Throughout this study, every statement of fact that derives from the manuscript record is supported by a reference given as a footnote. These references take a compact form - a volume number, an oblique stroke, and an image number, for example 005/76 or 028/114-127. They are not page or folio numbers of the original bound volumes. The number before the stroke identifies the manuscript volume in the sequence of transcribed East India Company records used for this work, and the number after the stroke is the image on which the passage appears within that volume. A reference spanning two numbers, such as 114-127, indicates that a single document or episode runs across several consecutive images.

A full key to the volume numbers - giving the complete title and date-range of each, with a hyperlink to the digitised original - is provided at the end of this study, in the section headed Key to the Manuscript Volumes. A glossary of period and trade terms follows it.

The evidence of this study is, first and last, the manuscript record itself - the consultations, letters, registers and lists kept on the island and in London. Wherever the records make a point, they are quoted directly and in their own words, so that the reader hears the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century voice rather than a modern paraphrase of it. Where the manuscripts fall silent or speak only in passing, modern works are drawn upon as well, but only where they supply something the manuscripts cannot: wider context, a comparative frame, or an insight of their own.

Further notes on method and scope

This study rests on a database of 743 individual food and provisioning records, each extracted from a single passage in the manuscripts and tagged by date, place, commodity, people and theme. The database spans volumes 001 to 030, running from the founding instructions of 1673 to the correspondence of 1724. Volume 015 is absent from the sequence, having been retired from the transcription, so no reference to it will be found.

Every footnote gives the exact image number of the passage it supports. A reference such as 030/240 points to the single image where the fact stands; a span such as 023/91-95 marks an episode running across several images. No placeholder is ever used in place of a real image number, so that any statement may be traced directly to its source and checked against the digitised original.

The record is uneven by its nature. It is fullest where the Council kept monthly accounts of its stock and stores, and thinnest in the registers of wills and deeds, which touch food only where a legacy or a sale happens to carry standing crops or cattle. A rising number of records in any year is therefore a sign of fuller record-keeping as much as of busier events. Where a figure is given as reported - a herd count, a price, a weight of yams - it is the figure the clerk set down, and no attempt has been made to correct the arithmetic of the original.

Sterling sums are given throughout in the period style, in the form £1 7s 0d, using the symbols rather than the words. Local and trade units - the dollar, the rixdollar, the piece of eight, the pecul, the catty and the maund - are kept as the records give them, since to convert them would lose the texture of a settlement that dealt in many currencies at once. Dates are given in the day-month-year form; where the record gives only a year, only a year is stated, and no day has been invented to fill a gap.

The report makes active use of published scholarship to widen its frame. At each topic the island’s experience is set beside a parallel drawn from books, papers or theses - the Dutch station at the Cape, the plantation colonies of the West Indies, the China tea trade, the long medical struggle against scurvy, and the environmental history of the tropical islands. These works are cited in full Chicago form in the Works Cited, with a page given wherever one can be. They are always kept in second place to the manuscripts. Where a modern work merely repeats what the records already say, the records are quoted instead, as the primary evidence; and no figure has been taken from any external work that belongs to a date later than the manuscript record itself reaches.

Introduction

St Helena was never chosen for its soil. A volcanic rock of some 47 square miles set in the South Atlantic, more than a thousand miles from the nearest land, it was seized and held by the English East India Company for a single reason. It lay on the homeward track from India, and a ship that could not water and refresh there might not reach England at all.

The founding grant recited that the island served as a refreshment station for homeward fleets, and its whole purpose flowed from that fact.^[1]

That role was not unique, and the island is best understood beside its nearest analogue. The Dutch East India Company had founded exactly such a station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, a garden and cattle-post to revictual ships and land the scurvy-stricken on the same India route. Its first commander, Jan van Riebeeck, was a ship’s surgeon who knew that young red wine eased scurvy, and he planted a vegetable garden within weeks of landing and vines within three years.^[2]

The comparison runs deeper still, for in the 1680s the Company tried to make St Helena a second Barbados. It shipped in Caribbean overseers and enslaved labour, modelled its slave laws on the Barbados code, and pressed sugar, indigo and cotton on the island, convinced that its latitude gave it a tropical climate. The scheme failed, because the island’s true climate is mild, high and rocky, wholly unfit for cane. That failure, recovered by Michael Bennett from the Company’s London letters, is the essential backdrop to the food history, for it explains why the island was pressed so hard to grow crops it never could, and why it fell back, again and again, on the ships.^[3]

The story that emerges from the manuscripts is not the paradise of the early travellers. It is a story of chronic shortfall, of a settlement that could never quite feed itself, still less the fleets it existed to serve. Bread grain never grew on the island. The staple that did grow, the yam, was a bulky root that gave little protein. The cattle that were the island’s wealth died in their hundreds when the rains failed. The lemons that guarded seamen against scurvy were destroyed by a blight in 1708 and never fully recovered.

The database on which this study rests allows that struggle to be traced year by year and commodity by commodity. It permits the herds to be counted as they rose and fell, the prices to be tracked through dearth and plenty, the citrus to be followed from abundance to collapse to rebuilding, the drinks and grains and dairy to be told apart into what the island made and what it bought, and the diet of its three classes to be reconstructed from the rations and accounts. Each topic is treated in turn and in chronological order. The charts are drawn directly from the figures in the manuscripts, and every statement is anchored to the volume and image where it may be checked.

The picture is critical as well as descriptive. Where the Company deceived itself, or its servants deceived the Company, the records are made to show it. Throughout, the island’s experience is set against the wider colonial world - the Cape, the West Indies, the China trade, the coffee route from Mocha, the long history of scurvy at sea, and the failure of European grain in the tropics - so that what was particular to St Helena may be told apart from what it shared with every European venture of its age.

1. Weather, Drought and the Great Famine

No theme runs deeper through the island’s food history than the weather, and none was more feared. On a small island with steep relief and no great rivers, the whole system of cultivation depended on rain falling in its season. When it did not, the yams withered, the pastures burned, the cattle starved, and a settlement that lived hand to mouth was thrown upon its slender stores and its imported grain. The record of weather is therefore a record of provisioning crisis, and it culminates in the great famine of 1713 to 1715.

The early dearths, 1674-1705

The pattern was set early. In times of plenty every family was ordered to lay up a store of dry provisions that would keep, a reserve against the shortfall that experience already taught them to expect.^[4]

A great shortage of supplies was reported in 1678, the inhabitants having failed to raise sufficient provisions, so that soldiers had to be quartered and dieted on them for want of Company supply.^[5]

The worst of these early crises came in the winter of 1682. It was not caused by weather alone but by the failure of the imported grain on which the island already leaned.

Coarse rice arrived from the East Indies damaged by poor packing and weevil, and had to be issued before it rotted further, while the monthly provisions allowance was raised by a peck a man as barely sufficient.^[6]

The 1690s and 1700s brought a run of dry seasons whose cumulative effect was to grind down the cattle herds.

By 1693 the Company’s own cattle, especially the males, had become scarce through several years of dry seasons, with little stock to be had elsewhere on the island.^[7]

A defamation case of 1701 turned on a prophecy, uttered while dry weather was under discussion, that St Helena would suffer famine within two or three years.^[8]

A plantation dispute of 1704 recorded plainly that the cattle had mostly died in the last dry season for want of fodder.^[9]

These were the tremors before the earthquake. Taken together they show an island already living at the edge of its subsistence, its herds thinned by drought and its grain dependent on the uncertain arrival of sound rice from India.

The great famine, 1711-1715

The failure began with the grain crops and the want of rain to raise them.

The council explained in 1711 that worms ate the Indian corn and beans as soon as planted, and that only the rains, or continual irrigation, let the seed sprout ahead of the worms.^[10]

By 1713 the yams had rotted and the plantations were neglected, the cattle total had fallen despite roughly 80 being bought in, and beef was bartered with arrack to stretch the supply.^[11]

Then came the central catastrophe of the whole record.

The island lay in a deplorable condition for want of rain, which had not fallen for upwards of ten months by mid-1713; the yam plantations were burnt and scorched, the roots too small to eat, and cattle, hogs and goats died in large numbers.^[12]

The garrison, likely to starve as no provisions could be had from the planters, neared mutiny, and the free planters petitioned that they and their children were ready to starve.^[13]

The toll was confirmed from London, where the Court of Directors read the island’s accounts with alarm.

The Court found the cattle unaccountably diminished, 18 head lost in two months, and the stock of goats quite omitted from the accounts as if all gone.^[14]

The measured low point came in July 1714, when a new Council arrived to take over a ruined island.

The Council found the island in a very poor and deplorable condition, the plantations gone to ruin, only 60 head of black cattle and 23 hogs remaining, with goats, sheep, poultry and deer all gone, and fish become the chief food.^[15]

The following year saw the crisis reach its social breaking point. Dearth turned to disorder.

In 1715 the soldiers mutinied for want of food; the slaughter of cattle and calves was halted to rebuild the herds, and salt beef, pork, pease, flour, bread and cheese were sent from England.^[16]

The scale of the loss, once the whole episode could be reckoned, was staggering for so small a place. When the herds were later counted against what had been lost, the reckoning stood at some 2,500 beasts dead in the famine.^[17]

The mechanism: deforestation and water

Why should a drought, severe but not unique, have cut so deep? The manuscripts record the effects without fully explaining the cause. Here a modern interpretation is illuminating. Richard Grove has argued that St Helena was the first place where the East India Company confronted the consequences of its own environmental damage. Plantation clearance and, above all, the goats had stripped the island’s timber; the loss of forest cover reduced the regularity of the streams; and the failure of perennial water then crippled the irrigation on which the yams and imported crops depended.^[18]

The island was not alone in this. The same collision of goats, clearance and soil loss had already transformed Madeira, the Canaries and Mauritius, wherever European ships stocked an island with browsing animals and then felled its woods for fuel and tillage. St Helena was an early and well-documented case of a pattern that ran across every ocean the Europeans entered.^[19]

Figure 1. Company cattle stock, 1683-1719, showing the famine collapse to 60 head in 1714 and the recovery under the slaughter ban. Drawn from the stock returns in the food records.

