Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination 9780367458003, 9781003025436

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Graphs
List of Tables
Introduction
Part I Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination
1 “Venereal Distemper”: Illicit Trade and Contagious Disease in the Journals of Captain James Cook
2 Creolizing the Gothic Narrative: The Politics of Witchcraft, Gender, and “Black” Magic in Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta
3 Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge as Cultural Capital in the Greater Caribbean
Part II Representation and Power in the Contact Zone
4 Materializing the Immaterial: Creating Capital in a Mirrored Mirage
5 Reading African Material Culture in the Contact Zone: Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea
6 Fetishes and the Fetishized: Material Culture and Obeah in the British Caribbean
Part III Consuming Cultures in the Colonial Atlantic
7 Maple: The Sugar of Abolitionist Aspirations
8 Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy: Circuits of Trade and Knowledge
Part IV Labor and Identity in Early American Probates
9 “The Only Property I Could Dispose of to Any Advantage”: Textiles as Mediators in Early Irish Louisiana
10 Institutionalizing the Slave Power at the Local Level: Deferential Care of Slaveholding Estates in Eighteenth-Century York County, Virginia
Part V Capital Networks, Capital Control
11 Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800
12 “Unless Speedily Relieved from Old or New England, the Commoner Sort of People and the Slaves Must Starve”: The Changing Nature and Networks of the Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World

Cultural Economies explores the dynamic intersection of material culture and transatlantic formations of “capital” in the long eighteenth century. It brings together two cutting-edge fields of inquiry—Material Studies and Atlantic Studies—into a generative collection of essays that investigate nuanced ways that capital, material culture, and differing transatlantic ideologies intersected. This ambitious, provocative work provides new interpretive critiques and methodological approaches to understanding both the material and the abstract relationships between humans and objects, including the objectification of humans, in the larger current conversation about capitalism and inevitably power, in the Atlantic world. Chronologically bracketed by events in the long–eighteenthcentury circum-Atlantic, these essays employ material case studies from littoral African states, to abolitionist North America, to Caribbean slavery, to medicinal practice in South America, providing both broad coverage and nuanced interpretation. Holistically, Cultural Economies demonstrates that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world of capital and materiality was intimately connected to both large and small networks that inform the hemispheric and transatlantic geopolitics of capital and nation of the present day. Victoria Barnett-Woods is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland.

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies Series Editors: Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

The long eighteenth century sits as a pivotal point between the earlymodern and modern worlds. By actively encouraging an international focus for the series overall, both in terms of wide-ranging geographical topics and authorial locations, the series aims to feature cutting-edge research from established and recent scholars, and capitalize on the breadth of themes and topics that new approaches to research in the period reveal. This series provides a forum for recent and established historians to present new research and explore fresh approaches to culture and society in the long eighteenth century. As a crucial period of transition, the period saw developments that shaped perceptions of the place of the individual and the collective in the construction of the modern world. Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies is a series that is globally ambitious in scope and broad in its desire to publish cutting-edge research that takes an innovative, multi-vocal and increasingly holistic approach to the period. The series will be particularly sensitive to questions of gender and class, but aims to embrace and explore a variety of fresh approaches and methodologies. Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England Bodies, Identities, and Power Soile Ylivuori Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England Picturing Royal Subjects Stephanie E. Koscak Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination Edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Eighteenth-Century-Cultures-and-Societies/ book-series/RSECCS

Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination Edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Victoria Barnett-Woods to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-45800-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02543-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To all the affiliate, contingent and adjunct faculty in the academy, thank you.

Contents

List of Figuresx List of Graphsxii List of Tablesxiii Introduction

1

VICTORIA BARNETT-WOODS

PART I

Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination17   1 “Venereal Distemper”: Illicit Trade and Contagious Disease in the Journals of Captain James Cook

19

LISA VANDENBOSSCHE

  2 Creolizing the Gothic Narrative: The Politics of Witchcraft, Gender, and “Black” Magic in Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta

37

ORIANNE SMITH

  3 Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge as Cultural Capital in the Greater Caribbean

56

CHELSEA BERRY

PART II

Representation and Power in the Contact Zone77   4 Materializing the Immaterial: Creating Capital in a Mirrored Mirage LEAH M. THOMAS

79

viii  Contents   5 Reading African Material Culture in the Contact Zone: Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea

102

REBEKAH MITSEIN

  6 Fetishes and the Fetishized: Material Culture and Obeah in the British Caribbean

123

VICTORIA BARNETT-WOODS

PART III

Consuming Cultures in the Colonial Atlantic145   7 Maple: The Sugar of Abolitionist Aspirations

147

BARRY L. STIEFEL

  8 Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy: Circuits of Trade and Knowledge

173

CHRISTOPHER MAGRA

PART IV

Labor and Identity in Early American Probates191   9 “The Only Property I Could Dispose of to Any Advantage”: Textiles as Mediators in Early Irish Louisiana

193

KRISTIN CONDOTTA LEE

10 Institutionalizing the Slave Power at the Local Level: Deferential Care of Slaveholding Estates in Eighteenth-Century York County, Virginia

216

WENDY LUCAS AND KELLY HOUSTON JONES

PART V

Capital Networks, Capital Control241 11 Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800 PHILLIP REID

243

Contents ix 12 “Unless Speedily Relieved from Old or New England, the Commoner Sort of People and the Slaves Must Starve”: The Changing Nature and Networks of the Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700

263

RYAN M c GUINNESS

Contributors285 Index288

Figures

Cover: A New Chart of the Vast Atlantic or Western Ocean (1771) by Carington Bowles. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, G1015.B69 1771 4.1 Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562) by Diego Gutiérrez. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3290 1562.G7 80 4.2 Detail from Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562) by Diego Gutiérrez. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3290 1562.G7 81 4.3 A New & Exact Map of the Coast, Countries and Islands within ye Limits of ye South Sea Company (1711) by Herman Moll. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G5200 1711.M6 88 4.4 A General Chart of the Western Ocean, John Seller, London, England, 1743–1765 (originally published 1721), black and white line engraving with modern outline color on laid paper, accession #1989–199, image #TC2000–815. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase 90 4.5 A New Chart of the Vast Atlantic or Western Ocean (1771) by Carington Bowles. Image courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library, G1015.B69 1771 93 5.1 Lidded Vessel, Yoruba Peoples, Owo Group (c. Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1991, 1991.17.126a, b. www.metmuseum.org108 5.2 Brass Plaque, Edo Peoples, Benin City (c. Sixteenth– Seventeenth Centuries). © The Trustees of the British Museum, Acc. No. Af1898,0115.31 110

Figures xi 7.1

7.2

9.1

9.2

Native Americans Collecting Sap and Cooking Maple Syrup in Pots, Tilling Soil into Raised Humps, and Sowing Seeds, North America, 1724, Joseph-Francois Lafitau (photograph). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/90705836/151 The Gradual Abolition Off the Slave Trade or Leaving of Sugar by Degrees, by Isaac Cruikshank. Published by S. W. Fores, London, April 15, 1792 (photograph). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/ item/2007676253/161 Man’s Linen Shirt. American, About 1800. Plain-Woven Linen with Needleworked Buttons. 102 × 88 cm (40 3/16 × 34 5/8 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Mrs. Helen Howard Hudson Whipple. 55.597. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 200 Ruffle, Possibly England, 1750–1765, linen, accession #1985–129, 1, image #DS1985–362. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase 204

Graphs

12.1 Origin of Ships and Tonnage Imported to Barbados, 1682–1688. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1682–1688 12.2 Origin of Ships as a Comparison over Time, 1690–1698. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690–1698 12.3 Origin of Imports as a Function of Time over Four Periods. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1680–1698

270 277 279

Tables

10.1 Negative Binomial Regression Results to Estimate “Unexpected Number of Slaves” 228 10.2 Regression Results Using “Unexpected Number of Slaves” 230 12.1 Quantity of Provision Trade in Barbados, 1680–1688 (in hogsheads). TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1682–1688 269 12.2 Alcoholic Beverage Imports, 1680–1688 (in hogsheads). TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1681–1688; Bean, “Food Imports,” 582 269 12.3 Barbadian Provision Imports, 1690–1698 (in hogsheads). TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690, 1691, 1695–1698273 12.4 Quantities of Alcoholic Beverages Traded to Barbados, 1690–1698 (in hogsheads). TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690, 1691, 1695–1698 274

Introduction Victoria Barnett-Woods

In 1722, at nearly 60 years of age, French Dominican priest JeanBaptiste Labat published Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de L’Amerique, the six-volume account of his experiences in the Atlantic world. Four years after his death in 1738, a new 1742 edition of his meticulously constructed catalog of peoples, places, flora, fauna, and, importantly, food was printed for metropolitan readership, “enriched” with new figures and the text “considerably augmented.”1 The publication history of Labat’s Nouveau Voyage, with numerous editions, additions, and abridgements, illustrates the insatiable desire of European readers to know more about the evolving material culture and creolizing politics and ideologies generated across the Atlantic. Amongst these were his ambivalent views toward slavery, in addition to the social identity politics of the white creoles with whom he interacted. Labat was a missionary in the French Caribbean, but he was also a member of the plantocratic class, and even contributed to new methods of sugar production.2 During his travels from island to island in the late seventeenth century, Labat recounts that many of the vessels he boarded were, as Donald Schier describes, “commanded and manned by buccaneers” who had been integrated into a competitive maritime economic system.3 In fact, Labat details how buccaneers charged reasonably fair prices for ferrying goods and passengers, while the local “merchants would have carried them at an excessive price.”4 The legends and tales surrounding the buccaneers of the seventeenth century are as quotidian today as they were a part of the cultural fabric of the West Indies during Labat’s time.5 With its historical start in the Caribbean, the evolution of the buccaneer—both in terms of social role and economic gain—established the myth that mercenary pursuits of liberty, fraternity, and wealth in the Atlantic would be met with extraordinary success. Labat reinforces his positive impression of the buccaneers as he teasingly claims that while they have softened, and “hardly can they resolve to make a step without being in a carriage and attending to the horses,” “they are laudable for having come out of

2  Victoria Barnett-Woods misery and amassed the good.” Inverting the trope that buccaneers are insatiably greedy, Labat also notes that they have already started well and it is a justice that I must give them, because they are charitable, [and] they practice hospitality, better than any other place in the world, and they generously share their wealth with those who address them.6 Within the maritime shipping industry, it appears that buccaneers present an instance of social mobility and socioeconomic transformation. In addition to describing the maritime economies of the Atlantic world and those who contributed to them, Labat’s Nouveau Voyage also went into great detail on the various consumable goods and cooking methods that defined Caribbean living. His descriptions of his culinary experiences are extensive and diverse, and as noted by Suzanne Toczyski, if cuisine signifies one’s sociability, then Labat’s expertise in indigenous and colonial cooking made him one of the most sociable men in the early French Caribbean.7 One culinary articulation of his West Indian experiences is his detailed instructions for preparing “boucan de tortuë,” a special sea turtle dish adopted and integrated into French-creole colonial cuisine. The recipe involves fresh turtle meat, hard-boiled turtle eggs, fine herbs, vegetables, lemon juice, salt, and black pepper, to be mixed into a hash and slowly roasted over a large charcoal for four hours.8 An additional boucan-style recipe for pork can be found in the sixth volume of his Nouveau Voyage, indicating the method’s popularity in the region. At its surface, it would seem that a Caribbean cooking method and the collective group of maritime men who shipped goods and people between islands would have little in common. However, “buccaneer” and “boucan” share a similar etymological history. The word “boucan” originated from the Tupi (indigenous Brazilian) word to describe the act of curing meat over a small fire. In the late seventeenth century, it was also the root word used to describe the European men who adopted this cooking method in the early settler stages of the French Caribbean. The rough environment around these early West Indian creole huntersettlers created a male collective that, with no imperial governance or assistance, supported one another in a littoral fraternity. Over the course of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, these hunter“boucaniers” integrated into the larger English and French imperial enterprise and were hired to join privateers against the Spanish. By the early eighteenth century, “boucaniers” were so integrated into the maritime economic system that a frugal French priest trusted their abilities and applauded their courtesies. The linguistic diversion of “buccaneer” and “boucan” was implicitly assumed while also typographically intertwined, as Labat’s third volume of the 1742 edition indicates: a description of “boucan de tortuë,” prepared for the governor of Martinique,

Introduction 3 would be a mere few pages from a description of the honest-working buccaneer captains. Though a few mere pages away from one another in Labat’s volume, “boucan” and “boucanier” signified two different experiences of the West Indian material world in the eighteenth century— culinary and maritime—and two entirely different entrées into a larger world of intercultural and economic exchange.9 However, if one were to reach back into the history of the early French Caribbean, there would be a time when the social identities of the boucaniers were intimately defined by the material culture and culinary exchanges that evolved out of imperial and indigenous contact. In terms of the buccaneer, what linguistically initiated with indigenous cooking practices in the early seventeenth century became synonymous with plundering on the high seas, which then became synonymous with romanticized notions of honest and generous maritime laborers. The connections between “boucan” and “buccaneer” provide an etymological demonstration of the nuanced patchwork between material culture, identity formation, and the capitaldriven relationships that shape the Atlantic world. This collection of essays, collated into Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World, further speak to these dynamic relationships and grew out of the 2017 East Central ASECS conference, which sought to explore the myriad ways that culture and capital were intricately intertwined in the long eighteenth century. Within Atlantic Studies, questions about these interconnections and cultural overlaps generated a robust response from the conference participants, as the eighteenth century saw the Atlantic world as a central commercial hub for European consumption. In geographic terms, the littoral states along the Atlantic coastline and Caribbean islands were also the sites where cultures were created from the economic objectification of entire peoples, radical shifts in value systems, and emerging social economies unique from those of Europe. The story of the buccaneers and “boucan de tortuë” is illustrative of those shifts, as too is the fact that a French Dominican priest can also be a slave owner in Martinique. The broad discussion of the intersections between culture and capital was, by necessity for this collection, narrowed to a specific operating methodology: through the material culture of the eighteenthcentury Atlantic world; more specifically, through the objects that signified and participated in the cultural economies that made the Atlantic as dynamic and diverse as it is today. At the moment, it is rare to have a monograph or edited volume that considers the intersection of material culture, capitalism, and eighteenthcentury social ideology sampled across the entire Atlantic. Many scholars work within linguistic and cultural boundaries in their studies and provide in-depth examinations of a specific material culture in the Atlantic world. Simon Gikandi, in Slavery and the Culture of Taste, draws a critical connection to the development of material and aesthetic culture in England with slavery in the Atlantic. In his work, he contends that

4  Victoria Barnett-Woods the economic institutionalization of slavery and the values surrounding taste generated a dialectic foundational to “the shaping of modern identity.”10 While a compelling and expansive text, Slavery and the Culture of Taste necessarily rests its focus on the connection between the monolithic formations of slavery and British taste in the long eighteenth century. More recently, texts on material culture have focused on specific material objects, textiles for instance. Titles such as Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert, and Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World by Robert Duplessis all speak to the connection between identity politics and (self-)fashioning in the eighteenth century.11 Material Atlantic, in particular, generates an important conversation around the intersectionality of race, colonization, and clothing. The “dress regimes” of the Atlantic created tangled networks of cultural differentiation and, simultaneously, interdependence. As another example, Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places and Material Culture, 1600–1850, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard Herman, is a collection of essays that examines material culture through the lens of “buildings, landscapes and settlements” and considers the motivations for the development of certain building models and urban centers in the colonial Americas. While not exclusively so, the volume narrows its focus on the architectural influences of a “shared experience” across the Atlantic and contends that there were “overlapping spheres of influence” in architectural thought across the Atlantic and between North America and the Caribbean.12 Each of the aforementioned works provides detailed examinations of specific connections between the British Atlantic material world and social values, undergirding the importance of specific examinations at the expense of providing a broader survey that is supplied in this collection. While the British colonial presence in the Atlantic world was, by economic standards, the most significant and longest-lasting, it was not the only one to have had a material impact on Atlantic culture. In the early 2000s, significant comparative projects have considered the intersection of materiality and intercultural influence within the Atlantic. Material Cultures in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean, edited by David Shields, is a comparative project exploring the material constitution of the coastal mid-North Atlantic and the West Indies.13 These two regions were historically related, and as Anglo-America explores, also developed a variety of regional differences manifest in material culture and architectural flair. John Styles and Amanda Vickery edited the volume Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, which contends that there was a “gendering” of material culture within a transatlantic context.14 The volume integrates the history of eighteenth-century

Introduction 5 gendered politics, giving greater focus to the female consumer. Women were, within the realm of the domestic sphere, central to the development of material identities and consumption patterns that reflect the commercial exchanges that existed outside of the household. Unique from the other two edited volumes mentioned earlier, in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, editors Bauer and Mazzotti explore the theoretical and material politics surrounding the word “creole.”15 The contributions to their volume draw a comparative discussion between ideas, texts, and cultural configurations within British, Spanish, and Portuguese contexts, committing to a rare interlinguistic examination that is still underrepresented (though emerging) within Atlantic Studies. These edited collections are far from an exhaustive sample of the exciting emerging scholarship that continues to be created within the fields of Atlantic and Material Studies. A participant in these circulating scholarly conversations, Cultural Economies uniquely targets the concepts of social and cultural capitals within the material Atlantic. Central to this new intervention comes with it the language found within the title: “cultural economies.” Within the context of the volume, the concept of “cultural economies” is expansive, incorporating multiple interpretations and approaches. Originating from the field of economics, the term “cultural economy” is founded on the idea that humans function as cultural beings, and all actions, interactions, assumptions, and practices are connected to systems of value, profit, loss, and expenditure. Institutional and personal decisions based on social learning and cultural formations within groups have economic outcomes. So, too, is the inverse true. Economics and financial systems of power have a direct influence on social learning, cultural formations, and the decisions that one makes on a daily basis. “Culture” and “Economics” are reciprocally formational to one another. This collection demonstrates the historical power of the ideological and material connections between cultural and economic thought in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, where slavery, colonial settlerism, maritime economic growth, and technological and agricultural development so clearly informed modern Western identity. Exploring the intersectionality of these two key terms is the through line of this edited volume, as it explores material culture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It is also a volume that interrogates the nomenclature of economic discourse and its application to cultural values. Not only were cultural values “bought” along with the individuals sold into slavery, some objects were “worth more” than others in different cultural contexts. The language one uses to describe an appreciation or abhorrence for an object—“interest,” “value,” “advantage”—demonstrates that the language of economic exchange is ever present in common vernacular. The language of different social groups reflects the dynamic ways that culture and economy interact, where an “interest” in an object declines or

6  Victoria Barnett-Woods appreciates dependent upon the individual interacting with it. Each of the material objects discussed in this volume had a value of some kind, whether that value be located in community deference, disregarded as socially useless, or allotted a commercial price. The object–subject relationship in the Atlantic was an economic one, operating at a global level, and the material world shaped what people valued, what individuals purchased, what was destroyed, and what was created. At the material level, within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the social importance of capital motivated settler colonialism, sugar production, and, most importantly, the displacement of Africans to the New World. It was not morality, nationalism, or sentiments of justified punishment that created the transatlantic slave trade and institutionalized slavery. It was the promise of material wealth. Economy of social and material value is a unifying component for the essays in this collection, and is what, in part, makes it a transatlantic study. Triangulating material culture, social economics, and the eighteenth-century Atlantic is an essential task for current scholarship, and the contributors of this volume take up this dynamic task, exploring the Atlantic world with new and original approaches. Within this framework, Cultural Economies provides more interimperial and diasporic examinations within its chapters, pivoting toward a more international understanding of this intersectionality within the Atlantic world. It additionally supplies a larger economic theoretical model for understanding materiality in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. It is wellsituated yet unique from the single-authored monographs and edited collections that have preceded it. This collection would not have been possible without two major scholarly turns in the past decade: Atlantic Studies and Material Studies. The turn toward the eighteenth-century Atlantic in recent years is part of a larger scholarly shift toward globalizing our understanding of the Enlightenment, an act that illuminates the cross-cultural fluidity of colonial contact. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal Provincializing Europe is a theoretical signifier of this shift, as his major claims critique the Eurocentric formations of modernity, and “the problems of representation that [European political thought] invariably creates” for non-European peoples.16 His foundational work pluralizes the notion of modernity into a global arena. While his project gives greatest focus to South Asia, his critique offers other scholars the opportunity to consider his conceptual framework in other places in history. Atlantic Studies, in particular, has picked up a considerable pace in the past decade with this organizing framework, given its immense impact on the current geopolitical formations of the Western Hemisphere and the comparative absence from scholarship until recently.17 New identities, new nations, and new peoples were carved out of the economic and material conditions of the Atlantic, and this geopolitical generation, and the conditions that have brought the Atlantic into its present form, has created an important niche

Introduction 7 of transatlantic scholars. Atlantic Studies has been an area of study for decades, but recent scholarship has emphasized the interimperial and diasporic influences on Atlantic cultural formation. For example, Paul Gilroy and Jace Weaver have considered African and indigenous influences. Carla Pestana, Camilia Cowling, and Jennifer Morgan, among others, have written beautifully on women of color in the Atlantic. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Sam Goudie, and Anna Brickhouse have all drawn hemispheric connections and illuminated cultural interdependencies between the Americas. As these historians and literary scholars have acknowledged in their work, to write of the Atlantic is write of relations, networks, and exchanges that move beyond borders, boundaries, and oceans. The recent turn to the Atlantic is representative of the recent interrogation of national and isolated “imagined communities.” As we continue to explore the circum-Atlantic world, particularly at the height of its commercial wealth in the eighteenth century, the more we realize how deeply interconnected it is and how we must examine this history, and the literature produced within it, with a network-based framework of study. While an important intervention, it is also a difficult one for scholars in the field, as Atlantic Studies demands a knowledge base that transgresses the national bounds of language and literature. The study of the Atlantic is itself not located in the nation but rather in the inherent transnational and diasporic evolutions that remain in perpetual movement. Atlantic Studies is, by its nature, the study of the world removed from conventional paradigms of economic and cultural development. As Robert DuPlessis succinctly writes, the Atlantic “was both part of a wider history and contained numerous ecologies, each with its own development” and was, at its center, “a zone of especially dense networks of interconnections and interactions.”18 The Atlantic is constructed through the network itself, decentralized, and seemingly impermeable. It has been the primary ambition of Atlantic scholars to unravel the history of these tightly knit networks, as the contributors of this collection seek to do. The second major framework that informs this collection is that of Material Studies. For scholars of material culture, objects within the historical record are not simply functional. For many researchers, material objects can be registered as historical actors in their own right. Nicole Boivin articulates it best when she writes, the material world impacts on the social world in a real way, not just because of its ability to act as a carrier of ideas and concepts, but because its very materiality exerts a force that in human hands becomes a social force.19 Scholars in Material Studies claim that studying the world through available objects (as opposed to texts) provides a more accurate representation

8  Victoria Barnett-Woods of the daily lives within our shared history, particularly as most members of any historical group until recently were illiterate.20 Foundational to this understanding of the work is Actor-Network theory, established by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, who, in the 1980s, argued that everything in the world was a part of a larger network, where objects, humans, and concepts functioned as relational actors. When reading the world through relations, material history (to include the environment, material goods, print culture, animals, plants, etc.) can serve as an avenue for exploration into the cultural order that shapes and is shaped by history. Material Studies, as articulated within the social sciences, dismantles the Eurocentric ideological hierarchy of idealism over materialism. Idealism, with cognition, perception, and articulation of the world through that perception, is the ontological process within European Enlightenment constructions of self and the larger world.21 When one understands the world through the material first, excising presuppositions of “mind over matter,” the Cartesian philosophy that informs Western epistemology begins to falter. In similar terms, Atlantic Studies dismantles the Eurocentric cultural formations of that knowledge as it is acted upon the modern subject in terms of race, gender, and art. To study the material culture of the Atlantic world, as a comprehensive study, is to then interrogate European modernity at its core and consider alternative modes, through transatlanticism and non-Platonic materiality, how eighteenthcentury history was composed. This collection illustrates the numerous ways that Material and Atlantic Studies can speak to one another. All of the essays in this book consider the relationship between material culture, capitalism, and the transatlantic epistemology. Its purpose is to bring together these critical discussions about the eighteenth century to the fore, illuminating how interdisciplinary the eighteenth-century Atlantic can be. This collection seeks to shape new understandings and methodological approaches to the Atlantic, analyzing through case studies the social histories of the Atlantic world and its material international connections. Topics within this collection range widely, but they are all connected through cultural and historical overlaps, shared through literature, social thought, art, law, and the quotidian. This volume, considered as a whole, is multidisciplinary. It is not intentionally comparative, though a reader may be able to draw comparisons between distinct Atlantic cultures through their relationships with the material. Rather, this collection can be registered as collaborative, functioning under a mode or an interpretation of “cultural economies.” Each essay functions independently but engages with the scholarly topics surrounding it, inevitably all contributions work together to generate a broad understanding of the important conversations that are occurring at the intersection of Atlantic Studies, Material Studies, and the cultural economies that inform our understanding of a shared history.

Introduction 9 Cultural Economies is broken down into four thematically organized sections, each part illustrating a situation where materiality and cultural economics collide. Part I, entitled “Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination” examines the rhetoric of contagion and cure resulting from intimate and medicinal exchanges in the contact zone. Disease and contamination were anxious concerns of European explorers and colonial settlers and were continuously articulated in language of capitalistic objectification and colonial otherness. In Chapter 1, “ ‘Veneral Distemper’: Illicit Trade and Contagious Threat in the Journals of Captain James Cook,” by Lisa Vandenbossche, disease is read as a physical consequence of the economic exchange of indigenous female bodies for goods by sailors in Cook’s passing vessels. Captain Cook, morally and politically restrained in his journals to write of the exchanges between his men and indigenous women during their travels, composed them with a language of contagion. Vandenbossche explores this language, just as she investigates the sexual colonial contact between Cook’s sailors and indigenous women. Both on sea and land, this language of contamination can be registered as both fear of disease and also a fear of miscegenation. Especially in the Atlantic colonies, while mixed coupling was a frequent occurrence, white creoles feared that racial “contamination” of European blood would give rise to the degradation of the colonial enterprise. Focusing on Jamaican influence on British thought, Orianne Smith in Chapter 2 explores the ways in which fear of racial “contamination” and sexual exchange influenced the cultural economies of slavery and readerly consumption practices in the long eighteenth century. Her essay, “Creolizing the Gothic Narrative: The Politics of Witchcraft, Gender, and ‘Black’ Magic in Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta,” renders the plantocratic fear of racial miscegenation in the novelistic form of gothic fiction. According to Smith, Charlotte Smith’s work capitalizes upon colonial anxieties of racial otherness, especially within the cross-cultural context of the trope of the “witch” already established in England. The author of The Story of Henrietta has been historically recognized for criticizing the contemporary social conditions for women in England, which metaphorically reduce them to the subject position of slaves. What interests Orianne Smith in her essay is Charlotte Smith’s preoccupation with the subversive political potential of the figure of the female witch and how the presence of the Obi women—foreign, magical, and threatening—disrupt the narrative flow of Smith’s story, redirecting it in ways that Smith may not have anticipated. The language of religious and cultural “contamination” in The Story of Henrietta fuels the epistemological fire of racial difference within the British Caribbean. In Chapter 3, “Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge as Cultural Capital in the Greater Caribbean,” Chelsea Berry shifts the focus of the discussion to the historical medicinal networks of knowledge from within the free black communities in Bahia, Brazil. Medical practitioners

10  Victoria Barnett-Woods of African descent incorporated multiple sources of knowledge to acquire their reputations of individuals worthy of both fear and reverence by slaves and planters alike. The knowledge practitioners acquired speaks to the hybridity of medical practice in Bahia, and the accusations of sorcery against these practitioners attest to the anxieties they produced amongst Iberian colonists. Using a 1749 inquisitorial court case against two practitioners of African descent, Berry claims that networks of medical knowledge and the reputations of these individuals had within the region constituted a new kind of cultural capital. It was a form of capital granted to those of African descent and created a position of authority for this group within the Greater Caribbean. In all of these essays, the authors examine the cultural and medicinal economies of interracial exchange and the European formations of otherness that sought to objectify non-European others in the contact zone. Part II of this collection, “Representation and Power in the Contact Zone,” dovetails with the first in its discussions of the power evoked from such economically and politically motivated constructions of otherness in the Anglophone Atlantic. This section moves from the unseen language of contamination and microbial forces resulting from interpersonal contact to physical objects that interact with whomsoever possesses them. In Chapter 4, “Materializing the Immaterial: Creating Capital in a Mirrored Mirage,” Leah Thomas generates a theoretical frame for contextualizing the representation of African and AfricanCreole subjects in the imperial imagination. With a mirror serving as a metaphor for literary and physical imperial mapping, Thomas claims that the representation of Native Americans and Africans duplicated one another within the British imagination, thereby generating a conflation of two unique cultures within the British imperial mind. As Europeans continued to explore the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, the Americas, especially the Caribbean and South America, mirrored Africa as its inverse and was constructed to reflect the African continent as well as be both a metaphorical and physical extension of it. It is in this cultural conflation that texts can be seen as cartographic objects, materializing in the mapping of South America in the early eighteenth century. In Chapter 5, “Reading African Material Culture in the Contact Zone: Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea,” Rebekah Mitsein narrows the focus provided by Thomas and examines the representations of African ivory carvings and bronze castings written by these very same European travelers who commissioned African artisans to produce them. For example, Mitsein looks as Benin bronzes and ivory carvings and the British imperial interaction with these African objects. In examining the European and African cultural perceptions of these carvings and castings, Mitsein also interrogates the Eurocentric assumptions surrounding what constitutes a “text.” In her essay, she contends that these objects were replete with narratives of their own and

Introduction 11 express African histories and mythologies through their iconography. In comparing the European accounts of these material artifacts with contemporary African traditions and myths, Mitsein posits that present-day scholars have another way to conceptualize precolonial African texts and their European interpretations in the early modern period. In Chapter 6, “Fetishes and the Fetishized: Material Culture and Obeah in the British Caribbean,” Victoria Barnett-Woods continues Mitsein’s examination of distinct culturally coded value of objects in the contact zone. The chapter, however, considers the cultural economies of obeah fetish objects as they are represented in colonial accounts and trials against the enslaved in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. Quotidian items, including glass, hair, rum, and eggshells, grew to have their own value within the Anglophone Atlantic enslaved communities. Arguably, they were the material manifestations of African-Creole autonomy within the Atlantic world. This chapter examines the multifarious and culturally coded receptions of obeah fetish objects from the perspective of colonial law, white creole literature, and from within the enslaved communities themselves. Considered together within the section, these essays illustrate the material influence and cultural capital that constructed African-European influences within the African continent and in the Caribbean. Part III, “Consuming Cultures in the Colonial Atlantic,” is the most appetizing of the sections, as it provides a snapshot into how consumable goods—the ways they were circulated and consumed—developed different kinds of cultural economies in the Atlantic. In Chapter 7, “Maple: The Sugar of Abolitionist Aspirations,” Barry L. Stiefel considers maple sugar and its political and economic associations with the Abolition Movement in eighteenth-century North America. As a less labor-intensive alternative to the slave-produced sugar of the Caribbean, maple was heralded as the sweetener of choice amongst abolitionists and their sympathizers. Stiefel examines maple sugar’s participation and circulation in abolitionist North America, coordinating a unique understanding between commercial markets, material culture, and the politics of consumption practices. Christopher Magra’s essay illustrates that consumable goods not only signaled a cultural politic but also a militaristic one. In Chapter 8, “Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy: Circuits of Trade and Knowledge,” Magra interrogates the current scholarly position of chocolate’s minor role in the North American colonies. His reading contends that chocolate produced in mills across the North American seaboard contributed to state-sponsored violence in the wake of the Seven Year’s War. Mill owners and transatlantic mariners established a valuable knowledge network of market conditions, enforced by the military, that ensured growth of the region by forcing indigenous peoples off their land and clearing large zones of territory for commercial growth. Magra contends that chocolate and the mills that manufactured it for European consumption are significant actors in the economic boom of eighteenth-century

12  Victoria Barnett-Woods North America and the consequential militarized removal of indigenous peoples and land. Both Magra and Stiefel collectively show that it wasn’t sugar alone that coordinated a connection between sweetness and power. Part IV of this volume, “Labor and Identity in Early American Probates,” integrates the materiality of archival documentation and recordkeeping into the critical discussion of eighteenth-century material culture in the Atlantic. Essays provided by Kristin Condotta Lee in the first essay, and coauthors Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones in the second essay in this section, provide case studies for the critical value of labor politics and social identity in colonial America. Lee’s case study considers another laboring, though free, migrant class—Irish immigrants in early republican Louisiana. Referencing probate records and extant garments, Lee explores the material culture surrounding the cloths taken with these immigrant laborers when they traveled from Ireland to the New World. In Chapter 9, “ ‘The Only Property I could Dispose of to any Advantage’: Textiles as Mediators in Early Irish Louisiana,” Lee emphasizes the capitalistic power of cloth in the cultural mediation for immigrants in the early Americas. She focuses on the meaning of the linen undershirt— a popular export from contemporary Ireland—within long-distance economies. Her essay assesses in detail, with the help of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century professional texts, the values expected of men working in the reputation-based commercial networks of early Louisiana. It also shows how, in chasing their ambitions, these Irish migrant men unintentionally helped to sculpt standards for masculine dress that would extend well into the nineteenth century. In Chapter 10, “Institutionalizing the Slave Power at the Local Level: Deferential Care of Slaveholding Estates in Eighteenth-Century York County, Virginia,” Lucas and Jones construct a detailed analysis of probate inventories to draw the conclusion that wealthy whites in eighteenth-century Virginia were granted more social deference with the more slaves they owned. Using a sample of York County, Virginia, probate inventories were drawn from between 1700 and 1800 to show that court-appointed estate appraisers returned inventories that were longer, more thorough, and more descriptive for decedents who owned an unexpectedly large number of slaves. Their data suggest that owning slaves granted wealthy whites of eighteenth-century Virginia a type of social capital that transcended the wealth that the mastery of black bodies indicated. The commodification of people of color provided benefits to whites that rippled beyond their bank accounts. In this section, the probate records, as a material object that recorded the material possessions of others, shape the understanding of eighteenthcentury Anglo-America. Probate records, in effect, are material traces that epitomize the relationship between capital and the material culture of a particular time and place. The final part of this collection, “Capital Networks, Capital Control,” illustrates through two case studies the dynamic networks of knowledge

Introduction 13 that existed in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Just as Part I considered the rhetoric of contagion and cure by intimate exchange, Part V repositions the lens of material culture to face outward to the open sea, with the reading of larger networks of maritime exchange and commerce as objects within themselves. In Chapter 11, “Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800,” Phillip Reid topically examines the ordinary merchant ship and its deterministic role in the growing market of the British Atlantic. The ship not only carried material goods aboard its deck, but itself was also a commodity, gesturing toward the larger transatlantic network of peoples and goods. Without the maritime technologies developed for the merchant vessel, Reid contends, the imperial growth in the New World would not have been possible. The final essay in this collection draws us back to the Caribbean, to the town of Bridgetown, Barbados. In Chapter 12, “ ‘Unless Speedily Relieved from Old or New England, the Commoner Sort of People and the Slaves Must Starve’: The Changing Nature and Networks of the Barbadian Import and Export Trade, 1680–1700,” Ryan McGuinness considers the Bridgetown port as a critical space for cultural economic growth and development. McGuinness uses extant Naval Office Returns of Bridgetown, Barbados to examine how goods, tastes, and trade evolved over three consecutive time periods during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When considered together, these three periods depict the extensive and shifting nature of late seventeenth-century commercial networks and how Barbadian planters, farmers, indentured servants, enslaved individuals, and merchants established and maintained access to vital consumable commodities. The shifting access to trade goods influenced the cultural economies of Barbadian life, and McGuinness demonstrates the vicissitudes of these cultural shifts as they are rendered through port documents. Access to consumer goods was a vital part of early colonial Caribbean life, just as its economy was dependent upon its exports harvested by slave labor. The port, as the final object in this collection, epitomizes this inherent interdependence of capital and material culture in the Atlantic world. Each of the essays in this volume is a demonstration of the cutting-edge scholarly conversations circulating around the intersection of material culture and capital in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Considered collectively, however, a broader sense of the evolving cultural economies of the Americas can be seen. From the representation of colonial intimacies as contagion to the interimperial networks of goods, peoples, and knowledge, these essays demonstrate just how dynamic the intersection between the material Atlantic and market capitalism can be. Geographic differences and similarities across hemispheric spaces, the cultural composition of settlers and slaves, and unique imperial ideologies have all shaped the disparities between the Americas and within the Caribbean.

14  Victoria Barnett-Woods What unites the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century was a capitalistic drive shaped by the market goods and trade networks produced. The goal of this volume is not to provide a be-all and end-all examination of the cultural economies of the Atlantic world. Quite the opposite, the goal of this edited volume is to demonstrate the broad scope in which scholars can discuss the rich models of intersectionality present in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Embracing essays that consider the critical combinations that include material culture, race, gender, technology, ideology, culture, and economics is an important model for future intersectional scholarship. The objects, ideas, and capitalized networks of knowledge discussed in the following chapters illuminate the very essence of the cultural economies percolating, simmering, and circulating in the transatlantic imagination.

Notes 1. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique contentant l’histoire naturelle de ces pays, l’ Origine, le Moeurs, la Religion & le Gouvernement de Habitans anciens & modernes [. . .] (Paris: J.B. Delespine, 1742). All references to this edition. 2. See Doris L. Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2005), 93–145. 3. Donald Schier, “The Missionary and the Buccaneers: An Episode from Father Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de L’Amérique,” The French Review 17, no. 3 (1944): 138. 4. Labat, Nouveau Voyage, vol. 3, 53. 5. For recent extended discussions of buccaneering in the early Americas, see Benerson Little, The Buccaneer’s Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main, 1674–1688 (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2007) and Jon Latimer, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 6. Labat, Nouveau Voyage, vol. 7, 195. 7. Suzanne Toczyski, “Jean-Baptiste Labat and the Buccaneer Barbeque in Seventeenth-Century Martinique,” Gastronomica 10, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 61–69. 8. Labat, Nouveau Voyage, vol. 3, 66. 9. For images of the buccaneer and the correlating depictions of the Boucan cooking method, visit Benerson Little’s website: https://benersonlittle.wordpress.com/tag/boucan/ 10. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), xii. 11. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2016); Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015); Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 12. Daniel Maudlin and Bernard Herman, eds., Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places and Material Culture, 1600–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 4.

Introduction 15 13. David Shields, ed., Material Cultures in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). 14. John Styles and Amands Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 15. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22. 17. While the turn to the historical Atlantic is a critical conversation at the present, and will continue to be in the years to come, it certainly is not the first. Conceivably, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, originally published in 1944, is the first widely known scholarly attempt to connect slavery in the New World with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in England. In doing so, he draws the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas into a central role in the sociocultural formation of the British national identity. 18. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 17. 19. Nicole Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6. 20. See the Introduction to Ann Smart and Ritchie Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997). 21. Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds, 13–15.

Bibliography Bauer, Ralph and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Beckert, Sven. The Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage, 2015. Boivin, Nicole. Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2008. “buccan | bucan | boucan, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019. Accessed August 18, 2019. www.oed.com/view/Entry/24096. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. DuPlessis, Robert. The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, And Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Garraway, Doris L. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2005. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Goggin, Maureen Daly and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds. Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950. New York: Routledge, 2016.

16  Victoria Barnett-Woods Labat, Jean-Baptiste. Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique contentant l’histoire naturelle de ces pays, l’ Origine, le Moeurs, la Religion & le Gouvernement de Habitans anciens & modernes [. . .]. Paris: J.B. Delespine, 1742. Latimer, Jon. Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Little, Benerson. “Boucan.” Accessed February 11, 2019. https://benersonlittle. wordpress.com/tag/boucan/. ———. The Buccaneer’s Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main, 1674–1688. Washington, DC: Potomac, 2007. Maudlin, Daniel and Bernard Herman, eds. Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places and Material Culture, 1600–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Schier, Donald. “The Missionary and the Buccaneers: An Episode from Father Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de L’Amérique.” The French Review 17, no. 3 (1944): 138–44. Shields, David, ed. Material Cultures in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Smart, Ann and Ritchie Garrison, eds, American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997. Styles, John and Amands Vickery, eds. Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Toczyski, Suzanne “Jean-Baptiste Labat and the Buccaneer Barbeque in SeventeenthCentury Martinique.” Gastronomica 10, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 61–69.

Part I

Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination

1 “Venereal Distemper” Illicit Trade and Contagious Disease in the Journals of Captain James Cook Lisa Vandenbossche You are likewise to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives and Inhabitants, where you find any; and to endeavor, by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with them; making them Presents of such Trinkets as you may have on board, and they may like best; inviting them to Traffick; and shewing them every Civility and Regard.1 —Instructions from the British Admiralty to Captain James Cook As there were some venereal complaints on board both the Ships, in order to prevent its being communicated to these people, I can order that no Women, on any account whatever were to be admitted on board the Ships, I also forbid all manner of connection with them, and ordered that none who had the veneral upon them should go out of the ships.2 —Journal of Captain James Cook, Third Voyage

Often referred to as the Second Age of Exploration, the second half of the eighteenth century saw Great Britain (amongst other European powers) turn its attention to the Pacific, as the British Admiralty sent explorers from the Atlantic to the Pacific in search of scientific and geographic discovery. In order to control the Pacific, and new trade routes and lands promised by this space, one first had to use new technology to map it and its people, which became part of the goal of the British Admiralty and gained the attention of groups like the Royal Society. As part of this mission, Captain James Cook led three voyages on behalf of the British Admiralty: one from 1768 to 1771, one from 1772 to 1775, and a final one from 1776 to his death in 1779. These voyages were a mix of naval exploration and scientific discovery: Cook’s public instructions for his third voyage included returning a visiting native back home to the Society Islands, whereas his secret instructions included searching for a Northwest Passage, as well as interacting with and documenting native populations, in order to “with the consent of the Natives . . . take possession in the name of the King of Great Britain, of convenient situations in such Countries you may discover.”3 Ultimately unsuccessful in finding

20  Lisa Vandenbossche a Northwest Passage, Cook was successful in geographically mapping unknown worlds of the Atlantic and Pacific and culturally mapping the peoples he discovered in his written accounts of these places as he took possession. Written in part based on these secret instructions from the British Admiralty, Cook’s published journals served as a guide to understanding the diverse people and places that the explorers encountered. They detailed the establishment of the purposed “Traffick,” tracing goods moving on and off the ships and formal relations between natives and Europeans in order to chronicle successful patterns of interaction and “friendship” that might be followed by those who came next. These accounts thus intentionally made visible systems of exchange between European states and Atlantic and Pacific peoples. Less visible in Cook’s writings, however, were the informal systems of economic and cultural exchange between sexes that were enacted between common sailors and indigenous individuals. Concentrating on journal accounts from Cook’s final voyage, this chapter considers how depictions of native women in Cook’s journal from his last voyage obscured these informal exchange networks. Looking specifically at moments where relationships between members of his crew and native women are described, I suggest the published journal accounts use language of contagious disease to describe the relationship between common sailors and native women. Whereas European and indigenous men participate in “Traffick” encouraged by the Admiralty’s instructions, women are rhetorically figured as objects of this trade. I argue that these accounts thus divert a reader’s attention to the spread of disease, or “Venereal complaints,” on board ships and within island populations and mask systems of illicit trade in which women’s bodies are commodified as objects of material exchange. Disease in these accounts is the material manifestation of alternative systems of capital and exchange established by natives and sailors outside formal networks supported by those in authority. Tracing this use of “disease” in describing the relationship between common sailors and native women illustrates how “disease” in these accounts functions at material and metaphorical levels: it is both a physical consequence of the economic exchange of bodies for goods and a representative figuration of cultural exchange between European/ non-European, Christian/non-Christian actors. Language of contagious disease linked with cross-cultural material exchange in Cook’s journals works to then frame later reform discourse in the Pacific, eventually driving larger social and political changes in this part of the world. *** Cook’s writings from his first voyage were mainly envisioned as military reports for the British Admiralty. When they were compiled with other writings by scientists and sailors on board and published in an official

“Venereal Distemper” 21 account by Dr. John Hawkesworth, however, they met with controversy that sparked public interest and a more popular readership.4 This official published account included descriptions of women the explorers encountered in Tahiti, particularly Oberea5 who “at the time was supposed to be queen of the island [Tahiti]” and whose eyes held “uncommon intelligence and sensibility.”6 This first description of Oberea remains fairly positive, but the text follows it with more explicit details of Oberea’s sexual practices and sexual customs of the island in general. Recounting a visit made the next day by the ship’s naturalist Mr. Banks, Hawkesworth tells readers that when looking into Oberea’s chamber, Banks “found her in bed with a handsome young fellow about five and twenty.”7 Rather than condemn this action, the text normalizes it, explaining that Banks “was soon made to understand that such amours gave no occasion to scandal, and that [the fellow] was universally known to have been selected by her as the object of her personal favors.”8 This is followed in the next chapter by a description of a sexual rites of the Arioi in which Cook observes a young man, near six feet high perform[ing] the rites of Venus with a little girl about eleven or twelve years of age, before several of our people, and a great number of natives, without the least sense of it being indecent or improper.9 In fact, the text goes on to suggest that “several women of rank, particularly Oberea,” coached the girl in her duties.10 As before, Hawkesworth’s account does not explicitly condemn this practice but instead questions the relativity of morality in general, asking “whether the shame attending certain actions which are allowed on all sides to be in themselves innocent, is implanted in Nature, or superinduced by custom.”11 Rather than censor the text along Anglo-Christian norms, in translating the experiences of the explorers for a British reading audience, Hawkesworth’s text invited questions about moral and religious norms more broadly. For British moralists, Hawkesworth’s writing about these sexual encounters was an act in and of itself that would spread contagious ideas about alternative models of sexual expression and female agency when it was read in England. This sparked outrage amongst British readers who feared the text might elicit similar sexual behavior in the homeland. As Anne Maxwell explains, “at stake was the possibility that an Edenic vision of the South Sea Islands might encourage domestic attempts to rebel against the established gender and political order.”12 Being too complimentary toward Pacific culture and sexual expression in narrative was dangerous in that it might encourage readers to rethink established order in the homeland and “the tendency to ‘go native’ observable in the plebeians of Cook’s crew might be repeated by the susceptible maidens, matrons, and mobs of the metropolis.”13 Social conservatives, amongst others, called for censorship of the text, inspiring questions about the

22  Lisa Vandenbossche relationship between exploration and documentation. Maxwell suggests this intense negative reaction encouraged Cook to rethink his own role as literary writer and Nicholas Thomas describes this shift during the second voyage as a change in both thinking and emphasis, when “Cook’s ambitions had turned from geographic to literary accomplishments.”14 While Thomas admits that Cook “never says so in so many words,” he convincingly shows Cook’s “greater attention to his writing, his redrafting, his expansion, his reflection and his address to his reader, say so again and again.”15 The publication of writings from the voyage taught Cook a lesson that would impact his later writings; he gained concern for both what he was saying and how he was saying it. As Cook became aware of the cultural significance of his words and the larger scope of his published work in the third voyage, descriptions of native women and sexual contact become censored through discourses of trade and contagious disease that obscure (rather than compliment) female actors and condemn these sexual practices. Descriptions of female actors and sexual practices disappeared into a language of disease prevention and reform. This shift in Cook’s understanding of his role as explorer and writer between his first and third voyages reflected a shift in the relationship between art and subject in terms of documenting voyages of exploration in the Pacific more broadly. By his third voyage, both Cook and the British Admiralty had become more familiar with the Pacific, Cook having already mapped parts of the southern Pacific and reported these findings from his first two voyages. The first two voyages were focused on mapping spaces; however, the rise of ethnography as a valid mode of scientific inquiry placed a greater importance on mapping people. Tracing this shifting focus through visual art, Bernard Smith notes, important advances were made in these sciences continually throughout the three voyages, but there were differences in emphasis . . . the first voyage is the botanical voyage, par excellence, the second is the meteorological voyage, and the third, the ethnographic voyage.16 According to Cook’s secret instructions, the goal of the voyage was to locate a Northwest Passage. The unofficial scientific objective that Cook also undertook was to produce ethnographic data (visual and written) of the people and cultures encountered in order to establish connections with them. In order to do so, Cook’s accounts often focused on how best to build and maintain relationships with the people he and his crew encounter to establish a “Traffik” in trade. Part of this included documenting moments of sexual exchange, along with documenting the importance of limiting contact, between sailors and native women as a means of preventing disease between natives and visiting sailors and creating friendships with local peoples.

“Venereal Distemper” 23 Cook’s journals carefully chronicle the goods that each ship takes with them as they leave England and how and where these goods are exchanged in order to maintain these peaceful relations to gain goods from native leaders. Thomas Dye interprets historical moments of transactions between Hawaiian natives and Cook’s men in the third voyage as a European misreading of the gift exchange culture of the kanaka maoli people of the Hawaiian Islands, a tradition in which “one seeks to maximise the value of the social relationships that are forged” rather than commodity exchange in which “one seeks to maximise the value of the things that one receives.”17 Hawaiian and other Oceania natives might have very well understood these exchanges in terms of social rather than European, exchange value; however, in Cook’s published journals, the exchanges are commodified into transactional value. Journal accounts transcribe these moments of exchange in terms of capitalistic transaction, as the (normally male) natives at times show “great readiness to part with anything they had and took what was offered to them in exchange.”18 Other times natives are depicted as asserting even stronger European notions of property rights having “high notions of everything the Country produced being their exclusive property” and demanding “payment” for goods like wood and water that are taken on board.19 Describing natives as participants in “Traffick” and capitalist exchange imbibes them with comprehension of European value and goods, appearing to both understand and participate in official networks of commercial exchange with officers on board, especially Cook. Cook’s narrative thus suggests both the establishment of official commercial “Traffick” between himself and natives on shore and the cultivation of friendship through these exchanges. Interactions between common sailors and native men borrow this same language in published journals. When Cook’s ships get close to land in places Cook is familiar with, sailors are often allowed on shore or native men are permitted by those in authority to visit the ships. In talking about these moments, Cook explains to his readers, by the time we had anchored the Ships were filled with the Natives and surrounded by a multitude of Canoes, filled also with them. They brought with them hogs, Fowls, fruit and roots which they exchanged for Hatchets, Knives, Nails beads, Cloth &c.20 In this account, native men who visit the sailors bring physical products that they exchange for other material goods. Just as Cook and his officers trade goods brought from home in order to gain goodwill and supplies as “payment,” sailors exchange material goods with native men for products from home in the Atlantic. Careful note is made by Cook of these officially sanctioned exchanges, along with geographic coordinates where they take place. This marked them as friendly populations and

24  Lisa Vandenbossche created visible networks of commercial exchange or “Traffick” for the British Admiralty and explorers who he anticipates will follow his voyages to the Pacific. In marking fluid networks of trade between natives and sailors with an official stamp of approval, Cook solidified these networks for those who will come after him. The careful tracking and visibility of these networks privileges the relationships between male natives and male sailors, while at the same time it obscures the relationship between native women and these same sailors—marking Cook’s disapproval and even prohibition of it. Cross-cultural sex was common in many places that Cook and his men visited and depictions of these exchanges can be found throughout accounts of all three voyages. Kathleen Wilson reads encounters in Polynesia in particular as potential acts of empowerment, where women participated in “traffic in European men: first for supernatural access; second, as that illustration faded, to get highly desirable manufactured goods that allowed locals to raise their own status or wage war.”21 Like Wilson, Anne Maxwell and Caroline Ralston also suggest a degree of autonomy in relationships between Tahitian and Hawaiian women who use their connections with European sailors to elevate social and possible economic standing.22 Whereas David Chappell questions the “extent of female volunteerism” in his study of shipboard relationships between Pacific Island Women and EuroAmerican men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguing “the consequent ‘control’ of the situation represented by personal choice—is difficult to interpret, considering the partial nature of the evidence.”23 In historic reality, it seems at least some Pacific women exerted control over their bodies as articles of trade and willingly participated for reasons we can only partially reconstruct. Hawkesworth’s account of Oberea from Cook’s first voyage seems to suggest this reading. In narrative figuration in Cook’s journals from the third voyage, however, the agency of these women disappears. While male networks of exchange are intentionally made visible by Cook for his readers and for those who will attempt to recreate his voyages, male/female networks are made invisible, as women become objects of trade rather than partners. Cook’s narrative highlights this notion of female bodies as objects of trade, referring to “articles of commerce” that natives in New Zealand bring to trade as “Curiosities, Fish and Women.”24 Cook then goes on to explain for readers that while “the two first always came to a good market . . . the latter did not: the Seamen had taken a kind of dislike to these people and were either unwilling or afraid to associate with them.”25 Native men gain agency through the language of exchange in the narrative, while women are objects in this same discourse, compared to (and actually listed after) “curiosities” and “fish,” whose bodies might be traded for the objects described earlier in the text like “Hatches, Knives, Nails, beads.”26 Women are not trading

“Venereal Distemper” 25 partners with their own agency but rather written about as goods in and of themselves, who are to be traded. As objects to be traded, however, female bodies were more complicated than curiosities and fish; they offered an alternative network of capital and exchange that posed a dangerous threat to the establishment of official trade networks between men and to the overall success of the voyage. In his first two voyages, Cook often allowed these alternative exchanges, as local women could come on board ship at anchor and his sailors were permitted to interact with them on shore; however, by his third voyage Cook had developed a stricter policy concerning these encounters in new places. His writings suggest that, like other naval leaders of the period, Cook understood some of the dangers that European contact posed for the health of Pacific people who had no previous contact with European populations, and that he anticipated dangers that sexual exchange posed to the success of his journey. In order to ensure healthy economic relationships between Cook and his native contacts, he had to limit sexual relationships between his crew and native women. Rather than talk about these instances in the language of commerce, however, by the third voyage published journals connected cross-cultural sexual practices and alternative networks of exchange with sexually transmitted diseases, thus linking sexual exchange and barter between sailors and native women within a discourse of contagious disease. The spread of contagious sexually transmitted diseases was a legitimate fear that had real material consequences, as “venereal distemper” could spread throughout the crew and native populations, with the potential to destroy entire nations with which Cook and his men interact and the sailors whose labor is needed to complete the voyage. The concern that Cook shows for disease transmission in accounts from his third voyage might very well reflected a genuine worry for this physical reality. It simultaneously, however, marked a rhetorical shift away from depictions of native women in Hawkesworth’s account. Detailed descriptions of native women and sexual practices become obscured in accounts from Cook’s third voyage and female agency within more fluid and informal networks of alternative capital exchange disappears into a preoccupation with disease transmission. As objects of trade, within this discourse women become the means by which disease is exchanged between European sailors and native populations. In what Cook terms the Sandwich Islands (modern-day Hawaii), he explains, as there were some venereal complaints on board both the ships, in order to prevent its been communicated to these people, I gave orders that no Women, on any account were to be admitted on board the Ships, I also forbid all manner of connection with them and ordered that none who had the veneral upon them should go out of the ships.27

26  Lisa Vandenbossche Here alternative networks of commercial exchange are masked by the concern of contagious disease that might be spread from those on board the ship to women on shore. Rather than write about this exchange in the language of commerce, Cook connects both (and his prohibition of it) as the desire to limit the spread of “venereal complaints.” In making “Venereal complaints” the reason sailors are not allowed to have contact with native women, Cook implies this contact would result in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases from Europeans to native populations. Unlike Hawkesworth’s account, Cook does not explicitly describe sexual contact. Disease instead becomes a cover for alternative systems of capital and sexual exchange that were established by native women and sailors. In framing his prohibition in a discourse of disease prevention, rather than commerce, Cook figures himself as a benevolent reformer. He becomes an authority figure who intervenes for the good of native women whose bodies (as capital to be exchanged) would become the site of disease if he did not keep them away from his crew (who would infect them as part of this exchange). Even as Cook acknowledges European male bodies as the origin of disease, female bodies are identified as objects by which (by becoming capital in nonofficially sanctioned trade networks) this contagious disease is spread to the rest of the native population. As captain, Cook’s orders were law for his sailors and his prohibition against exchanges between native women and sailors made sexual trading between these groups illegal. Men and women who engaged in these illegal sexual exchanges became marked visibly by the very diseases of which Cook is trying to prevent the spread. Unknown in the “new” worlds of the Pacific before contact with Europeans, venereal diseases were a real threat to those specifically connected with maritime labor and in port towns more generally. Sailors on long voyages, like those to the Pacific, were of particular concern, as their labor was needed to run the ship and complete the mission. For this reason, according to Thomas, “England’s Royal Navy for its part treated the infection as a violation of discipline, and docked the pay of men who made themselves incapable of service through carnal carelessness.”28 The diseases that sailors got were a physical manifestation, seen by the British Navy as punishment for those who ignore the rules of shipboard discipline. Once Cook prohibited cross-cultural sexual exchange and alternative trade networks that relied upon it, contagious disease took on an even stronger meaning. It signaled sailors’ participation in this practice of trading goods for sex when they were specifically forbidden by their captain from doing so. The painful consequences of venereal diseases were the dangerous result of indiscriminate sexual practices and cross-cultural partnering. In addition to making visible the disobedience of the actors, cross-cultural sexual encounters in the text also made visible the moral shortcomings of those who engage in it. Men are forced to pay doubly for their disobedience.

