Thistlewood was not a typical Jamaican white overseer: he was older and more highly educated. He arrived with Chaucer, Milton, Pope and Addison in his luggage (along with a Bible and Book of Common Prayer). He was also soberer and more careful with his money than the typical, younger white employee. His greatest extravagance was books: throughout his time in Jamaica, he ordered numerous volumes from London or elsewhere (in 1763 he got Benjamin Franklin’s book on electricity), often on publication, and received a number of periodicals. He read mathematics, botany and horticulture, as well as Hume, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In Westmoreland he found a small circle of white planters – all fellow slaveowners – keen to exchange and talk about books from these and other Enlightenment thinkers. No doubt Thistlewood saw himself as a harbinger, in a modest way, of the Enlightenment in the tropics, a scholar and perhaps even gentleman, loyal friend and respectable imperial subject, a man of principle and integrity, a better-than-ordinary Englishman. But for a modern reader of his diary, he is a monster: a rapist and a brutal sociopath.
Thistlewood’s acclimatisation was rapid. On the way to Jamaica, his boat stopped briefly at Antigua, where he was propositioned by black prostitutes and met an 81-year-old planter who cheerfully discussed his ‘kept’ young mulatto mistress. During his first days in Jamaica, he saw a slave whipped and then his wounds marinated in salt, pepper and lime juice, as well as another decapitated and his body burned for the crime of running away. His first boss, Florentius Vassall, seems to have possessed the common white Creole attribute of a steady, simmering rage, which would occasionally explode into violence, particularly after drinking. Only days after starting work at Vineyard Pen, Thistlewood witnessed a senior driver slave being given 300 lashes on the orders of Vassall. Shortly afterwards, Thistlewood himself ordered another high-ranking slave be given 150 lashes, thus imposing his own authority. He had hardly arrived at Egypt plantation before he was sent the severed head of a runaway slave to display to his workforce. Thistle-wood, as instructed, ‘Put it upon a pole and stuck it up just at the angle of the road in the home pasture’, where it stayed for four months.
Soon after his arrival in Jamaica, Thistlewood got hold of a series of instructions, written by Richard Beckford, about the best management of a plantation workforce. Beckford owned nearly 1,000 slaves and the largest and most fertile estates in Thistlewood’s parish of Westmoreland. ‘The Unhappy situation of a Slave is a Circumstance that will touch every Generous Breast with a Sentiment of Compassion’, he wrote. Slaves should be treated with ‘Justice and Benevolence’, so that ‘their lives may be render’d as cosy as their Condition will permit’. Beckford, like Henry Drax, whose own ‘Instructions’ were also procured by Thistlewood, gave detailed advice on feeding and care of slaves, and a warning that although they were uneducated, this was no reason for not ‘treating them as Rational Beings’, lest they should have a ‘Sense of Injury which will dispose them to Revenge that may produce more fatal Consequence than desertion’.
Thistlewood took on board many of Richard Beckford’s recommendations, including the care of sick Africans, and thereby suffered a slightly less brutal mortality rate than other estates. But the ‘Revenge’ threat really struck home. Having laboriously transcribed the ‘Instructions’ into his diary, he followed them with a poem in which slaves turn on whites in a ‘Bacchanalian Frenzy’ with ‘Full Acts of Blood and Vengeance’. It did not take long for Thistlewood to realise that the slaves hated him and wanted him dead.
This was no idle fear. The west of the island, where Thistlewood lived and worked, was more recently settled than elsewhere, and had even fewer whites, outnumbered by the enslaved Africans by as many as 16 to one. At Vineyard Pen, he went for weeks on end without seeing another white person. The move to the sugar plantation meant that a handful of lower-ranking whites were present, but it was also a much harder and more brutal establishment, with many more slaves. Soon after moving to Egypt, Thistle-wood had a narrow escape.
