Dan Snow's History Hit - Mutiny on the Rising Sun: Smuggling in Colonial America

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

This is the story of a bloody mutiny aboard the Boston-based schooner, the Rising Sun. The ship had been on a routine smuggling voyage before it was violently seized by three opportunistic crew members. They had their sights set on the lucrative cargo she carried, but below decks, the Rising Sun hid an even more sinister secret; 15 terrified enslaved people, held in the ship's hold as the mutiny raged overhead.Dan is joined by Jared Ross Hardesty, a professor of history at Western Washington University and the author of ‘Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate’. Jared takes us through this rebellion at sea from beginning to end and sheds light on the shady worlds of smuggling and slavery in 18th century colonial America.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the night of the 1st of June, 1743, a little Boston-based schooner, the Rising Sun, was sailing down the coast of South America. The owners were cheap. It was a skeleton crew on board. They didn't want to pay for extra hands. It would squeeze the profit margin, profit generated by the crates of contraband in the hull. It meant that there were few men on board to handle sails, yards. It also meant that the sailors on board were outnumbered by another form of contraband, of cargo, human cargo. They were enslaved African men and children. That June night, three of the crew members spotted an opportunity, a chance to win, well, to them unimaginable riches

and perhaps escape the crushing life of an illiterate deckhand. They rose up in mutiny. life of an illiterate deckhand. They rose up in mutiny. They launched a bloody attack on the captain and senior crew members. They catastrophically upset the carefully maintained hierarchy of the 18th century world. Now the historian Jared Ross Hardesty is a professor of history at Western Washington University. He's a scholar of colonial America and the histories of labour and slavery. And he came across the eyewitness testimony of the survivors of this mutiny as the mutineers, the men who carried it out, were put on trial. And from that, he pieced together the whole story. And he put it in his most recent book, Mutiny on the Rising Sun, a tragic tale of slavery, smuggling, and chocolate. And you're going to hear him tell me that story

now. The mutiny, and then how they were tricked, how they were captured and end up going on trial. You're going to hear all about their grisly fate, but it's a bigger and more dramatic story even than that. It's a story that I think is a microcosm of the world of the 18th century Spanish Maine, the West Indies, the Caribbean. It's a highly complex world, with never-shifting political landscape of competitive European empires and local actors. It's a world of enormous fortunes being made in growing and trading cash crops like sugar, of the free booters who risked all, and of the enslaved Africans, without whom none of it would have been possible. The men, the women, the children who toiled, who died in horrific conditions.

You know me, folks. I'm never happy that I'm talking 18th century maritime history. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. Enjoy. Jared, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. So tell me who is aboard this ship. It's like a game of Cluedo. Tell me exactly who's on board. Well, there's a number of different people on board, which is actually kind of a fun mystery in itself to figure out kind of who is on board. And so we have the captain, whose name was Newark Jackson, and I have no idea where the first name comes from, but that was his first name. There was also a merchant or a supercargo, the guy who's kind of in charge of the cargo, which is a mystery why such a small vessel had a supercargo on board.

His name was George Ledain, and he was a native New Englander of Jersey descent whose family migrated to New England in the 17th century. We also had John Shaw, who was the bosun on board the ship, who would have been kind of in charge of the crew and kind of like the head safety officer and in charge of all the equipment and gear. And we also had William Blake, who was the ship's mate and would have kind of been in second in command under Jackson. We also had a cabin boy, John Skinner, who had been about 12 or 13 years old. And then we also had the three crewmen. So we have Ferdinando da Costa, Thomas Lucas, and Joseph Ferreira. Joseph Ferreira, Ferdinando da Costa, and Thomas Lucas were three men of Lusophones,

Portuguese speakers who had been recruited probably in Barbados to serve on board the ship under Jackson. And they were the kind of common sailors. So all told, you had about eight people on board the ship. There were also two young men from New England on board, who their names only show up once or twice, who were probably training as sailors. That was my kind of assumption why they were there as well. So pretty small crew. Yeah, it's a small crew for all the handling of the sails and spars you had to do back in the day.

