Abstract
In the seventeenth century the earth and its climates were conceived of as “limited by two Parallels, distant from the Equinoctial toward each Pole,” with five zones of “a certain quantity of land”—two temperate, two frigid, “and one Torrid.” Zones “distinguish[ed] the quality of the Air” in relation to heat and cold and the position of shadows.1 Thomas Tryon’s sojourn in the West Indies confirmed a jaundiced view of human nature because Britons seemed unable to temper their passions to the extremes of a place. There was “no Region so happy, no Elevation of the Pole so temperate, no Air so salubrious, as to keep People in Health whether they will or no, and those that obstinately violate Nature, and wilfully persue courses absolutely destructive, may justly be rank’t amongst the number of Self-Murtherers.”2 The speed with which British settlers cleared the forest would, in a period of ecological awareness, be considered an obstinate violation of nature: contemporaries were more liable to note how much easier was their breathing. Wherever the land was not steep and mountainous, it was made suitable for cultivation and this entailed stripping it of its woodland. In the mid-seventeenth century, land was described as “fallen and unfallen,” but the extent and rate of woodland clearance awaits a systematic study of the wording of hundreds of thousands of deeds, patents, and plat-books.3 At the end of the century, however, woods were still privately managed, even in areas of relative population density: appraising land close to fortifications required public purchase, and privately owned woodland in St. James’s, Barbados, was deemed to hamper the operation of Queen’s Fort.4
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Notes
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (London, 1690); J. P. Day, “Locke on property,” Philosophical Quarterly 16.64 (1966): 207–220;
Karl Olivecrona, “Appropriation in the state of nature: Locke on the origin of property,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35.2 (1974): 211–230;
Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: the Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See chapter 5.
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As portrayed on the so-called “Robinson Painting,” depicting a procession traveling into Bridgetown, thought to be Sir Thomas Robinson (Governor 1742–1747), painter unknown, in the collection of the Barbados Museum; Karl Watson, “The Sephardic Jews of Bridgetown,” in Woodville Marshall and Pedro Welch (eds.), Beyond the Bridge: A Series of Lectures to commemorate the 375th Anniversary of Bridgetown (Bridgetown: Barbados Museum and Historical Society/UWI, Cave Hill, 2005), p. 41.
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J[ohn] A[llen], Judicial Astrologers Totally Routed ([London], 1659), p. 27. Among Norwood’s defenders were William Leybourn, The Compleat Surveyor (London, 1653), and Baptist Sutton who purchased a copy of Leybourn that year and added notes to himself. Richard Norwood, Trigonometrie. Or, The Doctrine of Triangles (London, 1631); R[ichard] N[orwood], Fortification or Architectvre Military (London, 1639); Richard Norwood, The Sea-Mans Practice (London, 1655); Mr. Richard Norwood’s VVorks (London: for Richard Mount “at the Postern on Tower Hill; where you may have all sorts of Mathematical and Sea Books,” 1694); Edward Harris, “Bermuda’s man of knots and degrees,” Heritage Matters 2 (2008): 28–29. Norwood set up a school on Bermuda in 1637.
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As a study of “necrogeography” this account has a considerable way to travel, but it has not been undertaken for the seventeenth century and not for the West Indies, unlike the nineteenth century mid-west: see Richard V. Francaviglia, “The cemetery as an evolving cultural landscape” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61.3 (1971): 501–509.
Among the earliest with such additional character reference flourishes is that of Charles Atkinson, who had served as a secretary to Sir Thomas Lynch and Lord Vaughan as Governors of Jamaica, and who, just about to embark for England “was seized by an invidious and malignant feaver under a paroxisme.” He died on November 20, 1678 and his memorial is in St. Catherine’s, Spanish Town. It is blue marble, with the arms and crest of Atkinson of Newark, Nottinghamshire. Also in St. Catherine’s, Colonel John Bourden was a councillor but also “a lover of justice a loving husband a faithful friend and a good master,” born Coleraine 1633, died Jamaica August 18, 1697. Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).
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Debate still rages over the degree to which the Goose Creek Men were renegades, uncontrollable Barbadians, Anglicans, enslavers of indigenous peoples; a combination, all, or none: L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
Alan Gallay, The Rise of the Indian Slave Trade in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Described as a “disturbing antiproprietary faction,” van Ruymbeke has added to the literature that the Goose Creek Men were neither Barbadian nor Anglican: van Ruymbeke, From Babylon to Eden, pp. 33–34.
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James Dobie and John Shedden Dobie, Cunninghame Topographized, by Timothy Pont, A.M., 1604–1608 (Glasgow, 1876);
Ruth Duthie, “The planting plans of some seventeenth-century flower gardens,” Garden History 18.2 (1990): 77–102.
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© 2014 Sarah Barber
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Barber, S. (2014). Place. In: The Disputatious Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480019_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480019_2
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