The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  “very badly fed”: “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” trans. and ed. Jerome S. Handler, JBMHS 32 (1967): 50–76, 67, http://jeromehandler.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Biet-67.pdf.

  any punishment: In New York Colony, what were called “the Duke of York Laws” of 1665 were the first to include slave laws under British rule in New York Colony; what became known as the “black code” was codified in 1702 as “An Act for Regulateing of Slaves.” See The Colonial Laws of New York (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1894), 18. “The New York Colony legislature explicitly provided that except for taking a slave’s life or dismembering him, it was ‘lawful for any Master or Mistress of slaves to punish their slaves for their Crimes and offenses at [the master’s] Discretion.’” Quoted by Aloysius Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color, Race & the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 119.

  “the sweet air of England”: Ligon, True and Exact History, 67.

  English country sports and rambles: Ligon, True and Exact History, 178–79.

  living hell: Richard Dunn portrays 1680 Barbados as an almost uninhabitable tropical paradise where the mark of a successful planter “was his ability to escape from the island and retire grandly to England,” the pattern Constant and Thomas Middleton followed. Larry Gragg counters that view, pointing out those who stayed on Barbados and established many aspects of a traditional English society. Dunn, “Barbados Census,” 30; Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  landed gentlemen: Constant’s landholdings have not been located in Brampton, Huntingdonshire; no reference to the place exists in his will. However, his younger son Humphrey died there as a minor two years after his father (Apr. 16, 1673), so it appears that the family maintained a residence there. Constant’s eldest son, also Constant, born in London in 1662/63, attended the prestigious St. Paul’s School for Boys, then St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1681, and trained as a barrister at Middle Temple (1682), one of the four exclusive English Inns of Court. Not listed as an heir to his father’s Barbados estates in 1694, Constant II was certainly dead by 1702, when his sister Grace Pickering administered their mother’s estate. Dame Grace (d. 1732) and Sir Henry Pickering (d. 1705) lived in Whaddon, Cambridgeshire, forty miles south of Brampton, at Whaddon Manor, a house with nineteen chimneys—fitting habitation for a woman with a gold repeating Tompion watch who described herself on her husband’s tombstone as the “heiress of Constant Sylvester of the Island of Barbadoes.” Mary, sister of Grace Pickering and Constant Jr., married Henry Pickering’s nephew, Richard Worsham, produced two daughters, and died in England in 1733. Grace Pickering relinquished her rights as Constant’s heir to Shelter Island to Henry Lloyd, Nathaniel Sylvester’s grandson. Brampton Parish Records; Robert Barlow Gardiner, Admission Registers of St. Paul’s School from 1748 to 1876. Edited with Biographical Notices and Notes on the Earlier Masters and Scholars of the School from the Time of Its Foundation (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 57, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=AQoCAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-AQoCAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1; Will of Grace Pickering 1732/1739, TNA: Prob. 11/699; Nesta Evans and Susan Rose, Cambridgeshire Hearth Tax Returns Michaelmas 1664 (London: British Record Society, 2000), 79; Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 52; “A Schedule of Papers,” SMA, NYUI/A/140/30; and New York Supreme Court of Judicature Minute Book: March 13, 1732/33–October 23, 1739, Patrick Lithgow ex dem (ex demessione, “on the demise”] Wm Nicoll et al. against Brinley Sylvester, 176, 180, 182, 189, Aug. 2, 1735–Oct. 25, 1735.

