The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica, and the Territories thereon Depending: From the First Discovery of the Island by Christopher Columbus to the Year 1746

By James Knight and Jack P. Greene

Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight—a merchant, planter, and sometime Crown official and legislator in Jamaica—wrote a massive two-volume history of the island. The first volume provided a narrative of the colony’s development up to the mid-1740s, while the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life as it had developed by the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the winter of 1746–47 and held in the British Library, this work is now published for the first time. Well researched and intelligently critical, Knight’s work is not only the most comprehensive account of Jamaica’s ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is also one of the best representations of the provincial mentality as it had emerged in colonial British America between the founding of Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned scholar Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean history unique in its contemporary perspective, detail, and scope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813945576

James Knight

James Knight was raised in the country town of Gunnedah in north-west NSW. From a young age he spent endless hours bashing a cricket ball into a chicken-wire fence in the backyard of the family property. When he realised he'd never be good enough to play for Australia, he dreamed of becoming a cricket writer and commentator. In the past decade his career has spanned Sydney metropolitan radio, press and television. A three-time winner of the NSW Cricket Association's best TV feature, he has covered tours in India, Pakistan, South Africa, the West Indies and England. He is the author of Lee2: Lee to the Power of Two, with Shane and Brett Lee.

Book preview

The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica

The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica

and the Territories thereon depending from the First Discovery of the Island by Christopher Columbus, to the Year 1746

JAMES KNIGHT

EDITED WITH ANNOTATIONS AND AN INTRODUCTION BY

JACK P. GREENE

IMAGES EDITED BY

TAYLOR STOERMER

WITH A HISTORIOGRAPHIC ESSAY BY

TREVOR BURNARD

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Knight, James, 1745 or 1746, author. | Greene, Jack P., editor, writer of added commentary, writer of introduction. | Stoermer, Taylor, editor. | Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme), author.

Title: The natural, moral, and political history of Jamaica and the territories thereon depending : from the first discovery of the island by Christopher Columbus, to the year 1746 / James Knight ; edited with annotations and an introduction by Jack P. Greene ; images edited by Taylor Stoermer ; with a historiographic essay by Trevor Burnard.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020026840 (print) | LCCN 2020026841 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945569 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813945576 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—Jamaica—History—18th century—Early works to 1800. | Natural history—Jamaica—History—18th century—Early works to 1800. | Jamaica—History—To 1962—Early works to 1800. | Jamaica—Politics and government—To 1962—Early works to 1800. | Jamaica—Social life and customs—Early works to 1800. | Jamaica—Description and travel—Early works to 1800. | Jamaica—Economic conditions—Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC F1884 .K48 2020 (print) | LCC F1884 (ebook) | DDC 972.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026840

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026841

End papers: A New Map of the Island of Jamaica: With Exact Plans of the Towns of Port Royal, and Kingston, Archibald Bontein, London, 1753. (Harvard University Map Collection, University Special Collections)

Cover art and frontispiece: From an insert on Benjamin Haynes’s Plan of Lucky Valley Estate, Clarendon, 1816. (Long Family Papers, Additional Manuscripts 43379, item no. C, British Library)

Unless otherwise noted, images are courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

For NORMAN FIERING, scholar, advisor, editor, and friend, who during his tenure as director of the John Carter Brown Library presided over the creation of an important international center for the advanced study of the early modern American world

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EDITORIAL CONVENTIONS

NOTE ON IMAGES

JAMES KNIGHT AND HIS HISTORY

JACK P. GREENE

Volume I

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART 1. The Etymology of the word Jamaica; and the Discovery of the Island by Christopher Columbus. Some account of the Native Indians, before they were Subdued and Extirpated by the Spaniards; with such other Occurrences, as happened, while it was in their possession.

PART 2. Of the Expedition and miscarriage of the Design against St. Domingo; The conquest of Jamaica by the English, and such other Occurrences as happened before the Restoration of King Charles the Second, or any form of Civil Government was Established.

PART 3. Of the Administration of the Severall Governors of Jamaica. The Origin and Exploits of the Privateers Commonly Called Buccaniers and all the Other Remarkable Transactions by Sea and Land, which happened during the Respective Governments.

Early Settlement and Travails, 1660–1684

Slave Rebellion, Natural Disaster, and War, 1684–1702

War and Constitutional Struggle, 1702–1716

Constitutional Settlement, 1716–1728

On the Defensive, 1728–1742

Volume II

PART 4. A Geographical Description of the Island, with its Mountains, Mines, Plains, Towns, Precincts, Harbours, Bays, Fortifications and Buildings, together with the Territories thereone depending.

PART 5. Of The Climate, Air, Seasons, Winds, Weather, Currents, Water and Rivers; as also of the Diseases and Distempers Most Frequent in Jamaica, and Other Parts of the West Indies.

PART 6. Of the Inhabitants, Masters, Servants, and Negroes; Their Number, Strength and Manner of living; as Also an Account of the Negroes, who were many Years in Rebellion, and Settled in the Mountains, together with the Treaty made with Them in 1738, upon which They submitted, and became Free Subjects of Great Britain.

PART 7. Of the Government of the Island, Civil and Military, of the Laws; Courts of Justice; Publick Offices; Revenues, and Church Affairs; with some Observations thereupon.

PART 8. Of the Soil and Productions, the Manner of Planting Sugar Canes, and Making of Sugar, Rum, and Indigo; Also Cocoa, Coffee, Ginger, Piemento, Cotton, and other Commodities, that are or May be Produced in Jamaica.

PART 9. Of Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Other Animals, and Insects in Jamaica.

PART 10. Of the Situation and Natural Advantages of Jamaica, and the Trade thereof to and from Great Britain, Ireland, Africa, the Plantations in North America, and other Parts, with some Observations and Proposals, for their Encouragement, Improvement and Security.