“Venereal Distemper” 27 The language of contagious disease made it possible for Cook to critique the moral shortcomings of his crew (and the non-Christian native women they encounter) without being explicit about their transgressions. When traveling further up the coast of the North American mainland in modern-day Canada and Alaska, Cook describes the Russian traders they meet as far more careful and more moral than his own men: “they never had any connections with the Indian Women, because they [the women] were not Christians,” which saves them from the consequences of contracting their diseases.29 Unlike the Russians, Cook’s sailors lack Christian moral codes; they were not so scrupulous, and some were taken in, for the Venereal distemper is not unknown to these people; they are also subject to the cancer or a disease like it, which those who have it are very careful to conceal.30 Natives will work to conceal contagious diseases from visiting sailors, in order to protect the value of their bodies as capital in trade. Again, rather than make explicit networks of capital exchange and the active role that natives play in it, Cook instead describes the active role they play in hiding their diseases. Cook then offers a moral reading of this exchange, as Russian traders are designated as men with stronger ethical courage than Cook’s men, who are able to exert better self-control than British sailors and who are consequently spared from the horrors of disease. Had Cook’s men been more “scrupulous” or of sterner moral character like the Russians they encounter, then they would not be suffering from the diseases they now have. This marked Cook’s writings as distinct from Hawkesworth and more acceptable for British readers in the metropolis. Disease in them becomes a physical manifestation and visible marker of moral shortcomings, but the informal trade networks that produce contagious diseases remain obscure and fluid. Cook’s journals thus illustrate how relationships between sailors and natives were mitigated by the reformist interventions of those in power, as British sailors are described as men in desperate need for intervention by those for their own good and the good of those around them. Native women on shore seek to conceal illnesses that they have in order to engage in trade, and it is only men of scruples who are not taken in by these women. Cook concedes in his journal that his intervention might not be enough though, telling readers whether these regulations had the desired effect or no time can only discover. It is no more than what I did when I first visited the Friendly Islands yet I afterwards found it did not succeed, and I am afraid this will always be the case where it is necessary to have a number of people on shore.31

28  Lisa Vandenbossche This lack of success is attributed to the actions of his men who are unable to curb their own impulses and his own inability to control the actions of everyone in his control at all times, for “the opportunities and inducements to an intercourse between the sex, are there too many to be guarded against.”32 Cook’s men are taken with illness because, according to Cook, they are incapable of considering the physical and moral implications of contagious diseases and continue to engage in illicit trade after he has forbidden it. Cook’s judgment was not simply reserved for his own men, however, as the sexual availability of one’s women is also seen as a mark of civility in native cultures. He tells the Admiralty that he believes it has been found amongst uncivilized people that where the Women are easy of access, the Men are the first who offer them to strangers, and where this is not the case they are not easily come at, neither large presents nor privacy will induce them to violate the laws of chastity or custom.33 In “uncivilized” (non-Christian) nations, women are expected to follow the rule of men, like sailors are expected to follow the rule of their captain at sea. The natives are represented as the sailors: men and women with the capacity for moral thought and action but need the help of authorities to maintain their honorable principles. Native women are not expected to rebuff the men who are willing to trade goods for services, and the sailors themselves have little compunction to moderate their actions for the welfare of the native population. Whereas Hawkesworth’s text suggests that morality might be culturally relative, Cook’s journal from this third voyage argues against this thinking, illustrating examples of native cultures that exhibit principles in line with Christian morality. Cook presents the fluidity of alternative networks of exchanges like those between sailors and native women as a threat to safety in places with native cultures that value morality along Anglo-Christian norms. Cross-cultural sexual encounters not only lead to the spread of physical contagious disease but also spread the social unrest (a different but equally dangerous contagious “disease”) within native populations that results in the outbreak of violence—violence that Cook attributes directly to this practice of cross-cultural, sexual exchange and networks of alternative capital exchange. Cook explains that some “men are of opinion it is one of the greatest securities amongst Indians,” thus echoing language that advocated for the security of “going native.” This is a practice that social critics in England opposed in Hawkesworth’s text, and perhaps with this lesson in mind, Cook is clear to dismiss this justification. He argues, “it may hold good when you intend to settle amongst them; but with travelers and strangers, it is generally otherwise and more men are

“Venereal Distemper” 29 betrayed than saved by having connection with their women.”34 While those in settler colonies or living at the edge of the frontier might find safety in integrating into native cultures through sexual exchange, Cook does not even entertain the notion that his sailors might settle amongst the uncivilized people they encounter. In Cook’s opinion, casual crosscultural sexual relationships for those who are passing through can only hurt relationships between natives and European sailors, inspiring violence rather than safety. When visiting new people with whom Europeans had yet to establish friendships and new places that lacked clearly established rules from those in authority about “Traffick” networks, female bodies have the potential to become contested objects in alternative capital exchange networks that disrupt official trade. In Van Diemen’s Land (modernday Tasmania), Cook and his men “paid their addresses and made [the women] large offers which were rejected with great disdain, whether from a sence of Verture or for fear of displeasing the Men I shall not pretend to determine.”35 Cook is unable to read the social customs well enough here to determine the cause for the reluctance of the women. He understands that their unwillingness to receive his men, however, has the potential to destabilize the relationship between him and the natives because relationship between women and European men “was certainly not very agreeable” to the native men. He cites an example of “an elderly man [who] as soon as he observed it, ordered all the Women and Children away, which they obeyed, but not without some of them shewing a little reluctancy.”36 In this instance, native men control the actions of their women who appear to possibly be interested in European men on board Cook’s ships, not allowing them to engage in trade with what might otherwise be willing partners. Here woman become objects that men from Van Diemen’s Land are unwilling to trade, thus no “Traffick” (either official or within alternative networks) is established. Cook reads the dangers inherent in this lack of exchange, as he argues, “this conduct to Indian Women is highly blameable” fearing that “it creates a jealousy in the men that may be attended with fatal consequences, without answering any one purpose whatever, not even that of the lover obtaining the object of his wishes.”37 In this example, intercultural sexual exchange between sailors and local women carries with it the threat of physical, material violence. In nations where virtue is prized, and/or men are unwilling to allow women to become capital in alternative trade networks, men will fight to protect their women. These women might not be infected with physical diseases, but their bodies still represent the potential for a deadly outbreak. Beyond the threat of medical disease, physical violence is a potential outcome, and social unrest can spread across the population just as quickly as contagious disease, with disastrous results.

30  Lisa Vandenbossche The danger of limiting the actions of sailors extended beyond the actions of sailors on shore, as the ship itself became a place of possible social unrest. Cook references this unrest when he describes a “mutinous” and “turbulent crew” who rebel against shipboard restrictions on food and drink.38 When Cook moves through the Pacific and up the coast of North America, his benevolent reform practice of limiting contact between sailors and women for the good of the native population only serves to increase these already present tensions. As the postscript to Cook’s journal documents, Cook’s increasing reluctance to allow relationships between his crew and natives results in Cook’s having “men flogged who had connections with women in spite of having venereal disease.”39 Venereal distemper can spread throughout the crew and the native populations with the potential to destroy entire nations with which Cook and his men interact and the morale of sailors whose labor is needed to complete the voyage. While ignoring sexual transmitted diseases, in his study of surgeons on board Cook’s voyages, W.E. Snell traces the high number of disease and death on board and the attempts of surgeons to limit both. According to Snell, disease spread rapidly in the confined space of the ship and death brought with it emotional and psychological ramifications, which often impacted the morale of the crew and their relationship with superior officers.40 Cook’s death, the result of a series of escalating altercations and misunderstandings between native Hawaiians and him and his men on shore in the Sandwich Islands, occurs before the crew puts any (real or imagined) mutinous plans into place. Cook, however, was aware that his intervention on behalf of the native women put him on shaky ground with the men he governed at sea and impacted the environment of the ship. Cook’s impulse to intercede in order to reform the actions of all men who served under him on his ship set a pattern for intervention by reformers between sailors and natives, and potential pushback from sailors, that came to define life in and writing about the Pacific into the mid-nineteenth century. *** By the third voyage, Cook had established himself as an active writer and editor eager to frame his own words and control their public reception. Through this service to England, Cook became an important naval figure, rising through the ranks of the profession, gaining larger social standing.41 In her study of the impact of the figure of Captain Cook, Kathleen Wilson explains that Cook became a nationalistic model, “heralded as a particularly English hero who embodied and extended his country’s genius for navigation and discovery, aptitude for science, respect for merit, love of liberty and paternalistic regard for humanity.”42 Through his published

“Venereal Distemper” 31 writings, Cook also became an important public figure, gaining national recognition for his exploration and humanitarian efforts.43 For Duncan Robertson, Cook’s voyages signaled “the birth of voyaging as a more intensely scientific process of exploration, where culminate experiences were codified into system procedure and results”44—all of which could and would be transmitted home to the Atlantic. As David Igler argues in his history of the Pacific Ocean, “Cook’s voyages—quickly followed by the wide dissemination of his journals—brought global attention to the Pacific as well as sustained contact with native groups throughout the ocean.”45 Less attention, however, has been paid to the language of the texts themselves and the impact this language has on eighteenth-century understandings of the Pacific World and its people. As Smith reminds us, “Cook’s voyages were not only fact-gathering phenomena, they deeply affected conceptual thought, and their influence penetrate deeply into the aesthetic realm.”46 In Cook’s journals, the language of contagious disease paints sailors and native women who engage in these illicit trade networks as men and women who are in need of reformist intervention—for actions like these must be curtailed by those who know better and are better equipped to make decisions that protect Europeans and native populations from both contagious diseases and contagious violence. Cook’s journals from his third voyage illustrate ways in which relationships between sailors and natives were mitigated by the reformist interventions of those in power who, in attempting to reform the actions of sailors, end up intervening in the government and culture of the Pacific people with whom they interacted on their voyages. Captains, and other authority figures, became a means of intervention between an unthinking crew and the native populations of the places they traveled to as a method of reforming both groups of people. While Euro-American missionaries in the Pacific are often discussed in opposition to Cook and many captains who came after him, I suggest a discursive continuity between these groups, as both use a language of contagious disease to reform both native populations and the sailors who visit them.47 In the early nineteenth century, Christian missionaries from the Atlantic coast of the newly established United States looked to the Pacific in general (and Hawaii more specifically) as a setting for religious conversion and social reform. One of the early American missionaries to the islands was Sheldon Dibble, who would become one of the first Euro-American historians of Hawaii. In A History of the Sandwich Islands, Dibble’s celebration and critique of Cook are linked to Cook’s humanitarian efforts and relationship with disease transmission, namely, his inability to stop his men from spreading it. Dibble commends Cook for an intercourse with the natives of Hawaii that “was marked, as the world would say, with kindness and humanity” offering a generally positive reading of the

32  Lisa Vandenbossche figure of Cook himself.48 Yet it is Cook’s legacy in Hawaii and connection to disease transmission that Dibble condemns, as it cannot be concealed that here and at this time, in the form of loathsome disease, was dug the grave of the Hawaiian nation; and from so deep an odium it is to be regretted, that faithful history cannot exempt even the fair name of Captain Cook himself, since it is evident that he gave countenance to the evil.49 Whereas Cook’s published accounts code the relationships between his men and Hawaiian women in terms of disease, Dibble uses the language of contagious disease to negatively evaluate Cook’s relationship with the Hawaiian people. While Cook did not engage with women himself, in Dibble’s account the “loathsome disease” that Cook’s men introduce still dirties the “fair name” of the Captain. The work of early Protestant missionaries from England and the United States, like Dibble, drove increasing religious conversion across all ranks of society, including government leaders and the royal family in the Hawaii. Sharing Cook’s understanding of disease as both literal and metaphorical, Dibble links religious conversion on the islands with the language of contagious disease. In his history, this language of disease gets mixed with the language of morality, as he identifies “sin and death” as “the first commodities imported to the Sandwich Islands” through the cross-cultural sexual trade. Disease becomes the mark of evil, a physical manifestation of immoral action on the part of both Euro-American sailors and native women; a “deadlier evil” that comes from Christian nations and “is sweeping the population to the grave with amazing rapidity.”50 Conversion, however, is a means by which the spread of this disease might be stopped as Dibble admits that it is “yet to be seen whether the influences of Christianity on the rising race shall stay that desolation,” but he is hopeful that it has the power to do so.51 These conversions inspired government officials in 1825 to issue a proclamation concerning the enforcement of ancient Hawaiian conduct laws. Like Cook’s own attempts to regulate the actions of his men at sea, this proclamation prohibited native women from visiting ships at anchor, as well as imposed limitations on the sale of liquor and established a curfew to prevent sailors from visiting island towns after nightfall. The result was, as Cook feared it might be on his own ships, violent riots by sailors in port towns in Hawaii throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, raising questions about personal responsibility and the power of the government to solidify otherwise fluid networks of alternative capital exchange in official trade networks. The use of the language of contagious disease in Cook’s accounts thus worked to establish a pattern of intervention that shaped writing about and life in the Pacific well into the

“Venereal Distemper” 33 nineteenth century, as well as influenced social and political discourses of disease and illicit trade that raised questions about intervention and personal responsibility that endure to this day.

Notes 1. Montagu, John, 4th Earl of Sandwich, “Secret Instructions to Captain Cook” (letter to Captain James Cook, British Library, 1776). 2. James Cook, The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Philip Edwards (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 532. 3. The Admiralty tells Cook specifically to “observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives and Inhabitants,” which Cook documents in journals to be reported back to his superiors and published for consumption by the British public. 4. All the writings from Cook’s first voyage were turned over to the British Admiralty who commissioned a cohesive narrative of the expedition. Dr. John Hawkesworth was commissioned to collect the various accounts and compile them into one comprehensive, official text from the voyage that was published for a general readership. 5. A more complete account of the relationship between Oberea and European explorers (including the origin of the mistaken notion that she was queen of the entire island) can be found in Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 6. John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere: and Successively Performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour: Drawn up from the Journals Which Were Kept by the Several Commanders, and from the Papers of Joseph Banks, 3 vols (London: printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell in the Strand, 1773), 105. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 128. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Anne Maxwell, “Fallen Queens and Phantom Diadems: Cook’s Voyages and England’s Social Order,” The Eighteenth Century 38, no. 3 (1997): 247. 13. Ibid. 14. Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Walker Books, 2003), 257. 15. Ibid. 16. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 193. 17. Thomas S. Dye, “Gift Exchange and Interpretations of Captain Cook in the Traditional Kingdoms of the Hawaiian Islands,” The Journal of Pacific History 46, no. 3 (2011): 276. 18. Cook, Journals, 539. 19. Ibid., 546. 20. Ibid., 466. 21. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 184. 22. Maxwell concentrates her reading of these relationships on depictions of Tahitian women in Cook’s journals (particularly the ones from the first

34  Lisa Vandenbossche voyage edited by Hawkesworth), whereas Ralston concentrates on relationships between Hawaiian women and Cook’s men. Caroline Raston, “Changes in the Lives of Ordinary Women in Early Post-Contact Hawaii,” in Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, eds. Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 23. David A. Chappell, “Shipboard Relations between Pacific Island Women and Euroamerican Men 1767–1887,” The Journal of Pacific History 27, no. 2 (1992): 135. 24. Cook, Journals, 452. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 466. 27. Ibid., 532. 28. Thomas, “Gift Exchange and Interpretations,” xxv. 29. Cook, Journals, 590. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 532. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 449. 34. Ibid., 452. 35. Ibid., 449. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Cook, Journals, 595. 39. Ibid., 608. 40. W. E. Snell, “Captain Cook’s Surgeons,” Medical History 7, no. 1 (1963): 46. 41. For in-depth, biographical readings of Cook and his life, see Frank McLynn, Captain Cook: Master of the Seas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) and Dan O’Sullivan, In Search of Captain Cook: Exploring the Man Through His Own Words (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 42. Wilson, The Island Race, 59. 43. Bronwen Douglas reminds us that Cook’s legacy into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, is more complicated, illustrating his “denunciation as a ‘transgressor’ by nineteenth-century Christian Hawaiians, and his demonization as a violent proto-colonizer by many indigenous people, especially in Hawaii, Australia and Canada.” Timothy Sandefur echoes this when he laments the fact that the contemporary twenty-first-century Cook is often seen as a “vanguard of imperialism and the exploitation of native peoples in his attempt has attempt to recover the reputation of ‘a humane man, a conscientious scholar—and in the context of his era—astonishingly modern in the treatment of the natives his expeditions first encountered.’ ” Bronwen Douglas, “Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People,” History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 713 and Timothy Sandefur, “Captain Cook: Explorer of the Enlightenment,” The Objective Standard (2017): 23. 44. Duncan Robertson, “Metropolitan Scurvy in the Shadow of the Cook Voyages,” The Journal of Pacific History 52, no. 1 (2017): 15. 45. David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. 46. Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 52. 47. In The Island Race, Kathleen Wilson in particular reads accounts of English missionary groups like the London Missionary Society from Tahiti as

“Venereal Distemper” 35 being intentionally oppositional representations of ethnographic works like Cook’s, Journals, 81–83. 48. Dibble Sheldon, A History of the Sandwich Islands (Honolulu: Thos. G. Thrum, 1909), 9. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid.

Bibliography Chappell, David A. “Shipboard Relations between Pacific Island Women and Euroamerican Men 1767–1887.” The Journal of Pacific History 27, no. 2 (1992): 131–49. Cook, James. The Journals of Captain Cook. Edited by Philip Edwards. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 3 Volumes. Edited by J. C. Beaglehole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955–68. Dibble, Sheldon. A History of the Sandwich Islands. Honolulu: Thos. G. Thrum, 1909. Douglas, Bronwen. “Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People.” History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 712–37. Dye, Thomas S. “Gift Exchange and Interpretations of Captain Cook in the Traditional Kingdoms of the Hawaiian Islands.” The Journal of Pacific History 46, no. 3 (2011): 275–92. Hawkesworth, John. An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere: And Successively Performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour: Drawn up from the Journals Which Were Kept by the Several Commanders, and from the Papers of Joseph Banks, 3 vols, 105. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell in the Strand, 1773. Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Maxwell, Anne. “Fallen Queens and Phantom Diadems: Cook’s Voyages and England’s Social Order.” The Eighteenth Century 38, no. 3 (1997): 247–58. McLynn, Frank. Captain Cook: Master of the Seas. New Haven: Yale University, 2011. Raston, Caroline “Changes in the Lives of Ordinary Women in Early PostContact Hawaii.” In Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact, edited by Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Robertson, Duncan Robertson. “Metropolitan Scurvy In the Shadow of the Cook Voyages.” The Journal of Pacific History 52, no. 1 (2017): 15–33. Salmond, Anne. Aphrodite’s Island. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Sandefur, Timothy. “Captain Cook: Explorer of the Enlightenment.” Objective Standard: A Journal of Culture and Politics 12, no. 2 (2017): 23–46.

36  Lisa Vandenbossche Smith, Bernard. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Snell, W. E. “Captain Cook’s Surgeons.” Medical History 7, no. 1 (1963): 43–55. Thomas, Nicholas. Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook. New York: Walker Books, 2003. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2002.

2 Creolizing the Gothic Narrative The Politics of Witchcraft, Gender, and “Black” Magic in Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta Orianne Smith Written in the midst of the Haitian Revolution when the British feared a similar rebellion amongst the slave population in Jamaica, Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta explores the issue of slavery from a gendered perspective. Henrietta was published in 1800, the same year when William Earle’s popular novel, Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack, appeared as well as a pantomime version written by John Fawcett. While Earle’s novel and Fawcett’s pantomime focused on Jamaica’s most notorious revolutionary—Jack Mansong, or “Three Finger Jack,” a former slave and guerilla fighter who was killed by Maroons in 1781— Smith’s novel approaches the subject of colonial unrest from a different angle. The Story of Henrietta centers upon the plight of the daughter of a tyrannical slaveholder in Jamaica whose idyllic life with her aunt in London is cut short by her aunt’s death and her father’s demand that she joins him at his plantation in the British colony. Poised on the brink of marriage with a respectable Englishman, Henrietta obeys her father, only to discover that he is planning to marry her off to one of his sycophants on the island. In this unusual entry in the Gothic genre, Smith unfolds a story that takes the Gothic narrative into uncharted territory— the colonial setting of Jamaica replete with threatening Maroons, a slave rebellion, tropical storms and earthquakes, and a sexually terrifying encounter with a lovesick slave who tricks Henrietta into running away with him. Scholarship on The Story of Henrietta tends to emphasize Smith’s negative representation of the slave population in Jamaica as an indicator of her endorsement of the increasing anti-abolitionist rhetoric at the turn of the century. For instance, George Boulukos argues that Henrietta “marks the transition from discomfort with the concept of race in the eighteenth century to ever more pronounced belief in racial difference in the nineteenth century.”1 M.O. Grenby goes even further, noting that Smith is “critical of the abuses of slavery but by no

38  Orianne Smith means an opponent of the institution.”2 Adriana Craciun points out the importance of Henrietta in discussions of “Enlightenment feminism’s problematic engagement with slavery,” and suggests that Smith’s “revolutionary cosmopolitanism” founders at the border of race.3 Although I agree with these scholars that The Story of Henrietta is problematic in terms of its racial politics, Smith spares no one in her sharp critique of the uses and abuses of patriarchal power and its corrosive effect on human relations. Men and women, black and white, young and old, in England and in Jamaica—all are held up for scrutiny and found wanting in their moral and spiritual development, a deficiency that she attributes to the structural inequities of a social and political system predicated on the subordination of others. The redemptive potential of religion, Christianity and the slave religion of Obeah, offers no relief in the claustrophobic world of Henrietta. The title of Earle’s novel and Fawcett’s pantomime—Obi or Three-Fingered Jack—drew as much attention to Jack Mansong’s association with Obi or Obeah as it did to the danger he posed to the plantation owners as a revolutionary figure. In The Story of Henrietta, Obeah, the folk religion of the West African slaves, functions as the element of the supernatural, and Henrietta’s Gothic nightmare begins and ends with Henrietta’s introduction to and interactions with Obi women. As Alan Richardson has pointed out, Henrietta’s description of the Obi women as the witches of Macbeth aligns them with the British stereotype of the figure of the witch.4 This essay takes Richardson’s point and develops it, tracing and analyzing Smith’s remapping of contemporary cultural anxieties in Britain surrounding the idea of the witch onto an historically oppressed people and a foreign landscape. Like the witches in the British folk tradition, the Obi women in Henrietta work their magic on the margins of the plantocracy, yet unlike the British witches they themselves are not marginalized. The female practitioners of Obeah that Henrietta hears about and encounters at the end of the story are represented by Smith as spiritual and political leaders within their community. Embedded in the Gothic narrative with its expected critique of patriarchal tyranny, these representatives of a matriarchal culture provide an intriguing alternative to the abuses of the institutionalized authority of church and state in Jamaica as well as England. I argue that Henrietta’s observation of the active participation of women in the Obeah tradition provides a sharp contrast to her awareness of her own helplessness and inability to fend for herself. Here Smith explicitly criticizes the current social conditions for women in England, which she, along with other Romantic era writers, suggests reduce women to the subject position of slaves. What interests me, and what I will explore in the pages that follow, is Smith’s apparent preoccupation with the subversive political potential of the figure of the female witch and how the presence of the Obi women—foreign, magical, and

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 39 threatening—disrupt the narrative flow of Smith’s story, redirecting it in ways that Smith may or may not have anticipated. *** In 1798, two years before the publication of The Story of Henrietta, Smith published her third children’s book, Minor Morals, Interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories. Minor Morals was structured as a series of instructive dialogues between a wise and benevolent aunt, Mrs. Belmour, and her four nieces who became her charges after the death of her sister. The sixth dialogue, “The Witch of the Wold,” provides an extended interrogation of the phenomenon of superstitious belief in witchcraft in England and the misogyny and ageism that underwrites it. One of Mrs. Belmour’s nephews, Lionel, who is visiting on holiday, laughingly describes to his sisters and aunt an incident in which a friend of his experimented with a “burning glass” first on a pig, singeing its bristles, and then burning a hole in the handkerchief of a poor old woman, whom the boy had terrorized previously, “calling her an old witch, and crying something about burning her.”5 Mrs. Belmour, appalled by Lionel’s lack of sympathy for the old woman, pointedly asks: [C]an you find no amusement but in unmanly cruelty? In insulting and terrifying a fellow-creature, and aggravating by fear the misfortunes of poverty and old age? . . . Put yourself for a moment in the place of this poor woman. Lionel’s response, “Lord, I can’t fancy myself an old woman,” is greeted by a stern lecture by Mrs. Belmour on the connections between “acts of barbarity” in young men, including “mean jealousy and hatred towards their sisters,” and dissolution “as they become older” when they will be “distinguished at school for nothing but a vulgar gluttony, and at the university, or in the army, for dirty vices.”6 Smith’s suggestion via Mrs. Belmour that misogyny and immorality are the consequences of an inadequate early education are themes that run throughout her work. Here, however, she applies it directly to the belief and persecution of witches. After dressing down her nephew, Mrs. Belmour delivers a lengthy disquisition on the subject of witchcraft beliefs in England, revealing Charlotte Smith’s own knowledge and interest in this subject. Mrs. Belmour opens with a reference to The Spectator’s well-known description of Moll White, a purported witch, which includes Addison’s “hovering faith” that “there is, and has been such a thing as Witch-craft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it.”7 Mrs. Belmour goes on to provide her nieces and

40  Orianne Smith nephew with an account of the brutal treatment in 1751 in Hertfordshire of an old man and woman, Ruth and John Osborne, who were dragged to the river by a mob for a “swimming.” As Mrs. Belmour notes, they were “so ill-used under pretence of their being witches, that one, if not both of them, died under the hands of their inhuman persecutors.” She pointedly emphasizes that the belief in witchcraft was not confined to rural outposts, citing the early example of James I, whose belief in witchcraft prompted him to publish Daemonologie (1597; 1603), incorrectly identified by Mrs. Belmour as Basilikon Doron, a book on kingship published by James as well. Mrs. Belmour concludes on a comforting note, stating that This folly, like many others, has vanished, as reason . . . has dismissed us from the trammels of superstition and prejudice.—The witch is dismounted from her broomstick, and the monk is no longer called from his cell to exorcise her, or to send the unquiet spirit into the Red Sea.—I believe it would now be difficult to find a reported witch even among the fells of the North, or the barren mountains of Scotland, where they lingered last.8 Mrs. Belmour (and Smith’s) overview of the belief in witchcraft as a relic of superstition and prejudice that had largely disappeared in the eighteenth century was a perspective shared by most Britons.9 This skepticism was codified early in the century by the Witchcraft Act of 1736 that took aim at those who pretended “to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or undertake to tell fortunes,” by forcing them to spend a year in prison as well as submitting to the shame of four visits during that year to the pillory.10 Although the Witchcraft Act categorically denied the existence of witches in the present day, as Smith’s reference to Addison’s “hovering faith” suggests, many Britons were hesitant to entirely relinquish their belief in witchcraft as an historical phenomenon. The reasons for this unwillingness to entirely discount witchcraft, even without evidence to support this belief, were religious and political. William Blackstone, the Tory politician and jurist, vociferously defended the existence of witchcraft in former times: “To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery . . . [is to] contradict the revealed world of God.”11 Others like Samuel Johnson concurred: “[W]itchcraft had ceased; and therefore an act of parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft. Why it ceased, we cannot tell, as we cannot tell the reason of many things.”12 As Owen Davies notes, “The likes of Blackstone . . . [and] Johnson were . . . all Tories, and their conservative political beliefs often went hand-in-hand with conservative religious tendencies.”13 Historicizing witchcraft while adamantly denying its existence during the present day enabled Britons to maintain their faith and their skepticism regarding the incursions of black

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 41 magic in contemporary society. The figure of the witch was complicated in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the belief in her continued presence in rural Britain was an embarrassment to the educated elite; on the other hand, belief in witchcraft was, for many, a necessary evil and incontrovertible proof of the existence of Providence. In addition to the notion of the witch as a wily crone preying upon the superstitions of farmers, the idea of the politically meddlesome witches of Macbeth also informed the ways in which well-read Britons like Blackstone, Johnson and, later in the century, Charlotte Smith thought about witchcraft and its subversive potential. The witches in Macbeth were emblematic of the breakdown not only of God’s orderly reign but also the political disorder in Scotland—a disorder that was explicitly gendered and, therefore, potentially even more threatening to the patriarchal authority of church and state. Unlike representations of the witch as a deluded old woman on the margins of a community, Shakespeare’s witches actively participated in and subverted local politics, prophesying and initiating the tragic events that ensue. As many scholars have noted, they and Hecate, the Queen of the witches, represented a direct threat to God’s orderly reign, establishing a gendered dichotomy between the forces of good and evil in Shakespeare’s drama. As Dympna Callaghan argues, for instance: “in Macbeth, the kingdom of darkness is unequivocally female, unequivocally matriarchal, and the fantasy of incipient rebellion of demonic forces is crucial to the maintenance of the godly rule it is supposed to overthrow.”14 For many Britons, therefore, in addition to folk representations of witchcraft, the figure of the witch also represented political disorder and chaos, the subversion of Christianity and Christian values from within the closed structure of the nation, its communities, and from within the family itself by the most marginalized and devalued members of society—women. Witchcraft and black magic may have ceased to be a problem in England in the eighteenth century, but the same was not true in 1760 on England’s colonial outpost of Jamaica, where another marginalized and devalued group posed a direct threat to the authority of church and state. The Tacky Rebellion, one of the most significant slave rebellions in Jamaica, began in the spring of 1760 when 150 slaves, under the leadership of Tacky, an enslaved man from the Gold Coast (modernday Ghana), attacked the fort at Port Maria in the parish of Saint Mary. This sparked multiple uprisings at parishes throughout Jamaica. Edward Long, a plantation owner and jurist, wrote in his History of Jamaica (1774) that Tacky was advised by a “famous obeiah man and priest, much respected among his countrymen.” Long went on to describe the Obeah man as an old Coromantin, who, with other of his profession, had been a chief in counseling and instigating the credulous herd, to whom these

42  Orianne Smith priests administered a powder, which, being rubbed on their bodies, was to make them invulnerable: they persuaded them into a belief, that Tacky, their generalissimo in the woods, could not possibly be hurt by the white men, for that he caught all the bullets fired at him in his hand, and hurled them back with destruction to his foes.15 Despite the fact that the “obeiah man and priest” and Tacky were killed early on in the insurrection, the revolt lasted for 18 months, during which time the rebels killed 60 white residents of the island. Also, 400 slaves and 60 free blacks lost their lives. Tacky’s Rebellion shocked Britons and the Jamaican plantation owners, who were quick to respond by passing an “Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves” in 1760. One of the principal “evils” singled out as a criminal activity was the practice of Obeah by “Obeah Men and Women, pretending to have Communication with the Devil and other evil spirits.” Those who “pretend to any supernatural power” and were convicted of this “wicked Art of Negroes,” which deludes “the weak and superstitious” will “suffer death or transportation.”16 The suggestion of a pact with the Devil clearly associated Obeah with the European conception of witchcraft, and the emphasis on the practice as a pretended art calculated to deceive the superstitious masses was in keeping with the skepticism of the 1736 Witchcraft Act. Although both the 1736 Witchcraft Act and the 1761 Act dismissed the practice of magic as a pretended art, the difference between the severity of the punishments meted out in 1736 in England and 1761 in Jamaica was indicative of the very real political threat that Obeah posed to the authority of the slave-owning population. Unlike the purported witches in England who typically came from poor, rural towns, and were not in positions of power within their communities, the authority and leadership of Obi men and women amongst the slave populations was a cause for alarm for the plantation owners. It is not surprising that Charlotte Smith would be tempted to explore these tensions and embed them in the Gothic narrative of The Story of Henrietta. This exercise enabled Smith to think through what she believed to be the political, social, and sexual disorder in England and its colonies at the turn of the century from the perspective of someone not unlike herself—a Gothic heroine who is both fascinated and repulsed by what she witnesses and experiences in the colonial outpost of Jamaica. Like other radical women authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Helen Maria Williams, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, Smith was an enthusiastic proponent of the abolition movement during the 1790s. Along with these other writers, she too associated the victimization of slaves with the victimization of women in England. Yet, as Moira Ferguson reminds us, this equation was problematic because Smith and other abolitionists, both radical and conservative, “still subjected

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 43 slaves to the status of the other” in their written works.17 As Ferguson notes, these women writers, and others before them such as Aphra Behn and Sophia Lee, mediated their own needs and desires, their unconscious sense of social invalidation, through representations of the colonial other, who in the process became more severely objectified and marginalized— a silent or silenced individual in need of protection and pity who must always remain “under control.”18 Yet Smith’s interest in the political and cultural power wielded by Obi women introduced a new and hitherto unexplored dimension to this narrative. Like the political witches in Macbeth, they resist any easy categorization that would elicit sympathy for their plight or shore up arguments about female empowerment. Smith’s willingness to think through the implications of this resistance in the context of her Gothic narrative, even if the results are ambiguous and inconclusive, is noteworthy. In writing The Story of Henrietta, Charlotte Smith attempts to take Mrs. Belmour’s advice by placing Henrietta in the subject position of a slave, both metaphorically and literally, with unexpected consequences. Smith’s novella is in some ways a version of the story Mrs. Belmour shares with her young charges. After her disquisition on witchcraft beliefs, Mrs. Belmour tells the children that she remembers a tale that she was told as a young girl “about a witch and a haunted house”—“The Witch of the Wold.” They clamor to hear it, and Mrs. Belmour begins: “Well then, shall I begin a true gossip’s tale with—You must know there was, once upon a time—No—I must tell it my own way.”19 Like “The Witch of the Wold,” Smith’s novella does not begin with “once upon a time”— because the events that were unfolding were happening as Smith wrote— and Smith had every intention of telling the story her “own way,” testing the limits of her sympathy (and the sympathy of her readers) for the oppressed—women and slaves—when they exhibit deviant behavior and refuse to be typecast as powerless victims. *** The Story of Henrietta was the second volume of Smith’s five-volume series of The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. Earlier she had taken up the issue of colonial slavery in Desmond (1792) and in The Wanderings of Warwick (1794). In the former, Lionel Desmond writes a letter to his friend Mr. Bethel in which he describes his participation in a spirited debate with a plantation-owning member of parliament regarding the abolition of the slave trade. When his opponent cites economic and racial grounds for continuing (“the importance of this trade to the prosperity of the British nation” and his belief that “negroes . . . have

44  Orianne Smith not the same senses and feelings as we have”), Desmond counters with an impassioned argument against subjection of fellow human beings.20 In The Wanderings of Warwick, Smith continued to ponder the troubling ethical and moral issues of the slave trade in what she describes as “A sort of dissertation on negro slavery”: an almost 30-page digression from the story in which Captain Warwick reflects upon the insidiousness of “habit” in the cultural endorsement of slavery in the West Indies.21 Smith’s initial forays into the abolition movement were in keeping with her enthusiastic endorsement of cries for social justice, largely conceived, by many Britons in the wake of the French Revolution. Whereas Smith’s earlier meditations on the subject of slavery were couched in philosophical or speculative language, and articulated by white male protagonists, The Story of Henrietta, published five years later, takes a very different approach. Switching from writing about slavery in the abstract from a male perspective to the subjective experience of a white Creole woman in distress observing the horrors of slavery firsthand enables Smith to dig deeper into the psychological dimension of slavery, particularly as it pertained to women. Smith’s novella develops several interconnected yet distinct strands of the Gothic genre in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The first involves the Radcliffean Gothic heroine, with her consistently imperiled virtue and her excessive sensibility. The second is the more explicitly political Gothic novels penned by Jacobin sympathizers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Henrietta’s Gothic adventures begin when her father commands her to return to Jamaica to marry “the person for whose slave my father designs me.”22 The metaphor of marriage as slavery is invoked later too when Henrietta arrives in Jamaica to find that lawyers have been some days in the house drawing up the bill of sale, for what else can I call it? [My father] has been used to purchase slaves, and feels no repugnance in selling his daughter to the most dreadful of all slavery!23 This idea of marriage as slavery or what Denbigh, Henrietta’s love interest and later her husband, describes as legalized prostitution24 had a precedent in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as well as in Wollstonecraft’s Gothic treatment of the subject in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1796). As Moira Ferguson points out, Rights of Woman contains more than 80 references to the connections between the conditions of slavery and the conditions of women in England.25 This comparison is in fact the dominant framing device for Wollstonecraft’s argument, as she notes: “I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.”26 Wollstonecraft continues this line of thought in her novel, Maria. Imprisoned by her husband, the high-born Maria notes:

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 45 “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves”—a sentiment echoed by Jemima, her working-class ally, who states: “I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence.”27 Smith’s The Story of Henrietta builds upon Wollstonecraft’s scathing critique of the patriarchal system in England and its victimization of women, interrogating its corrosive effect on human relations in the colonial setting of Jamaica. In writing The Story of Henrietta, Smith did her homework, reading up on Jamaica, a place that she had never visited. Smith did, however, have some secondhand knowledge of it from her father-in-law, Richard Smith, who had lived in the West Indies, and his Anglo-Caribbean wife, with whom Charlotte and her husband resided during the first years of their marriage. Smith mentions in a letter dated January 3, 1798 that she was seeking to “borrow Edwards or Long on Jamaica.”28 The reference here is to Bryan Edwards and Edward Long (cited earlier), two of the foremost experts on Jamaica who had lived there and written expansive popular accounts of its history, people, and culture. Bryan Edwards was in fact well-known to Smith: he was a friend and a former neighbor who read her early poems and encouraged her to publish them. Smith incorporates many details from both of these sources, and her description of the beauty, exoticism, and danger of Jamaica’s lush landscape, including its volatile weather, owes much to Long’s sublime descriptions of the awe-inspiring nature there. It was Long and Edwards as well who introduced Smith to the AfroCaribbean religion of Obeah or “Obi.” In their works, these two writers explicitly link the Obeah tradition to the skeptical discourse on witchcraft in the eighteenth century. Dismissing obi as “sorcery,” they both describe it as a criminal act engaged in by individuals attempting to subvert the status quo by preying upon the superstitions of their fellow slaves. Edwards, quoting a report on the slave trade that he attributes to Long, relates a story about an old woman—“the terror of the . . . neighborhood”—who was held responsible by the natives for causing the deaths and illnesses of half the slaves on a plantation. The plantation owner, returning from his travels, is dismayed and angered by this loss of property: He repaired directly, with six White servants, to the old woman’s house, and forcing the door open, observed the whole inside of the roof . . . and every crevice of the walls stuck with the implements of her trade, consisting of rags, feathers, bones of cats, and a thousand other articles. The house was set aflame and, as Long approvingly notes, the old woman—instead of being punished by death, according to the law—was “from a principle of humanity, delivered into the hands of a party of Spaniards.”29

46  Orianne Smith The gendered implications of this account of a male authority figure who seeks resolution to social unrest by violence directed at the least valuable (in terms of labor) member of this community—an old woman living on the outskirts of town—was not lost on Smith. This was, in fact, the plotline of Mrs. Belmour’s story of “The Witch in the Wold.” Loss of property (cattle in this case) is attributed to the dark arts practiced by a purported witch living on the outskirts of the community. The angry countrymen force themselves into her house, finding amongst other suspicious articles “some shells and dried plants and insects, which they were sure were collected as materials for the sorceress.”30 What they believed to be material evidence of black magic was unnecessary, however: The appearance of the old woman . . . would have been enough to have convicted her: she was thin and pale, bent almost double, and her countenance, furrowed with wrinkles, expressed a sort of wild melancholy, which her persecutors believed an evidence of guilt.31 In Smith’s version, the suspected witch dies after being “extremely illtreated, and almost tortured,” suffering “too much from the rude inhumanity of the mob.”32 Significantly, the “witches” that Henrietta encounters when she arrives in Jamaica are not the helpless victims of mob violence. Like Edwards and Long, Smith associates Obeah with the discourse on witchcraft, but here in The Story of Henrietta she shifts the comparison to another more sinister yet equally familiar representation of the female witch: the political witches of Macbeth. Early on in the story, Henrietta is sequestered by her father in a remote estate in the mountains, very close to the enclaves of the Maroons. Alone amongst the slaves, she begins to half-believe their tales regarding the magical powers of the Obeah men and women: There are times when the hideous phantasies of these poor uninformed savages affect my spirits with a sort of dread, which all my conviction of their fallacy does not enable me to subdue. Little Maria used to talk to me of their Obeahs, persons who persuade others, and perhaps believe themselves, that they possess supernatural powers, acquired by I know not what operations, resembling, as far as I could learn, those of the witches in Macbeth round the magic cauldron. I afterwards fancied that the two or three of them the little girl pointed out to me had something particularly horrid in their appearance; yet, as they are liable to severe punishment if their being Obi men or women is known, they carefully conceal any outward appearance of their profession . . . . These Obi men and women are, as I have been informed, more numerous here than in the other plantations: and I shudder involuntarily when I fancy, from the mysterious looks

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 47 and odd gestures of some of them, that they are deeply initiated in these wild rites of superstition.33 The comfortable distance that Long and Edwards enjoy between themselves and the slave population in Jamaica is a luxury that a Gothic heroine like Henrietta does not possess. Imprisoned, cut off from her British and Anglo-Caribbean roots, the lines of racial identity begin to blur. This is reinforced by Henrietta’s awareness that she is more closely related to some members of the slave population than she had realized before coming to Jamaica. “Little Maria” is in fact her half-sister, one of three that reside in her father’s house with her: [T]here are three young women here, living in the house, of colour, as they are called, who are, I understand, my sisters by the half blood! They are the daughters of my father by his black and mulatto slaves; and the awkwardness I felt when I was first under the necessity of addressing myself to them, seemed very wonderful to the people here, who see nothing extraordinary or uncommon in such an arrangement as my father has made in his family. They speak an odd sort of dialect, more resembling that of the negroes than the English spoken in England, and their odd manners, their love of finery, and curiosity about my clothes and ornaments, together with their total insensibility to their own situation, is, I own, very distressing to me.34 Henrietta’s response to the “distressing” news that she has “sisters by the half-blood” is to distance herself psychologically from them, noting that their speech is closer to the black slave population than the English spoken by the white population in England. Henrietta’s derogatory comments regarding her sisters’ “love of finery” and curiosity about her European clothing and accessories are reminiscent of the narrator in Oroonoko’s dismissive description of the native population’s fascination with the “glittering and rich” clothing that she wears and her observation that “they much esteem any shiny things.”35 The fact that Henrietta’s “half-blood” sisters are three in number, the same number of witches in Macbeth, is also significant; demonstrating the threat they pose to Henrietta’s privileged position within the plantation household as her father’s daughter. Henrietta’s disgust regarding her half-sisters is expressed in the racist terms that Boulukos and others have pointed out as an indicator of Smith’s ambivalence toward or even endorsement of slavery. Interestingly, though, Smith allows Henrietta to continue her line of questioning about the family resemblance between her and her sisters and whether that goes beyond their shared bloodline: “As I am a native of this island, perhaps I have the same cast of countenance without being conscious of it, and I will be woman enough to acknowledge that the supposition

48  Orianne Smith is not flattering.”36 The idea that Anglo-Caribbean people shared some of the same traits as the slaves was common at this time. Edward Long, for instance, argued that the “native white men, or Creoles, of Jamaica” resembled the native population and suggested that these “characteristic deviations” can be contributed to the shared climate zone in which they lived: Climate, perhaps, has had some share in producing the variety of feature which we behold among the different societies of mankind, scattered over the globe: so that, were an Englishman and woman to remove to China, and there abide, it may be questioned, whether their descendants, in the course of a few generations, constantly residing there, would not acquire somewhat of the Chinese cast of countenance and person?37 For Henrietta, this is not an academic question; it cuts to the very core of how she perceives herself and how others perceive her. Her situation pushes her even closer to something like an acknowledgment of a shared racial and cultural identity with her sisters and, by association, the black population on the island. Henrietta’s distress in following this line of questioning and its inevitable conclusion creates a fissure in her sense of identity as an Englishwoman. In true Gothic fashion, this psychological disturbance manifests itself a few pages later with a storm that pummels the plantation, rocking it to its foundation: The peals of thunder bursting, as it seemed, immediately over the house, and shaking it to its very centre, mingled with the roaring of the wind, the crash of trees which were swept away before it, the howling of the negroes, and the cries of the women, who, as the tempest raised with renewed violence, uttered shrieks and yells more terrific than can be imagined.38 “The howling of the negroes” and “the cries of the women” separated at the beginning of the sentence become indistinguishable at the end when it is impossible to know whether it is the slaves or the women who are shrieking and yelling. The mingling of their voices, raised in fear, reflect the Gothic heroine’s increasing anxiety as she realizes that she cannot forget or overwrite her Jamaican self. Henrietta’s mounting anxiety proves to be too much for her and for her narrative. Several pages after the storm, and about one third of the way through the novella, Henrietta’s voice in The Story of Henrietta falls silent. Like Henrietta who is prone to fainting, the story—her story— faints as well. At this point, Denbigh, Henrietta’s British lover, takes

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 49 over the narration as he describes his arrival in Jamaica and search for Henrietta. This includes the retelling of his capture and escape from the Maroons as well as Denbigh’s surprising rescue by an Englishman living as a hermit in a cave on the outskirts of the Maroon territory. The Englishman turns out to be Henrietta’s uncle, George Maynard, who steps in to tell his own story, which turns out to be as horrific as Henrietta’s without the supernatural trappings. In fact, there are some interesting parallels between his narrative and Henrietta’s. Like Henrietta, George is the victim of domestic tyranny when his first wife spends down his fortune and then absconds with another man. Later, after he attempts to help his first wife, now a penniless prostitute, George is accused of infidelity by his second wife whose jealousy results in the death of his beloved son. Shortly thereafter, he loses his closest friend and decides to come back to his birthplace, Jamaica, determined to improve the social conditions of the slave population. In this too George is frustrated: I found the reality of oppression, in which I was myself a party, utterly insupportable. But my endeavours at reformation were not only considered as the idle dreams of a visionary, but as being dangerous to the welfare of the island.39 He is declared a lunatic and his brother, Henrietta’s father, takes over his estates. It is then that Henrietta’s uncle, seeing no other recourse, retreats to reside as a hermit in the mountains: Repulsed . . . from my purpose, and disgusted with every system I had seen, I resolved to retire wholly from the world, and hide myself from the spectacle of human misery which everywhere empoisoned the scenes of nature, and made me abhor the species to which I belonged.40 One of the “systems” that fails both Henrietta and her uncle is Christianity and the Christian God who is either unwilling or unable to intervene in their fates. While Smith does not call into question the authority of God, His powers appear to be significantly diminished in Jamaica and England. Following the well-established pattern of the Gothic heroine popularized by Radcliffe, Henrietta attempts to appeal to God in nature in the midst of her suffering, bearing witness to the “thousand proofs of the benignity of that Being in whose hands I was” but fails miserably, noting that “It seems hardly in the power of Heaven to help me.”41 Later, after being forced to meet the suitor chosen for her by her father, Henrietta tries once again to appeal to a higher power: “I address myself in vain to Heaven; Heaven is deaf to my prayers.”42 Like Henrietta, her uncle too prays for divine intervention and receives no answer. After his

50  Orianne Smith son dies from a fatal gunshot dueling with the spy sent by his second wife, George Maynard asks: Almighty and all-wise Creator and Judge of the Universe! Is it thou that permittest thy rational creatures morally and physically to wound and destroy each other? And is man endowed with speech, only to become more fatal to his fellow than the lurking reptile or the prowling savage of the tropical regions?43 As George’s subsequent experience teaches him, “the prowling savage” is indeed kinder and more generous than his fellow plantation owners. In Jamaica, George once again asks “of the Divine Omnipotence that pervades all nature, why he has placed me in a world where only anguish has been my portion.”44 As the novella comes closer to its conclusion, providential delivery or divine guidance from God does not appear to be in the cards for Henrietta or her uncle, leaving the field open for other, less benign forces to intercede on their behalf. *** The Weird Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about, Thrice to thine and thrice to mine And thrice again, to make up nine. Peace, the charm’s wound up. (Macbeth, Act I, Scene III, 33–38) Henrietta and her story are revived in the last few pages of the novel. Henrietta relates that Amponah, her father’s black servant and the only person she trusts on the island, appears to be under duress as they await her father’s arrival on the plantation. When she questions him about this, Amponah alludes to his fears regarding her imminent marriage with the father’s chosen suitor as well as a possible attack from the Maroons. Amponah implores Henrietta to attempt to escape with him noting that the Obi women had been in the woods employed on their spells, and they discovered that some great misfortune was about to happen to me, and would happen if I did not immediately leave the house and take shelter in some other place.45 Although this turns out to be a subterfuge used by Amponah to trick Henrietta into placing herself in his control, the invocation of the Obi women here sets into motion a series of terrifying events that draw Henrietta even further into the darker regions of the Jamaican landscape.

