Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Henry also looks atypical when considered alongside the millions of servants, slaves, convicts, and sailors whose experiences are central to this book. He was a learned and literate man of privilege, but one who, because of the vicissitudes of war, found himself an astonished member of the Atlantic proletariat. As such he faced many of the “great sufferings” and “strange adventures” of other coerced workers, in his own time and after. Henry’s account shows how the escape from bondage worked as a practical process, allowing us to see what kinds of knowledge and social relationships made it possible. It also suggests that escape is a rather different, and historically more important, kind of resistance than usually thought.

  This point holds true even for the most highly developed historiography of escape to be found anywhere in the scholarly world: I refer to the extensive writing about running away from slavery in North America and the Caribbean in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In this rich, well-mined vein we find analyses of escape in relation to a plethora of variables: skill, acculturation, seasonality, geography, other forms of resistance. We have studies of petit marronage (temporary escape from slavery) and grand marronage (permanent escape). We have what the distinguished Caribbeanist N. A. T. Hall called “maritime marronage,” of which Henry Pitman’s escape is an example. But we have few examples of how it actually worked, concretely and in human terms, as a process.2

  With all this in mind let us turn to the Monmouth rebel and his Atlantic adventure. His is a picaresque story of slavery and no less a story of self-emancipation from slavery. It is a story of violence, misery, and death, and it is equally a story of courage, strength, and luck (which is sometimes called providence). It is fundamentally a story of knowledge—technical knowledge, natural knowledge, and social knowledge. It might in the end tell us something about myths we have long told—and continue to tell—ourselves.

  Capture

  Henry came to misfortune by an odd combination of curiosity, compassion, and chance. Having recently returned from a voyage to Italy and happening to visit relatives in Sandford, Somersetshire, just as the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis to launch his uprising, Henry decided to “to go and see whether his strength and number were answerable to what the common rumour had spread abroad.” He rode with family members to Taunton to satisfy his curiosity and promptly got himself caught between warring armies, Monmouth’s rebels on the one side, Oxford’s royalists on the other. He retreated to the former, among whom he met friends who asked him “to stay and take care of the sick and wounded men.” Before long, “pity and compassion on my fellow creatures, more especially being my brethren in Christianity, obliged me to stay and perform the duty of my calling among them, and to assist my brother chirurgeons towards the relief of those that otherwise, must have languished in misery.” Henry also treated the captured soldiers of the king, and he never actually took up arms in the cause, but his feelings of solidarity—with his fellow surgeons, fellow Christians, and fellow creatures (the last of these being a marker of radicalism from the 1640s and 1650s)—allied him with insurrection and ultimately treason. After the rout of Monmouth’s forces at Sedgmoor on July 6, 1685, many of the rebel soldiers were hanged immediately. Henry tried to escape, was captured, robbed (“pockets rifled” and “my coat taken off my back”), and committed, with about four hundred others, to Ilchester gaol. He lay among the wounded, the gashed, and the bone-shattered in a filthy, overcrowded jail, where dozens would die of fever and smallpox. Henry survived.

  Conviction and Exile

  The bloodbath had only just begun. Soon came the “Bloody Assizes,” presided over by the infamous hanging judge Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys, whose natural violent irritability was at the moment made worse by kidney stones. The agents of King James visited the jails and prisons bulging with 1,300 men, promising grace and mercy in exchange for admissions of guilt. Many refused to play the game, whereupon twenty-eight were selected for trial at Dorchester, condemned, and “a warrant signed for their execution the same afternoon.” After these hangings, most of the rest were sufficiently terrorized to plead guilty in hope of saving their lives. Most of those who did were quickly convicted and ordered “to be hanged, drawn, and quartered,” but opposition arose from an unexpected quarter: the hangmen protested that they could not carry out the number of executions being asked of them. (Their work standard was a dozen a day.) Another 230 prisoners were eventually executed, some of them making “no shew of repentance . . . but justified theyr treason and gloried in it.” Bodies were disemboweled, heads severed, remains tarred and put on public display in what would be England’s largest mass hangings since the 1550s. Henry’s luck was stubborn: “The rest of us,” he wrote, “were ordered to be transported to the Caribbee Islands.” For him as for 850 other prisoners, the living death of slavery would be substituted for the literal death of hanging.

