The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Whether out of pity, contempt, or ill health of their own, the Mosquitos grew impatient with the St. Johns expedition. Since river transport had depended upon their “spirited exertions and perseverance,” and since their hunting, fishing, and turtling had helped to feed the soldiers, things soon began to fall apart.38 Alexander Shaw, commissary of provisions, negotiated for their continued work, which they would agree to only on their own terms: “If any Mosquito men are employed in any laborious work it is only to be upon condition they chuse themselves to be so employed but they are not to be compelled, and are to be paid for their labour the same as other persons employed in such labour and are to be at liberty to return either to the Army or to their homes without Mollestation.” Officers were also ordered to “take every Step that the Soldiery have little connection with them [the Indians] in Order to avoid the possibility of Disgust on their Side.”39 The Indians nonetheless decided to go home, and they took their boats with them. Those who returned to Jamaica, meanwhile, “propagated reports among the lower class of the white people” that it was unsafe to go to the St. Johns River. The Indians “have the highest ideas of freedom,” wrote one of the officers in April.

  Once the Indians had deserted, the expedition relied almost entirely on the “Black River Negroes”—boatmen from the Mosquito Shore—for supplies. But when one of the leaders of their contingent fell ill, “almost all these Negroes deserted, and carried off with them the smallest and most suitable boats, so that the distresses of the Troops were greatly heightened, and there remained hardly any other prospect than that of being obliged to retire.” The desertions continued through May and June. By September, Despard wrote, the garrison was “so extremely weak that there are not Men sufficient to keep up the necessary Guards. The Negroes of the Corps, I have been obliged to keep in the Fort constantly to prevent their desertion, as well as to have them ready to work when necessary, & for some time past they have not had much spare time—five Men deserted one night four of the Volunteers & one of the Legion & took a Dory with them.” A captain soon reported a strike, as soldiers made “an absolute Refusal of their Labour.” In July, the resistance from below had taken an even more serious turn when the slaves on the Mosquito Shore revolted and captured the main town on the Black River.

  Two thousand soldiers went up the St. Johns River between February and November, and a hundred returned. Another thousand sailors also perished. Writing in 1780, Lord George Germain, Britain’s secretary of war, chastised Governor Dalling, “I lament exceedingly the dreadful havoc Death has made among the troops.” Unlike sixty-nine other officers, Nelson and Despard survived—Nelson only because he was carried downriver in a delirium and out of the country, then nursed back to health by the Afro-Caribbean woman Cuba Cornwallis. Despard remained. In July 1780 the governor of Jamaica indulged himself and his superiors in an apologetics of wishful, xenophobic praise of British regular troops: “It is by the superiority of their discipline we are to reap the greatest advantages. Impressed with this Idea, he flatters himself each Soldier will strive to distinguish himself, and show how superior disciplined and well-bred Troops are to a motley Crew of Indians and Mulattoes.”40 Despard owed his survival to precisely such a crew.

  After the catastrope of the St. Johns expedition, Dr. Moseley wrote that “the failure of that undertaking has been buried, with many of its kindred, in the silent tomb of government.”41 Despard’s personal triumph was made possible by his cooperation with the motley crew, including the Mosquito Indians, the black boatmen, and the miners, sappers, and builders with whom he lived and worked for nearly eighteen months. Driven by misplaced duty to imperial arrogance, forced to deny the plenitude of a tropical commons, and surrounded by a slaughter of men whose motley origins alone prevent us accurately from calling it genocide, Despard nonetheless formed an attachment to a people—the Mosquitos—whose knowledge of the commons was seminal, whose origins among buccaneers were held in pride, and whose ideas of freedom were lofty. Was Catherine one of them?

  BELIZE

  Between Despard’s departure from Nicaragua and his appointment as the Crown’s leading official in British Honduras in 1784, the cycle of rebellion initiated by the motley crew in the 1760s resulted in American independence. Mutinies at sea, revolts on the plantations, and riots in the port cities generated an imperial crisis and a revolutionary movement to answer it, but as we have seen, at war’s end many were excluded from the political settlement. Among these were the thousands of African Americans who had liberated themselves—often, after Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775), by running away to the British army.42 Military formations such as Leslie’s Black Dragoons and Brown’s Rangers advanced multiracial military organization and anticipated the West Indian regiments of the 1790s. Twenty thousand African Americans were carried out of North America after 1782, to Canada, the West Indies, Central America, England, and Africa. The people in diaspora expressed their journey, or exodus, in a discourse of deliverance that owed much to the renewal of liberation theology of the English Revolution, newly fortified by African American preachers such as Sambo Scriven, who traveled to the Bahamas, George Liele, who went to Jamaica, and John Marrant, who preached in London and Nova Scotia.43 Aboard men-of-war, in the harbors and ports of the northern Atlantic, in prisons afloat and ashore, they carried the message of jubilee as they searched for the New Jerusalem. This movement of people and ideas would come to affect Despard in Belize.

