Merryn Allingham

In the eighteenth century, sugar was the most important commodity in the world, in much the same way as oil  in the twentieth century. And just as the Middle East grew rich on oil, small tropical islands in the Caribbean became a magnet for those seeking money and status. Sugar revolutionised taste in Europe, diets changed, and on the back of this success whole cities such as Bristol expanded and thrived while, at the same time, millions of black Africans suffered brutal lives and an early death.

The Port of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century

The Caribbean became a place for Europeans to get rich very quickly, but also a place for them to die very young. European settlers suffered an appalling death rate from a host of unfamiliar diseases. If you go round any Caribbean churchyard, you will see the sad roll call of death, with age no distinguisher. The islands were dangerous places —there was not only disease to contend with, but a difficult climate, hostile Carib natives, and later slaves captured and brought from Africa, gradually fomenting rebellion from the inhuman lives forced on them. In addition, the natural world was full of risk, with hurricanes and earthquakes common.

Nevertheless, the West Indies offered opportunities for social mobility that were unknown in Europe. After a dangerous journey with many days at sea, the islands offered a place to make a new start, holding out a promise of freedom and an apparent lack of hierarchy. The West Indies were particularly appealing to those men—and it was usually men—who had got on the wrong side of the law at home, so that petty thieves could become pillars of the establishment. Women who had ‘sinned’ in some way had a new chance, too, with no questions asked. The aristocracy was particularly prone to sending out their spare sons. Traditionally, the second son would have gone into the church, the third into the army, but now they were often sent to the West Indies to found a new and often much wealthier branch of the family.

Although the class divide was nothing like as severe as in England, there were those who drew the line at socialising with ‘lost’ women and the odd pirate, and who objected to the levelling that for many appeared part of the islands’ attraction. The lower classes were often seen as lazy, drunk and immoral, but they were at least white, and white people stuck together for their mutual protection.

                        Planter and his wife, with a servant, British West Indies circa 1780.

Those who became rich on sugar were known colloquially as nabobs, their wealth derived entirely from slave labour, which for a hundred and fifty years went unquestioned. Slaves were treated with the utmost cruelty, physically punished and tortured by their white overseers for the slightest infringement, with women and children suffering along their menfolk. Some, who came out to the West Indies to find a new future, discovered they could not stomach what lay behind the nabobs’ enormous wealth and sailed back to Britain. Of those that stayed, the wives of plantation owners led relatively miserable lives. They suffered from isolation and from lack of access to education or anything like meaningful work. Slave women did all the housework, nursed their children, and were often press-ganged into the master’s bedroom. The white woman’s job was merely to look decorative.

It was nonconformist ministers—Baptists and Methodists—who first taught slaves to read, and with education came knowledge and a determination to gain freedom. Despite the Abolition of Slavery movement in the UK, when the slaves must have thought emancipation was close, it took many more years for freedom to come, years in which hopes were dashed and slave rebellions cost hundreds of slaves’ lives.

    Cutting the sugar cane, Antigua

After slavery was finally abolished in 1807, life expectancy for African West Indians increased hugely as did the survival rate of their babies and children. To continue working in the sugar fields carried a stigma, and former slaves turned their backs on the plantations, which were left untended and overgrown. An indentured Asian workforce was brought in by plantation owners to fill the gap slavery had left, but the experiment was largely unsuccessful and sugar production gradually slumped.

Plantation scene and slave houses, Barbados, 1807-1808  

Barbados was the first island to experience the sugar ‘gold rush’ and from there, it spread through the entire Caribbean. And when that commodity lost its global importance, Barbados, like the rest of the West Indies,  suffered a decline in sugar production. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to diversify the economy, but nothing produced the huge wealth that sugar had created. In our own times, sugar production has been replaced by tourism and offshore banking, neither of which has proved ideal. Tourism has uncomfortable resonances with the region’s history, since most visitors are white and stay in large plantation-style hotels, while most servants—the waiters, cleaners, gardeners—are black. And offshore banking has attracted unsavoury characters, with questions over fraud and money laundering linked to drug cartels.

Some islands have been less successful than others at adapting to a world in which they govern their own futures. In some, there is still a high level of poverty and infant mortality among the black population, which has led to waves of emigration, particularly to the United States. For the most part, the tiny white population has continued to live a comfortable existence, the islands’ most valuable assets often owned by them, or in the hands of foreign interests.

The article was part of the research I carried out when writing Caribbean Evil.