Yes. Yeah, it would have been a skeleton crew. I mean, merchants were notoriously cheap and labor was almost the biggest cost of a voyage. And so they tried to run with skeleton crews. I also think that's probably why Jackson hired the three men in Barbados. Two of them were at least of mixed race descent, which means their wages wouldn't have been as high. And so it was all kind of a cost-saving measure.

A very small crew going to Barbados. And then once they got to Barbados, they hired just enough people to make the voyage operate on their way to Suriname. There's a really cheap folks right on the show here. And it does make it because, of course, death and accidents and disease would have been so prevalent. I mean, you can understand why some of these ships kind of ghost into harbor or beach themselves with a crew not even able to drop the anchor or furl the sails properly. It's crazy. It really is. It's absolutely incredible, which I think, you know, that's where, you know, like Da Costa, Lucas Perea, they also were seasoned veterans of the slave trade, which means they'd been in West Africa. They'd probably been exposed to a lot of those tropical diseases. And so they're survivors. And you kind of wonder if that's part of the calculus of hiring them as well. They're going to, you know,

the final destination of this voyage was Suriname, which is notoriously, even in the 18th century, an incredibly unhealthy place. People associated with death and disease and things like that. So when they get to Suriname in May 1743, they sail into the capital of what was then a Dutch colony. There's already suspicious stuff going on. Why is the Dutch governor wary of this ship? The Dutch governor is probably wary of every British ship that comes into port, because Suriname has a kind of notorious for smuggling already. It's very easy to smuggle into Suriname because it's on the northern coast of South America, all kind of oriented around

rivers that ultimately flow into the Atlantic. And so it's very easy to go kind of in and out and smuggle and hide in coves and inlets and up rivers and things. And it's also an incredibly wealthy, prosperous plantation colony where people go to buy sugar, molasses, coffee, chocolate, things like that. And so it has this reputation as a place of smuggling. And so any foreign ship that enters, and although the laws allow a certain amount of limited foreign trade, is going to be highly suspect. And there's all sorts of requirements. And so when this British ship comes in, the governor is going to make sure that the ship has its paperwork in order and it is allowed to trade. And so in the case of ships coming from New England, ultimately, which is where the Rising Sun was coming from, they have to have horses on board.

That was like this requirement to carry horses. And there are no horses on board the Rising Sun. So this would have immediately raised red flags for the governor. And so it's a real kind of question, what's going on there, in his mind. And what in your mind was going on there? My mind is they're at a smuggle. They knew people, they had contacts on the ground, this guy named Edward Tottle. He lives in Parmaribo. He's kind of like the main factor facilitating trade between New England and Suriname. By his own letters, he describes himself as a, quote, good friend of George Ledane, the merchant on board the ship. to make contact with him and he'll kind of take care of this cargo they brought. And of course, the cargo is made up of enslaved African captives who are going to be trafficked into the colony, sold in exchange for a whole host of things, including chocolate, which is one of the main staples of this kind of smuggling ring that the Rising Sun's part of. Okay, so help me understand this. Why are they smuggling if the trade in enslaved humans is allowed at this point of British and Dutch history?

And you're allowed to also, as I understand it, buy chocolate. Why don't they just turn up on the customs jetty and transact it by the book? It has to do with the laws, actually. So during this time period, empires, both the British and the Dutch Empire, they're very concerned about foreign trade. There's this belief, and historians often call it mercantilism, that any sort of foreign trade that goes unchecked, unmonitored, untaxed, and tariff could actually hurt the economy as a whole. There's this belief that empires need to kind of hoard wealth. And if, let's say, New England in this case is in a trade relationship with a foreign colony, Suriname, and there's a trade imbalance, so they're importing more from