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 51 After Henrietta eludes the unwanted advances of Amponah, she is imprisoned by a party of Maroons and threatened by a forced marriage, this time to the chief of the clan, she faints. Henrietta wakes up to find herself in a cave attended by the chief’s mother and his two wives. The former, described as a “sorceress” by Henrietta, is intent on fulfilling her son’s wishes, and helps to revive her by making her drink a potion of what Henrietta suspects to be a mixture of rum and goat’s milk.46 The help that Henrietta receives from the two wives is even more substantial. After everyone is asleep, Henrietta struggles to the opening of the cave where she once again appeals to God: The sky above me was illuminated with myriads of stars. There was that peculiar clearness and lustre in the blue arch where they sparkled, that is seen only in these regions. My spirits were revived: I breathed more freely, and my soul once more resuming its powers, I was able to supplicate Heaven for mercy and deliverance. As if the great Governor of the Universe had heard me it was already at hand. I saw, coming from the ascent among the trees, two female figures, in whom I soon recognized the general’s two wives.47 God may or may not have heard her prayers, but he has ceded his role as a deliverer to an unlikely trio of saviors. Like the witches in Macbeth, these three Obi women intervene in Henrietta’s fate without regard for her well-being. The older woman is intent on curing her to satisfy her son’s desires and the two wives secure her release because they perceive Henrietta as a rival. They lead her through the camp to a hermitage where Henrietta’s uncle resides, and where she is soon reunited with her lover Denbigh. Once again restored to a place of safety under the protection of a male family member, and in the arms of the man who will become her husband several pages later, Henrietta glosses over the seemingly miraculous intervention of the Obi women: What happened at the cave of the Maroons, how the women contrived to divert the suspicions, or appease the anger of the general, or whether some attack of the troops sent against them prevented any pursuit, I had no means of ascertaining. I only know, that after remaining two days in my uncle’s wild abode, a stay which greatly restored my strength, Providence in its mercy conducted you, my dear Denbigh! thither.48 Like the conclusion of a Radcliffean novel, the ending of Henrietta with its improbable rescue of the Gothic heroine, a promised marriage, and the triumphant restoration of patriarchal order strikes a discordant note for

52  Orianne Smith readers who cannot so easily gloss over the intrusion of the Obi women in the narrative and the role they play in saving Henrietta. As in Macbeth, The Story of Henrietta is set in a politically and socially fractured world in which the authority of church and state is threatened by revolutionary forces, both natural and supernatural. In the brutal world of Macbeth, women, supernatural or otherwise, are either victims or monsters. At the end of the play, Hecate and the witches are gone, and Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff are dead. The restoration of centralized male authority in Shakespeare’s tragedy is predicated on eliminating both monstrous and ideal women. The Story of Henrietta similarly represents women, supernatural or otherwise, as victims (as in the case of Henrietta) or monsters (as in George Maynard’s two wives and the Obi women). Yet unlike Shakespeare, Smith does not attempt resolution in her narrative by consolidating or restoring male authority through the eradication of female power. Henrietta never had power to begin with and the Obi women are left alone to practice their magic somewhere beyond the pages of the book. Nor does Smith set hard and fast boundaries between her heroine and the exotic otherness of the Obi women. Henrietta, who suspects that as a Creole white woman she is not as white as the women in England, is very much aware that black and white are a continuum. Throughout her story, she engages in an uneasy version of the game of six degrees of separation, musing over the many shades of color on the island (mestizes, quadroons, mulatto) including her own. And the fact too that it is “her” story, even though her words comprise only a third of the book, is important. Henrietta does leap back into the arms both figuratively and literally of the comfortably white male patriarchal order, but her subject position as a woman makes it impossible for her to ignore the kernels of misogyny and ageism in the contemporary discourses on slavery and on Caribbean “witchcraft” that inform her world. By portraying the Obi women not as vulnerable old women but as powerful and dangerous or politically subversive entities like Macbeth’s witches, Smith explores—although doesn’t entirely commit to—the political potential of female deviance and its ability to disrupt the flow of narrative, both literary and historical—as told by men from Shakespeare down to Long and Edwards.

Notes 1. George Boulukos, “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-Slavery and Racial Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s Story of Henrietta (1800),” in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 87. 2. M. O. Grenby, “Introduction,” Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man and the Wanderings of Warwick, vol. 7 in The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. Curran et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), xvi.

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 53 3. Adriana Craciun, “ ‘Empire Without End’: Charlotte Smith at the Limits of Cosmopolitanism,” Women’s Writing 16, no. 1 (May 2009): 53, 55. 4. Alan Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797– 1807,” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 15. 5. Charlotte Smith, “Witch of the World,” in Minor Morals, Interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories (London: Sampson Low, 1798), 82. 6. Ibid., 79, 80. 7. Joseph Addison, G. Gregory Smith, and Richard Steele, The Spectator: A New Edition, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1891). Project Gutenberg. No. 117, July 14, 1711. www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030h/SV1/Spectator1.html 8. Smith, “Witch of the World,” 84, 85. 9. The last execution of an English witch, Alice Molland, took place in Devonshire in 1684, and the last conviction, that of Jane Wenham, came in 1712. 10. Brian P. Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 172. 11. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1775), 60. 12. James Boswell, “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,” in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 5 (New York: Bigelow, Brown & Co., 1825), 51. 13. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture: 1736–1951 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 8. 14. Dympna Callaghan, “Wicked Women in Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology, and the Production of Motherhood,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 358–59. 15. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, vol. 2 (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 451. 16. An Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves, Jamaica 1760. CO 139/21, National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. For further discussion of this Act and its implications for Obeah, see Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 39–40. 17. Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 197. 18. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 19. Smith, “Witch of the Wold,” 85. 20. Smith, Desmond, A Novel (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792), 162. 21. Smith, The Wanderings of Warwick (London: J. Bell, 1794), 67, 57. 22. Smith, “The Story of Henrietta,” The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer: Containing Narratives of Various Description, vol. 2 (London: Sampson, Low, 1800), 61. 23. Ibid., 76–77. 24. Ibid., 108. 25. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid, 9. 26. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and the Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), eds. Anne K. Mellor and Noelle Chao (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 55.

54  Orianne Smith 7. Ibid., 253, 278. 2 28. Stanton Judith, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 304. 29. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793), vol. 2 (London: T. Miller, 1819), 116, 117. 30. Smith, “Witch of the Wold,” 89–90. 31. Ibid., 90. 32. Ibid., 91. 33. Smith, “The Story of Henrietta,” 96–97. 34. Ibid., 57. 35. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2003), 57. 36. Smith, “The Story of Henrietta,” 58. 37. Long, The History of Jamaica, 261. 38. Smith, “The Story of Henrietta,” 80. 39. Ibid., 282. 40. Ibid., 284. 41. Ibid., 71, 72. 42. Ibid., 78. 43. Ibid., 275. 44. Ibid., 292. 45. Ibid., 297. 46. Ibid., 310. 47. Ibid., 313. 48. Ibid., 315–16.

Bibliography An Act to Remedy the Evils arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves, Jamaica 1760. CO 139/21, National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. Addison, Joseph, G. Gregory Smith, and Richard Steele. The Spectator: A New Edition. Edited by Henry Morley. London: Routledge, 1891. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1.html Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Edited by Janet Todd. London: Penguin, 2003. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1775. Boswell, James. “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.” In Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Vol. 5. New York: Bigelow, Brown & Co., 1825. Boulukos, George. “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-Slavery and Racial Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s Story of Henrietta (1800). Slavery and The Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Callaghan, Dympna. Wicked Women in Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology, and the Production of Motherhood.” In Reconsidering the Renaissance, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992. Craciun, Adriana. “Empire Without End’: Charlotte Smith at the Limits of Cosmopolitanism.” Women’s Writing 16, no. 1 (May 2009): 39–59.

Creolizing the Gothic Narrative 55 Davies, Owen. Witchcraft, Magic and Culture: 1736–1951. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. Earle, William. Ed. Srinivas Aravamudan. Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered (1800). Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2005. Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793). Vol. 2. London: T. Miller, 1819. Fawcett, John. Obi, or Three-finger’d Jack. London: Woodfall, 1800. Ferguson, Moira. Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670– 1834. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Grenby, M. O. “Introduction.” In Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man and The Wanderings of Warwick, The Works of Charlotte Smith. Vol. 7, edited by Curran et al. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. Levack, Brian P. Ed. The Witchcraft Sourcebook. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. Vol. 2. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. Olmos, Margarite Fernandez and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds. Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Paton, Diana. The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Paton, Diana and Maarit Forde, eds. Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Richardson, Alan. “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–1807.” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3–28. Smith, Charlotte. Desmond, A Novel. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792. ———. “The Story of Henrietta.” In The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer: Containing Narratives of Various Description. Vol. 2. London: Sampson, Low, 1800. ———. The Wanderings of Warwick. London: J. Bell, 1794. ———. “Witch of the World.” In Minor Morals, Interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories. London: Sampson Low, 1798. Stanton, Judith. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Noelle Chao. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.

3 Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge as Cultural Capital in the Greater Caribbean Chelsea Berry By the time they opened their healing clinic on the outskirts of Salvador, Bahia, free black medical practitioners Paulo Gomes and Ignacia were already well-known in the sloping streets behind the city center. Their neighbors, interviewed in 1749 by the city’s Inquisitorial commissioner, had shared a street with them for decades; their work performing cures with calundús (ceremonial therapeutic and divinatory dances) was not a secret, nor was their effort to continuously expand and improve their practice. A free pardo (likely Brazilian-born) stonecutter, Gomes in particular continuously sought out new streams of medical knowledge and advertised this knowledge to potential clients. People across a wide social spectrum—free, enslaved, black, white—went to Gomes and Ignacia for their medical knowledge and expertise; their success as practitioners rested upon their powerful reputation. However, success went hand-in-hand with risk. As the reputation of Gomes and Ignacia grew, so did the suspicion that they were responsible for supernatural afflictions in the area; the same power that attracted clients also made them morally ambiguous in the eyes of their neighbors. The reputation of Gomes and Ignacia, and attendant suspicions, extended well beyond their personal network as some of their neighbors sought outside help with their afflictions. Two different competitors in Salvador’s medical marketplace denounced Gomes and Ignacia in two different ways; both denunciations hinged on their fame for their powers to heal and harm. An unnamed preto (black, likely African) practitioner consulted by one of Gomes’ white neighbors and his afflicted wife did not instigate any sort of trial from the Inquisition or secular court, but he did identify Gomes as the source of harm as part of the medical narrative he built with his clients. The formal denunciation that led to the documentation of this case came from Dr. José Xavier Tovar, a white surgeon and fellow parishioner, who had heard about Gomes and Ignacia’s calundús after speaking with several of Gomes’ neighbors. Climbing the hill to the office of the Inquisitorial commissioner in the center of the city, Tovar denounced the couple for superstitious practices and feitiçaria. In the ensuing investigation, the

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 57 commissioner conducted interviews with neighbors and the details on their practices came pouring out.1 Tracking the testimony from this investigation reveals not only a complex web of intimacies and relationships but also a network of knowledge. Gomes and Ignacia built their medical practice over many years, establishing a wide clientele and incorporating multiple strands of medical authority—from a Castilian book of spells to Ignacia’s expertise as a master diviner. Cultural capital from social networks and networks of knowledge was the basis of prestige for black medical practitioners, placing them in a powerful, but precarious, position. The same reputation, visibility, and expertise necessary to successfully attract clientele also made practitioners like Gomes and Ignacia vulnerable to denunciations. The story of Gomes and Ignacia is a window into the risks and rewards of accumulating cultural capital for black medical practitioners in the greater Caribbean, but it is by no means the only one. Cases involving similar practitioners and practices in Suriname, Martinique, and Virginia from the eighteenth century converged with those in Bahia in several important ways. Despite wide differences in their respective histories, legal systems, and conditions of enslaved labor, these colonies shared waves of accusations of supernatural healing and harm against medical practitioners of African descent. The struggles of black medical practitioners to navigate webs of knowledge and relationships, to walk on the knife’s edge between success and denunciation that could lead to arrest or death, were similar across the greater Caribbean. Atlanticists have recently turned toward examining the ways black medical practitioners built their wealth of medical knowledge and their role in knowledge creation. Works on circulation of medical knowledge and practices in the Atlantic, and the ways that ideas on illness and health impacted each other and changed through their interaction, have flourished in the past two decades.2 Several recent works have analyzed ways black medical practitioners developed and revised their cures and rituals based on experience, with their success dependent on the locally perceived efficacy of their work.3 Practitioners continuously adopted and adapted diverse practices from a wide network of knowledge to serve a diverse clientele. By bringing poison cases from very different locations across the eighteenth-century greater Caribbean together, this essay reveals remarkable similarities in the strategies used and risks taken by black medical practitioners, as the very cultivation of networks of knowledge and clients that made these practitioners successful also put them at higher risk of being accused of being poisoners—from planters, slaves, and other practitioners. In investigating the similarities in strategies used by medical practitioners of African descent across the greater Caribbean over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we should not lose sight of the limitations of focusing on trials and the important differences between locales and

58  Chelsea Berry time periods. As with all historical sources, the trial data are limited by the survival of the records. Evidence from trials also does not necessarily reflect the full spectrum of black medical practitioners and their practices, as historians can only see those who were accused.4 Furthermore, the kinds of demographic information that the courts recorded varied significantly between different legal systems; for example, while all noted the gender and free or enslaved status of the accused, only the Inquisition records from Bahia consistently distinguished between Africans and Creoles—people of African descent born in the Americas. Bahia was also different from the other locations studied in that over half of the total poison cases from 1680 to 1799—and 16 out of the 42 black medical practitioners accused—originated from the urban environment of Salvador.5 Slaves in mid-eighteenth-century Brazilian cities generally had more opportunities than slaves on rural plantations to make arrangements with their owners for independent work, such as healing, and the relatively large population of free people of African descent, like Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, likewise had more opportunities to establish and run independent practices.6 While the slave societies of Bahia, Martinique, the Dutch Guianas, and Virginia differed widely from each other over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is these differences that make the shared patterns of strategy and risk taken by medical practitioners of African descent over this period so intriguing. Black medical practitioners were professionals: they learned their trade, acquired expertise, and were paid for their services. From Virginia to Bahia, planters often relied on black practitioners as white physicians were generally expensive, scarce, and ineffective. Furthermore, slaves specifically sought them out to treat illnesses and solve problems.7 Their medical knowledge and expertise made them fixtures in colonial medical marketplaces, even when their practices were specifically outlawed. The connection between vocation and knowledge for medical practitioners of African descent was apparent in the words they and their clients used to refer to themselves. In some cases, specific words from West and West Central African languages referring to professional healer-diviners traveled. Such was the case for Branca, an enslaved medical practitioner from Angola living in Bahia, who called herself a ganga and spoke when possessed with the voice of her dead son.8 The widespread and very old Proto-Bantu word root *-gàngà (expert, medicine man) had and continues to have specific associations with communications with the dead as the ultimate source of knowledge and power.9 Writing on eighteenthcentury gangas in Luanda, Roquinaldo Ferreira succinctly described them as “the primary conduits to the supernatural world.”10 More often, the idea of learned expertise was phrased in European vernacular terms. While termed empoisonneurs (poisoners) and, less frequently, sorciers (sorcerers) by the courts and their accusers, in Martinique black medical practitioners called themselves savant: a person of “great

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 59 erudition.”11 In his journal, colonial prefect Pierre-Clément de Laussat noted that “savant is the name that they [slaves] give among themselves to these black poisoners. I am not a Savant, they say to say that they are not poisoners.”12 In Virginia, practitioners often referred to themselves to as “doctor.” For example, two advertisements from the county jails of Charles City and Isle of Wight County printed in the Virginia Gazette in 1774 and 1777 specifically noted that the captured runaway practitioners respectively called themselves “Doctor Dick” and simply “Doctor.”13 Terminology was complicated in Suriname: wissiman, possibly derived from Dutch wijs for “wise” (i.e. “wise-man”) almost always had a negative connotation but referred to specialists with knowledge of plants and poisons.14 Diviners more often referred to themselves as lukumen (or locomen—spelling in sources varied), a Sranan creole word defined as “Wiessager” (seer) and “Zauberer” (magician, conjuror) by German missionaries in 1783.15 The 1763 trial of Kwamina, well-known to slaves in the area as a “Doctor & Lukkeman,” focused on his secret knowledge of herbs used to treat an enslaved man who had come to him from a different plantation.16 Gramman Quassi, perhaps the most famous and successful medical practitioner of African descent in the greater Caribbean, also chose to go by the term “lockoman”—translated by John Gabriel Stedman as “sorcerer” and “sibil.”17 In the words they chose to describe themselves, black medical practitioners emphasized their knowledge and acquired expertise. As part of their vocational work, whether free or enslaved, black medical practitioners generally received some sort of payment for goods and services rendered.18 This was true for both planters who hired them to treat mysterious afflictions and slaves who sought out their wide variety of services—though in cases where the practitioners were enslaved, payment would often be split or go primarily to their owner. For example, in Virginia, both Robert Carter and Thomas Jefferson hired medical practitioners of African descent and paid them, in consultation with their owners, in coin.19 In Suriname, an enslaved medical practitioner named Scaramouche sold substances termed “vergift” (poison) by the courts to five slaves on another plantation to guard against sicknesses.20 While coins of some sort were the most frequently noted form of payment, if the form was noted at all, others included bananas, cows, and, in two Suriname cases, strings of “papa gelt”—a form of money associated the Dahomey region, possibly cowrie shells.21 Medical practitioners of African descent often became involved in professional rivalries to proclaim their legitimacy and attract clients; such rivalries also increased the risk of one or both practitioners attracting unwanted attention. In diverse colonial medical marketplaces, they competed with white European-trained physicians and, particularly in the case of Bahia, Catholic priests sanctioned to treat supernatural afflictions with exorcisms. The richest and most detailed documentation of such

60  Chelsea Berry rivalries comes from the Bahian Inquisition records, but they were not alone.22 It is not a coincidence that in Bahia, professional rivals made several of the initial denunciations that led to an investigation by the Inquisitorial commissioner: Dr. Tovar, a white surgeon, in the case of Paulo Gomes and Ignacia.23 In another Bahian case, an Augustinian priest in the rural town of Jacobina vociferously attacked the practices of one Miguel, a slave from Angola, who had treated a white sergeantmajor with sorcery after the priest’s exorcism had failed.24 Black medical practitioners also competed with each other. In the case of Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, an unnamed black curador (healer) identified them as the culprits for enchanting a client; in the case of Miguel, he himself accused another healer-diviner named Maria Monjola of causing the sergeantmajor’s affliction in the first place.25 In addition to professional rivalries, some medical practitioners formed partnerships—as was the case between Paulo Gomes and Ignacia—or master–apprentice relationships. In the 1778 denunciation of Thereza and Luis from the Bahian Recôncavo, multiple witnesses made it clear that Luis, a crioulo, had learned divinatory practices and how to speak with “demons” from Thereza, a freed “Gege” (a Brazilian ethnic term indicating that she was from the Gbe-speaking region of West Africa).26 Their relationship, which was apparently also a romantic one, lasted for 20 years, their practices “notorious” public knowledge. In Martinique, such master–apprentice relationships were sometimes linked to the relative mobility of marronage. Such was the case for the maroon Zéphir, who was convicted not only of making, selling, and distributing many kinds of maléfices and poisons but also of instructing another man in “his destructive art.”27 Evidence from the eighteenth-century Virginia county court records is scarce, as these trial summaries carried few details. Recollections by former slaves on the nineteenth century in WPA narratives did describe chains of continuously adapted knowledge on plants and healing passed down from individuals to younger apprentices.28 While healing may have been a collective enterprise, it was not uncommon for practitioners to learn their vocation as one individual teaching another. The vocation of being a medical practitioner was so important for some that they took extraordinary risks to continue their practices and pass down their knowledge to others. This commitment comes through clearly in the case of Jupiter and Gouan, two enslaved men tried by the Martinique Conseil Supérieur in late spring 1754. Jupiter had been tried and convicted for carrying on his person arms, a purse filled with unknown ingredients, and several garde-corps (charms) during his marronage. He managed to have his sentence of a hanging commuted in exchange for giving information on others involved in the “distribution of secret drugs.” However, during his trial, the council discovered that he had covertly continued to make and sell his “poisons and maléfices” in the prison itself, instructing new apprentices, like Gouan, with his

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 61 secrets. He showed them how to hide ingredients from the jailers, how to put charms on the jailers and clerks to ensure their “benevolence,” and how to make others that caused “close to sudden death with the extraordinary symptoms” of the “sickness of the blacks who have been poisoned.” The court sentenced Jupiter to be burned alive; for helping him distribute the drugs and charms, his assistant Gouan was hanged.29 This case was part of a dramatic leap forward in Martinique trials; in the three months alone when Jupiter was imprisoned, the Conseil Supérieur convicted 12 other slaves and hanged or burned 6 for poisoning crimes.30 It is highly likely that Jupiter would have been aware of the danger, yet he continued his medical practices in prison anyway. The knowledge, power, and cultural capital—however precarious—attained by being a medical practitioner were, for many, apparently worth the risks. Knowledge and the accumulation of different kinds of knowledge was the key to black medical practitioners’ power and their ability to offer a wide range of services. One possible source of knowledge was a direct connection to previous experience in Africa. In the case of Gomes and Ignacia, several of the witnesses referred to Ignacia as the “greater sorcerer” of the two—a “master” calunduzeira (dancer of calundús) and “Queen”—and emphasized her connections to Africa as a “Mina.”31 While the denunciations primarily focused on Gomes, they singled out Ignacia for her “Africanness” and connected expertise. The idea of African medical practitioners deriving secret medical and supernatural knowledge from their countries of origin—having “learned in the land,” as one accusation from a planter in 1743 Suriname termed it—was not unique to Bahia.32 In an essay on poison and maléfice attached to a 1756 case sent to the Minister of the Marine, the Martinique Conseil Supérieur pointed to the knowledge of simples for curing illnesses “used in their counties” as the source for slaves’ poisoning expertise.33 Some planters purchased or hired enslaved medical practitioners specifically for their connections to Africa and African healing knowledge.34 However, the use of specific African rituals was not restricted to the African-born, nor did African-born practitioners restrict themselves to practices used in their region of origin.35 Focusing only on direct personal links to Africa obscures the myriad ways in which black medical practitioners made claims to knowledge. They appropriated, incorporated, and adapted sources of knowledge in specific local social and botanical environments to solve medical problems, building their reputations and networks of clients on demonstrable successes.36 As part of their efforts to bolster their practice and attract new clients, black medical practitioners like Gomes and Ignacia worked constantly to build their networks of knowledge.37 One major strand in a black medical practitioner’s network was the expertise of other medical practitioners. In the case of Paulo Gomes, one of his neighbors and coworkers claimed that Gomes frequently attended

62  Chelsea Berry the calundús of others before establishing his own. He described Gomes as constantly seeking out “various black sorcerers to give him fortune.” In the years before Gomes had saved money to purchase both the freedom of Ignacia and a farm where they could conduct their practices, he used to go to Rio Vermello and Itapagipe “to make feitiçaria and dance calundús” every Sunday and holy day. Not only did Gomes attend calundús organized around the outskirts of Salvador, but he also traveled as far as Pernambuco to visit the houses of other feitiçeiros.38 This detail of one medical practitioner specifically traveling to learn from others stands out among poison trials, but it was not uncommon for black medical practitioners to know one another. As discussed earlier, some practitioners formed master–apprentice relationships to pass on knowledge. Indeed, in Martinique associations between practitioners as part of “secret societies” with initiations were highlighted in trials from periods of panic in the early nineteenth century.39 Black medical practitioners also incorporated knowledge from European sources into their networks of knowledge. For example, several African practitioners in the Portuguese Atlantic adopted European divination methods like the “scissor and sieve” technique into their practices.40 Printed books were also sometimes taken into practice. João Roiz da Silva, a white painter who had been Paulo Gomes’ neighbor and pew-mate for ten years, told the inquisitorial commissioner that Gomes once told him during mass that he had a Castilian book that taught how to make malefiçios (sorcery objects) and their remedies. This was likely the same book that Antonia de Mattos, another of Gomes’ neighbors, described as “um livro de curar, e matar” (a book to heal and to kill).41 Books and other physical pieces of writing could be powerful magical objects and sources of authority in this period, particularly among a largely illiterate clientele.42 Significantly, Gomes not only sought out the Castilian book as a powerful source of knowledge, but he also advertised his possession of it to a potential client like Roiz da Silva. For some medical practitioners of African descent, the medical practices and ideas of indigenous peoples were also an important source of knowledge. Indigenous sources were not immediately apparent in poison cases from the greater Caribbean, as very few Amerindians were accused or mentioned in the trials. Unlike cases from the Mexico City Inquisition, where defendants of African descent frequently followed a strategy of identifying indigenous sources of knowledge in accusations of witchcraft—sources who could not legally be brought to the Inquisition— black practitioners in the locations for this study did not follow suit.43 This was even true for locations that did have relatively large Amerindian populations through the eighteenth century, such as Bahia and Suriname. However, there is evidence of exchanges of medical knowledge and interactions between ideas about healing through exchanges of knowledge about American plants.44

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 63 In addition to exchanges of knowledge about specific plants, there is evidence of influences and convergences of ideas about medicine and health that sometimes extended well beyond periods of extensive contact. For example, by the eighteenth century, very few indigenous Kalinago remained on Martinique. However, in a poison case from 1768 and treatises on poisoning and superstition from 1775 and 1844, the Kalinago word piaye (sometimes spelled pialle), translated as “shaman who talks to spirits,” appeared in the words of slaves to describe both black medical practitioners and the objects they sold for cures.45 By the latest of these attestations, the definition of piaye had evolved to include objects sold by medical practitioners of African descent to whites to ensure success in a duel; piayes also often appeared as primary pieces of evidence in the Cour Prévôtale poison trials of the 1820s.46 The adaptation of this word is particularly intriguing for the conceptual link to communication with spirits as part of medical practice. For many black medical practitioners in the greater Caribbean, the greatest source of knowledge and power was the dead. Practitioners often communicated with spirits through divination practices to diagnose illnesses, determine their root causes, and prescribe the best course for treatment.47 Adaptations of practices from West Central Africa often involved spirit possession. Generally speaking, ways of contacting the spirit world from Lower Guinea involved fewer instances of spirit possession and more the use of ritual objects for divination. However, healing was the common goal of diverse West and West Central African practices, and many practitioners in the Americas, regardless of their region of origin, bridged differences between them by incorporating, adapting, and creating new elements.48 The content of what divination entailed varied, and practices were not mutually exclusive. In Bahia, calundú dances in the eighteenth century involved the ritual possession of the practitioner by a member of the spirit world, often indicated by a changed voice and behavior. For example, two women identified as “Mina”—from Lower Guinea—were accused of making cures in 1745 Bahia by speaking in the voices of their deceased sons (interpreted by the denouncer, a white woman, as demonic possession).49 Several cases of the watermama or Minje mama dance in the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Dutch Guianas involved several different divinatory practices. Like calundú in Bahia, watermama was primarily a collective dance where spirits possessed ritually prepared participants for the purposes of public healing—though this dance specifically centered on seeking the aid of a powerful water spirit connected to Ijo practices.50 While the collective worship of specific deities was much less common in Virginia, which had far fewer people of African descent and a much smaller proportion of African-born than places like Bahia or Suriname, conjure doctors in the nineteenth-century United States south did use divination to identify sources of affliction causing “tricks.”51

64  Chelsea Berry Black medical practitioners were purveyors of a wide range of services for fees, including treating illnesses; making preventative, curative, and aggressive charms; and identifying culprits of suspected poisonings. In 1755, the Martinique Conseil Supérieur convicted one unnamed enslaved medical practitioner, “famous in his neighborhood,” for all three: composing and distributing “drogues malefices” (evil magical drugs) and “pretended remedies” for other slaves who believed themselves poisoned; having “mysterious understandings” of dangerous plants; and discovering poison and poisoners on plantations.52 At the farm of Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, clients received consultation and treatment through both divinatory practices and the application of particular herbs and objects. In addition to their divinatory practices, Paulo Gomes and Ignacia also sold therapeutic herbal baths and, on at least one occasion, a small pot with unspecified contents for an enslaved client to leave at a crossroads to ensure the “obedience” of his master—a form of taming.53 Practitioners across the greater Caribbean made and sold protective amulets—called bolsas da madinga, garde-corps, or simply variations on “packet”— to prevent misfortune and help ensure success in life.54 Medical practitioners were also understood to be capable of causing supernatural afflictions—through feitiços, conjure objects, etc.—whether for clients or on their own account. For example, when the enslaved man Toiny sought means to kill Antoine in 1754 Martinique, allegedly out of jealousy, he went to an old enslaved woman who was “a rather ordinary source of murders, and poisonings between these sorts of people.”55 Poison accusations directed at medical practitioners of African descent and evidence for trials often centered on the discovery of powerful objects allegedly used in their work. A close examination of some of the described objects recorded in trials uncovers a material culture of medical practice and suggests some of the context of their suspected use. A common element in community-led public accusations was the searching of the suspected poisoner’s home. Several cases noted concealed locations of practitioners’ supplies and objects: secreted in chests, buried under the floor, or hidden in a roof thatching.56 In some cases, the poison or medicine itself was conceived of as a hidden object. Amongst the accusations directed against Paulo Gomes from his Salvador neighbors, he allegedly murdered a man by hiding a small pot of feitiços in his door and caused illnesses in another house with a similar hidden pot.57 Indeed, part of an enslaved practitioner Coffij’s claim to fame at the Suriname New Fort Amsterdam construction site in 1742 was his stated ability to locate and remove all of hidden poison calabashes—their presence being the cause of illnesses and misfortunes.58 Such hidden objects could cause afflictions even without physical contact—walking over or past one could be enough to “catch” an affliction.59 Containers or “kits” of such objects were key tools in the production of a medical practitioner’s cultural capital. While all practitioners

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 65 individually developed their repertoire from experience, local sources, and local needs, several kinds of materials appeared frequently in both practices to heal and to cause harm. As a word of caution, it is important to remember the limits of using poison trials and investigations here: the objects recorded were only those identified by the planters, courts, or enslaved community as suspicious, and the records for some court systems did not always include the kinds of ethnographic details that historians would like. With that said, certain materials, like grave dirt, animal horns, and pieces of consecrated host, came up again and again.60 One element particularly prominent in the bolsas made in the Portuguese Atlantic was the pedra d’ara, a stone commonly used for love magic. These special stones appeared in bolsas from Angola to Lisbon to the Bahian Recôncavo with a range of healing and protective purposes.61 Other common materials included feathers, animal parts, and herbs— usually, and frustratingly, unidentified. Practitioners included specific objects of power and developed rituals to use them for specific purposes with the goal of affecting outcomes in the material world—to offer protection, for example, from injuries or the malevolent actions of others.62 Individual objects of power had particular meanings, but they worked in compositions designed, crafted, and “tied up” by medical practitioners. For example, one case from the Bahian Recôncavo in 1754 involved an affliction caused by a branch of an unidentified tree knotted up with a piece of iron; in the case of April in Suriname, already mentioned, the object he purchased and allegedly used to harm others on his plantation was a little stick packed with herbs and tied up with “papa monies.”63 It was the combination of objects together and associated rituals that held power; in each combination, we can see the work of the practitioner in assembling a network of knowledge.64 Building prestige and cultural capital through their relational networks of clients over a wide geographic area in addition to their networks of knowledge was a common strategy for both free and enslaved black medical practitioners, though the challenges to doing so varied widely with circumstances. Paulo Gomes and Ignacia actively built a diverse network, offering a wide range of services to a wide range of clients; attendees at their rituals on the farm included “people of all quality.” Gomes advertised his skills to his neighbors, black and white. One “gravely ill” white widow recalled to the commissioner that Gomes, whom she had known for 12 years, as they lived on the same street, had tried to persuade her many times over her long illness that she should come to his farm to be healed; she had declined his offer.65 In Virginia, several runaway advertisements from the eighteenth century described the “great acquaintance,” in some cases in counties across the colony, held by enslaved men who went by “Doctor.”66 Poison trials from the colony’s county courts reveal that many practitioners crossed plantation, or even county, lines to perform medical services and attract new clients and exhibited

66  Chelsea Berry their wares—making their services and objects used for healing known to potential clients.67 Robert Carter’s letters from the 1780s requesting the services of enslaved medical practitioners to come treat strange illnesses frequently noted how these practitioners were well-known and specifically requested by the afflicted slaves for their reputation. These requests highlighted the ways in which prestige sustained and expanded a practitioner’s clientele.68 The networks of enslaved medical practitioners and their clients in Suriname can be traced like a spider web over the colony’s numerous waterways—the neatly marked plantation boundaries on property maps stopped neither medical practitioners’ reputations nor their practices. Furthermore, in poison cases across the greater Caribbean, a practitioner’s reputation came up frequently as potentially damning evidence or the initial cause for suspicion when people or livestock became sick. The same cultivation of a reputation, networks of knowledge, and cultural capital that were necessary for success in their vocation also put practitioners at higher risk of being accused of causing illnesses through poisoning and/or sorcery. There was no clear resolution to the case of Paulo Gomes and Ignacia. Having collected denunciations and testimony from their neighbors over the course of a month, the Inquisitorial commissioner sent the package to Lisbon. It would have been months, possibly longer, before he heard back. As with most accusations of feitiçaria directed at people of African descent, the Lisbon Inquisitors decided the case was not worth the expense and declined initiating a full trial. Instead, they neatly copied the documents for the record into the 109th volume of the cadernos do promotor (prosecutor’s notebooks), and that was that. It is possible that Gomes and Ignacia were brought before the secular court, which had joint jurisdiction over feitiçaria cases.69 However, in the absence of surviving documentation, it is impossible to know. While the case of Gomes and Ignacia was ultimately inconclusive, many other poison trials of black medical practitioners ended with concrete finality. For La Rocke, an enslaved man whose head the Suriname court mounted on a pike in the Suriname river; or Jupiter, whose body the Martinique court burned; or Dido, an enslaved man whom the Virginia Cumberland county court hanged in 1756 for making and distributing “poisonous medicines,” the risks of conducting medical practice were very real, the results dire. It was an irony that the strategies used by eighteenth-century black medical practitioners to build their cultural capital—courting new clients, expanding networks of knowledge, building reputations for power and prestige—increased their risk of accusation from planters, slaves, or other practitioners. Medical practitioners of African descent built their professions on knowledge and the accumulation of different kinds of knowledge: from methods of contacting the dead to the use of power objects proven through experience to the social knowledge necessary to identify the work of other practitioners. It would have been difficult for

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 67 them to have been unaware of the risks of their work, especially during the mid-eighteenth-century peaks of poison trials; yet they continued their practices and continuously worked to expand them. To be a medical practitioner of African descent in the greater Caribbean—whether a savant, calunduzeiro/a, lukuman, or simply “doctor”—was to hold a position, however precarious, of power and prestige. It was a vocation that many risked, and sometimes paid, their lives for.

Notes 1. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, October 21, 1749, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Inquisição de Lisboa (IL) Series 30 Cadernos do Promotor, vol. 109, p. 153–60. 2. For key examples, see Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Akunwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders, eds., Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2014); Benjamin Patrick Breen, “Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640–1755” (PhD diss. University of Texas Austin, 2015); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 3. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 3, 132; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, Chapter 6: The Politics of Healing and Chapter 9: Algarve; Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, Chapter 2: Experiments with the Negro Dr’s Materia Medica. 4. James Sweet evocatively describes this problem with the metaphor of “loosing sight.” Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 223. 5. ANTT IL Series 28 Processos de Fé, Series 30, vols. 59–129. I checked volumes in the cadernos up to 1799, but the last poison/feitiçaria accusation I found was from 1778. 6. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 104–5, see Chapter 5: Rio de Janeiro and Chapter 6 Freedom. 7. Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 100–1; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 130; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 118; Fett, Working Cures, 50–55, 64, 159–62; Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers,

68  Chelsea Berry empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haïti (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1987), 81–82. 8. Denúncia de Branca e Pedro de Sesqueira Barbosa, 14 August 1701, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 81, pp. 239–48. James Sweet also discusses this case, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 148–49. For more on Angolan feitiçeiros/as in inquisition records from Angola, Bahia, and Minas Gerais, see Luiz Mott, “Feiticeiros de Angola na América Portuguesa,” Revista Pós Ciências Sociais 5, no. 9 (2008). 9. “gàngà,” Bantu Lexical Reconstructions, accessed December 1, 2017, www. africamuseum.be/collections/browsecollections/humansciences/blr/results_ main. I follow conventional orthography for historical linguistics with the “*” denoting that this is a reconstructed root and a “-” to stand in for different possible noun class prefixes. 10. Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil During the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 179. 11. “SAVANT,” Dictionnaire de L’Académie française. 4th edition (Paris: Chez la Vve B. Brunet, 1762), 686. 12. Memoires de Pierre-Clément de Laussat, Archievs Départementales de la Martinique (ADM), Fonds Pierre-Clément de Laussat Série J24–1, vol. 1, p. 85. 13. “COMMITTED to the gaol of Charles City,” September 8, 1774, The Virginia Gazette (Clementina Rind, ed.), no. 435, p. 4; “COMMITTED to the Jail of Isle of Wight County,” October 10, 1777, The Virginia Gazette (Alexander Purdie, ed.), no. 141, p. 3. Sharla Fett discusses “conjure doctors” and “root doctors” extensively, see Fett, Working Cures, Chapter 3: Sacred Plants; Chapter 4: Conjuring Community. 14. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 956; John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam: Transcribed for the First Time from the Original 1790 Manuscript, ed. Richard Price and Sally Prices. 2nd edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 525. Accusations of wisi as a practice among the Saramaka maroons, as described by Moravian missionaries in the 1770s, also had multiple interpretations: missionaries identified the practices as “poison,” while the maroons termed it “sorcery.” See Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 159. 15. “lukkuman,” in C. L. Schumann, “Neger-Englisch und Deutsches Woeterboek,” Edito tertia, 1783, manuscript in the possession of the Moravians of Paramaribo, published online at “Languages of Suriname,” created February 26, 2003, accessed December 18, 2017, www.suriname-languages.sil. org/index.html. See also Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners,” 951, 956, 958. 16. Proces van Kwamina, August 24, 1763, Nationaal Archief (NADH), Oud Archief Suriname: Raad van Politie (RVP), vol. 808, n.p. 17. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, 521. 18. As a sampling of payments for services, see Procès d’un negre, November 1755, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), Série F3 Moreau de Saint-Méry Collection, Compte-rendu des séances du Conseil supérieur de la Martinique et arets rendus, vol. 245, p. 405–7; Denúncia de Mariana e Francisca, July 18, 1745, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 106, p. 128; Proces van Schipio van Anka, Apollo, en Jasmijn, July 17, 1770, NADH RVP, vol. 818, pp. 51–59. For Virginia, see Fett, Working Cures, 99.

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 69 19. James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 992, 1005; Robert Carter to William Berry, July 31, 1786, Bull Run Regional Library (BRRL), Robert Carter Correspondence (RCC), Letter book 7, p. 62; William Berry to Robert Carter, August 11, 1786, Virginia Historical Society (VHS), Carter Family Papers, 1651–1861, Robert Carter Correspondence, 1754–1804. 20. Proces van Scaramouche en anders, May 14, 1765, NADH RVP, vol. 810, n.p. 21. Proces van La Rocke, February 1, 1741, NADH RVP, vol. 694, n.p.; Denúncia de Branca e Pedro de Sesquira Barbosa, 243; Proces van André, February 1, 1741, NADH RVP, vol. 794, n.p.; Proces van Marquis en Akkra, February 27, 1771, NADH RVP, vol. 819, pp. 234–46. See also Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), fn. 5, pp. 308–9. 22. See Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 165; Fett, Working Cures, Chapter 5 Doctoring Women; Jean de Laborde, “Effet dangereux de l’erreur et de la superstition dans les colonies françaises de l’Amérique,” 1775, ANOM Série C8b, box 14, f. 4; Rufz de Lavison, Recherches sur les empoisonnements pratiqués par les nègres à la Martinique; Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, Chapter 2: European Medicine in the Torrid Zone; Chapter 3: Enslaved Healers on the Plantation. 23. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 154. 24. Denúncia de Miguel e Maria Monjola, July 25, 1746, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 118, pp. 92–92v. 25. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 158; Denúncia de Miguel e Maria Monjola, 92v-93. 26. Denúncia de Thereza e Luis, January 17, 1778, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 129, pp. 490–94. 27. Procès de Zéphir, September 1768, ANOM Série F3, vol. 246, pp. 516–17. 28. Fett, Working Cures, 53, 61–62, 130; Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 22–23. 29. Procès de Jupiter et Gouan, July 1754, ANOM Série F3, vol. 245, pp. 235– 37, 251–52. 30. ANOM, Série F3, vol. 245. 31. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 155, 156v-157. This term deserves some caution, as “Mina” in Portuguese sources referred to much of the Lower Guinea coastline; without further information, the term does not allow us to pinpoint a region of origin. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 7. 32. Proces van Bienvenue, May 13, 1743, NADH RVP, vol. 796. Many of the volumes in this collection have missing page numbers, due to damage on the edges. 33. Procès d’un negre et une negresse, November 1756, ANOM Série F3, vol. 245, pp. 531–32. 34. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 56; Denúncia de Pedro Coelho Pimentel, March 28, 1686, ANTT IL 30, vol. 59, p. 135; Processo de Simão, 1688, ANTT IL 28 Processos, f. 8464. Sweet also discusses these two cases in Recreating Africa, 165, 120–22. 35. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 145, 156–57, 218, 222–23; Chireau, Black Magic, 53; Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners,” 956; Philip D. Morgan, Slave

70  Chelsea Berry Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 623. 36. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 3, see the entirety of Chapter 1: Arrivals; Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 2–4. 37. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 3. 38. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 159v. 39. Jugement rendu par le tribunal spécial contre des esclaves appartenant aux sieurs Eyma, de Leyritz, Pécoul, Chalvet, Fortier, Gradis, Lavener, Serrand, Ducoudray et Valmont accusés d'empoisonnements et de complot d'assassinat contre les économes du quartier, 2 November 1807, ANOM Série C8a Correspondence à l’arrivée en provenance de la Martinique, box 115, f. 51; Procès de Médéric et outres, November 26, 1824, ADM Série U7 Cour Prévôtale 1822–1826, vol. 1, n.p. 40. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 127–28. For an example in the Inquisition records originating in Bahia, see Denúncia de Rosa Maria Berreira, October 29, 1757, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 120, pp. 161–62. 41. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 156v, 158v–159. 42. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 77; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 195, 207. 43. Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), Chapter 6: Mapping Unsanctioned Power. 44. For example, see Parrish, American Curiosity, 280. Virginian snakeroot also became an important part of European pharmacopeias in the Atlantic. See João Vigier, Pharmacopea Ulyssiponese, Galenica, e Chymica, que contem os Principios, Diffiniçoens, e Termos geraes de huma, & outré Pharmacia (Lisboa: Na Officina de Pascoal da Sylva, Impressor de S. Magestade, 1716), 445–46; Breen, Tropical Transplantations, 264; A. M. G. Rutten, Dutch Transatlantic Medicine Trade in the Eighteenth Century Under the Cover of the West India Company (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000), Appendix V. See also Thomas Walduck to James Petiver, November 24, 1710, British Library (BL) Sloane Manuscripts, vol. 2302; Proces van Quashie, July 28, 1731, NADH RVP, vol. 787, n.p.; Proces van Jacob, May 3, 1734, NADH RVP, vol. 788, pp. 202–202v; Proces van Samson, May 9, 1741, NADH RVP, vol. 794, n.p. 45. Procès de Zéphir, 517; de Laborde, “Effet dangereux de l’erreur et de la superstition dans les colonies françaises de l’Amérique”; Étienne Rufz de Lavison, Recherches sur les empoisonnements pratiqués par les nègres à la Martinique (Paris: Chez J. B. Baillière, 1844), 25; Caroline Oudin-Bastide, L’effroi et la terreur: Esclavage, poison et sorcellerie aux Antilles (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2013), 188. 46. Rufz de Lavison, Recherches sur les empoisonnements pratiqués par les nègres à la Martinique, 25–26. 47. Fett, Working Cures, 56; Sweet, Recreating Africa, Chapter 6: African Divination in the Diaspora, Chapter 7: Calundús, Curing, and Medicine in the Colonial World; Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby, Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011 (Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012), 26. For works on the specific context of practices for communicating with spirits in Africa, see Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992).

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 71 48. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 156–57. See the practices of Domingos Álvares at his terreiro (healing house) in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1730s and early 1740s, Sweet, Domingoa Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, Chapter 5: Freedom; Chapter 6: The Politics of Healing. 49. Denúncia de Mariana e Francisca, July 18, 1745, ANTT IL 30, vol. 106, p. 128. For similar accusations of black medical practitioners speaking in the voices of specific deceased individuals, see Denúncia de Pedro Coelho Pimentel, March 28, 1686, ANTT IL 30, vol. 59, p. 135; Denúncia de Branca e Pedro de Sesueira Barbosa, 239–48. 50. Proces van April, August 4, 1742, NADH RVP, vol. 795, n.p.; Complaint against the negro Hans, June 17, 1819, National Archives, CO 116 British Guiana, Fiscal’s Reports 1819–1832, vol. 138, pp. 60–63. As Randy Browne notes in his article on watermama and obeah in early nineteenthcentury Berbice, “minje” was an Ijo word for “water.” Randy Browne, “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 463. Browne also discusses the case of Hans in detail, see pp. 463–68. See also Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, 457; Proces van April, n.p. 51. Fett, Working Cures, 101–2; Chireau, Black Magic, 50. By 1800, Africanborn individuals were a statistically insignificant portion of the Virginian enslaved population. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61. 52. Procès d’un negre, January 1755, ANOM Série F3, vol. 245, pp. 295–97. 53. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 157v. 54. There are many examples of these objects in poison cases. As a selection of such cases involving the makers of these objects, see Denúncia de João e Manoel, March 2, 1758, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 121, pp. 6–7; Procès de Jupiter et Gouan, 250–53; Proces van Titus en Dafina, November 30, 1763, NADH RVP, vol. 808, n.p. 55. Procès de Toiny, July 1754, ANOM Série F3, vol. 245, pp. 249–50. 56. See for example, Proces van Goliath en Prins; Proces van Bienvenue; Mémoires de Pierre-Clément de Laussat, vol. 1, pp. 71–72. 57. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 154v, 160. 58. Proces van Coffij (1742), n.d. Coffij’s claim is similar to that of Hans in 1819 Berbice, who told the court that he could “smell” poison where it was hidden. See Browne, “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah,” 478. 59. For examples, see Proces van Quashie, July 28, 1731, NADH RVP, vol. 787, n.p.; Proces van Karel, Datra, en Avans, August 22, 1798, NADH RVP, vol. 859, pp. 24–30v; Procès de Jean Baptiste et outres, p. 269; Fett, Working Cures, 90. 60. On grave dirt, for examples from nineteenth-century Virginia, see Fett, Working Cures, 94, 102–3. For early nineteenth-century Martinique, see Jugement rendu par le tribunal spécial contre des esclaves appartenant aux sieurs Eyma, de Leyritz, Pécoul, Chalvet, Fortier, Gradis, Lavener, Serrand, Ducoudray et Valmont accusés d'empoisonnements et de complot d'assassinat contre les économes du quartier; November 2, 1807, ANOM Série C8a, box 115, f. 51. See also similar accusation from the 1820s Cour Prévôtale: Procés de Catherine Rosane et outres, August 29, 1822, ADM Série U7, vol. 1, n.p.; Procés de Raimond et outres, November 27, 1823, ADM Série U7, vol. 1, n.p. For a much earlier case from 1742 Suriname, see Proces van Goliath en Prins. On animal horns, see Proces van Samsam, May 11, 1736, NADH RVP, vol. 790, n.p.; Procès de deux negres, January 1755,

72  Chelsea Berry ANOM Série F3, vol. 245, pp. 297–99; Complaint against the negro Hans, 63; Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 82. On Christian, especially Catholic, objects used in bolsas, see Processo de António Rodrigues da Silva, 1725, ANTT IL Series 28, f. 11246; Denúncia de Miguel e Maria Monjola, 92v-93; Luiz Mott, Bahia: Inquisição e Sociedade (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2010), Chapter 5: Quatro Mandigueros do Sertão de Jacobina nas Garras da Inquisição. One of the most famous poison cases in the Caribbean, that of Makandal in 1758 Saint Domingue, centered on the charge of sacrilege for a tied up power bundle that contained a crucifix. See ANOM Série F3, box 88, f. 212–52. 61. Breen, “Tropical Transplantations,” 178; Mott, Bahia, 106; Daniela Buono Calainho, Metrópole das mandingas: religiosidade negra e inquisição Portuguese no antigo regime (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2008), 95, 98, see the entirety of Chapter 3: A mandinga de Deus. 62. For example, see de Laborde, “Effet dangereux de l’erreur et de la superstition dans les colonies françaises de l’Amérique.” 63. Denúncia de Thereza e Francisco, November 19, 1754, ANTT IL Series 30, vol. 113, pp. 318–19; Proces van April, n.p. See also Proces van Isaac, May 10, 1731, NADH RVP, vol. 787, n.p. 64. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 140–42. See also Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders, eds., Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic. 65. Denúncia de Paulo Gomes e Ignacia, 156–57, 159–159v. 66. “RAN AWAY, about the First Day of June last,” November 21, 1745, The Virginia Gazette (W. Parks ed.), no. 486, p. 4; “RUN AWAY from the Subscriber,” November 4, 1763, The Virginia Gazette (J. Royle, ed.), no. 668, p. 4; “COMMITTED to the gaol of Charles City,” September 8, 1774, The Virginia Gazette (Clementina Rind, ed.), no. 435, p. 4; “COMMITTED to the jail of Isle of Wight county,” October 10, 1777, The Virginia Gazette (Alexander Purdie, ed.), no. 141, p. 3. 67. For an example of mobility, see Trial of Webster, Sarah, and Jenny, July 25, 1758, Library of Virginia (LVA) Brunswick Country Court Order Book (CCOB), vol. 7, pp. 233–34. For an example of “exhibiting,” see Trial of Isaac and Quash, May 29, 1759, LVA Cumberland CCOB, vol. 1758–62, pp. 56–57. 68. For an example, see Robert Carter to Bennett Neal, September 15, 1781, BRRL, Robert Carter Correspondence (RCC), Letterbook 4, pp. 117–19. For a Brazilian example of similar practices, see Sweet Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, 76. 69. For an example of this jurisdictional jostling, see Denúncia de Miguel e Maria Monjola, 94.

Bibliography Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. www.africamuseum.be/collections/browsecollections/humansciences/ blr/bantu_lexical_reconstructions_legend Bear, James A. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826. Vols. 1–2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Breen, Benjamin Patrick. “Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640–1755.” PhD diss., University of Texas Austin, 2015.

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 73 British Guiana, formerly Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, Miscellanea including Papers of the Dutch West India Company. Records of the Colonial Office. National Archives, Kew. Browne, Randy M. “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 451–80. Burnard, Trevor and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Calainho, Daniela Buono. Metrópole das mandingas: religiosidade negra e inquisição Portuguese no antigo regime. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2008. Chireau, Yvonne. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Collection Moreau de Saint-Méry. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-enProvence. Correspondance à l’arrivée en provenance de la Martinique. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence. County Court Order Books and County Court Minute Books. Library of Virginia, Richmond. Cour Prévôtale. Archives départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname.” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 925–84. de Laussat, Pierre-Clément. Papers. Archives départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France. Dictionnaire de L’Académie française. 4th edition. Paris: Chez la Vve. B. Brunet, 1762. Feierman, Steven and John M. Janzen, eds. The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. Ferreira, Roquinaldo. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Gómez, Pablo F. Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Handler, Jerome S. and Kenneth M. Bilby. Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1769–2011. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2012. Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the year 1619. 13 Volumes. Richmond: Printed by and for Samuel Pleasants, junior, printer to the commonwealth, 1809. Inquisição Lisboa. Processos, Cadernos do Promotor. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. Lewis, Laura A. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

74  Chelsea Berry Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Mott, Luiz. Bahia: Inquisição & Sociedade. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2010. ———. “Feiticeiros de Angola na América Portuguesa.” Revists Pós Ciências Sociais 5, no. 9 (2008): 1–32. Ogundiran, Akinwumi and Paula Saunders, eds. Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Parés, Luis Nicolau. The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil. Translated by Richard Vernon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Parés, Luis Nicolau and Roger Sansi, eds. Sorcery in the Black Atlantic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pluchon, Pierre. Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haïti. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1987. Price, Richard. Alabi’s World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Raad van Politie en Criminele Justitie. Nationaal Archief, The Hague. Robert Carter Letterbooks. Bull Run Regional Library, Manassas. Rufz de Lavison, Étienne. Recherches sur les empoisonnements pratiqués par les nègres à la Martinique. Paris: Chex J. B. Baillière, 1844. Rutten, A. M. G. Dutch Transatlantic Medicine Trade in the Eighteenth Century under the Cover of the West India Company. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000. Schiebinger, Londa Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Schumann, C. L. “Neger-Englisch und Deutsches Woeterboek,” Edito tertia, 1783. MS in the possession of the Moravians of Paramaribo, published online at “Languages of Suriname.” Created 26 February 2003. Accessed December 18, 2017. www.suriname-languages.sil.org/index.html. Schwarz, Philip J. Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Sloane Manuscripts. British Library, London. Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam: Transcribed for the First Time from the Original 1790 Manuscript. Edited by Richard Price and Sally Price. 2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Sweet, James H. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. ———. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Vigier, João. Pharmacopea Ulyssiponense, Galenica, e Chymica, que contem os Pricipios, Diffiniçoens, e Termos geraes de huma, & outré Pharmacia. Lisboa: Na Officina de Pascoal da Sylva, Impressor de S. Megestade, 1716. The Virginia Gazette (Clemintina Rind, 1774), Williamsburg. The Virginia Gazette (Alexander Purdie, 1777), Williamsburg.