Recovery and the later droughts, 1715-1720

The recovery, once it came, was rapid and closely managed, and it is treated in full in the next chapter. Its driver was a deliberate ban on slaughter.

Worrall’s stock return of 1715 counted 145 neat cattle, 244 hogs, 69 sheep and 266 goats, up from the bare 60 cattle and 23 hogs of 1714, the rebuild driven by a cow-saving order.^[20]

But the island was not done with dry weather. Two further episodes show that the vulnerability was structural, not a single misfortune.

A waterspout burst on the Main Ridge on 02 May 1719, sending floods that stripped the soil and carried off grass, trees, yams and stone walls, one plantation losing about 20,000 yams and forcing the Company to buy three or four months’ supply.^[21]

No rain fell for three months in early 1720, the pastures were almost burnt up, and the cattle began to suffer, the Council in dread of a very hard year until the rains returned at the end of April.^[22]

Reviewing the island in 1720, the Court noted with relief that it had well recovered from the drought of three or four years earlier, which had killed most of the cattle and reduced the inhabitants to poverty.^[23]

That the Council of 1720 could dread a hard year in the same terms as its predecessors of 1701 and 1713 shows how little the underlying problem had changed. The herds could be rebuilt and the stores replenished, but the island remained a place where a three-month drought was a threat to survival. Only the constant importation of grain, and the slow rebuilding of the cattle, stood between the settlement and a return to the famine of 1713.

2. The Animal Stock: Founding, Collapse and Recovery

Cattle were the island’s wealth and its currency. They provisioned the ships, fed the governing table, settled the planters’ debts, and stood as the visible measure of a plantation’s worth. The Company counted them obsessively, and in the recovery years it counted them month by month, so that the herds can be followed through the record with a precision granted to few other things. Their story is one of a small founding stock, painstaking increase, catastrophic collapse in the famine, and a swift, disciplined recovery.

The island got its cattle as the Cape did, by bartering with visiting ships and building a breeding herd. At the Cape the Dutch bought their first beasts from the Khoikhoi herders and only slowly bred a Company stock; St Helena, with no native people to trade with, depended wholly on cattle landed from Madagascar and from passing ships. Both stations learned that a herd built up over years could be destroyed in a single bad season.^[24]

The founding herds, 1683-1707

The stock was small and carefully husbanded from the outset; each planter family received two cattle delivered free by the Governor and Council to start it in provision-growing.^[25]

The Company built its herd by buying whole estates: in 1698 it took the departing Thomas Ellison’s entire holding, with 30 head of cattle, and ordered the beasts kept together in one place.^[26]

By 1707 a governor’s personal stock on arrival could number 124 head of neat cattle, 32 goats and 27 turkeys, with very few swine, a measure of what a well-found establishment then held.^[27]

The collapse, 1713-1714

The handover of July 1714 recorded the floor: only 60 head of black cattle and 23 hogs, with goats, sheep, turkeys, geese, ducks, fowls and deer all gone.^[28]

Few or none of the planters had any cattle left beyond breeding stock, so no beasts could be spared, and fish had become the chief food of the island.^[29]

From two founding cattle per family, through a herd that could stock a governor’s table with 124 head, to a total of 60 - the collapse is stark, and the absence of any goats, sheep or poultry at all shows how completely the productive stock had been consumed.

The recovery, 1715-1719

The rebuild was the achievement of Governor Pyke’s administration, and its instrument was a ban on killing breeding stock.

The cow-saving order of 07 Jun 1715 forbade killing any cow, heifer or calf without the Governor’s warrant, driving the rebuild after some 2,500 beasts had been lost in the famine.^[30]

Worrall’s return of 1715 already showed 145 neat cattle, 244 hogs, 69 sheep, 266 goats, 60 turkeys and 22 geese.^[31]

From August 1716 the overseer rendered monthly stock accounts, and these allow the recovery to be followed almost as a graph.

The account of 01 Aug 1716 counted 147 neat cattle, 325 goats, 103 sheep, 80 hogs, 55 turkeys, 31 geese, 56 fowls and 15 ducks.^[32]

By 01 Aug 1717 the neat cattle reached 197, the highest of the recovered series and double the 90 head of early 1715.^[33]

The account of 21 Sep 1717 counted 198 neat cattle, the strongest of the recovered returns to that point.^[34]

The climb continued into 1719: the return of 01 Jun 1719 gave 230 neat cattle, up from 209 on 01 May, the highest count in the whole record.^[35]

The poultry, by contrast, did not climb so smoothly. The returns show the fowls and hogs being drawn down faster than they could breed, a reminder that even in recovery the establishment consumed its stock as fast as it raised it.

Figure 2. Company livestock by species through the recovery, 1714-1718. Cattle, goats and sheep climb steadily under the slaughter ban while hogs, heavily consumed, fall away. Drawn from the monthly returns in the food records.

A note of caution belongs here. The counts are of the Company’s own stock, and sometimes of a single plantation, not of every beast on the island; the figures shift as Perkins’s and the Grand Plantation are combined or separated in the reckoning. They are snapshots of particular herds, not a full census. But as a measure of the Company’s recovery from the famine they are eloquent: within four years of the handover floor, the cattle had climbed nearly fourfold, and the discipline of the slaughter ban had turned a ruined stock into a self-sustaining herd.

3. Meat Distribution: Ships, Fort and Planters

The island’s meat, chiefly beef, was contested between three claimants: the visiting ships, whose refreshment was the island’s purpose; the Fort table and garrison, the resident establishment; and the planters, who bred the cattle and wished to sell them at the best price. How the beef was divided between these three, and at what price, is one of the clearest themes in the record, and it shifts sharply with the fortunes of the herd.

The problem the island was built to solve - feeding long-haul crews on a route where fresh meat spoiled and salt provisions bred disease - was the same problem that dogged every East Indiaman afloat. A crew fed for months on salt beef and biscuit sickened, and a station that could put fresh beef aboard a homeward fleet was worth a great deal to owners and men alike.^[36]

The founding framework, 1673-1706

The framework was set at the founding: on the arrival of Company ships a market was to be set up at a convenient place, the beef supply divided between the establishment, the ships and the planters.^[37]

As duties came increasingly to be paid in cattle, Company ships were in future to take their beef from the Company’s own stock where possible, sparing the planters’ beasts.^[38]

A price ceiling protected the trade: beef bought from planters to supply ships was not to be accepted above £4 10s the head in 1702.^[39]

The victualling station at work, 1708-1709

The fullest evidence of the meat trade comes from the plantation accounts of 1708 and 1709, which for the first time split the reckoning cleanly into a Fort head and a shipping head, and name the ships supplied.

A half-year Fort table account itemised the officers’ diet, 5,183 lb of beef among much else, while a separate shipping account charged out beef, yams, fowls and beans to named vessels.^[40]

The price at which each drew its beef differed, and the difference is documented exactly.

Beef put aboard passing ships was charged at 25s the hundred, against the 30s reckoned for the standing Fort supply - a plain price gap between the ship market and the garrison table.^[41]

The scale of the ship trade in a good year dwarfed the resident consumption.

One season’s shipping account named nine or ten vessels victualled with beef at once, the shipping side far outweighing the Fort table.^[42]

For the longest voyages cured meat was prepared: the Northumberland took a parcel that included 20 lb of dried beef and 24 lb of bacon alongside its fresh beef and yams.^[43]

Figure 3. The documented beef-price gap of 1708: ships bought beef more cheaply, by the hundredweight, than the Fort table paid. Drawn from the plantation account of 1708-09.

Collapse and rationed recovery, 1713-1716

The famine reversed the normal order entirely. The trade that existed to serve the ships could no longer do so.

With meat scarce in the continuing dry weather, fish became the only relief available, and nothing could be spared for passing ships.^[44]

Even as recovery began, ships got only the poorest meat, few or none of the planters having cattle left beyond breeding stock.^[45]

A fraud found well established in 1714 allowed the head, entrails and hide to be counted as a notional fourth quarter, inflating each beef payment by a quarter.^[46]

As the herds recovered under the slaughter ban, the ships were allowed only a strictly rationed share.

Under the cow-saving ban, shipping demand was the one permitted exception, the returns recording just one bullock released to the shipping apart from beasts killed ashore.^[47]

By 1716 the cargo price list set beef and pork to the shipping, taking a cask at a time, at 5d the pound, while single pieces ashore were dearer, an explicit bulk-versus-retail distinction.^[48]

The charter obliged the island to supply 300 lb of beef for every 20 men, but some ships would take twice that, and scarcity made the charter quantity a ceiling the island struggled to meet.^[49]

Figure 4. The relative value of provisioning the Fort table against the shipping in 1708-09. In a good year the fleet could take more than the resident establishment. Drawn from the accounts of 1708-09.

The meat trade thus swung between two extremes. In a good year such as 1709 the island was a true victualling station, supplying a whole homeward fleet and reserving the dearer, standing supply for its own table. In famine it could supply neither, and the ships, if they were served at all, got tough meat or a single rationed bullock. The recovery restored the trade, but on a controlled footing, with the breeding stock guarded and the ships charged a keen bulk price for what could be spared.

4. Antiscorbutics: The Rise and Fall of the Lemon

Scurvy was the great killer of long sea voyages, and fresh food was its only cure. The whole value of St Helena as a refreshment station rested on its power to break the salt-provision diet that bred the disease. Among all the island’s fresh foods, the lemon held a special place, for its juice was recognised, however imperfectly, as a guard against scurvy. The story of the island’s citrus follows a sharp arc: promotion, abundance, sudden collapse by blight, and a long, painful rebuilding.