Suriname than they're exporting, that's actually going to hurt the empire as a whole. And so both the British and the Dutch and the French and the Spanish, the Portuguese, all kind of European empires in the Americas in this time period have these trade laws and trade restrictions. In the British case, they're called the Navigation Acts. The French call it the Exclusif. The Dutch don't really have a collective name for them. And so these laws prohibit, by and large, foreign trade with some exceptions. As I said, a place like Suriname, which needs horses, needs timber, there are welcome New England ships if they bring those things. But they're only supposed to be trading in those products. And in the Dutch case, especially in terms of enslaved

people, yes, the slave trade is legal in the Dutch Empire, but at this moment in Surround, they can only be brought by Dutch ships. And so here you have a British ship arriving with enslaved people in it. They're not supposed to be traded. It is against the law, and they could be confiscated by the governor. The crew could be put on trial for smuggling

if this went awry. And so the Caribbean and the Spanish main and the coastline was absolutely rife with smuggling at this point, right? Or what they would have described maybe as free trade. Yes. And that's connected with the whole thing about the start of the American Revolution, which is a different podcast. But, and so these guys, they've got the anchor down,

but there's boats kind of pulling to and fro. As you say, they're anchoring up their estuary. They're just conducting nefarious trade. They're loading chocolate. They're getting rid of their cargo of enslaved human beings. Would there have been a bit of a blind eye turn to that? I mean, it's going on the whole time, right? So there's not a kind of relentless Gestapo-like inspection of all these ships' cargos. If you start to dig into various officials, they're on the take oftentimes. I think what happens with the Rising Sun in particular,

they lingered a little too long. So they come into port and they claim distress, that they need to caulk the ship, otherwise the ship will sink. And then they actually do re-caulk the ship, which is one of the funniest parts about this. They actually spend time caulking the ship, which is hard work. Which is smashing a kind of funny mixture in between the planks of a ship to sort of waterproof them. Yeah. Yes. And it's really hard work. And so it's like, it's a real commitment to the bit here, right? Like to do this. And they do. And I think they just lingered a little too long because the governor does become quite suspicious.

He ends up stationing troops on board the ship, about six soldiers, until they finally leave. And he tells them, you've got to leave. And they do. But it was about five days into a week-long time in Suriname. And by that point, the Cargos had been exchanged and everything. Is the governor kind of going through the motions here, right? That he knows what's happening. He's watching it happen.

And then once it's done, now he can make a show of force. He enforced the law. He upheld the law, right? Was he on the take? I don't know. We don't have the record of that. But it does raise that as a possibility. Yeah.

And so they sail out of Suriname. You're pretty confident the business has been done. Where are they up to next? Cayenne or are they going back to Barbados? They're going to go to Cayenne. So this was the way in which the smuggling network worked, is that they would go from New England to Barbados to Suriname. And Suriname was the main trade point. But then they'd go into Cayenne, which is today's French Guiana.

It's a French colony neglected by the French. And it was also a place where they'd started to grow cacao, which is one of the main things, this smuggling ring. And there, even more than Suriname, people just turned a total blind eye to smugglers because the colonists there were happy to see any ship come into port because they were so neglected from the French. And so here's an opportunity to sell and slay people, to buy more chocolate. They're trading a number of other things as well. And so it was this kind of a three-point sort of trade network. But on the way, things get a little crazy. Tell me what happens.

They go really crazy. Yeah, so it's kind of the middle of the night on June 1st, 1743. And most people are in bed. The bosun's on watch. And he calls one of the three Portuguese men up. And he asks for a dram of rum, which he's on watch. And they drank quite a bit. And he has to ask the sailor twice. And as he's asking the sailor, the sailor's asking him, what direction is Orinoco, which is eastern Venezuela? How do we get there? Where would we go? And the bosun, according to his own testimony, John Shaw says, well, you know, it's in this direction here.

