vance party, and in July of the same year there arrived his brother John with two ships and a hundred additional men and women. These people found land in readiness to plant, for the eighty pioneers had been at work clearing the woods for five separate plantations in the neighbourhood of Carlisle Bay.

There is no direct information about the status of the colonists, but from the usual practice of the time it may be inferred that a few were master planters who had embarked some money in the enterprise, whilst the remainder were indentured servants who were transported free on condition that they laboured without payment for a term of four or

five years. This system was general in the early English colonies and played a great part in their rapid peopling and establishment. Under humane management, especially in the pioneer stage, it worked well, for the ex-servant stood a chance of becoming a proprietor himself where land was still plentiful, and even as a paid employee his prospects were better in the colonies than they would have been had he remained a labourer in England. But under the brutal and unscrupulous rule which too often developed in the plantations, indentured service became mere slavery. The servant was sometimes worked or starved to death, he had no remedy against personal violence, and his agreed term was

often extended indefinitely on pretext of idleness or insubordination. All depended upon the character of his master or of the ruling men in the colony. In general it must be admitted that indentured service took the worse course. In the later seventeenth century men ceased to emigrate freely under its terms, and the place of the voluntary pioneers was taken by religious and political exiles, criminals preferring slavery to the gallows, parish paupers, and stolen children entrapped by crimps in the seaports. Yet there were exceptional colonies. New England, Maryland, and Pennsylvania had a cleaner record. In the tropical plantations white slavery gradually diminished before the influx of the cheaper and more docile negro from Africa.

For Barbados in 1627 all these things were of the future. The Powells were able men, and there is nothing bad on record against any of them. The eighty colonists went to work with a will, and Henry Powell, not waiting for the arrival of his brother, set sail for the coast of Guiana on further business. This was to remedy a defect of Barbados, the lack of useful plants growing in a wild state. Whether tobacco was indigenous does not appear. Very likely it was, but of other things there was a deficiency. So Powell sailed to the River Essequibo, where there was a Dutch trading station, and collected a good supply of roots and seeds

to plant in the clearings now being effected in the island woods. He recruited also a gang of Arawak Indians, who entered voluntarily into a twoyears' contract on the understanding that they were to be repatriated at the end of that time. Going back with these valuable aids to the colony, he found it prospering without a hitch, the additional men and supplies arriving from home soon after his return. John Powell the younger, whom he had left in charge, was evidently proving himself a capable governor, and so, having founded a settlement with less suffering and loss of life than had yet accompanied any such undertaking, the elder Powells returned to England before the close of 1627. On the way home they took two Portuguese sugar ships from Brazil, worth nearly £10,000, a sum about equal to the total outlay of the syndicate up to that point. Barbados seemed to have been born under a fortunate star.

But now a cloud was arising, portending ruin not for the colony, but for its founders. In 1624, as has been mentioned, Thomas Warner had made an English settlement at St Christopher, and the elder John Powell had touched there in the following year on his way home from his discovery of Barbados. Powell and his men had talked about their new island, and a sinister design had taken shape in Warner's mind. Warner was a man who planned empire on the great

scale, a Cecil Rhodes of the seventeenth century, and he was by no means content with the single island of St Christopher, to which he had already been obliged to admit French pioneers on equal terms with his own few colonists. In the late summer of 1625 he was back in England seeking Government recognition for his schemes. From the new king, Charles I., he obtained a commission under the Great Seal, making him governor of four islands-St Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, and one by him called Barbados. The first he had already colonised, Nevis and Montserrat were closely adjacent to it, and Barbuda, a barren and waterless place, lay not far distant. No other English projector had yet shown any interest in this Leeward group, and it was therefore quite reasonable for Warner to stake his claim in the manner implied by his commission. The spelling of all these island names was obtained from Spanish charts, and showed considerable variations in its English renderings: Nevis was often given as Mevis, Montserrat as Moncerate, and 'Barbados," to all but Thomas Warner, meant what we call Barbuda, well within his own sphere of operations. So thought the Courteen syndicate, who anticipated no trouble from Warner's proceedings, their own Barbados lying nearly four hundred miles away to the south-east.

