Empire: World History - 56. Tacky's Revolt: Causes of the Rebellion

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

What was life like for enslaved people on the plantations? How did white people treat their slaves? What economic model did plantation owners operate on? William and Anita are joined this week Vincent Brown, Professor at Harvard and co-founder of Timestamp Media, to discuss Tacky's Revolt and in this episode they focus upon the horrific circumstances that slaves had to endure. **TRIGGER WARNING: this episode contains graphic descriptions of the brutal treatment of slaves, do not listen with children. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. We have a very special guest today. Somebody I respect enormously. He is Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard University, author of, well, it's a simply extraordinary book.

Dasdling, dazzling book. Yeah, dazzling is a very good adjective. It's called Tacky's Revolt, the story of an Atlantic slave war. And it is the topic of today's podcast. And it dovetails very neatly in what we were talking about in the last episode, William, about the Royal African Company and the commodification of human beings on an industrial scale never seen before on this planet. But what is wonderful about it and what we didn't get into our last podcast at all really was to telescope it down to individuals and real people, particularly real African individuals caught up in this.

It was, yeah, it was the one hand clapping because we were talking about what happened in Britain. We were talking about the British attitudes. We were talking about what they did and how they did it, but not so much on the other side of this, the people who it was being done too. And so impossibly difficult to retrieve the African lives caught up in the And yet Vincent has done this, and we have silhouettes rather than full portraits, but we have real people sketched out with real clarity in this book. And an extraordinary and tight story. Is it a movie yet, Vincent? I feel that there's a possibility of some big Hollywood film,

surely, on this one. Well, not yet. I'm always seeking offers. My ears are open. But I want to thank you both, Anita and Willie, for having me on today. I mean, I admire your work enormously, both of you. And I think this Empire podcast is a very, very important service you're providing to listeners. Thank you. Can I ask you a question? I'm very grateful, very touched by the praise. But I've often wondered this. When your life's work delves in the darkest corners of human existence and the things that human beings can do to each other, do they not take sort of a massive toll on your soul? Because this is your world. This is what you look at. This is what you analyze all the time. When you're in these archives, do you kind of sit there gasping and go outside?

How do you do it? Yeah. Well, in terms of the cumulative toll on my soul, it's too soon to tell, but we'll know in time. But it is very, very difficult. And one of the things you have to do in order to read about this history, to really kind of delve into it, understand it. And frankly, you know, to empathize with some of history's worth villains so that you can actually tell these stories so that you can understand their context, the predicament of people who are the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in human history, one has to enter their world. I'm sure that takes some kind of toll. What you do, though, is in some ways set aside some of your emotional response so that you can

analyze what's going on, so that you can read these sources and try to be. to figure out peace together what's happening in this world. Do you dream this stuff, Vincent? I mean, when you go to sleep at night, do you find yourself thinking of slave revolts and people strung up in cages and all the rest of it? Certainly I have. I don't, those aren't my only dreams, but certainly, you know, those are dreams that I have had.

But I think one of the things you do is you kind of learn to manage your subconscious, you learn to manage your emotions. And I've analogized it to my students in the way that, you know, perhaps an emergency room doctor has to set us. the kind of emotional responses they might have to these life and death situations so they can do their work. But then, of course, when someone goes to a family and has to tell the bereaved what might have happened to their loved one, one has to find that emotional response again. Otherwise, there's something inhuman about it. And in this analogy, that's a lecture or when you're speaking.

The same thing happens for me when I write or when I lecture. In order to analyze the sources that I'm looking at, I have to in some ways kind of bracket and set aside my personal responses to them, but then I have to find those again so that I can understand why it matters for an audience of listeners or for an audience of readers. Does it make you look at the world differently? I mean, are you an optimist or are you, because you've seen the depths of depravity that humankind can sink to, does it make you a little bit wary of people? I am less shocked and surprised by instances of depravity.

when I see them. I think that those are a fundamental part of human history and how human history works. At the same time, and I think we can't stress this enough, in every situation that may be defined by brutality, there's also resistance to that. There is also, you know, extreme acts of kindness alongside that. There are also ways that people find fellowship in situations in which you could never expect it. So in this book, for example, I'm writing about a series of wars within wars, right? And I conceive slave revolt mostly as a species of warfare. But these are wars of all against all. And still, in those situations in which there's really every incentive for everyone to fight against each other, people find ways to connect, people find ways to make common cause,

people find fellowship and kindness, even in the midst of brutality. Well, I'm going to haul you up off the psychiatrist's chair. We unexpectedly thrust your phone. That was a real throwdown there. We've not done that before. How's your soul? I don't remember doing that. But look, we are here to talk about Tacky's revolt.

