Dan Snow's History Hit - Uncovered: South America's Biggest Slave Uprising

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

On February 27 1763, thousands of enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Berbice—in present-day Guyana—launched a huge uprising against their oppressors. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries—many of them African-born—effectively controlled the colony for a year as they resisted European attempts to overthrow them. In the end, the Dutch prevailed because of one unique advantage—their ability to call upon soldiers and supplies from neighbouring colonies as well as from Europe. This little-known revolution was the biggest in South America’s long and dark period of enslavement, one that almost changed the face of the Americas. Yet the efforts of the mutineers have largely been overlooked—until now. To shine a light on the uprising that came so close to success, Dan is joined by Marjoleine Kars who is professor of history at the University of Maryland in the US. Marjoleine is the author of Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast, which helped uncover the workings of this little-known yet crucial rebellion. The book has won multiple awards, including the Cundhill History Prize, and has been described as an astonishing work of original history.

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The Cundill History Prize is the biggest prize for historical writing anywhere in the world. A gigantic amount of money goes to the worthy winner of the Cundill Prize every year. History here are delighted to be a broadcasting partner for the prize. And this year it was won by Marielena Kars.

She has written the most brilliant book about a slave uprising, an uprising of enslaved people on the north coast of South America, the so-called wild coast, next to what became British Guyana, next to Suriname, at the southern edge of the Caribbean. This was an uprising that had basically been lost to history. It was known about, particularly known about within Guyana today, but it was considered a bit of a footnote. She found an amazing, hitherto unexploited archive of sources in the Netherlands. She was able to go where previous historians had feared to tread and it contained transcripts of interviews with rebels

or with soldiers, with colonial officials. The entire uprising lasting more than a year. Suddenly she was able to shine light on the entire uprising. It all began in February 1763. Thousands of enslaved people in what was the Dutch colony of Berbice launched a huge uprising against their oppressors. They drove them off, they killed them, they captured some. It is an amazing tale. And then these formerly enslaved people basically tried to run the colony themselves. It's an extraordinary tale. They built military, administrative, political structures, and they fought a war against their erstwhile oppressors, the Dutch, as they attempted to reconquer the colony. It is a heck of a story. It's one of these great examples of how historians

can discover, shine light on these overlooked episodes from our past, thanks to the discovery of new archives and sources. It's wonderful. Mary-Elena is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. It's been great talking to her during the course of her Cundall Prize adventure, and it's lovely to congratulate her as a worthy winner. If you want to watch the interviews with not just Mary-Elena, but the other finalists, basically Google Cundall Prize history hit, and it'll take you to my recorded interviews with them. If you want to watch documentaries, our documentary on barbarossa 80 years ago this week stalin's counter-attack was crashing into the germans at the gates of moscow the germans were retreating

they were recoiling for the first time in the second world war the wehrmacht was forced into a serious retreat on the ground you can watch part two of our extraordinary Operation Barbarossa documentary featuring the diaries, the previously unpublished, unheard of diaries of Friedrich Zander, a German tank commander. And you can see things got pretty rough 80 years ago. My God, an existential struggle of racial annihilation taking place in one of the coldest winters on record. Brutal.

That's all there at History Hit TV. Please go and check that out. Been great to work with historians like maria lena like the team that brought us this unpublished diary of a german tank commander there is still so much out there so many stories left to be told it is a great great honor to be here at history hit and making these things happen to subscribe to history you just go to history hit.tv and for the price of a pint of beer every month, you get access to the world's best history channel. Please head over and do it. Now, if you do it today,

you get two weeks absolutely free. In the meantime, everyone, here is Marilena Kars. She is talking about blood on the river. Marilena, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Dan. Tell me, tell me about the formation of this colony, because even by the standards of the sugar and the plantations involving enslaved humans in the Caribbean, this sounds like a bad, bad corner of the neighborhood.

