0:00:10.208,0:00:11.583
[narrator] I'm a Glasgow boy,

0:00:11.583,0:00:13.584
I was born and bred in the city,

0:00:13.584,0:00:16.292
and of course I've been told all about the tobacco lords,

0:00:16.292,0:00:20.375
and about how the wealth of Glasgow was based on our trade with the colonies,

0:00:20.375,0:00:22.958
with the Caribbean, with the Americas.

0:00:22.958,0:00:27.841
But there's an awful lot more to our colonial experience than I ever knew,

0:00:27.841,0:00:29.559
and most Scots know,

0:00:29.559,0:00:32.332
and perhaps more than they want to know.

0:01:05.750,0:01:08.750
This is the beautiful west coast of Barbados,

0:01:08.750,0:01:13.398
an up market holiday resort which attracts hundreds of Scots every year.

0:01:13.398,0:01:19.667
They come of course for the beautiful sand, the palm trees the rum punches, and the sun.

0:01:19.667,0:01:22.106
Little do they know, however,

0:01:22.106,0:01:25.171
that 14 miles in that direction, the rugged east coast,

0:01:25.171,0:01:27.875
there's an entirely different kind of Scottish community,

0:01:27.875,0:01:32.042
a community of Sinclairs, of Baileys, of McCaskies,.

0:01:32.042,0:01:36.200
But these families will not be going home after a fortnight in the sun.

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Heading inwards from the beaches and hotels,

0:01:43.833,0:01:47.750
a maze of little roads criss cross the flat, coral island.

0:01:47.750,0:01:50.208
Through the rural parishes of St. James and St. Thomas,

0:01:50.208,0:01:55.264
towards wild seas and the St. John coast.

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The east of the island, from the Scottish district to Martin's Bay,

0:01:58.458,0:02:00.604
is rocky and unyielding,

0:02:00.604,0:02:04.875
but like our own Scotland, magnificent and dramatic.

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This is the last stronghold of a people who once spread throughout Barbados.

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People who -- if they only knew how-- could trace their ancestors

0:02:12.417,0:02:16.348
back to Ireland, the west country, and Scotland,

0:02:16.348,0:02:19.238
some even to Jacobites from Gaeltacht.

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Do you know how your family first came to Barbados? [/narrator]

0:02:24.417,0:02:25.667
Really, I don't know.

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All I know is some family arrived from Scotland, in those days.

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Well, I born in Barbados,

0:02:35.042,0:02:40.962
My Scottish, maybe great great great great grandfathers, that's all they could tell you.

0:02:42.042,0:02:49.459
I understand that my father arrived,

0:02:49.459,0:02:52.875
his parents from Scotland,

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what part of Scotland I don't know.

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The Scots have been, in a sense,

0:02:57.958,0:03:01.209
you could say guilty of collective amnesia

0:03:01.209,0:03:03.809
over both our role in empire

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and the role in the slaving system.

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And it's up to us as historians

0:03:09.800,0:03:11.738
to reveal the Scottish past, warts and all.

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And one of the areas that's now being revealed,

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or is coming into greater significance,

0:03:18.391,0:03:20.389
is the role of the Scots in the Caribbean islands.

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[narrator] When it was settled, Barbados was an uninhabited island in the distant Caribbean.

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Barbadians themselves called it "Little England",

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but in fact, the first people to make serious money here were Scots.

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In 1627 King Charles I appointed a Scot, James Hay, as governor of Barbados.

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Both men were determined to see a good return from their new colony. [/narrator]

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Barbados was chosen because it's owned by the Hays,

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a border family who become the Earls of Carlisle.

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But to make an island like Barbados pay,

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it's the first British island,

0:03:59.862,0:04:03.020
you have to have people to work the land.

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The Hays desperately looked back to their own area, the borders of west coast Scotland

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for this supply of labour.

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And it is part of their business plan to encourage the movement of people onto the island.

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[narrator] When we think of Scots leaving their homeland to make their fortunes

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or at least ease their poverty,

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and going to the Americas in the 18th century, the 19th century,

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we think of Greenoch and Glasgow and Port Glasgow.

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But in fact earlier, in the 17th century,

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many Scots left from here, from Ayre,

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and not necessarily because they wanted to. [/narrator]

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I learned about the 1640's,

0:04:46.256,0:04:50.760
we had our first joint ventures to Barbados.

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And the first one we know is the Rebecca of Dublin,

0:04:54.708,0:04:57.250
is brought up to Britannia Ayre,

0:04:57.250,0:04:59.250
on the Firth of Clyde.

0:04:59.250,0:05:05.042
Ayre is then the major conduit for the emerging Glasgow merchant paternity.

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Controlled tightly by guilds,

0:05:08.268,0:05:11.958
and it's these guild brothers that set out the first ventures.