And this occurred in Jamaica in the 1760s. It was the largest slave revolt in the whole of the British Empire. Of the 18th century, I should say. in the 18th century. But can we first, if you don't mind, just start in Africa and the destabilization of Africa. We only started touching on it last week's episode. In the last podcast, yes, we were talking about this, how this sheer fact of all these slaving out of these ports with guns coming in and a lot of money to be made locally if you are shipping your neighbors out on British ships. How is that destabilizing?

What's going on in West Africa in the run-up to this in the 1740s, 50s and 60s? Yeah, I think that's a crucial point is that what we're seeing really from the mid-17th century on, especially in the region of Africa that I focus on, West Africa and the Gold Coast in particular, roughly the region that's now Ghana. What you're seeing from the mid-17th century onward is the militarization of all of these societies. And what that means, as you indicated, Willie, is that there are guns flowing in so that slays can ebb out, that what happens is, you know, there were always local conflicts among different

policies in Africa. Again, that's a kind of fundamental feature of human history. But what happens with the introduction of the slave trade across the Atlantic is these conflicts get more lethal, and they increase in scale. Because the incentive that's fed by the growth of these Atlantic empires is helping to fuel ever-increasing numbers of wars and larger wars at that, which facilitate the sale of enslaved captives to the coast, to the Europeans, who then come out and their labor builds the wealth of the Americas. There's one reference in your book to depopulation within 200 to 300 miles of the coast. Is that so, I mean, are people afraid to go anywhere near the coast in case they just get picked up and shipped off? Well, it's two things. I mean,

that fear is fed by what had happened in the previous decade or two with so much slaving and so many slaving wars that, you know, there were few people to fight these wars, few people in these villages, and then, of course, people evacuated those areas. And this comes from a British trader who was bemoaning the fact that there were a few people to be bought in this area of the coast because there had been such intensive slaving in the previous decade or two. And you now have to travel 400 miles in to find we're after. I mean, I hate this. I hate this analogy, but, you know, I suppose it works, but it's like the overfishing of a piece of water. And you're treating human beings like that kind of commodity.

We have overfished in these waters, and therefore we have to, unfortunately, go further in. Well, here's an analogy you like even less. There are often intensive wars, stimulated, encouraged, fed in zones of commodity trading. Right. So, you know, we like to think of wars for oil. I think it's no accident that there are so many wars in these places where we have commodities that people want to trade. Can we talk a little bit about the peoples of the Gold Coast? Again, now, there is one name which people may have heard of, and thanks to Hollywood, sometimes these things happen.

But the word Dahomey has now become something that people recognize because of a major blockbuster movie about a warrior queen of Dahomey. And when you talk to people and they know a little bit superficially, they say, well, it was the kings of Dahomey did it. You know, if they wouldn't have rounded people up, this wouldn't have happened. You know, you had to have complicity. I mean, first of all, tell me about them, who were they? And who were the other prominent tribes that we know that existed on this coast?

Yeah, sure. We know about Dahomey in part because, you know, it was one of the militarized, slaving states of West Africa during the 18th century. Among those would also be the Ashante that a lot of people have heard of. Among those would also be the Oyo above north of Dahomey that many people will have heard of. And so these were states that accumulated their power partly through the acquisition of European firearms, which were the best weapons available at the time. And then they would use those firearms to expand their influence, their territory, and their slaving networks across the territories in West Africa that they could control.

Now, we know a lot about them because when the French conquered Dahomey in the 19th century, they wrote extensively about them. So they kind of became famous as an African state among Europeans later. But there were many of these militarized slaving states in West Africa. And that's really one of the keys to the process that I describe in the book. At exactly the same moment that you're describing in West Africa, European mercantile companies are going into the interior of India and conquering chunks of it and actually establishing themselves as the ruler. Why did that not happen here?