The Company had learned the value of citrus long before it held St Helena. On Sir James Lancaster’s first Company voyage in 1601, the one ship whose crew received a daily spoonful of lemon juice stayed largely free of scurvy while the other three sickened, and in 1617 the Company’s own surgeon-general John Woodall prescribed lemon juice as a preventive in The Surgeon’s Mate. That the island’s lemons were prized for the ships was thus the application of a lesson the Company had held for three generations, even as the science of vitamin C lay more than two centuries in the future.^[50]^[51]

Promotion and abundance, 1673-1707

From the founding the island’s woods, meadows and pastures were valued for restoring ships’ companies, and the Company’s slaves were set to plant the fruit trees and seeds sent out.^[52]

The clearest early recognition of citrus as a ships’ medicine came in 1679, in a conservation order.

A scarcity of lemons having arisen from indiscriminate gathering before the fruit was half ripe, and from damage to the trees, gathering on Company land was forbidden without the Governor’s leave, the fruit reserved for ships calling to refresh.^[53]

The order had teeth: taking lemons or damaging lemon trees within a measured private plantation without leave incurred fines of 4 dollars for a first offence and 8 for a second.^[54]

Richard Grove has independently seized on this 1679 order as an early instance of a colonial authority struggling to protect a wild resource against its own settlers. The manuscripts give the order in full, quoted here as the primary evidence, but it is worth knowing that the moment has been recognised as significant beyond the island’s own records.^[55]

Citrus was abundant enough to name the landscape: Richard Harding’s will of 1681 left his wife 20 acres near Lemon Valley Rock with all the plantation, woods and timber.^[56]

London pressed the fruit hard, judging in 1683 that oranges would thrive, and directing that lime trees be preferred for quick hedges.^[57]

When the fruit would not regenerate on its own it was compelled by covenant: a 21-year lease of 1688 required the tenant to enclose an acre and a half and plant it with citrus and fruit trees.^[58]

As late as 1707 an enslaved woman traded two bottles of lemon juice for rum, and a lemon garden in Chapel Valley was leased and assigned between tenants, so cultivation survived on the eve of the blight.^[59]

The blight of 1708

Then, in 1708, came the disaster that broke the island’s citrus.

The council reported that a blight had ruined the lemons, leaving not a thousandth part of what once grew, and that replacement saplings caught the same affliction and died.^[60]

That the collapse was a specific affliction, and not mere neglect, is confirmed by the accounts, which show a working lemon supply still charged to the table in the very years around the blight.

The Fort accounts still charged home-grown lemons to the table, 2,600 at 2s the hundred in one half-year, confirming a working supply in the years just before 1708.^[61]

The loss was grievous precisely because it struck at the island’s special value. A refreshment station that could no longer furnish lemons had lost part of its reason to exist, and the blight defeated the obvious remedy, replanting, by killing the young trees as fast as they were set.

Failure and rebuilding, 1711-1718

After the blight, citrus began to appear through the store rather than from the orchards: a Pelican lemon was entered in the Company store account in 1711, valued at 13s.^[62]

The low point came in the famine, when the island had to buy its antiscorbutic from passing ships.

The Company gardens having been blasted by the drought so they could no longer supply the table, the council bought a hogshead of lime juice, 60 gallons, from a visiting captain, cheaper than buying lemons.^[63]

A lemon garden was still kept under the shelter of the Pigeon Rocks in Sandy Bay Valley, the only sheltered spot where the fruit survived.^[64]

This is a telling reversal. An island whose lemons had once been protected by fines, and reserved for the ships, was now reduced to buying preserved lime juice from a ship to prevent scurvy at its own table. The manuscripts thus catch, in a single purchase of a hogshead of lime juice, the same practical faith in citrus that James Lind would put on an experimental footing a generation later, in the famous trial of 1747, though the science that explained it came later still.^[65]

The rebuilding, when it came, leaned first on imported seed and vines.

After the famine the Court let the plantation overseer buy seeds and plants, and pressed the improvement of the vines so that grapes might benefit the inhabitants’ health.^[66]

The new Council asked the gentlemen at Bencoolen to send seeds and fruits suited to the island’s soil, part of rebuilding the fresh-fruit supply after the blight.^[67]

Only from 1716 did a deliberate replanting of lemons resume.

In a single month of 1716 the Company set 1,860 plants on new ground, including 100 lemon trees round the garden, part of an orchard programme to rebuild the stock destroyed by the blight.^[68]

By 1718 a high wall sheltered the Company garden’s lemon trees from the blasts, letting the fruit recover its quality, and a month’s planting set 130 lemon trees and 150 apple trees.^[69]

Figure 5. The rise, collapse and rebuilding of island citrus, 1679-1718. The vertical line marks the 1708 blight, after which the island bought lime juice before replanting from 1716. Drawn from the antiscorbutics records.

By the 1720s citrus had ceased to be a prominent island asset. When testators of that decade mention orchards, the orchards are English country properties inherited at home, while island bequests run to yams, cattle, goats and hogs. The fruit that had once named the island’s valleys and guarded its visiting seamen had become a thing the Company had to strive to keep alive. The blight of 1708 marks the great dividing line, before which the island supplied its own antiscorbutic, and after which it struggled to.

5. Hot Drinks: Tea, Coffee and the Reach of Empire

For most of the period the island’s drink was arrack, a fierce distilled spirit, supplemented by imported wine and English beer. Hot drinks - tea, coffee, chocolate - were costly novelties that had not entered the stores. Their arrival, and above all the arrival of tea, is one of the clearest examples of change over time in the whole record. It is the more striking because the two great hot drinks reached the island in opposite ways, tea early and coffee late, for reasons that lie in the geography of the Company’s trade.

Tea: a garrison medicine, 1716

For an island on the direct route from China, tea might have been expected early, yet the records are empty of it as a local commodity until 1716. When it came, it came not as a luxury but as a medicine for the soldiers.

The first appearance of tea, about Christmas 1716, was as a health ration against the rainy-season sickness.

Amid heavy mortality in the rainy season, about Christmas 1716 the Governor ordered tea made for the garrison’s ordinary diet in the Dutch manner, the council thinking the benefit might lie as much in boiling the water as in the tea.^[70]

The council’s shrewd remark - that the good might lie in the boiling of the water as much as in the leaf - is one of the sharpest observations in the record, and unknowingly correct. Boiling killed the waterborne organisms that caused much of the wet-season sickness, though the reason lay more than a century in the future. The soldiers were made to drink boiled water in the palatable form of tea, and their health improved for a cause no one on the island could yet name.

The apparatus of the habit arrived the same year: the Katharine landed graded coffee pots by the dozen, from quart down to quarter-pint, with copper tea kettles.^[71]

The class inversion: tea for soldiers, not for the poor at home

Here the island stood the English social order on its head. In England tea entered at the top and descended slowly. Catherine of Braganza brought it to the court of Charles II in 1662, and for the next three generations it remained a dear drink of the wealthy and the polite, taken in delicate bowls and hedged about with ceremony. It did not reach the labouring poor as an everyday drink until the middle of the eighteenth century, and the social reformer Jonas Hanway complained in 1756 that those would have tea who had not bread. Cheap smuggled tea, and the tax cut of 1784, completed the descent only in the later part of the century.^[72]

On St Helena the sequence was reversed. Tea was issued to common soldiers as a daily ration from 1716, and made permanent at 2 lb a head by 1718, a full generation before it became the drink of the ordinary English worker. The reason was neither wealth nor fashion but geography and health. The island sat on the Company’s China route, so tea was cheap to land, and it was given to the garrison as medicine against the rains. The private sentinel on St Helena drank tea daily while his cousin labouring in England could not yet afford it.

Two cautions temper the comparison. The St Helena soldiers were Company servants on an outpost that could draw China goods at cost, so they were not quite ordinary English labourers. And the English side of the contrast rests on the general history, not on the island’s own records, which end their tea sequence in 1720.

From ration to established trade, 1717-1720

The island sat athwart the route of a trade then in its infancy but soon to become the greatest branch of the Company’s commerce.

The wider trade routed past the island: in 1717 the Court divided the season’s treasure and tea between two China ships sailing in company on the Canton run.^[73]

The China tea trade would grow across the eighteenth century into the Company’s commercial mainstay, and the ships that carried the garrison’s ration were the earliest current of that vast later traffic.^[74]

Tea quickly became an everyday store line: the storekeeper’s monthly account of 1717 sold tea to the inhabitants by the pound at 9s, alongside sugar and rice.^[75]

By 1718 the garrison ration had been made permanent.

The Council thanked the Court for the tea allowance to the soldiers, which had bettered their health, set it at 2 lb a head, and asked for chests of bohea tea, putting the experiment on a permanent footing.^[76]

The store books also showed the Court had bought two chests of tea from Captain Kesar as far back as 1718 when there was none in the stores, the debt cleared by bills on London.^[77]

By 1720 the island’s consumption being very large for its bounds, the Council reckoned 800 catties of bohea and 100 of green tea would answer the year, the China ships directed to furnish a fixed quantity at a settled price.^[78]

Figure 6. Tea’s progress from garrison ration to fixed annual supply, 1716-1720. Drawn from the hot-beverages records.

In four years tea travelled the whole distance from novelty to institution. It entered in 1716 as an experimental medicine; by 1717 it retailed at 9s the pound to households across the settlement; by 1718 it was a permanent ration of 2 lb a head; and by 1720 the island fixed its yearly need at 800 catties of bohea and 100 of green, reckoned in the seller’s own Chinese units.