0:05:11.958,0:05:16.458
Well we know about this because it's also a plague year, 1642,

0:05:16.458,0:05:19.832
and they believe they're all going to die of the plague,

0:05:19.832,0:05:27.250
so they have a communal confession in St John's church, which still stands in Ayre.

0:05:27.250,0:05:29.677
And of over the 15 confessions they make,

0:05:29.677,0:05:35.750
most of them, you'd expect bad behaviour, drunkenness, whoring women all around the Caribbean,

0:05:35.750,0:05:38.593
it's #15 itself that's interesting.

0:05:38.593,0:05:43.609
They confessed to carrying away the children to the West Indies.

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And this is the first mention of carrying indentured servants.

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So basically they're clearing out the <u>_</u>

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This is the start of the trade in people to Barbados.

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[narrator] Scots who couldn't make a living at home

0:06:02.417,0:06:04.368
signed an indenture,

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selling their labour to planters in the new world

0:06:06.375,0:06:07.917
for an agreed period,

0:06:07.917,0:06:09.755
at the end of which -if they survived-

0:06:09.755,0:06:13.005
they were promised a piece of land.

0:06:13.005,0:06:15.750
The indentures weren't worth the paper they were written on.

0:06:15.750,0:06:17.835
Was there really any difference then

0:06:17.835,0:06:20.825
between a white indentured servant and a black slave? [/narrator]

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It didn't matter if you were an indentured servant or a slave,

0:06:28.410,0:06:30.351
if you were subjected to a severe whipping,

0:06:30.351,0:06:35.125
the whip cracked equally severely on a white man

0:06:35.125,0:06:37.875
just as it did on a black man.

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They were treated equally horrifically,

0:06:43.708,0:06:47.583
and suffered equal horrific punishments.

0:06:47.583,0:06:55.042
But African slavery could be transferred from generation to generation.

0:06:55.042,0:06:57.292
If you were an African slave,

0:06:57.292,0:06:59.000
who'd been brought over to Barbados

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and you had children,

0:07:00.625,0:07:03.583
your child would have been born into slavery.

0:07:03.583,0:07:05.750
If you were a white endentured servant

0:07:05.750,0:07:10.428
who had been condemned to servitude and you had children on the island,

0:07:10.428,0:07:11.868
they were born free.

0:07:11.868,0:07:14.773
So there is a marked legal distinction.

0:07:18.787,0:07:22.042
There is the concept of the "white negro",

0:07:22.042,0:07:25.382
and certainly, you know, in a legal sense they probably were slaves

0:07:25.382,0:07:29.500
because they were innumerated as part of the chattals,

0:07:29.500,0:07:35.645
in other words the property of the individual, ehm, who held their indentures.

0:07:35.645,0:07:39.381
So in that sense, you know, they were no different legally from black slaves.

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[narrator] Despite Scotland being a rich source of indentured labour,

0:07:44.875,0:07:48.648
demand on the island outstripped supply.

0:07:48.648,0:07:50.792
But there was a solution.

0:07:50.792,0:07:52.505
War. [/narrator]

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Things were taking a dramatic turn

0:07:56.000,0:08:02.250
when Oliver Cromwell invaded Scotland at the Battle of Dunbar.

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On one hand the Hays lose control of the island,

0:08:06.899,0:08:11.125
on the other hand, there's a new supply of labour,

0:08:11.125,0:08:13.130
prisoners of war.

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The ultimate answer is to transport them,

0:08:18.556,0:08:20.621
and Barbados is where they're sent.

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Here we are in Greyfriars Graveyard,

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and this is really where it all happened.

0:08:31.833,0:08:34.392
This is the trigger zone for, eh,

0:08:34.392,0:08:36.807
which will ricochet all the way to Barbados,

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because it's here that youre dissenting, eh, senior leaders

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of the Scottish rebellion against the king, Charles 1,

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come into this graveyard and sign a massive document called the National Covenant,

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which binds them to resist Charles' ideas about imposing Episcopalianism,

0:08:59.583,0:09:04.375
the Church of England's style of bishops etc on Presbyterian Scotland,

0:09:04.375,0:09:08.667
and by doing so, we start this great conflict.

0:09:08.667,0:09:13.792
So you can really claim that the English Civil War was actually triggered from here,

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and cascades down south, and to Ireland.

0:09:18.333,0:09:20.458
The monument we're walking towards now,

0:09:20.458,0:09:24.167
is possibly the most emotive part of that killing time,

0:09:24.167,0:09:32.256
before it goes on, and all these prisoners were sent off as slaves.

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Barbado'd.

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And here we have it.

