PANALBA

The Sugar Adventurers of Glasgow - Part 1

Stuart Nisbet 01/21/2010 03:17 AM

One of the strongest links to a city's past is its architecture. In the city of Glasgow, very few pre-1700 buildings survive. In the words of Charles McKean, the city's early architecture is largely a facet of the imagination. Glasgow's early mercantile history is equally elusive. The later ‘Tobacco Lord' culture is endlessly recycled, but the preceding century is invisible. Despite the importance of tobacco, it was claimed in 1777 that ‘Glasgow's first fortunes were made in sugar'. This article looks at the links between Glasgow's early sugar wealth and the Leeward Islands.

From the 1640s, Glasgow's cultural renaissance was driven by an enlightened group, christened the ‘Merchant Adventurers'. The most prominent was Walter Gibson, described as ‘the greatest merchant of his day'. Part of Gibson's wealth came from importing sugar from the Leeward island of Nevis. Gibson built one of the earliest most celebrated buildings, Gibson's Land in Stockwell Street. Designed by Sir William Bruce in 1677, no pictures survive, making it a prime example of Glasgow's invisible Renaissance culture.

Gibson's generation established a pattern which would define Glasgow's colonial merchant lifestyle. He served an apprenticeship as a maltman, giving him a Glasgow burgesship and the right to carry out trade. He started the trend of naming streets, creating Gibsons Wynd (now Parnie Street), one of the first new streets leading west from the High Street. His business was based around trusted family, bringing in his closest relatives, including his brother James to captain his ships. Once successful, he developed country estates west of the city. Finally, he achieved the highest burghal positions, including the city's first ‘Sugar Provost' in 1688.

The next Sugar Provost was Hugh Montgomery of Skelmorlie. Again much of his fortune came from sugar from the Leeward island of Nevis. This was refined in Glasgow's first large-scale factory, the Wester Sugar House. Unfortunately, the city's early sugar houses are as elusive as the villas of their founders but we do know that the Wester Sugar House had been built in the 1660s by Montgomery's father-in-law, Peter Gemmill, among the very first to import sugar from Nevis.

Daniel Campbell was another Leeward sugar trader, along with Gibson and Montgomery. His brother, Captain Matthew Campbell, carried his sugar. Daniel built another sugar house, the Easter, to process it (Picture: Easter Sugar House). He also built the Shawfield Mansion, Glasgow's earliest colonial villa, another invisible Glasgow icon. One of the few buildings which have survived from the period is the Merchant's Steeple (1659), a remnant of the Merchant's House (Picture: Merchants House, Steeple, stone engravings of merchants and ship). Like Gibson's lost mansion, it was reputedly designed by William Bruce, and stands today as a prominent reminder of Glasgow's sugar trade with Nevis. The common link between the sugar merchants was their deep contact with the Leeward Islands of Nevis and St Kitts (St Christopher).

Along with St Kitts, Nevis was one of the islands encountered by Columbus in 1493 (Pictures: Islands of Nevis & St Kitts). The islands are tiny, the largest being no bigger than the isle of Bute in the Clyde, yet they will not disappoint the economic historian. In the early 18th century their sugar exports exceeded the combined trade of the whole of North America. The demand for sugar in Glasgow and Britain's other growing Atlantic ports, stimulated an early and intensive system of agriculture on the islands. This would create the very deep, though hitherto invisible, connections with Glasgow which persist to this day.

The workforce which made Nevis successful initially came from Britain. From the 1650s hundreds of indentured servants were sent out, and those from the west of Scotland were the most highly favoured. Some went freely, with the promise of land after a few years service, but others were sent forcibly. This was another sideline of Glasgow's resourceful merchant Walter Gibson, who became the city's best-known trader in people. Not all went voluntarily and his unfortunate cargos in the 1680s included ‘thieves, robbers, vagabonds, beggars and gypsies', plus a few banished Covenanters.

However, it was soon found that few servants from Scotland could cope with the back-breaking work in the tropical heat. From 1673 the official English slave trading company, the Royal African Company, was based on Nevis. By 1700 the island had imported 8,000 African slaves, outnumbering the whites by five to one.

The sugar trade relied on a distant network of merchants who had travelled out from the Clyde to the Leewards and settled there. From the 1640s these included Robert Rowan on St Kitts and William Wardrop on Nevis. Wardrop was Hugh Montgomery's agent and partner in the Wester Sugar Works. Perhaps the most influential was William Colquhoun, who settled on Nevis and was elected on to the influential Island Assembly in 1677. Such early involvement is often marginalized by a focus on the Darien scheme and supposed restrictions of the Navigation Acts. Yet two generations before the Union, Scottish merchants such as Colquhoun were so well favoured that the Governor of the Leewards petitioned London to have the Navigation Acts repealed.

Back in Glasgow, Hugh Montgomery's Wester Sugar House expanded and he became immensely rich from its profits. He played an eminent part in the city's politics, as MP for Glasgow during the years straddling the Union of 1707. The city's connections with the Leewards continued to escalate. The next two players would be involved, not just in trade and settlement, but in the hitherto hidden side of Glasgow's sugar trade, the direct control of black slaves. The first was James Milliken, born near Largs in 1669, and a close relative of Hugh Montgomery. Milliken's family had mercantile connections in the Ayr ports and he became a burgess of Irvine in 1692. The second was William McDowall, born in 1678 to a middling landed family near Stranraer. His family also had a trading background and his father and grandfather were merchant burgesses of Edinburgh.

The pair would have enormous success in the Leewards, returning to Glasgow in the late 1720s as the city's most celebrated merchants. Along with their sons and grandsons, they rose to the very highest positions, as provosts, MPs, sheriffs and rectors of the University. They founded Glasgow's first bank and the city's greatest merchant house. By his death in 1748, William McDowall had taken over from the sugar aristocracy of Gibson, Montgomery and Campbell, to be described as ‘the most notable figure in Glasgow'. Again the common link was sugar from Nevis and St Kitts.

McDowall and Milliken are a celebrated part of Glasgow's history, but details of their rise to fortune are scant. All that has been known to date is that while serving as soldiers in the Caribbean, they became exceedingly wealthy, through marriage to plantation heiresses. This tradition has been repeated for nearly 300 years in every history of Glasgow, the emphasis being on a commission in the British army and a ‘fortunate' marriage. Like the merchants lost architecture, the truth is hidden, and every Glasgow historian to date has been hoodwinked by a smokescreen of legend and romance.

They initially went out to serve apprenticeships as slave overseers on sugar plantations on Nevis. By the late 17th century a ‘West India apprenticeship' was a favoured destination for young Scots, who had developed an unenviable reputation as the harshest taskmasters. From such humble origins they had the potential to rise to become planters. This required a particularly tough constitution and ruthless ambition to survive the heat, disease and violent life.

The recent discovery of several hundred original letters reveal that William McDowall's first eleven years on Nevis were spent as a slave overseer to Colonel Daniel Smith, one of the two largest planters on Nevis. James Milliken served a similar role through Smith's brother-in-law. When the two young men arrived on Nevis in the mid-1690s, the island was a relative newcomer to intensive sugar cultivation. The traditional small farmers had been driven out by the tough life. The process involved weeding, planting, cutting, crushing, boiling and drying (Pictures: Wm McDowall's sugar boiling copper, sugar works and windmill). The raw sugar was then barrelled and shipped to Britain, where it was refined in Glasgow's sugar houses.

Article courtesy of History Scotland (www.historyscotland.com )