Winter in Venice can be harsh. There are days of cold, sunny brilliance but there can also be monotonous grey days of rain, fierce enough to stir the mud in the bottom of the canals.  Sometimes the fringe of a bora—a north-eastern wind off the Adriatic sea—sweeps the water of the lagoon into fierce waves driving up the narrower canals and hurling moored boats against the quays.

 Fog is common in winter, sometimes drifting in from the sea, sometimes seeping up from the waters on which the city is built. It can be so thick that you can see only a few metres ahead, buildings slipping in and out of sight as though they’re moving and people approaching like phantoms. The fog can disrupt boat services badly, vaporetti for instance becoming divorced from any schedule and appearing randomly through the clouds of fog, then slamming heavily into the dock. When the fog comes to town, Venice becomes dank and desolate, the distant clanging of a fog bell or the deep boom of a steamer at sea, the only sounds to penetrate the muffled silence. 

Spring is probably the best time of the year, before the weather becomes suffocatingly hot and millions of tourists descend on the baking streets. On a perfect early spring day, you can feel the bright sun on old stones. The city smells of coffee and fresh brioche and the water on the Grand Canal sparkles. The fifteenth of May is when spring officially reaches Venice The fogs have gone and the swallows are still arriving. The city is not too crowded and the sun not too hot.

Summer in Venice can be unbearably hot and very, very crowded, with cruise ships arriving every day and disembarking thousands of their passengers. Even so, it’s possible to escape and, by avoiding well-trodden paths, you are gifted an entirely different city. Take a walk in Dorsoduro and you’ll find narrow streets, picturesque bridges, and a  café to rest at in any of the small campi or squares. Away from the hurly burly, you gain a sense of the Venice that was, and still is, beyond the tourist trail.

Autumn  can be chilly, particularly near the open waters of the lagoon where there is always the chance of a wind, and skies can be grey, the leaves on the trees in the small campi flipping over with the force of the wind. But there are beautiful days, too – with cloudless blue skies and a warm sun, and a wonderful crispness to the early morning air.

This article was part of the research I carried out when writing Venetian Vendetta.

As everyone knows, Venice is a city built on water and within its city limits there is every kind of boat for every kind of purpose.

The sàndolo is a smaller boat than the gondola with one oarsman facing forwards. It is one of the most common boats in the lagoon—its name appears to be from the Latin word sandalium or rather sandal, because of its form. The sàndolo has a flat bottom adapted for the low sea floor and varies in length from five to ten metres. Traditionally, it was used for fishing, but nowadays its primary use is as a means of transport.

The nippiest way to get around the city!

The vaporetto is often used to mean any kind of water bus, but officially, the term refers to flat-decked, single-level vessels such as the boats on the line running from the Grand Canal to Lido and those from the Grand Canal to the Giudecca Canal. They take to the water in most weathers, plunging into the lagoon through wind, rain and sleet.The average capacity of a vaporetto is 230 passengers, but they a run at a loss – in winter only a third of the seats are occupied and the fares are artificially low. Frequent, fast and reasonably comfortable, they are the lifeline for many Venetians, enabling them to travel cheaply around their city.

A traghetto which means “ferry” in Italian is a passenger boat that crosses the Grand Canal at seven points between the railway station and St.Mark’s basin. The boat carries up to ten passengers (compared to five for a privately-hired gondola) and eschews bow decoration, brocaded chairs, and other luxury trimmings. Rowed by two oarsmen, one stands behind the passengers like a traditional gondolier, the other closer to the bow. Most traghetti have been operated by the same families for generations and, as recently as the 1950s, there were some thirty of these gondola ferry routes rather than the seven today.

The gondola is said to have originated in Turkey but it has adapted itself to the nature of the city. It is high-prowed, lop-sided, brass-embellished and has been painted black since ordained by the sumptuary laws in the sixteenth century. The gondola is the primary symbol of Venice and is built only in its boatyards. The interior is thickly carpeted, with cushioned seats, but it is immensely strong and can be fast.

It’s constructed to be deliberately lop-sided to counter the weight of the one-oared rower at the stern.  At the prow is a ferro, a steel device with six prongs facing forwards and one prong astern. The gondoliers believe the six forward prongs represent the six districts of Venice, but disagree about the rest. Gondolas riding side by side through the lamplight of the Grand Canal, their ferros rampant, encapsulate the feel of Venice.