Those Other English Colonies: The Historiography of Jamaica in the Time of James Knight

TREVOR BURNARD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, the editor is grateful to the British Library for permission to publish James Knight’s manuscript History of Jamaica; to the Reed Foundation and the University of Melbourne for the funds necessary to bring it to fruition; and to Taylor Stoermer and Trevor Burnard, both former students, for their respective contributions to this publication. Norman Fiering, to whom this volume is dedicated, not only provided editing and publishing advice but put me in touch with Jane Rubin, director of the Reed Foundation, who offered encouraging support for this project over more than a decade after I first talked to her about it, and to David Latham who shepherded that foundation’s generous grant through its final stages. Mary Gwaltney Vaz and Sarah Springer transcribed Knight’s manuscript; Steve Sarson made an initial, extensive, and useful pass at the annotations; and Michelle LeMaster, Emma Hart, and Ellen Person proofread the typescript. James Robertson supplied me with a copy of Knight’s will. Margaret Porter translated a critical Latin passage. Bradley Dickson helped with the annotations for part 1. Taylor and Emily Stoermer aided in finding a competent digitizer for the many images I collected for this project, and Kerry Sheridan did the digitization. In collecting these images, most of them from the John Carter Brown Library, the staff, especially Susan Danforth, Ross Mulcare, Kim Nusco, and Val Andrews, were invariably helpful. Special help in the collection of images came from Charina Castillo, assistant, Department of Rights and Reproductions, New-York Historical Society; Yvonne Fraser Clarke, manager, Special Collections Department, and Keisha Myers, librarian, National Library of Jamaica; Richard Dabb, picture researcher, Museum of London; Dr. Courtney Skipton Long, acting assistant curator/prints and drawings, and Maria Singer, imaging and rights assistant, Yale Center for British Art; Anna Louise Mason, archive and documentation manager, Castle Howard Estate Ltd.; Ann McShane, digital collections archivist, the Library Company of Philadelphia; Robin Ness, senior library specialist, Special Collections Department, Rockefeller Library, Brown University; Claire Rudyj, Lennoxlove Trust; Susan Sherrit, gallery manager, the Harley Gallery, and Dr. Sophie Littlewood, curator, the Portland Collection; and Cecile van der Harten, Head Image Department, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Trevor Burnard, Max Edelson, Philip D. Morgan, Brooke Newman, James Robertson, and Linda Sturtz offered much useful advice and encouragement. Amy Turner Bushnell applied her customarily excellent editorial skills to my introduction and captions and to the final version of the index. As copyeditor, Margaret A. Hogan saved me from many mistakes and did a superb job in standardizing the various elements in this complicated project. David Robertson and I collaborated on the index. And finally, Richard Holway and colleagues at the University of Virginia Press—especially Morgan Myers, who took primary responsibility for shepherding this volume through the editorial process—once again demonstrated their adventurous spirit in taking on this difficult publishing project and their excellent work in bringing it to a conclusion.

Editorial Conventions

This text—in the handwriting of an unknown professional copyist or clerk with some interlineations and revisions in James Knight’s own hand—is fully legible. Like many eighteenth-century texts, it exhibits considerable variations in spelling, for which there is no way to tell whether Knight or the copyist was responsible. With a few exceptions, however, I have followed the spelling in the text. Seeking to make as little use of [sic] as possible, I have, first, silently corrected the spelling of all words in which i, rather than e, should follow c, as, for instance, in receiving. Second, the manuscript being inconsistent in its punctuation of possessive nouns, I have routinely added an apostrophe before a final s, as in majesty’s. Third, I have silently corrected obvious copyist errors. Although Knight made free and often haphazard use of the comma, I have removed commas only when they seemed likely to confuse the reader. Added commas or semicolons are put in square brackets. Every sentence ends with a period, although Knight’s copyist occasionally omitted them. Using square brackets, I have expanded contractions and abbreviations, but I have not endeavored to fill in the blank spaces that Knight left, pending further information, simply rendering them as [blank]. Knight himself did little annotating, marking the places to which his footnotes referred with a simple asterisk. I have numbered these notes continuously with my own editorial notes. To distinguish them, I have ended Knight’s notes with —Author. In notes that contain material from both Knight and myself, my portion ends with —Ed. In the interest of cutting costs on this extensive project, I have endeavored to keep annotations relatively short and free from references to a source unless the information in the note came directly from it. To the same end, I have not annotated information from standard sources such as the Dictionary of National Biography. I have tried to identify as many as possible of the people Knight mentions and the sources he used, but have not annotated the many places that appear in his text.

Note on Images

Had James Knight’s History of Jamaica been published during his lifetime, the publisher might well have commissioned an engraver to provide some illustrations, but the manuscript itself offers no indication that any were intended. From early on in our negotiations for a publishing subsidy from the Reed Foundation, however, Jane Rubin urged me to enrich the work with a generous number of visual images. Starting with a substantial body of contemporary images that I had collected over many years for various projects and adding still others recommended by Taylor Stoermer, whom I recruited to serve as visual editor, I selected and wrote the captions for the seventy-seven images in this volume and also chose the images for the dust jacket and end papers. Dr. Stoermer made sure that the digitized images were in the requisite format, obtained the permissions to publish them where necessary, and gathered them into a single digital file. Together, we edited the images, at times cropping them to sharpen and maximize their capacity to illustrate the subject depicted.

Two criteria governed my selection of images. The first was that they be essentially contemporary to Knight’s own generation. Only a few images derive from the years after the early 1780s (when the rapid expansion of the antislavery movement, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars changed the cultural map of the Western world), and those few depict nothing that would have been unfamiliar to Knight himself.

The second was that they correspond to Knight’s own mindset and objectives. A longtime settler himself, he wrote from a settler perspective that championed empire, colonization, trade, and what then passed for free governments; he was intensely anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish, and pro-British; and was deeply critical of corrupt, inept, or imperious metropolitan officials and of metropolitan ignorance of the best interests of the empire, as defined by those on the ground in the colonies.

Because the indigenous Tainos had been largely displaced during Jamaica’s century and a half Spanish occupation, Knight was far more sympathetic to them than were settlers who encountered populous and resistant indigenous cultures elsewhere in the Americas. The intensely anti-Spanish views of Spanish-indigenous relations used here to depict the indigenous population of Jamaica—the only contemporary images available on that subject—all come from English or (mostly) Dutch works that, in contrast to modern scholarship, accepted and for political purposes circulated the black legend about Spanish transgressions against indigenous people in the Americas, without, again in contrast to modern scholarship, exhibiting much explicit awareness that British and other European colonizing powers also were guilty of killing off, mistreating, dispossessing, and reducing indigenous and other captured peoples to enslavement and civic emasculation. The use of such images is thus fully compatible with Knight’s own views.