How come in a sense this is still limited to what was happening in an earlier phase of European colonialism in India, where you just have a factory on the coast with no hinterland around it under European control? I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is certainly the disease environment is forbidding. and Europeans don't actually survive in West Africa very long. Even on those forts that they manage to control, the death rate is extraordinarily high. The second reason is that these African states that I'm talking about were formidable, and they were not to be trifled with and not easy for Europeans to conquer. You really only had one major European polity, I could say, a colony in Africa,

and that's in West Central Africa, the colony of Angola that the Portuguese established. And that was run by Portuguese, Angolan auxiliaries and Brazilians. But for the most part in West Africa, in all these slaving states, the Europeans remained on the coast and had to maintain diplomatic alliances and trading relationships with these African policies. And just, again, before we move away from Dahome, which is the one word that is sort of swirling around at the moment, there's been a great deal made that Hollywood was eulogizing women warriors from this place. And I've seen sort of a... This is Marvel, is it? Or...

It's... I don't know who made it, to be honest. This was the Woman King. It wasn't a Marvel film. No, it's not a Marvel. So this, you know, the Dahomey Queen, there were warrior women who worked within the Dahomey kingdom, but they sometimes were the slaves themselves, weren't they? They were some of the ferocious women who went and rounded people up as well. Yeah. So that is certainly the case that, you know, some of these women warriors were also involved enslaving raids in Dahomey. And the film, you know, shies away from that. It shades that a bit. Although, kind of when I look at these Hollywood films by historical subjects, I don't judge them

too harshly because look at all the films on the American Revolution. How much veracity is there to these? Or cowboy movies. These films, these historical films are usually mythologized to a great degree. I don't necessarily think we should hold films about, you know, black people and subjects in Africa to a higher standard than we hold these other films. I mean, you look at that big film about the evacuation of Dunkirk that was made some time ago, and there were no colonial subjects anywhere to be seen in the film, for the most part. I mean, there were everywhere in these wars, and yet you would think that these wars happened in a kind of masterpiece theater casting environment

where everybody was white, not the case. We're going to bring one character to the fore now, And it's going to surprise our listeners. It's not tacky yet, but it is a character that I found, you know, your writing of deeply touching and also really revealing. And it is the young man Apongo, who will become very significant in a revolt. Just tell us a little bit about his, to use the Marvel metaphor, what's his origin story? Right. Well, his origin story is obscure.

That's the first thing to know about it. We learn about a pongo, also named Wager, from the diary of a brutal, brutal plantation overseer named Thomas Thistewitt. It's kind of Lord Voldemort of your book, who's the really evil, hideous character. Yeah. He's an Englishman who arrives in Jamaica in 1750, and he's there until his death in 1786, working as a plantation overseer. And he keeps a diary during his entire 36 years on the island. And that diary is a catalog of brutality, the extreme, disgusting tortures that he meets out upon enslaved workers, the rapes, the daily rapes of enslaved women. And also some of his observations about life in Jamaica.

He is someone who is there in Tacky's revolt, defending his plantation, and writes an account of one of the principal leaders of the revolt in the parish of Westmoreland on the southeast side of the island. Island. And there he says that Apongo had been when he was in West Africa a visitor, a frequent visitor, to the chief agent of Cape Coast Castle, which was Britain's principal fort, trading fort on the Gold Coast. And this man Apongo was an African dignitary. He was an African elite who would trade with John Cope, who was this chief agent of Cape Coast Castle. Now, at some point, John Cope retires from his position on the Gold Coast. He eventually sets himself up in Jamaica as a planter. And after that, Apongo is, we don't know exactly how, himself captured, enslaved, sold to the Europeans, and he ends up in Jamaica, where he again encounters John Cope. And John Cope lays out a tablecloth for Apongo for Sunday visits and treats him as a man of honor, even though he's now enslaved.

and insinuates that when his master comes back to the island, because his master is a Royal Navy ship captain, that John Cope will have Apongo redeemed and sent back to Africa. Now, John Cope dies in 1756, and somewhere in the intervening four years, Apongo becomes one of these leaders of the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire. Now, he's a prism. I mean, that story in itself gives you an idea of sort of the global,

aspect of slavery, even then. You know, there's the Jamaica, America, Great Britain, you know, all of these, the web is there. It would be good, I think, to talk about the global background to all of this, because we're coming off the back of the Seven Years' War, which Winston Churchill used to call the First World War, because it dragged in so many nations into the conflict. Caribbean, Philippines, Scotland, Ireland. How was the world churning?

