CHAPTER 7 Trade with the Heartland of Independence

The economic importance of the trade between and Suriname discussed in chapter 3 helps to explain the defiance of both the New Englanders and the colonists in Suriname in the face of Dutch and British restrictions. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century intercolonial trade started to take on a different character. The rather steady connection between the colony and the Dutch Republic became more haphazard at the end of the century while North American shipping increased in importance. The reasons for the change in the shipping routes were both military and economic: first, the col- lapse of the Dutch navy in the 1780s and secondly, the rise of North American freight shipping after Independence. In this period the undercutting of metro- politan restrictions was no longer simply part of the everyday evasion occur- ring in the colony but was exemplary of the transformation taking place in Atlantic world as a whole. The rise of the United States as an economic power in the second half of the eighteenth century heralded a shift in the economic and military center of the Atlantic and world economies. The United States provided a growing market for colonial goods produced in Suriname and was also able to supply provisions and enslaved Africans to the colony at rates that the Dutch could no longer match, which further undermined the remnants of Dutch mercantilist restrictions on the shipping with Suriname in the 1780s. In 1791 and 1795 the Dutch West India Company and the Suriname Company were brought directly under state control. There was frequent interchange across imperial boundaries between Suriname and North America as is clearly illustrated by the first news article in the first newspaper printed in Suriname on August 10, 1774 discussing the revolt against the Tea Act of 1773. It is a sign of a growing urban community as well as of a deep connection to the North American colonies that the inci- dent of forced British-taxed tea imports into New England formed the opening news item in Surinam’s first newspaper. The violent actions to prevent the sell- ing of tea were discussed favorably in the article.1 It is likely that this sentiment was shared among many of the colonists who had also supported the evasion of the earlier Molasses Act. Paramaribo was becoming a place where there was frequent exchange and interaction with people from colonies officially

1 ‘Noord-Amerika’, De Weeklycksche Woensdaagsche Surinaamse Courant, 1.1 (10 August 1774) 2.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004283350_008 168 CHAPTER 7 belonging to different empires, who felt a commonality when it came to tax issues with the metropolis. The hostility of North American merchants to metropolitan import duties – including on trade with Suriname – is also well exemplified by the Surinamese connection in the Gaspee Affair. As the story goes, Captain William Dudingston and his ship the Gaspee, a schooner in the service of the king of England, were despised by the smugglers and merchants of Providence. Among them was John Brown, a trader who formed a crucial link in the chain between the Surinamese plantations and New England distillers.2 Brown was a notorious tax evader, and, as discussed in chapter 3, he had suggested the tax-evasion strategy of “sailing to Madeira” after the Molasses Act had been renewed into the Sugar Act in 1767.3 When on the 9th of June 1772 the HMS Gaspee ran aground chasing a packet boat, John Brown mustered a force of sixty men in Providence. The men took longboats and peddled two and a half hours to the stranded ship, which they looted and (accidentally) set alight.4 In the period before the colonial opposition to the various British Acts culminated in the uniting of the American states (and their declaration of independence) and Boston became the main destination for non-Dutch ships leaving Suriname. The molasses trade was part of a network that centered on a coastal trade along the North American coast and was cru- cial to the economic development of the coastal colonies.5 The heartland of the independence movement formed the main customer for Surinamese and other non-British West-Indian molasses. Not all states were as eager to join the open rebellion against their motherland. As with any revolt, some were willing to strike deals. Others had moved beyond reconciliation and were pledging to fight until the end, especially those with a direct interest in regional trade. During the Age of Revolution North American freighters and slavers came to dominate Paramaribo’s shipping connections, and at the same time the num- ber of connected ports also increased dramatically. In the first half of the 1770s (1770–74) non-Dutch ships connected Paramaribo to twenty-nine ports. In the

2 Robert H. Patton, Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the , 1st Ed. (Pantheon, 2008), 4–6; Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, 2006, 102–126; Postma, “Breaching,” 107–31. 3 Frederick Bernays Wiener, “The Rhode Island Merchants and the Sugar Act,” The New England Quarterly 3, no. 3 (July 1930): 464–500, doi: 10.2307/359398. 4 Patton, Patriot Pirates, 4–6. 5 James F. Shepherd and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Coastal Trade of the British North American Colonies, 1768–1772,” The Journal of Economic History 32, no. 4 (December 1972): 783–810, doi: 10.2307/2117255.