Because the enslavement of Africans and their descendants would not come under international attack until nearly thirty years after his death, Knight, like the overwhelming majority of British people involved in colonization, questioned neither the utility of the institution of slavery to meet the labor demands of empire nor its compatibility with metropolitan English legal and cultural values. Rather, in sharp contrast to those colonials who in the mid-1770s took the lead in formulating a proslavery argument, Knight displayed no tendency to denigrate the mental capacities of the enslaved nor the integrity of their cultures, emphasizing instead their obvious aptitude for all kinds of work and social interaction, and making a serious effort to understand and appreciate their cultural diversity. The images of Black people in this volume, all showing them at work and in subjection to or at odds with whites, are illustrative of Knight’s views. A list of illustrations can be found in the back matter.

James Knight and His History

Jack P. Greene

Jamaica, one of the four Greater Antilles in the West Indies, had been a Spanish colony for a century and a half before an English expeditionary force captured it and, during the last half of the 1650s, drove out the Spanish settlers and all but a remnant of their slaves, who established autonomous settlements in the least accessible areas of the mountainous island. Under the Spanish, the colony was an early bloomer, reaching its high point in the first third of the sixteenth century, but as Spanish emigrants bypassed and existing settlers deserted the once thriving island for more dynamic economic regions of colonial Spanish America, it underwent a slow but significant economic and demographic decline into a peripheral area of the Spanish Main, unable in 1655 to repel an invading army. Within a quarter century after the English conquest, however, Jamaica went from a Spanish backwater to England’s most promising American colony.

Initially valued for its proximity to the rich colonies of the Spanish Empire and its plantation economy on the Barbadian model, it quickly became notorious for the new English port city of Port Royal, whose unabashed privateering and marauding against the Spanish in times of war and of clandestine trade with the Spanish Main at all times made it the richest English city in the Americas, overflowing with gold, silver, and ships, and the mariners, service personnel, and shopkeepers who flocked to share in the wealth. Outside of Port Royal, wealth flowed into the countryside to fuel the labor and plant demands of an expanding sugar and provision economy. Over the next century, no English American colony, not even the fabulously successful sugar colony of Barbados, got more press attention in London, as travel writers, trade analysts, chorographers, cartographers, historians, naturalists, belletricians, political combatants, social critics, moralists, and satirists, rushing to capitalize on the island’s growing fame, produced an astonishing volume of literature about it.

By the turn of the seventeenth century, Jamaica was better known and more thoroughly valued in the metropolis than any other American colony. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, it surpassed Barbados as Britain’s most valuable overseas settler colony, a status that it would enjoy throughout the eighteenth century, leaving the more populous continental colonies of Virginia and New England considerably behind as partners in trade and even as consumers of English manufactures. No wonder, then, that during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a proud Jamaican would be inspired to produce a formal history of Jamaica’s rapid rise and tumultuous development, or that that undertaking would result in a work of genuine intellectual distinction and extraordinary historical utility. That historian was James Knight, and that history, his The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica and the Territories Thereon Depending: From the Earliest Time to the Year 1742.

Inspired by a brisk interest in England in the exotic settings and economic and political results of English colonizing activities in America, enterprising participants in that process early produced works that they referred to as histories but that consisted of a blend of historical narrative and geographical, economic, and cultural description. Works by Captain John Smith on Virginia¹ and Richard Ligon on Barbados² were two of the more substantial examples. At the beginning of England’s second century of American colonization, Robert Beverley, a prominent Virginia planter, took this historical impulse to a new level with the publication in 1705 of his History and Present State of Virginia,³ a work that signaled the emergence of a new genre of historical writing about the English colonies in America, the most accurate name for which should be provincial histories. Over the next century, many of the more successful, populous, and richer colonies were the subjects of such studies. Written by native creoles or long-term residents during the three decades between 1750 and 1780, William Smith’s two-volume History of the Province of New-York,⁴ Thomas Hutchinson’s three-volume History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,⁵ Edward Long’s three-volume History of Jamaica,⁶ and Alexander Hewat’s two-volume Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia⁷ provide four excellent examples of this genre. Expressions of provincial patriotism and often including key illustrative documents, these works, from Beverley onward, used some combination of narrative, chorography, and important documents to promote provincial historical consciousness within their respective polities, correct metropolitan misconceptions about their character and development, and enhance metropolitan appreciation of their value to Great Britain. Constructed between 1737 and the mid-1740s, Knight’s imposing History falls squarely into and is a relatively early example of this literary tradition.

Far from paling by comparison with these well-known works, Knight’s History represents a remarkable intellectual achievement. From the founding of Virginia in 1607 through the mid-eighteenth-century imperial wars for empire that began in 1739 with the War of Jenkins’ Ear, no other historian of any colony in British America produced a historical study so substantial, so comprehensive in scope, so thoroughly researched in original sources and contemporary published literature, so grounded in close personal observation, or so penetrating in its analysis. By providing a complete history and a full and accurate description of Jamaica, Knight endeavored to raise historical consciousness among Jamaica’s free population, to promote British interest in and knowledge of what many metropolitan Britons already thought of as their most important American colony, and—particularly impressive—to raise metropolitan consciousness about flaws that he systematically identified in the British imperial system. A profound expression of provincial sensibilities and attitudes about the essential foundations and larger meanings of the process of British settler colonizing activities in America, Knight’s History provides an excellent guide to the provincial mentality—and to the aspirations, anxieties, and pride that underlay that mentality—not just of free Jamaicans but of settler colonists throughout British America.

Yet, until now, this sturdy monument to the early modern British Empire in America and national treasure for Jamaica has remained unpublished. Having finished his manuscript and reviewed and annotated sample printer’s proofs for the table of contents and preface, Knight died in late 1745 or early 1746 before the project could proceed to publication. For whatever reasons, the executors of his estate never pushed it through to publication, the finished manuscript in a clerk’s hand probably remaining with one of his heirs for several decades before it came to the attention and then into the hands of Edward Long (1734–1813) sometime after Long had published his own three-volume History of Jamaica in 1774. Although Long made extensive use of Knight’s much more comprehensive work in a revision of his 1774 work,⁸ he never published this revised edition, and in the early nineteenth century Knight’s manuscript came into the possession and care of the British Library with the acquisition of the Long Family Papers. It has since been available only to interested scholars and readers in the library’s manuscript division, where it can be found in Additional Manuscripts 12418 and 12419. With the permission of the library, it is here published for the first time in a handsome edition made possible by generous subsidies from the Reed Foundation and Melbourne University. This work includes the full text of Knight’s History along with the editor’s introduction and annotations, and Trevor Burnard’s essay on the modern historiography on Jamaica before 1750. Although Knight himself provided no illustrations for his work, this addition includes seventy-seven illustrations, all drawn from contemporary sources from Knight’s own era for which Taylor Stoermer served as visual editor.