  Constant would die: Business and politics may have led Constant to choose Brampton as his English country residence, where he died on Sept. 3, 1671, and was buried at St. Mary the Virgin on Sept. 4 (will proved London, Oct. 7, 1671; Barbados, Jan. 18, 1672). Thomas Middleton (d. 1672), Constant’s partner and colleague, in 1664 became Naval Commissioner for Portsmouth under Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Chief Admiralty Secretary for Charles II and James I. The two men spent time together; Pepys knew Brampton from boyhood and kept a house there; Constant may have gravitated to Brampton through these connections. Constant’s sister, Quaker Mercie Cartwright, lived in Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire, only thirty-five miles west of Brampton. Huntingtonshire was “Cromwell country,” home to many with former Presbyterian leanings like Constant’s. Brampton Parish Registers; Henry F. Waters, Genealogical Gleanings in England, 2 (Boston: New England Historical & Genealogical Society, 1901, repr. 1969), 1:17; William Page, Granville Proby, and S. Inskip Ladds, eds., History of the County of Huntingdon, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London: St. Catherine Press, 1936), 3:12–20; Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 45; Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 15; C. S. Knighton, “Middleton, Thomas (d. 1672),” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66463; The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1976), vols. 5, 7, 8, 9 for Middleton references; Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 21–26.

  enduring legacies: Constant Plantation descended in the family through Constant’s daughter, Mary Sylvester Worsham, during most of the nineteenth century. In 1900 the property, then 491 acres, was purchased by S. S. Robinson and is now owned by Ian and Jean Robinson. It is still operated as a sugar plantation. Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 9.

  5. NATHANIEL’S MIDDLE PASSAGE

  the Seerobbe: Evidence that Nathaniel, not Constant, was aboard the Seerobbe on this trip is circumstantial. In September 1644, NS was named as one of the owners of the Seerobbe (NAA 848/903); in July 1646 the Seerobbe arrived in Barbados from La Rochelle; an inserted clarification in the testimony of the Dutch steersman, Reijer Evertsen, states that NS was aboard in July 1646 (NAA 1294/68). “From there this ship went with English orders and crew, and also some French men, to the coast of Guinea. The said captain [Sijmon Dircxsz] came with it himself. There he, the witness, disembarked, the other Dutch crewmembers having already left before, at La Rochelle.”

  “the coast of Guinea”: The Amsterdam notary Hendrick Schaeff wrote “na de cust van Guinea werde gesonden” in 1647. Did he mean Guyana, a regular port of call for Atlantic traders and merchants? Schaeff had also taken a 1646 deposition regarding the same voyage, where he wrote “na de Wilde Cust.” “The Wild Coast” was the other name for Guyana, so it seems probable that Schaeff knew the difference between Africa and South America, Guinea and Guyana. On the basis of the Seerobbe’s stop in L’Orient, Brittany, a port specializing in textiles for the African trade, Herbert L. Klein confirms that in his view the trip was to Africa. NAA 1294/68, NAA 1293/30; Herbert L. Klein, Dec. 13, 2006, Apr. 10, 2012, pers. comms.

  Most slavers: The direct slave trade out of New England and the West Indies began in the 1640s: in 1644, a Boston vessel discharged a load of wine barrel staves in the Canary Islands, then returned to Boston with wine, sugar, salt, and “some tobaco which she had at Barbados, in exchange for Africoes, which she carried” from the Cape Verde Islands. In 1645 three Bostonians invested in the Rainbow to the Madeiras, then to Guinea for slaves to sell in Barbados. The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–49, eds. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 573; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 124.

  North Equatorial Countercurrent: http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/north-equatorial-cc.html.

  eastbound Guinea Current: “Upwelling off the coasts of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire occurs seasonally, with … intense upwelling from July to September.” Chika N. Ukwe, Chidi A. Ibe, Peter C. Nwilo, and Pablo A. Huidobro, “Contributing to the WSSD Targets on Oceans and Coasts in West and Central Africa: The Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project,” International Journal of Oceans and Oceanography 1, no. 1 (2006): 21–44, www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/100130.pdf. Also see Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accr
a: Sedco Publishing, 1980; reprinted 1999), 17.

  nineteen English ships: Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 121.

  effective control: In the 1640s, Barbadian planters welcomed shipments of slaves from all sources, Dutch or British; African rulers equally welcomed all European slavers, despite efforts by European countries or their monopoly companies to restrict trade. For English slaving companies between 1618 and 1688, see Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 120–23; A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1964), 26–27; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 163–65; http://www.bristolandslavery.4t.com/royal.htm.