Coffee: the drink that came late

Coffee ran the opposite course to tea. In England coffee came first and led the way. The first coffee house opened at Oxford in 1650 and Pasqua Rosee’s at London in 1652, and by the 1680s the coffee houses were fixtures of trade, news and male sociability. Tea was sold from within those same coffee houses and stayed the junior drink for decades.^[79]

The coffee an Englishman drank came from Yemen. The beans grew around the Red Sea port of Mocha, moved north through the Ottoman lands, and reached England chiefly through the Levant Company and from Amsterdam. The English East India Company kept a factory at Mocha from 1618, but it shipped the beans to Persia and Surat, not home round the Cape.^[80]

This geography explains coffee’s near-absence from St Helena. The database shows coffee only faintly, and never as a daily drink.

Coffee had been considered as a matter of trade as early as 1704, when the Council defended its judgement on the business, but the drink did not enter the island’s own diet.^[81]

The apparatus arrived with the tea kettles in 1716, the Katharine landing graded coffee pots by the dozen, yet no ration or price for the drink follows in the record.^[82]

The contrast with tea is exact and instructive. Tea reached the island cheaply and constantly because St Helena lay on the China route, and the tea ships called on their way home. Coffee came up the Red Sea and through the Levant and Amsterdam, off the island’s natural supply line, so it arrived only as pots on a shelf and a line in a trade dispute. The route that carried tea past the door made tea, not coffee, the drink of the place, and so the island reversed the English sequence in which coffee had led and tea had followed.

6. Home-Grown and Imported: The Limits of Self-Sufficiency

The central question of the island’s food economy was simple: how much could it feed itself, and how much must come by ship? The answer divides the island’s diet cleanly into two columns. Some foods the island raised - beef, yams, fish, goats, hogs, poultry, garden greens and, until the blight, lemons. Others it never grew and always imported - bread grain, rice, butter, cheese, sugar, salt, wine and, from 1716, tea. The single most important fact in the whole food history is that the island never grew a bread grain, and so was never truly independent of the ships it existed to serve.

This was the common predicament of the supply colony. At the Cape the Dutch began the same way, confining their first agriculture to a garden within the fort and only slowly pressing settlement outward as demand outran the beds; but the Cape’s Mediterranean climate let it grow wheat and vines, and it became a true granary. In the Caribbean the sugar islands went to the opposite extreme, turning every acre to cane and importing their grain and salt fish from New England and Ireland. St Helena fell between the two, growing much of its fresh food yet forever dependent on imported grain, and it is best understood as one point on that spectrum of colonial self-sufficiency.^[83]^[84]

Grain: the long failure of European cereals

The island imported four European cereals and grew none of them to any purpose. Wheat, barley, oats and rye all reached the stores, each with its own use and price.

The Johanna invoice of 1678 listed wheat at 1s 6d the bushel for the better sort and barley at 4s the bushel for malting or animal feed.^[85]

Oatmeal came in by the cask, one being taken into store from the Society cargo in 1680, and rye was issued as a provision to a new planter in 1684.^[86]

The Company tried for years to grow its own wheat, and failed. The effort was deliberate and sustained.

The Company concluded in 1683 that wheat grew well in similar latitudes and directed the Governor to make trials with English wheat sent for the purpose.^[87]

Further trials were ordered the same year, English wheat to be tried by soil and season, part of the drive to make the island grow its own bread.^[88]

The trials never succeeded: as late as 1715 the land was still not producing grain as expected, blamed on poor cultivation and cattle trampling the young growth.^[89]

This failure was not peculiar to St Helena but the common fate of European grain in warm latitudes. Wheat, rye and oats failed across the tropical, low-lying colonies of the Americas, thriving only in temperate or high-altitude ground such as highland Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish raised enough to supply their remote settlements. Everywhere else, maize took the place of the European grains. St Helena, mild and high but small and dry, never found the temperate niche that might have grown its wheat.^[90]

The island’s one promising cereal was not a European grain at all but maize.

Indian corn was judged in 1715 to grow well and to be superior to yams, since it kept better and could be stored.^[91]

The Governor thought maize more wholesome food than yams in 1711, and the Council reported in 1714 that it would thrive in stony places where little else grew.^[92]

Yet even maize was defeated in the famine, when worms ate the corn and beans as soon as they were planted unless the rains came at once. The island could not brew its own beer either, for want of the barley and hops that would not grow, so beer came from London.^[93]^[94]

English beer even appeared in bulk as a cheaper drought drink in 1713, 367 gallons at 1s 6d the gallon drawn by the inhabitants when other liquor was dear.^[95]

Bread: the imported loaf and the ship’s biscuit

The islanders ate bread throughout the period, but they never grew the grain to make it. Bread was a priced, rationed commodity from the first year of settlement.

The founding schedule of 1673 fixed brown bread at 2s the pound, the imported loaf dearer than the island’s own beef.^[96]

Bread reached the island in two forms, and the difference turned on the length of the voyage. Ordinary raised bread went stale within days and mouldy soon after, so it never crossed oceans. The bread that came from England was ship’s biscuit, twice-baked and near-moistureless, which kept for months if stored dry. Period records called it simply bread or ship’s bread, and the Royal Navy issued it at a pound a man a day after Samuel Pepys regularised naval victualling in 1665. Dryness was the whole point, since mould and staling need moisture, and a biscuit baked hard enough would survive a voyage that no loaf could endure.^[97]

Biscuit came from England in bulk, 40 casks holding about 127 hundredweight landed at 20 to 22s the hundredweight in 1680, the cask keeping out damp and weevil on the long haul south.^[98]

The island also imported flour and baked fresh bread on the spot, for flour travelled far better than any loaf and let the settlement eat soft bread that no ship could have carried.

Jonathan Beale was described in 1699 as both a merchant and a baker of St Helena, an island baker working from imported flour.^[99]

The general table drew bread and biscuit as a matter of course, a three-month account of 1694 listing wheat, biscuit and yams together.^[100]

The record notices bread chiefly when it failed. Bread first became available on the island in 1684, none having been held in store before; the Westmorland’s bread arrived mouldy and its flour sour in 1707; and the bread sent from England was scarcely eatable in 1714. The dependence was absolute, and the famine proved it, for when English wheat could not be had the garrison fell back on imported rice, over 10,000 lb drawn in a single three-month period.^[101]^[102]^[103]

Rice: the second grain, always imported

Rice being very dear at the Coast, and only a small parcel received from the Bay, the grain was drawn annually from India as the island’s second staple, never grown locally.^[104]

Here a modern history confirms and extends the record. Stephen Royle notes that the Company shipped rice and paddy from India throughout, and that paddy, sent unhusked, would keep up to seven years, though old paddy risked bringing on sickness. The manuscripts give the annual supply directly; the seven-year keeping quality is the kind of practical detail a modern survey usefully preserves.^[105]

Dairy: milk at home, butter and cheese by sea

The island made its own dairy but never enough, and the balance came by ship. The same cattle that gave beef also gave milk, and the Company equipped the plantation to work it.

The turnery wares of 1680 formed a complete dairying establishment, with cheese tubs, cheese vats, churns and milk tubs, and 50 calf bags had been sent in 1678 to stop the calves taking the milk meant for the dairy.^[106]

Milch cows were a named category of stock, and milk served as a working currency, orphans’ keep being paid in the milk of two cows in 1680 and a widow keeping the milk of her seized cattle in 1679.^[107]

Butter was scarce and dear: a debt was offered in 5 lb of butter and refused for quality in 1682, and butter was paid as wages in kind to those who hired Company slaves in 1689.^[108]

Because the island could not meet its own demand, butter and cheese were regular imports, and here the manuscripts touch a wider trade. Fresh butter and soft cheese cannot cross an ocean, so what came south was the durable kind, salted butter and hard, pressed, salted cheeses such as Suffolk and Cheshire, the very forms the Royal Navy shipped to sea. Salt butter was packed to keep, and hard cheese was salted and waxed against the heat.^[109]

Ship butter was valued at 7s 6d for 15 lb in a theft inventory of 1706, cheese came among the famine relief of 1714, and the Fort table drew butter as a staple of its diet.^[110]

So dairy followed the pattern of grain. The island made some, never met its need, and imported the balance in the salted and pressed forms that alone survived the voyage. Milk itself could not be imported, so all fresh milk was local, and the cattle were kept mainly for beef but milked besides.

Sugar: the crop that would not grow, the import that fed the tea

Sugar has a double place in the record. It was first the great hope of the plantation scheme, and then, when that failed, a settled import that rose with the new taste for tea.

The island was expected to grow its own sugar: the Company undertook for seven years to buy any planter’s surplus of sugar canes, indigo, cotton, ginger and tobacco.^[111]

The Company planned a large sugar plantation with mills, sugar houses and still houses in 1683, and fetched a servant formerly at a Barbados plantation to raise the crop.^[112]

This was the heart of the Barbadian scheme that Bennett reconstructs. The directors, believing the island tropical, expected cane to make the planters rich as it had in the West Indies, and they shipped in Caribbean expertise and enslaved labour to do it. The island’s real climate defeated them, and the local planters said so from the first.^[113]

A cane trial opened at Sandy Bay on 26 Jul 1709, the free planter Gargen engaged to raise it, and the Governor reckoned 20 or 30 acres would supply the island and 100 acres yield £1,500 a year besides rum.^[114]

The crop never took hold, and sugar reverted to being an import. Its later course fits the rise of tea exactly, for the two were consumed together.

Sugar sold steadily through the store at 8d the pound by 1718, in parcels of 174 lb and more, and the storekeeper’s monthly account of 1717 sold sugar and tea side by side to the inhabitants.^[115]

The pairing was no accident of the island but the pattern of the age. In England the rise of tea drove a fourfold rise in sugar consumption across the eighteenth century, the sugar drawn from Caribbean plantations worked by enslaved Africans. St Helena, buying its sugar to sweeten a tea ration issued to soldiers, was a small early instance of the same union of two colonial commodities that would remake the diet of the Atlantic world.^[116]

Salt, oil and vinegar: the preservation trade

Three imported goods underpinned the whole economy of keeping food, and each mattered more than its bulk suggests. Salt came first, for it preserved both meat and fish.