Black Medical Practitioners and Knowledge 75 Voeks, Robert. Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Walker, Timothy D. Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005. Weaver, Karol K. Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of EighteenthCentury Saint Domingue. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Part II

Representation and Power in the Contact Zone

4 Materializing the Immaterial Creating Capital in a Mirrored Mirage1 Leah M. Thomas The mirror metaphor in the Anglophone geographic imagination constructs Otherness in both the literary imagination and cartography. Within a British imperial context, this metaphor, or mirror in the map, often conflates Native Americans and Africans through a paralleled geographic juxtaposition of America and Africa, where the Atlantic performs as a mirrored conduit. Because America is cartographically located across from, or west of, Africa, America and Africa are reflected by the Atlantic Ocean, where the Atlantic is a mirror, as I discuss in the following examples of the maps and, especially, the characters Oroonoko and Imoinda in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the first novels written in English. This metaphorical mirror presents as a philosophical construct that informs imperial mapping; illustrations of this philosophical construct reinforce racial Otherness in the geographic relationship between America and Africa. While maps may not be used explicitly to demonstrate this metaphor, the metaphor is inherent in the mapping of the Atlantic Ocean at the center of the world. Through this mirrored metaphorical lens, particularly as described by eighteenth-century geographer Herman Moll, American and African indigenous bodies get constructed as part of a mappable landscape and seascape as Behn and Defoe show. While Lisa Vandenbossche and Orianne Smith have explored constructions of racialized sexuality in Part I, “Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination,” this chapter posits that racialized Otherness is constructed through a fundamental self–Other dichotomy—as described by philologist Erich Auerbach, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and philosopher Richard Rorty—reflected in a metaphorical mirror performed in the geographic imagination that materializes in a commodified print culture of narratives, fictions, and maps. The construction of space, territory, and perspective materializes in maps. While many kinds of maps and mapping exist, the perspective that informs imperial mapping constructs the idea of a hegemonic map.2 The map is an idea that classicist Christian Jacob describes as a “mediation between humans and space.”3 This idea of the map has

80  Leah M. Thomas hegemonic monolithic implications, as is evident in the role of maps in empire, especially during the age of exploration.4 Maps mediate between humans through a metaphorical mirror that reflects European ideology to construct geography through mimesis and alterity. This perspective materializes in maps as an actual mirror in the hands of mermaids in early maps, as shown in Diego Gutiérrez’s map of America, Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562). (See Figures 4.1 and 4.2.) The mirror in the map is a metaphor for this perspective, and constructs empire in maps. At the same time, the mirror, as in a sea mirror, may be a chart of the sea, as in a mariner’s mirror, such as

Figure 4.1 Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562) by Diego Gutiérrez. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3290 1562.G7.

Materializing the Immaterial 81

Figure 4.2 Detail from Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562) by Diego Gutiérrez. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3290 1562.G7.

Lucas Janzoon Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Leiden, 1584–1585) translated into English as The Mariners Mirrour (London, 1588).5 The mirror metaphor has persisted in literature and art from the medieval to the early modern periods in England and Spain.6 Classicist Adele Haft has addressed the significance of mermaids and their mirrors in the intersection of contemporaneous poetry and early maps.7 In this chapter, I argue that in early transatlantic geographic narratives, imaginative literature, and cartography, the sea itself performs as a mirror, with the “old world” recreated in the “new world.”8 This idea is based on philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman’s argument that America was invented from ideas and expectations that emerged from the medieval imagination, especially in Christopher Columbus’s having thought that he had navigated a western passage to the East. Columbus projected the geographic imagination from John Mandeville and Marco Polo’s travel narratives onto this “new world,” because he thought he was in the “old world.” O’Gorman posits, “Not only was America invented and not discovered, . . . but it was invented in the image of its inventor.”9 This invention occurs through a metaphorical mirror that reflects the perspectives, dreams, and ambitions of those who crossed the Atlantic.10 European imperial texts and maps published in Spain, Germany, and England—European powers with imperial interests—invoke this mirror metaphor that reinforced the reality of English imperial power. This metaphor that invented America through the eye of Europe also reinvented Africa in the image of America. ***

82  Leah M. Thomas The mirror is a way of seeing and of not seeing. In the reflection, one can only see the surface and see oneself, blinded by the self, like Narcissus, or like Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). To see through the mirror to the other side represents a kind of distortion, even madness, as well as experience. In a similar set of conditions, this is what literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the “contact zone” or space of exchange.11 The mirror, within this framework of imperial mapping in the contact zone, is a metaphorical object that materializes within geographic narratives, imaginative literature, and maps as the geographic imagination. Explorers reconstructed space, place, and people through this imaginary.12 Sometimes it materializes as an object within maps, as in the previously mentioned Gutiérrez map of the Americas (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), and metaphorically as the map itself, as indicated in the The Mariners Mirrour. Thus, the geographic imagination gets performed as mimesis negotiated between projection and reality. Mimesis is an identification with similarity that can occur through a distortion of one’s reality through projection, that is, a mirror of what one wants and expects to see because of one’s subject position. Erich Auerbach explores this idea of subject and Other, or alterity, that exists within the self. The Other gets projected onto individuals that are dissimilar to the Subject.13 Michael Taussig describes mimesis as an internal self-struggle that gets externalized.14 Yet, in the context of the contact zone and colonial encounter, mimesis “for marginalized subjects” may challenge “the construction of colonial difference” as discussed by literary scholar Barbara Fuchs.15 The material and metaphorical mirror functions, therefore, as a reflecting and dividing operative of the self and Other. The mirror illuminates the Other in the self. Richard Rorty postulates this self–Other dichotomy through a metaphorical mirror, which informs Western thought. Rorty explains the mirror of nature: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations.”16 This “picture” within “the mind as a great mirror” materializes in imperial geographic narratives, imaginative literature, and maps. Analyzing these contemporaneous texts reveals this metaphorical mirror. This comparison demonstrates how this mirror reflects America through the eye of Europe, especially England, and later reimagines Africa in America’s image.17 Rorty further explains the mirror metaphor through the tabula rasa and “the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind”: “it becomes obvious that the imprinting is of less interest than the observation of the imprint—all the knowing gets done, so to speak, by the Eye which observes the imprinted tablet, rather than by the tablet itself.”18 The eye and the mirror are both within the map. The geographic narratives and imaginative literature included in this chapter along with the imperial maps illuminate both this eye that reflects itself

Materializing the Immaterial 83 within the mirror that defines self and Other within written texts and maps to invent America and reinvent Africa. Philosopher Umberto Eco describes the mirror as “a thresholdphenomenon marking the boundaries between the imaginary and the symbolic,” where the interpreter is the one looking in the mirror. This Subject also differentiates between “virtual and real.”19 According to Eco, “the virtual image . . . is so called because the observer perceives it as if it were inside the mirror, while, of course, the mirror has no ‘inside.’ ”20 In other words, the Other is within us: like the mirror, we are the map. Therefore, the mirror is invisible, or “silenced,” within the map. Hence, the map relies on historical geographer J.B. Harley’s notion of “silences,” which can “become the determinate part of the cartographic message.”21 Harley argues for “allowing for those gaps on the map which make the pattern of lines and points a comprehensible image . . . [W]e should be prepared to regard silences on maps as something more than the mere absence of something else.”22 Geographic narratives, imaginative literature, and imperial maps allow readers to participate in the arguments within the images they create through these silences. According to art historian Ernst Gombrich, “images may indeed teach us to recognize and specify a visual and emotional effect which has always been present in our own experience.”23 Reading the map as a text in juxtaposition to geographic and imaginative literature uncovers how the mirror within these texts creates “a visual and emotional effect” that already exists within the reader. The map, like geographic and imaginative literature, reflects this self–Other dichotomy in the mirror metaphor. Within transatlantic texts, the Atlantic performs as a mirror, a space that reflects the “old world” in the “new world.” This metaphorical mirror materializes much earlier in the hands of mermaids in illuminated manuscripts and early maps. Examining the mirror as an object and metaphor in European manuscripts and maps offers a means for showing how this object itself represents a metaphor for representation and distortion within these texts, and, furthermore, how the texts themselves perform as mirrors. Shown previously, Diego Gutiérrez’s map Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (1562) depicts two mermaids with combs and mirrors on the southern west coast of South America at the Strait of Magellan (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). From the medieval period through the eighteenth century, the mermaids with their mirrors do not change but are replicated to symbolize the imagination that the sea represents. The sea as a mirror represents esoteric knowledge of maritime travel as in Waghenaer’s The Mariners Mirrour. The material mirror as an object symbolizes vanity and distraction. While frolicking mermaids may be distracting sirens and vanities, they expose the metaphor of the mirror, a kind of camera obscura, within the map that offers a way “for . . . reading . . . the shadowy inversion beneath it [the map] of its other, repressed side.”24 The location of the

84  Leah M. Thomas mirrors in Gutiérrez’s map signifies the perception within the geographic imagination, and what explorers and geographers expected to find there: whether gold, silver, cannibals, or giants. Even when the mermaids’ mirrors no longer appear on maps, the mirror remains implicit in the mapping of the continued exploration and colonization of America and, later, Africa. While not all transatlantic travel, trade, and commerce involved the transatlantic slave trade, commerce informed the imperial mapping of America and Africa as reflections of the other in their proximities because of their proximities and resources.25 They were continents separated and joined by a mirror, which was both the Atlantic Ocean and an imperial perspective. This commerce constructed the mapping of America and Africa through a transatlantic lens, or mirror, that conjoined the continents through the Atlantic Ocean on maps and in the geographic imagination. Through this lens, with a view for commerce, England, like Spain, mapped America as an extension of Europe and Africa. Hence, the mapping of the “new world” was an extension of the mapping of the “old world.” This perspective of America as an extension of Europe already existed in the European geographic imagination.26 The Atlantic Ocean became the center of many maps, which implied the triangular trade of transatlantic slavery. The center of maps is moveable, based upon a “double perspective” determined by ethnicity hidden behind geometry.27 Through charting the Atlantic Ocean, not only land was getting mapped but also, and especially, trade was getting mapped. The Atlantic represented a passageway of navigation, the in-between space speckled with islands, webbed with wind and rhumb lines, and darted with compass roses. More rarely, these maps visibly demarcated ships’ routes across the Atlantic, other than historic exploration routes. When these trade routes were demarcated, they did not usually reach the African coast. The maps show stops at islands, where trade, including human trafficking, occurred. Showing how this space gets mapped as a mirrored space illuminates how an implied mapping of the transatlantic slave trade reimagined America and Africa in the European geographic imagination. For American and African coastlines were inscribed with European toponyms for human commerce, as well as gold and ivory commerce. These delineated coastlines and toponyms demonstrate the influence of the transatlantic slave trade in transatlantic mapping. In a similar vein, Rebekah Mitsein explores the materiality of human commerce in her chapter, “Art Reading African Representation, 1650–1750.” *** Herman Moll’s A Map of the World, on wch. Is Delineated the Voyages of Robinson Cruso published in 1719 in Daniel Defoe’s The Farther

Materializing the Immaterial 85 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is based upon Moll’s earlier world maps and was a modified version of A Map of the World, Shewing the Course of Mr. Dampier’s Voyage Round It, from 1679 to 1691, which he created for William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697). The fictionalized map, like its original counterpart, shows most of the eastern hemisphere as complete except for Australia, while the Western Hemisphere appears incomplete. This incomplete Western Hemisphere may indicate that more territory is to be explored and is indicative of the limits of geographic knowledge at the time. This incompleteness implies more territory may extend beyond the limits of geographic knowledge and, thus, creates an imaginative space to speculate on what may be there and how far it may extend. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe participates in the geographic imaginary that such incomplete spaces on maps generate as in Crusoe’s island, Moll’s A Map of the World (1719) and Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World. The map opens an imaginative space where the Western Hemisphere is incomplete, an open landscape merging with the seascape. Thus, it is through this imaginative space that colonial commercial capital was created through print culture. Materializing the immaterial, meaning this geographic imagination in print culture, in what was thought to be a mirrored image of geographic space was actually a mirage, a figure of the imagination. This imperial imaginary gets illustrated in imaginative literature like Behn’s Oroonoko and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as well as the speculative writings of Moll’s A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands Within the Limits of the South-Sea Company (1711) and Defoe’s An Essay on the South-Sea Trade (1712). Initially, this mirroring occurs in descriptions of Africans and Native Americans through commodification in literature and cartography.28 For example, in Oroonoko, Behn uses this mirroring to Europeanize Oroonoko, recreating him in the image of her own culture. She still maintains his Africanness in his blackness: “His Face was . . . a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett . . . . His Nose was rising and Roman, . . . the finest shap’d that cou’d be seen.”29 The only difference that gets accentuated is his blackness, which she describes as “a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett,” heightening his blackness into the beauty of a commodity.30 Once he is situated in Suriname and fights against his enslavement, Behn transforms him and Imoinda from the indigenous of Africa into the indigenous of America. In her description of Oroonoko and Imoinda, Behn invokes the implied metaphor of the mirror to reflect the Other of the English: the Picts. The Picts were the painted or tattooed indigenous peoples of Scotland. In her description of Oroonoko and Imoinda, she further objectifies them by using the term “Japan’d”: I had forgot to tell you, that those who are Nobly born of that Country, are so delicately Cut and Rac’d all over the fore-part of the Trunk

86  Leah M. Thomas of their Bodies, that it looks as if it were Japan’d; the Works being raised like high Poynt round the Edges of the Flowers: Some are only Carv’d with a little Flower, or Bird, at the Sides of the Temples, as was Caesar; and those who are so Carv’d over tha [sic] Body, resemble our Ancient Picts, that are figur’d in the Chronicles, but these Carvings are more delicate.31 It is not until Oroonoko and Imoinda are entrenched in their American slavery and rebellion that Behn remembers to describe their tattooing that recalls the memory of her own heritage. This recollection reflects a lost heritage that is now part of her cultural memory that she replicates through her projection of this metaphorical mirror. Performance studies scholar Joseph Roach examines Behn’s same descriptions of Oroonoko and Imoinda but interprets Behn’s description as a “relentless assimilation of African identity into European ideology.”32 Behn is applying the metaphor of the mirror in the hegemonic Western geographic imagination by aligning Oroonoko and Imoinda’s physiognomy with her own ideals, while also objectifying and commodifying them in their decoration as “Japan’d.” Though her perspective may be assimilationist, her lens, as this mirror, underlies this act of assimilation that is fundamental to English imperialism. Further enforcing this American indigeneity and geography, Oroonoko’s name is a geographic feature in America—the Orinoco River. Oroonoko and Imoinda’s tattooing render their bodies as indigenous and geographic through a mirroring of the landscape, especially because their bodies are decorated with flora and fauna. Thus, this English mirror transforms Oroonoko and Imoinda, like the Native Americans, into commodities as “Japan’d” and also landscape. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the narrator Crusoe details a similar description of Friday to that of Behn’s Oroonoko in Crusoe’s differentiating Friday from Africans: His Hair was long and black . . . ; his Forehead very high, and large, and a great Vivacity and sparkling Sharpness in his Eyes. The Colour of his Skin was not quite black, but very tawny; . . . but of a bright kind of a dun olive Colour, that had in it something very agreeable; tho’ not very easy to describe. His Face was round, and plump; his Nose small, . . . a very good Mouth, thin Lips, and his fine Teeth well set, and white as Ivory.33 Similar to Behn’s description of Oroonoko’s skin as black, “a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett,” Crusoe’s comparison of Friday’s teeth as “white as Ivory” commodifies Friday. However, his naming the Native American according to an African-naming custom Africanizes the Native American,

Materializing the Immaterial 87 who is Christened “Friday.”34 Crusoe’s description, like Behn’s, constructs an English–African–Native American triad. Oroonoko and Friday are defined by not having African and Native American features that would further differentiate them from the English. In this way, both narrators’ perspectives perform as a mirror between Africa and America, conveying this hegemonic geographic imagination that recreated England and English-ness abroad. This mirror functions as a narrative mapping that maps geographically.35 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe illuminates this metaphor of the mirror in the physical geography as well as in the human geography already discussed. While Crusoe’s island adventure is actually set in an unidentified island in the Caribbean off the coast of Brazil, Defoe’s description of the island simulates Juan Ferdinando Island in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Even though the South Sea is the Pacific Ocean, within this geographic imagination, the South Sea was an extension or a mirror of the Atlantic, through its reimagining in cartography and literature. A contemporary of Defoe, Moll speculates on geography by incorporating an implied mirror in his A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands Within the Limits of the South-Sea Company, published in 1711. Published the following year, Defoe’s An Essay on the South-Sea Trade proposed settlement and trade in South America based upon a geography presumed to reflect that of Europe and Africa (the “old world”).36 Both Defoe and Moll may have incorporated this mirror perspective in their writings on America as a way to understand America and to predict its geography. While much of Moll’s geography is based on that detailed in explorers’ accounts, especially those by Dampier, some of Moll’s geography is speculative. Historian Dennis Reinhartz observes that Moll had little knowledge of the interior of South America, which Moll acknowledges in his A View and is shown in Moll’s A New & Exact Map of the Coast, Countries and Islands within ye Limits of ye South Sea Company, a frontispiece to Moll’s A View37 (Figure 4.3). Moll scantily maps the interior of Africa in his This Map of Africa (1710) and notes of Ethiopia that “this Country is wholly Unknown to the Europeans.” In the lower left, he includes a portion of Brazil along the edge of the map. This inclusion of Brazil as part of his mapping of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean offers a visual relationship between Africa and Brazil, especially the connection to the transatlantic slave trade. On this map, Moll includes an inset of St. James Fort on St. Helena, the island with which he compares the Island of Juan Ferdinando. For the English, the island St. Helena was a critical location in their participation in the slave trade. The English used St. Helena as a refreshment and trade stop, much in the same way the Spanish and Portuguese occupied the Canary Islands.38 Because of the expectation that the Pacific mirrored the Atlantic, Moll anticipated the Island of Juan Ferdinando would be similar to St. Helena.

88  Leah M. Thomas

Figure 4.3 A New & Exact Map of the Coast, Countries and Islands within ye Limits of ye South Sea Company (1711) by Herman Moll. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G5200 1711.M6.

For Moll, the Island of Juan Ferdinando mirrors St. Helena, because it can serve the same purpose as St. Helena: I must now . . . take a view of the Island of John Fernando, one of the most noted ones in the South Sea, being treated of by almost all

Materializing the Immaterial 89 Voyagers. This Port is the nearest of note to it of any on the Continent, and there are few Voyagers who sail thro’ the Pacifick Sea, but touch and refresh at this Island.39 On the inset of Juan Ferdinando on his map A New & Exact Map of the Coast, Countries and Islands within ye Limits of ye South Sea Company, he indicates that points “A. A. are 2 very good watering pla[ces].” He remarks later in his A View, “The Marks of the Mount of Copiapo, are, that it looks like the Point of St. Helena.”40 On his map of St. Helena in his Atlas Minor (1729), Moll inscribes English ownership of the island. He situates St. Helena within the perspective of the English in its prime meridian and fort, and the island’s role in commerce, because of its location adjacent to “Cape Negro in Lower Guinea.” His mirroring Africa and the Atlantic in his geography of the South Sea Project attempts to construct an imperial imaginary in the South Sea for English participation in the slave trade in South America.41 *** A space inscribed with known routes, the open ocean at the center of the chart was an in-between space that connected and separated the landmasses of Europe and Africa to and from America. The ocean reflected a silver surface of a mirror between the “old” and “new worlds.” The transatlantic slave trade also connected these continents and worlds and was created from the metaphorical mirror that informed the self–Other construct. For slavery represents the ultimate form of Othering, because it renders human beings as objects of commerce. Transatlantic maps of the long eighteenth century only reference the slave trade in their coastal toponyms and rarely show the triangular trade routes. An annotated copy of John Seller’s A General Chart of the Western Ocean (ca. 1743– 1756, originally published 1721) evidences an actual stop and location on the coast of Africa (Figure 4.4). The contemporaneous annotations of a ship’s route, unique to this copy located in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library in Colonial Williamsburg, indicate dates and anchorings.42 The yellow outline of North America and Africa draws a parallel between these continents, as does the green outline of Portugal and the Caribbean. The engraving and hand coloring shadow the transatlantic slave trade, but the annotated route conveys that routes were charted onto and within these charts. The center of these maps and charts is not the land but the ocean in which the ocean is the connecting, yet separating, space that functions as a metaphorical mirror. The same is true of Emanuel Bowen’s A Map of the King of Great Britain’s Dominions in Europe, Africa, and America (ca. 1752). In this mapping of Africa with Europe and America under the domain of England, Africa gets remapped in the image of England and America, both as a form of colonization and assimilation. The

Figure 4.4 A General Chart of the Western Ocean, John Seller, London, England, 1743–1765 (originally published 1721), black and white line engraving with modern outline color on laid paper, accession #1989–199, image #TC2000–815. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase.

Materializing the Immaterial 91 prominent Africa visually corresponds to North and South America in their typography. Bowen details the coast of Guinea beyond the Grain, Gold, and Slave Coasts, showing Fredericksburg, Cape Coast Castle, Fort Royal, Queen Anns Point, and James Fort, among others. James Island is located where the Gambia River empties into the Atlantic in Negroland. James Island is a toponym that also corresponds to the same one in Virginia on this map. While two locations having the same toponym may be coincidental, this place naming on the map indicates a visual and conceptual mirroring in the geographic imagination that reimagines the “old” and “new worlds” through each other. Literary and Material Studies scholar Martin Brückner notes that the English had a penchant for rebaptizing “native places with English names” on maps to incorporate America into the English geographic and literary imaginations.43 The English reimagined Africa in this same way. This remapping of Africa does not deny Africa’s role and agency in the slave trade and other commerce, but reconstructs Africa through England’s geographic imagination and obscures Africa’s agency in this trade. The map centers the Atlantic Ocean so that the mapping of the continents transforms the Atlantic into a mirror of commerce between America and Africa, with England as the eye. As the eye, England occupies the subject position that Othering Africa and America through the metaphor of the mirror. While the ocean appears to be a blank open space, the annotated routes, wind and rhumb lines, and graticules (latitudinal and longitudinal lines) indicate the knowledge and paths through the ocean that also get reflected in the parallel European, in this case English, toponyms inscribed on America and Africa. The mirror as a metaphor for a way of knowing and predicting physical and cultural geography functions as a “silence” within the map that informs the construction of the map and the map’s message. St. Helena is an example that represents an unmapped location that was known, which is not represented on Bowen’s map. Although not included on the map, the Island of St. Helena is noted by Bowen to be located in the “Ethiopick Ocean,” and that it belongs to Great Britain. He describes the island as “where a Governor & other Officers in ye service of ye English East India Company reside, in order chiefly, to supply their Homeward bound Ships wth. Fresh water & Provisions.” In this way, St. Helena is an extension of England, Africa, and America, performing as an integral site within the triangular trade. Bowen’s noting this island and its purpose conveys what little is actually being mapped and informs readers’ knowledge beyond the map itself. The acknowledgement that mapping is more about strategy opens a door for the possibility that knowledge is implied both inside and outside, within and without, the map. Bowen’s not including St. Helena on the map does not mean that St. Helena did not exist; neither does it mean that he was not knowledgeable of it. For the English, St. Helena was a significant portal in the transatlantic slave

92  Leah M. Thomas trade. The metaphor of the mirror informed their perception of Juan Ferdinando Island on the other side of the Atlantic, extending into the Pacific. The Atlantic Ocean as a mirror then becomes crucial to understanding the mapping of transatlantic commerce, especially human commerce. For, the southern continents of South America and Africa become reflections of each other through an English lens. Reinforcing this assumption and relationship, Herman Moll’s The Map of South America (1709) isolates South America, singling out its proximity to Guinea. Africa gets remapped through English trade evident in the English toponyms: Grain, Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts of Guinea. Moll further accentuates this English mapping of Africa with the apparent first meridian of London, between the Gold and Slave Coasts. He engraves the meridian through the map rather than the usual convention of noting the meridian at the margin of the map. Balancing the map visually and conceptually, Moll incorporates a vignette of the silver mine Potosí. His claim that the mine “employs” 20,000 miners attests to the arduous conditions of the mine. His term “employs” disguises the nature of the labor involved, which was the enslaved labor of Native Americans and Africans. Africa in the upper corner hints at the source of “employment” in Potosí, depicted in the lower left. Through transatlantic slavery, America and Africa became intrinsically linked with the Atlantic Ocean as a pathway and a mirror between them. As Moll mapped America and the South Sea Project, he implicitly mapped the transatlantic slave trade through the Atlantic as a mirror. As the open space of the Atlantic Ocean is imagined as one that reflects the “old” and “new worlds,” Africa was reimagined as an open space to be reinscribed by the English in the image of America through the transatlantic slave trade. Carington Bowles’s A New Chart of the Vast Atlantic or Western Ocean (1771), like many of the charts before it, is comprised of data from earlier surveys (Figure 4.5). While this chart is contemporary with its publication date of 1771, it includes historical information that documents locations and routes dating back to the 1730s. Details about the chart and the English colonies are imprinted on Africa. The English claim this space through naming: James’s Island and Fort, Cape of St. Mary, St. Philip, St. Anns Bank, English Fort, and Cape of St. Ann. Yet the clearly delineated, handcolored routes do not document stops along the African coast, regardless of the established English and other European presence along the coast. Opposite of the detailed mapping of the Atlantic Ocean and the New World, Africa gets reimagined as a terra incognita, or tabula rasa, to be reinscribed. Africa is not only a space for trade of textiles and enslaved peoples throughout the eighteenth century but also a space for colonization of peoples and lands throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

Figure 4.5 A New Chart of the Vast Atlantic or Western Ocean (1771) by Carington Bowles. Image courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library, G1015.B69 1771.

94  Leah M. Thomas Africa’s “old-world” presence and earlier mapping were essential to the mapping of the Caribbean and South America, and later North America and the South Sea. Although Africa tended to remain a marginal presence in the mapping of America during the eighteenth century, its marginalization defined and created America. The English mapped America and Africa as extensions of the Atlantic Ocean, using the Atlantic as a mirror and conduit. The same geographic imagination that constructed Africa constructed America. The mirror metaphor situated America in the subject position while Othering Africa. The identification of America with slavery obscured Africa’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. This obscurity silenced the European slave trade in Africa to erase the presence of slavery there, to reimprint slavery onto Africa during the nineteenth century, by reimagining Africa as another America. Thus, the mirror in the map operated to remap Africa in the image of America. *** The metaphorical mirror that invented America was constructed to reimagine Europe in America as a “new world” in geographic narratives, imaginative literature, and imperial cartography. The geographic literature of Moll and Defoe along with the imaginative literature of Behn and Defoe demonstrate this mirror as a means for constituting English identity and Englishness in relation to Native Americans and Africans. Furthermore, these writers conflate Native Americans with Africans through this mirror to coalesce indigeneity in England, America, and Africa to construct a self–Other dichotomy that fashions an AmericanAfrican identity as Other in relation to England. Moll and Defoe mirror the geography of St. Helena in the Atlantic through Moll’s description of Juan Fernando Island and Defoe’s description of Crusoe’s island. On the other hand, Behn’s narrator mirrors Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are African, as being or similar to being European, Native American, and Pict. Defoe’s Crusoe mirrors Friday, who is Native American, as being or similar to being European and African. Behn’s narrator and Defoe’s Crusoe are defined as “English” and the eye through their own reflection in America. The imperial maps included in this chapter center the Atlantic in the maps as a “silenced” space that symbolizes a mirror that reflects the commerce that traverses it as well as the continents on its opposite sides. The maps provides illustrations and texts of this imperial imaginary at the locus of this mirror that is the Atlantic, a movable center that is the eye of the Subject and the eye of the reader. This mirror also offers a way of understanding how transatlantic slavery became a conduit and a way to reimagine Africa as another America, both continents inscribed with English toponyms to be reinvented in the image of England. This image created print capital by materializing a metaphor within the geographic and literary imaginations that mirrored a mirage.

Materializing the Immaterial 95 This mirror metaphor informed European and especially English geographic and literary imaginations that materialized in print culture in geographic and imaginative literature, such as Behn’s Oroonoko and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The metaphorical mirror, in its image of transatlantic trade and commerce, materialized in exchanges of African artifacts that Mitsein analyzes, and the cultural codings of obeah fetish objects that Victoria Barnett-Woods examines in the following chapters. Just as the English and other Europeans brought their cultural objects and perspectives to America and Africa, peoples of America and Africa exchanged their cultures, perspectives, and objects with Europeans. Because of colonization and coerced and forced assimilation through the metaphorical mirror, relocating and reclaiming indigenous cultures and objects of America and Africa have to be gleaned through silences that have persisted, and looked beyond the reflection, for what is there.

Notes 1. I would like to acknowledge the following for research support that contributed to this chapter: 2013 Mendel Fellowship, Lilly Library, Indiana University; 2013 Helen and John S. Best Fellowship, American Geographical Society Library; and the 2016 Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, Mapping, Text, and Travel. I presented portions of this article at the 2017 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the 2017 East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conferences. 2. Edney critiques this idea of the hegemonic map in his Cartography, especially Chapter. 1. 3. Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, trans. Tom Conley, ed. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33. 4. J. B. Harley proposes a methodology for rereading Western maps to rethink how they construct territory through ideologies and tools of Western empire (J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–20). Harley’s theoretical approach is similar to those applied to textual and visual studies. Matthew H. Edney applies these approaches to his study of British India in his Mapping an Empire, esp. 30–36. S. Max Edelson demonstrates how British Americans used these ideologies to inform and construct British America, especially through the Board of Trade in his The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 21–63. 5. Günter Schilder and Marco Van Edmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries During the Renaissance,” in The History of Cartography. Vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1392–96 and Alison Sandman, “Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92. 6. In The Mutable Glass, Herbert Grabes explores the mirror metaphor in literature and art from the medieval to early modern periods in England. For the use of the mirror as object and metaphor in Spain, see Michael Schlig, The

96  Leah M. Thomas Mirror Metaphor Metaphor in Modern Spanish Literary Aesthetics (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2004), Chapters 1–2. 7. Adele Haft, “The Mocking Mermaid: Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part Four,” Cartographic Perspectives 79 (2014): 40–42. 8. The “old world” consisted of Europe, Africa, and Asia; the “new world” was America. Amerigo Vespucci conceived of America as the “new world” in his letter Mundus Novus (Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 115). 9. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, 140. 10. See William Boelhower, “Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,” Word & Image 4, no. 2 (1988): 477–81 and Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. 1986 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 45, 56, 71. 11. Mary Louise Pratt locates the contact zone within “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other to establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Imperial Eyes, 8). While the contact zone is a space of exchange, Pratt’s point is that this exchange is subject to power dynamics that emerge when those from an imperial power have to negotiate for survival with indigenous peoples. 12. This geographic imagination is an imperial imagination unlike the “diverse geographical imaginations” (Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), xi, 129–32). 13. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 554–55. 14. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. 15. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 16. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12. 17. Benjamin Schmidt suggests, “geography identified as the eye of (European) history—then space and distance (from Europe) served as key organizing principles for this later moment [the latter half of the seventeenth century] of geography” (Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 15). 18. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror, 143–44. 19. Umberto Eco, “Mirrors,” in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 203, 205, emphasis in original. 20. Ibid., 205. 21. J. B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 86. 22. Ibid. 23. Ernst Gombrich, “Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 270, no. 903 (1975): 147–48.

Materializing the Immaterial 97 24. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 4 [emphasis in original]. 25. Benjamin Schmidt describes this same phenomenon in the placement of a Native American in the cartouche in Hendrick Doncker’s Pas-Caert van Guinea (ca. 1670) (Inventing Exoticism, 241). 26. See Surekha Davies, “America and Amerindians in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae universalis libri VI (1550),” Renaissance Studies 25, no. 3 (2011): 370–72. 27. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 222–26. 28. I use the term Native Americans to refer to all indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the term America in its usage prior to the American Revolution to apply to the Americas. 29. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2003), 13. 30. Ramesh Mallipeddi explores Behn’s commodification of Oroonoko’s blackness in “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4 (2012): 475–96. 31. Although Behn does not use the term Orient or orientalism, “Japan’d” has the connotation of the East, which existed in the English geographic imagination as a Japanese process of preservation and decoration. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1979 (New York: Penguin, 1995), 12, 22–23, 39–40. Japanning, as a specific aspect of orientalism, held the connotations of commodification, hybridization, and “encounter,” as Chi-ming Yang illustrates in Performing China, 110, 139–43. Behn, Oroonoko, 40. When enslaved in Surinam, Oroonoko is renamed Caesar and Imoinda, Clemene (Behn 36). To minimize confusion, I refer to both characters by their original names, Oroonoko and Imoinda, throughout this chapter. 32. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123, 155–56. 33. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. 1719 (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 189–90. 34. Roxann Wheeler examines Friday’s racial complexity to demonstrate that race is not an essential category but is a politically and socially constructed one (Roxann Wheeler, “ ‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man,’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 62, no. 4 (1995): 821–61). 35. Martin Brückner points out the English penchant for rebaptizing “native places with English names,” and how maps incorporated America into the English geographic and literary imagination (“Popular Map Genres in American Literature,” in Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres, ed. Anders Engberg-Pedersen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 329–31). Ralph Bauer elaborates on this linguistic incorporation of America into the English imagination through geography in his “Of New Worlds and Old Words Cultural Geography and the Linguistic Discovery of America,” in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900, ed. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 29–60. 36. For a discussion of Moll’s and Defoe’s perspectives on the South Sea Project, see Dennis Reinhartz, “Shared Vision: Herman Moll and His Circle and the Great South Sea,” Terrae Incognitae 19 (1987): 1–10 and Gillian Hutchinson, “Herman Moll’s View of the South Sea Company,” Journal for Maritime Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 87–112. For additional information on Moll’s

98  Leah M. Thomas relationship to empire, literature, and cartography, see Dennis Reinhartz’s The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997) and his “Cartography, Literature, and Empire: Herman Moll, His Maps, and His Friends,” Mercator’s World 4, no. 2 (1999): 32–39. 37. Reinhartz, “Shared Vision,” 5. 38. See Leah M. Thomas, “Beauty and Commerce: Central Africa and Virginia in Sir Robert Dudley’s Arcano del mare,” The Portolan 100 (2017): 28–31. 39. Herman Moll, A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South Sea Company (London: Printed for J. Morphew near Stationers Hall, 1711), 69. 40. Ibid., 79. 41. Carl Wennerlind, “The South Sea Company and the Restoration of Public Credit,” in Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620– 1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 197–234. 42. Margaret Beck Pritchard, “A Selection of Maps from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection,” in Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America, ed. Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002), 194–97. 43. Brückner, “Popular Map Genres,” 329–31. Ralph Bauer suggests this linguistic incorporation of America into the English imagination through geography in his “Of New Worlds and Old Words,” 29–60.

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100  Leah M. Thomas ———. A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South-Sea Company. London: Printed for J. Morphew near Stationers Hall, 1711. O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pritchard, Margaret Beck. “A Selection of Maps from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection.” In Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America, edited by Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, 57–311. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002. Reinhartz, Dennis. The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. ———. “Cartography, Literature, and Empire: Herman Moll, His Maps, and His Friends.” Mercator’s World 4, no. 2 (1999): 32–39. ———. “Shared Vision: Herman Moll and His Circle and the Great South Sea.” Terrae Incognitae 19 (1987): 1–10. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 1979. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1995. Sandman, Alison. “Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 83–108. New York: Routledge, 2002. Schilder, Günter and Marco Van Edmond. “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance.” In The History of Cartography. Vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, edited by David Woodward, 1384– 432. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Schlig, Michael. The Mirror Metaphor in Modern Spanish Literary Aesthetics. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2004. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Seller, John. A General Chart of the Western Ocean. London: Sold by W. Mount & T. Page on Tower Hill, 1721. Smith, Orianne. “Creolizing the Gothic Narrative: The Politics of Gender and ‘Black’ Magic in Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta.” In Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination, edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods. New York: Routledge, 2019. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Thomas, Leah M. “Beauty and Commerce: Central Africa and Virginia in Sir Robert Dudley’s Arcano del mare.” The Portolan 100 (2017): 27–43. Vandenbossche, Lisa. “Veneral Distemper: The Contagious Threat of Illicit Trade in the Journals of Captain James Cook.” In Cultural Economies of the Atlantic

Materializing the Immaterial 101 World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination, edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods. New York: Routledge, 2019. Waghenaer, Lucas Janzoon. The Mariners Mirrour, wherin May Playnly Be Seen the Courses, Heights, Distances, Depths, Soundings, Flouds, and Ebs, Risings of Lands, Rocks, Sands and Shoalds, with the Marks for th’entrings of the Harbouroughs, Havens and Ports of s the Greatest Part of Europe: Their Several Traficks and Commodities: Together wth. the Rules and Instrumẽts of Navigation. Translated by Anthony Ashley. London: [H. Hasselup?], 1588. ———. Teerste deel vande Spieghel der zeevaerdt, vande navigatie der Westersche Zee, innehoudende alle de custen van Vranckrijck, Spaignen ende ‘t principaelste deel van Engelandt, in diversche zee caerten begrepen. Ghedruct tot Leyden: By Christoffel Plantijn, 1584. Wennerlind, Carl. “The South Sea Company and the Restoration of Public Credit.” In Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620– 1720, 197–234. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Wheeler, Roxann. “’My Savage,’ ‘My Man’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH 62, no. 4 (1995): 821–61. Yang, Chi-ming. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

5 Reading African Material Culture in the Contact Zone Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea Rebekah Mitsein In the turn toward the transatlantic in literary studies, West Africa remains an underexamined player on the early modern and eighteenth-century geopolitical stage. This oversight is at least partially due to the assumption that there was no textual exchange between West Africa and Europe during this time. Such claims assume a narrow definition of “text” that primarily includes alphabetical representation, yet the objects that West African artisans crafted either for local use or for the specific purpose of trade with Europeans contain culturally significant inscriptions that entail a sophisticated literacy.1 These are objects through which Africans expressed their experiences and communicated within and across communities. They are also narrative devices, telling the stories of the human and the divine, of kings, queens, and warriors, and of the natural and created world. They can be read as such by triangulating their iconography with contemporary accounts of traditional culture and myth and with historical European travel narratives and geographical texts. To borrow a phrase from Elizabeth Isichei, this may result in “ambiguous voices— but there are sometimes no other voices to be heard.”2 Doing this work, ambiguous though it is, gives scholars of eighteenth-century culture a way to conceptualize African worldviews in the contact zone, which in turn enables us to examine exchanges in European travel narratives with an attunement to how African self-expression existed and dictated terms within those encounters. This essay considers early modern ivory carvings, gold figures, and brass castings from West Africa as legible texts that circulated in Europe in the early Enlightenment, both as material artifacts and through description in travel narratives about Guinea. As ivory was carved for people in positions of authority, whether African or European, ivory carvings tell narratives about how Africans of the Guinea coast conceptualized state and military power in the early Enlightenment. Similarly, the brass casts that have come to be known as the Benin bronzes that travelers observed on visits to the Edo kingdom contain meaningful expressions of economic and martial power. Broadly speaking, these artifacts are structured

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 103 by a threshold aesthetic that reflects a belief system in which boundaries between the human, the natural world, and the divine world as porous if not entirely absent. I use Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea as a case study of how encounters with such material culture left lasting impressions in the European geographical imagination. I argue that Bosman echoes their threshold aesthetic in his own representational strategies as he struggles to account for Europe’s seemingly inexplicable inability to gain control over West Africa’s gold trade. For Bosman, the unpredictability of Europe’s political and trade relationships with Africa was inextricably tied to how African craftsmanship unsettled European ideas of form and to African beliefs about the permeability of the material world. In effect, Bosman and his own text ironically become very much like the kind of object he and his ilk termed the “fetish,” at once separate from and yet infiltrated by incorporeal forces that leave an observable mark on the narrative. Published in Dutch in 1703 and translated into English in 1705, Bosman’s account of West Africa was foundational to every Guinea travelogue that came after his, with some writers like William Smith simply incorporating entire passages of his text, word for word, into their own.3 Bosman’s text appeared on bookshelves from Newton’s to Diderot’s to Adam Smith’s. William Pietz asserts that “the Guinea known by the Enlightenment was above all Bosman’s Guinea.”4 Of course, the Guinea known by the Enlightenment, and by much of Western intellectual history, has also been a poor mimetic representation of a culturally dense geographical region. In Achille Mbembe’s words, European writings on Africa have never adequately “been able to account for complexity,” given their tendency to “assimilat[e] all non-linearity to chaos, forgetting that chaos is only one possible corollary of unstable dynamic systems.”5 Accounts of Africa like Bosman’s undoubtedly pit over and again the rational Enlightenment subject against the erroneous native. Western interpretations of African art objects and cultural artifacts played a key role in producing these stereotypes as well. By the time of Kant and Hegel, African material culture would serve in Western discourse as the primary evidence of Africa’s aesthetic, religious, and philosophical immaturity, of the inability of the African mind, as Pietz frames it, to appropriately value either trade resources or aesthetics.6 Africa in Bosman’s text could easily be read as “a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete, strange signs, convulsive moments—in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos.”7 However, that does not mean we must approach either Bosman’s text or his encounters with West African art objects and artifacts assuming that European philosophical supremacy is a foregone conclusion or that African worldviews thus had no traction at all in the contact zone. Mimetic representation is not the only kind of representation at work in Enlightenment travel writing, and African ideas and acts of self-representation, as articulated

104  Rebekah Mitsein through the artifacts that Bosman and his readers encountered, are legible in “Bosman’s Guinea.” They are legible in part because all travelers who had a vested interest in building economic relationships with West African potentates attempted to understand some of the nuances of local politics and culture, regardless of their personal judgments on those topics.8 Bosman’s delves into the material practices and meaningful expressions of local life almost in spite of himself. He tracks African ideas even as he purports to reject them. When giving a detailed report on a series of local tales about the creation of the Earth and the differences between the sexes, Bosman interrupts himself, writing, “’tis time to stop my Hand; for if I should particularize all their Notions concerning the Creation, the Moon and Stars, instead of being short, should grow insupportably tedious” (the point he interrupts himself on—how some Africans of “the Gold Coast would persuade us that the first Men came out of Holes and Pits”—is a passingly accurate if oversimplified account of one still popular Ashanti creation myth).9 A few pages later in the midst of a lengthy description of oath-taking practices, he justifies the amount of detail he has gone into by arguing that “it is a part of [the African’s] Religious Worship,” so he then has “some excuse for pursuing that Subject yet a little farther.”10 Despite Bosman’s dismissive tone, this oft-repeated rhetorical move illustrates the fact that he pursued such knowledge in detail and with interest, driven not only by economic imperatives but also by a deeply ingrained curiosity about the world that he claims in the early pages of his narrative motivated him to travel in the first place.11 Similarly, African material artifacts are sites of remarkable signification in Bosman’s text. In his presentation of one creation myth, he claims The Negros tell us, that in the beginning God created Black as well as White Men, thereby not only hinting but endeavoring to prove that their race was as soon in the World as ours; and to bestow a yet greater Honour on themselves, they tell us that God having created these two sorts of Men, offered two sorts of Gifts, viz. Gold, and the Knowledge or Arts of Reading and Writing, giving the Blacks the first Election, who chose gold, and left the Knowledge of Letters to the White.12 Functionally, the story serves as an affirmation not only of European supremacy but also of African complicity in their domination and exploitation as Bosman suggests that European intellectual superiority is central even to the Africans’ own self-narration. Formally, though, the anecdote creates parity between gold and the written word—both are thick with discursive power. Bosman is a porous narrative subject vulnerable to this discursive power, as the recurrent refrain “they tell us” indicates, in this example and through the entire text (“The Negroes tell us . . .”; “The

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 105 Negroes tell us . . .”; “The Negroes indeed tell us . . .”; “Confirming the reports of the Negroes who tell us . . .”; “As some tell us . . .”, etc.).13 Bosman’s acute attention to African self-representation, despite his arrogant judgment and Westernized analyses, invites us to examine his text as one shaped by European and African forces of culture alike. This is not to say that the relationship between these two forces is either balanced or harmonious in Bosman’s text. It is chiefly visible in moments of what Cassander Smith has termed “narrative compromise”: the breaks, inconsistencies, and contradictions in early European narratives of contact with black Africans, in which “writers struggled to correlate the material details of their encounter with literary, rhetorical objectives.”14 As Smith explains, the resulting “compromise” evokes both meanings of the term as “a factor that undermines the integrity of a structure or system and as a collaboration, a series of concessions between two parties.”15 It is a fitting term for most late seventeenth-century European company projects in Africa. Colonial ventures were frequently undermined, as my subsequent examples will show, and European factors often had little choice but to adapt to the worldviews and structures of power already in place in West Africa. In Smith’s terms, as their texts struggle through these reminders of European vulnerability, they “reveal the extent to which black Africans, as historical presences, helped to shape the literary record of the early Atlantic world—not as passive constructions but as active participants.”16 Bosman’s aforementioned fascination with African creation myths and oath-taking practices is an example of this compromise at work. Even as he is dismissive of local cultural practices, they break through his assured persona and reel him back to dwell on them “a little farther,” his hand continuing to write even against his better judgment until he needs to “stop” it short. Bosman’s authorial self is infiltrated in the contact zone, the material practices of the local inhabitants of the Gold Coast taking over his account and changing the direction, however momentarily, of the narration. Throughout Bosman’s text, this pattern repeats from his speculation about local religious ideas and practices to his inability to fully account for the Dutch West India Company’s continued failure to locate, let alone possess, the region’s goldmines. Encounters with West African material culture forced Bosman to confront in various ways the vulnerability of the European subject both as an embodied fact and as a philosophical concept. Early modern West African conceptual schemas are united in their willingness to imagine fluidity of being between the material and the divine and among all things. Although how these belief systems manifest can be highly individualized— ritual practices and iconography even within cultural or language groups vary from region to region—George E. Brooks identifies three categories of supernatural phenomena central to this worldview: a creator god who is omniscient yet does not directly intervene in human life; ancestors who

106  Rebekah Mitsein can act as intermediaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead; and spirits or agential energy that can coexist with both natural things, including plants, trees, stones, and animals, and created things— what eighteenth-century Europeans knew as idols, “fetishes,” or “grisgris.”17 E. Bolaji Idowu describes this last category in his foundational study on traditional African religions as “the African world swarm[ing] with spirits” that can move from an animal or object into a human and back again and can bridge the divine and quotidian realms.18 Such spirits—abosom in the Akan conceptual schema and orisha in Yoruba, for example—are the mechanisms through which humans interface with the divine. This philosophy is often incorrectly described as animism—a belief system in which nonhuman and inanimate entities have or house souls. However, as P’Bitek Okot frankly puts it, “There are no ‘animists’ in Africa.”19 Animism presumes a metaphysical divide between the material and the divine that is absent from most traditional West African worldviews.20 According to Kwame Gyekye, Akan metaphysics, for instance, rejects by implication the view, held by Cartesians and others in Western philosophy and also in Islamic philosophy, that matter is essentially passive or inert and that a creative divine being must therefore activate it . . . . Activity is a property intrinsic to matter, that is, natural objects; it is the essence of natural objects to be active, to possess power.”21 This is apparent, according to Gyekye, in the language itself. Phrases in English that would seem to identify a mind separate from a body, “I am hopeful, I am patient, I am humble” are demonstrably embodied in Twi, “My eyes are on it, my heart subsides, I have brought my body low.”22 There are still “categorical distinctions” within the “ontological pluralism” of Akan ideas of being, as Gyekye argues, but “there is no distinction between the sensible (perceivable world) and the nonsensible (nonperceivable) world in the sense of the latter being real and the former being unreal, as in other metaphysical systems.”23 In other words, the crossing of categorical distinctions is not emblematic of philosophical crisis or a descent into chaos as it would be in Western metaphysics, although Bosman and others often experienced it as such. Kwasi Wiredu explains that the Akan route around the mind/body or subject/object problem is accounted for in the language as well. In Twi, there is no word for the existential verb “to be” at all. According to Wiredu, the closest equivalent, wo ho, “always prompts the question, ‘to be what, where?’ or ‘being what, where.’ ”24 Thus, “in the Akan language existence is necessarily spatial. To exist is to wo ho, to be at some location.”25 Wiredu articulates a metaphysics in which reality is not produced through a strict separation between being and world, the way Cartesian

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 107 dualism has allegedly dictated Western concepts of being. All entities, including humans, objects, and abosom or spirits have being because they have a locational relationship with other humans, objects, and abosom—sometimes sharing the same space at the same time. Wiredu and Gyekye have different ways that they philosophize the lived practices of Akan communities, but they agree that cleaving the mind from the body, or the ideational from the material, is an absurd exercise in Akan thought. Wiredu suggests that the same is the case in Bantu and Yoruba metaphysics. Indeed, Segun Gbadegesin describes Yoruba notions of the self and world as comprised of various parts that bridge the visible and invisible. “How can a spirit occupy a space and still remain a spirit?” Gbadegesin asks: “It must be remarked that this is not an issue which engaged the attention of the traditional [Yoruba] thinker.”26 It’s neither accurate to describe natural or created objects as having souls or spirits, nor to describe them as mere conduits for immaterial energy. Existence dwells, rather, in the proximal relationships among entities. This is the general worldview that underpins the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art objects, artifacts, rituals, and performances that Europeans encountered on or from the Guinea coast, such as the ivory carvings that were highly prized and sought after by European collectors in the early modern period. Take, for example, an Owo vessel carved for a potentate in the seventeenth or eighteenth century (Figure 5.1), which would have likely held small objects in the reception room of his palace displaying a story of his power. The central figures have human heads, torsos, and hands. Heads and torsos are the most important parts of the human body in much West African art, which is often reflected in the proportions of human figures, the head standing in as the locus for leadership and human will and the torso as the house of the heart, digestive systems, and reproductive organs. Legs, by contrast, are usually shorter and smaller.27 In this vessel, the central figure’s legs are not human; instead, the figure splits into two creatures at the groin (crocodiles), which bend upward, and are gripped in the figure’s hands—a motif of “self-dompting” that was common in the precolonial art of both the Owo kingdom and Benin. Self-dompting emblemizes the dual nature of kings and leaders, who were thought to belong to both the spiritual and physical world.28 A powerful character in many different African belief systems, the crocodile was venerated for the same reasons it was decried by Europeans: as an animal that could live both on land and in the water, that seemed able to appear and disappear without warning, the crocodile was treacherous, but also clever and adaptable. The crocodile, like the king, bridged the spirit world and quotidian realms—in both the Edo and the Yoruba pantheon, crocodiles are the messengers of Olokun, the god/dess of the sea. The mudfish on the lower half of the vessel is also an emblem of liminality; due to its proto-lungs and stiff flippers, a mudfish can move from one

108  Rebekah Mitsein

Figure 5.1  Lidded Vessel, Yoruba Peoples, Owo Group (c. Seventeenth– Eighteenth Centuries). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1991, 1991.17.126a, b. www.met museum.org.

stream to another across dry land. Mudfish and crocodile masks feature prominently in contemporary West African masquerade, which Christopher Spring describes as an “art of transformation . . . often concerned with the process of harnessing the powers and forces of the spirit world and bringing them into the human world.”29 A similar notion is suggested by the physical conflation of the human and animal imagery in the vessel: the powers of the divine and natural are available to the human

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 109 leader who makes use of it or displays it in his abode.30 Thus, the vessel reflects a worldview where natural power (symbolized by the crocodile and the mudfish), spiritual power (symbolized by the self-dompting), and human power (symbolized by the head and the heart) all converge on a single metaphysical plane. The representation is not fanciful; it reverberates more closely with West African ideas of reality than what the eye sees looking only at the surface of the quotidian world. European travelers to West Africa not only received explanations of these kinds of material culture objects but were also offered explanations to very specific rhetorical and political purposes by local brokers and guides. In an appendix describing Benin City written by David van Nyendael included at the end of Bosman’s narrative, van Nyendael writes of the brass cast tiles that line the walls of the palace. He describes their subjects as “Human Figures: but so wretchedly carved, that it is hardly possible to distinguish whether they are most like Men or Beasts.”31 The plaque in Figure 5.2 is rife with iconography that plays with similar conceptual boundaries as the Owo vessel above (because the Edo had a colonial relationship with the Owo empire on and off through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there are clear borrowings between their aesthetic styles). Typical of Benin art, the head is proportionally larger than the body, emphasizing that this figure is a leader or king. He holds two leopards by their tails, symbols of life force or longevity. His arm position is reminiscent of the self-dompting seen on the Owo vessel and although he doesn’t grip his ankles, two mudfish hip masks project from his sides in a way that suggests they could be an extension of his torso as his legs are. Hip masks are worn for the same reason that masks are worn over the face during ritual masquerades—to bring particular qualities from the natural and spirit world in relation to a person or community.32 Though van Nyendael describes this kind of imagery as so bestial as to be unintelligible to a European, he writes that in spite of this fact, “my Guides were able to distinguish them into Merchants, Soldiers, WildBeast Hunters, etc,” indicating that he received an explanation of how the iconography of their carvings translated to African beliefs.33 Such insights were not given simply as a matter of course. When van Nyendael attends the coral festival in Benin City, he makes clear that he was not able to discover the Nature and Intent of this Coral-Feast, because the Negroes would not give me any Account or Explanation of it; their only answer to the Question, whenever I put it, being, We don’t know anything of it.34 Van Nyendael’s Edo guides, as his cultural brokers, emerge as figures who controlled the terms of Benin’s relationship with Europe through what they chose to conceal and what they chose to reveal. It is no surprise that they chose to explicate the expressions of Benin’s mercantile and