I mean, either of you, I mean, how was it churning? after the seven years war. Well, when I talk about slave revolt as kind of existing in a context of wars within wars, you know, one of those wars are these European conflicts that are convulsing the world in the 17th and 18th century especially, but really throughout the period of the expansion of empire. Your listeners will know that the 18th century kind of featured at least a century of war between the British and the French, who were competing with each other all over the

world in North America, in the Caribbean, in Asia, in India, for supremacy, for trading routes for colonial exploitation. Now, in North America, in 1754, there's a local conflict in the Ohio back country featuring a young George Washington as a British officer that then expands and mushrooms into a global conflict between the British and their European rivals, most importantly the French. There are various theaters. and campaigns in this battle. Some of them are very well known like the Battle of Quebec.

Some of them are lesser known like the conquest of Senegal and Martinique. And on this podcast earlier, we've had the Battle of Placci, which of course, the beginning of British Empire in India. Yeah. Same conflict.

Of course. Some of them lesser known like the battles in Senegal and Martinique, but almost nowhere, do people consider that Takke's revolt that happened in 1760 happens in the context of this seven years war.

You don't really find Tacky's vote mentioned in most of the major accounts of the Seven Years' War, as you said, often called the First European World War. And the British are using this war partly as an excuse to go and capture French slaving centers like Gori and so on, on the Senegal. Which they do. They capture French Senegal. They try to capture Guadalupe, but they do conquer Martinique. In the context of this, there are many soldiers who fight these campaigns. campaigns against the French who also then go on to suppress Takkes Revolt. It's worth noting for your

listeners who kind of know their military history that the British Royal Marines were newly reformed in the context of the seven seven years war to fight amphibious warfare. In Havana, most famously, they had the difficult landing in Havana. Most famously in Havana in 1762, but just before that, they're involved in the conquest of Senegal. They're involved in the campaigns in Guadalep and Martinique, and they're involved in the suppression of Tacky's revolt. So the very first campaigns of the newly reformed Royal Marines are fought against black people in the bush in West Africa and the Caribbean. It's so fascinating. I want to circle back again to Apongo, who, again, is not tacky? Is that a real name? Is that an anglicized name? What kind of name is that?

So that's an interesting bit of research there, which is in order to document Thistlewood's account of, Apongo, I went to try and cross-check everything he might have said about Apongo in records of West African trading forts, in the records of Royal Navy warships, in plantation accounts, to try and really fill in the life story that this would had hinted at. As it turned out, I never found anyone named Apongo, precisely a pongo, in the records of the West African trading forts. What I found were many other people, many other Africans who traded with Cape Coast Castle, who themselves were then enslaved and came out to places like Jamaica or Jamaica itself. What I also found was that there were many other Gold Coast West Africans sailing aboard Royal Navy warships.

And so, in a sense, if I didn't find Apongo himself, what I found were many people like him, what I found in the records was a kind of composite biography of Africans who were caught up in this world of enslavement, caught up in these wars within wars, came out to Jamaica, and to work as slaves and then became rebels. So Apongo wasn't alone in that sense. Now following the footsteps, the rather sort of light footsteps of the man we shall call, and you have called Apongo just for ease, who may well be a composite of others who experienced and suffered the same fate.

But he is, when he's captured, he becomes the property of a captain of a ship who renames him after the ship. I mean, just, and this was a, this was a common occurrence, wasn't it? As soon as you captured a human being, you took away his very name. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things about enslavement is the idea behind it is to reduce one human being to the will of an owner or a master. Part of that is to depersonalize that human being, to make them an extension of your will.

And part of that will is the renaming of someone. So we know who Apongo's master was in Jamaica. He was Captain Arthur Forrest of the Royal Navy, originally from Edinburgh, Scotland. He had achieved the rank of post-captain aboard the HMS Wager, so a significant milestone in his own naval career. He renames Apongo, wager, after that HMS Wager warship, and then owns him in Jamaica on his sugar plantations in Westmoreland Parish. And we have no idea how Cope, was he a slave driver, a foreman or something, how on earth did Cope come across him again? Any idea of that? Well, what we know is that John Cope retired from his position at Cape Coast Castle. I think he set himself up as a slave trader. We should say at this point for the Scots listeners, this is not Johnny Cope with the Battle of Preston Pans of 1745. Yeah, I did check on that, but this is a completely different John Cope. This is an English John Cope who was working for the Royal.

