by Ben Hughes
Flogging was the most common punishment. Although statistics from the late seventeenth century are not extant, the mid-eighteenth-century diaries of Thomas Thistlewood may cast some light on common practices. Over one eleven-month period, running from mid-1750 to mid-1751, Thistlewood whipped eighteen of the twenty-four male slaves under his supervision. Between them, they received thirty-one floggings, while seven of the eleven females received eleven. Thistlewood’s floggings were a minimum of 50 lashes. Sometimes 100 or 150 were doled out. The maximum during the period was 250 lashes, administered to a stranger, presumably from a neighboring plantation, whom Thistlewood caught inside one of his animal pens. Other supposed crimes recorded in his diary included “being saucy” to a white supervisor, “carelessness,” theft, “negligence,” “stupidity,” laziness, or petit maroonage, a term denoting the extremely common practice of fleeing from a plantation for a limited period with no intention of permanently escaping the system.119 To intensify the pain inflicted, overseers often resorted to a practice known as “pickling.” “After they are whip’d ’till they are Raw,” as Sloane explained it, “some put on their Skins Pepper and Salt to make them smart; at other times their Masters will drop melted Wax on their Skins, and use several very exquisite Torments.”120
Thistlewood also made much use of bilboes, or shackles, to punish transgressors for minor infractions. By forcing the slaves to lie down in the dirt with their legs hoisted up and their ankles shackled to an iron bar, the punishment was not only painful and degrading, but could also lead to permanent disability. Some malefactors were confined for three weeks at a time. An expert in degradation, Thistlewood also used punishments of his own invention. The most notable was administered to an unfortunate named Derby caught eating stolen sugarcane in January 1756. “Had Derby whipped,” Thistlewood recorded in his diary, “and made Egypt shit in his face.” Derby was caught eating cane a second time in May. Thistlewood “had him well flogged and pickled, then had Hector shit in his mouth.” In July Thistlewood introduced new depths of depravity. After whipping and pickling a runaway named Port Royal, Thistlewood “made Hector shit in his mouth [and] immeadiately put in a gag while his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.”121
More serious crimes demanded more serious punishments. Repeat runaways were shackled with ankle rings of great weight. Others were given “Pottocks about their necks,” Sloane noted, “which are iron rings with two long necks riveted to them, or a Spur in the mouth,” a device designed to snag on branches and vegetation should the wearer flee again. Some were hamstrung or “gelded,” a process by which half of one of the slave’s feet was chopped off with an ax. Castration was another punishment.122 Although slave owners were loath to kill their property, hanging or gibbeting were resorted to in the cases of those who dared strike their masters. After hanging a repeat runaway named Robin in 1751, Thistlewood mounted his head on a pole for four months to serve as a warning to his peers.123 Rebels were also executed, but by far crueler methods, such as being torn apart by dogs or burned to death. “By nailing them down on the ground with crooked Sticks on every Limb, and then applying the fire by degrees from their Feet and Hands,” Sloane recorded, “[they are] burn[t] . . . gradually up to the Head, where by their pains are extravagant.”124
Eyewitnesses spoke of the stoicism of those punished in such ways. “Negroe slaves died . . . obstinately,” Taylor noted,
not semeing in the least concern’d therat, for when they were burnning, or rather roasting at the stake (for the fier was made at some distance from the stake to which they were chained and all round soe that they roasted or burnt by degrees) they would sing and laugh and by noe tortur would they ever confes. . . . And soe their torment seem’d in vaine. And here ’tis worth observation to consider their undaunted resolutions . . . which I observed by a lusty Negro man executed at the Port while I was there, whoe being chained to ye stake, and the feir kindled about him, and seeing his master standing bie he said to him this: “Master why doe you burn me? Did I ever refuse to work? Or doe what you order’d me to doe? Or did I ever steal anything from you in all my life? Why therfore am I thus cruelly burnt?” His master answered him thus: “Samboo (for that was his name), I have done all I can to save thy life, and would now give a hundred pounds to save thee, but thou hast bin in the rebellion and therfor must die. . . .” “Well then (said hee), I thanck you good master, God for ever bless you, and now I will die.”125