Vita: Who Was James Knight?

James Knight is all over the public records of Jamaica during his residence in the colony, but we know relatively little about his private life: where and when he was born, whom he married, how many children he sired, how extensive his immediate social circle was in either Jamaica or London, or even how he looked, no portrait having come to light. By the time he himself emigrated from Great Britain to Jamaica in 1712 to take up a post in Britain’s overseas imperial bureaucracy, however, Knight was already a conspicuous surname in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Jamaica. A soldier named George Knight had died during the English conquest of the island, and a trio of Knights obtained seats in Jamaica’s elected representative assembly, Andrew representing Vere Parish between 1677 and 1683; Ralph, sequentially, St. Andrew and Port Royal in 1688 and 1689; and Dr. Samuel, Kingston from 1698 to 1701 and St. Andrew in 1702, with the constituencies of Ralph and Samuel suggesting that they were probably merchants. Even more prominent, Colonel Charles Knight, an overseas merchant involved with the African slave trade, was a member of the provincial military establishment and occupied a seat on the Jamaica Council from 1690 until his death in late 1706. Whether any of these people was either related to another or provided a family connection and economic base on which James could build a long and notable career as a merchant, officeholder, and landholder in Jamaica remains to be established. As he inadvertently reveals in the text of his history, he had himself resided in Jamaica for at least a part of his childhood, which suggests that his father was one of the trio of Charles, Ralph, or Samuel.⁹ His exact paternity could possibly be established through a more intense investigation of the rich holdings of the Jamaica Archives and Island Record Office in Spanish Town.

Whatever such research may uncover, James Knight seems to have come from a mercantile background and, at the time of his arrival in Jamaica in 1712, to have been a mature and accomplished adult, his ability to rent the office of deputy receiver general from the longtime nonresident patentee Leonard Compere suggesting that Knight was already a person of means looking to create an estate in Jamaica. By 1716, just four years after Knight’s arrival, Acting Governor Peter Heywood, impressed by Knight’s handling of his official duties and perhaps also by his activities as a merchant, considered recommending him to London authorities to fill a vacancy in the Jamaica Council, whose twelve members were, at least prescriptively, the leading men in the colony. But Knight’s tenure as a royal official was relatively short, lasting just six years. In June 1717, Compere sold his receiver generalship patent to Richard Mill, to whom Knight turned over his duties in 1718 when Mill arrived in Jamaica to take up the office himself. By early 1719, records refer to Knight as the late Receiver General, and Knight was describing himself simply as a merchant at Kingston, who, as he testified before the British Board of Trade in May 1726, had lived several years as a factor in Jamaica, a factor being a merchant who handled shipments from British merchants in the colony.¹⁰

Although Knight never achieved a seat on the Jamaica Council, his loss of the deputy receiver generalship did not impede his growing public prominence in Kingston, and over the next two decades, as he continued to follow his mercantile pursuits and to acquire and manage productive land holdings, he rose to become custos rotulorum (the first among the parish magistrates) of Kingston Parish, which he also represented in the Jamaica Assembly from 1722 to 1725 and again from 1732 to 1737. During at least parts of five years of the seven-year gap in his assembly service, from 1723 to 1728, Knight was in England, perhaps living in Charton, Kent, now in east London. Whether this long trip was for reasons of health, business, or other considerations is unknown, but while he was there, he appeared before the Board of Trade at a hearing on Jamaica’s African slave imports in May 1726¹¹ and, with other Jamaica and British West Indian merchants, pressed British ministers and Parliament for a firmer response to Spanish depredations on British West Indian shipping, a subject on which he published, anonymously, a substantial and well-informed pamphlet in 1726.¹²

Over the decade between his return to Jamaica in 1728 and his final departure for England in 1737, Knight resumed both his successful mercantile business and his highly visible role in the colony’s public life, once again obtaining for the final six years of his residence in Jamaica election as one of Kingston’s two representatives in the Jamaica Assembly. Although he never became one of the colony’s great landowners and sugar planters, he managed to build an impressive estate. Retaining two substantial rental and profit-making properties on Port Royal Street in the heart of Kingston’s shipping and financial district, Knight also owned, as he specified in his will in March 1743, a plantation called Molynes and two cattle pens or ranches in St. Andrew Parish, which was adjacent to Kingston, plus a financial interest in a plantation in St. Ann Parish on Jamaica’s north coast. At his death in late 1747 or early 1748, Knight bequeathed these properties to his son John Knight, who had remained in Jamaica to oversee his father’s St. Andrew properties. As landholdings went in Jamaica, this estate was a relatively modest one. Just before his death in late 1753 or early 1754, only five years after his father’s, John was using these St. Andrew properties, two white servants, and seventy-five black slaves, as James had probably done before him, to produce sugar and provisions and raise cattle for the Kingston market. Out of a total of 368 acres, John cultivated just 134 (34.6%), with 84 acres (23%) used to produce annually 45 hogsheads of sugar and 15 puncheons of rum, and 50 acres (14%) used to raise provisions. The remaining 164 acres (64%) were in pasture.¹³

When in 1737 James Knight took up residence in Britain for what would be the last decade of his life and settled with his two daughters, Sarah and Jane, and a ward, Mary Willis, the surviving daughter of his Jamaica associate William Willis, in Stoke Newington in the parish of St. Mary, Newington in Middlesex County, now part of north London, he thus remained bound to Jamaica by his family estate, left in the hands of his son, and by his continuing business and property interests in Kingston and elsewhere on the island, which James Barclay, his friend and business associate in Kingston, managed for him. Although he had become a resident of Stoke Newington, he still thought of himself, as he announced in the first lines of his will, as being of the Island of Jamaica.¹⁴

Far from distancing himself from the place where he had successfully sought his fortune over the previous quarter century, Knight remained intensely engaged with the island throughout his final years. Both before and during the War for Jenkins’ Ear (1739–45), he busied himself with lobbying for Jamaica’s interests with the ministry and other metropolitan agencies of colonial administration.¹⁵ Most of all, however, he simultaneously filled his time and displayed his passionate and continuing emotional attachment to Jamaica by conceiving, gathering materials for, writing, and completing his substantial two-volume history of Jamaica. No previous work on the colony had been anywhere nearly so comprehensive in its conception and execution, been based on such extensive research and so much personal observation, nor exhibited such thoughtful commentary and analysis. In every possible respect, this work compared favorably with contemporary histories of other British American colonies produced up to that time and indeed for many decades thereafter. With the possible exception of Sir Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica,¹⁶ Knight’s manuscript was the most impressive intellectual production relating to Jamaica during its first century as a British colony.