You can see if you take this, you know, compass point that you end up in Orinoco. Shaw was quite familiar with this coast of South America. He just kind of humored him and then said, go get me a dram of rum. He goes down to get the dram of rum. And about 15 minutes later, it's just pure chaos on the ship as the three men begin attacking the other crew members. They start with the captain, Newark Jackson, and the merchant, George Ledain, stabbing them repeatedly. They actually do make it up on deck where they are followed by the mutineers, the three Portuguese sailors, Perea, Lucas, and Da Costa. They're hacked to bits with axes and knives.

John Shaw himself is cut pretty bad. William Blake, the mate, is awoken by the screams. He comes up on deck and is stabbed. The cabin boy is also injured. He goes up the shrouds of the ship, up the mast, and the meteors lure him down, promise they won't kill him. And the moment he comes down, they throw him overboard. Ledain is dead. He's tossed overboard.

Jackson, once again, according to the testimony of Blake and Shaw, who survived, he's picked up and kind of curled into the water. And he's screaming on the way down, which means he was still alive. And the two young male sailors from New England, they kind of just watched in horror. As did probably about 15 enslaved people who were still on board the ship who had not been sold in Parmaribo. They kind of stood witness to this act. Wow. Now, why? What happened? That's the question is why. This is the real struggle. One of the problems, and this gets into kind of what sources we're left with as historians and what we have to work with, and we have the testimony of the mutineers. The thing is that the judicial officials were not really interested in questions of motive.

They just assumed they were guilty. And now they're just going to figure out what they're guilty of. So there's not a lot of kind of probing about motive. So this was a big mystery. Why would these three guys, what do they want? And why did they do what they did? And so the first clue is that this interest in Orinoco in Venezuela, what's going on there? Well, what we know is that Orinoco at this moment, the Spanish were trying to develop it as a Spanish colony. And they were pretty much willing to welcome anyone who would arrive who was Catholic.

And these three men were Catholic and were willing to pledge loyalty to the king of Spain. And so if they made it there, they would have kind of been safe. There's not going to be a lot of questions asked. They had a cargo on board the Rising Sun that was quite valuable, full of chocolate, full of enslaved people. There's also quite a bit of gold and silver, which is also kind of one of the mysteries. I'm pretty sure they were selling enslaved people for cash as well. And so there's quite a bit of gold and silver. New York Jackson and George's Day both had quite a bit of jewelry that was on board.

So there's a lot of wealth on board that ship. If they made it to Orinoco, they would have been able to sell and perhaps kind of retire. These guys were sailors. They lived a really hard life. That does come out in their testimony. Thomas Lucas, especially, he's old for a sailor. He's 36, which is old for a sailor. Oh, he's ancient.

He's ancient. And he started to age out of the profession. And he's also, not only was he a sailor, he was the cook, which is sometimes considered the lowliest profession. And his wages were the same, but he had to do the work of a cook and of a sailor as the other two men. And so I think they're looking for a way out of this world, out of this really tough profession. And they see an opportunity to take the ship. That's kind of my speculation, at least. Newark Jackson must have gone to his death thinking, I should have spent a bit more money on the crew. You want to take reliable guys that

you've sailed with before from New England. Instead, he picked up these three unknowns because he wanted to save some money. Exactly. That's all I could think, too, is that I do wonder, like, the regrets that were going through his mind as he kind of plunged into the water. And that's definitely, I think, one of them. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about Mutiny on the Rising Sun. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by

subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. New England, Boston itself, I mean, smuggling was, it was trading, but it was technically smuggling because they were in British hulls, but they were trading with and picking up produce and trade goods right across the Caribbean, no matter whichever flag happened to fly over that colony at the time. But this was a network. I mean, this sort of oligarchy of smugglers in Boston. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, that's what I always think about someone like Newark Jackson is he's climbing the ladder. He kind of comes out of obscurity and he's making a name for himself. He starts showing up on the records in the early 1730s, running these kind of more local

