The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  The sugar planters imposed a puritanical work discipline, which to the slave embodied a Satanic principle in both the physics and the economics of accumulation: “The Devel was in the English-man, that he makes every thing work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work, and the Winde work.”51 It took four decades to clear the island’s xerophilous forest, with its ironwood, rodwood, tom-tom bush, and hoe-stick wood. The final phase of deforestation began in 1650, after which coal had to be imported from England to keep the sugar boiling. The successful cultivation of sugar relied upon a labor process of multiracial gangs in the canefields:

  trash, windmill, crack bubble o vat in de fac’try

  load pun me head, load in de cart, de mill spinnin spinnin spinnin

  syrup, liquor, blood o de fields, flood o’ the ages.

  The workers of the early plantation system were chattels; their labor was organized and maintained by violence. Floggings and brandings left bodies scarred beyond the imagination, or so thought Father Antoine Biet, who witnessed these punishments in 1654. Orlando Patterson has written that “the distinction, often made, between selling their labor as opposed to selling their persons makes no sense whatsoever in real human terms.” The same Devil controlled all.52

  Resistance included running away, arson, murder, revolt. The Irish, according to Governor Searle in 1657, wandered around as vagabonds, refusing to labor. James Holdip, a planter, watched cane fields worth ten thousand pounds go billowing up in flames in the year of the conspiracy, 1649. In 1634 servants had conspired to kill their masters and make themselves free, then to take the first ship that came and go to sea as buccaneers. Their leaders, John and William Weston, had experienced the antienclosure riots surrounding Bristol in the 1620s and 1630s.53 Cornelius Bryan, a redheaded Irishman, was flogged, imprisoned for mutiny, and eventually deported. “As he was eating Meat in a Tray,” he said “that if there was so much English Blood in the Tray as there was Meat, he would eat it, and demanded more.” The cooperation between such redshanks and African slaves was a nightmare for the authorities. The Governor’s Council announced in 1655 that “there are several Irish Servants and Negroes out in rebellion in ye Thicketts and thereabouts,” making a mockery of a law passed in 1652, “An Act to Restrain the Wanderings of Servants and Negroes.” The first recorded group of maroons in Barbados was interracial, as was the cage in the capital, Bridgetown, into which recaptured runaways were thrown. “What planters feared most of all was a rebellious alliance between slaves and servants,” explains the historian of Barbados, Hilary McD. Beckles. Irish and Africans conspired together in plots of 1675, 1686, and 1692. The “Black Irish” emerged as a regional ethnicity in Montserrat and Jamaica.54

  To stabilize their regime, the rulers of Barbados separated the servants, slaves, and religious radicals from each other. This they accomplished in the 1650s and 1660s, with inadvertent help from Oliver Cromwell, microbes, and the “spirits.” In Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655, a naval squadron headed by Venables and Penn stopped off at the island and carried away some four thousand servants and former servants of Barbados to attack Jamaica and seize it from Spain. Most of them died of yellow fever. As servants left the island or perished, the big planters replaced them with African slaves, who by the 1660s were being provided by slave traders in greater numbers and at lower prices than traders of indentured servants could offer. The upper class also used informal policy to create division, instigating criminality and taking comfort as workers quarreled among themselves. Morgan Godwyn explained this as the politics of “Tush, they can shift”:

  An effect of their scant allowance of Food to their Slaves [is] the many Robberies and Thefts committed by these starved People upon the poorer English. Of which, I should affirm their owners to be the occasion, by thus starving of them, I think I should not hit much either beside, or beyond the Mark. That they are not displeased at it, if dexterously performed, is the general belief and sense of the Sufferers: And this is said to be the true meaning of that customary reply, Tush, they can shift, to the Stewards and Overseers requests for a supplie of the Negro’s want of Provision.55

  In this scenario, starvation produced theft, to which the poor English responded by shooting the thieves dead. The division between servant and slave was codified in the comprehensive slave and servant code of 1661, which became the model for similar codes in Jamaica, South Carolina, Antigua, and St. Christopher. The planters legally and socially differentiated slave from servant, defining the former as absolute private property and offering the latter new protections against violence and exploitation. The effort to recompose the class by giving servants and slaves different material positions within the plantation system continued as planters transformed the remaining servants into a labor elite, as artisans, overseers, and members of the militia, who, bearing arms, would be used to put down slave revolts. The policy of “Tush, they can shift” was institutionalized as a permanent structural characteristic of American plantation society. Once the abolitionism of the English Revolution was defeated, sugar production increased threefold in Barbados.56

  THE RIVER GAMBIA, 1652

  Following the executions of 1649, the Irish invasion, and the defeat of the servant rebellion in Barbados, two of the main rivals of the era, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Rupert, took different paths to same destination, West Africa—one politically, the other actually. Rupert, the opponent of Rainborough at the siege of Bristol in 1643, nephew of the beheaded King Charles I, and cousin of the future King Charles II, took to the seas as a royalist privateer with his brother, Prince Maurice. Cromwell meanwhile pursued an aggressive strategy designed to reduce Dutch might and establish England as the preeminent maritime power of the Atlantic. The two halves of the English ruling class (the “new merchants” and the old aristocrats) met and clashed at the river Gambia, where they created the triangular slave trade. The English were the major slavers in Africa at the end of the seventeenth century, but not at the beginning.57 In fact, in 1623 one English trader, Richard Jobson, when presented in Gambia with “certaine young blacke women,” made answer, “We were a people who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another.” This would change by 1649.