Africa Company, and after his time on the Gold Coast, set himself up in London for a bit, and then moved to Jamaica and bought a plantation there where he eventually died. We know that his plantation was in Westmoreland Parish, not far from where Arthur Forrest's plantation was, where Apongo Wager worked. So at some point, they encountered each other again, and that's when John Cope recognized Wager, Apongo, and realized he knew him from the old country. Right. And just, I mean, just paint a picture of what a Bongo Strait wager went through when he first arrived on that plantation. And we talked very, very briefly in the last episode of this notion of seasoning the slaves when they first arrived in the new land. And I should say, and maybe it was remissive as not to have pointed this out, this is going to be an unusually difficult listen for a lot of you because the brutality is horrific and it will be. described in visceral and horrific terms, and we make no apology for that. But if you are listening with small children, as many of you I know do on your long drives, maybe this is not the one

to have in the car with tiny people. That warning is now out of the way. But tell us now a little bit about this. You take the name, but then you take the humanity. And that seems to happen as soon as you land in your new country. What do they do? Yeah. Thank you for that, Anita. I appreciate. I appreciate that warning. I take it as a warning to myself in some ways. Not at all. No, no, it's to set you free. Because I think the thing is often we have sort of tea time manners to talk about things that are so horrific. And I don't think that's helpful sometimes. So I think if we have allowed people the choice to stay with us or listen later,

I feel that we can discuss this as grown-ups, I hope. Yeah, I very much appreciate that. I mean, I do think that the first thing to recognize is that the entire, experience from warfare in West Africa in which one might have been captured through that time in those fetid, you know, absolutely horrific dungeons on the coast into the slave ships, those darken hold with, you know, naked bodies rolling around in their own filth for weeks at a time to Jamaica or the Caribbean or North America or Brazil or any place else in the Americas. That time itself, was so radically disorienting, so fundamentally dislocating, that that's one of the primary

techniques of depersonalization, that disorientation, that kind of displacement. And so when people arrive in Jamaica, they're confronted with the task of completely trying to remake not only their social worlds, but their sense of self. And that's where slaveholders are going to try and intervene to make sure a slave's sense of self reflects the will and serves the will of the slave master. Part of that process is that, you know, the environment is so catastrophic. It's a deadly disease environment, right? Because you had so many people coming from so many different places into these, we had these nodes in the circuit of transatlantic disease. And so you had smallpox epidemics, you had yellow fever epidemics, you had amoebic dysentery epidemics,

all kinds of things were killing people such that during the seasoning period you mentioned of about three years of acclimatizing to Jamaica, you know, the survival rate was something, you know, two out of every three people. So a third to 40 percent of all people died within their first three years. So about a third die on the seasoning and already, what, a sixth have died on the voyage, a quarter? Yeah, anywhere from, you know, 5% if a voyage was going to very fortunate to 20 to 30% if you had some kind of calamity aboard ship. But what that meant was that the experience of death and dying was ubiquitous among all the survivors. This was a catastrophe in every sense of the word, both physical, spiritual, mental, emotional. Yeah, I mean, there's three years of

seasoning that you talk about. I mean, I don't think we should dispense with it lightly either, because it's not just a climatization. They're expecting from these. It's brutalization. Yes, it's utter submission through physical pain. And again, having issued that warning, I think we can talk about this now. What are the accounts of the time or the evidence that you've dug up of how those people were treated in those three years? So, you know, what happens during that seasoning is, you know, again, the survival rate during the seasoning is, you know, some 40% may have died within the first three years of arriving in a place like Jamaica. And even after that three years, life expectancy may have been only seven to ten years, depending on what kind of work

you were doing. Now, I think your listener should be aware of one thing, because there's a common assumption, expectation, idea that, you know, if a slaveholder had invested in a, you know, if a slaveholder had invested in a slave as a piece of property, they would have had some great incentive to care for that property, meaning that person. But in a place like Jamaica or these other sugar colonies where the profits were so extraordinarily high, there was actually no incentive to care for people. In fact, planters estimated that within about four years, five years, seven years of labor, these enslaved people had paid for themselves many times over. And it was actually cheaper for them to work people to death and buy new workers through the transatlantic slave trade than it was to feed and clothe and

house people sufficiently so they could raise families. And the plantation owners write this themselves. This is not our interpretation. And the plantation owners write this themselves. They're explicit about it. This is part of their calculation. They can work people to death in seven years and that is highly profitable to them. In fact, much more profitable than, you know, investing in people to raise families and children. Or caring for them in old age when they're no longer any use. Or caring for them in old age. So what they're doing is they're basically, one would say they're outsourcing the responsibility