Salt was imported in bulk, 114¾ bushels in one 1678 invoice, as a fundamental material for curing meat and fish.^[117]

The Company tried to make its own: salt being reported plentiful about the island, elaborate salt works were directed using seawater in 1685, and an iron pan for boiling salt was sent in 1716 to answer a standing want.^[118]

The island’s salt-making was unlikely ever to answer, for a reason the period itself understood. Salt drawn straight from seawater by simple evaporation carried bittern, the magnesium and calcium that made coarse bay salt poor for curing; such salt was said to leave meat dry and rotten and even to breed scurvy in a besieged garrison. Good curing salt needed the cleaner, coarse-grained bay salt of France and Portugal, which the island could not make from its own sea. So salt, like grain, remained a thing the island bought.^[119]

Oil and vinegar came with the salt, and rose in importance whenever fish was the staple.

Sweet oil, meaning olive oil, came in quantity, 115 gallons at 4s 6d in 1678 and 157 gallons alongside 240 gallons of rape oil in 1680, for cooking and medicinal use.^[120]

Wine vinegar came in at 175 gallons in 1678 and 181 gallons in 1680 as a working preservative, and the council reported oil and vinegar very necessary in 1714 since fish was the chief food.^[121]

Olive trees were themselves judged, with maize, among the most profitable things the plantations might raise, but like sugar and wheat they never became a crop, and the oil kept coming by sea.^[122]

The high point of self-sufficiency, 1717

For one brief moment, in 1717, the island came close to feeding both itself and its fleets from its own produce.

Provisions of every kind, scarce and dear when the Governor arrived, had fallen to about two-fifths of their former price, the island now victualling the returning fleet from its own produce.^[123]

Yet even this high point was incomplete, and the very entries around it show the limit. Rice was still needed whenever the rains spoiled the drier-ground yams.

The Council pressed that every ship able to carry more than her charter tonnage should bring rice, needed whenever the rains spoiled the drier-ground yams; still wholly imported.^[124]

This is the essential truth of the island’s economy. Even in its best year, when it could victual a whole fleet and drive prices down to two-fifths, it still had to beg rice in every charter against the failure of its own staple. The self-sufficiency was real but partial, and it rested always on grain, salt, sugar and dairy that came by sea.

Figure 7. The principal foodstuffs of the record divided by origin. The home-produced column is longer, but it lacked the one thing that mattered most - a bread grain. Drawn from the home-versus-imported records.

7. The Fishery: The Island’s Insurance Against Starvation

Fish was the island’s salvation whenever the herds and crops failed, and the Company managed the fishery as a deliberate food source, not a mere convenience. From the founding grant to the famine relief, the record shows the settlement equipping, surveying and organising its fishing so that the sea might feed it when the land could not.

The founding of the fishery, 1673-1685

The Crown’s grant conveyed the fishing of all kinds of fish, including whales and sturgeons, so the sea was part of the island’s endowment from the first.^[125]

Sir Richard Munden left three boats, kept in repair for the inhabitants to fish, the common fishery of the early settlement.^[126]

The Company sent species-specific tackle in quantity, a sign of how seriously it took the fishery.

Fishing lines of 1678 at £28 4s covered albacore, bonito, dolphin, rockfish, porgy, bream and mackerel, and fishing hooks at £18 11s 8d supplied over 5,000 hooks matched to each species.^[127]

The Governor was to survey the windward fishing grounds in fair weather, and new boats were built for the purpose, one of 27 feet and a yawl of 18 feet with new sails.^[128]

A salt-fish enterprise was planned in 1685, planters supplied with young slaves and tackle to fish for the Company store, so that cured fish might be laid up as a provision.^[129]

Fish as famine relief, 1713-1717

When the great drought struck, the fishery became the difference between hardship and starvation.

The Company fishing yawl was opened to the inhabitants in the drought of 1713, fish being the only relief available when meat was scarce.^[130]

About 2,142 fish hooks and dozens of lines were imported in bulk for drought relief in 1713, drawn by the inhabitants to take fish in default of meat.^[131]

When the herds collapsed, fish became the chief food of the island, few or none of the planters having cattle left to spare.^[132]

So wanted was the tackle that naval-store twine meant for sale to ships’ masters had to be turned into fishing lines in 1714.^[133]

After the famine the Company made the fishery a standing part of how it fed the establishment, and above all how it fed the enslaved.

By 1717 the Court had some slaves appointed to fishing parties to fish for the whole establishment, making it self-provisioning in fish.^[134]

The Court directed that fishing should eke out the slaves’ yams, since a diet of yams alone left the workforce weak.^[135]

The fishery thus played a part in the island’s food economy out of all proportion to its place in the accounts. It was the one resource that did not fail when the rains did, and the Company treated it accordingly, sending graded tackle, surveying the grounds, building boats, and in the last resort turning the enslaved to the sea to feed themselves. In a settlement forever short of meat and grain, the fish of the bay were the ultimate reserve, and more than once they kept the island alive.

8. Land Allocation: Acres for Provisions

Behind every yam and every beast lay a question of land. Who held the ground, on what terms, and to what use, determined what the island could grow. The records of land allocation - grants, leases, purchases and rules - show the Company using land deliberately as an instrument of provisioning, tying every grant to the raising of food and the keeping of stock. They also show a recurring tension between the Company’s wish to spread the land among many small provision-growers and the tendency of a few planters to engross it.

The tension was written into the plantation scheme from the start. The Company meant to plant the island thick with smallholders who would grow provisions and, it hoped, cash crops; but it also imported the Barbadian model, with its drift toward large estates worked by gangs of enslaved labour. The land records catch the island poised between these two futures, a settlement of small provision plots forever threatened by engrossment, exactly the pull Bennett traces in the Company’s wider design.^[136]

The founding grants and rules, 1678-1688

The standard grant was small and tied to residence and provisioning: men who had served their time, like John Duffield and William Doveton in 1678, were admitted freemen and allowed land and cattle to raise provisions.^[137]

Title carried an obligation to produce: land passing to an heir off the island had to be settled and worked within two years or be forfeit.^[138]

Every free planter was ordered in 1683 to maintain one slave for every parcel of land held, tying labour directly to the ground.^[139]

Leases could compel orchards: Edward Bloxfoe’s 21-year lease of 20 acres in 1688 required him to enclose an acre and a half and plant it with fruit trees.^[140]

Estates, schemes and the great yam project, 1694-1711

The Company brought whole estates under its control, negotiating in 1694 to take the Longwood land because of its value for provisioning.^[141]

Whole plantations passed as single holdings with their stock, as when John Bowman left his entire 60-acre plantation, its livestock and a slave together in 1696.^[142]

The Company bought departing planters out: it took Lufkin’s 30 acres and the provisions growing on them in 1707.^[143]

The most ambitious land-and-food scheme of the whole record came in 1711.

The Governor proposed carrying water from Plantation Valley onto 200 acres of hillside to plant near 2 million yams, a great irrigation scheme against the failure of dry-ground crops.^[144]

The settlement drive and the engrossing ceiling, 1717-1723

After the famine the Company granted and hired out waste land to raise provisions, planters pressing for parcels of 10 to 18 acres in 1717.^[145]

The planter Alexander sought 15 or 18 acres in Sandy Bay Valley holding neglected lemon trees, undertaking to tend them and supply passing ships.^[146]

The great settlement drive came in 1719, and with it a direct attack on engrossing.

The Governor set a 40-acre ceiling on fresh grants to curb engrossing, one planter already holding at least 290 acres, more than any two men.^[147]

Governor Pyke opened a settlement drive, letting Company waste in parcels of 16 to 30 acres by lot, the poorer ground compensated, every settled family meant to raise provisions and fruit for the ships.^[148]

The planters warned that letting yet more land would swell the cattle herds beyond the market for them, the beasts dying unsold if the ships did not call.^[149]

The registers of the early 1720s show land routinely conveyed with its food, as when Mary Swallow sold 17 acres with all the provisions standing on it in 1720.^[150]

Figure 8. Land parcels in the record by size and type, 1678-1723. The 200-acre yam scheme of 1711 and Powell’s 290-acre engrossing estate of 1719 stand out against the ordinary run of small provisioning grants. Drawn from the land-allocation records.

The tension between smallholding and engrossment was not peculiar to St Helena; it was the same struggle the Dutch faced at the Cape, where the Company wished to keep the settlers to garden plots and found them pressing ever outward for grazing and grain land. On both stations a supply base built for provisioning tended, against its masters’ wishes, toward a landed society with interests of its own.^[151]

9. Population and the Yam: Feeding the Establishment

The yam was the foundation of the island’s subsistence, and the number of mouths it had to feed was the measure of the burden upon it. This chapter brings the two together: the population the island had to provision, and the great census of yams that shows how it was fed. The yam was to St Helena what bread was to England or rice to India - the bulk of the ordinary diet, and above all the food of the enslaved labour force on whom the whole establishment rested.

The yam itself was an African transplant, carried across the Atlantic world as a slave-ship provision and a plantation staple wherever Europeans settled enslaved Africans in the tropics. On St Helena, as in the Caribbean, it was the food that fed the labour force cheaply, and its African origin is a reminder that the island’s diet was assembled from the same global movement of crops and people that fed every plantation colony of the age.^[152]

The population to be fed, 1683-1718

The island’s population was reckoned in fixing its legal method as early as 1683, a small settled community.^[153]

The governing household alone was substantial: the Governor’s establishment numbered 27 at the Fort Table and 18 at the Lower Table in 1708, besides slaves.^[154]

A detailed census of 1708 counted each planter’s household by white and black persons, with their land and cattle.^[155]

The plantation fed the Governor’s household and all the Court’s 200 slaves in provisions by 1717, the core labour force.^[156]

The shape of the population matters for the food history. The enslaved were the majority, and they were the great consumers of yams. It explains why the yam census was, in effect, a measure of how long the labour force could be kept alive.