  The drama of the slave trade lies in the way the people of the river were caught between two historic forces, commonism and slavery. Léopold Senghor, the poet of Négritude, says that the “Negro African society . . . had already achieved socialism before the coming of the European.”58 W. E. B. DuBois revered the human warmth of the West African village. Walter Rodney characterized political organization as chieftancies and “ethnicities organized communally.” The river Gambia is a major watercourse of Africa, navigable for five hundred miles. Jobson observed that the Mandingo agriculturalists seeded their fields using a series of iron-tipped hoes: “One leading the way, carries up the earth before him, so many others following after him, with their several Irons, doing as he leadeth, as will raise up a sufficient furrow.”59 Rice grown by Jola women in freshwater swamps was the major subsistence crop and would later form the basis for the South Carolina rice culture. The chief estuarial commodity was salt. Canoes traded in fish and the oysters of the mangroves. James Island was fortified in 1651, and rights were negotiated with the Niumi people to hew wood and draw water on the mainland. The Jola people on the southern bank would never recover from the slave trade. Nasir al-Din (d. 1674), a religious revolutionary and Berber cleric, preached naked in the villages to overthrow the dynasties corrupted by the slave trade, which would become a state enterprise by the end of the century.60

  In the storied year of 1649, British merchants ordered the construction of a trading fort, or factory, on the Gold Coast.61 At the same time the Guinea Company, first founded in 1618, was scrutinized by the “new merchants” and the Council of State, receiving a new charter in 1651, when ships were dispatched to West Africa. Matthew Backhouse, a representative of the Guinea Company and a triangulator of
trade among England, Africa, and the West Indies, sailed to the river Gambia in September 1651 with Captain Blake aboard the Friendship. Their purpose was to establish regular trading relations and to obtain fifteen or twenty “young lusty Negers of about 15 yeares age” to carry to Barbados. Backhouse himself traded for twenty-five elephant teeth and African textiles, the esteemed “Mande country cloth” whose staggered bright colors influenced the visual traditions of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.62 They arrived in Gambia soon after a previous English ship had suffered a mutiny in which the slaves “got weapons in their hands, and fell upon the Saylors, knocking them on the heads, and cutting their throats so fast” that the master, in despair, “went down into the Hold, and blew all up with himself; and this was before they got out of the River.” Such events caused the Guinea Company to stock its ships with “shackles and boults for such of your negers as are rebellious and we pray you be veary carefull to keepe them under and let them have their food in due season that they ryse not against you, as they have done in other ships.”

  After Prince Rupert was defeated by Rainborough at Bristol, he escaped to Kinsale, the Irish port, where he provisioned and manned a small fleet before setting out to roam the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, hoping to keep Barbados royalist. In December 1651 Rupert watered at Arguin, tucked under Cape Blanc, near the waters of the dreadful disaster memorialized in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Rupert hired a pilot in the Cape Verde Islands, then another in the mouth of the Gambia River, then a third, a grometta named Jacus. A creole population of mixed African and Portuguese, beginning in the fifteenth century and known as lançados, acted the part of intermediaries. For his part, Jacus served first the Cromwellians and then the royalists.63 Upriver in a tributary on March 2, Rupert captured two English merchant ships, the Friendship and the Supply, whose crews were weakened by malaria, before sailing on March 18 for Cape Mastre and the town of Reatch.

  Jacus advised a stop. “Some of them stole off in one of their canoes a sailor of Prince Maurice’s, a native of that place, who lived long among Christians, and was become one himself; but upon promise of the others that he should return aboard again, he went with them to visit his parents.” The muster books of the era reveal scores of absences from any given ship, so this was hardly unusual. Nevertheless, the prince, resolving to capture the sailor by force, sent a hundred men after him, who were dislodged from their boats in the surf. Two gentlemen, Holmes and Hell, were taken hostage. Of Hell we know little, but Holmes helped to form the imperial nation. Here followed a rapid series of events on sea and shore in which nautical power confronted indigenous people (“the beach of dreams, and insane awakenings,” wrote Césaire). A canoe paddled out to treat. One of the men was slain. The prince ordered out another hundred musketeers. The natives “sent a considerable party of men into the sea, as high as their necks, to impede our landing who, as soon as they saw us present at them, dived under water to avoid the execution of our shot; and then appearing, gave us a volley of arrows . . . until one of their arrows unfortunately struck his Highness Prince Rupert above the left pap, a great depth into the flesh, who called instantly for a knife, and cut it forth himself.”