for raising families onto villages in Africa. They're externalizing that cost in today's terms. And just to stay with the economics of all of this, I mean, first of all, just let that hang in the air for one moment longer. It was cheap at a buyer's slave and work them to death in this seven to 10 year lifespan. and then buy another human being, then look after a human being. I mean, just let that hang in the air. But also, I mean, just as far as profitability is concerned,

this territory, Jamaica, is the most profitable for the British, isn't it? Yeah. So a lot of American listeners, you know, have no idea that there weren't just 13 American colonies in the British Empire in America. There were 26. and by far the colonies in the Caribbean were the most profitable, the most militarily significant, and the best politically connected of the colonies that the British had in America. And that is because they were so much more profitable.

Jamaica was, by the time of the American Revolution, the most profitable colony in the British Empire, far, far more profitable in a place like Massachusetts, which was in fact the poorest, a least profitable colony in British America. The average worth of a free white person in Jamaica was something like 25 times the average worth of a free white person in a colony like Massachusetts. So the profits were enormous. You know, we talk about, you know, in British India, we talk about Clive. But the Jamaican planters were certainly on Clive's level, right? And this comforts the British when they lose the American colonies because they've clung on actually to the most profitable bits and they've lost the difficult, unprofitable.

comfortable bits, as far as I concerned. Frankly, I think it explains why the British don't take this rebellion in Massachusetts as seriously as they might in the early 1770s, because there's so much more focused on these more important places in the Caribbean. That's extraordinary. And also, I mean, strategically, apart from financially, you know, if you're in the midst of the seven years war, there's this global conflict that drags everybody in, starting sort of radiating out from Europe and dragging in the Caribbean and the Americas, you don't just need to pay for it, and this is a great revenue generator, a taxation levyer, but it's also a strategic place. It's of strategic naval importance also, is it not?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, one of the key dimensions of the seven years war, kind of a shift in strategy, is when William Beckford, who has had a point the Lord Mayor of London, but also was a major Jamaican planter. Famous for his library, wasn't he? He was an art collector. And famous for his library, right, approaches William Pitt and says, we need to have an Atlantic strategy focused upon the slave trade and the French possessions in the Caribbean. And he's convincing.

And that is in some ways what leads to this idea that they're going to conquer Guadalupe and Martinique, perhaps even conquer what was then the most profitable colony, European colony in the world, which was the colony of San Domain, which is now the state. of Haiti. Not a place one associates with huge riches today. Not today, but in fact, that was the most profitable European colony in the world. And for some of the same reasons, they were growing sugar and coffee and indigo and cotton with a population that was about 90% enslaved. Wow. And so no labor costs. So the labor costs are all, in fact, capital costs. The capital involved in purchasing a human being, right? That was the cost. And then labor, you compel with

terror. Okay. So if you have this much, whenever you have very rich men who have their hands on great baubles of wealth, there is also the terror that someone might take it from you. So, I mean, how much did it sort of play in the minds of Britain and other slave-owning countries that there may be a revolt? You know, we are outnumbered on these islands, because they must have been outnumbered on these plantations and other places. How much did you find that there was a paranoia, stroke, rational fear that this could be taken from them? Oh, these places were governed by fear. And so not only the fear of the planters and the slaveholders by the enslaved, who were subject to extreme and brutal tortures like the ones documented by the overseer Thomas Dissewood, but also the fear of the

slaveholders that the slaves might rise up, which they did with surprising frequency, in part because the slaveholders were so outnumbered. In a place like Jamaica, they're outnumbered by as much as 10 to 1. And in some places, remote parishes, which are dominated by plantations, they may be outnumbered by as much as 20 to 1. The way they maintain their rule is the old strategy of divide and conquer, which is they keep these enslaved people fighting each other, right? And they dole out small favors and concessions along the way in order to keep people focused

on their power as opposed to organizing collectively to take power from them. Yeah, we've been there before. It's a theme. We tend to stay there. Now, if you want to think about how they actually maintain that, it's not only on the plantations themselves. It's because they've got a whole infrastructure of projecting power that reaches all the way back to the imperial military, right?