Knight’s History

Designating himself as A Gentleman, who resided above Twenty Years in Jamaica (p. 2),¹⁷ Knight entitled his ambitious two-volume work The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica, and the Territories Thereon Depending from the First Discovery of the Island by Christopher Columbus to the Year 1746. As he explains in his preface and introduction, his interest in pursuing this project principally derived from his conviction that Jamaica had long suffered from an inaccurate, undeserved, and negative reputation in metropolitan Britain, a reputation fostered by persistent Misrepresentation and prejudice and sustained by the absence of reliable published information about the colony. Older accounts, mostly published soon after its conquest and before the English had made any Considerable Improvements, were, in his view, both out of date and too insubstantial, while more recent accounts, all authored by Obscure Creatures, not only exhibited great Ignorance but were full of Malice, and notorious Fals[e]hoods (p. 5).¹⁸

In Knight’s view, this situation had produced several deleterious effects, at once contributing to the metropolitan government’s failure to provide any funds to subsidize the colony’s settlement and development, discouraging metropolitan immigration and private investment, and preventing Jamaica’s free inhabitants from fully appreciating the substantial achievements of their predecessors, who in less than eight decades had overcome many difficulties and turned Jamaica into an important extension of British culture overseas and a valuable component of the British Empire. Persuaded that Jamaica only wanted to be better known, to be more Encouraged, and Countenanced in Britain, Knight decided to take it on himself to produce an extended work that, copiously and in detail, would put Jamaica in a just and true light, provide a clear and Satisfactory Idea of the Country to Strangers, and be of utility to every Person who has any Interest or Concern in that part of the World (pp. 5–6). As the Memoirs of this Island (p. 200), moreover, the History would provide a venue for Knight to evaluate the administration of each of its royal governors and to call attention to those local personages who had rendered meritorious service to the colony’s public life, defense, and development.

Initially, Knight’s interest in this project seems to have been stimulated by his experience in Jamaica’s public affairs. For the most Part of his residence, he tells his readers, his deep involvement in the Service of the Crown and Country had furnished him with knowledge of some Remarkable transactions, which were unknown to every Common Observer, about which he collected information that, along with several Observations he made upon the Spot, he committed to Writing, with . . . the Design of methodizing and putting them together, whenever I had the leisure and a proper Opportunity (pp. 6–7). Eventually, he decided to make his Treatise nothing short of a faithful Register; of all the Memorable Events; which have hap[pe]ned, and I could attain the knowledge of, from the first Discovery of Jamaica, to the present time (pp. 6–7).

When, after he moved to London in 1737, Knight finally found time to design this expansive project, he seems early to have settled on a plan that would involve a Treatise (p. 7) broken down into ten parts in two volumes, each one quite different in character from the other. Consisting of a table of contents, preface, introduction, and parts 1–3, the first volume, a comprehensive history of Jamaica, would require extensive reading and research for the long period before his 1712 arrival. For parts 1–2, Knight could draw most of what he needed from contemporary published materials. For part 1, which covered indigenous culture before Columbus encountered the island in the 1590s and its development as a Spanish colony over the next century and a half, he could rely on English translations of some of the most Eminent Spanish writers (p. 7), including Peter Martyr, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. For part 2, which treated the English conquest of Jamaica and its early occupation under military rule, Knight found many published sources and was also able to acquire an original manuscript of the proceedings of Colonel Daniel Doyley while he was commander in chief of English military forces and then, from 1660–62, the Crown’s first governor of Jamaica.¹⁹

Together with the preface and introduction, part 1 and 2 accounted for just under a fourth of the total number of words in the first volume, and part 3, a narrative of Jamaican history during the eight decades after the establishment of English civil government in the early 1660s, took up the last three-quarters of the volume and required research in a much wider range of sources. Like most English historians of his day, Knight conceived of his history as a narrative of the course of successive administrations and reigns, and of the major natural events, civil disturbances, and military and naval engagements that had broad public ramifications. Following in this tradition, Knight made the Proceedings of the several Governors, Council and Assembly (p. 9) the central subject in part 3, while also paying systematic attention to natural disasters, including earthquakes and hurricanes; slave rebellions; defense preparations against and interactions with pirates and the forces of foreign rivals, including the French invasion of 1693; ongoing relations, both commercial and military, with the Spanish Main; and the changing naval administration in Jamaica.

On some of these subjects, such as the great Port Royal earthquake of 1692, he found printed accounts or took testimony from survivors he encountered. With regard to the Administration of the Several Governours (p. 12) in part 3, however, he soon realized that getting the best Information he could on that subject would require extensive research into Original Minutes and other Authentick papers (pp. 6–9) relating to the course of Jamaican provincial governance. In sharp contrast to previous Jamaica analysts, who, building chiefly upon Tradition and hearsay, had produced accounts that were incomplete and jumbled things together . . . in an Obscure, confused manner, Knight was determined both to Omit no material Transaction, which hap[p]ened in their respective Governments and to place things in the Natural [sequential] order, in which they hap[pe]ned; and to give a Relation of Facts from Authentick Records and Tracts (pp. 11–12).

No doubt he thought—correctly—that London would be the very best place for such research. Metropolitan authorities required colonial governors to transmit all the important executive and legislative records from their jurisdictions to London, where they were subject to review by the Privy Council’s Committee on Plantation Affairs and filed away for use and safekeeping at the Board of Trade, the principal agency for colonial oversight. To Knight’s surprise and annoyance, however, when he applied to the board for permission to examine and make copies of documents transmitted from Jamaica, board officials refused his request on the grounds that it only granted access to its holdings in cases involving appellate jurisdiction or actions of law or equity. Although, as Knight writes in his preface, this response considerably retarded the finishing of his project and almost discouraged his proceeding further on it, he managed, with great Expence and trouble to my friends (p. 11) in Jamaica, to secure the documents he sought from the originals in Jamaica.²⁰ Had he obtained access to the Board of Trade records, which would have included gubernatorial reports not in the original public records in Jamaica, his research might well have been even more exhaustive and publication of work during his lifetime more achievable.

