Author Description

Dust jacket notes: "From the founding of St. Christopher in 1624 to the terrible earthquake that destroyed the metropolis of Port Royal in 1692, the English and Irish who emigrated to the West Indies struggled to establish permanent colonies, as did their fellow countrymen in New England and on the Chesapeake. Adaptation to the tropical environment was difficult, the attempt to use indentured white servants ended tragically, and only when new staple crops - cotton and sugar - and a new labor force from Africa were introduced did the Caribbean colonies improve economically. Even with these radical changes, however, well-rounded societies did not form in the Leeward Islands of Barbados during the seventeenth century. The Spanish, French, and English maintained that peace in Europe did not extend to the Caribbean. Foreign wars, Carib raids, and freebooters disrupted all normal activities, and white men also had to battle the climate and epidemic diseases, which always seemed to ravage the West Indies. Further, human greed, the failure of religion, and the cruelty of the age insured that there would be 'no peace beyond the line' for anyone who ventured to the West Indies. This fascinating narrative is the first to deal with the daily lives of all the people - white and black - who inhabited the British West Indies in the seventeenth century. With sympathetic insight and a firm grasp of the social and economic conditions of the time, the authors describe the hardships faced by the white settlers, discuss the disappearance of the indigenous Indian population, and the establishment of the institution of slavery and the lives of the slaves on the sugar plantations. Moreover they provide an important basis for comparison with the contemporaneous experiences of th esecond stream of British migration to North America...."