In the foregoing I have attempted to distill the wine of history into
something more like a brandy, while still retaining as much authentic
flavor as possible. Many of the episodes in the novel are fictionalized
renderings of actual events, albeit condensed, and the majority of
individuals depicted also were drawn from life. The action spans
several years, from the first major slave auction on Barbados, thought
to have occurred slightly before mid-century, to the English seizure of
Jamaica in 1655. The structure of race and economics in England's
Caribbean colonies changed dramatically in those short years, a social
transformation on a scale quite unlike any other I can recall. The
execution of King Charles and the Barbados war of independence also
took place during that crucial time.
All documents, letters, and broadsides cited here are essentially
verbatim save the two directly involving Hugh Winston. Of the people,
there naturally were many more involved than a single novel could
encompass. Hugh Winston is a composite of various persons and
viewpoints of that age (such as Thomas Tryon), ending of course with
the famous buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, later appointed Governor of
Jamaica in recognition of his success pillaging Spanish treasure.
Governor Dalby Bedford is a combination of Governor Philip Bell and his
successor Francis, Lord Willoughby. (Neither was actually killed in the
Barbados revolution. The revolt collapsed when, after defectors had
welcomed Parliament's forces ashore, five days of rain immobilized the
planters, whereupon a stray English cannon ball knocked down the door
of a plantation house where the island's militia commanders were
gathered and laid out one of the sentries, demoralizing them into
surrender.) Katherine Bedford was inspired by Governor Bell's wife, "in
whome by reason of her quick and industrious spirit lay a great stroak
of the government." Benjamin Briggs is an embodiment of many early
settlers; his installation of the first sugar mill on the island and
his construction of a walled compound for protection recall James Drax
and Drax Hall, and his later career is not unlike that of Thomas
Modyford, a prosperous Barbados planter who later became governor of
Jamaica.
Anthony and Jeremy Walrond are vaguely reminiscent of the prominent
royalists Humphrey and George Walrond. Edmond Calvert was drawn for
some portions of the story from Sir George Ayscue and for others from
Admiral William Penn. Richard Morris is a combination of Captain
William Morris and General Robert Venables, and James Powlett recalls
Vice Admiral Michael Pack. Most of the Council and Assembly members
appearing here were actually in those bodies, and my Joan Fuller is
homage to a celebrated Bridgetown brothel proprietor of the same name;
of them all, I sincerely hope I have done most justice to her memory.
Jacques le Basque was modeled on various early boucaniers--beginning
with Pierre le Grand, the first to seize a Spanish ship (using
dugouts), and ending with the much-hated French buccaneer-king Le
Vasseur, who built Forte de la Roche and its "dovecote." Tibaut de
Fontenay was the latter's nephew, who murdered him much as described
over the matter of a shared mistress.
Although Serina, as mulatto "bed-warmer" to Benjamin Briggs, had no
specific prototype at that early time (a condition soon to change, much
to the dismay of English wives at home), Atiba was inspired by a Gold
Coast slave named Coffe who led an unsuccessful revolt on Barbados in
the seventeenth century, intending to establish a black nation along
African lines. As punishment he and several others were "burned alive,
being chained at the stake." When advised of his sentence, he
reportedly declared, "If you roast me today, you cannot roast me
tomorrow." A contemporary broadside depicting the affair retailed
briskly in London. Atiba's subsequent career, as a Maroon leader with
whom the English eventually were forced to negotiate, also had various
historical models, including the fearsome Cudjoe, head of a warlike
nation of free Negroes still terrifying English planters on Jamaica
almost eighty years after it was seized.
Very few physical artifacts survive from those years. On Barbados one
can see Drax Hall, on which Briggs Hall was closely modeled, and little
else. On Tortuga, this writer chopped his way through the jungle and
located the site of Le Vasseur's Forte de la Roche and "dovecote." A
bit of digging uncovered some stonework of the fort's outer wall, but
all that remained of the "dovecote" was a single plaster step, almost
three and a half centuries old, once part of its lower staircase and
now lodged in the gnarled root of a Banyan tree growing against the
huge rock atop which it was built. On Jamaica there seems to be nothing
left, save a few relics from the heyday of Port Royal. Only the people
of those islands, children of a vast African diaspora, remain as living
legacy of Europe's sweet tooth in the seventeenth century.
The story here was pieced together from many original sources, for
which thanks is due the superb Library and Rare Book Room of Columbia
University, the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, the
Archives of Barbados, and the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston. For
information on Yoruba culture and practices, still very much alive in
Brazil in parts of the Caribbean, I am grateful to Dr. John Mason of
the Yoruba Theological Seminary, the Caribbean Cultural Center of New
York, and friends in Haiti who have over the years exposed me to
Haitian _vodun_. For information on Tortuga and the boucaniers,
including some vital research on Forte de la Roche, I am indebted to
the archeologist Daniel Koski-Karell; and for their hospitality to an
enquiring novelist I thank Les Freres des Ecoles chretiennes, Christian
Brothers missionaries on the Isle de la Tortue, Haiti. I am also
grateful to Dr. Gary Puckrein, author of Little England, for his
insights concerning the role slavery played in Barbados' ill-starred
attempt at independence.
Those friends who have endured all or portions of this manuscript, pen
in hand, and provided valuable criticisms and suggestions include, in
alphabetical order--Norman and Susan Fainstein, Joanna Field, Joyce
Hawley, Julie Hoover, Ronald Miller, Ann Prideaux, Gary Prideaux, and
Peter Radetsky. Without them this could never have been completed. I am
also beholden to my agent, Virginia Barber, and to my editor, Anne
Hukill Yeager, for their tireless encouragement and assistance.