In December 1752, he came across a runaway slave, Congo Sam. Attempting to seize him, Thistlewood was attacked with an axe the slave carried, as Congo Sam shouted ‘in the Negro manner, “I will kill you, I will kill you now”’. Although Thistlewood parried most of the blows with a stick he was carrying, several times Congo Sam hit Thistlewood’s coat, but ‘the bill being new was not very sharp’, and the white man ‘received no harm’. Thistlewood was by now shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Murder!’ and ‘Help! For God’s sake!’ ‘but no assistance came’. Thistlewood, fearing he had ‘no prospect but to lose [his] life’, threw himself at the African and succeeded in grabbing the end of the axe, and dragging Congo Sam back towards his plantation. But at the watch hut by a bridge that marked Egypt’s boundary, ‘he would get no further. Bella and Abigail were there, but would not assist me. (He spoke to them in his language and I was much afraid of them)’, Thistlewood wrote in his diary. Sam took the chance to shake his captor free and throw himself in the river. Thistlewood jumped in after him, and the two men wrestled for possession of the axe. During the course of the struggle, five ‘Negro’ men and three women, none known to Thistle-wood, crossed the bridge and observed the battle. Thistlewood called out for help with capturing the runaway, but they ‘would by no means assist me, neither for threats nor promises; one saying he was sick, the others that they were in a hurry’. Eventually one of Thistlewood’s slaves, London, came to his assistance, and Congo Sam was captured. (London subsequently attempted to let Congo Sam escape, and then refused to testify against him). For Thistlewood, it was a close-run thing.
Thistlewood perceived that he was a marked man, and noted the murderous mutterings against him. His response was to attempt to demean, demoralise and traumatise the slaves into obedience and passivity. ‘The first thing you learn is discipline’, he wrote of his acclimatisation. During his year at Vineyard, he whipped almost two thirds of the men and half of the women. At Egypt, the regime was even worse, particularly when the Seven Years War made provisions scarce and the slaves hungry. At one point Thistlewood reported in his diary, ‘My pocket Whip is broke and Wore out.’ For those caught eating cane from the fields, Thistlewood developed his own particular punishment, which was repulsive even by the standards of the time and place. On Wednesday 28 January 1756, he noted in his diary that one of his charges had been caught foraging among the canes: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his mouth.’ This disgusting punishment, which became known as ‘Derby’s Dose’, did not even work. Derby continued to eat cane and then ran away.
This punishment for eating cane was repeated numerous times during the year, sometimes with even crueller modifications. In July, one slave who had run away was given a ‘moderate whipping’, but was then ‘well’ ‘pickled’, ‘made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours’. On another occasion a slave was made to urinate into another slave’s mouth. Cuttings and mutilations were also deployed. When Derby continued to run away, he had his face chopped with a machete so that his right ear, cheek and jaw were almost cut off. Thistlewood also used stocks and ‘picketing’, where the victim was hung by the hands with only a toe taking the weight of the body. Once, he punished a female slave, Cubbah, for leaving the property by having her ‘picketed’ on ‘a quart bottle neck till she begged hard’.
In spite of this reign of terror, Thistlewood’s diary shows how the enslaved workforce continued to resist the total dominance of their masters – by working slowly or deliberately incompetently, through pretending illness, by constantly wandering off the plantation, or by plotting the overthrow of the whites.
This was the case throughout the island, as the dramatic events of 1760 illustrated. On 7 April, more than 100 slaves, under the leadership of a charismatic young Akan or Coromantee called Tacky, left their estates in St Mary parish and raided an arsenal in Port Maria, on Jamaica’s northeastern coast. They then swept southwards, killing whites they came across, burning
crops and buildings, and gathering recruits. Soon they were 1,000 strong, as rebellions started flaring up all over Jamaica. It was the most significant slave revolt in the West Indies until the Haitian revolution. A Jamaican writing less than 15 years later claimed that the aim of ‘Tacky’s Revolt’ was ‘the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants’. Africans who refused to join would become slaves of the new regime of small principalities throughout the island.