As it turned out, however, the success of Knight’s collecting effort was impressive, supplying him with so much information that, along with his determination to leave out no material Transaction which came to my knowledge nor any Observation I thought proper to be incerted, and his decision to include in his text full copies of many of the most important documents, the process certainly swelled this History beyond the bulk I at first designed (p. 641), as he acknowledged in the concluding paragraphs of his work. Indeed, part 3 was almost seven times as long as part 2, the next longest portion of his project, and about 15 percent longer than the seven parts that constituted volume 2 combined. Knight himself made no apology for the disproportionate length of part 3 in relation to the other nine parts of what he regarded as the well intended and necessary Work (p. 12) of bringing the island’s intricate political history fully into public view. Indeed, this achievement resulted in the production of what remains to this day—almost three centuries later—the fullest and most coherent narrative of Jamaica’s political history as a British colony before the mid-1740s. For the convenience of modern readers, however, the present editor has broken the long text of part 3 into five roughly equal chronological units and designated them as chapters A–E.

Notwithstanding Knight’s admission that, as a merchant, historical writing was a thing that is out of my Province (p. 5), his practice in constructing his history followed many of the same guidelines that emerged as standard procedures as professional historical studies took shape during the nineteenth century, with comprehensiveness and deep research in original sources being two of the most important. Like his successors, moreover, he carefully noted his indebtedness to the Authors of such Pieces as I thought necessary to quote or make use of (p. 11). Taking for his motto a quotation from Cicero, which Knight translated from the Latin as The first law in History Writing is not to dare to Assert any thing that is false, and the next [is] not to be afraid of speaking the truth. Let there be no Appearance of Dissimulation[;] let there be none of private Malice (p. 13), he also made every effort to achieve the elusive goal of objectivity and rarely emphasized his own role in the events he described, on the grounds that it was difficult for a Man to speak of himself without Suspicion of prejudice or partiality (p. 246). While his propensity to publish key documents in their entirety is uncommon in modern historical studies (though relatively common in histories written during this time period), he rarely let them speak for themselves, usually interpreting them and commenting on their significance in Jamaica’s history. Nor did he, like some modern historians, reduce a complex history to the elaborate analysis of a few illustrative anecdotes or stories.

Knight’s second volume was not a history but a full-blown chorography, an ancient genre designed to describe a particular place in terms of its principal characteristics. Intending to make this chorography as comprehensive as he possibly could, Knight divided it into seven separate sections, parts 4–10, each of which covered a different set of related topics: part 4, physical and human geography; part 5, climate, seasons, wind and water resources, and disease environment; part 6, inhabitants, free and slave and white and black, including the free Maroon populations in the mountains and the indigenous occupants on Jamaica’s dependencies in central America; part 7, government, political and religious establishments, and revenues; part 8, soil and economic products; part 9, animals, both wild and domestic, birds, fish, and insects; and part 10, continuing problems and opportunities for further development, or, to use the popular language of Knight’s era, improvement. This last section also included a thoughtful discussion of specific measures by which the metropolitan government might render Jamaica even more secure and valuable to the emerging British Empire. By thus digesting the[se] Severall matters under their proper heads (p. 6), Knight hoped to make it easier for readers to find the information that most interested them or that would be useful in undertaking their own particular ventures in the island. Except for his descriptions in part 4 of several parts of the island in which he had himself little experience and therefore had to depend on residents of Candour and Judgement who were much better acquainted with them (p. 11), Knight derived the information he presented throughout his chorography chiefly from his own Observation and Experience (p. 11). And he had no doubt that the result was a more particular Description of the Island and Inhabitants, Their Customs, manner of living, Climate, Air &c. than has been hitherto published, or is now Extant, an account that, he hoped, would provide readers with a Natural and Artless View of the Country, and every Circumstance relating to it, that is Material or Necessary for Their information or Satisfaction (p. 11).

Notwithstanding his aspiration to be objective, however, Knight throughout both the history and the chorography exhibited a sturdy appreciation of Jamaica’s achievements and potential. As he freely acknowledged, his study was principally Calculated to contribute to the Interest and well fare of Jamaica (p. 641), and he repeatedly invoked the many Pleasures and gratifications, which nature has bestowed on the island for the comfort and Happiness of its inhabitants (p. 17). Yet, he was careful to distinguish himself from promotional writers who in both the Spanish and English worlds touted the great Riches (p. 15) to be obtained, the salubriousness of the climate, and the fecundity of the earth in whatever place to which they sought to entice settlers from the Old World, disclaiming any intention to suggest that Jamaica was so agreeable a Country to live in as England, and other Parts of Europe, or that Men of Fortune, who were Easy and happy in other Respects should choose to go over and reside there (p. 15).

Knight provided unity and coherence for his ambitious undertaking by giving special prominence to several general themes that he worked into the fabric of his work whenever they seemed appropriate or relevant. These recurring themes were neither original nor exclusive to Knight. Deeply rooted in early modern English overseas settler colonization, they were, rather, omnipresent in the writing of colonial analysts seeking to inform metropolitan readers about the character and importance of the societies and polities that Britons were then constructing on the other side of the Atlantic. Few such writers, however, managed as well as Knight to formulate these themes fully, develop them cogently, or ground them on a sturdy empirical base. Indeed, Knight’s use of them can be taken as exemplary, even paradigmatic, of the attitudes and aspirations of settler populations throughout the colonial British American world and perhaps beyond it.

Celebrating Cornucopia

Despite his resolve not to turn his magnum opus into a promotional tract, Knight rarely missed an opportunity to praise Jamaica’s natural beauty, its fortunate geography, its abundant natural resources, and its promising situation for trade, devoting substantial sections of four parts of his seven-part chorography to those subjects and presenting Jamaica as a bounteous natural cornucopia that could attract and sustain a large volume of people and domestic animals and awaited only the application of English industry and art to turn it into a highly productive, attractive, and congenial civil and social space.