110  Rebekah Mitsein

Figure 5.2 Brass Plaque, Edo Peoples, Benin City (c. Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries). © The Trustees of the British Museum, Acc. No. Af1898, 0115.31.

military authority contained in the palace plaques. Such an explanation would have been a reminder to the Dutch West India Company of who was calling the shots in their relationship. Van Nyendael’s account reveals that encounters with African representation were not neutral experiences

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 111 for European travelers; they were experiences of compromise, in both senses of the word. Europeans had to concede to the authority represented there, but facing the threshold aesthetic of these objects was also an exercise in facing an anti-Cartesian worldview in which existence is spatial and reality is determined through one’s proximity to other people, objects, and forces. It makes sense, then, that for Bosman the way African art unsettled European ideas of subjectivity and form went hand in glove with what he perceived as Africa’s political and economic capriciousness. In a revealing passage, he argues that the inhabitants of the Guinea Coast have devised “a sort of Artificial Gold, composed of several Ingredients; among which some of them are very oddly shaped. These Fetiche’s they cast . . . into what form they please.”35 They use this fool’s gold to make statues and jewelry, which they then trade to Europeans, allegedly keeping all the pure gold for themselves. This anecdote elides the “oddly shaped” artifacts with the “artificial” gold and suggests that both are emblematic of the trickery or duplicity of the locals who control trade. It also foreshadows Bosman’s frustration, articulated a few pages later, over the fact that local potentates continue to divert European attempts to find the location of the Gold Coast’s goldmines, which are so well protected that no European “has ever seen one of them.”36 This frustration is ultimately integrated into Bosman’s larger investigation into African worldviews in which the boundaries between things are not easily understood or accounted for: when Bosman goes into greater detail regarding fetishes as religious objects, he writes, Before I proceed to inform you how they represent their Gods, I shall only hint that all things made in Honour of their False Gods, never so mean, are called, Fetiche: and hence also the Artificial Gold mentioned in my sixth Letter derives its Name.37 In fact, he defines abosom, or “Bossom,” as the “Negro” word for “fetish.”38 Unsettled aesthetics and a worldview that understands material boundaries to be negotiable are, for Bosman, at the very compositional root of Europe’s inability to gain ground on the Gold Coast. This elision between Bosman’s frustration over Europe’s lack of political control over the region and his suspicion regarding African representational practices is also apparent in Bosman’s account of ivory carving. Because ivory carvings like the Owo vessel in Figure 5.1 were prized in early modern Europe, travelers to Africa included descriptions of these artifacts among those of other regional commodities. Bosman and John Atkins, for instance, write about “Ornamental rings made of Ivory” worn around the arms as a common part of ceremonial garb in the Guinea states.39 Bosman, Samuel Purchas, Jean Barbot, and Pieter de Marees pay particular attention to the “Hornes of Elephants Teeth,” ceremonial

112  Rebekah Mitsein trumpets carved from elephant tusks on the Gold Coast, “which [the Akan] decorate nicely with incisions and other things.”40 Barbot, who made detailed drawings of the tusks, writes that some of these decorations are “figures of men and beasts” and that the others are “only the product of fancy.”41 These trumpets were even specially crafted by African artisans for European clients, some of whom commissioned specific European designs like heraldic beasts, coats of arms, and scenes of stag hunting.42 Most modern-day ceremonial ivory trumpets—ntahera as the Akan call them—are relatively plain, but seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury versions were decorated with similar kinds of motifs that the Owo artisan used on the vessel already described. The most common icon on these trumpets from West African regions including the Sape, Akan, Benin, and Congo is a crocodile head, which was often carved in three dimensions into the narrow end of the trumpet.43 In other examples, human figures, or figures that blend human imagery with animal imagery—a man riding an elephant, a crocodile devouring a man—adorn the dense smaller end of the tusk. Bosman’s account of these instruments captures the blending of the human and the animal that was almost universal to the ntahera’s appearance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like van Nyendael’s description of the brass plaques and Bosman’s own track record writing about other aspects of Gold Coast culture, Bosman’s account of the instruments appears dismissive: the horns are made of small Elephant’s Teeth; though not so very small but some of them weigh betwixt twenty and thirty pounds, and others more: To adorn these they cut in them several Images of Men and Beasts; and that so finely that it seems to be done Litterally in Obedience to the Second Commandment; for indeed ‘tis difficult to discern whether they are most like Men or Beasts.44 Also, like van Nyendael’s description of the brass plaques, Bosman’s account of the ntahera is a moment of narrative compromise—one that allows a glimpse into West African signifying practices as Bosman struggles to make sense of both the instrument’s imagery and its sound. The artisans who carve the ntahera learn to play “all sorts of Tunes” in the custom of the country.45 When they are ready to “shew their BlowingHorns publickly,” they invite their acquaintances together and have an “Extravagant ceremony,” “borrowing Gold and Coral of their Friends to make the greater show.” The noise of these instruments, Bosman assures the reader, is “a horrid and barbarous shocking Sound,” “an extravagant Noise; which they reduce to a sort of Tone and Measure and vary as they please.”46 Drums are played “in consort with the blowing of the Horns,” and the end result is one that the English translation describes as “not agreeable, yet . . . not so horrid as to require a whole Bale of

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 113 Cotton annually to stop ones Ears.”47 Ethnomusicologist Joseph Kaminski has termed the ritual that Bosman is witnessing “sound barrage,” an Ashanti musical ceremony still practiced today in which ensembles of seven trumpeters—along with drummers and other musicians—play “separate songs simultaneously” in order to “create a protective sonic barrier against any potential evil.”48 The theory behind this practice is dependent on the aforementioned metaphysical principles, particularly the notion that abosom can move or be moved through the physical world, leaving behind an observable effect or trace. Bosman may not fully understand the purpose behind either the images carved into the ivory trumpets or the sound barrage itself, but their threshold aesthetic is nevertheless palpable in his text. The noise is a concrete manifestation of philosophical worldview that Bosman encounters here—it is material even though it has, in and of itself, no constitutional substance. It can move through and cause changes in physical bodies, sharing the same space with both organic and inorganic matter. Perhaps most importantly, it is impossible to block out. Even if one were to “stop ones Ears” with cotton, the vibrations would still permeate the boundaries of the human body and the human mind, serving as a reminder of just how easily such thresholds are crossed. The fact that Bosman finds the sound barrage unpleasant attests to both his discomfort at facing this physical reality and to the tangibility of the ceremony’s effect. When it comes to noise, the materiality of African self-expression shapes Bosman’s experience of encounter in a way that he cannot escape. He can attempt to assimilate his experience into judgment, but the details of encounter nevertheless exceed the limitations of language to fully constrain them. If Bosman’s account of the aural effect of the sound barrage reveals his personal precariousness, his account of the carvings on the instrument are part of a larger anxiety throughout the text over the inability of Dutch factors to successfully read and interpret African political and military maneuvers. When Bosman’s remarks that the carvings on the instrument were done “Litterally in Obedience to the Second Commandment; for indeed ‘tis difficult to discern whether they are most like Men or Beasts,” he is not necessarily suggesting that craftsmanship is poor—Europeans prized these objects for their artistry. But he is providing a description of an object whose iconography binds man with beast, the kind of artifacts he states elsewhere serve as “mediators betwixt God and Men,” and that he associates with local diplomatic intractability.49 Bosman knew the symbolic value of animals like crocodiles, snakes, and spiders to Yoruba and Akan cultural groups. In fact, his narrative is the first recorded Western account of Ananse, the spider of West African and Caribbean folklore.50 Bosman is also cognizant of the fact that such creeping animals are conflicting signifiers in European and African representational traditions. At one point—trying to make sense of the practice of snake worship in Fida (Whydah, populated in the late seventeenth century by both Yoruba

114  Rebekah Mitsein and Akan groups)—Bosman writes that snakes “possess the chief Rank among their Gods.”51 He then goes on to reflect on the “contrary Opinions of the Sons of Adam . . . . For as we take the Serpent for the Fatal Destroyer of Human-Race; so these of Fida on the contrary esteem him their Supreme Bliss and greatest Good.”52 The snake’s very characteristics that make it deplorable in Christian symbolism—its forked tongue, the fact that it slithers on the ground, its trickery—are not negative or evil according to the doctrine of these snake cults. Its twisting and writhing, the fact that one cannot immediately tell its head from its tale, as well as its ability to shed its skin, mean that it is often used in African art as a symbol of renewal and eternity.53 Bosman, of course, associates such symbolism with the Christian prohibition on graven images, and through his evocation of the second commandment when describing the ntahera, he associates the creeping animals there with the same. Bosman uses the same animal imagery in order to describe West Coast soldiers at war. When they train or fight, they are able to “put their Body into very strange Postures, and so artificially cover themselves with their Shield, that ’tis impossible to come at them.”54 Indeed, earlier Bosman complains, In fight the Negroes don’t stand upright against one another, but run stooping and listening that the Bullets may fly over their Heads. Others creep towards the enemy, and being come close, let fly at them; after which they run away as fast as they can . . . . In short their ridiculous Gestures, stooping, creeping and crying, make their Fight look more like Monkeys playing together than a Battle.55 As dehumanizing as this description is, Bosman is not simply indulging in stereotypes of brutish primitivism here. His animal rhetoric is not the biological arguments for racial difference that would surface late in the eighteenth century and gain traction in the nineteenth century, depicting African culture as so primitive as to be essentially bestial. Most travelers to Africa rejected the notion of “wild men” wholesale, like John Snoek, whose description of the Ivory and Grain Coasts Bosman includes as an appendix at the end of his text: Snoek writes that while “some Men differ from the other so much, that some may be comparatively called Wild, or Brutes” this is due not to the fact that they “are not endowed with a Rational Soul” but rather that their souls have been “degenerated by barbarous Usages, and for want of Conversation with civilized Nations.”56 In other words, human difference is cultural rather than innate. And the animals that Bosman uses to try to explain African cultural practices are most frequently the ones that show up in the artifacts he encountered— crocodiles, snakes, and spiders. Indeed, John Mbiti notes that in general “creeping animals feature in [African] religious concepts more than do other wild animals,” significant for the way they become emblematic of

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 115 a metaphysics where the vital forces of the universe continually cross thresholds.57 Bosman is continually troubled by, and returns to, this creeping imagery as he faces down the same reminder that van Nyendael is given in Benin—that Dutch control is tenuous and that their presence is tolerated only on the goodwill of their hosts. When Bosman describes the inhabitants of Guinea, he attempts to both make sense of and explain the performances of martial and economic power that he encountered— performances that continually foiled European attempts to gain control over the region’s goldmines. Indeed, he states outright that “The Natives here are Powerful, and Rich.”58 The Fante “drive a very great Trade” that neither the English nor the Dutch “dar[e] to hinder,” for “if they should attempt it, ‘twould ruine them there, we not having the least Power over this nation.”59 Although “There is no small number of Men in Europe who believe that the Goldmines are in our Power; that we, like the Spaniards in the West Indies, have no more to do but to work them by our Slaves,” Bosman makes clear that Europeans, “have no access to these Treasures; nor do I believe that any of our People have ever seen one of them.”60 Colonial fantasies are present in Bosman’s text, but he makes clear that they are just that—fantasies that have yet to manifest in any real political or territorial supremacy for the Dutch in the region. In fact, one attempt to gain control of some goldmines in Fante territory ends in utter disaster for the Dutch. As Bosman explains, “We lost our Footing there in a very Tragical manner”: For the Commander in Chief of the Negroes, being closely Besieged by our Men (as Fame Reports), shot gold instead of Bullets, hinting by signs that he was ready to Treat, and afterwards Trade with the Besiegers, but in the midst of their Negotiation he blew up himself and all his Enemies at once, as Unfortunately as Bravely, putting an end to our Siege and his Life, and like Sampson revenging his death upon his enemies.61 The only eyewitness left alive was one of the Dutch West India Company’s enslaved men, “and since we could get no better account, we were obliged to believe this,” Bosman writes.62 Perhaps for the African reporting the story, the commander shooting gold bullets—whether a factual detail or a narrative embellishment—was symbolic of the bravery and efficacy in battle that Bosman himself admits to, but for Bosman the gold is a multivalent symbol of the African commander’s duplicity and incalculability. Initially appearing as one thing—a signal to start a treaty—the gold quickly becomes emblematic of something else, an ambush. Like the images on the ivory carvings and brass casts that Europeans in Bosman’s narrative encounter, the “signs” in this exchange seamlessly transform, defying the categorical expectations of the European observer.

116  Rebekah Mitsein The same could be said of the “King of Commany” in Bosman’s account of the other Dutch loss in the Komenda Wars. The relationship between the Dutch and the locals was already tenuous at Komenda when some European miners came into the area to make an assay of a hill about a half a mile away from the Dutch fort. The “King of Commany”—the Akan leader of the Eguafo Kingdom—claimed that the hill was “dedicated to one of their Gods,” which Bosman states was a pretense for attacking, abusing, and robbing the miners.63 A high-ranking factor used this as a reason to attempt to overthrow the king and claim the region for the Dutch. However, according to Bosman, this official was “deluded by the too great Opinion he had conceived of himself and his followers” and had “too contemptible thoughts of his Enemies.” The campaign was a disaster, with the Dutch losing two major battles in a row against the Akan, due, according to Bosman, to the fact that the king is “Villainous,” using “Pretence[s]” in all his dealings with the Europeans.64 In this case, the king let the Dutch believe that they were winning a battle, putting plenty of plunder in the path of the Dutch soldiers to distract them. The Dutch soldiers “fell greedily” upon it when the King unexpectedly marched toward us with fresh Forces, who had their Musquets turned the wrong way in order to deceive us; which took so good effect, that we taking them for our Friends, continued our greedy course of Plunder, till the King came upon us, and his Men turning their Musquets fired so briskly at us, that they diverted us from the Prey, and obliged every Body to save his Life as well as he could.65 The material object—the plunder that Bosman argues the king himself planted—is the thing that deceives the senses and becomes a precursor for the king’s own crafty performance. At the same time, Bosman describes the King of Commany as “excell[ing] . . . in Valour and Conduct”—and seems to be at least passingly criticizing the Dutch for their looting—he clearly disapproves of the king’s trickery. Yet there is no questioning on its effectiveness. As Bosman indicates, the Commanians enjoyed a “second complete victory” as a result of this tactic. In other words, treachery and trickery—although frowned upon—are often synonymous in the text with expressions of the African leaders’ very real military and economic power, and Bosman suggests here that it is a mistake to underestimate the material efficacy of these tactics and the martial savvy of the opposition. It was, after all, the Dutch general’s “too Contemptible thoughts of his Enemies”—in other words, an unwillingness to take African political and military power seriously, or to attempt to understand how it might work—that was his undoing. The art objects and artifacts that Bosman and his contemporaries encountered destabilized the categorical methodologies that European

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 117 travelers used to render Africa legible. They are important texts in their own right because they not only remind us that self-conscious articulations of eighteenth-century African worldviews still exist today, but they also enable us to see how the self-conscious articulation of African worldviews dictated the terms of encounter in the contact zone. In the larger logic of the New and Accurate Description, gold is emblematic of the unpredictability of Africans’ political and economic relationships with Europeans, of how African craftsmanship unsettled European ideas of form, and of African beliefs about the permeability of the material world. In his account of the ntahera and the sound barrage, the carving done “Litterally in Obedience to the Second Commandment” and the noise of the trumpets and drums assail Bosman’s senses, penetrating past the barrier of the European self. In the Commany Wars, the soldiers embody their own illegibility, reflective of the images carved into the ntahera or cast into the plaques that hang on the walls of the Palace at Benin. They change from one thing to another, defy the expectations and the empirical senses of their European opponents, and emerge victorious. The desire to read travel writing as the product of deeply entrenched ideologies that tell us more about the world of the traveler than the world traveled through is understandable and justified. Texts like Bosman’s can tell us much about the hopes, desires, anxieties, and beliefs of early eighteenth-century European subjects. But rather than analyzing these moments to reach conclusions about Bosman’s colonial strategizing, pairing them with a careful look at the types of objects Bosman encountered enables us to see how the worldviews and material practices of West Africa are present in the textual production of the early Atlantic world. The fact that Bosman only imperfectly understands the philosophy behind African representational practices does not exclude materiality of encounter from permeating his own. The suggestion that either Bosman’s impenetrable European consciousness or his narrative frame entirely erases or obscures their signifying power is antithetical to the worldviews these objects evince and that Bosman’s text to some extent proves—one in which existence is spatial and one’s experience of the world is formed through contact and spatial proximity rather than through categorical divisions.

Notes 1. Art historian Peter Mark argues that African ivories should be understood as having their own semiotics, what he calls “an underlying unifying structure of meaning,” rather than simply “common theme[s]” that bring them together as a body of work (266). 2. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 239. 3. I am working from the 1705 English edition of Bosman’s text, published two years after the Dutch version. For discrepancies between the Dutch and the

118  Rebekah Mitsein English versions of Bosman’s text, see Albert van Dantzig, “English Bosman and Dutch Bosman,” a line-by-line analysis of the English translation published as a series of articles over the course of ten years in History in Africa. I have noted an instance where translation errors might slightly alter the tone if not the content of Bosman’s descriptions. 4. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988): 116. 5. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 17. 6. Using Akan hair beads as an example, Pietz writes that these “Small gold ornaments” were “of intense interest to Europeans since gold was the primary commodity sought (at least until the slave trade took clear precedence at the beginning of the eighteenth century). Cast into elaborate and varied animal, vegetable, and mythic forms with a mixture of gold and other substances, such charm-ornaments in fact represented both a desired and an undesired commodity in European eyes” (110). The gold was mixed with base metals before it was formed into shapes. The abasement of the economic value of the object was thus emblematic of both socioreligious and aesthetic perversions as well, one of which was the presumed fact that the “African mind failed to distinguish between personal religious objects and aesthetic ornaments” (110). 7. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 3. 8. It is also worth noting that Bosman lived in Africa for almost 15 years, from the time he was 16 until he was in his 30s. He cohabitated with an African woman with whom he had children, which he acknowledged. Not just a passing observer, Bosman was enmeshed in life on the Gold Coast. 9. Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705), 147. 10. Ibid., 150. 11. Bosman writes in his preface that he was “a lover from [his] Youth of the Descriptions of Travels and Voyages, and Accounts of Foreign Countries”: “I always had a longing desire to go and see what I read of in Books; and during my fourteen Years stay upon the Coast of Guinea, I had an opportunity to satisfy my desire, there being few or scarce any places upon the Coast, where I have not stay’d for some time, and now can speak of with experience.” He says that the “sole design” of his text “is to gratifie those who are moved with the same Curiosity that influenced [him].” 12. Ibid., 147. 13. Quotes can be found in Bosman’s account, pages 351, 248, 81, 321 and 241, respectively. 14. Cassander Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 2. 15. Ibid., 24. 16. Ibid., 2. 17. For an extended explanation of these categories, and the overlap between these belief systems and early modern Portuguese thought, see George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 23–27. 18. E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973), 133, 174.

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 119 19. Okot P’Bitek, Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship. Originally published as African Religions in Western Scholarship, 1971, (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011), 27. 20. Idowu’s study is perhaps the most conservative in his account of this—his swarming spirits are “distinct from material objects, although they reside in material objects or express themselves through material objects” (133). The objects themselves are “at best, technically a symbol” (125). Yet this way of defining the metaphysics of African thought may very well be the result of what V.Y. Mudimbe refers to as the “silent dependence on a Western episteme” that reduces African beliefs to Western philosophical metrics (x). As the president of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, Idowu arguably had much invested in theorizing traditional African religions in a way that was fundamentally copacetic with a Christian worldview. 21. Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75. 22. Ibid., 166. 23. Ibid., 69. 24. Kwasi Wiredu, “Introduction,” in Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship, ed. Okot P’Bitek (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011), xvii. 25. Ibid., xviii. 26. Segun Gbadegesin, “Eniyan: The Yoruba Concept of a Person,” in African Philosophy Reader, ed. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, (London: Routledge, 1998), 154. 27. For more on the human form in West African art, see Herbert M. Cole, Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989), 43–45. 28. On the self-dompting motif, see Douglas Fraser, African Art as Philosophy (New York: Interbook, 1974), 11. 29. Christopher Spring, African Art in Detail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 26. 30. The vessel itself, though valuable and beautiful, does not need to have served any uniquely noble purpose in and of itself to fulfill this end. It may simply be a saltcellar or serve a similar domestic function, though it probably held small gifts in a palace reception area or was given as gift itself to a visitor to the palace. See Kate Ezra, Royal Art of Benin: The Perls Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 278. In West African conceptual schemas, all created things possess power or spirit from art to everyday objects like hoes or baskets. See Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 74 and Kwasi Wiredu, “Introduction,” in Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship, ed. Okot P’Bitek (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011), 34. Europeans like Bosman struggled with this notion, hence their tendency to categorize all cultural artifacts as “fetishes.” Yet, unlike the ntahera discussed later, which serve a very clear ritual purpose, this ivory vessel and the brass plaque in Figure 5.2 are art in the sense that their primary function is to capture and communicate something through form. However, unlike much of Western art, African art is usually presumed to simultaneously perform the metaphysical functions it represents. 31. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 464. 32. According to Allen Roberts, “Mudfish in Benin art refer to important gods and spirits, such as Olokun, ‘Lord of the Great Waters.’ The Oba, or king,

120  Rebekah Mitsein mediates between Olokun’s watery realm and everyday life on dry land” (87). On hip masks, see Sasser Elizabeth Skidmore, The World of Spirits and Ancestors in the Art of Western Sub-Saharan Africa (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995), 83. 33. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 464. 34. Ibid., 466. 35. Ibid., 74. 36. Ibid., 80. 37. Ibid., 155. 38. Ibid., 147–148. 39. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description 119; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies (London, 1735), 61. 40. First quote in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (London, 1613), 949; second quote in Pieter De Marees, Description and Historical Account of Guinea (1602). Trans and eds Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 93. 41. John Barbot, Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712, eds P. E. H. Hair and Adam Jones. 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 567. 42. Usually referred to as the “Afro-Portuguese” ivories since Portuguese travelers purchased and even commissioned such carvings from Sape and Benin artists, they are a kind of hybrid text in and of themselves, often including European and Christian iconography, although “they employ a visual vocabulary that developed in response to purely African beliefs and values” (Ezra, Royal Art of Benin, 14). Ezio Bassani and William Fagg were the first art historians to document the presence of these ivories in Renaissance Europe extensively, and they analyze the objects largely in terms of the European art traditions that might have influenced their iconography. See Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. However, as Peter Mark argues, although these ivories featured “both Christian and local African imagery” (238), they are “far more African than they are Portuguese. West African artists created the sculptures within the context of their own cultures” (239). For additional work on the Portuguese history of these objects, see Rita Costa-Gomes, “In and Out of Africa: Iberian Courts and the Afro-Portuguese Olifants for the late 1400s.” 43. One way to tell trumpets carved for European export apart from those carved for local use is by looking at this crocodile head. It becomes part of the embouchure in the trumpets carved for export to Europe, and it appears increasingly dragon-like. 44. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 139. The point here is presumably that Exodus 20:4–6 declares, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness that in heaven above, or that in the earth beneath, or that in the water under the earth” (KJV; emphasis added); thus, a graven image that does not specifically look like any of these things, or conflates one or more of these things, would technically obey the commandment. 45. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 135. The English translation says they “cause their family to be taught all sorts of Tunes usual, according to the extravagant Course of the Country” (135). According to van Dantzig, the original Dutch is more neutral: they “cause their People to learn, in the manner of the Land, to play, or blow, all sorts of Tunes” (120). 46. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description. 139. 47. Again, van Dantzig indicates the Dutch is less negative, describing the noise as “an extraordinary sound, which is done to a certain Measure and Tone,

African Material Culture in Contact Zone 121 and which they can vary in several ways, in accordance with their mood” See: Albert van Dantzig, “English Bosman and Dutch Bosman: A Comparison of Texts, II” in History in Africa 3 (1976),121. 48. Joseph Kaminski, Asante Ntahera Trumpets in Ghana (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pages 26 and 9, respectively. 49. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 545. 50. Ibid., 146, 322. 51. Ibid., 368. 52. Ibid. 53. Roberts, “Mudfish in Benin,” 62. 54. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 186. 55. Ibid., 182. 56. Ibid., 489. 57. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Anchor, 1969), 66. 58. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 25. 59. Ibid., 57. 60. Ibid., 80. 61. Ibid., 12. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 32. 64. Ibid., 29 and 30, respectively. 65. Ibid., 33.

Bibliography Atkins, John. A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies. London, 1735. Barbot, John. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712. Edited by P. E. H. Hair and Adam Jones. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1992. Bassani, Ezio and William Fagg. Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. New York: The Center for African Art, 1988. Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London, 1705. Brooks, George. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Cole, Herbert M. Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989. Costa-Gomes, Rita. “In and Out of Africa: Iberian Courts and the AfroPortuguese Olifants of the late 1400s.” In Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Vale, edited by Hannah Skoda, Patrick Lantschner, and R. L. J. Shaw, 167–88. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012. De Marees, Pieter. Description and Historical Account of Guinea (1602). Translated and edited by Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Ezra, Kate. African Ivories. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. ———. Royal Art of Benin: The Perls Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. Fagg, William. Tribes and Form in African Art. London: Methuen, 1964. Fraser, Douglas. African Art as Philosophy. New York: Interbook, 1974.

122  Rebekah Mitsein Gbadegesin, Segun. “Eniyan: The Yoruba Concept of a Person.” In African Philosophy Reader, edited by P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, 171–99. London: Routledge, 1998. Gyekye, Kwame. An Essay on African Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Idowu, E. Bolaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. London: SCM Press, 1973. Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kaminski, Joseph. Asante Ntahera Trumpets in Ghana. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Mark, Peter. “African Meanings and European-African Discourse: Iconography and Semantics in Seventeenth-Century Salt Cellars from Serra Leoa.” In Religion and Trade: Cross Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900, edited by Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes. 236–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Anchor, 1969. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. P’Bitek, Okot. Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship. Originally published as African Religions in Western Scholarship, 1971. New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988): 105–24. Poliner, Sharlene May. “The Exiled Creature: Ananse Tales and the Search for an Afro-Caribbean Identity.” Studies in the Humanities 11, no. 1 (1984): 12–22. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas his pilgrimage. London, 1613. Roberts, Allen F. Animals in African Art: From the Familiar to the Marvelous. New York: Museum for African Art, 1995. Sasser, Elizabeth Skidmore. The World of Spirits and Ancestors in the Art of Western Sub-Saharan Africa. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995. Smith, Cassander. Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Spring, Chris. African Art in Detail. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. van Dantzig, Albert. “English Bosman and Dutch Bosman: A Comparison of Texts, II.” History in Africa 3 (1976): 91–126. Wiredu, Kwasi. “Introduction.” In Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship, edited by Okot P’Bitek. New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011.

6 Fetishes and the Fetishized Material Culture and Obeah in the British Caribbean Victoria Barnett-Woods

Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760 Jamaica has been recognized as a critical moment in British colonial history in the Atlantic world. Contemporary writer Edward Long’s record of it, what he termed a “scheme of conquest,” is one of the better detailed accounts of the events now so wellknown in Atlantic Studies. What started as a series of revolts beginning in St. Mary’s Parish in April of 1760 ended fully in October of 1761, when the country was “happily restored again, by the total suppression of the rebellion.”1 Within his pro-plantocratic descriptions, colored by his support of slavery and the security of time passed, Long momentarily dwells on an important figure of the rebellion: the obeahman. The “old Coromantin,” a respected figure from within the enslaved population and known for his medicinal knowledge and military strategy, had administered a powder to the rebels that was “to make them invulnerable” to colonial firearms. While Tacky and his men fought bravely, they were outnumbered, out-supplied, and shot during a skirmish with the Maroon population living on the island. In the midst of the suppression of the rebellion, the obeahman was found and hanged in public, “tricked up with all his feathers, teeth, and other implements of magic.”2 Long writes that as the enslaved watched a community leader perish before their eyes, they “soon altered their opinion of him, and determined not to join their countrymen in a cause which hitherto had been unattended with success.”3 Being hanged with his ritualistic attire and objects, the obeahman appeared foolish to Long, uncivilized, and an outright mockery to the community that believed in his power; the obeahman will be recorded by the white planter as an “old imposter” into perpetuity.4 However, to those who watched the obeahman die, his death could have signified something else entirely. It may not have meant that the crowd believed that Obeah was a sham, as Long believed it did—quite the opposite, in fact. The obeahman’s death could have been a signal of white Obeah (Christianity) conquering their own cosmological forces, igniting a fear on both terrestrial and spiritual planes.5 This alternative reading of Long’s observations allows for the possibility that Christianity was

124  Victoria Barnett-Woods appropriated and transformed to accommodate African creole religious practice. The aftermath of the revolts in 1760–1761 produced more questions related to Obeah fetishes and the seemingly subversive role they played within the plantocratic system. Consequently, the Jamaican Assembly enacted a law prohibiting the practice of Obeah, or as seen from the perspective of colonial administrators, “An Act to Remedy the Evils arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves.”6 Physical “evidence” of Obeah practice, worthy of investigation and consequently leading to either death or transportation included: “Blood, Feathers, Parrots Beaks, Dogs Teeth, Alligators Teeth, Broken Bottles, Grave Dirt, Rum, Egg-shells.” These objects, and others like them, were prohibited across the Anglophone Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.7 Within this piece of Atlantic history, what resonates with me is the material influence of Obeah fetishistic and ritualistic objects and the value they had within the circulating systems of power in the eighteenthcentury British Caribbean. Why was it that the obeahman was hanged with his “implements of magic,” and why was Long so keen to derisively note this fact in his chronicle of events? What significance did these objects have within the dynamic cultural economies of the eighteenthcentury British Caribbean? How did these objects shift in cultural value across the different communities living in the region? The events that followed the obeahman’s death express, at a microscopic level, the larger social conditions and concerns that shaped and were shaped by the “instruments of Obeah.”8 What is an unfortunate truth is that those invested in learning more about the social value of these objects within enslaved populations hit a wall built by years of violent oppression. Typically, the only access point to the voice of the enslaved is through the writings of the white slaveowner, judiciary official, or some other white member of the Atlantic world striving to represent the black subject in some way. Yet, through indirect channels, a reader gets a glimpse into the material world of the enslaved and how their environment and conditions shaped their identities. This includes how these remarkable, seemingly everyday items had a social, cultural, and religious value to the people who interacted with them. This essay will examine the multifarious and culturally coded receptions of Obeah fetish objects from the perspectives of colonial law, white creole writing, and from (what can be surmised) within the slave communities themselves. The title of this chapter refers to the Anglo-European fetishization of certain materials used within African-creole Obeah ritualistic practices. The word “fetish” only tells a part of the story, and itself represents the European collapsing of African and African-Creole religious beliefs and the cultural value of some objects over others during a ritual. Wyatt MacGaffey’s authoritative categorical definition of the African “fetish”

Fetishes and the Fetishized 125 object, an extension of the work done by intellectual historian William Pietz, directly informs my use of the term in this chapter. Though MacGaffey discusses the composite features of the fetish from an anthropological perspective, his examination is useful for those who study Obeah and the religious relations between the colonizer and the colonized of the long eighteenth-century Atlantic world. For example, Pietz and MacGaffey describe the fetish of the BaKongo religion of western Zaire as, among other things: an object established in an intense relation with, and exerted power over, the desires, actions, health, and self-identity of individuals whose personhood was conceived as inseparable from their bodies: the human body . . . was subjected to the influence of amulets and the like that, although cut off from the body, functioned as its controlling organs at certain moments; for example, for healing.9 Additionally, fetish objects on the West African coastline share the similar characteristic of being “irreducibly material,” meaning that unlike an idol, the immaterial force of that object is held within the object itself. In sum, fetish objects of western Africa, carried and altered to meet the tumultuous and new environment across the Atlantic, could be registered as objects endowed with spiritual or supernatural qualities that can alter behavior, heal, or harm. Second, these objects were not worshipped but rather used as implements of spiritual–terrestrial border crossing. For further discussion of the colonial encounters of eighteenth-century African material culture, Rebekah Mitsein discusses the British reception of West African religious beliefs and art in this collection. For the purposes of this chapter, however, my focus rests on the representative power of Obeah fetish objects once West African cosmologies collided and were reconstituted under the oppressive forces in the Atlantic. While MacGaffey claims that fetish objects have little use value aside from mediating the relationships between people in West Africa, I contend that the recurring pattern of named objects in the British Caribbean archival record indicates that the objects themselves carried significance within a larger colonial and diasporic network.10 The objects that were worn on the day that Tacky’s obeahman was hanged were used in rituals and symbolically connected to African cosmological roots. It is also important to establish some context for understanding Obeah’s presence and cultural power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Its history as a syncretic religious belief system, which merged medicinal and spiritual practice, has a long and complicated history in the Anglophone Caribbean.11 “Obeah” was a catchall term for planters, describing the coevolving African-based shamanistic practices that they hesitantly acknowledged as an important social component to their laboring enslaved populations. The obeahman or woman’s knowledge

126  Victoria Barnett-Woods of local herbs, homeopathic treatments for diseases or disorders would occasionally lead them to serve in a slave hospital or under a physician.12 But for the vast majority of planters across the Anglophone Caribbean, the spiritualistic presence of Obeah practitioners within enslaved communities was registered as a threat to the fragile plantation economy. In the growing Obeah scholarship, it becomes clear that Obeah’s belief system generated a definitive but invisible border that established the racial, economic, and power barriers across the landscape that was formed in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. The idea that these objects were a material threat to the plantocratic social order is most evident in the slave codes that prohibited them within the enslaved communities. The repetitious nature of the restrictive slave codes across the Caribbean enters into the realm of ritual itself—these laws appear as a decades-long plantocratic mantra vilifying the agentive tools of Obeah practice. The Jamaican Assembly slave code of 1760, immediately following the fall of Tacky’s Rebellion, was ground zero for a wave of colonial codes and laws restricting Obeah and affiliated objects. What would follow is nearly two centuries of various laws and codes that banned specific everyday items from the possession of the enslaved. Similar to other slave laws that publicly denigrated the humanity of the enslaved, as Marisa Fuentes puts it, anti-Obeah codes attempted to “legitimate structures built on racial . . . subjugation and spectacles of terror.”13 Following the newly implemented slave codes of the Jamaican Assembly, in 1796 the Bahaman colonial administrators enacted a substantial number of laws connected to the treatment of the enslaved. On their surface, the majority of the laws appeared ameliorative in nature.14 For example, one law stipulated that “the condition of the slaves should be rendered as comfortable as possible,” so it was essential for every owner to give his or her enslaved peoples provisions and a “sufficient quantity of land.”15 However, there were multiple laws that directly targeted anything affiliated with Obeah rituals, gatherings, or objects. All material goods, food, clothing etc. were controlled and surveilled by the slave-owning population; what was permissible and what was banned was filtered through the anxious control of the colonial administration. Slave owners themselves appeared complicit with all regulations that meant to suppress the lives of the enslaved. For instance, no master could grant any enslaved, “exceeding twelve in number, to assemble together, and beat their drums or blow their horns, or shells in any place”.16 Perpetuating the colonial anxiety about poisoning, a further act dictates that “if any negro or other slave shall mix or prepare, with intent to give, any poison or poisonous drug,” they shall suffer “death, transportation for life, or such other punishment.”17 While Bahaman law stipulated that any poison needed to also be intended for another person, colonial administrators frequently did not require proof of intent; vials of liquid or Obeah bags filled with items

Fetishes and the Fetishized 127 supposedly affiliated with poisoning would suffice for evidence. The violation of colonial slave law resulted in fines for the slave owner and either death or transportation for the enslaved.18 The Bahaman law that prohibited the use of drums or other musical instruments was also found in other slave codes across the Caribbean. In Grenada, should any slave or slaves . . . be found gaming, beating drums, blowing shells or other loud instruments at improper hours . . . they shall be punishable for any such offence, at the discretion of any one justice of the peace.19 In Jamaica, along with clear regulations prohibiting “instruments of obeah,” no owner could allow their slaves to use “military drums, horns or shells” at any time, although the enslaved were allowed other “amusements,” “provided that [they] are put to an end by ten of the clock at night.”20 In Trinidad, plantation owners were fined if, on their property, enslaved peoples were found to “beat any drum or drums, empty casks or boxes, or great gourds, or to blow horns, shells, or other loud instruments,” or if they allowed “slaves belonging to other persons or plantations to assemble and mix with their own, for that [drum beating] or any other bad purpose.”21 Obeah, which the colonial administration also affiliated with poisoning, was banned outright in several British Caribbean colonies, and fetish objects were only criminalized indirectly, leaving the rule vague and open to administrative interpretation. For example, on November 4, 1806, the Barbadian colonial governance instituted an anti-Obeah act that noted that many “valuable slaves have lost their lives . . . by the wicked arts of certain negro and other slaves going under the appellation of Obeah men and women.”22 In their purview, colonial officials argued that they were protecting the enslaved from themselves by implementing this law. In Saint Vincent, if any enslaved person was found to administer any love potions or philtres, he, she or they shall suffer punishment in the public market by whipping . . . and in the case that any person has died from apprehension or administration of any potion or drug, the offender or offenders shall be judged guilty of felony without benefit of clergy and shall suffer death accordingly.23 In these two instances, as was true of Jamaica previously, the material ingredients for concocting a poison were absent from the record. It is only circumstantial and post-hoc “evidence” of plausible poisoning that would condemn an Obeah practitioner to either a publicly performed execution or transportation.

128  Victoria Barnett-Woods According to the research, with the exception of Jamaica, British colonial laws provided specific lists of prohibited objects only after emancipation (with the noted exception for drums). For scholars Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby, the increased colonial attempt at defining and prohibiting the material objects of Obeah was an indirect attempt to maintain legislative power over the formerly enslaved.24 For example, they note, on the island of St. Lucia, there was little in the way of anti-Obeah law, but by1872, specific items including “ ‘any philter, phial, blood, bone, image or other article . . . intended for the practice of obeah’ ” was prohibited.25 In British Guiana, in 1855, any “phials, images, or any other articles or things used in the practice of obeah or witchcraft” would be confiscated and sent to the Justice of the Peace for further review.26 For the most part, all prohibited fetish and ritual objects were cataloged under the blanket term “instruments” of Obeah, implying that any object confiscated from a person of African or African-Creole descent could be seen as an Obeah object in the court of law. From the general assessment of the various slave codes already discussed, a few conclusions can be drawn about British colonial administrative views toward Obeah and any affiliated ritualistic objects. First, of the British Caribbean islands, Jamaica generated the most detailed list of prohibited objects in the eighteenth century. Second, most British colonial laws across the Caribbean were concerned with two things as it related to Obeah and its objects: poisoning and musical ceremonies, rituals or seemingly other loud “disturbances,” which includes the potential congregation of the enslaved. Finally, after emancipation in the Caribbean, anti-Obeah laws became more detailed and stricter and included more prohibited objects that were associated with Obeah.27 In looking at this survey of British colonial laws as it relates to the instruments of Obeah, a narrative about the explosive reaction in Jamaica, its administrative echoes in the other colonies, and the rise in plantocratic anxiety about Obeah’s presence in the Caribbean after emancipation emerges. The increased presence of the objects listed by name and type in the colonial law only reinforces the administrative notion that whomsoever was in possession of these objects, these fetishes, these “instruments” of Obeah had significant power over the colony’s enslaved and formerly enslaved populations. It was not only the colonial administrators that deliberately identified certain objects as threatening to the plantocratic order. A second insight into the significance of Obeah ritual and fetish objects comes from the journals and treatises of colonial planters, those who had (typically) daily direct contact with the enslaved. As the accounts from Edward Long indicate, these records portrayed the material culture of Obeah cosmology, including the objects used in rituals, as “wild and savage to an extreme.”28 One of these recorded accounts comes from Thomas Thistlewood, who arrived in Jamaica in his youth to become a slave-owning

Fetishes and the Fetishized 129 planter. Thistlewood has been the subject of much current research; particularly, scholars tend to focus on the sexual violence that he perpetrated against his female slaves, in addition to the cruel and unfeeling punishments he would dole out to the enslaved who disobeyed his orders.29 Yet, amongst his 37 diaries that date between the years 1748 and 1786, he also made note of the material culture that circulated around and was generated by Obeah. For example, on January 6, 1754, Thistlewood wrote that a Negro man belonging to old Tom Williams, named Jinney Quashe (a noted Obia [sic] man) pretending to pull bones &c. out of several of our Negroes for which they were to give him money, was discovered to be a cheat, and they chased him out of the estate.30 Or, in another journal entry nearly 30 years later, Thistlewood writes: Monday, 18th December 1780: Last night Abba miscarried of a boy . . . . Friday, 29th December 1780: Mr. Wilson’s Will (who is an Obiah, or Bush Man) catched [sic] in Abba’s house, at work with his Obiah, about midnight last night, and made her believe Damsel is the occasion of her children being sick, & of her miscarriage, &c. A sad uproar. Took him home this morning, with his Obiah bag. Mr. Wilson flogged him well.31 According to the slave record, at the time of Thistlewood’s death in 1786, Damsel (who was accused by Will while “at work”) was sold, along with her children, to another planter. Abba, who had miscarried in 1780 had four children and one grandchild at the time of Thistlewood’s death.32 This means that for six years, Abba and Damsel were on the same plantation, with one believing that the other was responsible for her miscarriage. The “sad uproar” of the evening likely permeated throughout the entirety of the plantation. At the center of the event is Will, who had determined Damsel’s guilt and possibly catalyzed a protracted feud between the two women. He, with his “Obiah bag” in tow, could have shifted the community’s social structure on the plantation until Thistlewood’s death. From these entries, a few points can be made about Thistlewood’s views toward the material culture of Obeah in eighteenth-century Jamaica. First, there appears to be a developing awareness of the threat that the rituals and material objects posed. While in 1754, it was the enslaved community that chased the Obeah practitioner out of the plantation, by 1780, the planters had taken a vested interest in searching for, finding, and physically punishing the Obeah practitioner. There is also a difference in the description of the immaterial and material items that

130  Victoria Barnett-Woods accompany the “Bush Man.” In the 1754 entry, the only material object that was mentioned was the anticipated payments for the removal of the immaterial bones being pulled out of the client. (It is quite possible Thistlewood was misinterpreting what was in fact being witnessed.) Further, the details in the incident recorded in 1754 are far more vague than in 1780; Thistlewood is simply conjecturing that Jinney Quashe was chased out of the plantation because he was discovered to be a fraud. The 1780 journal entry provides more specific detail and increased understanding of Obeah as a belief system. In this entry, the obeahman visited his client and identified and condemned another for recent troubles. This mode of spiritual adjudication was a common practice that provided enslaved communities a sense of self-regulated justice. The “Obiah bag” mentioned in the second entry was the singular item included as Will’s possession as he was returned to his owner. Thistlewood was far from the only planter who expressed an interest in Obeah fetish objects as functioning elements within the enslaved populations. Henry De la Beche, historically recognized for his groundbreaking work in geology and paleontology, was also an absentee slave owner in Jamaica. While conducting a geological survey on the island in 1823–1824, he recorded some observations about the conditions of the enslaved. For example, he notes with detail the effects of a local man who had been accused of practicing Obeah: Contents seized from a man tried for having “materials in his possession notoriously used in the practice of Obeah”: small pieces of chalk, broken pieces of wood of different lengths, roots of grass, pieces of eel skin, bat wings, two or three pieces of old leather, painted different colours with small bags of different sizes attached to the rim, an English sixpence, a gilt button, the gilt handle of a small drawer, with a string of beads, small bags with mixtures, including one with a human tooth, enveloped in a mixture of a brown soapy substance.33 De la Beche, as a scientist, maintains his observational distance in his reporting of the objects confiscated from the man. In these calculating descriptions, found in his pamphlet Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica, there appears to be no emotional connection between these objects and De la Beche. While he does not acknowledge them as such, these artifacts of Obeah ritual practice have been recognized by planters as granting the user supernatural powers of strength and protection. In another description of Obeah objects on the following page, however, De la Beche’s derision toward them and their users becomes more transparent: Negroes still continue to place “watchmen” in their provision grounds, commonly composed of: pieces of wood-ant’s nest; root of

Fetishes and the Fetishized 131 a particular grass, grave dirt; bunches of feathers; some people make small coffins, line them with black or white cloth and fill them with earth, most often grave-dirt.34 In his description, the term “watchmen” refers to the various ritualistic objects that were charged with spiritual forces designed to protect an enslaved person’s garden. The use of quotation marks around the term alludes to De la Beche’s reluctance to grant the objects and the beliefs behind them any legitimacy, even while “watchmen” as a word implies his acknowledgement of some kind of practice. Grave dirt, as a material object infused with spiritual power, is of significance to De la Beche and other planters who have written about Obeah. According to the plantocratic understanding of its power, it is believed that if an Obeah practitioner throws grave dirt on an intended victim, that person will die soon after.35 In contemporary fictional accounts like Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), the consumption of a concoction made up of grave dirt, blood, and gunpowder elicits a power of possession. In the novel, the white antagonist Roland consumes the concoction and is bound to the Obeah practitioner who made the mixture and conducted a ritual of spiritual possession.36 The novelistic representation of poisonous subterfuge riddled the plantocratic consciousness in both fictional and nonfictional work. Both in Hamel and in De la Beche’s account, Obeah fetish objects are registered as tools of possession and regulation. As white planters and administrators policed and condemned the enslaved on plantations and in the cities, it reasons that within the plantocracy, Obeah fetish objects could be seen as a type of strategic countersurveillance. For those in power, the notion of countersurveillance and control executed by the enslaved was stuff of fiction and dismissively represented. The inclusion of the word “still” in De la Beche’s description is an example of his disregarding the enslaved population’s belief in the watchmen’s powers; he writes as if to imply that they should have moved beyond their superstition. It is however, as illustrated in these two representations of Obeah instruments that specifically include grave dirt, that there rests a certain level of anxiety about the notion of a countersurveillance. Both De la Beche and Cynric Williams (author of Hamel) have inherited the power to watch over and condemn, even to death, the bodies who labored on their Jamaican plantations. Though a supporter of ameliorative practices of slavery in Jamaica, De la Beche opposed abolition in the colonies, seemingly wanting to maintain his power of surveillance over his enslaved human property.37 Within the framework of racial surveillance, the word “still” can then be connoted with a tone of anxiety. De la Beche wanted the watchmen to disperse and for the enslaved behavior to cease. In Hamel, countersurveillance is transformed into a counter-possession, where the enslaved subject controls the will and body of the white planter,

132  Victoria Barnett-Woods and within this fictional narrative, deeply seated plantocratic anxiety is elevated to extraordinary levels. While the novel represents an extreme manifestation of the plantocratic imagination, De la Beche and his “still” remain in the archival record. So too will the plantocratic anxiety over the watchmen remain. Reading the archive closely in these moments of personal observation allows for scholars to peek into the complex relationships that existed between slave owners and the enslaved, especially concerning politically complex matters like Obeah. In the previous discussion, the representations of Obeah fetishistic and ritualistic objects have been described through colonial regulation and slaveowner accounts. For the duration of this chapter, I observe and speculate on the third perspective given to us from the records: that of the enslaved communities themselves. It will be impossible for me to determine definitively how the objects discussed impacted the daily lives of those who interacted with them. More often than not, the enslaved communities, who trusted and relied upon Obeah and its instruments of justice and power, did not have the means to articulate themselves and their beliefs into the record. Examining the archive with an attentive and cautious eye provides half-closed glimpses into the daily lives of those enslaved. These men, women, and children can be seen, as Fuentes puts it, in ways that “subvert and illuminate biases in these accounts” and help articulate the agency and authority that existed in Obeah, its practitioners, and the tools that worked as mediators between the cosmology and the people. One way that scholars have attempted to hear the voices of the enslaved in the historical record is to listen for them in trials that were held against them. In most instances, enslaved defendants had no legal recourse for accusations made against them. In the majority of the trials, the enslaved were executed, transported, or subject to public physical punishment for their accused crimes. Yet it is with these court cases that the defendants’ confessions or pleas are recorded, offering the smallest of windows into their daily lives and beliefs. Trial records also help garner some understanding about Obeah fetish objects from the perspective of those enslaved in the British Caribbean. The first case to be discussed is likely the most familiar to readers of British Atlantic history: that of Willem in Berbice, British Guiana. It was first brought to fiscal Bennett by Officer W. Sterk, who had taken Willem, a certain negro belonging to plantation Buses Lust, on the information of him the said negro having, at plantation Op Hoop van Beter, been engaged with the other negroes in dancing the so called Minje Mama dance, which is strictly forbidden by the existing laws of the colony . . . and that a negro woman named Madalon, belonging to plantation Op Hoop van Beter, had been denounced to the gang of that estate by the negro of Buses Lust as above stated, as a bad

Fetishes and the Fetishized 133 woman, and the cause of the death of several people belonging to said planation, and that the said woman had either absented herself, or had been taken away from the estate; but that a strong suspicion had arose that the woman had been made away with and buried in the bush.38 The investigation and trial took nearly four months to complete, beginning on September 20, 1821 to Willem’s sentence and execution on January 18, 1822. Several slaves were called in to provide testimony on what happened the night of Madalon’s disappearance. From the testimony provided by the enslaved and Officer Sterk’s deposition, Willem, who had been known across the plantations as an “Obeah-man,” was hired by the drivers of the Op Hoop van Beter estate to address recent deaths on the plantation. Once the day’s labor was finished on the first night in question, Willem allegedly performed the “Minje Mama” dance to find the culprit for the recent deaths, denouncing the older and isolated Madalon as the responsible negative force on the plantation.39 She was then hung up on a tree by the wrists and flogged by Primo and Mey (the drivers) at Willem’s command, while pepper was “rubbed into her private parts” in front of Primo’s house.40 She was left there, hanging from her wrists until Frederic, the plantation’s watchman, found her on the ground. He untied her, covered her with a blanket, and “conveyed her to his house.”41 The following day, Madalon attempted to return to her work in the field, but was unable in her condition to finish it. On the second evening in question, Willem returned to the estate and tied Madalon to another tree, this time, in front of Frederic’s door (the man who had helped her the previous night). She was then flogged and beaten a second time at Willem’s command. Baron, a slave who was witness to the event, testified that Madalon acknowledged she had been guilty of the death of several persons, that took place after she had been punished; she was subsequently brought to the Mangoe tree and tied up by the hands, so that her toes could just touch the ground.42 Willem refused to believe Madalon’s repentance and by one account, hit her across the back with a shovel, wherein she screamed out “you are killing me.”43 Believing it a sham, Willem was set to exorcise the “bad” out of her, until she was left unconscious, hanging by the wrists on the mango tree. Madalon was found dead the next morning. By some accounts, her body was removed and placed into a coryaal (corial) loaded with rocks and sunk in the river.44 Willem’s actions those two nights, which led directly to Madalon’s death were considered “a horrid crime of murder” and, according to the colonial administration needed to be “severely punished, to serve as a dreadful example to others.”45 Willem, along with

134  Victoria Barnett-Woods two other men who were accused as serving as accessories, were hanged on the branches of the same tree where Madalon had been hanged. While the two accused accomplices were then immediately buried, Willem had his “head severed from his body, and stuck on a pole, there to remain till destroyed by the elements, or birds of prey.”46 As many scholars have noted, this case is exceptionally detailed in its description, making it an excellent resource for understanding judicial operations in the British Atlantic.47 For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to focus on the instruments of Obeah that are marked in the trial by the colonial authorities. The focus on Obeah has been an important one for researchers, as Willem’s first crime listed in the proceedings is “Obeah”; “Murder,” and the violent way that the murder was executed, is considered only a secondary crime in this trial. Yet the two crimes are enmeshed into the third implicit crime of subverting the colonial order. This is truly the crime for which Willem is held on trial, and the instruments of Obeah played a significant role in his case and execution. First, Willem had, according to the record, ordered the “Minje or Water Mama dance” to be performed. This command led the enslaved on the plantation to “disrespect and set at nought the subordination due and owing to their proprietors, and subjecting themselves (the drivers), in presence of the gang of negroes over which they were placed, to the implicit obedience of the orders and commands” of Willem.48 Simply put, the drivers’ compliance with Willem’s orders to perform the dance upset the assumed social hierarchies established by the white plantocracy. In this moment, their physical bodies willingly labored for a ritual configured within Obeah cosmology. Considered within the context of Obeah fetishes and fetishistic rituals, this case provides a clear example of the material lives of the enslaved butting up against the abstract colonial law designed to control their bodies. Second, on the first night of the ritual condemning Madalon for her purported crimes, Willem sought means to protect himself and the events of that evening. He “administered to the other negroes a drink, declaring that it would be the death of any of them who should reveal what had taken place.”49 Frederic, the enslaved deponent who had testified against Willem in the examination, explicitly stated that he did not partake of the drink or of the affiliated ritual. Delivered to the initiates of the ritual to try and condemn Madalon, the beverage served as a binding agent between them and Willem. A power dynamic, similar to that written in Hamel, subjects the drinker of a concoction to the will of the administrator. Both the dance and the drink provide evidence for the material culture surrounding Obeah in British Guiana, just as they move us toward a deeper understanding of how the “instruments” of the practice reinforce or represent the lives of those enslaved outside of their condition of enslavement. In context of Obeah ritual practices serving as a kind of