In May, the rebellion flared up in Westmoreland, and at Egypt plantation news of massacres of nearby whites combined with sightings of rebels in the morass to bring a feeling of embattled crisis to Thistlewood’s plantation. On one occasion Thistlewood heard that the adjacent estate had been overrun. Soon he could see nearby buildings burning. He armed his most trusted slaves and guarded his property carefully, as rumours swirled around – ‘strange various reports with torment & confusion’. There was a constant stream of militia and regular troops passing though, whom Thistlewood fed, lodged and watered, as Egypt became a staging post for operations against the rebels.
One night, one of the junior overseers at Egypt panicked and started shooting at all blacks he saw, for which he received a severe reprimand from Thistlewood. But the fear was well justified. Thistlewood, in the end, was reliant on his slaves to remain loyal to him. The Egypt slaves could easily have turned on the handful of whites and made themselves masters of the plantation. But although a number, to Thistlewood’s alarm, shaved their heads, the motif of the rebellion, and a couple ran away, they did not revolt, but instead faithfully guarded the borders of the property.
This loyalty was about more than the terrible punishments rebels could expect if the revolt was unsuccessful, or the demeaning slave regime that deliberately ‘demanned’ its victims. Many of the slaves actually had a small stake in the status quo – possessions, livestock, other articles of property, family. Enough were prepared to stick with the ‘devil you know’ to render the revolt at last unsuccessful.
Another key factor was the maroons. Ironically, the free maroons were an inspiration for the rebellion. One account reported the rebellious slaves planning ‘to fire all the plantation they can, til they force the whites to give them free like Cudjoe’s Negroes’. But Cudjoe stuck by his deal made at the end of the war of the 1730s, and sent his men to support the whites against the rebellious slaves.48 Ultimately a maroon tracked down, shot and killed Tacky, which was the beginning of the end of the rebellion, and maroons were used to mop up resistance, which simmered on until the following year.
Along with several hundred black slaves, some 60 whites were killed before order was restored. The retribution enacted illustrates the white community’s sense of shock and fear. Five hundred slaves were transported, in the main to Honduras, and 100 executed, mostly in slow and painful ways. One ‘was made to sit on the ground, and his body being chained to an iron stake, the fire was applied to his feet. He uttered not a groan, and saw his legs reduced to ashes with the utmost firmness and composure, after which, one of his arms by some means getting loose, he snatched a brand from the fire that was consuming him, and flung it in the face of the executioner.’ In addition, far stricter rules were introduced, mainly to control the wanderings of slaves off their plantations, and dividing lines between whites and non-whites became much more rigid.
As well as dispassionately noting the brutal punishments dealt out under his rule, Thistlewood’s diary also details his voracious and predatory sexual behaviour. Using schoolboy Latin, he lists all of his ‘conquests’: ‘Sup. lect. cum Marina’ (on the bed with Marina), ‘Cum Flora, a congo, Super Terram, [on the ground] among the canes’. Everywhere on the estate – the fields, the boiling house, the Negro shacks – Thistlewood took his pleasure with the slave women, not caring who saw. In his first year in Jamaica he had sex with 13 different women on 59 occasions. Hardly any of the available female slaves escaped his attentions. On average he had 14 different partners in a year, and overall slept with nearly 140 different women, almost all black slaves, while in Jamaica.
Very soon after his arrival, he contracted a venereal infection, writing in his diary in September 1751, ‘Perceived a small redness, but did not regard it.’ Two days later he was ‘last night Cum Dido’, but had ‘A greater redness, with soreness, and scalding water. About 9 a.m., a running begin, of a yellowish greenish matter.’ This was followed a subsequent night by ‘painful erections, and sharp pricking, great torment, forced to get up and walk about’. Worse symptoms followed, then the following week he recorded: ‘Spoke to Dr Joseph Horlock. A rank infection.’
Horlock charged him nearly £3 for the treatment, which consisted of bleeding, mercury pills, salts and ‘cooling powders’, together with instructions that had Thistlewood ‘bathing the penis a long time in new milk night and morning’. None of this, however, stopped his amorous advances. The next day he was ‘cum’ Nago Jenny.