In part 4, Knight took the reader right around the island with a parish by parish survey that, while paying substantial attention to the human geography of each parish as it had taken shape by the late 1730s, also emphasized the island’s complex, varied, and attractive natural topography, ranging from accessible and cultivatable coastal lowlands to upland savannas suitable for cattle raising, fertile flat valleys fit for all sorts of agricultural enterprises, and a hilly and mountainous interior that from a distance appeared Strange . . . and Romantick but, even in its rockiest places, always exhibited a beautiful verdure from the Leaves[,] Blossoms and Fruit (pp. 388, 393–94) of the numerous trees and plants that adorned its slopes, and contained ample spaces for settlers and their auxiliaries to build profitable enterprises. With eighty-seven rivers that discharged into the sea, on some of whose courses could be found divers[e] Beautifull Cataracts or Cascades and an abundance of Rivulets and Springs almost every where in the island, Jamaica, Knight reported, was plentifully furnished with a great Variety of Water (pp. 451–52) and eight fine Harbours, and severall Convenient Coves and Bays where Ships may safely ride (p. 614). Endowed with a mineral-rich hot spring on the eastern slopes of the mountains, Jamaica, he predicted, would ultimately be found to contain large deposits of copper and possibly even smaller ones of gold that could provide the basis for a substantial mining industry.

In Knight’s presentation, Jamaica’s natural geographic advantages were reinforced by its beneficent climate, the subject of part 5. Except for the highest elevations of the towering mountain chain on the eastern half of the island (later known as the Blue Mountains), where, Knight reported, citing several Affidavits, on one occasion several black men in pursuit of rebellious Maroons became so benumbed that they died with Cold (p. 391), Jamaica was a place with neither cold weather nor radical changes in temperature. In an extended survey of the diseases and health problems that were most common and incidental to the Climate (p. 458), he devoted several pages to a prescription of a dietary regimen and modes of behavior that, he was persuaded, would be a helpful preventative. He was careful to point out that the climate in the island’s higher elevations was undoubtedly more Suitable, and Agreeable to an European Constitution, than in any other part of the Island (p. 391). Nor did he shy away from acknowledging that the Extreme heat of the Sun in the lowlands could be sometimes hot and troublesome during the hours from 9 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. But he insisted that the mornings were always fresh and cool, that the days were generally Serene and Clear throughout the Year without any Foggy or hazy Weather, and that the nights were for the most part fair cool and exceeding pleasant (p. 437). Indeed, he called the reader’s attention to the refreshing effects of the air and the prevailing winds that, in conjunction with occasional rain showers, cooled the bodies of both men and beasts and had Wonderful Operation and Effects on . . . Vegetables, and even on Iron, which is the hardest of all Metals (p. 437). With no pronounced changes in seasons, Jamaica actually had two Springs, one after the great Rains in May and a second after similar rains in October so that the inhabitants annually enjoyed two Crops of Corn, Pease, and other Grain, and almost all sorts of Fruit, which are Natural to the Climate. Spring vegetables appeared in all their glory in kitchen gardens, the savannas and pastures were cloathed with Green and the trees and Plants with Blossums and Flowers, and the air became fresher, cooler and Pleasanter (p. 441).

Along with its geography and climate, Jamaica’s natural abundance was conducive to both plant and animal life, and Knight surveyed the former in part 8 and the latter in part 9, both of which Knight used to emphasize the extraordinary diversity and richness of Jamaica’s natural environment. Giving particular attention to those trees, plants, and creatures that were peculiar and Natural to the Country (p. 569), he also included the many Old World plants and animals that had been successfully transplanted to Jamaica and those commodities that settlers had been able to turn to their economic advantage. Also in part 8, Knight explained to readers the process and conventions of the production of sugar, minor staples, and other items that had been fundamental to the development of the island’s export economy.

Following in the tradition of Dr. Thomas Trapham’s early report in the 1670s²¹ and Hans Sloane’s systematic and comprehensive two-volume natural history of the island between 1707 and 1725, and foreshadowing Patrick Browne’s impressive study of the same subject in 1754,²² just a few years after Knight’s death, Knight in part 8 produced, tree by tree and plant by plant, a descriptive catalogue that carefully assessed the character and utility of each, singling out the plantain for its beauty as a plant and value as a food source and closing his description of island fruits with the Pine, or pineapple, which in his view exceeded any other fruit in the world in its Singular beauty and delicious tast[e] (p. 574). In part 9, he did the same for domestic and wild animals, birds, sea animals such as turtles and manatees, fish, and insects. Along with those of Sloane and Browne, Knight’s detailed descriptions of early eighteenth-century Jamaica’s natural plant and animal worlds provide still a third set of data evidently derived from extensive independent investigations of Jamaica’s natural world and certainly invite the attention of modern scholars interested in exploring the importance of Jamaica in expanding Old World knowledge of the wider overseas world.²³ Knight strongly implied that his own descriptions were based mainly on personal observation and were not a mere repetition of entries in Sloane when he noted that his descriptive entries omitted such Valuable Commodities as Drugs and Woods because they were not within my Province and because Sloane had already very particularly delineated and described them (p. 564).

Knight was too critical a scholar not to note important qualifications to his affectionate celebration of Jamaica as a natural cornucopia. Over the course of his residency in Jamaica, the lowland parishes along the south coast had, in what Knight thought of as a failure of the seasons (p. 396), become too dry for reliable sugar production with the result that the centers of sugar culture shifted to the east and west. Yet the older parishes still had enough water and other resources to sustain a shift to ranching, provision farming, and minor staple cultivation. Long before, early Spanish settlers had converted the savannas that the indigenous population used to cultivate corn and other vegetables into pastures to feed their Cattle and Horses (p. 393), and early English settlers followed this example. As a result, Knight noted, those lands, having gone so many years without Tillage, or Culture, had become barren and could no longer be cultivated. Yet, they continued to produce great plenty of Grass and appeared pleasant, and Green after Rains, and feed Vast numbers of Sheep and Cattle (pp. 393–94). Even in the face of adversity, Jamaica’s extraordinary natural endowments invited and sustained such adjustments.

Craving Validation

Notwithstanding their colony’s greater visibility in Britain, Jamaicans shared with other British colonists a widespread and peculiarly colonial anxiety about the effects of their physical separation from the parent state. As they pursued projects of society and polity building out of the immediate sight of the metropolis and in obscure places on the outer edges of the English-speaking world, they feared that they would slowly drift out of metropolitan consciousness, their achievements going unnoticed, unappreciated, and open to the distortions and slanders of malicious commentators, and their very status as English people coming under challenge. Thoroughly expressive of such anxieties, Knight’s History pursued a strategy designed to persuade metropolitan British readers that Jamaica contributed substantially to their economic welfare and international prestige, and that Jamaicans were creating a world which, despite modifications required by differences in physical setting and economic orientation, was not only recognizably English but thoroughly compatible with its English heritage. In doing so, he, like numerous other colonial writers, sought metropolitan validation and the respect that it conferred.

