Sugar, rum and the making of Bridgetown

Barbados never changed hands. From 1627, when English ships first put ashore at what is now Holetown, until independence in 1966, it remained a British colony without interruption — longer than any other territory in the Caribbean, most of which were traded between European powers repeatedly, sometimes annually. That continuity shows in the island's parish churches, its cricket grounds, and above all in the harbour at Bridgetown, which was built and rebuilt on the profits of a single crop.

A crop that remade the island

The English planters who arrived in the 1620s grew tobacco and cotton first, with little success. It was sugar cane, adopted from Dutch planters in Brazil during the 1640s, that changed everything. Within a generation, Barbados had become one of the wealthiest colonies in the English empire, and the reason was brutal and specific: sugar cultivation on this scale required a constant, large labour force, and the planters obtained it through the transatlantic slave trade. By the mid-seventeenth century, enslaved Africans and their descendants made up the great majority of the island's population, working and dying on plantations whose Great Houses still stand today. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834, though a system of compulsory "apprenticeship" delayed full freedom for several more years. The plantation economy that followed, based on nominally free but still deeply unequal labour, shaped Barbadian society well into the twentieth century.

Bridgetown and its Garrison

What survives from this period is now protected rather than hidden. Bridgetown's harbour and its Garrison — the parade grounds, forts and coral-stone warehouses built to defend the colony and its trade — were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, recognised as one of the best-preserved examples of British colonial military and commercial architecture anywhere. The Garrison Savannah, once a parade ground for imperial troops, is now a horse-racing track, which is as good an illustration as any of how the island has repurposed its colonial infrastructure rather than erasing it.

Bridgetown's history is not only English. The Nidhe Israel Synagogue, founded in 1654 by Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition by way of Brazil, is among the oldest synagogues in the Western Hemisphere, and a reminder that the sugar economy drew in merchants and settlers from well beyond Britain.

What the harbour trades in now

The commodity that once meant everything to Bridgetown's economy hasn't disappeared; it has simply changed form. Mount Gay, founded in 1703 and widely recognised as the oldest rum producer still in continuous operation, still distils on the island, and its history is bound up with the same sugar economy that built the Garrison. Where cane once left the harbour as raw sugar bound for refineries in Bristol and London, it now leaves, distilled and aged, as one of the island's better-known exports.

Bridgetown is also, increasingly, a place ships start from rather than merely call at. A handful of round-trip Caribbean sailings now begin and end in the harbour itself, among them the Jewels of the Caribbean Sea cruise, a fourteen-night loop out of Bridgetown that calls at Guadeloupe, Antigua, Aruba and several other islands before returning. For a longer view of the region and its history, the Gems of the Caribbean Sea sailing runs a very different route: forty-two nights from London Tilbury, crossing the Atlantic before spending a fortnight island-hopping through the Eastern Caribbean, Bridgetown among the stops, then returning by way of the Azores.

Reading a harbour honestly

None of this is a reason to avoid Bridgetown; it is a reason to look at it properly. The coral-stone warehouses, the fortifications, the synagogue and the rum houses are not separate stories bolted onto a beach holiday. They are the same story, told in different buildings, of an island whose wealth was built on a crop and on the people forced to grow it, and whose modern life still runs, in large part, through the same harbour.

Visit in the cooler, drier months from December to April, when the island is at its most comfortable for walking Bridgetown's old streets, and before the Atlantic hurricane season narrows the sailing calendar from June onward.