trade runs on the coast. And over time, he clearly kind of builds up a reputation as being someone who can spuggle, who can make it to these foreign colonies and successfully complete these trade expeditions to places like Suriname. He shows up in a couple other Dutch colonies, if I think Martin, for example. And so he's kind of climbing this ladder to success in this kind of, as you said, a kind of trade-off like Archi. Yeah. And so this is a world where he could have begun as a deckhand before the mast. I mean, this is a world where it's a rough meritocracy, is it? Roughly, yeah. I mean, people are sorted. He would have probably come out of a more middling family, Yeah, I mean, people are sorted.

He would have probably come out of a more middling family. But there's a cabin boy on board who probably was, you know, not maybe a prosperous farm family or a small time like shopkeepers or merchants. Kind of, you know, lower middle could go up, especially in New England. There is opportunity to rise up in this world, even kind of starting off in kind of a place at a lower class kind of farming family or kind of shopkeeper or something like that could really rise up in this world. Yeah. And so much the crazy patchwork of political jurisdictions within, well, the Western hemisphere at this point, you know, with Spanish, Dutch, British, French, it must have made for opportunity if you were unscrupulous enough and you could do business in all these different jurisdictions. Yeah, unscrupulous is the key. And if you have an

understanding of it, that's the thing like John Shaw, who was the Bosun, who did survive the Bivni. He was described again and again as having a familiarity with this region. He could speak Dutch. And so he shows up and multiple voyages, always kind of hired. And you see him actually moving up. He started off as a lowly sailor in the 1730s, and he's bosun. But he's eventually going to become a landowner by the 1750s in Essequibo, which today British Guiana, or let's say Guyana was in British Guiana, is a landowner. So if you have a knowledge of this world and the way this is kind of all interconnected and entangled, if you untangle that and serve useful to others in untangling that, there's a lot of opportunity. And I don't want to take this all back to the American Revolution because that's a very different subject, but also you've got a class of men who are very used to ignoring, even taking on the imperial administration, for whom the British

Empire is a slightly tiresome obstacle in the way of're making money. And it's not a huge jump from that to patriot politics and active military resistance and fighting for independence. Exactly. And you can start to see that where you begin to see, especially a divergence between the way West Indian planters and merchants feel about their relationship with the British Empire, feel about their relationship to North American colonists. For someone like Newark Jackson, if you'd ask him, he would say he's a loyal British imperial subject. That's where his liberties cover. He loves his British liberties and things like that. But when he's smuggling, he's engaging in this sort of free trade. He's serving the people he's close to, his community. It's a sort of local act, right?

He's bringing them goods and things they otherwise would not have access to or would pay a very high price for. And so in some ways, his sort of local identity as a Bostonian is superseding his identity as a British subject. And as you said, right, that's a pretty quick jump to active resistance if imperial authorities wouldn't be heavy handed. So much of time and effort here is dedicated to avoiding entangleness with imperial authorities wouldn't be heavy handed. So much of time and effort here is dedicated to avoiding entangleness with imperial authorities. Yeah, as you said, what an apprenticeship for the eventual fighting the British government in North America. It sounds like he's spending his whole time dodging around governors and giving people the slip. And that's what these smugglers end up doing in Boston, particularly, but elsewhere during the revolution. Fascinating stuff.

And if the British government says, you're not allowed to buy sugar from these colonies, you have to buy them from British colonies. Well, he's going to say, no, man, I want to go where the deal is. Exactly. Yeah. I'm going to go where the prices are. I'm going to go where my community has connections already. Yeah, absolutely. Now let's talk about the other people on this ship, who it's easy to kind of ignore in a way because we don't know enough about them. We don't even know their names in the majority of cases. The enslaved people, when you say they would have witnessed this, I always think of the Middle Passage where enslaved Africans were confined in hideous, inhumane conditions. Do you think they would have been up on deck? Would they have

