384 THE LONDON WEST INDIA INTEREST July to that which James Knight describes as having been paid by the Virginia interest in 1725. 1 It was a charge of, normally, Id. per cask of sugar or puncheon of rum or 1,000 lb. of coffee and in proportion for other goods brought into the port of London from the West India Islands ; there was also a charge of Id. per ton on the shipping employed in the trade : 2 the merchants paid it to the treasurer of the society. In the year 1777 it was stated that some gentlemen had omitted to pay it, and the secretary was directed to write to them impressing upon them the necessity for contributing their share of this ' the sole fund ' of the society. 3 But though the merchants paid the charge it was the planters on whom the main burden of it ultimately fell. The merchants in all their transactions acted as the factors of the planters. 4 The sugar, &c, was shipped to the merchants at London, and they shipped back to the planters the goods required on the planta- tions ; they sold the sugar and other goods at the best price they could get and sent accounts of sales to the planters, showing the various charges to which they had been subject and the net proceeds of the sales and how far these were exhausted in the value of the goods exported. And in these accounts of sales one item was ' pierage, primage and trade ', 6 the last the import charge to which reference has been made. of Messrs. Lascelles and Maxwell, 1745-8, letter dated 14 June 1746 to John Frere). A year earlier the Planters' Club stated that they had thought their expenses might be paid from ' the Old Fund of One penny per Hogshead ' levied ' whenever it was called for '. They had abandoned the plan because in their care for the general interests of the islands they were sometimes at variance with the merchants : Colonial Office Papers 177 (5, 16 October 1745). Possibly before this time the charge was collected only on such occasions as the Sugar Act agitation, although for this some at any rate of the cost was paid by the islands through their agents. The Planters' Club in 1745 concerned themselves with the prevention of plunderage, and this suggests that the charge was paid to them in 1746 ; but their statement in 1745 seems to preclude this view : possibly the merchants had some form of association of which traces have not been found. Cf. the evidence of James Allen in 1796 before the committee appointed in that year on the trade and shipping of the port of London (Reports of Commissioners i Port of London, 1796, pp. 170-1). The West India Mer- chants raised a fund ' to defray the Expence of Prosecutions for Thefts committed on the River, and on the Quays, of West India Produce ' : and employed two con- stables on the quays to detect thieves. 1 See above, p. 377. 2 There are very few references to this charge on shipping in the extant minutes. The only references are : Merchants' Minutes, vol. i, meeting of 7 July 1778 ; ibid., vol. iii, meeting of 23 May 1797 ; ibid., meeting of 22 May 1799, 3 Merchants' Minutes, vol. i, meeting of 6 May 1777.
- This was stated categorically by the merchants in a document drawn up by them
in 1799 on the occasion of the loan made to them by the Bank of England (Minute Book of Committee appointed by a Meeting of the West India Merchants, 3 October 1799, meeting of 15 November 1799). 5 The accounts of sales from which I have taken this information relate to the early years of the nineteenth century. There is a volume headed ' Barbadoes, Accounts, &c.' belonging to Messrs. Lascelles and Maxwell, which gives an example of an account of sales in 1806.