  “count the seas”: John Atkins, “A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies, etc.” in A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Thomas Astley (London, 1743–47, 1745), 3:450.

  goods: Most slaving ventures took on a precise, expensive mix of goods in Europe. East Indian printed cottons, embroidered velvets, European and North African “white goods,” and other textiles made up half of the imports. The Sylvesters’ last European stop before Barbados was “Larrante,” or L’Orient, in Brittany, an important depot for the printed cottons Africans favored. Constant’s warehouse, “Fiftye fotte in Length & nineteen foote broad,” offered ample room for trade goods, including Barbadian rum and tobacco. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 86–89; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 100; Deeds of Barbados, Barbados National Archives, contract signed by John Crispe and Constant Silvester, Nov. 14, 1645, recorded Jan. 1647.

  Orchards and kitchen plots: See Thomas Astley’s illustrations, “Views of Dixcove and English and Dutch Forts at Sakkundi,” where the solid fort walls look down on cultivated slopes laid out in neat plots. Astley, A New General Collection, 2: plate 59; Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts, 37–39; Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), ch. 5, 170, for a list of New World foods.

  “Dinner being over”: Thomas Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694, from England, to Cape Monseradoe in Africa and Thence Along the Coast of Guiney to Whidaw, the Island of St. Thomas, and So Forward to Barbadoes,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts, Others Now First Published in English, ed. John Churchill and Awnsham Churchill (London, 1732) 6:169–239, 201, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=0FVEAAAAcAAJ&rdid=book-0FVEAAAAcAAJ&rdot=1.

  Ham was cursed: Genesis 9:25–27, Genesis 10:1–32. See also Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” WMQ 54 (January 1997): 103–42.

  “dark” or “black”: David M. Goldenberg, “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism?” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations, eds. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21–52, 24–25.

  bulkheads: Charles Garland and Herbert S. Klein, “The Allotment of Space for Slaves Aboard Eighteenth-Century British Slave Ships,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 42, no. 2 (Apr. 1985): 238–48. The allotment of spaces on seventeenth-century ships did not radically differ from those described by Garland and Klein. Herbert Klein, pers. comm., 2008.

  The Seerobbe: A ship Seerobbe, used or hired by the chamber of the Noorderkwartier, the northern chamber of the WIC, measured 150/140 last (about 280/300 tons) and carried 16/20 cannon, 21/22 sailors, and 13/18 soldiers. The port of origin for the trips made by the Sylvesters that were investigated by the WIC is the same port of Hoorn, which constitutes some slight evidence for identifying this Seerobbe as the same vessel later owned by the Sylvesters. In 1635 and 1636 the chamber of the Noorderkwartier had freighted the Seerobbe for trips to Dutch Brazil. Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in Verthien Boeken (Annual Report of the Activities of the Chartered West-Indian Company in Thirteen Books), eds. S. P. l’Honoré Naber and J.C.M. Warnsinck (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1937), part 4; References to the Seerobbe in Brazilië in de Nederlandse archieven—O Brasil em arquivos Neerlandeses (1652–54): de West-Indische Compagnie: Overgekomen brieven en papieren uit Brazilië en Curaçao (Brazil in the Dutch archives, 1652–54: the West-Indian Company: transferred letters and documents from Brazil and Curaçao), Mauritinia no. 2N, ed. Marianne L. Wiesebron (Leiden: Research School CWNS, 2005), indices August 2, 1635; June 12, 1636; March 26, 1637; March 19, 1639; April 10–May 1639; February and June 1642.

  interior: Garland and Klein. “Allotment of Space,” 238–48; Philip Morgan, re numbers of crew and captives, pers. comm., 2007.

  eighteen inches: Garland and Klein. “Allotment of Space,” Table III, 244.

  Central and South America: See Richter, Before the Revolution, 67–87.

  encomienda: John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130–41; Richter, Before the Revolution, 79–82.