In his pursuit of validation, Knight was particularly concerned to refute allegations about Jamaica’s supposedly sickly climate, its association with piratical activity in the Caribbean, and the social excesses of its free inhabitants. With regard to health, Knight acknowledged that Jamaica, like England and any other part of the world, suffered from its own Endemicall Evils (p. 17), but he argued that the longevity of many of the original settlers and the prevalence during his own residence of Divers Persons, who have lived on the Island, from 20 to 50 years, and Natives, Whites as well as Blacks, who are Sixty Years of Age and upwards (p. 18), gave the lie to charges that Jamaica was an especially unhealthy place and suggested that it was healthier than many a neighboring place on the Spanish Main. Moderation and adaptation to a hotter climate were, in his view, all that was required to stay healthy. Provided a person was Temperate in his diet, and Exercises, and Conforms to the Nature of the Climate, Knight wrote, a Man, with common Industry and Oeconomy, may . . . enjoy his health, and live in a decent and Comfortable manner (p. 17).

Much more fully, Knight sought to refute allegations that Jamaica had been a den of pirates and had officially encouraged piracy or buccaneering. Carefully distinguishing between buccaneers—who made Tortuga their rendezvous, acted without a Commission or legal authority, and preyed indiscriminately on English as well as French or Spanish shipping—and privateers, who acted under and by Vertue of a Commission, from any Prince or State, at Enmity or War with any other Nation or Country, he argued that before Jamaica had had notice of the Treaty of Breda (1667) officially ending the war between Britain and Spain, Jamaica’s governors had encouraged privateers in their attacks on Spanish shipping and settlements on Account of the great Riches They brought in (pp. 107, 109, 134). Indeed, those riches had brought Jamaica to the time of its greatest prosperity, when it was not only Populous and in flourishing Circumstances, but mon[e]y so very plenty[ful] that Port Royal was Reckoned the Richest Town in America, and as the great Resort of Privateers, attracted a large population of people willing to go a rambling on the Seas, and Shores, of America, in Search of Prizes and other Booty (pp. 107–8).

Acclaiming the Gallant Exploits of Jamaica’s legally authorized privateers such as John Davis and Henry Morgan, who had Executed Their Designs with such Intrepidity and Surprising Success and thereby made so much noise in the World without any repudiation from the English government, he objected that the indiscriminate coupling of them with pirates by earlier writers had resulted in the Inhabitants of the Island in general [being] unjustly Stigmatized for the Actions of pirates operating without official sanction. Knight admitted that some of the real Bucaniers, by permission or Connivance, did dispose of their prizes and Squander away their money at Port Royal, before the Treaty concluded between Great Britain and Spain in 1667 (p. 109), but he refused to excuse such complicity. Nor did he deny that some of the privateers may have been guilty of some of the same Attrocious Actions committed by the buccaneers, whom he denounced as undoubtedly the most cruel and Inhuman Villains that ever Appeared in the World. But he argued that, even if some Jamaicans had connived with buccaneers, it was unreasonable to reproach a whole society or Country . . . for the action of a Part of Them only, and protested that both at the time and subsequently, no Country or People, ever was more assiduous, or at a greater Expence, than this Island has been at, to Suppress those who acted without a legal Authority (pp. 109–10).

Improvements Made and to Be Made

To combat metropolitan perceptions of Jamaica’s social deficiencies, Knight employed the language of improvement, perhaps the most common of the themes he used to structure his volumes. Omnipresent in the economic writings of early modern Britain, this language referred primarily to schemes, devices, or projects through which the economic position of the nation might be advanced, the estates or fortunes of individuals bettered, or existing resources made more productive. In the new and relatively undeveloped societies of colonial British America, the term improvement carried similar connotations but also acquired a wider meaning: it was used to describe a state of society that was far removed from that of the indigenous inhabitants. An improved society was one defined by a series of positive and negative juxtapositions. As opposed to migratory, impermanent, rustic, and crude, it was settled, cultivated, civilized, orderly, developed, and polite. The model for an improved society was the settled society of Great Britain. Colonials aspired to create a fully developed market society with credit, commercial agriculture, a stable labor force, and a brisk circulation of money and goods through busy urban centers. In particular, they hoped to create a social structure in which successful, independent, and affluent people would have the opportunity, in conformity with the longstanding traditions of British and other European societies, to exploit dependent people, whether free or slave. They desired authoritative, if unobtrusive and inexpensive, political institutions that would facilitate their socioeconomic and cultural development and be presided over by the most successful part of the community. They wanted vital traditional institutions that would contribute to and stand as visible symbols of their civility, including courts, churches, schools, and towns. Most of all, they wanted metropolitans to regard the very process of colonization as a form of national improvement.

Sharing this well-established colonial mindset, Knight stressed the many changes Jamaica had undergone under English governance in expanding settlement, collecting a labor force, producing vendable commodities, becoming a growing market for British manufactures, building and maintaining a polity along English lines, and creating a functional and increasingly refined social environment—all of which he regarded as improvements. At both ends of his account of English Jamaica, he inserted a document to give the reader a clear impression of the transit of the island’s development. Illustrating the extent to which royal encouragement and the fair Prospect of raising . . . Fortunes, by the Fertility of the Soil and other Advantages (p. 102) had caused many immigrants to flock to the island, the first, a demographic table made in 1664, revealed that in just ten years, the English had divided the island into twelve precincts occupied by more than 1,900 families or households with a total population of upwards of 17,000 Inhabitants, including Men, Women and Children of which not more than One third were Negroes (p. 106). The second, evidently made by Knight himself, was a parish by parish survey of the number of sugar works in each parish and the average annual quantity of sugar they produced for the three years ending in 1737, the year of Knight’s return to Britain. This survey indicated that in 1737, Jamaica’s nineteen parishes contained a total of 428 sugar works with an annual production of 33,234 hogsheads of sugar, almost 1.2 million gallons of molasses, and just over 1.5 million gallons of rum, together valued at slightly more than £6 million. This figure did not include the value of an unknown number of bags of cotton and ginger; casks of pimento, coffee, and indigo; tons of logwood and fustic; and linear feet of mahogany that the island yearly shipped to Britain and its colonial territories, for which Knight never managed to obtain precise information.

In Knight’s view, these figures made it clear that, notwithstanding the many misfortunes it had suffered