The great yam census of 1719

The failure of the dry-ground crops in 1711 had prompted the great irrigation scheme, with its aim of near 2 million yams. From 1715 the Company ordered its plantations surveyed to track the crop.

The council ordered every Company plantation surveyed monthly to see the success of the yam suckers and gauge how long the crop could feed the slaves.^[157]

The census of 05 Jun 1719 is the fullest single measure of the island’s staple in the whole record.

The Company’s yam census of 05 Jun 1719 totalled 1,405,022 yams across eight plantations, the running count measuring how long the slaves and establishment could be fed without buying from the planters.^[158]

Figure 9. The Company yam reserve: the 1711 scheme aim of 2 million against the actual census of 1,405,022 yams in 1719. Drawn from the yam-stock records.

The census reached about seven-tenths of the scheme’s ambition - a shortfall, but a substantial achievement for a settlement that six years earlier had seen its yams scorched to nothing. The distribution across the plantations is itself revealing, for it shows how concentrated the staple was.

The Hutts held 417,200 yams, the heaviest stock of any plantation, serving as the main larder for the slaves quartered there.^[159]

Figure 10. The 1719 yam census by plantation, the Hutts and Perkins’s together holding more than half the island’s Company stock. Drawn from the census of 05 Jun 1719.

The census shows the yam supply as a managed reserve, counted like money and watched like a bank balance. The Hutts and Perkins’s together held more than half the total, and the whole was reckoned against the months each parcel would take to ripen. When the waterspout flood of 1719 stripped some 20,000 yams from a plantation, the loss was felt at once as a hole in this reserve, forcing the purchase of three or four months’ supply from the planters.^[160]

The way the island fed its enslaved on a home-grown root had a direct parallel in the West Indies. There the planters made the enslaved grow their own subsistence on provision grounds, plots of land unfit for cane, so that the estate need not buy their food. St Helena’s yam grounds worked to the same end, feeding the labour force cheaply from ground the Company controlled, and the 1719 census was in effect a reckoning of how long that self-provisioning could hold.^[161]

10. Diet by Rank: The Table and the Yam-Ground

The island ate according to station. What a person consumed depended on whether they governed, farmed or laboured in bondage, and the records allow the three diets to be reconstructed and set against one another. At one extreme stood the Fort table, rich in meat and dairy; at the other, the enslaved, whose food was yams and little else. Between them lay the free planters, feeding themselves and their own slaves from their holdings. The contrast is one of the sharpest social facts the food record reveals.

The slave diet: yams and deficiency

The enslaved were the majority of the island and the great consumers of its staple. Their diet was monotonous, bulky and deficient, resting on the yam with only occasional meat or fish.

The enslaved captives from Calabar were allowed weekly one piece of beef and 50 lb of yams each, with maize or rice, a ration heavy in bulk carbohydrate and light in protein.^[162]

Slaves exchanged off the island in 1717 reported they had little or nothing besides yams, and rejoiced to leave; the Court directed that they be fed better and some set to fish for the rest.^[163]

The enslaved allowance of 1718 stood at 10 lb of rice each a week, the rice given in the rains when the drier-ground yams turned unwholesome.^[164]

The deficiency was recognised, if imperfectly, by the establishment itself. That slaves drooped without beef, and that the Court had to order fishing to feed the workforce, shows the yam diet failing the very people it was meant to sustain. The nutritional truth, in modern terms, is plain: the yam gave bulk carbohydrate and a little fresh vitamin C, but little protein, and a diet resting on it needed beef, fish or rice to be complete.

St Helena’s enslaved shared the predicament of the enslaved across the plantation Atlantic. The West African dietary inheritance was itself low in animal protein, and the yam-and-cassava provision-ground regime that fed the enslaved in the Caribbean did little more than sustain life, so that malnutrition and high mortality were the common condition wherever a stable protein source was wanting. The island’s Madagascar slaves who drooped without beef were suffering the same want that killed the enslaved of Martinique and the Danish islands.^[165]^[166]

The planters and the Company slaves compared

The Court itself observed in 1717 that the planters fed and nursed their own slaves well, since they lived by them, a distinction that told against the Company’s own management.^[167]

This distinction cut to the heart of the establishment’s difficulty. The Company’s slaves, concentrated in its own plantations and slave houses, were provisioned from a central store that failed in dearth; the planters’ slaves, fewer and dispersed, were fed from holdings their masters had a direct interest in keeping productive. Overcrowding made the Company’s people sicker still.

Disease spread worst where the greatest number of the Court’s slaves lived crowded together, the want of a surgeon compounding it.^[168]

The Fort table: meat, dairy and lemons

At the opposite pole stood the governing table, whose fare was rich and various.

A half-year Fort table account itemised the officers’ diet: 5,183 lb of beef with yams, butter, poultry, greens and lemons, a diet richer than anything the labouring people saw.^[169]

The gulf is best measured in the yams themselves, for the accounts weigh the table’s share against the slaves’ in the same half-year.

The half-year account separated 22,109 lb of yams for the General Table from 11,852 lb for the slaves.^[170]

Beyond the table yams, a further 18,200 lb was issued directly to the slaves who worked at the fortifications.^[171]

That the governing table should consume nearly twice the weight of yams issued to the Company’s slaves is a startling measure of inequality, the more so since the table also enjoyed the beef, dairy and lemons the slaves rarely tasted. Sir Hans Sloane, describing the enslaved diet of Jamaica in 1707, recorded the same reliance on fish, cassava bread and yams eaten in place of bread, the mark of a plantation world in which the labouring people everywhere lived on the cheap starchy staple while their masters ate the meat.^[172]

The greatest quantity of yams went not to people at all but to the hogs: at the Hutts a weekly account showed only 350 lb feeding the overseer and four slaves, most of the crop fattening pigs.^[173]

The diet of the island was thus a map of its society. The enslaved lived on yams and sickened when the yams failed; the planters kept their own people better than the Company kept its; and the governing few ate beef, veal, bacon, butter and lemons at a table that consumed more of the staple than the labourers who grew it. The food record, read this way, is a record of rank made visible in what each class was given to eat.

11. Prices: The Cost of Food over Half a Century

Prices are the pulse of the food economy, and the record preserves enough of them to trace the cost of the island’s staples through plenty and dearth. The prices are not a continuous series - they are the figures the clerks happened to set down - but they cluster around the moments that mattered, and above all they show the violent inflation of the famine and the return to order after it.

The early prices, 1673-1708

The founding schedule of 1673 fixed beef at 1s 6d the pound and brown bread at 2s the pound, the imported loaf dearer than the island’s own meat.^[174]

Potatoes were delivered to the store at a set rate by the bushel in 1694, and arrack from the ships was capped at 6s the gallon.^[175]

By 1708 beef was reckoned at 30s the hundred for the Fort and 25s for the ships, while home-grown lemons were charged to the table at 2s the hundred.^[176]

The famine inflation, 1713

The famine of 1713 drove prices to their extremes, and the figures measure the crisis exactly.

The council bought over 3,000 gallons of Batavia arrack and quantities of rice from the fleet to relieve the scarcity, the relief goods then retailed to the inhabitants at a markup.^[177]

With yams scorched and gardens blasted, the council fixed working prices on the English stores, bread and flour among them, to hold the line during the dearth.^[178]

These famine measures are the numerical signature of the catastrophe. An island thrown upon imported food at inflated cost bought its survival by the gallon and the pound from the very fleets it existed to supply.

The return to order, 1716-1720

By 1716 the cargo price list set beef and pork to the shipping at 5d the pound, taking a cask at a time, while store peas and beans stood at 11s the bushel.^[179]

The later prices show a settled market: tea at 9s the pound and sugar at 8d in 1717 and 1718, rice constant at 12s the hundredweight and sheep at 24s each these many years.^[180]

The last price in the record carries a warning about the island’s dependence on its own staple.

The Council warned in 1720 that if the planters learnt the Court must buy of necessity, they would raise the price of yams, self-supply being the only guard against being held to ransom.^[181]

Figure 11. Selected provision prices in pence per pound, 1678-1718, showing the famine spike of 1713. Drawn from the price records.

The prices, taken together, tell the same story as the herds and the yams. A settled base in the early decades gave way to violent inflation in the famine, when the island bought imported grain at whatever the fleets asked, and then to a return of order as the herds recovered and the stores filled. The final note - that the planters could raise the yam price the moment the Court was forced to buy - is the whole economy in miniature. The island’s food was cheap when it was plentiful and ruinous when it failed, and the only true security lay in growing enough that one never had to buy.

Conclusion

The half-century traced in these records tells a single, coherent story. St Helena existed to feed the Company’s ships, and it never quite managed to feed itself. That contradiction runs through every theme of this study, and it explains the island’s whole food history.

The contradiction was there from the birth of the colony. The Company, misled by the island’s latitude and by the Edenic travel writing of the age, believed it had acquired a tropical garden fit for sugar and indigo, and in the 1680s it tried to make a second Barbados in the South Atlantic. The island’s true climate - mild, high, dry and rocky - defeated the scheme, and the local planters said so from the first. What the Company got instead was a refreshment station that could grow fresh meat and yams but no bread grain, and that struggled to grow much else it tried. The plantation dream and its failure, recovered by Bennett from the London letters, is the frame within which the whole food story sits.^[182]

The land could not be relied upon. When the rain failed - as it did in 1693, 1701, 1704, and catastrophically from 1712 to 1715 - the yams withered, the cattle starved, and the settlement was thrown upon its imported grain. The great famine of 1713 to 1715 was the defining event, reducing the Company’s herds to 60 cattle and 23 hogs, killing some 2,500 beasts, and driving the garrison to mutiny. That a modern historian can explain this catastrophe as the consequence of the island’s own deforestation only deepens the tragedy, for the island had in part made its own disaster, as Madeira, the Canaries and Mauritius had before it.