been witnessing this almost as crew members? They would have been above deck. They would have been below deck, which is where the kind of violence started. One of the men on board, he was wounded in the attack, and he crawled towards the deck. He crawled back into the hole where the enslaved people had been. So he almost kind of hid behind them before the mutineers kind of pulled him out. So they would have been below deck, unclear if they'd been restrained or not. So we think these folks were, which these are the group where I have the least kind of documentation. I think that they were probably brought via the Middle Passage to Barbados

and then purchased for the Rising Sun to take to Suriname. It's a kind of a second Middle Passage or sometimes historically called the Final Passage. It would have been terrible, but not quite the degree of horror of the Middle Passage. The voyage was shorter,

so they had fresh food. They would not have probably been as restrained, but they would have still been held below deck, and they would have witnessed the outbreak of the violence, the crawling in, wounded, that sort of thing. And you say that the majority of them were children. Yes. So that was a clue as to who they were. In Suriname, there was not as much of a demand for enslaved children. And so in Barbados, they probably purchased a mixed group of large adult men and women with a few children. And when they got to Suriname, most of the adult men and women would have been sold,

leaving the children as the remainder. So you're talking about adolescents, probably, based on the description. There's an inventory taken of the ship after the mutiny. probably, based on the description. There's an inventory taken of the ship after the mutiny. And the Dutch term, use for boys and girls, indicates those between about 10 and 12 years of age.

People will know this, but it's worth repeating that families just separated by the traders with not a thought for any of those kind of bonds between family members as well. Yeah, it's multiple families and communities broken in Africa and then in people on them in the Middle Passage, they do form community on those ships, then they're split up again. And then they would have been put on in the hold of the rising sun for another moment of kind

of family and community formation. And that is broken apart in a couple of weeks in Suriname. So it's this kind of repeated sort of shattering of connections again and again as they cross the ocean. So these unfortunate men and children are now in the hands of the mutineers sailing towards a Spanish colony. Yeah, so they're sailing to the Spanish colony, and they're just moving very slowly. About five days, they're just kind of lumbering along the coast. And the Orinoco is a very big river, and that's about all the mutineers know. It's a big river, there'll be a big river mouth. And so eventually they come across a big river mouth, and they ask, is this the

Orinoco? And Shaw and Blake, who survived the mutiny, say, yeah, it is. Do we know why they were left alive? Just to help handle the sails or do some navigating? Yes, exactly that, to navigate and to help handle the ship. So one of the fascinating things about sailors in this time period is that while they could work the sails, work the ropes, anchors, and things like that, they did not have the navigational knowledge necessary to survive. And so what happens in the mutiny is that they want to murder John Shaw, actually. He's wounded. He's the one that crawls into the hole and he's pulled out. And they want to murder him, but William Blake actually saved his life by saying, the mate is also the navigator. He says, I'm the navigator, but I'm not familiar with this region.

You should keep John Shaw around. And they agree to this. And so Blake and Shaw say, this is the river. And they sail up the river about 30 miles or so. And they encounter an outpost. And so they all go on board. Da Costa has taken Newark Jackson clothes and puts them on. He's the pretended captain, in the words of John Shaw. And they go to this outpost, and out comes a soldier who speaks Dutch. So it is definitely not the Orinoco. And at that moment, the media's realized that they're not in Orinoco.

They're somewhere else, and they're in a Dutch colony. And they are, in fact, they were in the Quarantine River, which is what's today the western border of Suriname. So they had not actually moved that far. And it does speak to the ignorance the sailors had of navigation because there's a current called the equatorial current that runs from West Africa across the Atlantic up into the West Indies. It actually pretty much dead ends in Barbados. What they could have done is easily just sailed north a little bit, caught that current, and sailed very quickly to Orinoco. But Shaw and Blake don't do that.