  Henry, his brother William, and about a hundred other prisoners were given by the authorities to Catholic merchants, who immediately entered into negotiations with Henry’s family for ransom. Fearing that Henry would not be released even if the money was paid, the family members hesitated, but relented when threatened that the brothers would be singled out for especially harsh treatment if they did not pay the required 120 pounds. Meanwhile, Henry was moved from Wells to Weymouth, where he and his “companions” (as he called them) were herded onto the Betty, a London ship now bound for Barbados. The five-week passage was “very sickly.” Nine of the prisoners died and were buried in the sea. Those who survived would be linked in ways that were not yet clear to them. Henry’s luck survived the transatlantic voyage to a strange land.

  Slavery

  Henry introduced his experience in Barbados by copying into his narrative the legislation passed by the colonial assembly in January 1686, just as he arrived, for the governing of political prisoners and transported felons such as himself. Fate had sent him to England’s richest colony, a plantation society built on the gruesome exploitation of indentured servants and slaves who produced sugar for the world market. These workers, as one visitor noted, “perform their dreadful tasks and then expire,” and indeed the death rate for workers black and white was high. Insatiable for labor power, the planters of Barbados were grateful to get Monmouth’s rebels.3

  The act of 1686 begins by denouncing the “monstrous villainy” of the traitors, who sought to turn the king’s dominions into “theatres of blood and misery.” Many “convict rebels” were justly hanged, the law announced, while others were sent, through his majesty’s “unparalleled grace and clemency,” to the colonies to serve ten-year terms of servitude. Henry observed sourly, “And thus we may see the buying and selling of Free-men into slavery, was beginning again to be renewed among Christians, as if that Heathenish Custom had been a necessary dependence on arbitrary power.”4

  The law spelled out exactly how the ruling class of Barbados thought Henry and his ilk would try to escape. They knew that some would try “to redeem themselves with money,” and some would attempt to intermarry with free women on the island. They knew that some would feign death and try to get away in disguise, others would flee the island using “False Tickets under wrong names,” still others would get shipmasters or anyone else they could to help them abscond. Some would get small craft and attempt to emancipate themselves by sailing away to freedom. (Some, the legislators knew, would die trying.) The legislation therefore preemptively forbade manumission through self-purchase or intermarriage, created a registry to keep track of the convicts, established a bevy of fines and imprisonments for any who assisted escape, regulated the use of all small vessels, and prescribed punishment for those who tried to run away: “Thirty-nine lashes on his bare body, on some public day, in the next Market town to his Master’s place of abode: and, on another market day in the same town, to be set in the pillory, by the space of one hour; and be burnt in the forehead with the letters f.t. signifying Fugitive Traitor, so as the letters may plainly appear in
his forehead.” Henry considered this to be “an inchristian and inhuman Act.” It reflected the class struggle over the mobility of bonded laborers.5

  Exploitation

  Despite the promises made to Henry’s family by the merchants in England, Henry and his brother were sold to Robert Bishop, who showed “great unkindness,” quashing all the petitions and entreaties for the freedom their family had paid for, refusing to give the servants proper clothes, and allowing them but a “very mean” diet, one that made Henry sick of “a violent flux.” Henry tried to play upon his class background and professional skill in negotiating with his master: he “humbly recommended to his consideration my Profession and practice, which I hoped would render me deserving of better accommodation than was usually allowed to other Servants.” His hopes were inappropriate to his new class condition and Bishop frankly told him so. Wounded, Henry declared, “I would choose rather to work in the field with the Negroes than to dishonour my Profession by serving him as Physician and Surgeon, and to accept the same entertainment as common Servants.” Bishop flew into a rage, beat Henry with his cane until it splintered, then clapped him in the stocks “exposed to the scorching heat of the sun” for twelve hours.