Fetishes and the Fetishized 135 justice internal to the enslaved populations, it becomes clear that dance and drinks do play an integral role, just as they do in many religious practices. One year after Willem was executed in Berbice, nine Jamaican men were brought to trial for conspiring against the “white inhabitants” of the colony and planning a rebellion. According to the record, the conspirators met two weeks before Christmas of 1824 to discuss a plan of acquiring weapons and hiding them in preparation for an attack. Then, on the evening after Christmas, they intended to meet at the cow-pen [of the Baclarres plantation], then proceed to the works, murder the overseer and book-keeper; they were to then hoist a light as a signal to the negroes of the neighbourhood to join them; after which there were to proceed up the river, kill all the bukras, burn all the houses, and then return to proceed down the river, killing and burning as they went.50 Jean Baptiste Corberand, alias Dimanche, provided the testimony against the men before the rebellion was executed, and pointed to Henry Oliver, a slave at the Baclarres plantation, as its leader. As in many court cases that emphasize the violent criminality of the enslaved, there was a significant focus on the rituals that accompanied Oliver’s plans. He and his alleged coconspirators were accompanied by an Obeah-man who had performed two rituals that were meant to ensure the rebels’ protection. On the “night of the swear,” at some point before the intended rebellion, Henry Oliver cut his finger and put the blood into the basin, the obeah man then threw a quart of rum into it, and something else, but could not tell whether grave dirt or gunpowder; he [the witness] saw the prisoners there drink of it, and swear to one another; they then proceeded to the cow-pen to learn exercises.51 A series of questions were raised by the jury about the plantation owner’s whereabouts, the mood of the ritual, and who else was present at the swearing ceremony.52 In response to these questions, it was also revealed that the Obeah practitioner brought an Obeah-bag with him, but that Corberand did not know the contents within it. It was also ascertained that, in the midst of the ritual’s proceedings, Oliver cried that once the men drank of the blood elixir, they were to “all stand to the battle!” and was met with a resounding “yes!” by his men.53 The ritualistic drink, as indicated in the planters’ accounts, appears to bind the men together in a faithful fraternity, while also physically protecting them against their enemies.54

136  Victoria Barnett-Woods While the alleged planned rebellion was reported before it had begun, the consequences against Oliver and his accused coconspirators were severe. Six of the men were sentenced to transportation. Three men— Henry Oliver, Richard Montagnac, and Dennis Kerr—were sentenced to death. With a rhetorical flourish the trial concludes: “It would appear that one of the greatest criminals, viz, the obeah man . . . has not yet been apprehended.”55 After the initial sentencing, it was conferred that Oliver was “the principal person engaged in the conspiracy,” and Montagnac and Kerr had their sentences commuted to transportation. Oliver, however, was condemned to hang. The record, however, cannot fully confirm if Oliver was executed: four days after he was sentenced, on the day of his hanging, a notification was sent to the senior magistrate that the execution had not taken place. After this notification, Oliver is absent from the record. A month after Oliver’s trial, the court condemned the alleged Obeah practitioner who participated in the conspiracy, an enslaved man who only went by the first name of “Jack.” Similar to that of Oliver’s examination, Jack was frequently asked to give specific details about the ritualistic behavior affiliated with the conspiracy. For example, in addition to the binding ritual, it was recorded that the obeah man Jack . . . stripped himself naked, mashed up the bush, and rubbed them [the rebels] all; the obeah man said the bush was to make them strong, and to give them the spirit to overcome the white people.56 Jack, who provided a two-page recorded confession of his actions, was executed in April of 1824.57 He must have been a significant figure to the Jamaican community in which he resided, given the length and detail provided for his confession. Even Oliver, the alleged primary conspirator, was not granted this privilege. The recorded confession provides the rarely seen perspective of an Obeah practitioner. From it, readers are able to glean Jack’s significance within the community at large and the role that Obeah played in creating his self-identification. For example, Jack recollects that a plantation owner, recorded only as the letter “M”, asked Jack if he “knew of anything” that could “do harm” to a man who had “enticed away his wife.”58 After this exchange, Jack “doctored” the enslaved Antoinette and Suckey, “who from being very sick recovered and did work.” Jack afterward “went to Lafite’s and dressed the sore arm of a woman, John Charles’s wife, which he cured and she worked.”59 This sequence of events, described as if they all occurred over the span of a single day, clearly identifies Jack by his aptitude in herbal and holistic medicine. While he claims that “he knew that his doctoring was what bukra called obeah” and that “Buckra had their own fashion,”

Fetishes and the Fetishized 137 he testifies that in “Guinea, negro could doctor,” and care for members of the community at a professional level.60 Jack, and those around him of all colors, valued him for his service and his skill within the fields of medicine and healthcare. As discussed by scholars in the field, including Chelsea Berry’s essay in this collection, this knowledge made a practitioner sought out by both blacks and many whites for their services. In his confession, Jack also demonstrates a keen awareness of the different perspectives toward Obeah that were held between the enslaved and slave-owning populations. He recognized the work that he did was beneficial to his community and used his instruments as tools for healing, strength, and protection against physical and spiritual harm that came from slave owners. What the whites called “obeah,” he and his community members called “doctoring.” An important similarity between Oliver’s and Jack’s trials is the seeming obsessive juridical interest in Obeah and its rituals. Only the follow-up questions to Jack’s lucid confession, which had described the medicinal qualities of Obeah and his adroit skills as a healthcare professional, were redirected to the “swearing” ritual. He corrected the number of those who congregated at the ceremony by halving it (from 100 to 50). He also stated that it was Jean Baptiste Corberand who “brought a little dirt taken up from a place showing the print of a white man’s foot, and threw in the swear,” highlighting Corberand’s participation in the ceremony.61 Jack also claims in his confession that those enslaved who had come from Saint-Domingue were the ones who “enticed” the Jamaicans to initiate a revolt. As the questions about the ritual were presented to Jack during the examination, he frequently pivoted to what appeared to be the more critical issues related to the trial. First, he identifies Corberand as a key participant in the ritual, despite the fact it was Corberand who testified against Oliver and the other alleged conspirators. Second, in the confession, Jack makes the point that there were still a few dozen muskets and a barrel of powder hidden somewhere on the Balcarres plantation. Whether the diversions were strategic or not, Jack kept the focus away from the perceivably negative aspects of Obeah, including the ritual. Instead, he elaborated on the beneficial services that he and his tools provide for the community at large. This striking difference between Jack and the jury demonstrates not only the ignorance of the planter class but also, more importantly, the value that Obeah had within the enslaved communities. For Jack and Oliver in Jamaica and for Willem in British Guiana, the cosmology and instruments for Obeah were used for different kinds of justice. In the case of Willem, justice was enacted within the enslaved community: he located a suspected “bad woman” and sought to get the “bad” out of her. While for many, the sexualized violence and brutal “punishment” is seen as wholly unnecessary, for other members on the plantation they saw justice being done. In the case of Jack and Oliver, justice was aimed outward

138  Victoria Barnett-Woods toward slave owners as a means to liberate themselves from the yoke of slavery. Fellow slaves were being protected and were bound to one another in a fraternity. Justice took the form of being oriented against the oppressor. The ritualistic objects identified in the trials—grave dirt, red pepper, mixed drinks, etc.—connect actor and action in instances of tyranny or corruption within the enslaved populations. This chapter serves as a cursory overview of the ways in which Obeah objects were perceived in the eyes of colonial law, within planters’ logs, and, though obliquely, from the perspective of those enslaved. This discussion is also far from exhaustive. In fact, it can only represent a sliver of the archival evidence available that discusses the tools and markers of Obeah within the Atlantic world. It scratched the surface of the cultural value of the “instruments” of Obeah, and how that value changed when moving from the colonial administration to the planters to the enslaved communities that used them. Everyday objects, recontextualized within Obeah cosmology, became infused with spirituality and intent. They were used for holistic medicine, to assert justice, and to fight against the oppressive forces of enslavement. The power invested into these objects had responses that ranged from faith to condemnation, depending upon who was engaging with them. To examine the “instruments of Obeah” is a challenge, as the documents that shed light on these tools of resistance and autonomy are themselves instruments of colonial violence and administrative suppression. Researchers can only view the history, perceptions, and records of these objects through the eyes of those who would wish to have them banned. In giving detailed focus on the transgressive and simultaneously powerful representations of these objects in enslaved communities, as well as an examination on how they participated and circulated in the colonial imagination, this chapter helped to trace the intersections of the material and spiritual worlds in the long eighteenth-century Atlantic.

Notes 1. Edward Long, The History of the Jamaica, Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island . . . (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 464 [his emphasis]. 2. Ibid., 451. 3. Ibid., 452. 4. Ibid. 5. As they are recorded by British planters, enslaved peoples considered Christianity to be a “white Obeah,” more powerful than its black counterpart. So, too were new technologies perceived to be evidence of the power of “white Obeah.” See Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008 [London: John Murray, 1834]), 147–48; John Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1823), 258.

Fetishes and the Fetishized 139 6. Act TNA CO 139/21. Image available at https://obeahhistories.org/ 1760-jamaica-law/ 7. “Fetish” is European nomenclature, etymologically derived from the Portuguese, and associated early on with contact and manipulation of the spiritual world. While the use of the word to describe the material ephemera of Obeah practice is predicated on European (not African-based) epistemology, it helps to distinguish between the material objects that compose an Obeah bag and the religious cosmology of Obeah. For more, see Diana Paton’s definition in her The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20. For an account of slave codes prohibiting Obeah, see Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby, Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011 (Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012). 8. The Obeah Law, 1898, p. 128, https://obeahhistories.org/1898-jamaica-law/ 9. Wyatt MacGaffey, “Notes and Comments: African Objects and the Idea of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 25 (1994): 123–31. Quote on p. 123. 10. Ibid., 131. 11. The creolization of the practice from its West African origins within the Anglophone Caribbean has been well documented; even the term “obeah” is under consistent etymological scrutiny, further elucidating the complex origins and evolution of both name and practice. Joseph Williams writes in his Vodous and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft that Obeah derives its origins from Ashanti witchcraft from which the god “Aub” or “Obi” is worshipped (New York: Dial Press, 1932), 213. Much of the functioning assumptions supporting his work have been debunked, though Handler and Bilby have noted in Enacting Power that as recent as 2009, Obeah has been exclusively tied to witchcraft or sorcery (Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012), 9–15. This reductionist approach to Obeah has been most recently redressed in the special issue of Atlantic Studies, in which editors Kelly Wisecup and Toni Wall Jauden write that Obeah was “mutually constitutive and interconnected” with medicine, “shaping and partitioning the Atlantic World in its denominational and epistemological contours,” (129). See “On Knowing and Not Knowing Obeah,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (June 2015): 129–43. 12. Juanita De Barros, “ ‘Setting Things Right’: Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803–1838,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and PostSlaves Studies 25, no. 1 (2004): 25–34. 13. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 12. 14. Miscellaneous Papers Volume XIX, Session 1 February–2 July, 1816. Excerpted from Section “Colonial Laws Respecting the Treatment of Slaves” (9–193) pp. 13–21, https://books.google.com/books?id=ry5bAAAAQAAJ 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Ibid. 18. See Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 90, for a list of additional countries that did not criminalize Obeah until after the end of slavery. 19. Ibid., 57. 20. Ibid., 123. 21. Ibid., 186. 22. Ibid., 37–38.

140  Victoria Barnett-Woods 3. Ibid., 172. 2 24. Enacting Power, xi. 25. Ibid., 89. 26. The New Local Guide of British Guiana, containing Historical Sketch, Chronological List and the Ordinances in Daily Use, up to December, 1862. Google, https://books.google.com/books?id=u64jAAAAYAAJ 27. See Enacting Power, pp. 45–101, for more information about specific countries. 28. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, Vols. 1, 2 (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 497. 29. For more general biographical information, see Barbara J. Starmans, “The Journals of Thomas Thistlewood,” www.thesocialhistorian.com/journals-ofthomas-thistlewood/. For more in-depth research about his sexual violence toward female slaves, see Jennifer Reed, “ ‘Sites of Terror’ and Affective Geographies on Thomas Thistlewood’s Breadnut Island Pen,” Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society 1, no. 1 (January 2016). 30. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750– 1786 (Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 61. 31. Ibid., 279. 32. Ibid., 315. 33. Henry De la Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1825). Quoted in Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 34. Ibid., quoted in Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 57. 35. Excerpted from Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission, 1866 (London: Printed by Eyre and Spottiswoode), 522, https://books.google.com/ books?id=iDUe5-p_8IAC&pg=PA522&dq=grave+dirt+obeah&hl=en&sa= X&ved=0ahUKEwjsyZuWrcDeAhWGzlkKHdUXBMkQ6AEIVzAI#v=one page&q=grave%20dirt%20obeah&f=false> 36. See Cynric Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man, ed. Candace Ward and Tim Watson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010), 125–26. 37. His Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes suggests that racial hierarchies were scientifically founded, in addition to “stressing his own good practice.” See Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche: Profile and Legacies Summary,” Legacies of British Slave-ownership, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/ view/2146633718 38. “Trial of a Slave in Berbice, for the Crime of Obeah and Murder . . . proceedings of the Court of Criminal Justice of the colony Berbice.” Parliamentary Papers (London: House of Commons, 1823), 5. Physical copy available at the Library of Congress, KHN135.W55 1823. 39. Ibid., 14. 40. Ibid., 15. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 22. 43. Ibid., 25. 44. Ibid., 40. A corial is a small canoe, frequently used to travel between plantations. Many colonies in the Dutch and British Guiana were in close proximity to the river. Berbice was on the Berbice River, which flows into the Atlantic. Within underdeveloped roadways and dense forests, traveling by corial was a common mode of transportation for slaves in these colonies. 45. “Trial of a Slave in Berbice,” 41. 46. Ibid.

Fetishes and the Fetishized 141 47. See Randy Browne’s “ ‘The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011); Alvin O. Thompson’s Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803–1831 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 181–82; Gordon E. A. Gill, “Doing the Minje Mama: A Study in the Evolution of an African/Afro-Creole Ritual in the British Slave Colony of Berbice,” Wadabagei 12, no. 3 (Winter 2009); Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah; Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 60–62. 48. “Trial of a Slave in Berbice,” 9. 49. Ibid., 13. 50. “The King v. Henry Oliver and Others,” in House of Commons. Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824. March 1, 1825, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=hvd.hxjp1e;view=1up;seq=7 Additional summary of the case can be found in Paul Brown, “Representations of Rebellion: Slavery in Jamaica,” thesis submission for Clemson University, 21–27. 51. Ibid., 88. To “learn exercise” meant that they ran drills using their weapons for target practice. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 90. 56. Ibid., 96. 57. See Jack’s confession in Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824, 108–9. 58. Ibid., 108. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 108–9. 61. Ibid., 109.

Bibliography “An Act to Remedy the Evils arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves, Jamaica, 1760.” CO 139/21. Accessed December 12, 2018. https://obeahhistories. org/1760-jamaica-law/. Brown, Paul. “Representations of Rebellion: Slavery in Jamaica.” Master’s thesis, Clemson University, 2014. Browne, Randy. “ ‘The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 451–80. De Barros, Juanita. “ ‘Setting Things right’: Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803–1838.” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slaves Studies 25, no. 1 (2004): 25–34. De La Beche. Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica. London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1825. Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Gill, Gordon E. A. “Doing the Minje Mama: A Study in the Evolution of an African/Afro-Creole Ritual in the British Slave Colony of Berbice.” Wadabagei 12, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 7–29.

142  Victoria Barnett-Woods Hall, Douglas. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750– 1786. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999. Handler, Jerome and Kenneth Bilby. Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011. Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012. “The King v. Henry Oliver and Others.” In House of Commons. Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824. March 1, 1825. Accessed January 7, 2019. https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxjp1e;view=1up;seq=7. Lewis, Matthey Gregory. Journal of a West India Proprietor. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008. [London: John Murray, 1834]. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of The Antient and Modern State of that Island. Vol. II. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. MacGaffey, Wyatt.“Notes and Comments: African Objects and the Idea of the Fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 25 (1994): 123–31. Miscellaneous Papers Volume XIX, Session 1 February–2 July, 1816. Accessed January 7, 2019. https://books.google.com/books?id=ry5bAAAAQAAJ. “The Obeah Law, 1898.” CO 139/108. https://obeahhistories.org/1898jamaica-law/. Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824. London: House of Commons, 1825. Accessed February 4, 2019. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd. hxjp1e&view=1up&seq=7 Paton, Diana. The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. “Profile and Legacies Summary Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche.” Legacies of British Slave- ownership. Accessed February 2, 2019. www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/ view/2146633718. Reed, Jennifer. “ ‘Sites of Terror’ and Affective Geographies on Thomas Thistlewood’s Breadnut Island Pen.” Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society 1, no. 1 (January 2016). Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission, 1866. London: Printed by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1866. Royal Gazette. The New Local Guide of British Guiana, containing Historical Sketch, Chronological List and the Ordinances in Daily Use, up to December, 1862. Demerara: Printed for the Royal Gazette, 1863. Starmans, Barbara J. “The Journals of Thomas Thistlewood.” Accessed February 2, 2019. www.thesocialhistorian.com/journals-of-thomas-thistlewood/. Stewart, Dianne. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Stewart, John. A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica [ . . . ]. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1823. Thompson, Alvin O. Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803–1831. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. “Trial of a Slave in Berbice, for the Crime of Obeah and Murder . . . proceedings of the Court of Criminal Justice of the colony Berbice.” Parliamentary Papers. London: House of Commons, 1823.

Fetishes and the Fetishized 143 Williams, Cynric. Hamel, the Obeah Man. Edited by Candace Ward and Tim Watson. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. Originally published in London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827. Williams, Joseph. Vodous and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft. New York: Dial Press, 1932. Wisecup, Kelly and Toni Wall Jauden. “On knowing and not knowing Obeah.” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (June 2015): 129–43. Accessed March 5, 2017.

Part III

Consuming Cultures in the Colonial Atlantic

7 Maple The Sugar of Abolitionist Aspirations Barry L. Stiefel

During the long eighteenth century, abolitionists eagerly sought an alternative sweetener to sugarcane without the taint of enslaved labor. French and English colonists learned how to use refined maple sap as a sweetener from indigenous peoples in the Americas during the seventeenth century, eventually developing the delectable and familiar condiments maple sugar and maple syrup. Therefore, the objective is to study sweeteners from the sugar maple tree (Acer saccharum) as the Atlantic world’s alternative sugar in relation to the abolitionist perspective on this commodity as an object of material culture and economic commodity. Prior to 1820, maple-derived food products represented guilt-free, morally responsible capitalism, untainted by the stain of enslaved labor. Moreover, I will investigate to what extent maple sugar was traded and transported beyond its region of production in North America—such as other corners of the Americas and Europe—as an alternative sweetener to sugarcane. This analysis will bring a greater understanding of the “culture of consumption” in relation to sugar and slavery in all of its manifestations: material, economic, and cultural. According to Margaret Hope Bacon, during the eighteenth century, only sufficient quantities of maple sugar could be made to supply local demand; in other words, there was not enough to create a viable export industry to compete with Caribbean-produced sugarcane.1 Abolitionists in Europe experimented with other vegetables to produce sucrose, and in 1747 Andreas Marggraf (1709–1782) in Germany successfully produced for the first time sweetener from beets. But due to the market abundance of sugar derived from cane, sugar beet was also unsuccessful until the early nineteenth century, when Great Britain’s blockade forced Napoleonic Europe to invest in sugar beet production because they had been cut off from the sugarcane-producing Caribbean colonies. Briefly, following the Napoleonic Wars, sugarcane returned to its former economic prominence, but with the spread of abolition in the British, French, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese empires between the 1830s and 1860s, sugar from beets were now an economically viable export.2

148  Barry L. Stiefel By the 1880s, sugar beets had usurped sugarcane as the primary sweetener of global trade due to a deliberate change in economic policy. So, what of North American maple sugar that fell behind? Why did maplebased sweeteners not succeed as abolitionists in North America and Europe had hoped? Maple-based sweeteners were also not strictly limited to the northern colonies or the Old Northwest (today comprising the Great Lake states and provinces of the United States and Canada). Colonists as far south as the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina also encountered indigenous peoples making maple syrup.3 Therefore, maple was a tentative alternative to sugarcane that many abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic world took very seriously because it could grow in a temperate climate, unlike the Caribbean cane-derived import that originated from southern Asia. *** The relationship between abolitionists and maple products during the eighteenth century has only recently been explored by scholars, such as Julie L. Holcomb’s Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott on Save Labor Economy, where she identifies that “[s]upporters of maple sugar celebrated the connection between moral responsibility and economic self-interest . . . . [but] Nonetheless, a large-scale [cane] sugar boycott never materialized in the United States”.4 David Gellman has looked more broadly at the intersection of the eighteenth-century slave and sugar trade economies, including the hoped-for interplay by abolitionists of maple sugar with sugarcane in his journal article, where he argues that: Maple sugar production spoke even more directly to the desire to master economic and moral challenges. American maple sugar might crowd the tainted produce of the West Indies out of the market, serving the purposes of both entrepreneurial promoters and moralistic critics. The cases for debtor relief and abolishing slavery each drew on a desire to place a newly free and independent society on a bedrock of rectitude and rationality. Like maple sugar production and free trade, these reforms offered new, less openly coercive, ways of doing business.5 Because many eighteenth-century consumers of maple sugar were aware that it was far less labor intensive compared to sugarcane and did not require the use of enslaved labor, this attracted a demographic of socially conscious consumers: abolitionists and their sympathizers! Sweeteners made without enslaved labor came to the forefront of the abolitionists’ movement in the late eighteenth century with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. All three revolutions asserted in some manner that

Maple 149 all men were created equal (women’s suffrage would come later). Mark Sturges articulates in his scholarship that abolitionist-minded interest in sweetener derived from maple created a short-lived “maple sugar bubble” during the 1790s that “translated into a georgic fantasy that blended agrarian ideology with antislavery activism.”6 Additionally, Lawrence B. Glickman contextualizes the 1790s maple sugar bubble as a precursor to the antislavery boycotts first initiated by the British in the 1790s, which also targeted cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo, and other commodities with intensive economic involvements of enslaved Africans in the Free Produce Movement and lasted unto the 1840s; but this strategy did not gain as much traction in North America. The British boycott of sugar produced by enslaved people in the eighteenth century was a critical change in the Quaker-led abstention movement but was not exclusive to maple sugar as an alternative either. For instance, sugarcane verifiably grown by free labor was acceptable, and in many instances preferred or more readily accessible by many in Europe where maple sugar exports had not reached, and sugar maple trees did not grow. So, we must understand that abolitionist interest in making slavery obsolete through alternative commodities was part of a larger strategy of moral consumerism that was emerging during this time period and experimental in its approach in order to find economically viable means of ending chattel slavery.7 Therefore, this study will look at what occurred before, during, and after the abolitionist-led maple sugar within three distinct episodes during the long eighteenth century: before the revolutions (c.1690–1774), the years of revolution that also included the “maple sugar bubble” as identified by Sturges (1775–1804), and then the height of the Napoleonic Wars (1805–c.1820) with the British–French continental blockade of Europe, the subsequent peace, and the early years of the Free Produce Movement that sought to find alternative non-slave labor sources for agriculturally produced commodities like sugar. *** European explorers and traders first encountered maple sugar and its production process in the seventeenth century during encounters with various indigenous North American peoples, where occasional observations were documented.8 As recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London from 1693, North American sugar maple trees were often confused with sycamore trees, both of which were alien to Europeans. It likely took a generation or more for indigenous knowledge on the edible applications of maple to transfer to the colonists. The Royal Society of London did not call the product from maple trees “sugar” or even “syrup,” but “juice [that was] fermentable,”9 though its experimentation for creating alcohol was European-derived. Robert Beverley Jr. (c.1667–1722), historian of colonial Virginia commented

150  Barry L. Stiefel in his 1705 publication, The History and Present State of Virginia, “[t]hough this Discovery [of maple sap or juice] has not been made by the English above Twelve or Fourteen Years; yet it has been known among the Indians, longer than any now living can remember,”10 dating the acknowledged maple sugar encounter between Virginian colonists and indigenous peoples around 1690. With Virginia colony formally established in 1607 at Jamestown, this near-80 year span from settlement to common knowledge of the edible applications of maple-sourced juice took between two to three generations. By this time French colonists were also using maple-derived sweeteners. From the second volume of Joseph-François Lafitau’s (1681–1746) 1724 Moeurs des Sauvages Américains Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (translated as Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times) is an illustration depicting Native Americans collecting sap and cooking maple syrup in pots, who liked to use it as a condiment on food as well as to drink when supplies were plentiful.11 Lafitau was a Jesuit missionary who explored areas in what is now Quebec during the 1710s, and conducted naturalist and ethnological studies of where he went and the Iroquois peoples he resided among in order to spread awareness of North American opportunities in Europe.12 Traditionally, collecting maple sap was relatively easy (Figure 7.1). Not until the twentieth century were more complex, mechanized methods created. Sap is harvested during the late winter and early spring when it flows through the tree’s outer, soft vascular layer, called the sapwood. A hole of a few inches in depth is drilled upward into the tree, into the sapwood, approximately waist high above the ground. A “spile” is then stuck to the tap hole, onto which a bucket or other vessel is attached in order to collect the sap as it comes out in drops. On a regularly basis— such as once a day or every couple of days, depending on flow rate—the farmer then visits each of the tapped maple trees to collect the sap, which is then taken to a sugar house for processing, consisting of boiling down the liquid in order to thicken it into a syrup. Further processing takes place in order to reduce the sap into thicker, more refined products, such as maple butter and maple sugar granules. On average it takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to produce a single gallon of maple syrup.13 Maple syrup, butter, and sugar can be used as a condiment, such as poured onto pancakes and waffles; as an ingredient to make other maple-derived foods, such as candies or sweeteners in baked goods; or fermented or distilled into alcoholic beverages, like beer or liqueur. Europeans experimented with indigenous North American knowledge of maple sugar and syrup making using native varieties of maple trees in the British Isles and Germany during these early decades, but with little economic success.14 Therefore, well into the eighteenth-century sweeteners derived from North American maple trees were a curiosity observed by European explorers and colonists, as reported in such periodicals as the Mercure de France and The London Magazine during the 1750s and

Maple 151

Figure 7.1 Native Americans Collecting Sap and Cooking Maple Syrup in Pots, Tilling Soil into Raised Humps, and Sowing Seeds, North America, 1724, Joseph-Francois Lafitau (photograph). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/90705836/.

early 1760s.15 Europeans sampled maple sugar and syrup on occasion, even mixing it with their own dishes, but recorded little in respect to its serious economic opportunity, regardless of the enslaved African labor morality issue of West Indian sugarcane.

152  Barry L. Stiefel The 1760 edition of the A New Complete English Dictionary defined maple as “a tree whose wood is used for many purposes, especially for ornament,”16 with no mention of edible benefits, signifying the lack of recognition of it. But, in the 1760s, colonists in the British North American colonies began to see maple as more than just lumber and a food novelty made by native peoples. One of the benefits was that the season for maple sap harvesting is from February into early April, a time of relative inactivity for most North American farmers. Thus, maple sugar was an additional economic opportunity for farmers with stands of maple trees. In northwestern Massachusetts, near Bernardston, farmers began to produce sufficient quantities of maple sugar to sell at regional market, adapting indigenous techniques of tapping maple trees with the European process of extracting sap from pine trees for making turpentine. Mohican and Abenaki, local tribes that lived in northwestern Massachusetts, had maple syrup part of their regular diet. This area of the colony was becoming more intensively settled by Europeans from the 1730s into the 1760s, thus facilitating greater social and economic interactions between Europeans and indigenous Americans.17 Observed in newspapers about maple sugar was that we might be able at least to supply ourselves with these Articles [sugar] and no longer have Recourse to our West India Neighbours, we imagine, after this Discovery, will be as much Necessitous from the Want of our Lumber, as ever we have yet been from the Want of their Produce [sugarcane].18 Neither slavery nor abolition is mentioned once within periodical coverage within the British Empire, which appeared from Boston to London.19 Nonetheless, these comments about locally available sweetener sources are significant because since the Middle Ages, sugar (among other exotic spices) was a status commodity among Europeans. Indeed, the high commodity status of sugar was the impetus for Iberian experimentations with sugarcane cultivation in the Atlantic islands and the Caribbean during the sixteenth century, which was made successful by the Jamaican–Barbadian plantation economy developed by the English during the 1660s and 1670s, and subsequently copied by the French and Dutch in other areas of the West Indies. Thus, some farmers on the North American colonial frontier were enthralled to have an opportunity of their own “white gold” on the edge of what they perceived to be the civilized world.20 But to the north, with the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, France lost its hold on Quebec and the maple trees that were there, leading to a lost opportunity for them to further explore maple sugar as an alternative economic commodity—as well as competition—making the British the sole managers of maple-produced sweeteners (which they neglected due to the empire’s great capital investment in West Indian sugarcane).

Maple 153 The roots for the commercial production of maple-derived sweeteners were likely a response to the Sugar Act of 1764, which the American colonists were only just beginning to be perturbed about in 1765, in addition to other subsequent tax changes by the British Parliament in faraway London. Historians, such as Stuart Berg Flexner and Andrew F. Smith, have argued that it was the Molasses Act of 1733 that caused the peaked interest in maple-based sweeteners, but according to Kenneth Morgan, the Act of 1733 was poorly enforced due to the frequent bribing of customs officials.21 The lack of media attention to maple sugar in the periodicals and other publications of the 1730s through 1750s (as a formal economic opportunity) in comparison to what is seen in the 1760s and later suggests that Morgan’s observations are more sound. At most, the Molasses Act of 1733 encouraged a family unit–based cottage industry of maple sweetener consumption. Even without the Molasses Act threatening to increase the price of Caribbean-produced sugar between the 1730s and 1760s, access to cane would have been limited due to the remote location of the western New England colonies from the major pathways of trade, especially considering the ready availability of maple sugar as an alternative in this isolated corner of the British Empire. For decades colonists had learned how to be self-sustaining with local resources as well as had informal trade economies with friendly indigenous neighbors. With the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, tea, salt, sugar made from cane, and other taxed imports became lumped together under a common grievance by many in the British North American colonies as taxation without representation. Ghost authored by “A Connecticut Farmer” several months after to his “Farmers of the Colony of Connecticut,” and subsequently republished throughout New England, the unidentified author called for that it will therefore be necessary to show them [Members of Parliament, especially those with financial ties to the West Indian sugarcane plantations] of how much importance we are, by distressing them for want of our trade . . . and as cheap and as they could bring it from the West-Indies . . . our maple trees will produce very good sugar and molasses.22 In order to make good on such an economic threat, one has to be positioned to follow through. By the eve of the American War for Independence, New England had a regional economy in maple sugar production that was on the verge of becoming more formally commercialized. *** By the 1780s, merchants in New England advertised wares and tools for making maple sugar, signifying the growing consumer interest in

154  Barry L. Stiefel do-it-yourself sweetener manufacturing and consumption.23 Not only was this tendency due to popular preference to boycott goods that were taxed by the Sugar Act by fervent patriots, but also because many North American ports like Philadelphia were under rebellion, thus blockaded by the British Navy. This situation further encouraged a do-it-yourself, craft-making industry in the rebelling British colonies. The naval blockades intended to cut off contraband and weapons smuggled to the revolting colonists, they also restricted the importation of other commercial goods, such as Caribbean-grown sugarcane. From 1776 to 1781, the Dutch island of St. Eustatius had been one of the most significant Caribbean ports through which war supplies were smuggled to the rebelling 13 colonies, owing to their preexisting networks of sugarcane that had been traded earlier.24 Pennsylvanians and other blockaded colonists frequently had to obtain sugar from maple if they desired any form of sweetener due to these circumstances, regardless of where their sympathies lied during the American War for Independence.25 After American Independence, when the British Sugar Act became irrelevant, it was not lost on a Pennsylvanian using the penname “Agricola” that “[i]mmense sums of money are sent every year to the WestIndies for sugar,” but what was suggested was not to discourage the use of it—but recommended the manufactory of it among ourselves. A species of the American maple contains a genuine sugar, and if properly prepared, would in every respect equal in all its qualities the sugar obtained from the cane in the West-Indies.26 This Pennsylvanian even went on to list that “maple sugar not only affords an excellent sugar, but a pleasant molasses, an agreeable beer, a strong sound wine, and an excellent vinegar,”27 subsequently giving the reader very detailed and precise instructions on how to make each of these maple-based products, beginning with how to tap a tree for sap.28 Instructions to make various edible food items for both consumption and economic gain accrued frequently and inexpensively in newspapers, especially in the northern states and those seeking advice on settling in Western territories.29 Some local governments provided financial incentives to the public to promote maple sugar production economies. In March 1792, which was in the midst of the sugaring season, Albany, New York offered payments of $75, $50, and $25 for those who could respectively produce 600, 400, and 200 pounds “of the best quality of grained maple sugar.”30 Four months later, the winners were also celebrated in the local news; Thaddeus Scribner of Herkemer County in first place, followed by Comfort Cook of Otsego County, and John Harris and Rayner Huntley of Saratoga County.31 Since at least 1789 (if not before), the manufacture of maple sugar as a form of rural economic development in upstate New York had been an objective of the Quaker

Maple 155 and Congressman, William Cooper (1754–1809), where he owned vast tracks of forested land.32 The winner of the competition, Thaddeus Scribner (1761–1845), was a local-known Revolutionary War hero and mail courier.33 However, the name Comfort Cook suggests that the runner-up was an African American, possibly even enslaved or formerly enslaved.34 Within the trial document of those charged in the New York Slave Rebellion of 1741 is recorded that an enslaved person also by the name of Comfort Cook was executed by burning at the stake on June 9, as a public display to deter other enslaved people from revolting.35 The trial of the alleged perpetrators of this rebellion was very controversial, because the prosecutor Daniel Horsmanden (1691–1778), who also held the position of a magistrate, was overly zealous to uncover a conspiracy. After multiple witch hunt–like tribunals that resulted in the execution of 30 African Americans and 4 whites, as well as the exile of more than 80 others, only a very weak plot was uncovered through testimony of those held under duress.36 Later, Horsmanden published the journal of his records from 1741 as a matter of justifying his actions.37 Within the court records, Gerardus Comfort (1690–1784) is identified as the master of the enslaved Comfort Cook, killed in 1741. During the trial, Gerardus served as a defense witnessed and testified that he saw “nothing amiss”38 regarding the behavior and actions of Comfort and other enslaved people earlier in 1741, who were all subsequently executed. However, the judges were unimpressed with Gerardus’s account because he regularly traveled for matters pertaining to his livelihood, and thus could not vouch for times he was not present. While identified as a cooper, Gerardus also ran a dock that faced the Hudson River near Wall Street and managed a public well that was popular among both whites and blacks.39 Gerardus was originally from Schenectady, New York, and was the patriarch of what would become a very prolific family across the colony, and later state.40 The circumstances broach the question of whether or not the Cook Comfort who was the 1792 recipient of the maple sugarmaking prize in Albany may have been a subsequent enslaved person owned (at least at one time) by a member of the Comfort family, and by extension, a plausible relative of the executed Cook Comfort in 1741? There is precedent in naming patterns of enslaved Africans that sons sometimes took the name of their father, as well as the possibility that masters named another enslaved person after one that was deceased.41 Nonetheless, we have a peculiar circumstance where it appears that a small number of enslaved people were used in the production of maple sugar. Not until 1799 would New York pass its Gradual Emancipation Act, which freed the children of enslaved Africans born after that date upon reaching adulthood. Another law was passed in 1817 freeing all enslaved Africans born before 1799, in 1827.42 Thus, in some instances, abolitionist aspirations for seeking guilt-free sugar untainted by the blood

156  Barry L. Stiefel of enslaved labor in its production were, of course, idealistic, as exemplified by the public competition that took place in Albany. By the late 1780s, maple sugar was, at best, a distant second as a sweetener to sugarcane in terms of economic production and demand. Many eighteenth-century sugar connoisseurs criticized the functional shortcomings of maple to cane sugar as an alternative because it lacked the same cooking versatility, such as maple having a higher moisture level that made certain types of candies and confections more difficult to make. Maple sugar also has a unique taste that cane sugar lacks, which limits what flavor combinations one can make with it.43 Nonetheless, the knowledge that slavery was not used in making it was a fact propagated by abolitionists as the movement developed in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. For instance, published in the May 16, 1789 edition of The New York Packet, we find: A gentleman, who has lately visited the country between Delaware and the Susquehanna, has calculated that there are Sugar Maple Trees enough in the State of Pennsylvania to make as much sugar as could be consumed in the United States. This Maple Sugar has been examined in Philadelphia, and yield loaves equal in quality to that which is made from the juice in the West-Indies sugar cane. To freeman, its sweetness ought to be enhanced by the reflection, that it is not stained with the sweat and blood of Negro slaves.44 It is precisely during the formative years of the American and French republics where abolitionist rhetoric advocating for the expansion of maple sugar economic development over that of sugarcane became pronounced in the media. Indeed, we can read from European traveler report observations and correspondences in the United States on the moral virtues of maple sugar in relation to slavery. Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–1793), a French Revolutionary leader, applauded the sourcing of sugar made from maple and the North American Quakers who advocated for its use. In 1788, he reported that M. Lanthenas, one of the most enlightened defenders of the Blacks in France, has made some calculations on this subject, which cannot be too often repeated. Supposing, says he, that a family will produce in a season 1500 lb. of sugar, 80,000 families will produce, and that with very little trouble, a quantity equal to what is exported from Saint-Domingue in the most plentiful year, which is reckoned at one hundred and twenty millions.45 The utopian dream that abolitionists like de Warville fantasized about was that making maple sugar could be promoted in such a way that

Maple 157 through its economic success it would undermine the slave-based mode of production for sugarcane in the Caribbean. De Warville even proposed transplanting the cultivation of sugar maple trees to France to refocus the country’s sugar source away from cane, especially because France was no longer in control of Quebec. He, along with many other abolitionist colleagues, imagined that a systematic change could be achieved throughout the Atlantic world, “new world,” which would be free of slavery due to a simple and relatively easy shift in means of sugar production.46 De Warville would go on to establish the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks) and was an outspoken antislavery activist. He was well connected across North America and Europe, representing Paris in the Legislative Assembly in 1791, and had ties to abolitionists abroad, such as Thomas Clarkson in Great Britain among others in the United States.47 The abolitionist Francois Xavier Lanthenas (1754–1799), whom de Warville quotes, was also an associate of Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), as they attempted to coordinate an abolition political agenda between their two countries and respective colonies.48 American ambassadors abroad who supported the end of slavery, such as David Humphreys (1752–1818) in Portugal and William Short in the Netherlands (1759–1849), also championed the opportunities of maple sugar from their diplomatic posts, thus spreading the gospel of maple and antislavery rhetoric even further.49 In 1791, in the midst of both the French Revolution and a revolt in Saint-Domingue, the Mercure de France commented, [s]o many advantages have not been seen without being struck by the influence it [maple sugar] might have on the abolition of slavery of the blacks. A company [or society] has been formed, the object of which is to perfect the manufactory of this sugar; and from the very beginning, it had the greatest successes.50 This may be referring to the emergence of the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree in Pennsylvania, which was only then just beginning to be formed. Thus, abolitionists across the Atlantic world were very well aware of the potential role North American maple sugar could play in their cause to end chattel slavery in the American colonies by undermining the sugarcane economy. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, the Philadelphian civic leader, abolitionist, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) wrote to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson on behalf of the American Philosophical Society on the virtues of the sugar maple tree, urging American policy to invest in it because of greater selfsufficiency in trade, as well as its potential to resolve the contentious slavery issue. Within his letter, “An account of the sugar maple-tree of the United States: and of the methods of obtaining sugar from it,” Rush was

158  Barry L. Stiefel well aware of Jefferson’s complicated position on slavery, which both advocated for equality of men and simultaneously owning and using enslaved Africans at his plantation, Monticello. And Jefferson was also familiar with the perspective that maple sugar could provide economic independence to the United States as an alternative to the dependence on Caribbean sugarcane controlled by European powers, especially because the British dominated commercial shipping trade routes on the Atlantic and Caribbean seas. Rush concludes his letter: I cannot help contemplating a sugar maple tree with a species of affection and even veneration, for I have persuaded myself to behold in it the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our African brethren in the Sugar Islands as unnecessary, as it has always been inhuman and unjust. I shall conclude this letter by wishing that the patronage, which you have afforded to the maple sugar as well as the maple tree, by your example, may produce an influence in our country as extensive as your reputation for useful science and genuine patriotism.51 For Jefferson too had his own stand of sugar maple trees from which he produced his own sweeteners, which at one point entailed a planting of 60 trees (though it was never economically operational due to difficulties in transplantation). Jefferson also, for a period of time during the 1790s, only consumed maple sugar at Monticello as an act of solidarity with his Philadelphian colleagues, and in 1791 traveled to Vermont with James Madison where they visited stands of sugar maple trees.52 We do not know if Jefferson had his maple trees at Monticello cared for with free or enslaved labor because so little documentation on this nuanced history survives, but he did comment in a correspondence to Benjamin Vaughan (1751–1835) “[w]hat a blessing to substitute a sugar [from maple trees] which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary[for sugarcane],”53 even though Jefferson continued to have his tobacco-producing plantation run by enslaved labor. In 1792, Rush and other abolitionists in Pennsylvania formally founded the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree, and Jefferson became a supporting member. The plan fit within Jefferson’s scheme of the American yeoman farmer, who would produce sufficient quantities of sugar from maple to both supply the country’s needs and compete in foreign markets with Caribbean planters of sugarcane. Through promotional materials to encourage maple sugar production, the organization would purchase the finished produce from farmers and resell to retailers in order to reduce American dependence on foreign grown sugarcane.54 Jefferson as well as other American political and economic leaders, such as William Cooper of New York, was also

Maple 159 cognizant of the trade imbalance between the United States and other European powers. Indeed, they specifically wanted to make use of maple, among other species indigenous to North America, as a resource that was uniquely American as part of national identity development besides economic.55 Thus, in an era that was beginning to embrace the virtues of abolitionism in Europe and North America, maple sugar offered a chance of balancing trade deficits in what was hoped to be a morally responsible approach that was arguably of the New World, and not the Old.56 Boosters were enticed to encourage the settlement of vast expanses of maple forests for sugar production across New York, Pennsylvania, New England, and the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.) because of the potential economic benefits. Rush and Benjamin Franklin both also advocated that free labor was morally economically superior, reflecting the ethos of Pennsylvania Quakerism, because morality was more virtuous than efficiency or luxury.57 Quaker abolitionists also copied British boycott moral rhetoric on enslaved-made sugarcane as part of their promotion of maple sugar. However, noticeably missing from the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree’s mission was any mention of abolition, which was instead exclusively focused on promoting the manufacture of sugar from the sugar-maple-tree and furthering the interest in agriculture in the State of Pennsylvania. The society’s attention shall be primarily and principally confined to those objects, and the manufactures of pot and pearl ashes.58 While Rush and other members independently continued to lecture and publish on the virtues of maple over cane sugar regarding enslaved labor, this narrowing of the Society’s stated objectives may have been due to compromises with those of influence in the United States who owned enslaved-labor dependent agribusiness, as well as fluctuations in the sugar market due to revolutionary events in the Caribbean and Europe.59 Others, such as Tench Coxe (1755–1824) did the opposite, as we read in A View of the United States of America, where he moderated his “capitalist agenda by cloaking it in abolitionist agenda.”60 Sturges contends that maple sugar boosters “failed to understand the interests and independence of the frontier settlers whom they imagined— wrongly, it turns out—as willing participants in a scheme of agricultural improvement controlled by land barons and gentleman farmers.”61 Instead, “frontier settlers . . . produced maple sugar for their own household consumption.”62 Thus, we are likely seeing a combination of factors that prevented the success of the maple sugar experiment from becoming successful, for none of these observations are necessarily exclusive of one another. Indeed, looking abroad, we find that the successful slave revolt on Saint-Domingue caused French sugar prices to rise steeply, for

160  Barry L. Stiefel all sugar by this time had shifted in consumption from a luxury to a staple, yet maple sugar imports never occurred in large quantities to fill the economic demand—in fact there is little appearance of maple sugar during the 1790s despite French abolitionist rhetoric that supported it. In 1792, slavery ended in Saint-Domingue, and in the following year it was temporarily abolished in other French Caribbean colonies, which caused French aristocratic planters and merchants of sugarcane to engage in speculative hoarding. The French public was outraged, adding fervor to their already fanatical revolutionary patriotism against the ruling class, who also controlled the sugarcane trade. In response, angry mobs plundered the sugar warehouses, selling off seized cane sugar at lower prices. After the sugar riots, war broke out between the French Assembly against the allied Austrians and Prussians, whose emperors sought to protect the French monarchy for their own imperial protection purposes.63 Several years later, under Napoleon Bonaparte, the French would look to alternative sources of sugar that they could produce domestically because they were largely cut off from Caribbean cane and North American maple. Contemporaneously, the British Parliament in London also rejected the Abolitionist Bill of 1791, causing an estimated 400,000 abolitionists across Great Britain and more abroad in various colonies to boycott Caribbean-made sugar and rum made from cane that used enslaved labor. The British Monarchy—King George III and his extended family—caught the ire of satirical cartoonists for overindulging in sugar and other commodities that exploited colonial enslaved labor (Figure 7.2). The abolitionists William Fox composed a pamphlet, which over a four-month period sold over 70,000 copies on the evils of sugarcane made from enslaved people. According to Holcomb, an American Quaker-led boycott of enslavedmade sugar (or other commodities for that matter) never materialized in North America. Abolition by means of economic boycott pressure was instead thwarted in the United States due to political compromises between the political parties of pro-slave and antislave states.64 In contrast to France, the British boycott caused a glut in the sugar market, where sugar prices dropped by more than 30% but the demand for alternatives that were verifiably made without enslaved labor peaked. However, the alternative sugar source that the consumers in the British Isles sought was not Canadian-made maple but East Indian-grown sugarcane made from workers who were free laborers (though their treatment and pay as indentured servants from today’s perspective is debatable).65 In this way, speculative Jeffersonian-American attention to maple sugar production quickly shifted from a means to emancipate enslaved Africans from bondage to a way to capitalize on the economic opportunities in Europe, where the supply of sugarcane had been drastically reduced; or where more serious abolitionists were engaging in economic tactics to procure sugar that was untainted by enslaved labor.

Maple 161

Figure 7.2 The Gradual Abolition Off the Slave Trade or Leaving of Sugar by Degrees, by Isaac Cruikshank. Published by S. W. Fores, London, April 15, 1792 (photograph). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2007676253/.

Colonists in the British Caribbean were very well aware of these events, though their concerns appear to be more so from North American maple sugar than East Indies sugarcane competitors.66 Meanwhile, American enthusiasm for maple sugar as a means to end the slave trade waned after the maple sugar bubble burst, where the promotional rhetoric was replaced by advocacy for balancing trade deficits. By 1805, maple sugar was listed by the United States as an export commodity in foreign commerce, taking advantage of economic opportunities in European markets due to the social turmoil in Paris, London, and other imperial capitals, such as Amsterdam, as well as the issue of slavery in the West Indies.67 However, as Holcomb argues, the “absence of a widespread slave-sugar boycott in the United States in the 1790s reveals the highly contextual nature of consumer activism.” While “British Quakers successfully transformed the boycott of slave-grown sugar into a popular, ecumenical movement by using current political and cultural debates about the slave trade and the rise of consumer society,”68 American Quakers were not able to deliver such success, where they had so drastically hoped to have leveraged through the use of free labor maple sugar over enslaved labor-produced sugarcane. ***

162  Barry L. Stiefel Sweeteners during the early nineteenth century did not exclusively come from cane, maple, or beet. Honey was another source, but it was sold for medicinal use and not advocated as an alternative to sugarcane, despite being described metaphorically within abolitionist literature, along with milk, referring to the promised land of freedom for enslaved people.69 While certain bees are native to North America, the honeybee (Apis mellifera) that is optimal for honey production is a species native to Europe. Europeans introduced the honeybee to the Americas during the 1620s, but never perceived it as a commodity that would supplant sugarcane or end the slave trade.70 Experiments were also being conducted with wheat, corn, and potatoes in the American Midwest as well as sap from the birch tree in the British Isles.71 Maple is still mentioned, but with the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the spread of emancipation, the focus of sugar production shifts to beetroot, where abolitionists do not appear to take much of an interest in. A regional example where maple sweeteners continued to play a consequential role was in Canada and the northern United States, where in 1818 “[l]arge quantities of Maple sugar are sold at about half the price of the West India sugar.”72 Additionally, within free produce stores established by Quakers and abolitionists of other faiths across various parts of the United States during the early and mid-nineteenth century, maple sugar was being sold along with morally correct free labor products, including other sweeteners (i.e., morally responsibly sourced cane) and various finished goods from cotton and tobacco.73 After having lost the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Louisiana (a second time) between 1803 and 1804, the remaining French Caribbean islands were insufficient to meet France’s market demand for sugar. Prices for sugarcane from French colonies thus increased substantially. While Napoleon Bonaparte temporarily reinstituted chattel slavery in 1802, the subsequent revolt in Saint-Domingue and the achievement of independence by the Haitians in 1804 undermined France’s ability to bring back its Caribbean plantation sugarcane economy.74 Enslaved Africans in the remaining French West Indies also revolted periodically, which continuously threatened sugarcane production until abolition was declared again in 1848. Sugar made from cane in Great Britain also increased by 50% between 1802 and 1804, with the market demand collapsing in 1806 due to surplus stores in London warehouses after Napoleon conquered several continental European ports, ending the trade by Central Europeans for British Caribbean sugarcane. Believing that the market crisis on the continent was temporary, British sugarcane production continued as before, further exasperating the problem with their surpluses.75 However, Central Europeans began to look elsewhere to source their sugar, and some even temporarily experimented again with maple trees ca. 1800 when we consider the publication of Ueber Zucker-Erzeugung aus Ahorn-Saft: Eine Uebersicht der Hierauf Bezug (translated as About

Maple 163 Sugar Production from Maple Juice: An Overview of This Reference, 1811) by Johann Christian Mikan in Prague and Untersuchungen über die Möglichkeit und den Nutzen der Zuckererzeugung aus inländischen Pflanzen (Studies on the Possibility and Benefits of Sugar Production from Domestic Plants, 1811) by Johann Burger in Vienna, demonstrating continental Europe’s sugar interest in response to world affairs.76 American commerce with Great Britain and France also diminished during this time due to a trade war, entailing the Bayonne Decree, Embargo Act, Non-Intercourse Act, among others. This trade war subsequently evolved into the War of 1812 (1812–1815) between the United States and Great Britain, severely hampering maple sugar exports. With the successful development of French-grown sugar beet in the motherland by 1810, which was subsidized, this crop and its associated industry flourished, soon spreading to other industrialized economies with temperate climates after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars.77 While postNapoleonic peace on the continent did see a flood of sugarcane across many European markets, this did not completely drown out the emerging sugar beet industry.78 A key element that emerged was that it was far cheaper to transport beet sugar from local and regionally based farms than cane (as well as maple) from across the Atlantic. Along with European government subsidies, beet sugar began a sure and steady comeback of its own. By 1820, a farmer in northern France, the primary growing regions for sugar beets, could expect a profit of nearly 25%.79 The processing of sugar beets into refined sugar was also assisted by the urban industrialization that was simultaneously taking place in northern France. In contrast, the harvesting of maple sap to make sugar was a process that could not be successfully industrialized with the technologies and techniques of the early nineteenth century. Nature also further complicated the harvesting of maple sap by impacting sap yield through fluctuations in winter weather. Nonetheless, to the delight of abolitionists, sugar could at least now be processed in great quantities from beet by mechanized labor instead of by those who were enslaved. This was also reinforced in 1826 when France initiated foreign import tariffs in order to encourage domestic sugar beet production. The German-speaking states of Central Europe and Russia in particular liked sugar beets because they did not have colonies located in the tropics where sugarcane could be grown, nor were sugar-producing maple trees native to their territories.80 Sugar beet cultivation was soon experimented with across North America, where the tuber could grow far faster as an annual crop then waiting for a stand of sugar maple trees to fully mature, which could take many years. Old growth forests where sugar maple were the dominant species were not necessarily available to all. By 1850, sugar beet had made a noticeable impact on the global sweetener economy, with maple falling behind—though it remained significant in many local markets in Canada and the United States. These impacts

164  Barry L. Stiefel were noticeable in the heart of sugarcane-growing Caribbean, where it was reported in the Antigua Weekly Times that [i]f the production of Beet and Maple Sugar continues to increase in the same ratio [as it has since 1828], the cultivation of Cane Sugar will soon cease to be remunerative. Increased consumption along can save the growers of it, particularly upon poor lands and unfavorably situated Estates. The single circumstances that the Beet and Maple Sugar produced in Europe and America in 1850 equals in quantity the Cane Sugar of the whole British possessions in that year, is sufficient to show how great a change has taken place in the production of the article during the period mentioned above.81 According to this article, in 1850, 70,000 tons of maple sugar had been produced in North America along with 130,000 tons of European beet sugar. And as mentioned earlier, by 1880, sugar beet production surpassed sugarcane and would continue to have the majority share of the sugar commodity economy well into the twentieth century. *** With the exception of Haiti, where a slave revolt brought emancipation and independence, Atlantic world-style chattel slavery continued well into the nineteenth century. However, the open market for the transAtlantic Slave Trade was largely ended under the auspices of British foreign policy from the late 1800s into the 1820s. But British success to end the slave trade, and later emancipation through the political actions of the abolitionist movement, came about through military and economic pressure. So, sugar beet did serve as an economic crutch for enabling nineteenth-century cessation of Atlantic world slave trade and slavery by undermining the economic dependence of sugarcane; but sugar beet was never the venerated commodity that abolitionists aspired maple to be, despite its economic success. Maple sugar came about as an idealized opportunity to end slavery in the eighteenth century because of its exotic association as a common resource on the North American frontier, which from a colonial perspective even “noble savages” and children could “playfully harvest.”82 Indeed, abolitionist advocates of maple would frequently exclaim in georgic writings that sap harvesting could be a family-oriented activity.83 But what ultimately led to the successful economic revolution of sweetener production coming about without the input of African enslaved labor was France’s necessity to find an alternative during the Continental system, which it re-encouraged through subsidy after the Napoleonic Wars because it brought the country a special economic advantage in geopolitical affairs in regard to Great Britain. In this manner a way was found to make sugar without the British or the

Maple 165 West Indies, without cane or the maple tree, and most significantly for abolitionists—without slavery. Sugar beet would also go on to great success in North America, where the largest producing areas of it today are in the states and provinces of Minnesota, Michigan, and Ontario, where so many abolitionists had once hoped would be a center of maple sugar production.84 Not until the 1980s did high fructose syrup made from corn seriously compete with sugar beet, and this was because it was easier to produce and use in industrial factory farming and food processing.85 The essential, underlying issue for producing commercial quantities of sweeteners, whether in the past or in the present, is labor. Intensive labor for sugar production first developed in the sixteenth century with enslaved Africans and sugarcane in the Spanish West Indies and continued as the primary means for making sugar into the nineteenth century, when efficient mechanized technology could replace this means of production. Even today, efficient mechanized harvesting for the once hoped-for sugar maple cannot economically compete with sweeteners from factory farm-grown beet and corn, which is why maple remains a luxury condiment and is not a staple ingredient.