They just kind of lumber along the coast for, like I said, about five days. So they're basically on a treadmill going the wrong way. Yes, exactly. They're just kind of moving very slowly along the coast. And the Orinoco is one of the world's most massive river delts. I mean, you'd know about it if you saw it, right? Yes, exactly. Which tells us that these men had never seen it before.

Wow, fascinating. Yeah. So, and at that stage, is their cover blown? Yeah, pretty much. So when the group eventually goes on land at first, they leave Shaw on the ship because there is a little suspicion, understandably among the mutineers,

that this is not the Orinoco. So they leave Shaw on the ship because he'd be the one to tell. So they kind of talk to this Dutch officer and they pretend, William Blake pretends like, oh, we're lost. Let me go get the bosun and some maps and I'll come back. And then he brings Shaw ashore and Shaw, who can speak Dutch, tells them what has happened. They hang out for the night. They eat with the Dutch soldiers, a few other soldiers.

There are some native people who are allies of the Dutch. They kind of dine together in the evening. They get back to the ship, and they realize they've been found. They know they've been got, so they decide they should leave and pull anchor. They want to murder Blake and Shaw. And this is when, as they're debating what to do, Shaw takes the opportunity, wounded still, and he kind of jumps overboard. And he swims ashore, and this causes the mutineers to cut the anchor rope. Now they're on a river.

The river flows northward. So the current's going to take them out. But it's night. They don't have sails. And so they start moving north and shawmik to the shore. And there the Dutch, he's a corporal, the officer decides to form a posse to hunt down the mutineers and the surviving crew to bring them to justice. Wow. And the vessel doesn't actually make it out of the river, does it?

No, there's never islands in the river in the mid, as I said, can't navigate. So it eventually runs aground. It also, they can move pretty well at night, but when morning, when the tide starts to come in, they're going to get some resistance. And so the Rising Sun actually does run aground. And then behind them come John Shaw, the Dutch soldiers, and a number of native allies of the Dutch who live in the region. They come behind them to take the ship. And the mutineers at first debate fighting, but the ship only has one small cannon, one small bottle of gunpowder. There's no way they're going to be able to amass enough force. Two of the mutineers decide to kind of give up.

Meanwhile, Perea decides that he will jump overboard and run into the jungle. And this is the point, the environment really matters, right? This area is just very, very dense jungle and he just runs into the jungle. So the Dutch arrest the two other, Lucas and Nacosta. They take the ship and the mutineers and the survivors, including the enslaved people, back to the post and kind of figure out what to do as they send a posse of native men into the jungle to hunt for Perea. They do eventually find him, but he commits suicide before they can capture him. There's an account of the trial, though, of the other two men, is there? Yes, there is. And so this is the kind of document that tipped me off to this whole case,

is that these two guys, Da Costa and Lucas, are put on trial. And we have their testimony of them telling kind of who they were and what happened, what they planned to do. They do kind of throw each other under the bus a little bit. So discerning the exact details can be kind of difficult. They're trying to save their lives. But they are taken to Parvo and put on trial for mutiny and for murder. And found guilty. Yes, guilty. There was no question about guilt. This was the fascinating things about the court case. There was no assumption of innocence. They knew they did it. And so what they were looking for was a confession. And they followed the Dutch civil law properly, the legal procedure to eventually get to the point of a confession for murder.

It's interesting to me how despite all the differences, antipathy and enmity between these sort of European colonial competitors, there seems to be kind of a universal emphasis on property, on hierarchy. So, you know, the idea that's like, oh, well, you did away with one of the ships that's been engaged in illicit trade with our colonies. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. It feels like this is kind of one of those 18th century truths that run much deeper even than national affiliation. It's like, if you rise up and kill your officers, you're going to get executed. Absolutely. Without question. I mean, that's about reinforcing hierarchy. It's really telling because when the men are executed for their crime, they are taken before all sailors who are in port. They're expected the ships will gather and the sailors will watch this happen.

