WEBVTT

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[narrator] I'm a Glasgow boy,

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I was born and bred in the city,

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and of course I've been told all about the tobacco lords,

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and about how the wealth of Glasgow was based on our trade with the colonies,

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with the Caribbean, with the Americas.

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But there's an awful lot more to our colonial experience than I ever knew,

NOTE Paragraph

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and most Scots know,

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and perhaps more than they want to know.

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This is the beautiful west coast of Barbados,

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an up market holiday resort which attracts hundreds of Scots every year.

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They come of course for the beautiful sand, the palm trees the rum punches, and the sun.

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Little do they know, however,

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that 14 miles in that direction, the rugged east coast,

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there's an entirely different kind of Scottish community,

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a community of Sinclairs, of Baileys, of McCaskies,.

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But these families will not be going home after a fortnight in the sun.

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Heading inwards from the beaches and hotels,

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a maze of little roads criss cross the flat, coral island.

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Through the rural parishes of St. James and St. Thomas,

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towards wild seas and the St. John coast.

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The east of the island, from the Scottish district to Martin's Bay,

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is rocky and unyielding,

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but like our own Scotland, magnificent and dramatic.

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This is the last stronghold of a people who once spread throughout Barbados.

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People who -- if they only knew how-- could trace their ancestors

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back to Ireland, the west country, and Scotland,

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some even to Jacobites from Gaeltacht.

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Do you know how your family first came to Barbados? [/narrator]

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Really, I don't know.

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All I know is some family arrived from Scotland, in those days.

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Well, I born in Barbados,

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My Scottish, maybe great great great great grandfathers, that's all they could tell you.

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I understand that my father arrived,

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his parents from Scotland,

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what part of Scotland I don't know.

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The Scots have been, in a sense,

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you could say guilty of collective amnesia

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over both our role in empire

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and the role in the slaving system.

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And it's up to us as historians

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to reveal the Scottish past, warts and all.

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And one of the areas that's now being revealed,

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or is coming into greater significance,

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is the role of the Scots in the Caribbean islands.

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[narrator] When it was settled, Barbados was an uninhabited island in the distant Caribbean.

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Barbadians themselves called it "Little England",

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but in fact, the first people to make serious money here were Scots.

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In 1627 King Charles I appointed a Scot, James Hay, as governor of Barbados.

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Both men were determined to see a good return from their new colony. [/narrator]

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Barbados was chosen because it's owned by the Hays,

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a border family who become the Earls of Carlisle.

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But to make an island like Barbados pay,

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it's the first British island,

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you have to have people to work the land.

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The Hays desperately looked back to their own area, the borders of west coast Scotland

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for this supply of labour.

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And it is part of their business plan to encourage the movement of people onto the island.

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[narrator] When we think of Scots leaving their homeland to make their fortunes

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or at least ease their poverty,

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and going to the Americas in the 18th century, the 19th century,

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we think of Greenoch and Glasgow and Port Glasgow.

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But in fact earlier, in the 17th century,

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many Scots left from here, from Ayre,

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and not necessarily because they wanted to. [/narrator]

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I learned about the 1640's,

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we had our first joint ventures to Barbados.

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And the first one we know is the Rebecca of Dublin,

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is brought up to Britannia Ayre,

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on the Firth of Clyde.

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Ayre is then the major conduit for the emerging Glasgow merchant paternity.

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Controlled tightly by guilds,

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and it's these guild brothers that set out the first ventures.

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Well we know about this because it's also a plague year, 1642,

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and they believe they're all going to die of the plague,

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so they have a communal confession in St John's church, which still stands in Ayre.

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And of over the 15 confessions they make,

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most of them, you'd expect bad behaviour, drunkenness, whoring women all around the Caribbean,

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it's #15 itself that's interesting.

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They confessed to carrying away the children to the West Indies.

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And this is the first mention of carrying indentured servants.

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So basically they're clearing out the <u>_</u>

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This is the start of the trade in people to Barbados.

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[narrator] Scots who couldn't make a living at home

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signed an indenture,

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selling their labour to planters in the new world

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for an agreed period,

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at the end of which -if they survived-

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they were promised a piece of land.

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The indentures weren't worth the paper they were written on.

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Was there really any difference then

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between a white indentured servant and a black slave? [/narrator]

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It didn't matter if you were an indentured servant or a slave,

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if you were subjected to a severe whipping,

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the whip cracked equally severely on a white man

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just as it did on a black man.

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They were treated equally horrifically,

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and suffered equal horrific punishments.