It was. It started in the early 17th century by a Dutchman who wants to grow tobacco. Pretty quickly, they discover that they can grow sugar with enslaved laborers from Africa. The colony developed slowly early in the 18th century. It is bought by a group of investors from Amsterdam. And they really develop it into a larger colony in which about a third of the plantations, sugar is grown and the other two thirds, they grow cocoa and cotton and other crops. So sugar is not as big in Berbice as it is in other places, but it's a bad place for the enslaved because it remains kind of a frontier colony. So the planters are not that wealthy. Enslaved people are very poorly fed. Supply ships from Holland often don't arrive on time. So there's a lot of

hunger. And because of this frontier nature of it, I think it's a particularly bad place. It's also just environmentally, the habitats, it just seemed extremely hard, even by the terrible measure of the time. You go into some detail, there was the disease, there were animal microbes and larger animals. It's a tough place. It is. It's an odd colony. It's organized along the Bear Beice River for about a hundred miles almost. There

are plantations hugging the river, but beyond the river. It's jungle, it's savannah, it's wild animals. The Dutch have no control there whatsoever. It's really still in Amerindian hands. And so the colony is this little sliver of scant Dutch control, really. It's subtropical. So there are indeed lots of diseases to which both Africans and Europeans don't have immunity. Lots of fevers in particular, lots of rain. So it is a tough place. And there was an expression in the Netherlands at the time that was sort of like the equivalent of going to hell in a handbasket.

And it was literally going to Berbice. That hell got even worse thanks to dislocation caused by the Seven Years' War. And is that the context for the uprising? I think that the context for the uprising, of course, is slavery itself. But yes, the Seven Years' War has a lot to do with it because supply ships arrive even more irregularly. There is yet more hunger and there is a lot of unrest in the area. So I think that it's the Seven Years' War and a series of epidemics that are hitting there be sort of during the same time period. period. And that combination of war and therefore low supplies and large numbers of people dying, which means that the ones who remain have to work harder to make up for the loss of people have died, together create conditions in which a number of enslaved people say,

we know that rebelling is really dangerous, but we're going to try it. It's worth it to us. And in notes that the rebels sent to the Dutch governor initially, they say but we're going to try it. It's worth it to us. And in notes that the rebels sent to the Dutch governor initially, they say, we're doing this because we were hungry. We were particularly badly treated. We were beaten. The overseers, you know, had their way with our wives. Basically, we have a lot to be discontent about. Now, Maria Elena, that's where let's talk about the sources and let's talk about that written material, because that's what's causing such stern interest in this book. You have discovered a huge amount of sources that allow us really to tell this story from both sides. Sources that were made from talking to enslaved people, interviews, letters, etc. And they were

deliberately ignored by previous generations of historians. Talk to me about that. Sure, absolutely. So, you know, most slave rebellions in the Atlantic world were quickly suppressed within days, for instance. So the fact that this one lasts more than a year already makes it unusual. But what is more unusual is that at the end of it, when the Dutch finally regained their battered colony, they investigated the guilt of enslaved people, both those who had participated in the rebellion and they interviewed people who had been bystanders. And those investigations, as the Dutch call them, are all still in existence. And again, this is rare because if you look at Jamaica, for instance, a British colony, where there was a huge rebellion in 1760, there are no such judicial records. So we don't have the voices of the

enslaved themselves. In this case, in Berbice, they do exist. There are about almost 900 people were questioned. Those interrogations are all available and they make for a really magnificent source to try to figure out what did this rebellion mean to the people who were caught up in it. And subsequent historians for a long time felt that, and they would say that, they would say, you know, there was a book written about the rebellion in 1776 and one in, I think, 1889 or something. And in both cases, they say, we're not going to use these records in which enslaved people or which slaves were questioned,

because we all know that you can't trust what slaves say. So nowadays, of course, we evaluate that very differently. And so this book is the first account of this rebellion, A, a modern account, and B, an account that makes extensive use of these investigations. The second unusual source I have is that the rebels wrote a series of letters to the Dutch governor trying to enter rebellion through diplomatic means. And so I have those letters. And then thirdly, the Dutch send out Native Americans who fought on the side of the Dutch to spy on the rebels. We have people who escape from the rebels who come back, the Dutch send out Native Americans who fought on the side of the Dutch to spy on the rebels.