First and foremost, it's about preserving hierarchy and protecting property of traders. And then we could talk about the kind of inner imperial competition. And there is a little bit of that behind the scenes. The attorney general of Suriname insists that now the rising sun is Dutch property. The ship and everything on it is now Dutch property, but that's a secondary concern. It's enforcing that social hierarchy. That's first and foremost. Because if you're a property owner, you're a rich guy in the 18th century, the horror of the servants, of the men attacking you in the night in your bed, it must have been ever-present. Absolutely, yes. And that's exactly what happened, right?

The captain and the merchant, these two men of standing, are attacked in the middle of the night and murdered. Unacceptable. I mean, that is an unacceptable 18th century crime, right? Exactly. Beyond unacceptable. And which is why it's murder, it's mutiny, which also explains why they were sort of executed in the fashion which they were, which is incredibly grotesque and performative. It's a performance of violence where the men are taken, they're put on the rising sun, is the site of execution, and they're essentially crucified on the front masts of the ship where they are perceived to be poked with hot iron pokers.

And then they're taken down. And then in Suriname, there's a common punishment of taking a very large iron hook and putting it through someone's ribcage and hanging them to suspend. And so that they were both put on the hook, which is usually a punishment reserved for enslaved people. And the fact this happens to free sailors is, I think, very telling, speaking of hierarchy and maintenance of hierarchy. They're put on these hooks and left to hang for 24 hours. One of them is assassinated, who expired, and the other was still living the next day, and he was beheaded. Wow. The enslaved people, where do they fit into this story? Their property is the kind of short answer. So it's very hard to get at their experiences. They are on the ship for two weeks at the post as the posse's hunting parade, and they're trying to figure out how to get people back to Parmaribo.

So they're on board the ship then. They would have been cared for and provisioned. There's some accounts that suggest that the officer at the post is feeding them. Then they go to Parmaribo. They would have been there for the trial. They are sequestered with all the other goods on the ship, probably held perhaps in a person's home in Parmaribo or in what's called a pen, which is a kind of outdoor area with some buildings for enslaved people held, usually waiting for sale. And they were technically, just like the ship and all the other cargo, impounded. But when the ship leaves, what I find so fascinating is there's two inventories made.

There's inventory made of the ship itself and its tackle and everything that's on board, the sails and everything. And there's an inventory made of its cargo. And in that division, the attorney general put the enslaved people with the ship. And so when the ship left, it was going to leave with the enslaved people, which I think kind of marked them as contraband not to be traded. Whereas everything else, all the sugar, the cacao, that could actually go into the market and be sold. And there's no England merchants there buying that. And so the owner of the ship received some, but the enslaved people were listed with the ship and sent back to Barbados from the ship departing. We assume that they were then sold, do we?

There's kind of tantalizing evidence of two of them. There were 15 total, two young men, so late teens, early twenties, and then 13 children. We have evidence of one of the men, I leave his name at least to people who sold him, his name was Franklin, because there's records in Newark Jackson's widow receives of the property of the rising sun to pay for his wages and stuff. And some of that property was an enslaved man named Franklin, who she then sold, Amy Jackson, his widow then sold. But we also know that the chief organizer of the voyage and partner of the ship is a guy named Clark, who was a merchant in Barbados, born in Salem, Massachusetts. He sent a young girl shortly after the Rising Sun arrived back in Barbados. He sent a young girl to Salem to some merchant friends of his who'd been requesting a girl to work in their house.

And she arrived, but she died relatively shortly thereafter. And that's the closest evidence we have to anything that happened kind of after the mutiny. It's a tragedy kind of all around. Well, it's a light shone on this, on extraordinary world of the Atlantic smuggling and trade and enslaved people.

It's just such an interesting tale. Thank you very much, Jared. Tell everyone how they can get the book. The title of the book is Mutiny on the Rising Sun, A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate. Also available as an e-book. Thanks very much, Jared. Yeah, thanks so much, Dan. Appreciate it. you