Gondolas are very expensive to build and every three weeks or so in summer they must go back to the yards to be scraped of weeds and tarred again. The fares are high, since the gondoliers are more or less unemployed in the winter. The gondola is not easy to row and the gondolier is a skilled boatman, his feet placed in a ballet-like position, toes well out, and the oar raised to waist level. Around sharp corners, his body twists in the opposite direction as he spins the gondola with a swing and a swish. The reverse stroke of the oar is as difficult as the forward because the blade must be kept below water to keep the bows straight with an instant movement of the oar in and out of the complicated row-lock. Gondoliers are showmen, bringing their boats to the landing stage with a flamboyant flourish, whipping their oars neatly out of the row-locks to act as brakes, and coming alongside with a surge of water.

Visitors on the Grand Canal

The article was part of research I carried out when writing Venetian Vendetta.

The Venetians have been Italian citizens only since 1866 when the city joined the newly unified country of Italy, and they have remained very much a race in themselves. Despite periods of colonial expansion, Venice has always been a city state which has preserved a robust insularity and a particular Venetian character.

In many ways, Venice is a bourgeois city and its inhabitants homely and provincial. They are filled with local pride, certain that their city is the best in the world. Venetians are convinced that their way is the best way, but it’s a self-esteem that can make for narrow horizons. In the 1960s, many poor Venetians had never been to the mainland of Italy, and thousands had never even visited the outer islands of the lagoon.

Venetians have a language of their own, a rich dialect, which over the years has lost its impact because of cinema and television. The language has queer contractions and distortions which make the street signs of the city, often expressed in the vernacular, confusing.  The church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo is in the street signed as San Zanipolo. San Stae is really Sant’Eustacchio. San Stin is Santo Stefano.

Venice is a compact city, more a collection of villages, with each district having its own market square and a recognisable atmosphere. Even the dialect varies from quarter to quarter and the same street names appear over and over again in each section of the city. The six districts called sestiere are: Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, San Polo, San Marco, Santa Croce and Castello.

Historically, the Venetian Republic supposed the worst in everyone, from the Doge downwards, and modern Venice is similarly cynical. Violent crime is rare—it’s a city of petty thieves. In the eighteenth century pick-pockets who took their haul to the city guards were allowed to keep a percentage of its value. Burglars are skilled at climbing through the windows of canal-side houses, stealing a handbag or necklace and drifting away in a silent boat. Big hotels have watchmen on the canals, private houses are heavily shuttered. The front doors of Venice are secured with a variety of locks, triple turn Yales, antique padlocks, bolts, chains and bars. For all the locked doors, though, Venice is a gossipy city where neighbours’ movements are observed and visitors analysed.

Much of the colour and richness of the city comes from the church:  wonderful buildings, processions and festivals, incense and organ music. Monks are ubiquitous, along with columns of nuns, whimpled in white. There are a huge number of churches in the city, yet only a fraction are in use today and the great religious festivals are often ill-attended. The summer services at the Basilica attract more tourists than Venetians, so it’s perhaps worth remembering that in her heyday, Venice was subservient to the Papacy only when she found it convenient.

East and West have always mingled in Venice—it’s said that the East begins in Venice—and practical tolerance of inhabitants has made it a cosmopolitan city. In its commercial prime, Venice was like a bazaar: Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Germans and the Turks all had their quarters, the Jews being the most resilient. They were originally forced to live on the island of Guidecca, then the Ghettos in the north-western part of the city on the site of a disused ironworks—ghetto is said to be medieval Venetian for a foundry.

There are market stalls that even today suggest a Middle Eastern bazaar. The outdoor market on Strada Nuova (on the way to the station) its canvas awnings flapping amid the clamour of high pitched voices, smells of fish, pepper and cloves. Venetians like to think of their city as a bridge between Occident and Orient. Their buildings are cluttered with Oriental treasures and the history of the city has been inextricably interwoven with the East since the first Venetians entered agreements with the Byzantine emperors. The great trade routes which kept Venice rich and powerful converged out of Turkestan and Persia, Afghanistan and Arabia on the seaports of the Levant where the Venetians maintained their own great warehouses.

Despite this affinity, when the Venetians spoke of pagans they usually meant Muslims and most strange foreigners were characterised as Moors. Yet they owed a great debt to Arab civilisation in the art of navigation and in architecture. Architects from both civilisations shared a common heritage of Byzantium, making St Mark’s and the Dome of the Rock distant cousins.

The article is part of the research I carried out when writing Venetian Vendetta