Warner's commission gave

robbery was the motive. Here it may be well to consider why, with all the islands to choose from, there should have been an unscrupulous push by the Carlisle party for the possession of Barbados. The reason lay in its immunity from Carib attacks. Warner's people at St Christopher were in constant dread of these ferocious savages; and even after the local tribe had been massacred, their friends came continually in canoes and made surprise landings on the coast. In Guadaloupe, Dominica, St Lucia, and the other large islands of the Carlisle patent, the Caribs were in such strength that English pioneers, coming out from home in driblets, would have had no chance of evicting them. To conquer the Lesser Antilles it was necessary to have some place of assembly in which a large body of colonists could gradually accumulate, whilst living by their own exertions until strong enough for further expansion. Barbados best provided such a site, and Carlisle's business associates were determined that he (or they) should have it. The strategical guidance came undoubtedly from Thomas Warner, who had perceived the value of Barbados as soon as he had heard of it in 1625. Carlisle, on the strength of his 1627 patent, had before

the issue of the Pembroke grant allotted 10,000 acres in Barbados to a group of London merchants who were creditors of his. He had further given them the right to select a governor for the whole island, and their choice had fallen upon Captain Charles Wolverston,

man who had had colonial experience in Bermuda. There was thus a countersyndicate in the field proposing to develop Barbados to the exclusion of the prior claims of the Courteen syndicate. The business head of Carlisle's syndicate was a merchant named Marmaduke Rawden or Roydon, who in after years achieved the dignity of knighthood. When the Courteen party obtained the issue of the Pembroke patent, Rawden and his friends saw that it must be nullified, or the 10,000 Barbadian acres would never be theirs. They accordingly stirred up their patron to obtain a second grant from Charles I., overriding the Pembroke patent of February 1628. In April of that year the complaisant monarch gave them their wish by a patent in which Barbados, its name spelt for greater certainty in four different forms,1 was included in the dominions of the Earl of Carlisle. earl then signed a governor's commission for Wolverston and certain other documents, and

The

departed on an embassy to the continent, leaving the Rawden syndicate to carry on the busi

ness.

Rawden and Wolverston knew perfectly well that possession was nine points of the law, especially beyond the Tropic of Cancer, and they did not yet regard their victory as won. With the Courteen colonists firmly established in Barbados, a cautious game must be played to ensure success. When, therefore, Charles Wolverston appeared in the island with a shipload of new planters in the summer of 1628, he did not announce that he held a commission to govern it, but produced a document of less menacing tenor. This was a letter from the Earl of Carlisle

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addressed to his very good friends" John Powell junior and the Courteen planters, setting forth that His Majesty had granted him (the Earl) the proprietorship, and desiring their assistance for Wolverston and his party to plant on such parts of the island as might be available, engaging at the same time that the behaviour of the said Wolverston should be such as to give no cause of offence. And whatsoever courtesies, the missive concluded, "they shall receive from you there, I shall be ever ready to acknowledge and deserve from you or any of your friends here in England. wishing you a happy success to your endeavours, I rest your very loving friend,

So,

John Powell was in a quandary. Most likely he suspected that something was wrong. Yet the letter was courteous, it seemed to recognise his authority, its writer was a great man not lightly to be offended, and there was undoubtedly plenty of room for the newcomers. So he ended by admitting them, and they began a separate plantation at some distance from his own.

For two months all was outward peace, although intrigue was busy. Then Wolverston threw off the mask. He showed his governor's commission, and summoned Powell and the Courteen planters to recognise his authority by attending a court under his presidence. Powell called out his men in arms, but was not well served. Captain William Deane, his second-in-command, went over to Wolverston, and a parson named Lane or Kentlane preached defeatism under colour of peace-making. The indentured servants had little to lose by a change of rulers, whilst the planters knew that those who first joined the winning side would get the best terms for themselves. The whole affair was thus decided by a few dominant spirits, and Powell's people laid down their arms without fighting. He himself became a prisoner, and Wolverston took control of the colony. The new governor then called a meeting of the planters, regranted their lands in Carlisle's name, and fixed a scale of quit-rents and taxes pay