Thistlewood was unusual in noting his sexual encounters, but entirely typical in his behaviour. At the beginning of the same year, he casually noted in his diary that ‘ye Barb[ados] woman that was rap’d by three of them (at Kingston) in a short space’ had produced a bastard child, to the consternation of the white men. It was the complication of the child, rather than the triple rape, that made the story noteworthy for Thistlewood. All the white bookkeepers at Egypt took slave ‘wives’, and many came down with venereal disease. On one occasion, in March 1753, Thistlewood acted to stop a rape at the plantation: ‘At Night Mr Paul Stevens and Thomas Adams going to tear old Sarah to pieces in her hutt’, he wrote, ‘had a quarrel with both of them. They burnt her and would fire the hutt Note they both drunk.’ The concern, though, seems to be more with damage to property than to the unfortunate victim.
At the end of 1754, William Dorrill died and the ownership of Egypt passed to John Cope, from a local gentry family, who had married Dorrill’s young daughter Molly. Cope’s speciality was turning up at Egypt, getting drunk, then summoning a slave woman to his bed. In March 1755 he arrived with a party of six, four of whom ‘being heartily drunk, haw’led Eve separately into the Water Room and were Concern’d with her[.] Weech 2cd. First and last.’ Thistlewood did nothing to stop the rape, but did not punish Eve when she subsequently ran away for a few days.
On another occasion Cope, following a drinking session with Mr MacDonald (‘who had Eve to whom he gave 6 bitts’), ordered ‘Tom fetch Beck from the Negroe’s house for himself with whom he was with till morning’. But Beck had not been the first choice, as the next Monday Cope ordered ‘Egypt Susannah and Mazerine whipped for refusal’. In revenge, ‘Little Phibbah told Mrs Cope last Saturday’s affair. Mrs Cope also examined the sheets and found them amiss.’
But Cope continued the same behaviour, which became increasingly drunken, erratic and angry. In October 1756, Thistlewood noted, ‘Mr C. in his tantrums last night. Forced Egypt Susanah in the cookroom; was like a madman most part of the night, &c. Mrs Cope very ill today.’ Cope made no effort to hide his behaviour, and his young wife Molly was forced to turn a blind eye; nor did it stop Cope becoming an assemblyman and custos of the parish.
Thistlewood hardly ever condemned any of this behaviour, except for when Cope forced himself on girls as young as nine. Men like Thistlewood and Cope expected white men to have sex with enslaved black women, whom they thought of as the embodiment of earthiness, sexuality and physical strength. Attractive female slaves, ‘young and full-breasted’, always fetched a premium at slave auctions. White bookkeepers were even encouraged to take on black ‘wives’, in the hope that their concubines might betray an incipient Negro plot. The resulting stream of mulatto children, some 10 per cent of all births in Jamaica, were, for visitors, evidence of the planters’ ‘licentious and even unnatural amours … a crime that seems to have gained sanction from custom’. From the highest to the lowest, almost all white men, ‘of every rank, quality and degree’, chose to ‘riot in these goatish embraces’, as an eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica put it.
According to a later writer, J. B. Moreton, who worked as a bookkeeper in Jamaica, attorneys managing plantations for absentee owners would ‘keep a favourite black or mulatta girl on every estate’. He complained that these women ‘are often intolerably insolent to subordinate white men’. Alternatively, as Moreton explained, an attorney would come with ‘a few dissipated gentlemen’ and then order the manager to ‘procure some of the finest young wenches for the gentlemen’. At sunset, the girls were called from the fields; ‘these poor wretches wash themselves in some river or pond, brace up their breasts, and meet at the Great House’. There, they danced for the white men, and then were taken to bed. ‘Their black husbands’, Moreton continued, ‘being neglected, silently pass those nights in disagreeable slumbers, wrecked with jealousy and torture.’
Sometimes, it seems, revenge was had. Henry McCormick, who worked for Thistlewood at Egypt, was killed by a tree being felled by slaves. Thistle-wood noted that the slaves, who were now runaways, had ‘murdered him for meddling with their women’.
The Sugar Barons Page 36
