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3. The West Indies, Cornerstone of Trade
- University of Georgia Press
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Chapter Three The West Indies, Cornerstone of Trade With a wealth that far surpassed that of any other region in the Western Hemisphere, the West Indies offered Georgia a way out of its economic woes. Devoted to the production of sugar, molasses, and rum, the sugar islands were exporting to Britain over £3 million sterling of staples in an average year by the early 1770s.The island colonies outshone the mainland in ways that defined the emerging British empire. They were at the heart of the ever-increasing transatlantic trade in human beings; they supported a large merchant marine carrying enslaved people and sugar; they provided a ready market for British manufactured goods; and they were generating substantial accumulations of capital in Great Britain. North America bene fited mightily. Sugar plantations were monstrous consumers of people and things,and economic logic dictated a close relationship between the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard. By the early 1770s, British North America was receiving £800,000 sterling per year from wood, fish, flour, livestock, and other products shipped to the south. Without an export crop and barely able to feed itself, trustee Georgia had little hope of breaking into this highly competitive game.The promotional literature that had branded the land as “the most delightful Country of the Universe” and painted for credulous readers a vision of fertile soil and virgin forests succeeded in luring many an unsuspecting soul into becoming a charity settler, but even the shrewdest merchants of Charles Town never found a way to cut lumber profitably in the new colony. With his usual clarity, James Habersham explained to the trustees in 1747 that lumber was the logical place for the colony to make a start but the obstacles were many. The “Negroes” of South Carolina cut and sawed lumber more cheaply; the shippers of Charles Town offered rates as much as 50 percent less; New Englanders built vessels and sent them to the West Indies to be sold while transporting lumber at low rates to add to their margins. When Habersham applied to a New York factor in Frederica to hire a sloop to The West Indies, Cornerstone of Trade 51 transport lumber,the factor set impossible terms because of his lack of con- fidence that a low-value item like wood would pay the cost of the voyage. Lumber alone would not do, the merchant lamented, and he underscored the importance of “mixed cargos.” Georgia’s lone merchant suffered the indignity of watching crews from Bermuda sail into tidal creeks and coastal rivers, offer a pittance to residents, and cut valuable cypress and cedar trees for shipbuilding. In the early 1760s, the British West Indies awoke to the rich opportunities that the colony offered as a major supplier of longleaf pine, also called yellow pine or heart of pine,which covered so much of the coastal plain and beyond. Pine barrens extended on the flat coastal plains from the southern frontier of eastern Virginia to the Florida peninsula, bounded on one side by the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and on the other by coastal marshes. Of matchless height, longleaf pines were ramrod straight with few or no branches and an open crown spreading outward at the top; the soil they grew in was mainly sand and gravel over clay; the undergrowth, mostly wire grass or broom sedge. Resistant to flames, the trees had an environmental advantage over other species in a region prone to fire set by lightning or by natives hunting deer. The general flatness of the land and the lack of underbrush enabled visitors to pass through miles of unbroken forest, described by some as like a “park” but characterized by a numbing uniformity. Hard, resistant to decay, and possessing great tensile strength, longleaf was ideal as a building material, whether used to frame a house or in naval construction, and was much sought after in the West Indies. In the brackish marshes and swamps along the coast were valuable cypress, white cedar, red bay, live oak, and tupelo gum. Opportunities for a thriving lumber industry were at hand. From 1761 to 1768, Georgia saw its exports of longleaf pine jump sevenfold , from 307,000 feet of lumber to 2.1 million feet. In 1761, it sent out 606,000 cedar shingles for roofing; seven years later, 3.6 million shingles, a dramatic sixfold increase. The merchants of Savannah and Sunbury took heart. Shipping was now materializing...