So if one wants to think about how important these places in the Caribbean were to the British Empire in the 18th century. Think about it this way. There are three major naval stations that the British have in America, right? The first they establish at Port Royal Jamaica in the 1690s. And then they establish another at English Harbor Antigua in the Lesser Antilles in 1731. And then they establish another, right, in Nova Scotia at Halifax in 1749. What's missing there? There's not a major naval station in Manhattan. There's not a naval station. There's not a naval major native station in Charleston or Boston. Rhode Island, Virginia, none of those.

Two in the Caribbean and one in Canada, right? And the major naval battles at a time when Britain was emerging as the supreme naval power in the world are fought in the Caribbean. We are coming up to a commercial break, but do join us after the break where I think I'd like to talk a little bit more about this ghastly man. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but Thomas Thistlewood and what we learned from him, but then getting to that point where people start saying enough is enough. Join us after the break.

Welcome back. So, you know, we've called this couple of podcasts of ours, Tacky's Revolt. We haven't even got to Tacky yet, and this is what we're like. I'm so sorry, our very special guest are Vincent Brown. When we have a very exciting and interesting man like yourself on the program, we just go off on one. And we can't apologize. It's also so fascinating. You mentioned one man, and I'd like to talk about him a little bit more,

because he also is an exemplar of just cruelty to human beings, and the fact that he documented it so well, which is just bizarre. Tell us more about Thomas Thistlewood. Now, his brand was, I mean, completely appalling. Is it what T-I-T-Y on people's shoulders? That's what he did. And he kept a record of the kind of deprable. without even a sense of shame.

Tell us the kind of things. I'd rather you said it than I said it because I feel sick even just reading it. But the kind of stuff that he confessed openly to doing to the humans he looked after. And the tone, was it confessional? Was it pride? Was he swaggering? Well, that's an important thing. It wasn't in Thissa Woods' conception a confession at all.

Right. For the most part, it was a matter-of-fact description, totally unself-conscious. in a way that makes it very valuable for historians, right? Because it's clear that he's not trying to justify or shade or apologize for the things he's doing. He's just telling us what happened in his terms. He's noting things down in the most matter-of-fact way possible. And the things he's noting down are, as you said, the branding of people's flesh, the rape and cruel violation of women.

I mean, can we just talk about the numbers? I mean, I don't think we can just say rape because, you know, we think of that and one, you know, one rape is an appalling abhorrence. How many times does he say he has forced himself onto his slave women in his control? Well, just about every day and often many times a day and many women.

I mean, he considers that his right as a slaveholder to rape the women under his authority. When he's writing about it, what is he? Is he bragging? Or is he just, what's the tone? Well, it's almost as if he's just kind of totaling the numbers. You know, he never actually kind of makes a count,

but he describes in no detail, but just in the kind of driest terms possible and what he's done and who he's done it with, in a kind of crude pig Latin. What are the punishments on the Thistlewood estate? If you object to this, let's say that you don't like the way he's treating a girl next to you, and you make some resistance, what might happen to you in the Thistled Land?

Well, in part because of the kind of the demographic disparity that I described, where these slaveholders are so grossly outnumbered, they rule through sheer terror, and the threat of punishment is always hanging in the air. And so none of them actually allow any questioning of their authority. You can't talk back without the threat of punishment. And those punishments are the ones that people know, the whippings, the, you know, certainly the verbal insults, the withdrawal of sustenance, food, shelter, and support. Vincent, he invents, I mean, he invents things that now carry sort of. I was just, I was just, I was just going to get to that, which is that he also is quite, you know, I guess we could say innovative or creative in his depravity.

So at one point, so he catches someone eating young sugar cane. All these people were starving. And so the man was eating sugar cane. And what Thistowood does, because he doesn't like this and he wants to put a stop to it, is he has another man named Derby defecate in that other young man's mouth. And then he binds his mouth together and makes him suffer like that for a while. He repeats this punishment many times more, so much so that he comes up with a little name for it. He calls it Derby's dose.

So it becomes a routine part of his punishment arsenal. And this is often combined, you write, with lashes and then rubbing lime juice into the raw wounds. All of that, all of that. Horrific to describe, more horrific to actually think about, and to experience it. That's the world of Caribbean slavery that we're talking about. And that was what Planters thought was necessary to maintain their control. To us, this is, you know, this is depravity and monstrosity. This is the stuff of horror movies.

do you get any impression that, you know, casual visitors to the Caribbean see it the same way? Or roughly the same date I write about India, you have the British public very, very angry about the Bengal famine. They have reports of a million people dying and you have plays put on. Clive is being hissed in the streets. Is there the same dislike of Caribbean planters when they go back to England? Are they regarded as monsters or is this considered fine? Well, not at first. But as the 18th century develops, right?

there's a kind of growing awareness by the late 18th century of what's going on in the Caribbean and a kind of emerging revulsion about what's being done in the name of the British Empire. But before that, in the early 18th century, to the mid-18th century, to around the time of Tacky's revolt, you know, this kind of common brutality is just not considered. It's not really thought about. I think that is a parallel to India because there's no one going to India with actually on India Company passport. There's no journalists or anything. They don't get reports of this until you have the Bengal famine. Then everyone knows about it and there is revulsion.