Yet the record is also one of recovery and management. Under Governor Pyke the herds were rebuilt with remarkable speed and discipline, climbing from 60 head in 1714 to 230 by 1719 under a strict ban on slaughter. The yam reserve was rebuilt to more than 1.4 million by 1719. Tea arrived and established itself within four years, the island catching the leading edge of the China trade that would remake the Company. Lemons were replanted after the blight. The Company pressed always toward self-sufficiency, and in 1717 it briefly succeeded, victualling a whole fleet from the island’s own produce.

But the success was always partial, because the island never grew a bread grain. Bread, flour, biscuit and rice came by sea across the entire period, and so did the salt that cured its meat, the sugar that sweetened its tea, and much of the butter and cheese of its table. Even in the high summer of 1717 the Company had to beg rice in every charter against the failure of its yams. The food economy rested, in the end, on goods that came by ship, and that dependence defined the limit of everything the island could achieve. In this it was the twin of the Dutch station at the Cape, another supply base that began as a garden for the fleets, though the Cape’s kinder climate let it grow the wheat and wine that St Helena never could.

The food record is also a record of a society. The island ate by rank, and the gulf between the Fort table - rich in beef, veal, bacon, butter and lemons - and the enslaved majority, living on yams and sickening when the yams failed, is one of the sharpest facts the manuscripts preserve. In this the island was a small mirror of the whole plantation Atlantic, where the labouring people everywhere lived on the cheap starchy staple, deficient in protein, while their masters ate the meat. The yam that was the whole of the slave’s diet was only a part of the master’s, and more of it went to fatten hogs than to feed the Company’s slaves. In what each class was given to eat, the hierarchy of the island stands revealed.

The drinks of the island tell the same story of empire in miniature. Tea reached the common soldier of St Helena a generation before it reached the labouring poor of England, because the island lay on the China route and the drink came as medicine against the rains; coffee, travelling up the Red Sea and through the Levant, scarcely reached the island at all. In the cup of tea sweetened with Caribbean sugar, issued to a garrison on an Atlantic rock, the whole reach of the Company’s world may be read.

These are the conclusions the manuscripts yield, read closely and in order, and set against the wider world of which the island was a part. They portray a settlement perpetually short, perpetually striving, and perpetually dependent - a place whose whole purpose was food, and whose whole difficulty was that it could never grow quite enough. The records end, for this study, in 1724, with the herds rebuilt, the tea trade settled, and the island once more dreading a dry year. The struggle was not resolved; it was merely, for the moment, held at bay.

Key to the Manuscript Volumes ▲

The references in this study identify a passage by a volume number and an image number, separated by an oblique stroke. The number before the stroke denotes one of the transcribed manuscript volumes of the East India Company’s St Helena records listed below; the number after the stroke denotes the image on which the passage appears within that volume. Thus 005/76 refers to the seventy-sixth image of volume 005, and 028/114-127 refers to a passage running across images 114 to 127 of volume 028. A span of two numbers indicates that a single document or episode extends across several consecutive images.

It must be stressed that the image number is not the page or folio number of the original bound manuscript. The present study draws on volumes 001 to 030. Each title is hyperlinked to its record in the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, where the digitised images may be consulted. Volume 015 is absent, having been retired from the transcription sequence.

001 Goodwin’s Abstracts of Letters from England, 1673-1707

002 Constitution, Laws and Instructions, 1673-1714

003 Letters from England, 1673-1683

004 Letters from England, 1673-1701

005 Records, 1678-1683

006 Register of Leases and Deeds, 1682-1719

007 Register of Wills, 1682-1745

008 Letters from England, 1683-1689

009 Records, 1683-1687

010 Records, 1687-1693

011 Records, 1693-1696

012 Records, 1696-1699

013 Records, 1699-1703

014 Records, 1703-1704

016 Letters to England, 1706-1714

017 Records, 1706-1709

018 Records, 1709-1712

019 Records, 1712-1715

020 Letters from England, 1713-1716

021 Letters to England, 1714-1715

022 Records, 1715-1716

023 Letters to England, 1716-1717

024 Records, 1716-1717

025 Letters from England, 1717-1725

026 Letters to England, 1717-1720

027 Records, 1717-1718

028 Records, 1718-1720

029 Register of Leases and Deeds, 1720-1731

030 Letters to England, 1720-1724

All volumes were digitised under the Endangered Archives Programme project EAP1364, with earlier material surveyed under EAP524. The digitised images are held at the St Helena Government Archives, Jamestown.

Glossary of Period and Trade Terms

The following terms of trade, measurement and cultivation recur in the records and may be unfamiliar to the modern reader. The definitions describe the sense the words carry in the St Helena manuscripts of this period.

Arrack. A distilled spirit, here chiefly the Batavia kind shipped from the Dutch East Indies, the leading article of the island’s liquor trade and the drink whose distilling from potatoes consumed the island’s timber.

Batta. An exchange allowance or premium added to reconcile coin and weights between the Company’s presidencies.

Bohea. A black tea of the cheaper grade, the common drink of the period and the bulk of the island’s tea supply; green tea was the lighter, dearer sort.

Bushel. A measure of dry capacity used for grain, potatoes and calavances.

Cabbage-tree. An endemic St Helena tree; parcels of cabbage-tree land appear repeatedly in the deeds as a class of upland ground.

Calavances. A kind of pulse or bean (also caravances), grown on the island and sold to the ships as a source of vegetable protein.

Catty. A Chinese unit of weight used in the China trade, the measure by which the island reckoned its yearly need of tea; roughly 1⅓ lb.

Dollar. A silver coin (the Spanish or piece of eight and related dollars) in general circulation; fines and prices are often reckoned in dollars.

Fifth-quarter. A fraudulent accounting device by which the head, entrails and hide of a beast were counted as a notional extra quarter, inflating each beef payment.

Gumwood. An endemic St Helena tree that once covered the island; gumwood land is a common class of parcel in the registers, and the wood was used for fuel and building.

Hogshead. A large cask; the hogshead of lime juice bought in the famine held about 60 gallons.

Leaguer. The large cask, about 150 gallons, in which Batavia arrack was shipped.

Maund. An Indian unit of weight, varying between the Company’s settlements, used for rice and sugar shipped from Bengal and Madras.

Neat cattle. Ordinary horned cattle (oxen, cows, bullocks, heifers and calves), distinguished in the returns from goats, sheep and hogs.

Paddy. Rice in the husk; shipped unhusked from India because it kept far longer than clean rice, though old paddy was reckoned unwholesome.

Pecul. A Chinese unit of weight (also picul) of about 100 catties, used in the China trade for tea.

Peck. A measure of dry capacity, a quarter of a bushel; the soldiers’ monthly ration of rice was reckoned in pecks.

Piece of eight. The Spanish silver dollar of eight reals, a standard trade coin of the period, current on the island alongside sterling.

Pipe. A large cask for wine; Madeira was ordered by the pipe for the table and stores.

Rixdollar. A silver coin of Dutch account, used in dealings with Dutch ships.

Yawl. A small ship’s boat; a fishing yawl was opened in the famine to take fish when the herds and crops failed.

Works Cited

Primary sources: manuscript

East India Company. Records of the Governor and Council of St Helena, Letters from and to England, and Registers of Wills, Leases and Deeds, 1673-1731. Manuscript volumes 001-030 (volume 015 retired). St Helena Government Archives, Jamestown. Digitised by the Endangered Archives Programme, projects EAP1364 and EAP524, British Library. https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1364.

Primary sources: printed

Collins, John. Salt and Fishery, a Discourse Thereof. London: A. Godbid and J. Playford, 1682.

Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Last of Those Islands. Vol. 1. London: Printed by B. M. for the author, 1707.

Woodall, John. The Surgeon’s Mate. London: Edward Griffin for Laurence Lisle, 1617.

Secondary sources: books

Adshead, S. A. M. Salt and Civilization. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

Carney, Judith A., and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Carpenter, Kenneth J. The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th anniversary ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004.

Ellis, Markman, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger. Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.

Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Kiple, Kenneth F. The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Lind, James. A Treatise of the Scurvy. Edinburgh: Sands, Murray and Cochran, 1753.

Macdonald, Janet. Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era. London: Chatham Publishing, 2004.

McClellan, James E., III. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Mui, Hoh-cheung, and Lorna H. Mui. The Management of Monopoly: A Study of the English East India Company’s Conduct of Its Tea Trade, 1784-1833. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984.

Royle, Stephen A. The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

Sutton, Jean. Lords of the East: The East India Company and Its Ships, 1600-1874. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1981.

Theal, George McCall. History of South Africa under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company, 1652 to 1795. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897.

Ukers, William H. All About Coffee. 2nd ed. New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935.

Secondary sources: articles

Atkins, Peter J. “Navy Victuallers and the Rise of Cheshire Cheese.” Rural History 33, no. 1 (2022): 1-18.

Bennett, Michael D. “Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models: The Case of the English East India Company and St Helena in the Late Seventeenth Century.” Atlantic Studies 20, no. 4 (2022): 1-27.

Guelke, Leonard. “The Making of Two Frontier Communities: Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century.” Historical Reflections 12, no. 3 (1985): 419-448.

