ABSTRACT
The winding road to Codrington College climbs the steep cane-covered hills to the oldest Anglican seminary in the New World. Within earshot of the eighteenth-century college buildings, Atlantic waves crash into Conset Bay on Barbados’ rugged eastern coastline. Christopher Codrington bequeathed his Barbadian estates in 1710 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. At his death, he empowered the Society to establish a missionary seminary on the Codrington estates, and to manage his large sugar plantations and the 300 enslaved people upon them. Codrington’s wishes, however, were only partly fulfilled. While the buildings rose, the slave population of the Codrington plantations underwent massive decline. Low birth rates, infant and adult death, and widespread disease so debilitated the slave population that, despite purchasing 450 additional slaves from 1712 to 1761, the total number of slaves on the Codrington plantations numbered 190 in 1760. Every year, the Society bought dozens of Africans from slave traders in Bridgetown, but the number of births and new acquisitions failed to keep pace with death on the plantation. Young and old, African and creole succumbed to tropical disease and to the physical rigors of New World slavery (Bennett, 1958: 1–3, 52, 61).