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Being Barbados'd was equivalent to being transported,

0:09:42.833,0:09:47.083
ehm, you've got to remember the fact that these were not idyllic islands in that period,

0:09:47.083,0:09:49.833
these were lethal areas with very high death rates,

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especially for Europeans,

0:09:51.875,0:09:54.826
and especially through yellow fever.

0:09:55.334,0:10:01.188
[narrator] So this is where the covenanters were held before being shipped off. [/narrator]

0:10:01.188,0:10:02.667
Some were here for up to two years.

0:10:02.667,0:10:04.810
[narrator] So they're locked in here,

0:10:04.810,0:10:06.482
are they fed and watered and covered?[/narrator]

0:10:06.482,0:10:08.792
Barely, no cover.

0:10:08.792,0:10:13.667
They're not dying here, but the survivors were all marched off and sold,

0:10:13.667,0:10:16.667
some of them would have appeared in Barbados,

0:10:16.667,0:10:18.792
because the market was strong there.

0:10:18.792,0:10:25.167
[narrator] But therefore the people who are finally indentured and sent to the colonies,

0:10:25.167,0:10:27.891
arrive here in pretty bad state in the first place.

0:10:27.891,0:10:30.250
If they've been held out here for two years,

0:10:30.250,0:10:31.560
and after a war,

0:10:31.560,0:10:34.833
they're not arriving in Barbados really full of strength and very well fed. [/narrator]

0:10:34.833,0:10:37.417
I don't think they would have fetched much.

0:10:37.417,0:10:40.667
And knowing the state of vittles on both ships as I do,

0:10:40.667,0:10:44.719
I think most of them didn't made the passage to be honest.

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A great tragedy.

0:10:53.542,0:10:56.000
[narrator] Transportees were shackled and kept below deck

0:10:56.000,0:10:59.625
in a voyage that lasted anything from 8 to 10 weeks.

0:10:59.625,0:11:05.167
Conditions were so bad that many of them died long before they reached the Caribbean.

0:11:05.167,0:11:08.333
There are no records of how traders treated their Scottish cargo,

0:11:08.333,0:11:11.083
but we do know what they would have faced on arrival,

0:11:11.083,0:11:14.875
thanks to the writings of visitors the island like Richard Ligon,

0:11:14.875,0:11:20.696
who published a true and exact history of the island of Barbados in 1657.

0:11:25.333,0:11:28.917
Professor Fred Smith, of William and Mary University on Virginia,

0:11:28.917,0:11:31.667
is on an archeological dig in Barbados.

0:11:31.667,0:11:34.500
Fred's students tried to imagine what life must have been like

0:11:34.500,0:11:38.154
for those early arrivals who had to build their own shelters.

0:11:38.154,0:11:40.832
Richard Ligon paints a vivid picture of those difficult days:

0:11:43.263,0:11:44.875
"Upon the arrival of any ship

0:11:44.875,0:11:46.417
the planters go aboard

0:11:46.417,0:11:48.375
and having bought such of them as they like,

0:11:48.375,0:11:50.625
send them with a guide to his plantation,

0:11:50.625,0:11:54.417
and being come, commands them instantly to make their cabins,

0:11:54.417,0:11:56.125
which they not knowing how to do,

0:11:56.125,0:12:00.917
are to be advised by other of their servants that are their seniors.

0:12:00.917,0:12:03.093
But if they be churlish and will not show them,

0:12:03.093,0:12:05.375
or if material be wanting to make them cabins,

0:12:05.375,0:12:08.758
then they are to lay on the ground that night.

0:12:08.758,0:12:12.000
These cabins are to be made of sticks with some plantain leaves,

0:12:12.000,0:12:16.083
under some little shade that may keep the rain off.

0:12:16.944,0:12:21.833
Their supper being a few potatoes and water and __ for drink,

0:12:21.833,0:12:26.125
the next day they are rung our with a bell to work at 6 o'clock in the morning,

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til the bell ring again,

0:12:27.583,0:12:29.000
which is at 11 o'clock,

0:12:29.000,0:12:31.375
and then they return and are sent to dinner

0:12:31.375,0:12:33.760
and then they return and are set to dinner,

0:12:33.760,0:12:35.669
either with a mess of <u><u></u>, <u></u></u>, or potatoes."

0:12:38.250,0:12:41.958
Professor Carl Watson is a decendant of the first immigrants to Barbados,

0:12:41.958,0:12:45.262
and a leading historian of the island's poor whites.

0:12:46.328,0:12:47.833
Well history has two levels.

0:12:47.833,0:12:51.808
History seen from above, from the point of view of the powerful;

0:12:51.808,0:12:53.750
and history seen from below.

0:12:53.750,0:12:59.250
And usually those from below were either illiterate and hence left no written records

0:12:59.250,9:59:59.000
of their daily lives...