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Weathering the Storms: Hurricanes and Risk in the British Greater Caribbean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Matthew Mulcahy
Matthew Mulcahy
Affiliation:
MATTHEW MULCAHY professor of history atLoyola College in Maryland.
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Abstract

The risk of hurricanes made planting in the British Greater Caribbean, a region stretching from Barbados through South Carolina, an especially volatile and uncertain business during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The storms were a new experience for European colonists, and they quickly became the most feared element of the region's environment. Hurricanes routinely leveled plantations and towns, destroyed crops and infrastructure, and claimed hundreds of lives. The widespread destruction resulted in significant losses for planters and necessitated major reconstruction efforts. Most planters survived these economic shocks, often with the help of outside credit, but at times hurricanes were the breaking point for smaller or heavily indebted planters. The profits that came from sugar and rice kept planters rebuilding, but the threat posed by the storms shaped the experience of plantership in the region throughout the period.

Type
Special Forum: Reputation and Uncertainty in Early America
Information
Business History Review , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , Winter 2004 , pp. 635 - 663
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2004

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References

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24 I am unable to account for the discrepancy between the total losses listed in this document and the total listed on the official report.

25 “Return of the Losses in the Parish of St. George by the late Hurricane on the 10th day of October, 1780,” RB 9/3/9, Barbados Archive, Black Rock, St. Michael. The enumerator made several small mistakes, which appear when the numbers are recalculated. For example, in the entry for John French, he reported the loss of forty-five cattle (£300) and of housing and other buildings (£1500), but entered the total loss as £1845. The analysis in the text is based on my calculations. A few individuals with the same name appear. I have treated them as separate claims. Likewise, it appears that a few husbands and wives entered separate claims, and I have treated them as separate entries.

26 Richard Gill to William FitzHerbert, 23 Apr. 1781, FitzHerbert Papers, D 239, M/E 20775; “State of Buildings,” 12 Jan. 1781, FitzHerbert Papers, M/E 20756. Papers located in Derbyshire Record Office. I consulted a microfilm copy of these records at the Barbados Archives in Black Rock, St. Michael.

27 “Estimate of the Losses,” FitzHerbert Papers, M/E 20755; “January 12, 1781 Condition of Plantation Land,” M/E 20775; Gill to FitzHerbert, 23 Apr. 1781, M/E 20775.

28 “State of Buildings,” 12 Jan. 1781, M/E 20756; Gill to FitzHerbert, 23 Apr. 1781, M/E 20775.

29 Gill to FitzHerbert, 23 Apr. 1781, M/E 20775.

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46 Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 Aug. 1767; Laurens to William Cowles, 15 Oct. 1768, and Laurens to Cowles, 23 Aug. 1768, in The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 6, pp. 133, 79; see also Ian Steele, Kenneth, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford, 1986), 25–26Google Scholar; Morgan, Kenneth, “Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” English Historical Review 107 (July 1992): 648Google Scholar.

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52 Perez, Winds of Change, 83–108; Sheridan, Richard, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (Oct. 1976): 633–35CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. On cotton, see Dickson, William, Mitigation of Slavery in Two Parts (London, 1814, repr. 1970), 376–77Google Scholar; Richardson, Bonham, “Catastrophes and Change on St. Vincent,” National Geographic Research 5 (1989): 111–25Google Scholar. On the decline of rice planting in the low country and the role of the storms, see Heyward, Duncan, Seed from Madagascar (Columbia, S.C., repr. 1993), 221–48Google Scholar; Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe,” 236–37.

53 Pares, A West-India Fortune, 80.