Notes 1. Margaret Hope Bacon, “By Moral Force Alone: The Antislavery Women and Nonresistance,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, eds. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 275–300. 2. Andrew Jacobson, “Age of Industrialization and Agro-Industry,” in The Cultural History of Plants, eds. Ghillean Prance and Mark Nesbitt (London: Routledge, 2005), 357–76. 3. Mary Miley Theobald, “Thomas Jefferson and the Maple Sugar Scheme,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Autumn 2012), accessed April 22, 2018, www.history.org/Foundation/journal/autumn12/maplesugar.cfm. 4. Julie L. Holcomb, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott on Save Labor Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 63. 5. David Gellman, “Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Slaves: Political Economy and the Case for Gradual Abolition in New York,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 51–68. 6. Mark Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’: Maple Sugar Georgics in the Early American Republic,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 353–80 (quote from 367). 7. Lawrence B. Glickman, “ ‘Buy for the Sake of the Slave’: Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism,” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 889–912. 8. Theobald, “Thomas Jefferson and the Maple Sugar Scheme,” Autumn 2012. 9. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 7 (London: Royal Society of London, 1693), 382. 10. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 103.

166  Barry L. Stiefel 11. Joseph Francois Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps, vol. 2 (Paris: Saugrain l’aîne, 1724), opp. p. 154. 12. H. James Birx, ed., “Lafitau, Joseph-François (1681–1746),” in Encyclopedia of Anthropology, vol. 1 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006), 1399. 13. “How to Tap and Make Maple Syrup,” Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, accessed August 21, 2018, https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/destinations/state_parks/maplesyrup_how.pdf 14. Philip Miller, The Gardener’s Dictionary: Containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen, Fruit and Flower-Garden, vol. 1 (London: Printed by the Author, 1741), n.p.; F. Jeffries, The Gentleman’s Magazine 36 (1706): 195. 15. Mercure de France (January 1755), p. 134; and James Emonson, Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle 3 (January–June 1758): 294. 16. D. Bellany, A New Complete English Dictionary (London: J. Fuller, 1760), n.p. 17. Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 47. 18. “A Description of an Uncommon Animal Lately Found at or Near Great Barrington,” The Massachusetts Gazette [Boston], July 4, 1765, p. 3. 19. R. Baldwin, The London Magazine: Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 34 (1765): 545. 20. Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600– 1800 (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 90–92. 21. Stuart B. Flexner, Listening to America: An Illustrated History of Words and Phrases from Our Lively and Splendid Past (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 369; Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 393; and Kenneth Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815,” in The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, eds. Donald Winch and Patrick Karl O’Brien (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 165–92. 22. From the Connecticut Gazette, “To the Farmers of the Colony of Connecticut, Gentlemen,” The Massachusetts Spy [Boston], August 25, 1774, p. 1. 23. Jacob Ogden, Advertisement, American Mercury [Hartford], February 6, 1786, p. 3. 24. Barry L. Stiefel, “Jews as Middlemen in the Neutral XVIIIth Century Atlantic World,” in Neutrals and Neutrality in the Atlantic World in the 18th Century (1700–1820): A Global Approach, ed. Éric Schnakenbourg (Mordelles, France: Editions Les Perséides, 2015), 159–84. 25. The Freeman’s Journal [Philadelphia], May 29, 1782, p. 2. 26. Agricola, “From the Pennsylvania Gazette,” Massachusetts Gazette [Boston], November 4, 1788, p. 3. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. “To Make Maple-Sugar,” Providence Gazette [Rhode Island], November 15, 1788, p. 1; “New-York,” The City Gazette [Charleston, South Carolina], April 3, 1790, p. 3; and “Advice to American Farmers, About to Settle in New Countries”; Litchfield Monitor [Connecticut], April 13, 1789, p. 1. 30. “Philadelphia, March 19, 1792,” National Gazette (March 19, 1792), 163. 31. “Philadelphia, July 18,” Gazette of the United States, July18, 1792, p. 55. 32. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 33. David Fiske, “History Lesson: Ballston’s Thaddeus Scribner—Revolutionary War Patriot, Saratoga County Mailman Published May 29, 2011,” Saratogian

Maple 167 News, May 29, 2011, accessed April 25, 2018, www.saratogian.com/article/ ST/20110529/NEWS/305299995 34. “Philadelphia, July 18,” Gazette of the United States, July 18, 1792, 55. 35. Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library, 2002), 120. 36. Peter C. Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 105–17. 37. See Daniel Horsmanden, The New-York Conspiracy, or, a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal (New York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810). 38. See Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Vintage, 2009). 39. Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28–29. 40. See Cecelia C. Botting and Roland B. Botting, Comfort Families of America: A Collection of Genealogical Data (Brookings, SD: Botting, 1971). 41. Newbell N. Puckett, “Names of American Negro Slaves,” in Mother Wit from Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 156–74; and C. Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 186–212. 42. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 11. 43. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 68. 44. “Philadelphia, May 15,” The New York Packet, May 16, 1789, 2. 45. Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America Performed in 1788 (Dublin: W. Corbet, 1792), 302. 46. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 67. 47. Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 250–51. 48. J. R. Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, c. 1787–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 118. 49. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 50. Mercure de France, Part I (1791), n.p. Translated by the author from “On n'a pu voir tant d'avantages sans être frappé de l'influence qu'ils pouvaient avoir sur l'abolition de l'esclavage des Noirs. Il s'est formé une Société, dont l'objet particulier est de perfectionner la fabrique de ce sucre; & dès son origine, elle a eu les plus grands succès.” 51. Benjamin Rush, “An Account of the Sugar Maple-Tree of the United States, and of the Methods of Obtaining Sugar from It, together with Observations upon the Advantages Both Public and Private of This Sugar. In a Letter to Thomas Jefferson, Esq. Secretary of State to the United States, and One of the Vice Presidents of the American Philosophical,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 3 (1793): 64–81. 52. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 53. Peggy Cornett, “The Princes of Queens,” in The Best of New York Archives: Selections from the Magazine, 2001–2011 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 39–44. 54. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 66. 55. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 56. David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 91. 57. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 65.

168  Barry L. Stiefel 58. Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree, “Constitution of . . .”. Philadelphia, Aitken, 1792. American Philosophical Society, 46876. 59. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 60. Ibid. (quote on 365). Also see Trench Coxe, A View of the United States of America, in a Series of Papers, Written at Various Times, Between the Years 1787 and 1794 (Philadelphia: Printed for William Hall, no. 51, Market Street, and Wrigley & Berriman, no. 149, Chesnut Street, 1794). 61. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80 (quote on 358). 62. Ibid. (quote on 378). 63. Gregory Fremont-Barnes, The French Revolutionary Wars (Oxford, UK: Osprey Pub, 2001), 25. 64. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 68. 65. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17–18. Bottom of Form. 66. “Maple Sugar [The following is copied from a late Kingston (Jamaica) paper.],” American Apollo [Boston] 2, no. 12 (21 December 1792): 1. 67. Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 130–31. 68. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, 64. 69. John Lawrence, A Practical Treatise on Breeding, Rearing, and Fattening, All Kinds of Domestic Poultry, Pheasants, Pigeons, and Rabbits: Also the Management of Swine, Milch Cows, and Bees, and Instructions for the Private Brewery (London: Printed for Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1830), 265. 70. Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York: Routledge, 1999), 303. 71. “Weekly Summary,” The Plough Boy [Albany, New York], September 18, 1819, p. 127; and Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 116. 72. “Information Respecting the Canadas,” The Observer [London, UK], September 20, 1818, p. 2. 73. See Holcomb, Moral Commerce. 74. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 476. 75. Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 130–31. 76. See Johann C. Mikan, Ueber Zucker-Erzeugung Aus Ahorn-Saft: Eine Uebersicht Der Hierauf Bezug Habenden Erfahrungen (Prague: G. Haase, 1811); and Johann Burger, Untersuchungen Über Die Möglichkeit Und Den Nutzen Der Zuckererzeugung Aus Inländischen Pflanzen (Wien: Geistinger, 1811). 77. Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, Second Edition: Martinique and the World-Economy, 1830–1848 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 114. 78. Elizabeth Abott, “Sugar,” in The Routledge History of American Foodways, eds. Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Lindsey R. Swindall, and Michael D. Wise (New York: Routledge), 128–50. 79. “French Agriculture,” National Intelligencer [Washington, DC], May 4, 1820, p. 2. 80. See James Walvin, Sugar: The World Corrupted from Slavery to Obesity (New York: Random House, 2018). 81. “Changes in the Sugar Product,” Antigua Weekly Times, August 29, 1851, p. 4.

Maple 169 82. “Maple Sugar [The following is copied from a late Kingston (Jamaica) paper.],” 1. 83. Sturges, “ ‘Bleed on, blest tree!’,” 353–80. 84. Tom Meersman, “It’s Shaping up to be a Sweet Harvest for Minnesota Sugar Beets,” Star Tribune (October 10, 2015), accessed May 7, 2018, www.startribune.com/it-s-shaping-up-to-be-a-sweet-harvest-for-sugarbeets/331825671/#1; and Canadian Sugar Institute, Growing Sugar Beet (2018), accessed May 7, 2018, www.sugar.ca/Nutrition-Information-Service/ Educators-Students/Geography-of-Sugar/Growing-Beet-Sugar.aspx 85. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 103–4.

Bibliography Abott, Elizabeth. “Sugar.” In The Routledge History of American Foodways, edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Lindsey R. Swindall, and Michael D. Wise, 128–50. New York: Routledge, 2016. “Advice to American Farmers, About to Settle in New Countries.” Litchfield Monitor [Connecticut], 13 April 1789, 1. Agricola. “From the Pennsylvania Gazette.” Massachusetts Gazette [Boston], 4 November 1788, 3. Bacon, Margaret Hope. “By Moral Force Alone: The Antislavery Women and Nonresistance.” In The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, 275–300. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Baldwin, R. The London Magazine: Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 34 (1765): 545. Bellany, D. A New Complete English Dictionary, 294. London: J. Fuller, 1760. Beverley, Robert. The History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Birx, H. James, ed. “Lafitau, Joseph-François (1681–1746).” In Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006. Botting, Cecelia C. and Roland B. Botting, Comfort Families of America: A Collection of Genealogical Data. Brookings, SD: Botting, 1971. Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Economic History of the Caribbean Since the Napoleonic Wars. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Burger, Johann. Untersuchungen Über Die Möglichkeit Und Den Nutzen Der Zuckererzeugung Aus Inländischen Pflanzen. Wien: Geistinger, 1811. Canadian Sugar Institute. “Growing Sugar Beet (2018).” Accessed May 7, 2018. www.sugar.ca/Nutrition-Information-Service/Educators-Students/Geographyof-Sugar/Growing-Beet-Sugar.aspx. “Changes in the Sugar Product.” Antigua Weekly Times, 29 August 1851, 4. Connecticut Gazette. “To the Farmers of the Colony of Connecticut, Gentlemen.” The Massachusetts Spy [Boston], 25 August 1774, 1. Cornett, Peggy. “The Princes of Queens.” In The Best of New York Archives: Selections from the Magazine, 2001–2011, 39–44. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. Coxe, Trench. A View of the United States of America, in a series of papers, written at various times, between the years 1787 and 1794. Philadelphia: Printed

170  Barry L. Stiefel for William Hall, no. 51, Market Street, and Wrigley & Berriman, no. 149, Chesnut Street., 1794. Crane, Eva. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. New York: Routledge, 1999. Davis, Thomas J. A Rumor of Revolt: The “great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York. Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library, 2002. “A Description of an Uncommon Animal Lately Found at or near Great Barrington.” The Massachusetts Gazette [Boston], 4 July 1765, 3. de Warville, Jacques Pierre Brissot. New Travels in the United States of America Performed in 1788. Dublin: W. Corbet, 1792. Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Emonson, James. Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, Vol. 3 (January– June 1758). Fiske, David. “History Lesson: Ballston’s Thaddeus Scribner—Revolutionary War patriot, Saratoga County mailman. Published May 29, 2011.” Saratogian News, 29 May 2011. Accessed April 25, 2018. www.saratogian.com/article/ ST/20110529/NEWS/305299995. Flexner, Stuart B. Listening to America: An Illustrated History of Words and Phrases from Our Lively and Splendid Past. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Freeman’s Journal, The [Philadelphia], 29 May 1782, 2. Fremont-Barnes, Gregory. The French Revolutionary Wars. Oxford, UK: Osprey Pub, 2001. “French Agriculture.” National Intelligencer [Washington, DC], 4 May 1820, 2. Gellman, David N. Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. ———. “Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Slaves: Political Economy and the Case for Gradual Abolition in New York.” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 51–68. Ghachem, Malick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Glickman, Lawrence B. “ ‘Buy for the Sake of the Slave’: Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism.” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 889–912. Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Hemphill, C. Dallett. Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hoffer, Peter C. The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Holcomb, Julie L. Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott on Save Labor Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Horsmanden, Daniel. The New-York Conspiracy, Or, a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal. New York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810. “How to Tap and Make Maple Syrup.” Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Accessed August 21, 2018. https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/destina tions/state_parks/maplesyrup_how.pdf.

Maple 171 “Information Respecting the Canadas.” The Observer [London, UK], 20 September 1818, 2. Jacobson, Andrew. “Age of Industrialization and Agro-Industry.” In The Cultural History of Plants, edited by Ghillean Prance and Mark Nesbitt, 357–76. London: Routledge, 2005. Jeffries, F. The Gentleman’s Magazine 36 (1706): 195. Koeppel, Gerald T. Water for Gotham: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Lafitau, Joseph Francois. Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps, Vol. 2. Paris: Saugrain l’aîne, 1724. Lawrence, John. A Practical Treatise on Breeding, Rearing, and Fattening, All Kinds of Domestic Poultry, Pheasants, Pigeons, and Rabbits: Also the Management of Swine, Milch Cows, and Bees, and Instructions for the Private Brewery. London: Printed for Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1830. Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan. New York: Vintage, 2009. “Maple Sugar [The following is copied from a late Kingston (Jamaica) paper.].” American Apollo [Boston] 2, no. 12 (21 December 1792): 1. Meersman, Tom. “It’s Shaping Up to Be a Sweet Harvest for Minnesota Sugar Beets.” Star Tribune, 10 October 2015. Accessed May 7, 2018. www.star tribune.com/it-s-shaping-up-to-be-a-sweet-harvest-for-sugar-beets/331825 671/#1. Mercure de France, January 1755, 134. Mercure de France, Part I (1791), n.p. Mikan, Johann C. Ueber Zucker-Erzeugung Aus Ahorn-Saft: Eine Uebersicht Der Hierauf Bezug Habenden Erfahrungen. Prague: G. Haase, 1811. Miller, Philip. The Gardener’s Dictionary: Containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen, Fruit and Flower-garden. Vol. 1. London: Printed by the Author, 1741. Morgan, Kenneth. “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815.” In The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, edited by Donald Winch and Patrick Karl O’Brien, 165–92. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. “New-York.” The City Gazette [Charleston, South Carolina], 3 April 1790, 3. Top of Form Northrup, David. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ogden, Jacob. “Advertisement.” American Mercury [Hartford], 6 February 1786, 3. Oldfield, J. R. Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, C.1787–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. “Philadelphia. March 19, 1792.” National Gazette, 19 March 1792, 163. “Philadelphia, May 15.” The New York Packet, 16 May 1789, 2. “Philadelphia, July 18.” Gazette of the United States, 18 July 1792, 55. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Vol. 7. London: Royal Society of London, 1693. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.

172  Barry L. Stiefel Puckett, Newbell N. “Names of American Negro Slaves.” In Mother Wit from Laughing Barrel, edited by Alan Dundes, 156–74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Rush, Benjamin. “An Account of the Sugar Maple-Tree of the United States, and of the Methods of Obtaining Sugar from It, together with Observations upon the Advantages Both Public and Private of This Sugar. In a Letter to Thomas Jefferson, Esq. Secretary of State to the United States, and One of the Vice Presidents of the American Philosophical.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 3 (1793): 64–81. Smith, Andrew F., ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Smith, Woodruff. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012. Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. “Constitution of . . .” Philadelphia, Aitken, 1792. American Philosophical Society, 46876. Stiefel, Barry L. “Jews as Middlemen in the Neutral XVIIIth Century Atlantic World.” In Neutrals and Neutrality in the Atlantic World in the 18th century (1700–1820): A Global Approach, edited by Éric Schnakenbourg, 159–84. Mordelles, France: Editions Les Perséides, 2015. Sturges, Mark. “’Bleed on, Blest Tree!’: Maple Sugar Georgics in the Early American Republic.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 353–80. Theobald, Mary Miley. “Thomas Jefferson and the Maple Sugar Scheme.” Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Autumn 2012). Accessed April 22, 2018. www. history.org/Foundation /journal/autumn12/maplesugar.cfm. “To Make Maple-Sugar.” Providence Gazette [Rhode Island], 15 November 1788, 1. Tomich, Dale W. Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, Second Edition: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. Walvin, James. Sugar: The World Corrupted from Slavery to Obesity. New York: Random House, 2018. “Weekly Summary.” The Plough Boy [Albany, New York], 18 September 1819, 127.

8 Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy Circuits of Trade and Knowledge Christopher Magra Samuel Massey began to learn the “Knowledge, Art, and Mystery of a Merchant” at age 17 by working in a grocery store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1751.1 He became the store owner’s apprentice and assisted with importing and retailing a variety of goods from overseas markets, including chocolate. He went to the local tailor, got fitted for a new set of clothes, and traveled to the Caribbean to conduct business for the owner.2 He “entered Dutch School” and learned a foreign language to facilitate overseas commercial transactions in St. Eustatius.3 By 19, he had already discovered an important lesson about the relationship between circuits of trade and knowledge. Massey wrote, “It is reported and said by those that have had An experimental knowledge of it that Markets at Barbados” typically became saturated with imports “about the middle or latter of September.”4 Even a teenager understood that knowledge of economic conditions was essential to effectively time overseas markets and successfully pull off long-distance trade. Massey then partnered with one of the owner’s sons, and the young entrepreneurs opened their own grocery store in Philadelphia in 1760. They began importing Caribbean cocoa beans. The two men purchased ships and hired crews. They sent their ships and mariners with loads of flour to various Caribbean islands in search of the beans. Massey instructed the captains of these ships to sell flour wherever it could be disposed of “to the best Advantage,” or the highest profit, regardless of whether the island belonged to the British, French, or Dutch. He further instructed captains to “remit the proceeds” from the sale of the flour “in good Cocoa,” but only if it could be had at a low price.5 Massey planned to use grist mills around Philadelphia to grind the cocoa beans into chocolate powder for retail in his grocery store. If cocoa bean prices were too high, then the captains had to purchase other tropical goods such as sugar, rum, and molasses. The key was to determine market conditions. Massey never forgot the lesson he learned about the importance of “experimental knowledge” of overseas markets. He stopped traveling overseas so as to better manage business ventures that included a store, a wharf, a warehouse, and several ships. Instead, he relied on trusted

174  Christopher Magra ship captains to obtain first-hand knowledge of these markets. At times, captains wrote letters to Massey informing him of rapidly fluctuating market conditions among different Caribbean islands and asking for advice. On other occasions, the captains reported commodity prices on the islands when they returned to Philadelphia. He then planned the next trade voyage to the Caribbean based on the information he received from his mariners. The buying and selling of Caribbean cocoa beans and the North American production of chocolate depended on the acquisition and transmission of this information. The early modern Atlantic economy floated on a sea of trust.6 Merchants used a combination of kinship and religious ties to establish transoceanic networks of trust in and out of foreign territories all around the Atlantic world. Having trusted family and church members residing in key commercial hubs promoted the dispersion of economic information. Merchants also relied on these trusted agents to broker deals across oceans. Ship captains also acted as trusted agents who disseminated news of market conditions. They were uniquely positioned to acquire and transmit this information. Circuits of trade and knowledge connected North American chocolate manufacturers such as Samuel Massey with tropical markets. Mariners played key roles in facilitating these transoceanic circuits. Letters between ship captains and colonial entrepreneurs reveal the ways in which mariners acquired, processed, and transmitted the experiential knowledge that made a seaborne Atlantic empire of chocolate possible and profitable. *** Customs records for the 13 mainland British North American colonies are particularly rich and detailed for the years 1768–1773.7 Over this period, British colonists legally imported 3,028,454 lb. of cocoa beans. The majority of these beans, 68% (N = 2,071,207), were imported from foreign Dutch, French, and Spanish tropical sources in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The lion’s share of the total imported beans, 65% (N = 1,956,597), ended up in New England colonies. By itself, Beantown, or Boston, accounted for 18% (N = 545,965) of all imported cocoa beans. Only Philadelphia imported more beans (N = 599,941, or 20% of the total). During the same time span, Americans legally imported 231,722 lb. of chocolate. The bulk of these imports, 46% (N = 105,485), went to the Chesapeake Bay colonies, Virginia and Maryland. Though Virginia had the largest European population of any colony in this part of the world, settlers in the region concentrated on tobacco production and remained happy importing their sweet treat. North American chocolate manufacturing centered in New England. Yankee entrepreneurs exported a great deal of chocolate between 1768 and 1773. They shipped 17,718 lb. of chocolate to Portugal,

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 175 Spain, and Madeira to exchange for lines of credit, salt, and fruit. Merchants exported 459,347 lb. to colonies in North America for a variety of goods. They shipped 1,950 lb. to Africa to exchange for slaves. And they exported 5,880 lb. to the Caribbean islands to exchange for tropical commodities such as cocoa beans, molasses, rum, and sugar. In all, American merchants shipped 484,895 lb. of chocolate across the Atlantic Ocean during a time for which we have accurate data to measure. This amounted to nearly 100,000 lb. per year. The seaborne chocolate empire was robust. Chocolate was not an expensive luxury good that only wealthy consumers could afford in British North America. Its retail price in the eighteenth century typically fell between expensive tea, which was still widely consumed, and less costly coffee.8 Men, women, and children drank chocolate. Rich and poor consumed chocolate beverages. Black and white, slave and free peoples enjoyed chocolate as part of their diet. Soldiers and civilians drank it. People living in British North America consumed chocolate in a variety of ways throughout the eighteenth century. Chocolate powder was mixed with milk or water and consumed hot or cold. In place of chocolate powder, consumers took the shells of cocoa beans, which was really a membrane, and steeped them in hot water. The result looked, tasted, and smelled like coffee. Sugar could be added to each of these beverages to sweeten them. Chocolate powder flavored cakes, custards, and creams. Consumers also ate chocolate-covered almonds during the eighteenth century.9 Chocolate was comfort food in early America. Colonial fishermen took it to sea with them on commercial fishing expeditions to mitigate hard manual labor.10 Wives and family members sent it as reminders of home to soldiers and sailors in wars.11 Hospitals provided chocolate to recovering patients.12 Chocolate was also a pick-me-up that was often consumed early in the morning. Reverend James Blair, the founder of the College of William and Mary, invited people to his Virginian home in 1705 “to drink chocolate in the morning.”13 Around this time, the Virginia planter William Byrd recorded in his diary: “I rose at 6 o’clock this morning and read a chapter in Hebrews and 200 verses in Homer’s Odyssey. I said my [prayers] and ate chocolate for breakfast with Mr. Isham Randolph.”14 According to George, Martha Washington believed chocolate “agreed with her better than any other Breakfast.”15 Theobromine, cocoa’s main alkaloid, was a stimulant that jumpstarted people as the sun was rising.16 A variety of people believed chocolate could be used for medicinal purposes. The London physician William Heberden insisted chocolate should be given to patients recovering from smallpox to restore their lost energy.17 The Jamaican planter Edward Long thought that most people thought chocolate to be “highly restorative, insomuch that one ounce of it is said to nourish as much as a pound of beef.” Cocoa oil was “esteemed a good

176  Christopher Magra embrocation in paralytic cases.” And raw cocoa beans were said “to assuage pains in the bowels.”18 Chocolate was also a saleable commodity. The chocolate powder that was manufactured in North America was consumed domestically and it was used in intercolonial trade. It was exported to Newfoundland, Ireland, England, Iberian markets, and even as far away as the West Coast of Africa. The Atlantic chocolate trade connected producers and consumers. Its overseas distribution linked manufacturers with far-flung markets. The production, distribution, and consumption of chocolate made knowledge of these markets an integral part of profit maximization in an increasingly connected capitalist semi-global economy. Academic studies of the Atlantic chocolate trade have largely ignored North America. A great deal of scholarship has been done on European interaction with indigenous cocoa bean producers in Central and South America between 1500 and 1800.19 This stands to reason, as the bulk of cocoa beans produced in the Western Hemisphere during this time period came from these regions. But there were cocoa beans produced in the Caribbean, and we know comparatively little about this process. And while the bulk of these beans were refined, or milled, into chocolate powder in Europe, chocolate was also produced in and exported from North America. There was a seaborne empire of chocolate headquartered in this part of the world. Boston was the key port. Caleb Davis was one of the leading chocolate producers in Boston before the American Revolution. He was a 27-year-old entrepreneur who owned ships and a dry goods store in Beantown in 1765.20 He also rented a stream and a water-powered mill for producing chocolate in nearby Roxbury, Massachusetts. Davis’ rental agreement provided him with “Liberty to Grind Chocolate” for his “Chocolate Works” at the rate of three shillings and four pence for every pound of chocolate he ground. In addition, Davis had to pay a fee of £1.6.8 “for the Room he Improves in the Mill and for the Shop where he Cleans his Cocoa.” For the total rental charge, Davis was “to have the Water whenever he wants it,” which meant if Davis wanted to grind chocolate, then he could grind as much as he desired at whatever time.21 By the Revolution, Davis was refining tens of thousands of cocoa beans into thousands of pounds of chocolate powder. Experiential knowledge was vital to the success of Davis’ import and export business. There were no electronic methods of communicating market conditions across the globe. Yet transatlantic trade would have failed without some understanding of commodity prices and the number and intensity of business competition in foreign regions. Expensive ships with mariners on monthly wages transporting costly, often perishable cargo would have wasted precious time traveling months across a vast ocean only to find a glutted or barren market. The Atlantic chocolate trade would not have been profitable without experiential knowledge.

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 177 Davis was a profit-oriented merchant who cared a great deal about knowing which overseas markets afforded him the best margins. He instructed his ship captains to “inform yourself of the Market” conditions at overseas ports for certain commodities, and he told them to “write us every Opportunity” so that he and his business partners could develop strategies for sending certain goods to specific markets at certain times to maximize profits.22 Like Massey, Davis needed information to flow across the Atlantic Ocean to make the seaborne empire of chocolate profitable. In particular, chocolate producers needed experiential knowledge of overseas market conditions. Experiential knowledge could only be gained through experience or “experiment” in Samuel Massey’s terms. One had to continuously travel to and from the Caribbean in the 1700s to gain experiential knowledge of tropical island market conditions. This knowledge could not be gained a priori. Merchants did not understand the nature of overseas markets on instinct. Nor could they study economics in school to discover the price of cocoa beans in Kingston, Jamaica on May 15, 1765. There was even a difference between having a practical, working knowledge of overseas trade and maintaining an experiential knowledge of fluctuating market conditions on a continual basis. Ship captains were ideally situated to provide eighteenth-century entrepreneurs with the knowledge required to conduct the most lucrative of all commerce, long-distance trade.23 Navigating overseas markets that took months to reach required hands-on experience and face-to-face discussion. Unlike other business agents who worked overseas on a semipermanent or permanent basis such as factors, ship captains routinely traveled back and forth across oceans. These mariners provided a steady stream of communication, and they offered their merchant employers frequent interpersonal dialogue about a wide variety of factors that limited and expanded overseas markets. Atlantic commerce floated on a sea of trust and experiential knowledge. Ship captains were trusted agents. Early modern ship owners did not trust their prize possessions to random men. Each vessel was handcrafted and built to order by shipwrights and other craftsmen. Ship-owning merchants specified cargo space sizes to match their particular business plans. They detailed the types of wood used in construction and the size of the ship to facilitate future travel to certain parts of the world. These specifications were precisely laid down in legal contracts between the entrepreneurs and the shipwrights.24 Ships were not randomly or casually purchased. Ships represented considerable capital investments. Expenses associated with building new vessels or purchasing used ships, buying supplies, maritime insurance, and maintenance fees were so significant, and the risk of loss at sea was so great, that entrepreneurs involved in overseas trade frequently took on business partners. Those same entrepreneurs placed a great deal of trust in ship captains to manage

178  Christopher Magra transoceanic voyages. That is why Samuel Massey referred to Samuel Carpenter, master of the brig Lydia, as “Respected Friend,” at the start of his instructions for the transport and sale of Philadelphia flour at St. Kitts in 1760.25 Similarly, Massey greeted Robert White, master of the ship Hamilton, with “Esteemed Friend” before a voyage to Antigua that same year.26 Massey and other North American chocolate producers maintained meaningful personal relationships with ship captains. Caleb Davis trusted Amasa Davis and Jonathan Pierpoint during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Amasa was Caleb’s brother. Jonathan was Caleb’s brother-in-law. But these men weren’t just family. They were maritime employees. Both of these ship captains sailed great distances over vast stretches of the Atlantic Ocean to a variety of destinations for Caleb Davis. Amasa followed Caleb’s instructions and took cargo to Môle St. Nicholas and St. Eustatia.27 Môle St. Nicholas was a French port on the northwestern coast of what is today Haiti, and what was then Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was one of the crown jewels in the French Empire. By 1775, the sugar plantations on Saint-Domingue alone surpassed the production of all the British sugar islands combined.28 St. Eustatia was a popular Dutch free port.29 Both islands produced a range of tropical commodities, including cocoa beans. They were not sugar monocultures, although sugar was their leading export.30 On one of these West Indian trade voyages in 1771, Amasa sailed the brig Kingston from Boston to St. Eustatia. Caleb took out a maritime insurance policy of £1,000 on the Kingston with financiers in London. He procured such a large policy because of “Daily expectations of a War, which is now generally thought unavoidable.”31 The Boston merchant and his London insurers believed Great Britain was going to enter into yet another war with France in 1771. Amasa transported refuse grade dried, salted cod, pickled mackerel, wood, and bread to sell to tropical purchasers in exchange for lines of credit, cocoa beans, sugar, and molasses. Caleb, the merchant, entrusted Amasa, the ship captain, to buy and sell goods on the trade voyage the former had organized. The merchant strategized and set the wheels of commerce in motion, while the ship captain managed all of the more mundane aspects of trade. The Kingston stopped first at St. Eustatia. Amasa sold most of the goods on his vessel, but he did not want to sell everything. Instead, he left St. Eustatia and sailed to Saint-Domingue.32 Amasa made the decision, he explained in a letter he wrote to his brother, because he believed he could “make a much Better Voyage,” or a more profitable voyage, selling his remaining cargo at Saint-Domingue.33 He had learned from experience that market conditions were not entirely favorable at St. Eustatia. Amasa heard from other ship captains and local merchants that conditions were preferable on the larger French island. He wanted to travel

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 179 there to investigate matters himself. Amasa therefore hauled anchor and set sail for French waters. When Amasa made it to Môle St. Nicholas, he discovered the information he received at St. Eustatia was incorrect. He immediately wrote Caleb to inform him of heavy business competition in the area. “When I shall Purchase the Remaining Part of my Cargo is Very Uncertain,” he wrote, “as there is upwards of 30 sail of Vessels that wants” cocoa beans, sugar, molasses, and other goods. He had passed other Massachusetts ship captains on the high seas and learned in passing that they had left Saint-Domingue having easily filled their holds with cocoa beans. This news must have filled his sails during the transit. Amasa was thoroughly deflated when he finally reached the French island. “It Frets me so,” he bemoaned, “to think how Easy Captain Howes and Doubleday [the other Massachusetts captains] got their Cargoes and that I must be so unfortunate as to Come too Late.” Market conditions had changed. Amasa missed his opportunity to secure a lot of cocoa beans at a low rate. “I can hardly Sleep,” he wrote his brother.34 These notes served to update Caleb Davis on current market conditions in the Caribbean, and they helped Davis adjust his expectations for Amasa’s trade voyage. Amasa then sold the remainder of his goods in Môle St. Nicholas. He was nervous and wrote his brother again: “I am Very Uneasy Concerning the War; But hope to get home Before it’s Proclaimed.” He observed that in the French port “all Preparation Possible [were being made] for War; Yesterday a French Ship 500 Tons Burden Came here loaded with Cannon and Another is Expected Tomorrow with Mortars and Shot for the forts here.” With a shaking pen, he swore to Caleb he would “remain your Loving Brother til Death.” The looming imperial conflict clearly weighed heavily on Amasa. Yet he ended his letter with a postscript detailing goods he had successfully sold on the French island and an apology for poor market conditions, there being “no demand” for his remaining cargo.35 Amasa then stayed in the French port for another five days after writing this anxious letter. He finished loading goods onto his vessel. He again wrote to his brother “I am Very fearful of a War.” But he hoped be home in Boston “by the 20th March.” He also hoped the expensive cocoa beans and other tropical goods he purchased would yet “be agreeable” to, or profitable for, his brother.36 Amasa’s letters to his brother Caleb underscore the ways in which ship captains acquired knowledge of Caribbean market conditions for New England merchants during the eighteenth century. Amasa physically traveled across the ocean on a regular basis. He talked to merchants and mariners in overseas ports about those ports. He also listened to merchants and mariners who had traveled from other ports. Caleb sent other ship captains to additional Atlantic destinations to gather further commercial intelligence.

180  Christopher Magra Jonathan Pierpoint typically distributed Davis’ refined chocolate powder to European ports, especially in Spain. While the Spanish monarchy may have held a grudge against the British Crown for wartime losses and peacetime piracy, Spanish merchants had a long-standing commercial relationship with Massachusetts merchants. Spain was arguably the most important market for finished goods such as dried, salted cod and chocolate.37 On one of these trade voyages to Spain in 1769, Pierpoint captained the schooner Matilda with a load of chocolate and fish. Davis’ instructions to Pierpoint in his 1769 sailing orders were for the captain to “proceed directly for Gibraltar.” After selling the goods on the schooner, Pierpoint was to “inform yourself of the Market” for commodities at Malaga, Spain, “so that any articles you may have on board you may dispose of according as you find the Market.” Davis wanted Pierpoint to use “the Proceeds” of the sale at Gibraltar to purchase, or “invest in,” goods at Malaga. If Pierpoint discovered that Malaga was a better market than Gibraltar, then he was not to waste time. Davis provided Pierpoint with specific instructions as to how to purchase fruit at Malaga. “Examine the fruit that you purchase very carefully,” Davis wrote, “see that the Raisons are of the last growth of A Bluish Cast, free from any Sand and [that the] Casks [are] in good order, the Lemons fair well sweated and packed in good Order in Boxes.”38 Davis reminded Pierpoint that he expected “Money can be laid out at Malaga to advantage.”39 Pierpoint surely yawned at these reminders. He was the source of Davis’ expectations regarding market conditions at Malaga. He was the one who discussed the condition of fruit at the Spanish port. What is more, Pierpoint knew when he read the initial instructions in Boston’s harbor that market conditions could shift during the two-to-three-month Atlantic crossing. In the end, Pierpoint sailed to Alicante, Barcelona, and Mahon, but not Malaga.40 He alerted Davis to the discovery of better markets in the other regions. No doubt, Pierpoint smiled when he sent this information back across the Atlantic Ocean. For his part, Davis trusted Pierpoint to process the knowledge he acquired of market conditions. Ship captains did not simply acquire experiential knowledge of overseas market conditions. They were not simple beasts that picked up seeds in one field only to drop them in another area without understanding what was in their mouths. Like neurons, mariners processed the data they received. One can see the gears turning in the minds of ship captains as they penned letters home to their maritime employers. Nathaniel Bosworth distributed Caleb Davis’ chocolate to colder climes on the schooner Raven. Fishermen throughout New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland devoured the sweet treat on fishing expeditions. It gave these hardy maritime laborers energy for physically demanding work, and it provided them with comfort during weeks and months away from home.

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 181 Bosworth wrote to Davis from Canso, Nova Scotia in 1771 to alert the merchant of market conditions in the region. Prices for flour and molasses were low. Rum was “a very poor article” to trade. But Bosworth did not end his letter with the transmission of these data. He mulled it over and reported that “I shall be obliged to Sell Everything very low, else not at all.” He also acted on the experiential knowledge he acquired without Davis’ authorization. He sailed to nearby fishing communities to see if he could find better markets, but “Every harbor is full of goods.” To make matters worse, he learned from local fishermen that there was “very little fish fit to ship.” Bosworth planned “to stop at all these harbors” once again after traveling to St. John’s, Newfoundland to make doubly sure catches were poor this season. He wanted Davis to know he was doing everything in his power to sell high and purchase dear. But, the Yankee ship captain was realistic. And he wanted Davis to be realistic, as well. “You must Expect a good many articles will come back” to Boston, Bosworth wrote. “Speshly the Rum.”41 Joshua Davis was the master of the 50-ton sloop Sally on a trade voyage to Maryland in 1772. He was also Caleb’s brother. Market conditions were not good in the Chesapeake Bay colony. Joshua sold the chocolate and other trade goods on his sloop. He reported the price his load of chocolate fetched. He could not find commodities to purchase for the return trip to Boston, however. “Grain of all sorts” was “exceeding scarce.” He recorded the prices for wheat, corn, and flour. He also reported that there were “five vessels in the river besides us.” But his letter to his brother did not stop with these reports. Numerous waterways connected the interior of Maryland to the Bay. And Joshua could “hear of no opportunity in any other river at present.” He concluded on his own that “it will be difficult getting loaded” with grain to take home. He thought about traveling “to the head of the River to try to purchase the rest of my cargo if possible.” But, he believed grain would be “dearer and scarcer” because some of the other ship captains had already done this. He felt “Stuck with a very dull prospect.” Still, he was going to “endeavor to make the best of Everything” so that his brother “may not lay all the blame on me if I make a bad voyage.”42 Amasa Davis contemplated traveling to Amsterdam in 1771. He had learned at the Dutch island of St. Eustatia that market conditions were favorable in the European port. Instead of simply sending this news home to his brother, Amasa weighed the pros and cons and “Concluded Otherwise.” He didn’t even bother explaining to Caleb why he made this decision: “my Reasons are too tedious to mention at Present.” Amasa also learned that fish prices were higher on St. Eustatia than on SaintDomingue. But cocoa prices were lower on the French island. Amasa did not pick up these data and head back to Boston. He “sold and delivered all my fish, which will Average Between £0.26.0 and £0.27.0 [per

182  Christopher Magra quintal].” Then, he planned to sail to Mole St. Nicholas, where, he wrote, “I expect I shall bring home 4 or 5 thousand weight of Cocoa and some sugar.” He closed the letter in his usual way by listing the “Price Current” for various commodities in his port of call.43 Eighteenth-century ship captains took the commercial data they acquired and made quick decisions about which overseas markets were oversaturated and which markets provided the best chance at securing profits. Merchants sent ship captains to certain areas with a load of trade goods that they believed they could profit from based on previous trade voyages. Merchants trusted ship captains to time those markets as best they could and to adjust plans on the fly. Once they acquired and processed experiential knowledge of overseas market conditions, ship captains conveyed this knowledge to merchants back home. This knowledge transfer primarily involved correspondence and face-to-face communication. Letter writing provided merchants with timely snapshots of market conditions. Letters let them know what the ship captain thought of the market on a given day. They represented premodern market analyses. Face-to-face interaction provided entrepreneurs with an exchange of ideas and a distanced reflection about that analysis with an eyewitness. Davis’ ship captains routinely sent commercial information to Boston from ports around the Atlantic. This premodern, transoceanic communication was handled in different ways.44 Ship captains, like modern postmen, understood mail routes. They also knew how to discover which ships were bound for certain destinations. Captain Pierpoint used British warships bound for the naval base at Halifax, Nova Scotia to get letters close to home.45 Like most mariners, Pierpoint realized that naval bases and commercial ports were hubs of ship traffic, with vessels arriving and departing daily from a wide variety of overseas locations. As a Massachusetts mariner, he also knew that fishing vessels and ships on trade voyages regularly traveled between Boston and Halifax.46 So, sending mail on a warship bound for Halifax was a reliable means of conveying news of European markets to Boston. On this particular trade voyage, Pierpoint was at the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. He reported to Caleb Davis that he was “extremely Sorry.” The transatlantic passage had taken longer than expected, which meant that overhead costs were going to be elevated. Moreover, there were “4 Brigs arrived here . . . full Loaden with the Same Commodity in Less than ten days past.” Peirpoint processed these data and signaled to Davis that there could only be “an indifferent prospect of an ordinary sale of the Cargo here.” High operating costs and low prices meant that Davis needed to adjust his expectations downward for profits from the trade voyage. He was “informed markets are better at Dunkirk.” But the merchant who gave him this information had a vested “interest” in convincing Peirpoint to go to Dunkirk, so he doubted the

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 183 veracity of the claim. He wanted to travel to Dunkirk to see for himself if, in fact, markets were better there.47 Ship captains also relied on other ship captains to deliver mail, especially if that mariner was traveling to the letter’s destination. Amasa Davis wrote from Saint-Domingue in 1771 to his brother Caleb in Boston. Amasa wanted to send the chocolate manufacturer news of “a glut” in Caribbean markets. He had found commodity prices to be low on the French island, and he heard news from Jamaica that was “Very discouraging.” He noted in the letter that “this will be Handed you by Captain Morton, who can give you any Particular Accounts Concerning Markets Here.”48 Conveying commercial information back to Boston made it possible for Caleb Davis and chocolate producers like him to make business plans. In order for the Atlantic chocolate trade to continue, it had to be profitable. Profits from maritime commerce depended on timing long-distance markets. Timing these markets was challenging during the eighteenth century. But it was vital. A single failed trade voyage could sink a business. Entrepreneurs had to plan what they were going to sell and where and when they were going to sell it. Ship captains did not only distribute trade goods. They acquired, processed, and conveyed the knowledge of overseas markets that merchants relied on to time markets and make profits. Ship captains made transatlantic trade and knowledge circuits possible. *** The Atlantic Ocean was as much a conduit as a barrier in terms of the early modern transmission of commercial information. Ship captains acted as neurons running along maritime conduits. They were uniquely situated to acquire, process, and transmit experiential knowledge. Unlike merchants and other less peripatetic business agents, ship captains were trusted agents who regularly traveled back and forth over long distances. They constantly sought after knowledge of market conditions in and around the places they visited. They processed this information on the fly in foreign locales. They habitually wrote letters home informing money men of these conditions. And, unlike other overseas businessmen, ship captains returned home on numerous occasions throughout the year to engage in extended face-to-face dialogue about these conditions. The acquisition, processing, and transmission of experiential knowledge of overseas market conditions made the Atlantic chocolate trade possible and profitable. Though he rarely left Boston, the constant transmission of commercial news made Caleb Davis as familiar with Iberian and West Indian markets as he was with markets in Massachusetts. The same could be said of other entrepreneurs involved in the importation of tropical cocoa beans into North America and the manufacture and export of chocolate. Like Samuel Massey, Davis understood what prices

184  Christopher Magra his commodities would fetch in different markets. He knew what trade goods cost in these markets. He could evaluate the potential for profit and the amount of risk he would incur. He could take steps to manage that risk. Most important, he could make informed decisions about which venture to invest his money in. Samuel Massey was right. “Experimental knowledge” made businessmen powerful and successful.49 That is why Davis expressly instructed Captain Pierpoint to “inform yourself of the Market” conditions at Spanish ports during his initial layover at Gibraltar. That is why Davis included in his orders to Captain Pierpoint the injunction to “write us every Opportunity” during the voyage to Spanish ports.50 And that is why Davis met with mariners and debriefed them upon their return to Beantown. Rational calculators such as Davis and Massey could not calculate without experiential knowledge of market conditions around the Atlantic world.

Notes 1. Memo dated June 26, 1751. Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751– 1755. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 2. Accounts running from August 5 to September 26, 1755 for “Expenses in getting myself ready for a Voyage to Jamaica.” Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751–1755. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 3. Memo dated October 7, 1754. Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751– 1755. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 4. Memo dated September 2, 1753. Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751–1755. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 5. Instructions from Samuel Massey to Samuel Carpenter dated Philadelphia June 3, 1760. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 6. Manuel Herrero Sánchez and Klemens Kaps, eds., Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550–1800: Connectors of Commercial Maritime Systems (New York: Routledge, 2016); Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks (London: Boydell Press, 2013); Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); and John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973). 7. I compiled the following trade data in this paragraph and the next from the “Ledgers of Imports and Exports, America,” National Archives, Kew Gardens, London, England, Records of the Board of Customs, CUST 16/1.

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 185 8. Eighteenth-century North American newspapers regularly advertised chocolate for sale at an average rate of 12.5 shillings per pound. Multiple varieties of tea sold between 25 and 50 shillings per pound. Coffee sold for less than 10 shillings per pound. 9. Darra Goldstein, ed., The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145. 10. See, for example, the bill of lading for the schooner Ruby that sailed out of Gloucester in 1788. Ship’s Log Books, James Duncan Phillips Library, Salem, MA, Microfilm #91, Reel 68. Also see the accounts for Robert Knight, skipper of the Molly and Barnett, dated March 1772. William Knight Account Book, 1767–1781, also at the James Duncan Phillips Library. 11. Henry Knox Papers, two letters each dated June 19, 1777. Lucy Knox to Henry Knox proclaiming her love and mentioning potential new appointments in the army. [Correspondence]. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. GLC02437.00614. Available through Adam Matthew, “Marlborough, American History, 1493–1945,” accessed March 17, 2016, www.american history.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/GLC02437.00614; and William Knox to Henry Knox regarding the potential appointment of a new artillery general. Available through Adam Matthew, “Marlborough, American History, 1493–1945,” accessed March 17, 2016, www.americanhistory.amdigi tal.co.uk/Documents/Details/GLC02437.00615 12. Evans Imprints, Series 1, #8191. Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, of His Majesty’s province of the Massachusetts-Bay (Boston: N.E. Printed by Samuel Kneeland, printer to the Honourable House of Representatives., 1758), 312. 13. Letter from Governor Francis Nicholson to the Board of Trade dated March 6, 1705. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies. 14. L. B. Wright and M. Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1941), 4. 15. “Burges Ball to George Washington, 13 February 1794,” in The Writings of George Washington, vol. 33, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1936), 280n. 16. Joel Mokyr, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 461. 17. Evans Imprints, Series 1, #8367. William Heberden, Plain instructions for inoculation in the small-pox; by which any person may be enabled to perform the operation, and conduct the patient through the distemper (London: Printed at the expense of the author, to be given away in America, 1759), 11. For evidence that this medical treatise was distributed in America, see Evans Imprints, Series 1, #8581. 18. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, vol. 3 (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 698. 19. Silke Hackenesch, “Chocolate, Race, and the Atlantic World: A Bittersweet History,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 21 (2011): 31–49; Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008); Cameron L. McNeil, Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); Johannes Postma, “Suriname and Its Atlantic Connections, 1667–1795,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, eds. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (London: Brill, 2003); Eugenio Piñero, “The Cacao Economy of

186  Christopher Magra the Eighteenth-Century Province of Caracas and the Spanish Cacao Market,” in The Atlantic Staple Trade, vol. 2, ed. Susan Socolow (Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1996), 493–518; and Dauril Alden, “The Significance of Cacao Production in the Amazon Region During the Late Colonial Period: An Essay in Comparative Economic History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (1976): 103–35. 20. The Caleb Davis Papers is an enormous manuscript collection that covers nearly the entire life of an early American entrepreneur. Caleb Davis Papers, 1684–1826, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA (hereafter cited as CDP). 21. Account dated Boston, July 22, 1767. CDP, Box 3 Folder 7. For the location of the mill in Roxbury, see CDP, Box 4 Folder 25. 22. Letter from Caleb Davis to Jonathan Pierpoint dated Boston, March 6, 1769. CDP, Box 4, Folder 29. 23. Fernand Braudel insists long-distance traders played key roles in the rise of capitalism. They connected artisans with distant raw materials needed to produce finished products. They also were responsible for bringing those finished products to distant markets. Moreover, long-distance trade contributed to the accumulation and concentration of large amounts of capital. “The indisputable superiority of Fernhandel, long-distance trading,” Braudel writes, “lay in the concentrations it made possible, which meant it was an unrivalled machine for the rapid reproduction and increase of capital. In short, one is forced to agree with. . . [those] who see long-distance trade as an essential factor in the creation of merchant capitalism, and in the creation of the merchant bourgeoisie.” Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume 2: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 408 [emphasis in the original]. For additional arguments on the importance of long-distance trade to the rise of capitalism, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Alan K. Smith, Creating a World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade, 1400–1825 (New York: Westview Press, Inc., 1991); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 24. For more on shipbuilding, see Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Macmillan & Company Limited, 1962), Chapters 3, 4, “Ships and Shipbuilders in the Seventeenth Century,” and “Ships and Shipbuilders in the Eighteenth Century.” Also, see Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1976); and Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926). 25. Instructions from Samuel Massey to Samuel Carpenter dated Philadelphia June 3, 1760. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 26. Instructions from Samuel Massey to Robert White dated Philadelphia June 11, 1760. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library.

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 187 27. For St. Eustatia, see the letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated St. Eustatia January 10, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 17. For Mole St. Nicholas, see the letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated Mole St. Nicholas, February 7, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 19. For evidence that Caleb Davis owned the vessels Amasa captained, see the bill of sale for the schooner Fair Lady dated Boston, April 12, 1766, the bill of sale for the schooner Success dated Boston, March 30, 1770, and the bill of sale for the sloop Sally dated Boston June 5, 1772. CDP, Box 3, Folder 12; Box 5, Folder 12; and Box 6, Folder 4. 28. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990). 29. Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (London: KITLV Press, 1998); and P. C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (London: Ashgate, 1998). 30. Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World Before the “Sugar Revolution” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 31. Letter from Henry and Thomas Bromfield to William Davis, dated London, January 3, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 17. 32. Letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated St. Eustatia, January 10, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 17. 33. Ibid. 34. Letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated Mole St. Nicholas, February 7, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 19. 35. Ibid. 36. Letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated Mole St. Nicholas, February 12, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 19. 37. Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and James G. Lydon, “Fish for Gold: The Massachusetts Fish Trade with Iberia, 1700– 1773,” The New England Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 1981): 539–82. 38. Letter from Caleb Davis to Jonathan Pierpoint dated Boston, March 6, 1769. CDP, Box 4, Folder 29. 39. Ibid. 40. For Alicante, Spain, see Captain Pierpoint’s account with Davis dated May 21, 1769, in which Pierpoint paid for port charges. CDP, Box 5, Folder 2. For Barcelona, Spain, see the receipt dated June 3, 1769. CDP, Box 5, Folder 3. For Mahon, Spain, see the memorandum dated Mahon, July 3, 1769. CDP, Box 5, Folder 4. An additional receipt dated June 15, 1769, is entirely in Spanish. CDP, Box 5, Folder 3. 41. Letter from Nathaniel Bosworth to Caleb Davis dated Canso July 20, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 25. 42. Letter from Joshua Davis to Caleb Davis dated Maryland January 20, 1772. CDP, Box 6, Folder 4. 43. Letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated St. Eustatia, January 10, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 17. 44. The definitive study of early modern Atlantic communication is Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

188  Christopher Magra 45. Letter from Jonathan Pierpoint on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel to Caleb Davis in Boston “Per the Mermaid Man of War, who touches at Plymouth [England] bound to Halifax,” dated simply 1768. CDP, Box 4, Folder 26. 46. For more on these connections, see George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia’s Massachusetts (Ontario: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1973). 47. Letter from Jonathan Pierpoint to Caleb Davis dated simply 1768. CDP, Box 4, Folder 26. 48. Letter from Amasa Davis to Caleb Davis dated July 2, 1771. CDP, Box 5, Folder 25. 49. Memo dated September 2, 1753. Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751–1755. Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863. Box 1, Folder “Memorandum Books (Accounts), 1751–1760.” Hagley Library. 50. Letter from Caleb Davis to Jonathan Pierpoint dated Boston, March 6, 1769. CDP, Box 4, Folder 29.