  Belize was a dense tropical forest protected by the largest coral barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere. Even on Despard’s and his associate David Lamb’s maps, the boundaries of private property showed as unconvincing geometric lines amid the prolific rendering of forest.44 For nearly two hundred years the region had been home to Indian, African, and European mariners, renegades, and castaways, including buccaneers, pirates, and sailors, millenarian dissidents from the former Mayan milpas, transported Jacobite rebels from the Fifteen and the Forty-Five, survivors of wrecked slave ships, and transported Jamaican rebels. They cut logwood in the mangrove swamps, often at night, by the light of pitch-pine torches, to escape the heat.45 They sold the logwood to Jamaican traders, who in turn shipped it to Europe, where it was used as a mordant in dyeing textiles. They lived “generally in common,” for whenever they used up a “stock of provisions & Liquors, they go to live with their neighbors.” Although they appeared to outsiders to be lawless, they in fact had “certain rules of their own making,” wrote the merchant encyclopedist Postlethwayt. Belize was a landed extension of hydrarchy in compound with Mayan milpas: it provided mankind with an example of collective self-reliance in a commons, self-government without the principle of hierarchy, and multiethnic solidarity, which had already shaped local historical consciousness by the time Despard arrived and which was to remain so powerful that when Lewis Henry Morgan visited, years later, he would coin the expression “primitive communism” to describe it.46

  By the time Despard landed there in 1786, much of the Belize littoral had been transformed into private property. The Treaty of Paris had concluded the Seven Years’ War in 1763, giving British settlers more secure land tenure and opening the way to mahogany cutting. Wealthier settlers had moved to the region, bringing with them slaves and the aggressive cupidity of a new mode of production. The magnificent trees were felled by axmen who belonged to slave gangs of cattle drovers, rafters, teamsters, cooks, providers. The mahogany was sold to European furnishers, of whom Thomas Chippendale was merely the most enterprising. His publication of The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director (1754), with its four hundred designs and 160 folio copper plates, represented a step toward standardization, moving the industry from handicraft production to manufacture. The European ruling class now ate off of mahogany tables, clothed itself from mahogany dressers, gazed upon itself in mahogany-framed mirrors, wrote letters on mahogany écritoires, sang in choir stalls of mahogany, and so on. Meanwhile, Admiral William Burnaby had arrived with naval warships in Belize in 1765 to establish a
formal legal code and to announce that land would no longer be held in common. The same year brought the first slave revolt; others followed in 1768 and 1773. By 1780, slaves outnumbered the free by six to one. Fifteen “Baymen,” as the ambitious planters termed themselves, had engrossed all mahogany production.47

  Despard’s assignment there in 1786 coincided with a new agreement between Britain and Spain, called the Convention of London, whose implementation would trigger armed conflict in Belize over land and labor and decisively alter the colonel’s life. The Convention required Britain to evacuate more than two thousand of its settlers from the Mosquito Shore to Belize in exchange for new mahogany-cutting rights there. In February 1787, 514 immigrants arrived from the Mosquito Shore. Most of them, Despard observed, were “indigent people of colour” of the American exodus. In May another 1,740 people joined the suddenly crowded settlement. Despard was charged with providing subsistence for the new settlers while integrating them into the colony.48 Who were these people who came to the bay to be “Hewers of Wood and the Drawers of Water”?49 In the first group were members of the Loyal American Rangers, who had been recruited in New York among deserters and prisoners of the Continental Army in 1780 and posted to Jamaica in 1781, when Despard “had the honor of commanding most of them” in the routing of the Spanish on the Black River in 1782.

  While treaty arrangements with Spain forbade the cultivation of food, in practice this prohibition was impossible to enforce. Fishing and turtling provided the staple diet of the Mayas, the Mosquitos, and the buccaneers, but not so the settlers; as their numbers grew, the rapacious among them began to privatize the commons, and the colony thus became increasingly dependent on food imports from North America. In order to ensure subsistence for the “poorer sort of people,” Despard allowed the cultivation of plantains, yams, corn, pineapples, and melons, disregarding the terms of the treaty. He set aside certain areas “to be enjoyed in common by all the settlers” and strengthened his alliance with the people who knew the local ecology. He waged a bitter struggle against American merchants who charged exorbitant prices for foodstuffs, thereby “keeping the people poor and totally dependent upon them.” When, in 1788, such merchants violated trading regulations, he did not hesitate to impound and even to sell their vessels.50

  Despard also had to decide how the new settlers would “get the means of subsistence by their labor and industry.” His allocation of land from the newly ceded territory caused the established mahogany men to howl in protest. Earlier, the Baymen had opposed his decision to permit the landing of a ship of convicts, suspected his motives in granting manumission from slavery, and felt insulted when he showed lenience to a Negro charged with the murder of a white man. Now Despard ignored their pressure and proposed to hand out land by lottery, which he deemed the “most equal and impartial mode of distribution.” The Baymen responded angrily that this would give the “lowest Mulatto or free Negro” an “equal chance” with the wealthiest. One of them could not understand how “a person of his extensive property should be placed on a footing with fellows of the lowest class and have no more land allowed him than . . . a fellow as Able Tayler (this is a man of Collour).” The lottery, they complained, would distribute land “without any distinction of Age, Sex, Character, Respectability, Property, or Colour.” Despard, they charged, was no respecter of persons: he insisted “that he cannot & will not know any distinction between these very different classes of men.” He assigned lots to all classes and colors of men as well as to sixteen women.51