We have people who escape from the rebels who come back to the Dutch who tell them what's going on. So putting all those sources together, triangulating them, as we call it, I think I got a pretty good picture of what this rebellion looked like from the inside out, so that I can tell you not just about the Dutch. We have those kind of colonial archives everywhere, but I can really talk about it from the enslaved point of view. You're listening to Downsend's History, talking to Marilena Kars about slave uprisings. More coming up. Ancient history fans, this is our moment. Subscribe to The Ancients now to get your weekly goodness of ancient history.

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Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

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and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So it is February 1763. The enslaved people pushed beyond endurance by their condition of slavery, but also pushed even further by dislocation, hunger, disease. What do they do? Well, on five plantations right smack in the middle of the colony, people rebel. They are led by a man who calls himself Governor Coffey, and his second in command is a man named Akara. And they announce by drumming that they are rebelling. They take over an arsenal of

weapons that is stored on one of their plantations by the Dutch militia. And they begin to expand a rebellion by moving from plantation to plantation, assessing who's on their side, who's against them, and growing their army. It starts on a Sunday, as rebellions often do, usually on a Sunday morning, because some of the slaveholders are in church. As soon as the Dutch come back from church and they realize what's going on, they begin to flee en masse. They bury their valuables. Some of them arm their slaves, hoping that they will protect the plantations, and they take off for the fort. The Dutch are hugely outnumbered. There are only about 350 of them, maybe 4,500 to 5,000 enslaved people. There's been a rebellion the year before that took six weeks to suppress. And so the Dutch are almost certain that they cannot beat this. And so they flee. And that allows the rebels,

I think, to succeed beyond what were probably their wildest dreams. Because with the Dutch moving out and not having any counter insurgency, the enslaved are just able within a week to take over the entire colony. And then extraordinarily, they launch quite an ambitious program. Well, how do we describe it? A Republican program, a program of self-sustenance. Tell me about what follows. Well, what follows is the Dutch flee from the fort to the coast. Most of them take off for neighboring colonies or the Dutch Republic.

About 100 of them remain. And the Dutch governor digs himself in on a sugar plantation about 30 miles from the coast. He gets some reinforcement from Suriname and he's sort of able to hang on by his fingernails. The rebels try to dislodge him in a couple of big attacks, but they can't really win because the cannon on the ships that the Dutch have that are bobbing up and down in the river in front of the plantations proved too powerful. But in the meantime, Governor Kofi organizes his rebellion. He sets up a military government that is headed up by Captain Akara, and he sets up a civil government. He is the governor, he has a council, he has an executioner, He has a prosecutor. He begins to get supplies from all over the colony so that he can feed his army. He begins the inventory where all the different animals are, cows and horses, so that he can control those. So he really organizes himself politically and militarily.

And sometime in the summer, he opens negotiations with the Dutch, basically saying, let's end this peacefully. Why don't we divide this colony in two? I will take the southern part of it. You can have the northern part of it. And he's basically proposing that he is going to have a republic of his own in about half of the colony that is closest to the hinterlands of South America. So quite an extraordinary proposal. What I'm fascinated by reading your book is to what extent were his ideas in government and military the result of African tradition and perhaps his youth in Africa? And to what extent are they European ideas that he is adapting? from the Gold Coast, which is where Kofi came from. He is known as an Amina, which is sort of a diasporic identity

of people who came from the Gold Coast and who in West Africa would not have considered themselves to be one ethnic group, but who, once they come to the New World, sort of stick together. And the Amina came from a region in West Africa where statecraft was practiced on a high level, where polities were highly militarized. They came from hierarchical societies where people moved ahead by practicing slavery. The sort of thing that Kofi is doing, which is both attacking militarily and trying to seek a diplomatic or political solution,