There's one traveler that I cite who goes to Jamaica in the early to mid-18th century who is shocked when he gets there. And what he says is that the people who grow up there actually think nothing more of seeing a black man's head cut off than they were seeing the slaughter of a calf, right? He is shocked at first, and then he describes how people grow accustomed to that brutality, especially they justify it for themselves because they think that's what's needed to maintain the society. You have a very nice illustration of that in your book where there's, I think the same traveler probably describes kids growing up, and the kind of toys that the plantation kids use are not sort of hoops and balls, but whips, and they whip trees and

things until they're allowed to whip actual human beings. They learned to practice whipping people from a very young age, right? So they're kind of inculturated into this kind of brutality toward other human beings. And that marks a difference between these kinds of slave societies where 90% of the population is enslaved and other societies where maybe a few people are enslaved or societies where almost no one is enslaved, right? Those societies without slaves on the territory may be profiting enormously, right, financially from those slave companies. colonies, but they're not aware of the daily brutality. And when they do become aware of it, and when they do begin to kind of feed some, when it does begin to feed some revulsion, that helps to stimulate campaigns to do something

about it. Do you know, when I read that section of your book, I felt quite sick and I had to walk away from it and come back, actually, I had to leave it for a couple of days. I just found to read. Well, I apologize for that. No, no, no, no, goodness, no. You don't need to apologize. You are the last person who needs to apologize for that.

But, you know, but there was this, the name, that awful man, Thistlewood, just kept sort of rumbling around in my head because I thought, I'm sure I've heard of an abolitionist called Thistlewood. And there is one. Arthur. Arthur. Arthur. Thistlewood. I believe he's a grand nephew or something like that. Right. Okay. So that's weird, because I didn't know that until I've just asked you that. Okay, that's very, very strange. But then it doesn't mean. Well, not so weird. I mean, you know, Zachary McCauley. began his career as a plantation overseer and then became an abolitionist as well. So John Newton, right? Kind of the famous Methodist. Maybe the younger, Tistlewood was just appalled by his monstrous great uncle.

It's possible. That gives me a bit of hope. John Newton, for example, who was a slave trader in the mid-18th century, but Vinn converted to Methodism, became kind of one of the principal evangelicals and wrote the fantastic song Amazing Grace, that saved a wretch like me, that is still sung. So, you know, this kind of thing happened. So eyes do open. Now, look, finally, and with much delay.

Do you know what, Vincent, we're going to have to do two programs on this because it's so, so interesting. And we're getting to tacky in the last few minutes of this podcast. How shameful. There is a book. There is a book. I can promise there will be a tacky's revolt in the book. You are literally going nowhere, my friend. You are not going anywhere, I'm afraid.

But just do an introduction to tacky and where he. fits and where he comes in to this appalling hellscape that we've painted of life in Jamaica. So we talked a bit about Apongo, who was one of the major leaders of this series of revolts from 1760 through 1761 in the parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica. But the rebellion is most commonly known by the name Tacky's Revolt, the title of the book, in part because one chief Tacky is mentioned in the earliest accounts of the revolt in the parish of St. Mary, where everything began in April 1760. And he's featured as the principal leader in the earliest historians account of the revolt. And that's in Edward Long's three-volume

history of Jamaica. Edward Long was the Jamaican planter who was there during Taki's revolt, and then wrote one of the first and most extensive accounts of Jamaican Slave Society, published in 1774. Well, on that cliffhanger, you've now met Taki finally for the first. At the end of an hour. I mean, do forgive us. I mean, we meant to get to him earlier, but I mean, I hope you will forgive us for talking about something that is this important in this much detail. But join us for the next episode. We're going to run two this week with our wonderful guest, Vincent Brown.

And until then, it's goodbye for me, Anita Arnind. Goodbye for me, William Durember.