Autograph letters signed. Small 4to. Old folds, small losses where seals have been removed. Both docketed to verso. 2, 2pp. Bristol, 14th June, 1774 & 27 November, 1779.
In the first letter Mark Davis Esq. of Davis & Co., an established Bristol-based sugar merchants, present to Mr. Perrin reports from the captains of various vessels, which will carry his Grange Hill Sugars to Bristol, and with news of a Mr. Laing, on whom their captains had been instructed to wait on their arrival in Jamaica. The letter continues with details of provisions arriving to the West Indies from America: "Capt. Thomas Crooker in our snow the Nancey arrived at Morant Bay from Philladelphia with a cargo of staves".
1774 was a volatile year in American revolutionary politics, with a boycott on British good implemented by the Continental Congress that December. On the same paper, dated 17th March 1774, there are the details of a £1500 insurance policy made on 100 hogsheads of sugar being shipped from Jamaica to Bristol. It names each of the ten owners across whom the risk is spread, with a total premium of £63 3s.
The second letter informs Perrin that "conformable to his directions" his Sugars have been put into the market at 60/. but have not yet sold and if they can get 59/. they will let them go, along with news of the ships in their fleet. It also mentions widespread condemnation in London of "this mode of defending the islands", which likely refers to the West India lobby's action in British Parliament, which increased considerably in influence during the period of the American Revolution. They then disparagingly remark: "we see clearly that little if anything can be done in this City".
William Perrin was a major plantation owner in Jamaica, inheriting five estates in 1769, with 135 enslaved people. By his death in 1820, this number had increased to 950.
The Huntington Library holds a collection of fifteen letters between Protheroe & Claxton sugar merchants, and William P. Perrin Esq, dating between 1796-1803. St Johns College Cambridge hold further papers relating to the Perrin estate, as part of their Slavery Abolition Movement Collection.
O'Shaughnessy, A.J., “The Formation of a Commercial Lobby: The West India Interest, British Colonial Policy and the American Revolution” in The Historical Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March, 1997) pp.71-95.