White residents rarely felt sympathy. “The corporal punishment of slaves is so common,” explained an English doctor resident in Dutch Guiana in the 1790s, “that instead of exciting repugnant sensations, felt by Europeans on first witnessing it, scarcely does it produce, in the breasts of those accustomed to it in the West Indies, even the slightest glow of compassion.”126
As slaves were considered property, owners could punish them with impunity. The only laws curtailing such behavior merely highlight the brutality of the system. Prior to 1688 the penalty for an owner killing one of his or her slaves “wantonly” was a fine of £25. Legislation brought in by the Lords of Trade raised this to a three-month prison sentence. Loopholes meant that these laws were rarely enforced: owners could simply claim that the slave had died while undergoing a severe beating, a punishment that was perfectly allowable by law.127
SLAVE RESISTANCE came in a variety of forms. Most were relatively trivial acts, but effective in terms of diminishing production and profitability. Theft of food or other property was common. Perpetrators targeted other slaves as well as whites, especially those from neighboring plantations. Another form of resistance was suicide. Sabotage was frequent: animals were wounded or poisoned, machinery was broken, and, occasionally, the canes were set on fire. It has been speculated that such acts were particularly appealing to the Akan, whose cultural legacy included tales of animal tricksters, such as the Anansesem, or spider stories. Petit maroonage was another common form of resistance.128 Thomas Thistlewood noted that most slaves ran away alone, for personal reasons, and did not stray far or for very long. The plantation offered sustenance and shelter, and Jamaica was an extremely hostile place for slaves caught wandering off without written permission. Nevertheless, certain individuals appear to have become addicted to temporary escape. One example among Thistlewood’s charges was a young Ebo named Coobah whom Thistlewood raped nine months after purchasing her as a fifteen-year-old. Coobah had a child with a free black man at the age of twenty. The child died at fifteen months old and from that point Coobah began to run. The first occasion was in August 1765; after a four-day absence, Coobah returned. She was flogged and had a collar and chain put round her neck. Three years passed before she ran again, but from then on her temporary absences became increasingly common. In 1770 Coobah ran eight times. She ran five times in 1771. She received severe floggings, was kept in the stocks, and was branded on the forehead as a repeat runaway. Coobah also indulged in other minor acts of resistance. She argued with other slaves about the amount of work she was expected to do and stole food from whites and blacks alike. In October 1770, Coobah stole Thistlewood’s punch strainer “and shit in it, wrapping it up and covering it with a piece of board.” Thistlewood had the excrement “rubbed all over her face and mouth,” but noted that Coobah appeared oblivious to the punishment. In 1774 Thistlewood ran out of patience. He sold Coobah for £40 and she was transported to Georgia.129
Outright rebellion was an ever-present threat. Jamaica was ideally suited to the establishment of maroon communities. The sixty-degree forested slopes of the Blue Mountains rose 7,400 feet in the east while the 500-square mile expanse of the Cockpit Country to the west also provided a perfect environment. The region’s nigh-on impenetrable undergrowth, deep canyons, abundant limestone sinkholes, and broken ground was far more akin to the West Africans’ homelands than their masters’ European habitats. Wild foodstuffs and medicinal plants that resembled West African equivalents were to be found, thus enabling runaways with some bush lore to survive indefi
nitely.130 As these areas were also relatively close to the fertile savannah where most plantations were established, maroons could remain in contact with plantation slaves. The two communities bartered commodities and established communications. Maroons were thus able to encourage their enslaved brethren to join them. They would also launch raids against the plantations to capture weapons and ammunition and abduct young female slaves to enable their communities to be self-perpetuating. Another factor facilitating the establishment and success of maroon communities was Jamaica’s indigenous heritage. Although most Tainos had died out by the time of the arrival of the English, it is believed that a few holdouts survived in the interior into the late seventeenth century. These individuals may well have mixed with the earliest maroon communities thus allowing a blending of indigenous and African culture, bush lore, and, perhaps most important, methods of guerrilla warfare, thus facilitating their continuing resistance.131