  Over the next fifteen months Henry experienced more cruel treatment by Robert Bishop, but soon the master fell into debt and Henry was sent back to the merchants who had originally sold him. The humiliation was complete: he was now “goods unsold.” Tired of waiting for a pardon, angry about the endless abuse, and saddened by the recent death of his brother, Henry “resolved to attempt the making of my escape off the island.” He would risk “a burnt forehead and a sore back,” a branding and a whipping, but as it happened he was risking even more. As he later discovered, the planters of Barbados, once they learned of the collective escape, “were resolved, as they said, that I should be hanged!” The gallows would cast its shadow over Henry’s adventure from beginning to end.

  Planning

  Henry mulled over various strategies of escape; all of them were dangerous. The one he chose entailed securing a small boat, organizing a group of fellow conspirators, gathering supplies, and slipping away in the middle of the night for the island of Curaçao, a voyage of six hundred miles, with the northeast trade winds at his back. (He chose a Dutch colony because he assumed that the officials of an English colonial government would capture and return him to Barbados immediately.) His relatives in England had facilitated the escape (perhaps unwittingly) by sending goods on consignment to a friend on the island who in turn sold them and gave the proceeds to Henry. Having money was a critical advantage, but it meant little without a series of alliances on which the whole endeavor would depend.

  Henry began by working with a man named John Nuthall, who was not a prisoner, nor even a servant, but rather a free man, a wood carver in “mean circumstances”: he had fallen into debt and wanted to leave the island, but he had no means to do so. Henry engaged Nuthall in a pact of secrecy and asked him to acquire the vessel for their common escape, in exchange for which he promised money, free passage, and eventually the boat itself once they had reached their destination. Henry gave him twelve pounds to buy the boat of “a Guiney man” lying at anchor in the harbor. This Nuthall did, but as soon as he registered the vessel (as required by the law) he aroused the suspicion of the authorities, who wondered where such a poor man got the money and how he intended to use the boat. Fearful that the magistrates might seize the boat, Henry got Nuthall to sink it offshore and lie low to allow suspicions to subside.

  Henry now turned his attention to a second alliance. He brought into the plot two other transported felons who were political prisoners, Thomas Austin and John Whicker, the latter of whom had voyaged with him on the Betty from Weymouth to Barbados. These two gladly contributed what little money they had to the design. Whicker, a joiner, would be especially important to their voyage in a wooden vessel. Meanwhile, Henry continued to play the lead role in organizing the escape, since he had, in his employ, “more time and liberty” than Austin and Whicker. He and Nuthall met nightly on the waterfront at “some convenient place remote from town.”

  The next task was to gather supplies for the voyage. Henry compiled a detailed list of necessaries “so nothing might be forgotten”: “A hundredweight of bread, a convenient quantity of cheese, a cask of water, some few bottles of Canary and Madeira wine and beer; these being for the support of Nature: and then for use, a compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, half-minute glass, log and line, large tarpaulin, a hatchet, hammer, saw and nails, some spare boards, a lantern and candles.” These he stored first at a friend’s house near the waterside, then at the warehouse tended by Whicker close to their intended point of departure. Henry’s preparations were thorough and careful.

  In his third act of alliance Henry expanded the conspiracy further, bringing in another debtor, Thomas Waker, and four more fellow “convict rebels”: Jeremiah Atkins (a husbandman from Taunton), Peter Bagwell (a thirty-three-year-old farmer from Colyton), John Cooke (from Chard), and William Woodcock (a nineteen-year-old cloth worker, a comber, imprisoned at Taunton). Bagwell and Cooke had been shipmates with Henry and John Whicker aboard the Betty. Old solidarities served a new design.