  Indian slavery: Legislation in New York Colony officially outlawed Indian slavery on Dec. 5, 1679, but the legal understanding of who could be enslaved continued to expand nonetheless: By 1708 the owners of any “Indian or Negro slave or slaves” punished by death for their crimes were to be reimbursed to a maximum of £25, minus the cost of prosecution not to exceed £5. Examples of wills and inventories of Long Island’s East End demonstrate the continued treatment of Indians as property. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 13: 537; Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 122; The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution, Charles Zabine Lincoln, William Henry Johnson, Ansel Judd Northrup, New York (State) Commissioners of Statutory Revision (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon Co., 1894), 631, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=d3U4AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en_US&pg=GBS.PR3; Patricia and Edward Shillingburg, “The Disposition of Slaves on the East End of Long Island from 1680 to 1796,” 2003, http://www.shelter-island.org/disposition_slave.html.

  Indian power: Confirmation of a deed of sale, March 23, 1653, recorded January 28, 1661, STR 158–59; Mathias Nicolls to JWJr, March 7, 1675, Winthrop Family Papers, MHS.

  “Indian” and “negro”: Berthold Fernow, comp., and A.J.F. van Laer, ed., “Calendar of Council Minutes 1668–1783,” New York State Library Bulletin 58, History 6 (Albany: University of the State of New York, March 1902), 111–12, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=jFAOAAAAIAAJ&rdid=book-jFAOAAAAIAAJ&rdot=1.

  Within Africa: Thornton, Africa and Africans, 72–97; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 88–102; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 103–29.

  African slavery: Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 47–73; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 72–116; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 110–25.

  “Coromantees”: Thompson, “Henry Drax’s Instructions,” 285.

  Fort Amsterdam: Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts, 245–49. Following the loss of Fort Cormantine in 1665, permanent British headquarters were relocated to Cape Coast Castle, only ten miles from the Dutch WIC headquarters at Elmina.

  “Gold Coast guardians”: As many as fifty people per vessel, including women who apparently helped with food preparation aboard, were loaded onto various Royal African Company vessels in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 64, no. 4 (Oct. 2007): 679–716, 686–91.

  “Eyes met eyes”: Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 58, quoting Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–35), 1:206–9.

  “strip them of all”: Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts, etc. (London, 1705),
370, http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=uNkTAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PT5.

  “so wilful”: Phillips, A Voyage in the Hannibal, 219.

  Father Denis de Carli: Michael Angelo and Denis de Carli, “A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo in the Years 1666, and 1667,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts, ed. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill (London, 1732), 1:577, http://www.canadiana.org/view/33297/9.

  seven months: Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 59.

  African drums: Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 95.

  how much water: Current research estimates a generous 3 liters (about 6.5 pints) of drinking water per day as the minimum for survival. In 1684 Portuguese law prescribed 1.5 pints daily. The French estimated that one water cask per person, weighing between 65 and 66 kilograms, was required for a two-month voyage, or slightly less than two pints a day. Peter H. Gleick, “Basic Water Requirements for Human Activities: Meeting Basic Needs,” in Water International 21, no. 2 (1996): 84; Thomas, Slave Trade, 421; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 94.

  100 degrees Fahrenheit: Thomas, Slave Trade, 422.

  Slave rations: Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 93–96; Klein, pers. comm., Dec. 13, 2006.

  scurvy: a medical condition caused by the lack of vitamin C whose symptoms include swollen bleeding gums and extreme weakness; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 93.

  ventilate the hold: Thomas, Slave Trade, 416–17.

  Fort Amsterdam exists: Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts, 246, fig. 19.

  “two … square bastions”: van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, 22.

  Seventeenth-century coastal traders: For the following passage, see de Marees, Gold Kingdom of Guinea, 24, 31, 35, 36–39, 54, 75, and “Wilhelm Johannes Muller’s Description of the Fetu Country, 1662–69,” 183, 188, 194, 201, 202–4. For African cloth consumption and preferences, see Thornton, Africa and Africans, 48–52.