Lobby’s Rebellion, the first recorded slave rebellion in English-held Jamaica, took place in 1673. Two hundred Coromantee slaves on Major Selby’s plantation in St. Ann’s Parish killed a dozen whites, including their master, seized arms, and fled into the mountains between Clarendon and St. Elizabeth’s. Although they defeated the first militia detachment sent after them, the rebels were gradually reduced by subsequent attacks yet never entirely dislodged and went on to form one of the elements of the group which would later become known as the Leeward Maroons. The year 1676 saw a rash of defections from plantations in St. Mary’s Parish which were deemed so serious by the authorities that martial law was declared and a permanent guard established in the outlying districts. In 1678 a rebellion broke out on Captain Edmund Duck’s plantation near Spanish Town when the river that separated the property from the capital became impassable due to heavy rain. Duck was seriously wounded and his wife, Martha, was killed along with several other whites. One slave who remained loyal swam the river to raise the alarm in Spanish Town, and a troop of horse was sent out to attack the rebels. Some were killed, while the rest were captured and “put to exemplary violent deaths.” In 1685 one hundred and fifty slaves revolted on Widow Grey’s estate in Guanaboa Vale. The rebels laid siege to the great house on the neighboring plantation belonging to Major Francis Price but were forced to retreat when a detachment of militia infantry arrived from Spanish Town. After their leader, “one of their conjurors, on whom they chiefly depended,” was killed, the survivors briefly held a limestone crag before dispersing into the interior. One of the resulting bands, led by a Cormantee named Cophy, terrorized St. Mary’s Parish for several months afterward. A reward of £10 was offered for Cophy’s head and £5 for those of each of his five lieutenants. Several bounty hunters took up the challenge. Bloodhounds were used and a group led by Captain Davis also employed “Indian” trackers from Central America. Cophy’s death was reported soon afterward. Of the one hundred and fifty rebels in his band, seven were killed in battle, thirty were captured, and fifty surrendered. The rest remained at large. Escaping to the east of the island they merged with a shipload of Madagascan runaways who had been living in the woods ever since the slave vessel which had transported them had been wrecked near Point Morant sometime in 1669 or 1670. Bounty hunters continued to scour the area for the Widow Grey rebels until the middle of 1687, but by then the survivors were firmly established in several villages. Due to their position in the east of the island, they came to be known as the Windward Maroons.132
As the slaves came from several different, and linguistically distinct, areas of West Africa, the whites erroneously presumed that they could not understand one another and therefore would remain divided. “It has been accounted a strange thing,” Richard Ligon wrote in 1673,
that the Negroes being more than double the numbers of the Christians that are there . . . should not commit some horrid massacre upon the Christians, thereby to enfranchise themselves, and become Masters of the Island. But there are three reasons that take away this wonder; the one is, They are not suffered to touch or handle any weapons: The other, That they are held in such awe and slavery, as they are fearful to appear in any daring act; and seeing the mustering of our men, and hearing their Gun-shot, (than which nothing is more terrible to them) their spirits are subjugated to so low a condition, as they dare not look up to any bold attempt—Besides these, there is a third reason, which stops all designs of that kind, and that is they are fetch’d from several parts of Africa, who speak several languages, and by that means, one of them understands not another.133
Ligon was wrong on at least two counts. Although it does seem that slaves lived in fear of the island militia, he was incorrect in his assertion that slaves were never allowed to handle weapons. Thistlewood makes several allusions to slaves carrying firearms when hunting, a practice encouraged by their owners to supplement their rations and thus reduce costs.134 It also seems that language was not as much of a barrier as contemporaries believed. West African societies had significant linguistic similarities. Furthermore, bilingualism and multilingualism were commonplace. Jamaica was probably multilingual from the time of its colonization, and linguists argue that Twi-Asante, the dominant language of the Gold Coast, soon became the lingua franca of the plantations alongside an English-Akan patios, unintelligible to the early white settlers.135
Rebels were often led by obeah men. As well as being valued for the charms and spells they used to ward off bullets, they also orchestrated the blood pacts which bound rebels together.136 One testimony, given after a failed revolt in Antigua in 1736 led by an individual named Secundi, provides some details as to how such ceremonies were performed.