is quite common there. So there is no doubt that certainly in terms of military craft, but also statecraft, he would have drawn on those traditions. On the other hand, I think he's also drawing on what's happening in the New World, in the typical mixture of many immigrants, even forced immigrants, maroons in neighboring Suriname. And maroons are people who have run away from plantations and formed their own villages. Maroons in Suriname have recently created peace treaties with the Dutch, where in exchange

for them agreeing not to attack plantations, the Dutch will give them a yearly amount of food and iron objects that they can't produce themselves. And so there is a tradition of creating peace treaties with colonial authorities for people who have self-liberated. But we don't know of any proposal as bold as Kofi's because he's not saying, I'll go live in the jungle in little villages. He is saying, we are going to start our own state. We are going to live next door to you as our own independent country. We want to be able to trade on the coast.

And so his proposal is bold and self-confident and probably draws both on African and New World traditions. Would this new republic have been a republic in which slavery was tolerated? It appears, and what I know about his plans for the future is limited. I get some of it from what people tell when they come back to the Dutch, some of it from these letters. But it is clear that, as in all revolutions, revolutions require coercion because they are dangerous. People don't want to engage. So there is a certain amount of coercion involved in getting young men to join the army. There's some evidence of young women being taken to be distributed to officers in the army.

But it's also clear that people who live on the sugar plantations are being forced to keep working in the fields to create sugar because Kofi knows that if he is going to succeed as an independent nation, he needs a cash crop in a capitalist world. He needs to have something that he can trade with the outside world. So given that nobody wants to work in the sugar fields voluntarily, yes, it appears that a form of coerced labor will be tolerated. And also people like Kofi himself and other people who are high up in the government have servants who attend to them. That is common, of course, in Europe. And it's also

common in West Africa that to show your status, you need people in your retinue. You need people to take care of you. I was very struck in your book by the accounts of people crossing the lines that there were even some white European recruits to Kofi's cause. Tell me about them. Yes, it's really a topsy-turvy world that develops in Berbice once this rebellion gets started. And one of the topsy-turvy things is that a regiment of European soldiers sent to Berbice by neighboring Suriname, which is also a Dutch colony, are very unhappy with their labor conditions, in part because without enslaved people, the soldiers have to do a lot of the heavy work that's normally done by slaves. And so the soldiers complain that they're being used as slaves and they decide to mutiny. And in the middle of the night, they staged their mutiny and they take off, hoping to make their way to Venezuela, where they think they can enlist in the Spanish army.

and at some point they are led by a young black woman to a rebel camp on the neighboring Kanji river which is part of the Berbice colony and the head rebel there is very suspicious of them. He executes a number of them almost immediately but he keeps a number of them alive and they become incorporated into the rebellion the same way many enslaved Barbicians are incorporated. Some of the soldiers seem to be eager to join because they realize having mutinied, they're going to be killed anyway if they come back to the Dutch. Others are sort of forced into it. A number of them are put to work for Governor Kofi.

They have to paint his quarters. They exercise his troops. And it's really a fascinating story. In the end, a number of them are recaptured by the Dutch and they're court-martialed. So I have those testimonies as well. Speaking of Dutch recapturing, what swings the balance? How do the Dutch manage to reimpose their control over the whole of the colony? Previous historians, of course, usually thought it was because of the Dutch soldiers.

But I think it's much more because the Dutch managed to outsource their war primarily to native people, Carib in particular, Arawak as well, who through treaties are obligated to aid the Dutch in warfare and who come to the aid of the Dutch in this rebellion. It takes them months and months to be mobilized because native soldiers fight on their own schedule, but eventually they form a cordon around the colony. They close off the hinterland so that any rebels who would have wanted to disappear into the jungle can't really do so. And both these native people and a number of Africans who work on the side of the Dutch or who change affiliations and end up joining the Dutch probably do more to gain the colony back than the European soldiers

who come in relatively large numbers, about 1,200, 1,500 of them, but they are not trained in jungle warfare. They're afraid at night. They don't know how to find their way in the woods because the jungle is very dense. They don't have a compass. They rely on the sun. They can't see the sun. They're used to fighting in formation. The rebels, of course, fight a guerrilla war. So the Dutch soldiers are bunglers and they fall ill. Tropical diseases decimate them. So the native folks are really crucial in the Dutch gaining their colony back.