A note on the use of the secondary works

The works above are cited only where they add something the manuscripts cannot supply: a comparative frame, a wider context, or an insight of their own. Bennett reconstructs the Company’s failed attempt to make St Helena a second Barbados, the frame within which the whole food story sits; Grove furnishes the interpretation of deforestation, reduced stream-flow and drought that gives the island’s dearths their mechanism; Royle supplies the wider frame of the Company colony and its trade. Carpenter and Woodall set the island’s lemons within the long history of scurvy at sea, and Lind marks its later direction. Kiple, Carney, Sloane, McClellan and Menard place the enslaved yam diet and the provision-ground within the plantation Atlantic, and Dunn gives the Barbadian sugar revolution behind it. Ellis, the Muis, Ukers and Macdonald trace the drinks and the sea-bread - tea, coffee, the China trade and the ship’s biscuit - while Crosby, the Columbian Exchange and the Ecological Imperialism together explain the failure of European grain in the tropics and the ecological fate of the oceanic islands. Collins, Adshead and Atkins supply the trades in salt and dairy that underlay the keeping of food, and Theal, Guelke and Sutton give the parallels of the Cape station and the victualling of the Indiamen. In every case where a modern work merely repeats what the manuscripts already state, the manuscripts have been quoted instead, as the primary evidence; and no datum has been drawn from any external work that belongs to a date later than the manuscript record itself reaches. Where a work post-dates the period - as Lind’s treatise of 1753 does - it is named only to mark the later direction of a story the island’s own records had already begun.

003/10 ↑
On the Dutch company garden at the Cape - founded with the station in 1652 under Jan van Riebeeck, a former ship’s surgeon who knew young red wine eased scurvy, planted first with European vegetables and from 1655 with vines, and provisioned with cattle bartered from the Khoikhoi - see Nigel Penn, "The Voyage Out: Peter Kolb and VOC Voyages to the Cape," in Cape Town Between East and West, ed. Nigel Worden (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2012); and more broadly Leonard Guelke, "The Making of Two Frontier Communities: Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century," Historical Reflections 12, no. 3 (1985): 419-448. ↑
On the East India Company’s deliberate attempt in the 1680s to build a Barbadian-style plantation economy on St Helena - importing Caribbean overseers and enslaved labour, modelling its slave laws on the Barbados code, and pressing sugar, indigo and cotton in the mistaken belief that the island’s latitude gave it a tropical climate - see Michael D. Bennett, "Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models: The Case of the English East India Company and St Helena in the Late Seventeenth Century," Atlantic Studies 20, no. 4 (2022): 1-27. ↑
003/35; 004/30 ↑
004/47 ↑
005/317 ↑
011/24 ↑
013/147 ↑
014/32 ↑
018/118 ↑
002/225; 002/231 ↑
019/35 ↑
019/72; 019/183 ↑
020/50 ↑
021/12; 021/25 ↑
002/305; 002/310 ↑
022/74 ↑
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ↑
On the wider pattern of rapid ecological transformation on oceanic islands - goats, deforestation and soil loss on Madeira, the Canaries, Mauritius and St Helena - see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ↑
022/12; 022/74 ↑
028/86 ↑
030/80 ↑
025/66 ↑
Guelke, "The Making of Two Frontier Communities." ↑
003/21 ↑
012/56 ↑
016/21 ↑
021/12 ↑
021/126 ↑
022/74 ↑
022/12 ↑
024/37 ↑
024/109 ↑
027/7 ↑
028/104 ↑
On the victualling of East Indiamen and the chronic problem of feeding long-haul crews, see Jean Sutton, Lords of the East: The East India Company and Its Ships, 1600-1874 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1981). ↑
003/19; 002/22 ↑
002/63 ↑
001/57 ↑
023/91 ↑
023/95 ↑
023/12 ↑
023/13 ↑
019/34 ↑
021/126 ↑
021/54 ↑
022/34 ↑
022/29 ↑
024/61 ↑
On Sir James Lancaster’s 1601 East India Company voyage, in which the ship whose crew received three spoonfuls of lemon juice each morning stayed largely free of scurvy while the other three ships sickened, see Kenneth J. Carpenter, The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ↑
John Woodall, The Surgeon’s Mate (London: Edward Griffin for Laurence Lisle, 1617), which prescribed lemon juice as a daily preventive on Company ships; see also Carpenter, History of Scurvy and Vitamin C. ↑
003/54 ↑
005/46 ↑
005/47 ↑
Grove, Green Imperialism. ↑
007/27 ↑
008/21 ↑
010/15; 010/37 ↑
017/12 ↑
016/29 ↑
023/91 ↑
018/117 ↑
019/70 ↑
019/135 ↑
James Lind’s controlled trial of 1747, published as A Treatise of the Scurvy (Edinburgh: Sands, Murray and Cochran, 1753), lay a generation beyond the present record and is noted here only to mark where the island’s practical faith in citrus was heading; the science of vitamin C came later still. ↑
020/27 ↑
021/9 ↑
024/37 ↑
027/45 ↑
023/200 ↑
024/17 ↑
On tea’s slow descent through English society - a luxury of the court after Catherine of Braganza introduced it in 1662, still dear enough in the 1750s for Jonas Hanway to complain that those "will have tea who have not bread", and only a drink of the labouring poor from the later eighteenth century - see Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). ↑
025/13 ↑
On the East India Company’s China tea trade and its rapid growth in the early eighteenth century, see Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, The Management of Monopoly: A Study of the English East India Company’s Conduct of Its Tea Trade, 1784-1833 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984); and for the earlier Canton trade, Earl H. Pritchard, The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750-1800 (Pullman: Washington State University, 1936). ↑
027/281 ↑
026/17 ↑
030/183 ↑
030/240 ↑
On coffee’s origin in Yemen, its export through the Red Sea port of Mocha and overland via the Levant, and its arrival in England in the 1650s - the first coffee house opening at Oxford in 1650 and Pasqua Rosee’s at London in 1652, the beans reaching England chiefly through the Levant Company and from Amsterdam - see Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). ↑
The English East India Company established a factory at Mocha in 1618 to ship coffee to Persia and Surat, yet the beans that supplied London’s early coffee houses came largely up the Red Sea and through Amsterdam, off the Cape route that St Helena commanded; see William H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 2nd ed. (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935). ↑
002/186 ↑
024/17 ↑
Guelke, "The Making of Two Frontier Communities." ↑
On the Barbadian sugar revolution and the monoculture that made the island wealthy yet dependent on imported food - grain, salt fish and provisions drawn from New England and Ireland to feed a population turned wholly to cane - see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). ↑
003/62 ↑
003/143 ↑
004/96 ↑
008/25 ↑
002/180 ↑
On the general failure of wheat, rye and oats in tropical, low-lying colonies, and their success only in temperate or high-altitude ground such as highland Mexico and Peru, with maize taking the place of the European grains, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th anniversary ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). ↑
002/273 ↑
018/119 ↑
018/118 ↑
003/134 ↑
019/108 ↑
003/18 ↑
On ship’s biscuit - the twice-baked, near-moistureless wheaten bread that alone survived a long voyage, called simply "bread" or "ship’s bread" in the records, and regularised in the Royal Navy by Samuel Pepys in 1665 at a pound a man a day - see Janet Macdonald, Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era (London: Chatham Publishing, 2004). ↑
003/140 ↑
013/10 ↑
011/71 ↑
009/61 ↑
016/25 ↑
019/108 ↑
003/91 ↑
Stephen A. Royle, The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). ↑
003/133 ↑
006/52 ↑
005/336 ↑
On the keeping of dairy for sea and distance - salted butter and hard, pressed, salted cheeses such as Suffolk and Cheshire, the durable forms the Navy and the colonies shipped - see Peter J. Atkins, "Navy Victuallers and the Rise of Cheshire Cheese," Rural History 33, no. 1 (2022): 1-18. ↑
017/43 ↑
004/25 ↑
008/25 ↑
Bennett, "Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models." ↑
018/8 ↑
027/48 ↑
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. ↑
003/72 ↑
008/60 ↑
On seventeenth-century salt for curing - the coarse "bay salt" made by solar evaporation, and the observation that salt drawn straight from seawater carried bittern that spoiled meat and was thought to breed scurvy in besieged garrisons - see John Collins, Salt and Fishery (London: A. Godbid and J. Playford, 1682); and for the wider trade, S. A. M. Adshead, Salt and Civilization (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). ↑
003/69 ↑
003/69 ↑
004/92 ↑
026/6 ↑
026/48 ↑
003/10 ↑
003/19 ↑
003/71 ↑
003/34 ↑
008/60 ↑
019/34 ↑
019/170 ↑
021/126 ↑
021/16 ↑
025/39 ↑
025/48 ↑
Bennett, "Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models." ↑
005/39; 005/41 ↑
002/28 ↑
004/85 ↑
010/37 ↑
011/157 ↑
007/54 ↑
017/9 ↑
018/119 ↑
027/61 ↑
027/200 ↑
028/109 ↑
028/54 ↑
028/355 ↑
029/224 ↑
Guelke, "The Making of Two Frontier Communities." ↑
On the transfer of African yams into the Atlantic world as a slave-ship provision and plantation staple, see Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ↑
002/51 ↑
016/28 ↑
017/183 ↑
026/48 ↑
022/518 ↑
028/196 ↑
028/196 ↑
028/86 ↑
On the provision-ground system by which Caribbean planters made the enslaved grow their own subsistence on land unfit for cane, a parallel to the yam grounds of St Helena, see Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). ↑
021/139 ↑
025/48 ↑
026/48 ↑
On the low-protein character of the West African and enslaved-Atlantic diet, and the reliance on yams, cassava and maize that "did little more than sustain life", see Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). ↑
On chronic malnutrition and high mortality among the enslaved of the French Caribbean, tied to provision-ground staples and the want of a stable protein source, see James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ↑
025/22 ↑
030/128 ↑
023/91 ↑
023/93 ↑
023/108 ↑
Sir Hans Sloane’s account of the enslaved diet in Jamaica - fish weekly "besides Cassada Bread, Yams, and Patatas, which they eat as Bread" - appears in A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 1 (London: printed by B.M. for the author, 1707). ↑
022/565 ↑
003/18 ↑
011/71 ↑
023/95 ↑
019/35 ↑
019/73 ↑
022/29 ↑
027/281 ↑
030/24 ↑
Bennett, "Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models." ↑