  Henry found the right moment to escape when the governor of Nevis visited Barbados, whose own governor put on “a noble entertainment,” parading the town’s militia in arms, with “revelling, drinking, and feasting to excess.” Henry sent out word to his comrades to meet, with whatever arms they could gather, by the wharf during this time of “drowsy security and carelessness.” Meanwhile Nuthall arranged for “two lusty blacks” to refloat the boat and bring it to the point of embarkation, where, at 11:00 p.m. on the night of May 9, 1687, the men met to load their “necessaries of life.” Their grand plan was unexpectedly interrupted when several watchmen strolled by, causing panic and flight, but they did not notice the boat and continued their rounds. Henry in particular was so terrified as to be “altogether unwilling to make a second attempt” until he remembered those “whom I had engaged in so much danger.” Thomas Austin, fearful “of being cast away,” refused in the end to make the voyage. At midnight eight men rowed softly—and closely—by the fort and a man-of-war anchored in the harbor. Their small craft began to fill with water, but they could not bail for fear of “making a noise to alarm our enemies.” They made their escape to freedom in an unlikely vessel—a leaky old boat from a slave ship.

  At Sea

  Once they got clear of their enemies, they fell to work, emptying the boat of water, raising their mast, hoisting their sail, and setting their course southwest toward Grenada. The boat continued to leak despite their efforts to plug the gaping seams with tallowed linen and rags; someone had to be kept bailing “continually, day and night, . . . our whole voyage.” Henry was at the helm “to guide and govern the boat,” as he was the only one among the eight who knew navigation. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the crew were hanging over sides of the vessel, seasick. They began to grumble, “to wish themselves at Barbadoes again.” Henry explained that there was no going back. This was literally true; the winds made it impossible. The following morning, when they were almost out of the sight of the island, “we began,” according to Henry, “to be cheered up with the thoughts of our liberty, and the hopes of our safe arrival at our desired port.”

  The high spirits did not last, for that night crisis struck. A brisk gale arose, damaging the rudder, which split, suddenly forcing them to lower sail and use an oar “to keep our boat before the sea.” John Whicker, the joiner, sprang into action, mending the helm by nailing two boards to it. “That done,” Henry wrote, “we went cheerily on again.”

  Over the next few days the escape was aided by good weather but plagued by Henry’s inability to take a true observation by his quadrant “because of the uneven motion of the sea, and the nearness of the sun to the zenith.” He therefore steered a course from island to island, from Grenada to Los Testigos, to Margarita, where on the fi
fth day of the voyage, the men grew tired of their putrid water and wanted to go ashore for a fresh supply. Henry resisted the idea because he feared the “savage cannibals” they might encounter. But once they got to the north side of the island, which seemed to be free of the “inhuman man-eaters,” Henry relented. They brought the boat to shore, got water, and soon directed their course for Saltatudos, or Salt Tortuga.

  Late in the day (May 15) the wind stiffened “and a white ring encircled the moon,” an omen of bad weather. Soon “a dreadful storm arose, which made us despair of ever seeing the morning sun. And now the sea began to foam, and to turn its smooth surface into mountains and vales.” The boat “was tossed and tumbled from one side to the other”; it was “violently hurried and driven away by the fury of the wind and the sea.” The men once again began to wish themselves back in Barbados or even on the island with the “savage cannibals” rather than face this “approaching ruin.” At this point, Henry recalled, divine providence intervened. They heard “an unexpected voice,” someone holloa-ing at them from a great distance. The violence of the winds and the furies of the raging waves ceased. With God’s help, Henry thought, they had survived.

  The next morning Margarita Island lay before them. They intended to go ashore to refresh themselves after the storm, to search for water, and to repair the leaks in the boat, whose timbers had been loosened by the pounding seas. They “stood in directly for shore, thinking it a convenient place to land,” but then saw a canoe heading from the shore directly toward them. They reached immediately for their arms, blunderbusses and muskets, only to discover that they had left their bag of shot on the wharf as they escaped Barbados. So they loaded their barrels with pieces of glass and prepared for engagement. When they saw that the men in the canoe bearing down on them paddled like Indians, they decided to make haste and try to get away from them.