[Quawcoo, the Obeah man,] took . . . [a] Cock[rel], cut open his Mouth, and one of his Toes, and so poured the Cocks blood Over all [himself],” the witness reported, “and then Rub’d Secundi’s forehead with the Cocks bloody Toe, then took . . . [a] Bottle and poured Some Rum upon the Obey, Drank a Dram, and gave it to Secundi and made Secundi Sware not to Discover his name to any body. Secundi then Asked him when he must begin to Rise. Quawcoo took a String Ty’d knots in it, and told him not to be in a hurry, for that he would give him Notice when to Rise and all Should go well, and that as he ty’d those knots so the Bacarras [(the slaves’ name for whites)] should become Arrant fools and have their Mouths Stoped, and their hands tyed that they should not Discover the Negro’s Designs.137
PRIOR TO 1700 the great majority of maroon leaders across the Americas about whom information is available were African born.138 Having grown up inside the plantation system, and having known (and perhaps played with) their white masters since birth, in contrast, creole slaves had mixed loyalties and were therefore considerably less likely to rebel.139 Another pattern which emerges is that many rebel leaders had held positions of authority in Africa prior to their enslavement, with former royalty being particularly well-suited to the role, especially seeing as most such figures would have risen to their previous position due to military expertise. Indeed, four of the six most important early maroon leaders across the Americas claimed to have been kings in Africa prior to enslavement: Ganga Zumba, a former Congolese prince, was the first ruler of what was perhaps the most impressive of all maroon settlements, Palamares in eastern Brazil, a fortified town with a population of over 10,000 which existed for nearly ninety years until finally reduced in 1694; Domingo Bioho, also known as King Benkos, ruled a maroon settlement carved out of the forests and marshes of Matuna in northern Colombia for close to two decades until he was betrayed, captured, and hung; Gaspar Yanga, a slave who established a community of maroons in the early seventeenth century in the highlands of Veracruz in Mexico, was said to have been a former prince of the “Bron” people (perhaps a reference to the Brong, an Akan culture group from modern-day Ghana); while Bayano, a Mandinka prince from modern-day Sierra Leone, set up a maroon kingdom in the jungles of Darien in Panama in the mid-sixteenth century. Like several of his peers, Bayano made treaties with the local governor, thus establishing his community inside the leg
al framework of the colony before he too was betrayed and sent to Spain for execution.140 Aphra Behn, the seventeenth-century English novelist, chose to make the eponymous hero of her slave-rebel epic a former African prince: Oroonoko was enslaved after being betrayed and later turned rebel in the plantations of Surinam.141
To the list of royalty-turned-slave-rebel can be added the name of Cudjoe, an obscure figure who is believed to have led the most significant slave rebellion in seventeenth-century Jamaica, which broke out on Thomas Sutton’s plantation on July 31, 1690. That Cudjoe was Coromantee is apparent by his name. That he led the rebellion and that he subsequently fathered a son, also named Cudjoe, who would grow up to be the most significant figure in early Jamaican maroon history, is all that is known about him.142 It has been speculated, however, that he had been a warlord, aristocrat, prince, or king prior to his capture. It is also likely that Cudjoe was a relatively recent arrival in Jamaica. Typically, revolts were carried out by those who had not long been in country. Once slaves had been institutionalized, their moral as well as physical strength began to atrophy, while their fear of retribution grew to such a point that rebellion became unthinkable.143 How exactly Cudjoe arrived at Sutton’s plantation is unknown. Although it is tempting to hypothesize that he may have arrived on board the Hannah, the single largest shipment of slaves to arrive in the colony in the twelve months prior to the uprising, it seems more likely that he came on board one of the interlopers with whom it would appear Sutton habitually did business. Regardless as to how or exactly when Cudjoe arrived at Sutton’s, what can be said is that he was a persuasive and charismatic individual. By late July, as the sugar manufacturing process was coming to a halt for the season, he had convinced the entire slave population of some four to five hundred individuals to rise up and kill their oppressors. Afterward, Cudjoe planned to move on to a neighboring estate. From the course of latter events it can be surmised that Cudjoe not only intended to secure his own freedom and that of his fellows at Sutton’s, but also that he hoped that his rebellion would eventually engulf the entire island.
