picture that emerges from these three snapshots is
of British imperial subjects who were more connected “horizontally” to their Caribbean neighbors than
they were “vertically” to their nominal home country. It also shows “vertical” ties that were both
weakening and frequently lack in the kind of reciprocity and mutual attention that even eighteenthcentury actors knew were the basis of loyalty and effective sovereign power.
We may see in this overall narrative of imperial resistance and inter-colonial accommodation a story
about the stubborn localism of West Indian planters and other British colonists. Certainly, some of the
behavior of the colonists seems to be most readily explained by a strong sense among West Indian
colonists that their needs came first, and ought to be satisfied. In the first case study, we saw how one
group of colonists resisted a fusion with another. There is good reason to think that it would have
ultimately benefitted the Baymen greatly to welcome the Shoremen. Yet, instead of welcoming their
compatriots, Baymen magistrates at British Honduras worked to make the newcomers’ lives in the colony
intolerable. In Dominica, colonial officials stubbornly resisted calls from their metropolitan government
to stay out of politics in the neighboring French islands. The locals believed that it was impossible for
them not to become involved in the affairs of the nearby islands, so they took the action that seemed to
them the most suitable, regardless of orders from above. In Saint Christopher, the multiethnic conspiracy
to capture Saint Eustatius—after learning that the Dutch island wasn’t designated a target of Trigge’s

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1801 campaign—shows that colonists could go as far as effectively declaring war on their own
responsibility when they felt that their own interests were at stake.
The picture of West Indian colonial society that emerges from Cultural Kinfolk may also contribute
to our understanding of the long-term decline of British colonialism in the Caribbean. A longstanding
historiographic narrative is that plantation society in the British West Indies experienced a major
declension, both internally and within the larger British Empire, around the turn of the nineteenth
century.
612 This decline is usually attributed to a few factors. First, a general shift in British colonialism
towards favoring Asia and Africa. Second, the rise of political abolitionism in the metropole made the
continuation of slavery untenable.
613 Third, snobbish cultural attitudes towards the West Indian plantation
class made Caribbean colonists eager to reassert their Britishness with respect to the metropole. Cultural
Kinfolk suggests that another piece of the story may be that the intransigence of their own colonists in
many of their own colonies pushed British officials to reassert the dominance of the imperial metropole.
Although undoubtedly also motivated by higher moral aims, if we consider this dissertation’s
findings, it is impossible to not perceive that the British empire’s choice to outlaw the transatlantic slave
trade in 1807 as something of a rebuke to entitled colonists. The trade’s ultimate abolition showed the
rapid evolution of a political position, as the empire’s Prime Minister Lord North had publicly rejected a
similar petition to abolish the trade in 1783, which he cast as an impossible request, it is striking that
Parliament would vote to abolish the trade just over twenty years later.614 As part of Lord North’s
reasoning against the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave trade in 1783 was that the practice of slavery
was too deeply imbricated into the nation’s economic practices to be removed, Parliament’s ultimately
choice to abolish the trade seems to be a deliberate decision to reject the empire’s “West Indian Interest”
612 An excellent overview of the major trends in these debates can be found by reading Selwyn H.H. Carrington,
“British West Indian Economic Decline and Abolition, 1775-1807: Revisiting Econocide,” Canadian Journal of
Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes 14, no. 27
(1989): 33–59; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, “Capitalism & Slavery and Caribbean Historiography: An Evaluation,”
The Journal of African American History 88, no. 3 (2003): 304–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/3559074.
613 Burnard, “Powerless Masters.”
614 Paula E. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, First published (Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1.

203
which they would have had to have known might decrease the financial stature of those interested.615 One
explanation for why British officials, who were hesitant to defy pro-slavery interests in 1783, might have
been willing to rebuke the ‘West Indian Interest’ in 1807, seen in light of the case studies in this
dissertation, is that they were not merely reluctantly willing to spurn the West Indians, but were in fact
positively eager for the opportunity to reassert their dominance over Caribbean colonists who were, at
best, unpredictable allies.
It is my sincerest hope that this dissertation might inspire a future scholar to future explore
intercolonial relationships in the revolutionary Caribbean, and indeed, the entire Atlantic world. On a
practical level, the nearly limitless combination of ethnic groups, borders, and cultural crossings in the
early modern world might supply scholars with opportunities to understand how eighteenth-century
colonists understood themselves, as members of individual empires and as their particular category of
citizen, as well as how eighteenth-century colonists understood their colonial neighbors, both those who
were technically within same empire and those represented by rivals. To build on this dissertation’s
findings, I have three recommendations for future research. Most importantly, my development of the
terminology of creole-royalists and creole-republicans might provide a fruitful avenue for future scholars
to follow. Can one find these same categories at other places during the Age of Revolutions? Are there
any other hybrid ethnic or political groupings scholars can detect around this period? What could this
transition from a national based identity to an ethnopolitical one tell scholars about the wider zeitgeist of
the age of revolutions? Second, my microhistory of Dominica from 1783 to 1795 calls for a longer
treatment. How did the relationships between creole-royalists and creole-republicans change on the island
over time? For how many years did British officials in Dominica operate as if their colony were also de
615 Here I am using historian Paula Dumas characterization of this collective. She states the “term ‘West Indian
interest” here refers to the individuals and organizations that had personal or business connections in Britain’s West
Indian colonies. The West Indian interest in Britain possessed complex connections to the West Indies through the
personal possession of property or slave ownership, family investments, birthplace, or relationships. It also included
British and West Indian merchants, ship owners and builders, dock owners, and mortgagees. British West Indians
were not necessarily either attached to formal West Indian organizations or politically active…The West Indian
interest in Britian was thus a large heterogenous group whose members formed a formidable lobbying force in the
eighteenth century and possessed much political and financial power at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
Dumas, 3.

204
facto a French colony? And did Dominicans of French and British descent ever coalesce into one group,
whom one could simply called Dominicans? Finally, I encourage scholars to place the colonists whom I
have studied here in conversations with colonists in other locations of the British empire. Do we see
similar themes among the interethnic relationships in the North American colonies? In Canada? In Asia?
Or indeed was something distinct, as scholars have sometimes advocated, occurring in the colonial
Caribbean? Ultimately, I urge scholars to spend time understanding the ways that colonial settlers
conceived of themselves ontologically, and, to think about the connections and relationships between
colonial settlers across imperial lines as they each deciphered how to proceed in this new geopolitical
world.

205
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Cultural Kinfolk is an examination of the relationships between colonists of differing empires in the colonial Caribbean during a brief period of the Age of Revolutions. A series of three micro-histories, each case study uses military seizure as a lens to examine the relations between British colonists and neighboring colonists aligned to other empires.

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Creator Sigismondi, Lydia Rae (author)

Core Title Cultural kinfolk: intercolonial relations in the revolutionary British West Indies

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 07/15/2024

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Tag British West Indies,colonial identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,rivalry

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