  This was enough, and thanks to Jacus, the others were rescued, rowed quickly back to their ships, and sailed away. Jacus himself remained, declining the offered rewards of Rupert, preferring the intermediating topography, the beach or estuary, between land and sea. Oral historians of the locality, the griot, remember not only Kunta Kinte and the “saga of an American family,” for this was the region of Roots (1976), but multitudes of sagas of centuries of European violence on the beaches.64 Why was this African sailor so important to Rupert? Was it his linguistic ability? His knowledge of the region? His skills as a mariner? Or was it his transatlantic knowledge of American slavery, which might prove dangerous to English interests in the region? The tale we tell is not a family saga but one of class forces at the critical meeeting of the sailor of the European deep-sea ship and the boatman of the African canoe. This meeting contained the possibility of cooperative resistance against a common enemy who in this case would bear the scar of it for the rest of his days.

  No sooner had Rupert begun to retreat than a mutiny broke out on one of his ships and carried it away. A second mutiny then occurred in the Cape Verde Islands, led by William Coxon. With him were the cooper, the gunner, the boatswain, the master’s mate. Such officers spearheaded the 1648 mutiny. Capp quotes a gunner who claimed to be “above ordnances.”65 The ship had 115 men on board—French, Spanish, Dutch, English, and many Africans. Twenty-five of this multilinguistic, multiethnic crew became active mutineers.66 They changed the name of the ship from Revenge of Whitehall (Charles Stuart had been beheaded at Whitehall) to Marmaduke, under which name it would sail in 1655 to the Caribbean with Venables and Penn. In 1649 the tenth query to the troops going to Ireland had been “whether those that contend for their freedom (as the English now) shall not make themselves altogether unexcusable, if they shall intrench upon other’s freedom; and whether it be not an especial note and characterizing badge of a true pattern of freedom, to indeavor the just freedom of all men as well as his own?”

  The encounters on the river Gambia in the year 1652 continued to shape the lives of Prince Rupert and Robert Holmes, who in turn shaped the course of English Atlantic history. Robert Holmes would twice return to Gambia, first in 1661 to seize what would become James Island, the main English fortification on the river, and later, in 1663–64, to attack the Dutch factories. When he sailed by the place where he and Rupert had battled the boatmen years before, he remembered, “At this Portodally [Portudal] if it had not been for God’s providence I had been murthered by some of the Blacks of the Country on shore.”67 Building his career at a time when the navy was becoming the formative institution of the nation, Holmes personally precipitated two world wars. James Island in particular and the river Gambia in general became “the main stronghold of the English in the northern part of Africa during all the history of the African Companies.” Dryden praised him: “And Holmes, whose name shall live in epic song . . . who first betwitched our eyes with Guinea gold.” Dryden praised Rupert, too, as an eagle, a messiah who “shook aloft the fasces of the main.” Rupert became the driving force in the rechartering of the Royal African Company in 1660 and again in 1663, after the restoration of Charles II to the throne. This charter laid pompous claim to the entire maritime interface from the Pillars of Hercules to the Cape of Good Hope, “and all the singular Ports, Harbours, Creeks, Islands, lakes, and places in the parts of Africa.” The weird speech-act of magical usurpation can be compared with the bat in the baobab tree who poked his head out to tell the first king (or mansa) of Niumi, “I do not deny your claim of having found a country, but whatever country you have found, it has an owner.”68

  So the incident of Rupert’s breast wound reminds us, first, that the workers in the slave trade participated only under certain conditions—in this case, a sailor’s being permitted shore leave to say farewell to his family—and second, that the fastest-growing parts of the proletariat were sailors and African slaves. The sailors were multiracial—Irish, English, African—and a center of this Afro-maritime world was London. Although Backhouse himself was unable to return to London, his cargo did, and it included “one niger boy” at a time when “Black Tom” was becoming a London stereotype. In Westminster Tom introduced himself to an old miser: “Gwide Maystre, Me non Inglant by mine Phace, none Inglant by mine Twang: Me de grecat strawnger of Aphric, me de pherry phull of Maney.” Tom, who had never been out of England in his life and spoke no other language but English, was a trickster who manipulated the Londoners’ greed and prejudice against outlanders to turn the situation to his own advantage.69

  LONDON, 1659–1660

  If the Putney Debates of 1647 revealed the English Revolution as an abolitionist movement, a 1659 Parliamentary debate on slavery and the “free-born Englishman,” held on the eve of the restoration of
Charles II and the Stuart monarchy, marked a counterrevolutionary reversal. Circumstances had changed since Francis and Rainborough questioned the relationship between slavery and freedom at the peak of revolutionary possibility. Domestic repression of the radicals had made possible new adventures for the English bourgeoisie in Ireland, Barbados, Jamaica, and West Africa. On March 25, 1659, Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle petitioned the House of Commons “on behalf of themselves as of three score and ten freeborn people of this nation now in slavery in the Barbadoes; setting forth most unchristian and barbarous usage of them.” The ensuing debate made it clear that a convergence of ideas about slavery, race, and empire among Parliamentarians and royalists, former antagonists in the English Revolution and civil wars, would ease the way to the restoration of the monarchy.70