In the end, they're successful and the rebels are terribly badly, the descriptions of their punishment and torture is brutal. Yes. And of course, another major reason that the rebels lose is that they don't have allies. You know, 30 years later in Haiti, people like Toussaint Louverture will be successful in their huge slave uprising on the island of Saint-Domingue, which then becomes Haiti after the former slaves win and declare independence, in part because they get help from the Spanish, who hate the French. But in the 1760s, there are no European powers willing to help these rebels in a Dutch colony. no European powers willing to help these rebels in a Dutch colony.

The Europeans stick together. They are afraid that if this rebellion spread, other colonies will fall. And nobody is willing to help the rebels. And so they run out of food, they run out of guns. And the Dutch, of course, have this long Atlantic reach where they can get new soldiers, medication, supplies from the Dutch Republic. So it's not only the military might of the Dutch with their native allies, it's also the fact that nobody is willing or capable of aiding the rebels, and they're entirely on their own.

And so when the Dutch gain their colony back, they begin to ascertain the guilt of people who rebelled. The company that owns the colony writes and says, don't kill too many of them because we really want this colony back on its feet and enslaved people are expensive. So just kill the main perpetrators. But their letters arrive kind of late and the Dutch governor is really into justice or what he considers justice. And in the end, 125 people are burned alive at the stake or broken on the wheel, which means, you know, people are beaten with hammers till they die, or some are hanged, which is the most merciful death under these particular circumstances.

Some are hanged, which is the most merciful death under these particular circumstances. The colony goes back to much the way it was, a sort of struggling plantation colony. So what is the legacy of this uprising? And do you think there's a legacy, obviously in this part of South America, but across the Atlantic world of these plantation colonies? What does it mean? I think that there are a number of legacies. One is in Berbice itself, planters. Some of them realize that enslaved people, of course, are always going to try to resist.

But they also realize that particularly brutal treatment is likely to contribute to that. So there are early efforts at what is called amelioration, which will become a big thing in the British Empire, for instance, in the early 19th century. It also begins to dawn on the Dutch that having colonies run by private companies is not the way to go. And in the 1790s, the Dutch do away with these private companies and the state takes over these colonies directly. More importantly, though, I think that Berbice is part of what we call the Age of Revolutions, which we have long interpreted as revolutions perpetrated by Europeans and European colonists. So the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, of course,

and then the freedom fights in South America for independence. But we're beginning to realize now that this period of unrest in which people were trying to gain greater independence and freedom, of course, extended to native people, to enslaved people, to poor whites. And so I think one of the legacies is that the Berbice Rebellion is an early example of one of these freedom struggles that we have long overlooked. And I think the third legacy is that it is enormously important, particularly people of African descent, to be aware that their ancestors engaged in vigorous protest

and engaged in activities that people feel they can be proud of. I gave a lecture in the Netherlands a couple of months ago, and a woman stood up of Surinamese descent, and she said, I'm so tired of historians talking about victimized people. I want more stories that I can show to my son, where he can be proud of the people that he came from. And so I think giving more attention to the ways in which enslaved people fought their enslavement, partly militarily, as in this case, but also more in day-to-day resistance, is an enormously important legacy, even if it's a long-term one. Your book has enjoyed all the success that it deserves. Is it exciting getting nominated for

this prize? Very exciting. It's an enormous honour. Such fantastic books have been nominated in the past and also this year. I was totally gobsmacked that I was among them, and it's been an amazing experience so far. Well, Mary-Lena, good luck in the final. Thank you for coming on the show. Remind us what the book's called. The book is called Blood on the River. And the subtitle is A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast. It was published in 2020 by the New Press. And it's also available in a Dutch translation in the Netherlands. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

We will have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone

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