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But African slavery could be transferred from generation to generation.

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If you were an African slave,

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who'd been brought over to Barbados

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and you had children,

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your child would have been born into slavery.

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If you were a white endentured servant

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who had been condemned to servitude and you had children on the island,

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they were born free.

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So there is a marked legal distinction.

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There is the concept of the "white negro",

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and certainly, you know, in a legal sense they probably were slaves

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because they were innumerated as part of the chattals,

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in other words the property of the individual, ehm, who held their indentures.

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So in that sense, you know, they were no different legally from black slaves.

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[narrator] Despite Scotland being a rich source of indentured labour,

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demand on the island outstripped supply.

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But there was a solution.

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War. [/narrator]

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Things were taking a dramatic turn

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when Oliver Cromwell invaded Scotland at the Battle of Dunbar.

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On one hand the Hays lose control of the island,

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on the other hand, there's a new supply of labour,

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prisoners of war.

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The ultimate answer is to transport them,

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and Barbados is where they're sent.

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Here we are in Greyfriars Graveyard,

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and this is really where it all happened.

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This is the trigger zone for, eh,

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which will ricochet all the way to Barbados,

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because it's here that youre dissenting, eh, senior leaders

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of the Scottish rebellion against the king, Charles 1,

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come into this graveyard and sign a massive document called the National Covenant,

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which binds them to resist Charles' ideas about imposing Episcopalianism,

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the Church of England's style of bishops etc on Presbyterian Scotland,

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and by doing so, we start this great conflict.

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So you can really claim that the English Civil War was actually triggered from here,

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and cascades down south, and to Ireland.

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The monument we're walking towards now,

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is possibly the most emotive part of that killing time,

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before it goes on, and all these prisoners were sent off as slaves.

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Barbado'd.

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And here we have it.

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Being Barbados'd was equivalent to being transported,

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ehm, you've got to remember the fact that these were not idyllic islands in that period,

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these were lethal areas with very high death rates,

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especially for Europeans,

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and especially through yellow fever.

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[narrator] So this is where the covenanters were held before being shipped off. [/narrator]

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Some were here for up to two years.

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[narrator] So they're locked in here,

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are they fed and watered and covered?[/narrator]

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Barely, no cover.

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They're not dying here, but the survivors were all marched off and sold,

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some of them would have appeared in Barbados,

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because the market was strong there.

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[narrator] But therefore the people who are finally indentured and sent to the colonies,

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arrive here in pretty bad state in the first place.

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If they've been held out here for two years,

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and after a war,

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they're not arriving in Barbados really full of strength and very well fed. [/narrator]

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I don't think they would have fetched much.

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And knowing the state of vittles on both ships as I do,

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I think most of them didn't made the passage to be honest.

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A great tragedy.

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[narrator] Transportees were shackled and kept below deck

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in a voyage that lasted anything from 8 to 10 weeks.

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Conditions were so bad that many of them died long before they reached the Caribbean.

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There are no records of how traders treated their Scottish cargo,

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but we do know what they would have faced on arrival,

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thanks to the writings of visitors the island like Richard Ligon,

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who published a true and exact history of the island of Barbados in 1657.

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Professor Fred Smith, of William and Mary University on Virginia,

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is on an archeological dig in Barbados.

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Fred's students tried to imagine what life must have been like

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for those early arrivals who had to build their own shelters.

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Richard Ligon paints a vivid picture of those difficult days:

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"Upon the arrival of any ship

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the planters go aboard

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and having bought such of them as they like,

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send them with a guide to his plantation,

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and being come, commands them instantly to make their cabins,

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which they not knowing how to do,

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are to be advised by other of their servants that are their seniors.

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But if they be churlish and will not show them,

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or if material be wanting to make them cabins,

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then they are to lay on the ground that night.

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These cabins are to be made of sticks with some plantain leaves,

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under some little shade that may keep the rain off.

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Their supper being a few potatoes and water and __ for drink,

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the next day they are rung our with a bell to work at 6 o'clock in the morning,

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til the bell ring again,

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which is at 11 o'clock,

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and then they return and are sent to dinner

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and then they return and are set to dinner,

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either with a mess of <u><u></u>, <u></u></u>, or potatoes."

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Professor Carl Watson is a decendant of the first immigrants to Barbados,

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and a leading historian of the island's poor whites.

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Well history has two levels.

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History seen from above, from the point of view of the powerful;

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and history seen from below.

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And usually those from below were either illiterate and hence left no written records

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of their daily lives...