  Tensions escalated when a “free man of Colour,” Joshua Jones, drew town lot number 69 and, on Despard’s authority, tore down the cookhouse of a wealthy settler that had been built on the land. Jones was arrested by magistrates representing the Baymen and clapped into jail. Soon a “few white people of the very lowest class, a number of Mustees, Mulattos, and Free negroes,” began drumming, “playing the Gambia,” and “running about the streets and assembling under arms,” threatening to free Jones. Despard intervened on their side and demanded Jones’s release. It was one of those flashpoints of history that illuminate an epoch. The Baymen expressed a doctrine of racial supremacy combined with class superiority, arguing that the “mode of distribution adopted by the Superintendent, was equally unjust and unpolitic in putting Negroes and Mulattoes (a set of persons who, in all the West India Islands, were considered in a very inferior light to the whole Inhabitants) upon a footing with Gentlemen and Mahogany Cutters, who were the supporters of the Country.” Maintaining an egalitarian view that was nonetheless still consistent with the mixed constitution of king and Parliament, Despard replied that “the legislative powers of these Islands made, it is true, some distinctions between white people and Negroes and mulattoes; but that there being no legislature in this Country, it must be governed by the law of England, which knows no such distinction, that even in those parts of the British Colonies where any such distinctions took place, it by no means did so in the distribution of the King’s land; and that these people of colour were as much entitled to places to live as the first Mahogany Cutters in the Country.”52 The Baymen continued to assault the new claimants, prompting the “people of colour” to petition in 1787 against their exclusion from land by reason of race:

  We your Petitioners the Inhabitants of the Mosquito Shore humbly sheweth that the many circumstances that immediately occur to us gives the most assured reason to expect that it will be really impossible for us to procure a livelihood in this Country, as we are not allowed the privileges of British subjects, and as Colored persons treated with the utmost disrespect, even threatened of being deprived of the Laws and privileges of this Country in case we do not sign and agree to a certain resolution made by a Committee appointed by persons for that purpose, which are of opinion is contrary to the proposals of Colonel Despard Superintendent of this Country and to any British Constitution whatever.

  Among those signing this petition was Joshua Jones.

  In the same year, Despard stood for election as magistrate. He won with more than 80 percent of the vote. His enemies claimed that some of the ballots had been cast by “ignorant turtlers” and “men of colour, possessing no species of property or any fixed residence.” Robert White, the agent of the Baymen, wrote to Lord Sydney in London in 1788 that Despard’s lottery “breaks into pieces all the Links of Society, and destroys all Order, Rank, and Government”; to this Despard responded by noting the partiality of the Baymen’s laws to rich people.53 Their law of naturalization excluded people of color, seeking to prevent them from independent subsistence and to force them to become servants or slaves. By September 1789 the Baymen’s complaints had expanded to include the full chorus of the North Atlantic bourgeoisie. Lord Grenville, Britain’s secretary of state, announced in October of that year that Despard had been suspended from office.

  Race was not the only issue here: how the classes were constituted in relation to subsistence and to the commons was also in question, and inherent in that was the matter of reproduction. In the slave and military society of plantation Jamaica, reproduction was made possible by the creolized group living and nursing of the boardinghouse. In the Nicaraguan expedition of 1780, it had depended on the rigid command of scarcity in the midst of fecundity, which had led inevitably to catastrophe. Only in Belize did Despard attempt a third solution: accommodation with the commons and union with the motley crew. But Despard did not so much organize a motley crew as he was organized by one. While it is conceivable that Despard met Catherine in either Jamaica or Nicaragua, it is perhaps more likely that they formed their alliance in Belize. Having arrived in the settlement unmarried, Edward had a wife and a son by the time he sailed back to England in April 1790.54 Our story, then, is of a woman of the African American revolutionary diaspora who married an Irish officer amid the egalitarian modification of a Central American commons, only to be defeated by a commercial concupiscence of empire that they now sought to face squarely in the midst of revolution.

  THE HU
MAN RACE

  Edward and Catherine Despard reached London in the spring of 1790, one year after the storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the French Revolution, and one year before the stormy night of voodoo in the Bois Caiman that would launch the Haitian Revolution. They arrived to find a movement afoot in England to abolish slavery. The middle-class educational program about West Indian slavery promoted a sympathetic, if false, impression. Josiah Wedgwood’s seal of the kneeling Negro, captioned “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” (1787), presented a posture of individual supplication, while the Plymouth Committee’s image of the plan of a slave ship (1788) conveyed a sense of reiterated passivity (see page 155). Edward and Catherine knew the truth, which would become obvious to others only after the Haitian Revolution. The Despards would use this truth as they organized in London “to burst the chain of bondage and slavery,” as they advocated the “principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice,” and as they developed their conception of the “human race.”