Bibliography Albion, Robert Greenhalgh. Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926. Alden, Dauril. “The Significance of Cacao Production in the Amazon Region during the Late Colonial Period: An Essay in Comparative Economic History.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (1976): 103–35. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volume 2: The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982. Caleb Davis Papers, 1684–1826, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. Coclanis, Peter A. ed. The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. Cornell University Press, 1973. ———. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry In the 17th and 18th Centuries. London: Macmillan & Company Limited, 1962. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. London: 1774. Emmer, P. C. The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation. London: Ashgate, 1998. Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene D. Genovese. The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Goldenberg, Joseph A. Shipbuilding In Colonial America. Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Goldstein, Darra, ed. The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Grafe, Regina. Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Chocolate and the Atlantic Economy 189 Hackenesch, Silke. “Chocolate, Race, and the Atlantic World: A Bittersweet History.” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 21 (2011): 31–49. Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hunter, Phyllis Whitman. Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Klooster, Wim. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. London: KITLV Press, 1998. Lamikiz, Xabier. Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks. London: Boydell Press, 2013. Lydon, James G. “Fish for Gold: The Massachusetts Fish Trade with Iberia, 1700– 1773.” The New England Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 1981): 539–82. McCusker, John J. and Kenneth Morgan, eds. The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McNeil, Cameron L. Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Mokyr, Joel. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Piñero, Eugenio. “The Cacao Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Province of Caracas and the Spanish Cacao Market.” In The Atlantic Staple Trade, edited by Susan Socolow. Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1996. Postma, Johannes. “Suriname and Its Atlantic Connections, 1667–1795.” In Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, edited by Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven. London: Brill, 2003. Records of the Board of Customs, CUST 16/1, National Archives, Kew Gardens, London, England. Samuel Massey Memorandum Book, 1751–1755, Mifflin & Massey records, 1751–1863, Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Sánchez, Manuel Herrero and Klemens Kaps, eds. Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550–1800: Connectors of Commercial Maritime Systems. New York: Routledge, 2016. Schwartz, Stuart B., ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World before the ‘Sugar Revolution’. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Ship’s Log Books, James Duncan Phillips Library, Salem, MA. Smith, Alan K. Creating A World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade, 1400–1825. New York: Westview Press, Inc., 1991. Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

190  Christopher Magra William Knight Account Book, 1767–1781, James Duncan Phillips Library, Salem, MA. Wright, L. B. and M. Tinling, eds. The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712. Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1941. The Writings of George Washington. Vol. 33. Edited by John C. Fitzpatrick. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1936.

Part IV

Labor and Identity in Early American Probates

9 “The Only Property I Could Dispose of to Any Advantage” Textiles as Mediators in Early Irish Louisiana Kristin Condotta Lee In 2015, educators at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland developed a program to connect elementary students and local seniors. They brought these visitors together in front of a reconstructed, nineteenth-century brig and placed before them a single traveling case, measuring about 36 × 24 inches (or slightly smaller than an eighteenthcentury trunk).1 They then asked participants to envision Irish migrants’ physical act of packing for life in the New World, discussing what items, in particular, travelers may have chosen to bring with them in their limited luggage and why. Most picked sentimental objects, like photographs and hometown newspapers. A few youngsters—understanding that this imagined voyage historically was one way—offered their mobile phones or other means of maintaining contact with family and friends. All, however, assumed that the material things left behind were permanently lost, eliciting via simulation the sentiments of social and cultural dislocation we presume migrants themselves felt. Now, this exercise identifies with a very particular historical moment, post-1845 Famine migration from Ireland to the Americas, and it is not meant to encompass all transoceanic travel between the two settings. Yet the feelings of isolation and material loss it encourages characterize the ways scholars and the general public continue to think about Irish migration, even beyond this limited time frame.2 Such emotions, however, are not universally accurate, especially when we consider immigration in earlier periods, among different social groups and to diverse geographical spaces. They especially are complicated in the context of colonial and early national New Orleans. Getting at what these early Irishmen and women actually brought to the Americas is not altogether easy, given the absence of detailing packing lists for contemporary travelers. We can, however, piece together a few disparate sources to suggest a larger image. First, basic ship logs tell us that passengers typically were allotted one trunk and one small handbag per overseas voyage.3 We know, from extant artifacts, that these trunks held about as much as a modern, large suitcase.4

194  Kristin Condotta Lee Second, we know via letters what earlier migrants suggested friends and family members bring with them abroad. In correspondence to Ireland, this was overwhelmingly yards of cloth, especially island-made linens. Irish natives would have seen regular notices in local newspapers, seeking “passengers, provisions and linen cloth” to fill the holds—and increase the potential profits—of vessels sailing to North America throughout the early 1800s.5 But migrants also praised amongst one another the potential of Irish linens to serve as financial capital in the New World: “You can send nothing which will sel better here than Irish linans of all Sorts.” A similar note sent from Wilmington, Delaware in 1795 acknowledged: “You cant lose any thing by bringing over Indented Servants, Linins or Irish flannals, and these are the only articles I would recommend.”6 Third, we finally know, through letters and probate records, that new settlers followed this advice. An associate of New York City settler A.T. Stewart, for example, noted that the Irishman “invested his legacy of £600 in linens and laces” before leaving home, which returned “more than he paid in Belfast.” This seed-money helped him to establish his own American firm. The unidentified author of Hibernicus, too, remembered his ca. 1800 transport of “three boxes of Irish linen, forty pieces in each, two bales of woolen cloth [and] one bale of Irish blankets.” “The only property I could dispose of to any advantage” in North America, he warned, were the linens.7 Early Irish migrants, in short, chose to fill their limited packing allotments with marketable items and not sentimental possessions, and there is little evidence that they regretted the decision. Of course, this does not mean that immigrants shunned the personal benefits of material things, an underlying theme in this collection. Linens, rather, served as a form of capital par excellence, as items of inherent value, as trusted inroads for professional development, as sites of cultural familiarity and, ultimately, as the means to procure and accumulate more capital in the New World. They significantly eased the transitions of Irishmen and women to new spaces like early Louisiana, mediating the sentiments of disconnect and isolation that could have characterized their migrations. Ireland was well connected to a worldwide community of cloth by the late 1700s. A typical draper, or textile retailer, ca. 1780 might offer “Superfine . . . and middling English and Irish clothes,” Hollands, “French and Dutch corded,” indiennes, Silesian linens, Guinées, silks, “Pekins,” and “Russia drab.”8 It was east Asian and Indian cottons, however, that most fascinated contemporary European and American dressers. Cottons were lightweight—not itself a prime concern, especially in the chilly British Isles—but this meant they dyed well and maintained their colors after washing. Also, cottons were relatively affordable. This satisfied the demands of quickly expanding, socially middling consumers, who finally had the excess funds to spend on added and aesthetically pleasing garments. Cotton, in its many printed, patterned, and brightly

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 195 colored forms, historian Beverly Lemire argues, offered “a cheap facsimile of the brocades and flowered silks favoured by the aristocracy.” Its ability to be washed and whitened also spoke to emerging ideals of health and cleanliness. Cottons, or calicoes as they additionally were known, made fashion popular.9 Yet this popularity came with a price, namely, foreign textiles competed with cloths already manufactured in Europe, particularly the woolens industry. As a result, shortly after the East India Company imported and retailed one million cotton pieces in England in 1684, the trade was banned by protectionist legislation. Eventually, the import, making, and wearing of cottons would be prohibited not only in England but in rivaling France and Spain until the 1770s.10 This ban turned boon for Irish natives, for, while cotton fabrics were prohibited on the island and internationally, the technologies that made the cloth’s distinct patterns and allowed for its cleaning flowed in and out. They also could be readily applied to nonbanned, local linens.11 The high quality of Irish linens was recognized early on by British imperial officials. An administrative report from 1609, for example, described island textiles as “finer and more plentiful there than in all the rest of the kingdom.”12 Additional efforts were made to import spinning wheels and to offer production bounties to weavers who made linens in popular sizes, in hopes that islanders might manufacture cloth with imperial and transoceanic markets in mind.13 Such incentives were hardly needed. Ireland is naturally suited to flax and linen production. The island’s soggy climate, especially in northern Ulster, allowed flax substantial moisture to grow. It also aided farmers in the retting of their fields, whereby the outer stalks of uprooted plants are soaked, left to rot, and then beat away to reveal the soft inner fibers that constitute linen threads. Originally, linen was the product of domestic labor and intended for household use. And, even after overseas demands began to rise, a significant amount of its initial crating, including beetling, scotching, and hackling flax fibers, remained in private homes and was done by family units.14 During the eighteenth century, middlemen began connecting these household clothmakers with expanding markets in regional towns and cities. Belfast, Lisburn, and Ballymena, all in flax-filled County Antrim, each averaged between £1,000 and £2,000 in weekly local linen sales by 1784, and another 39 towns across the island retailed at least £100 worth of undyed brown linens every week.15 Rising overseas demand for linens during the eighteenth century resulted in several major changes, which impacted large-scale sellers and small-scale craftsmen across Ireland. First, and as imperial officials anticipated, it altered production methods to favor foreign consumers. Traditional, narrow bandle cloths measuring 12–20 inches, for example, were abandoned in favor of wider fabrics above 22½ inches. Bounties additionally were established for the harvesting of kelp, increasingly used on the island for textile bleaching, in 1707.16 By 1800, customs records

196  Kristin Condotta Lee indicate that at least half of island linens were going to nonlocal consumers, with the North American colonies being the second most regular site of export after England.17 These cloths were not intended for use by the enslaved populations of the New World, the fate of Scottish osnaburgs and seventeenth-century Irish salt meats. Instead, they generally were sold to settlers of European birth and descent to make dresses, skirts, jackets, vests, and especially shirts and shifts until surpassed by cottons in the 1810s.18 Second, the nonlocal demand for high-quality linens dramatically impacted the process by which flax was cultivated in Ireland. Harvested flax plants were upended, rather than cut, so as to not waste any of the long fibers starting in their roots. This meant flax seeds were planted yearly. Farmers, however, were well aware that flax fibers and flaxseeds do not mature at the same rate. Indeed, one of the reasons Irish linen was so refined (here, soft) was because the flax plant was harvested before it germinated, meaning producers had to get next year’s seed from elsewhere. They initially turned to continental suppliers, including flax farmers in Holland and Germany. But, by the late 1700s, it was Pennsylvania and New York that supplied even small growers in Ireland, with North America contributing 98% of an average 35,120 annual hogsheads imported by 1775.19 This cyclical exchange of flaxseed to Europe and then linens back to the Americas thus connected not only elite merchants but also rural Irish farmers, spinners, weavers, and bleachers to global markets. Finally, and as already suggested, immigrants were well aware that they traveled on vessels simultaneously employed in the textile trade. John Moore, commenting on a particularly bad storm he encountered while sailing from Philadelphia to Londonderry in 1764, recalled that his captain “ordered all the flax seed in the cabin to be hove over board” to improve ship stability.20 Emigration routes, too, were coordinated to correlate with the seasonal ebbs and flows of the exchange, with ships “go[ing] over to Ireland, every fall, with flax-seed &c. and return[ing] in the spring with servants and goods” as well as paying passengers to the American colonies by 1768.21 They included a direct and semiannual shipment of linens from Belfast to New Orleans by 1810.22 This backdrop is central to the story of Irish New Orleans, because the majority of migrants who settled there between 1769 and 1820 were not soldiers or political/religious refugees; they worked in overseas commerce. And Louisiana, too, in this time frame, was reorienting toward transoceanic trade. New Orleans initially was founded in 1718 under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, on behalf of the French Compagnie des Indes. He (rightly) believed the site well-situated to connect the commercial networks of the Mississippi River with those of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean. Conflicts with the Natchez peoples in 1729, however, ended company hopes that Louisiana might produce

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 197 tobacco at rates that challenged British Virginia and Spanish Mexico. When the colony transferred to royal control in 1731, its residents were left to their own economic devices, pursuing local and regional exchanges without official oversight.23 The treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris in 1762 and 1763, which ended the Seven Years’ War, returned attention to Louisiana— transferring French territories east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain and west to Spain, with the latter also receiving New Orleans. The two rival and now abutting powers quickly sought to cement control over their new American holdings, building forts, encouraging settlement and enforcing policies to integrate local trade into imperial systems. Indeed, beginning in 1768 and expanding in 1772, 1782, 1787, 1793, and 1795, Louisiana commerce incorporated wider supplies, more ships, and participants beyond the Spanish world.24 Irish natives played these changes as well as administrative needs to their benefit, an effort aided by their liminality within the British colonial world. Migrants offered themselves as loyal Britons, faithful Catholics, and often both in order to obtain land grants in the two rival powers’ territories.25 More regularly, they put their professional pasts to present use, involving themselves directly in trade, an enterprise that continued to grow after New Orleans transferred to the United States in 1803. My research thus far has confirmed the presence of 498 Irishmen and women living or working in early New Orleans, although this group certainly was larger. Of this Irish-born population, 60% of those with identifiable professions pursued career as merchants, frontier traders, wholesale retailers, commercial seamen, shopkeepers, and waterfront artisans locally.26 Many of these settlers directly engaged the overseas textile trade to get ahead along the Gulf Coast—the reason, after all, they first moved from Ireland. All experienced sartorial mediation. The cloth–flaxseed exchange launched the professional careers of several eventual Irish New Orleanians, making their Old World origins a New World asset. One immediate benefit was retained overseas contacts. James Blair, a native of Newry, for example, traded sugar and slaves throughout Louisiana and the Caribbean by 1788.27 His first forays into long-distance exchange, however, were in the 1770s, when he shipped flaxseed and linens across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of his immediate family. His mother, Elizabeth, and sister, Anne, managed a small shop in Northern Ireland, wherein they sold the seeds James imported to them at prices he suggested. The women, in turn, procured bundles of cloth as well as “qunty of Stockings and hankerchifs,” or finished linen accessories, from Dublin and shipped them back to James for resale.28 Their aid ensured that James received regular and quality products, key to establishing a reputation in the business. It also ultimately allowed him to afford a sugar plantation in newly British Demerara.29

198  Kristin Condotta Lee Daniel Clark, Sr., a native of western Sligo, similarly established himself as a merchant in the Americas through the circulation of linen and flaxseed. After migrating to Philadelphia in the 1750s, he met and joined the firm of Irishman Adam Hoops. Hoops, a Belfast native, traded widely, buying rum from the West Indies, tobacco from Virginia, grain from Illinois, and finished metal wares from London. He shared these contacts with Clark, who became his son-in-law in 1758.30 The latter contributed to the firm his own connections to Sligo, a port that specialized in importing and retailing flaxseed within Ireland. One of the Irishman’s first customers was his mother, Eleanor Clark, who ordered four hogsheads of seed on her “Account and Risque” likely for resale in 1761.31 The trade quickly expanded beyond intimates, and Clark invested in a schooner named Polly with Adam Hoops and several other Irishmen also in 1761, which routinely shipped flaxseed to Ireland and returned to North America with servants and cloths bought in Ireland and England.32 By 1770, he used the money he obtained in this trade to establish his own firm in Spanish Louisiana, where his Sligo-born nephew and namesake, Daniel Clark, Jr., eventually joined him in business.33 Irish New Orleanians also keenly understood and exploited differing demands for imported cloth. One significant group of consumers was indigenous Americans. Several immigrants moved amongst, intermarried with, and “dressed in [the] fashion” of tribesmen and women along the lower Mississippi River and Gulf Coast—even learning “to chatter . . . their languages” (Irish natives were, in fact, prevalent interpreters and language tutors in the colonial region).34 There, they collected animal pelts that they sold to exporters in New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Savannah, and Philadelphia for use in Europe-made and Europe-styled hats, shoes, and leather breeches. This trade specifically relied on access to cloths and finished garments manufactured in Britain, which indigenous buyers understood to be of higher quality than their French or Spanish counterparts. Daniel Clark, Sr. transported and sold many sodubbed “Indian Goods” in the 1760s and 1770s, including blue and red woolens used in blankets, French match coats, and low-priced and brightly patterned calicoes. Clark and fellow Irish traders John Fitzpatrick, John Joyce, and Oliver Pollock also exchanged “Irish linnens” and ready-made shirts along the southeastern frontier.35 These textiles and garments were incorporated into native dress and came to validate leadership, visually demonstrated and recorded in contemporary images through the wearing of European shirts.36 This exchange had important diplomatic consequences for colonial administrations, too, as trade brought tribes into regular conversation with Europeans, encouraged peace, and was believed to cement alliances. Irish natives used this need, and their privileged access to British cloths, to their advantage. Cork-born John Joyce, his Scottish partner John Turnbull, and English associates Arthur Morgan and James Strother, for

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 199 example, negotiated exemptions from general prohibitions on Spanish trade with England during the late 1700s. In 1784 and 1795, in particular, governors Esteban Miró and Francisco Luis Héctor, baron de Carondelet, citing a need for “friendship with [the] Indians,” allowed the men to bring two shiploads of goods from London for the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek trades. Imports included numerous garments and textiles, such as shirts, handkerchiefs, blue Limbourg, and linens “Irlandas.”37 A second factor easing this exchange was that Joyce, Turnbull, Morgan, and Strother were not required to become Spanish citizens. It was a notable exception, and a necessary one after Parliament began requiring British citizenship for the London trade, for an imperial power typically obsessed with settler loyalties.38 A second demand for British cloths, especially linens, originated in urban New Orleans, whose white residents linked social status with the ability to access and wear recent European fashions. A minimum of 6 merchant tailors, 1 linen draper, 33 tailors, and 3 seamstresses worked in the city by 1811.39 These individuals mostly sold, cut, sewed, and altered ells of imported cloth rather than retailed finished garments, as indicated by the postmortem inventories of several local shopkeepers.40 Here, again, Irish-born sellers seem to have had an advantage in their native connection to European textiles. New settlers like Robert Sanders Lett, Cornelius O’Flaherty, and James Fletcher supplied their shops with plentiful bolts of cottons, silks, and serges as well as more costly linen crapes, gauzes, platillas, and ticking originating “d’Irelande.” We also know that this array of cloth was available further up the Mississippi River, supplied partially again by Irish merchants to shoppers in Natchez, St. Louis, and the Illinois Country before 1800.41 These select examples show that the economic conditions existed for immigrants to New Orleans between 1769 and 1820 to benefit from local demands for nonlocal linens, especially those from Ireland and Great Britain. They also reveal that many did just so, as transoceanic suppliers, frontiers traders, and urban salesmen. Yet textiles also mediated Irish settlers’ experiences of life in Louisiana in more intimate ways. As climate adaptors, social signifiers, and professional statements, cloths routinely helped immigrants adjust to their new communities and communicate their values through their day-to-day dress. The neoclassical style that emerged in the 1770s represented a major deviation from earlier sartorial trends. Particularly after the political revolutions of 1776, 1789, and the 1790s, many European dressers sought inspiration from the republican models of antiquity. For women, this meant a simple draping of cloth from high waistlines, which accentuated the natural silhouette. Male dress, meanwhile, focused less on mirroring the physical look of classical statuary and more on projecting its assumed values, notably simplicity and moral self-control. This entailed more muted colors, looser-fitted tailoring, and limited ornamentation.

200  Kristin Condotta Lee Such styles paired well with current interests in colonial cloths, which flowed easily and could be laundered a popular white.42 The switch to simpler dress for everyday wear, too, meant that consumers no longer needed to buy expansive ells to cover hoopskirts or form the starched pleats on men’s skirted coats. Wardrobes generally became larger and— because lightweight fabrics typically sustained only two or three years of regular use—more frequently refreshed with new, as opposed to altered, garments.43 This all meant that linens played a regular and fundamental role in contemporary fashions. The new trends that captivated Europe, including Ireland, specifically looked to colonial Asia and the Americas, where linen and cotton dresses, shirts, pants, and robes typical to undress, or casual domestic situations, combatted quite practical hot temperatures, humidity, and insects (Figure 9.1). New migrants to Louisiana shared these concerns, expressing anxiety about swarms of mosquitos, “sudden transitions” between hot and cold, wet and dry as well as all of that “[m]ud, mud, mud.”44 And they, like their neighbors, combatted these foes, some of which they knew could make them ill, through their dress. Take the example of John Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick migrated from Waterford to New Orleans in 1768, where he engaged a peltry trade extending east to Pensacola and north to the Illinois Country. Expelled by Spanish

Figure 9.1  Man’s Linen Shirt. American, About 1800. Plain-Woven Linen with Needleworked Buttons. 102 × 88 cm (40 3/16 × 34 5/8 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Mrs. Helen Howard Hudson Whipple. 55.597. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 201 governor Alejandro O’Reilly, he moved his business to nearby Manchac in 1769 and, before his death in 1791, established himself as a tobacco planter.45 Long trousers, still mostly associated with laborers, would have been useful in protecting him from the ankles to the knees as he traded along the Mississippi River and eked out his rural life. Fitzpatrick owned eight pairs.46 That they were made of linens and linen–cotton mixes and were well-used suggests his appreciation of their breathability and sweat absorbency along the bayou. Yet such colonial fashions, as cartoonists showing shivering British women in see-through gowns pointed out, were not made for nor were they realistic in northern Europe.47 And Fitzpatrick, too, owned articles of dress whose uses were not so apparently practical. We might wonder, for instance, when and where the Irishman donned his formal three-piece suit, with its “coat and sleeveless vest of fine material in a stained pearl color”? Also, how did he keep it clean? Fitzpatrick struck the balance between colonial usability and imperial fashion in the most basic element of his wardrobe, his collection of lightweight shirts variously described as “used” and as “ornamented . . . in good condition.” This garment, averaging 34 inches wide and a generous 42½ inches long for men, traditionally served as underwear, as its tail could be tucked between the legs to prevent chaffing. Typically worn under silk, wool, and velvet waistcoats to protect these costly (and nonwashable) fabrics from bodily excretions, shirts were visible only at the neckline and along the wrists. Either might be ornamented with neutral embroidery, detachable ruffles, or fine pleats. Shirts also were primarily made of linen, preferably high quality for its tight weave and softness.48 Such garments again had their place in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Louisiana, wicking away the sweat of regional residents. Yet bleached and properly cared for linen garments also were essential to the more modest, transatlantic fashions of contemporary men.49 And Fitzpatrick, who no doubt planned to continue selling his Manchac tobacco long-distance through New Orleans, certainly understood the importance of appearing attuned to current fashion trends. He thus purchased not only earthenware basins for washing and irons “for pressing” these cloths but also owned two enslaved women, Mariana and Juliana, skilled in the complex and harsh process of garment care— boiling fabrics with soaps, wringing and beating them, laying them out to dry, and ironing them.50 Wearing Irish linens thus may have been comfortable in early Louisiana, but these habits revolving around dress were not necessitated by the local environment. Probate records, like those of John Fitzpatrick, offer a particularly rich means to get at such material behaviors. Created after an individual’s death, they note with varying degrees of detail the possessions of the deceased, including his or her clothing, tools, furniture, land, and claims to enslaved labor. The reach of such records is necessarily limited; they

202  Kristin Condotta Lee only, for example, catalog goods owned at the moment of death and, even then, only those that interested or were deemed valuable by appraisers. Yet, especially when facing a contested succession or when the deceased left behind numerous debts, as merchants commonly did, it behooved estate administrators to be as detailed as possible in their inventories and thus ease the eventual auction of these goods. Many probates thus include not only descriptions of what past individuals owned but notes as to these items’ physical conditions, allowing material culture scholars to trace how money historically was spent, what range of commodities was available locally, and how purchased items then were used. Such records indicate that Irish dressers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean bought into the complex uses of their linen undergarments. Shoppers, for one, accumulated far more shirts than they required. In 1778, James Alexander, an ex-East India Company merchant and eventual first Earl of Caledon, packed up his sizable quantity of “5 dozen shirts appearing new; three dozen & eight very old shirts” for his travels throughout Ireland. A 1793 Irish homeowner similarly catalogued his personal linen collection as containing “48 Shirts new & old.”51 Along the Gulf Coast, appraisers of the estate of banker James Rice Fitzgerald noted 20 “chemises” in good and bad condition, commercial agent Daniel McGlade netted 5, and both captain of the French troops Thomas de Trente and County Clare-born planter Patrick Macnamara recorded 24 linen shirts in 1815, 1814, 1775, and 1788, respectively.52 Middling and high-end estates in Europe and New Orleans averaged a dozen, sometimes reaching even 50 or 60, shirts and shifts (the female equivalent) per dresser by the late eighteenth century.53 Of course, these stacks of surplus shirts—which represented significant investments of capital in-and-of themselves—would not have been seen unless worn, especially given that unattended garments were among the most commonly pilfered items in urban settings. Their collection, instead, spoke to certain personal privileges, the most basic of which was the ability to change shirts frequently in-between washes. Contemporaries believed that linens had a buffing effect on the skin, cleaning the body without requiring water submersion. This allowed wearers to avoid the presumed negative impact of baths, which in the 1500s became associated with miasma and plague, while reducing odors and protecting from dirt. French author Charles Perreault perhaps best summed up this view in 1688: “We do not make great baths, but the cleanliness of our linen and its abundance, are worth more than all the baths in the world.”54 The amassing of additional shirts thus allowed Irish dressers the private pleasure of shedding and laundering their soiled clothes with greater frequency, thereby reaching standards of cleanliness. These habits, too, reinforced themselves. As linen undershirts collected sweat, especially under the arms, they increasingly became prone to rotting out. Yet, by regularly washing and drying garments away from the

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 203 body, owners extended these items’ material lives, in the process making their accumulation easier. That is, for those who could afford the care. The whiteness of linen cloths thus came to symbolize not only the cleanliness of the wearer but the leisure time and financial means to invest in his or her daily appearance. A load of laundry in 1789 cost a New Orleanian about three reales, roughly equivalent to a pound of chocolate, 12 candlesticks, a new pair of women’s stockings, or one grammar book. But, as a recurring cost paid for two or three times a month, washing quickly competed with greater expenses, like a pair of shoes, a quarter pound of tea, or a week of groceries. (This remained significantly cheaper than the three piastres it took Galway-native Mathias O’Conway to buy “[t] wo trimmed shirts.”)55 This willingness to spend emphasizes the value of linens as social markers, separating the clean wearer from the one doing the washing, typically enslaved women or free women of color. Recent scholarship, in fact, suggests that the whiteness of linens may have been linked to the colonial message, associating darker skinned individuals (like soiled linens) with labor and immorality.56 It is unclear how much Irish dressers really thought about imperial ideals in their everyday dress; but they certainly made an effort to procure whiteness with their linens and to do so in public ways. Irish immigrants, indeed, were incredibly aware of those portions of their linen shirts that were visible to their neighbors, and the material evidence shows they reserved special care for such spaces. Some Irishmen brought with them to the Americas ruffles and frills that could be attached at the wrist and neckline. Such ornaments peeped out over the top of waistcoats and extended past the cuff on jackets, unlike the majority their shirts, which were hidden by these garments. Anne Blair, the sister of merchant James Blair, for example, sent her brother “a Pair of ruffles of my own work” in 1774, which she instructed him to fasten to his sleeves with buttons and along his collar with pins (Figure 9.2).57 Beyond enhancing his dress, this construction allowed James more control over the moments he wore—or, perhaps better, did not wear—his sibling’s handiwork. In particular, he could remove ruffles at times when they might get dirty or when subjecting the overall body of his shirts to the harsh conditions of the wash. He thus better preserved not only a material connection to Ireland but the visual whiteness of his linens, meaningful to contacts in the Old and New Worlds. Even when additional frills were not added, wrist and necklines still received extra attention by dressers. Curators at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, for instance, discovered during the 1990s that a linen shirt in their collection showed signs of selective repair, focusing exactly on these sartorial spaces. The collar and wristbands had been replaced with a different, finer fabric and reattached with cotton thread, likely sometime in the early nineteenth century. These fixes were expertly sewn, done with a locking topstitch meant to strengthen the seam.58 Yet such

204  Kristin Condotta Lee

Figure 9.2 Ruffle, Possibly England, 1750–1765, linen, accession #1985–129, 1, image #DS1985–362. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase.

repairs were not the only ones done to extend the life of linen undergarments. Extant shirts also show evidence of the careful darning of large holes, a hand-stitching process similar to weaving. These patches weren’t intended to be seen and typically occurred in hard-wearing places near the shoulder seams (where gravity pulled and waistcoats rubbed) as well as under the arms. Yet the fact that dressers selectively replaced the most visible portions of their shirts with higher quality cloths suggests a performative aspect to these improvements. Indeed, the most bleachable linens, like the brilliant platilla, often retailed at two to three times above average textile costs.59 Dressers, thus, by replacing only their collars and wristbands with better fabrics could appeal to current standards of hygiene, fashion, and wealth at lower costs than by buying entire finer shirts. For those Irish natives who moved to early New Orleans to benefit from long-distance trade, the linen shirts took on further value. Shirts founded and protected the three-piece suits worn by merchants, as they had since the late 1600s. Their sartorial simplicity also suggested conservatism, speaking to the political ambitions of a rising middle sort eager to distinguish their values from the material luxuries of the aristocracy.60 But, most importantly, garments like linen shirts, which almost always

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 205 were made of imported cloths until the 1820s, projected traits thought necessary for commercial success to new and potential clients, suppliers, and lenders. Given that contemporary trade remained largely reputationbased, visual cues assumed added weight in confirming or rejecting the values merchants suggested to one another in letters or shared via third parties.61 Two of these assumed beliefs were a knowledge of current market trends and financial responsibility. Merchants’ bodies visually evinced their awareness of recent fashions, emphasizing, too, their access to a range of transoceanic commodities. New Orleans dressers made a concerted effort to stay up on European fashions, even commissioning garments straight from Parisian tailors.62 To remain competitive, Irish merchants sought out and maintained professional networks with individuals who could supply them the newest of Old World garb on the fastest timetables. Daniel Clark, Sr., for instance, asked a London supplier ca. 1760 “that care be taken in the Choice of my goods . . . [given] my slight Knowledge of the Business.” He also made a small appeal to his associate’s wife: “I mention something new fashion’d to touch the Fancy of some of our Ladies which [I] leave Intirety to Mrs. Neale’s Taste.”63 American traders, in return, promised to keep contacts up to date on which imports “sell fast” and which should be “good Quality and cheap.”64 Dress also could show professional access to and a willingness to extend credit. Acts of buying and selling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the advent of banks, rarely were conducted with hard currency. Instead, exchanges were made with monetary loans at accepted rates of interest, through account debts to be paid in future goods, and via the transfer of already existing bills-of-exchange.65 In all cases, lenders had to be fairly confident that their money would be returned within agreed upon time frames. Otherwise, they might fall behind, too, in their carefully balanced credit cycles. An 1821 publication singled out dress as the main culprit for such nonpayments of debt: “Expensiveness in apparel . . . is almost as great a folly as a man can commit; for if your dress be beyond your estate, the only estate you acquire is that of a prodigal.”66 Crisp white shirts suggested financial security without frugality. The process of laundering or purchasing new garments, evident in bleached cuffs and collars, showed a knowledge of male fashion as well as suggested that the wearer knew where and how to best invest in his appearance. Probate records, again, suggest that Irish migrants keenly followed this professional fashion advice. The 1818 estate of Robert Sanders Lett, for example, broke down into two distinct sections: those textiles intended for resale and marked in ells (yards) and those finished items he personally wore. Lett’s New Orleans shop was stocked with an impressive array of textiles, including colorful silk bombazettes, percales, crepes, gauze, marly, indienne anglaise, warm woolen merinos, and braided gowns.67

206  Kristin Condotta Lee Yet the Irishman himself continued to dress in the conservative dress of the long-distance trader. Each day he donned one of his four linen shirts, one of his three cotton vests, and a buff-colored pair of pants. On finer occasions or colder days, Lett might have turned to his pairs of cashmere breeches, but his daily dress remained remarkably subdued for all the sumptuous cloths around it. Lett’s appearance, of course, was very much in sync with his socially middling neighbors in early national Louisiana, especially those recorded in contemporary portraits.68 Yet, in 1818, the Irishman remained early in his career and thus still establishing his reputation.69 His muted dress may have made his retailable goods shine all the brighter; but it also sent a clear message to potential suppliers and lenders about the ambitious retailer’s responsibility with credit. The linen shirt was not the only, or even the most obvious, element of male professional dress between 1769 and 1820. But it was the most foundational. Linens helped many Irish New Orleanians to establish themselves professionally in the Americas. They also aided them in communicating their professional values and expectations in ways that crossed imperial, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic lines. In the process, linens transformed from an article of capital in-and-of itself into a means to procure more capital overseas. As such, it is less surprising that the longer Irish merchants and retailers worked in the New World, the less they came to rely on the trade in transatlantic textiles and on their Irish commercial counterparts. Composed dress continued to play a role in communicating values and identities, much as it does today; but, as several contributors to this volume show, material expressions of wealth shifted across individual lifespans. Indeed, by their deaths, many Irish natives counted out their professional successes not in terms of cloths but through the number, ages, and skillsets of enslaved laborers on their estates.70 Textiles, nevertheless, provided a major site of mediation for Irish immigrants moving to colonial and early national Louisiana. Yet the terms traditionally used by scholars to account for this social and cultural process—ethnic continuity (i.e., the Irish retained Old World cultural habits to distinguish themselves as a group), assimilation (i.e., the Irish picked up new habits in the New World), or even creolization (i.e., the Irish mixed Old and New World habits to create a hybrid identity)—seem somewhat inadequate. This essay suggests a revised model, emphasizing the theme of transoceanic connectivity. It understands Ireland and New Orleans as joined in the same “world of goods” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.71 This connection allowed migrants to find meanings in objects that were mobile and, in many ways, prepared them for their lives abroad. Cloths like Irish linens did much to ease Irishmen and women’s adjustments to early New Orleans, allowing them to be literally and imaginatively comfortable in their own clothes.

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 207

Notes 1. Catherine McCullough, Director of the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies, e-mail to author, May 24, 2018. 2. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: From the Old World to the New (London: Watts, 1953); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Earl F. Niehaus, The Irish in New Orleans, 1803–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965). 3. See the Nancy, Edward and Halifax, October 26, 1802, May 31, 1802, September 4, 1816, MIC333/1, Passenger lists, Philadelphia, USA, 1800–1882, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI). 4. Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012): 231–59. 5. See records relating to the Edward, William & Jane, Augusta and Edward Downes: The Belfast Newsletter, May 13, 1803, June 18, 1805, May 4, 1804, October 22, 1805, December 22, 1820. 6. William Faris to Arthur Dobbs, Wilmington, February 18, 1750, D162/48, PRONI. Silas Weir to James Robinson, Philadelphia, November 21, 1795, Papers of the Weir Family, 1746–1854, D1140, ibid. 7. John McKee to Mr. Rankin, New York, October 18, 1903, T2753/3, ibid. Hibernicus; or Memoirs of an Irishman Now in America (Pittsburg: Cramer & Spear, 1828), 153–54. 8. Advertisement of Henry Hickman, Cork, March 1776, in Maired Dunlevy, Dress in Ireland (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1989), 143. This also paralleled New World drapers. See inventory of Robert Sanders Lett, 1818. Estate Inventories of Orleans Parish Civil Courts, 1803–1877, Louisiana Division/ City Archives & Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library (hereafter NOPL). 9. Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4, 14, 20; John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 109–32. 10. “An Act for the more effectual employing the Poor, by encouraging the Manufactures of this Kingdom,” 1700, Acts of Parliament in the reign of William II, Chapters 11 and 12. “An Act to preserve and encourage the Woollen and Silk Manufactures of this Kingdom, and for more effectual employing the Poor, by prohibiting the Use and Wear of all printed, painted stained or dyed Callicoes in Apparel, Household Stuff, Furniture or otherwise,” 1720, Acts of Parliament in the reign of George I, Chapter 7. The French banned calico imports and production in 1686 and their absolute consumption in 1692. Philip V of Spain similarly banned cotton imports in 1718. 11. Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, “East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 893–900; Francis Little, “Cotton Printing in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century,” The Bulletin of the Needle & Bobbin Club 22 (1938): 15–23. 12. “Motives and Reasons to Induce the City of London to Undertake the Plantation in the North of Ireland,” May 25, 1609, in Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls, Chancery, Ireland of the Reign of King Charles I, ed. James Morrin, vol. 1 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1863), 618. 13. These included laws in 1696 allowing for the free import of plain linens into England and in 1715 supporting the free export of linens from Ireland to

208  Kristin Condotta Lee the British colonies. Additionally, island officials created their own Board of Trustees to monitor the quality of exportable textiles in 1711, and cities like Dublin began building centralized linen halls to aid exchange. Conrad Gill, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1964), 336–38. 14. Brenda Collins, “Proto-industrialization and Pre-Famine Emigration,” Social History 7 (May 1982): 127–46; Jane Gray, “Gender and Plebian Culture in Ulster,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (Autumn 1993): 251– 70; Kathleen Curtis Wilson, Irish People, Irish Linen (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011). 15. Gill, Rise of the Irish Linen Industry, 336–38. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. “Yearly Export of Plain Linen in Yards,” 1780, 1790, 1800, Abstracts of Irish exports and imports, in 24 volumes, for the period 1764–1823, Mss. 353–76, National Library of Ireland, Manuscript Division (hereafter NLI). 18. Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 59–69, 212–15. While DuPlessis sees evidence of a long march back toward cottons, it is noteworthy how long linens held to their primacy, despite this competition. 19. Thomas Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 195; Adrienne Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 20. John Moore, Journal, February 4, 1764, Journal kept by John Moore of Carrickfergus, 1760–1770, D3165/2, PRONI. 21. The Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, February 22, 1768. Marianne Wokeck has found that most sailings from Philadelphia to Ireland took place in December, with one-quarter of returns happening in March and April and more than one-half in July through September. Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 198. 22. See records relating to the Walron, Dart, Indian Hunter and Concord: The Belfast Commercial Chronicle, August 25, 1810, September 24, 1810. The Belfast Newsletter, September 14, 1810, December 21, 1810. 23. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992); Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 99–138; Erin Greenwald, Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). 24. John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 158–80, 221–74. 25. Gilbert C. Din, “Proposals and Plans for Colonization in Spanish Louisiana, 1787–1790,” Louisiana History 11, no. 3 (1970): 197–213; Fernando Solano-Costa, “La colonización irlandesa de la Luisiana Española: dos proyectos des inmigración,” Estudios 80–81 (1981): 201–8. 26. Kristin Condotta Lee, “Trading Spaces: Commerce, Ethnicity and Early Irish New Orleans,” Louisiana History 59, no. 3 (2018): 261–307. 27. Proceedings instituted by Don Patricio Morgan, in order to prove his authorization, February 3, 1790, Spanish Judiciary Records, 1769–1803, 1790020304, Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans (hereafter SJR).

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 209 28. Elizabeth Blair to James Blair, Newry, May 5, 1774, August 12, 1774, October 29, 1775, October 29, 1774. Blair Family Letters, 1773–1796, D717, PRONI. Anne Blair to James Blair, Newry, n.d., ibid. 29. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612–1865 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 94. 30. Priscilla H. Roberts and James A. Tull, “Adam Hoops, Thomas Barclay, and the House in Morrisville Known as Sumerseat, 1764–1791,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 90, no. 5 (2000): 4–20. 31. “Invoice of four hogsheads best Antingua rum & 4 hogds. Flaxseed shipped by Daniel Clark on board the Polly . . . for Sligoe,” February 20, 1761, Daniel Clark Letters and Invoice Book, 1759–1762, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP). 32. Daniel Clark to Holliday, Dunbar & Co., Philadelphia, January 14, 1761, ibid. Daniel Clark to James Drumgoole, Philadelphia, December 5, 1761, ibid. Daniel Clark to Edward Cochran, Philadelphia, November 23, 1761, December 5, 1761, ibid. Also, Daniel Clark to William Neale, October 16, 1760, ibid. 33. “Mr. Clark’s Statement to Congress,” 1808, in Daniel Clark, Jr., Proofs of the Corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson and of His Connexion with Aaron Burr (Philadelphia: William Hall, Jr. and George W. Pierie, 1809), 105–9. 34. Mathias O’Conway to Cato B. M. O’Maddon, Philadelphia, n.d., Correspondence and miscellaneous papers of the family of O’Conway in the United States of America, early 19th century, Mss. 21/553, NLI. 35. Daniel Clark to Messrs. Neal & Pigou, Philadelphia, November 12, 1761, Clark Letters and Invoice Book. John Joyce Diary, Mss. 4342, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA (hereafter LSU). Also, Usner, Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; Kathryn E. Holland Braud, Deerskin & Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-Americans, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 36. See especially Alexandre de Batz, Sauvages Tchaktas matachez en guerriers qui portent des chevelures, watercolor, 1735, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 37. Invoice of the Condesa de Galvez, London, September 6, 1787, Panton, Leslie and Company Collection, 1739–1847, University Archives and West Florida History Center, Pace Library, University of West Florida. Invoice of the Condesa de Galvez, Pensacola, March 5, 1791, ibid. 38. Esteban Miró and Martin Navarro to the Marqués del Campo, New Orleans, March 14, 1787, ibid. 39. New Orleans City Directory, 1811, NOPL. 40. See, for example, inventory of Robert Sanders Lett, 1818, Estate Inventories. Inventory of Catherine Laty, widow of Jean P. Bernard, 1810, ibid. Inventory of Paul Similien, 1814, ibid. 41. Inventory of James Fletcher, 1819, Probate Records for Adams County, Historic Natchez Foundation. Succession of Andrew Todd, 1798–1801, Saint Louis City Archives Records, 1816–1848, vol. 5, 427–74. 42. Aileen Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 95–151; Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstress of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 43. John Styles estimates that modest dressers in England bought approximately two shirts, two stockings and one pair of shoes each year. Outer wear lasted about three years. Styles, Dress of the People, 72, 222–23.

210  Kristin Condotta Lee 44. Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans, ed. Samuel Wilson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 67, 139–44. Hugh Quin, Jr., Journal, November 17, 1817; November 18, 1817; November 21, 1817; Quin Papers, 1817–1941, T2874, PRONI. 45. Margaret Fisher Dalrymple, The Merchant of Manchac: The Letterbook of John Fitzpatrick, 1768–1790 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 3–33. 46. Succession of John Fitzpatrick, May 4, 1791, in ibid., 426, 429. 47. See, for example, Isaac Cruikshank, Parisian Ladies in Their Winter Dress for 1800, print, November 24, 1799, Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. 48. Linda Baumgarten, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986), 50–51. David Wilcox, “The Clothing of a Georgian Banker, Thomas Coutts: A Study in Museum Dispersal,” Costume 46, no. 1 (2012): 23–24, 38–39. 49. For more on the meaning and costs of garment care, see Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 26–32, 98–117. Sophie White, “ ‘To Ensure That He Not Give Himself Over,’: Cleanliness, Frenchification and Whiteness,” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 2 (2012): 130. 50. Succession of John Fitzpatrick, May 4, 1791, in Dalrymple, Merchant of Manchac, 428, 430. 51. “Packed up in a large chest No 1,” February 10, 1778, Account book of James Alexander, first Earl of Caledon, D2433/A/4/5, PRONI. “Inventory of My Linnens,” July 1793, D4457/248, PRONI. 52. Inventory of James Rice Fitzgerald, 1815, Estate Inventories. Inventory of Daniel McGlade, 1814, ibid. SJR 1775100201. SJR 1788012101. 53. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime’, trans. Jean Birrell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170–71. Brenda Collins, “Matters Material and Luxurious—Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Linen Consumption,” in Luxury and Austerity, ed. Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), 115. 54. Charles Perrault, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, vol. 1 (Paris, 1688), 80, quoted in George Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60–61. 55. Account books, April 24, 1789, April 26, 1789, May 24, 1789, June 4, 1789, June 6, 1789, June 27, 1789, July 11, 1789, August 18, 1789, Correspondence . . . of the family of O’Conway, NLI. 56. Brown, Foul Bodies, 42–57, 109–14. 57. Anne Blair to James Blair, Newry, October 28, 1774, Blair Family Letters. 58. Linda Baumgarten, “Altered Historical Clothing,” Dress (1998): 46–47. 59. Inventory of Lewis Fremont, 1809, Estate Inventories. Inventory of Catherine Laty, widow of Jean P. Bernard, 1810, ibid. Inventory of Paul Similien, 1814, ibid. 60. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity; Michael Zakim, ReadyMade Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 61. Pierre Gervais, “Neither Imperial Nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Europeans Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008): 465–73; Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 211 62. Sophie White, “ ‘This Gown . . . Was Much Admired and Made Many Ladies Jealous’: Fashion and the Forging of Elite Identities in French Colonial New Orleans,” in Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 86–118. 63. Daniel Clark to William Neale, Philadelphia, October 16, 1768, September 25, 1768, Clark Letters and Invoice Book. 64. Coxe & Clark to Reed & Forde, New Orleans, March 21, 1793, July 10, 1793, Reed and Forde Papers, 1759–1823, HSP. 65. Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 66. A Father’s Gift to His Son, on His Becoming an Apprentice (New York: Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821), 31. 67. Inventory of Robert Sanders Lett, 1818, Estate Inventories. 68. See, for example, José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza, Portrait of a Gentleman, oil on canvas, 1797, The Historic New Orleans Collection. José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza, Portrait of a Gentleman, oil on canvas, 1801, Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection. Gilbert Stuart, George Pollock, oil on canvas, 1793–1794, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 69. Lett died on December 15, 1818. He only married in June 1818, in what was probably his first nuptial. He thus likely was in his 20s or early 30s. Earl C. Woods and Charles E. Nolan, Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, vol. 13 (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1998). 70. “Inventory and estimation of the property belonging to the partnership of the deceased Turnbull & Joyce at Baton Rouge, Bayou Sara, St. John’s Plaines, Big Black, New Orleans, &ca. &ca., with the Division of property between Mrs. Turnbull & Mrs. Joyce,” May 5, 1800, Turnbull-Allain Papers, 1784– 1941, Mss. 4261, LSU. Succession of John Fitzpatrick, May 4, 1791, in Dalrymple, Merchant of Manchac, 430–31. Will of George Cochran, 1804, Probate Records for Adams County. Succession of William Vousdan, 1802– 1821, ibid. Also, Trevor Burnard, “Collecting and Accounting: Representing Slaves as Commodities in Jamaica, 1674–1784,” in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 177–91. 71. John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); Sophie White, “Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Things,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 2/3 (2011): 229–48; Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Bibliography Barnard, Toby. Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Baumgarten, Linda. “Altered Historical Clothing.” Dress 25, no. 1 (1998): 42–57. ———. Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986.

212  Kristin Condotta Lee Braud, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskin & Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-Americans, 1685–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Brewer, John and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. New York: Routledge, 1993. Brown, Kathleen. Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Burnard, Trevor. “Collecting and Accounting: Representing Slaves as Commodities in Jamaica, 1674–1784.” In Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, 177–91. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Clark, Daniel, Jr. Proofs of the Corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson and his Connexion with Aaron Burr. Philadelphia: William Hall, Jr. and George W. Pierie, 1809. Clark, John G. New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. Collins, Brenda. “Matters Material and Luxurious—Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-century Irish Linen Consumption.” In Luxury and Austerity, edited by Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon, 106–20. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999. ———. “Proto-industrialization and pre-Famine emigration.” Social History 7, no. 2 (1982): 127–46. Crowston, Clare Haru. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Dalrymple, Margaret Fisher, ed. The Merchant of Manchac: The Letterbook of John Fitzpatrick, 1768–1790. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Din, Gilbert C. “Proposals and Plans for Colonization in Spanish Louisiana, 1787–1790.” Louisiana History 11, no. 3 (1970): 261–307. Dunlevy, Mairead. Dress in Ireland. New York: Holmes & Meir, 1989. DuPlessis, Robert S. The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. A Father’s Gift to his Son, on his Becoming an Apprentice. New York: Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821. Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gervais, Pierre. “Neither Imperial nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008): 465–73. Gill, Conrad. The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry. Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1964. Gray, Jane. “Gender and Plebian Culture in Ulster.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 2 (1993): 251–70.

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 213 Greenwald, Erin. Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: From the Old World to the New. London: Watts, 1953. Herman, Bernard L. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012. Hibernicus; or Memoirs of an Irishman Now in America. Pittsburg: Cramer & Spear, 1828. Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections John Joyce Diary Turnbull-Allain Papers, 1784–1941 Historic Natchez Foundation Probate Records for Adams County Historical Society of Pennsylvania Daniel Clark Letters and Invoice Book, 1759–1762 Reed and Forde Papers, 1759–1823 Hood, Adrienne. The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce and Industry in Early Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Kuchta, David. The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Latrobe, Benjamin Henry Boneval. Impressions Respecting New Orleans. Edited by Samuel Wilson, Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Lee, Kristin Condotta. “Trading Spaces: Commerce, Ethnicity and Early Irish New Orleans.” Louisiana History 59, no. 3 (2018): 261–307. Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lemire, Beverly and Giorgio Riello. “East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 893–900. Little, Francis. “Cotton Printing in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.” The Bulletin of the Needle & Bobbin Club 22 (1938): 15–23. Louisiana Division/City Archives & Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library. Estate Inventories of Orleans Parish Civil Courts, 1803–1877. New Orleans City Directory, 1811 Louisiana State Museum Spanish Judiciary Records, 1763–1803 Mann, Bruce H. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Morrin, James, ed. Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls, Chancery, Ireland of the Reign of King Charles I. Vol. 1. Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1863. National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Division.

214  Kristin Condotta Lee Abstracts of Irish Exports And Imports, in 24 volumes, for the period 1764–1823. Correspondence and miscellaneous papers of the family of O’Conway in the United States of America, early 19th century. Niehaus, Earl F. The Irish in New Orleans, 1803–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Pearsall, Sarah M. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. Blair Family Letters, 1773–1796. Journal kept by John Moore of Carrickfergus, 1760–1770. Papers of the Weir Family, 1746–1854. Passenger Lists, Philadelphia, 1800–1882. Quin Papers, 1817–1941. Ribeiro, Aileen. The Gallery of Fashion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Roberts, Priscilla H. and James A. Tull. “Adam Hoops, Thomas Barclay, and the House in Morrisville Known as Summerseat, 1764–1791.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 90, no. 5 (2000): 4–20. Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime.’ Translated by Jean Birrell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612–1865. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Saint Louis City Archives Records, 1816–1848. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Truxes, Thomas. Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. University Archives and West Florida History Center, Pace Library, University of West Florida Panton, Leslie and Company Collection, 1739–1847. Usner, Daniel H., Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992. Vigarello, George. Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. White, Sophie. “Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Things.” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 2/3 (2011): 229–48. ———. “ ‘This Gown . . . was Much Admired and Made Many Ladies Jealous’: Fashion and the Forging of Elite Identities in French Colonial New Orleans.” In Washington’s South, edited by Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien, 86–118. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. ———. “ ‘To Ensure that He Not Give Himself Over,’: Cleanliness, Frenchification and Whiteness.” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 2 (2012): 111–49. Wilcox, David. “The Clothing of a Georgian Banker, Thomas Coutts: A Story of Museum Dispersal.” Costume 46, no. 1 (2012): 17–54.

Property I Could Dispose of to Advantage 215 Wilson, Kathleen Curtis. Irish People, Irish Linen. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Wokeck, Marianne. Trade in Strangers: The Beginning of Mass Migration to North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Woods, Earl C. and Charles E. Nolan. Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. 19 vols. New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1987–2004. Zakim, Michael. Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

10 Institutionalizing the Slave Power at the Local Level Deferential Care of Slaveholding Estates in Eighteenth-Century York County, Virginia Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones In eighteenth-century Chesapeake Virginia, wealthy people’s material status signals and genteel performance commanded respect. Prosperous Virginians enjoyed perquisites in social, legal, and economic transactions. They took their pick of political and military offices, accruing additional wealth and prestige. Their station afforded access to advantageous marriages and social networks, the best land, and reputations for gentility: being deemed by society to possess superior taste, speech, and thought. Social conventions should have caused wealthy, genteel Virginians to have been accorded deference, in the ordinary meaning of persons of lesser social orders abetting the desires of “men of influence.”1 Thus, this class expected to wield power and consistently worked to preserve its status. Embedded in its social rank was the position as slaveholders. Wealth permitted the purchase of slaves, slave labor and reproduction increased masters’ wealth, and the presence of slaves served as a performance of wealth and power. So woven was mastery in the fabric of wealthy Virginians’ social status, it can be difficult to separate the power it held distinct from wealth and reputation. Slaveholders as a class held great power, but were wealthy slaveholding Virginians able to demand deference based exclusively on their wealth, or did mastery independent of the wealth slaves represented, command respect among whites?2 We analyze the probate inventories of eighteenth-century York County, Virginia, to study the approbation of slaveholders’ power apart from their wealth. We present quantitative analysis suggesting that owning slaves (and owning more slaves) conferred power and status beyond the wealth that slave ownership represented. Our question relates to the older historiographical problem of deference in early America but differs in that our study’s actors—local appraisers— were not necessarily self-aware in affirming slaveholders’ status.3 Richard Beeman’s formulation of “deference” possesses strong elements of consensus, acceptance, and legitimization by the base of the social pyramid,

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 217 a “modified patron-client relationship [where] the relationship between patron and client [is], if not wholly voluntary, at least possessing varying degrees of consensual and reciprocal understanding.” But the essential give-and-take of Beeman’s deference manifests itself one-sidedly in our primary sources, as the slaveholders we examine were deceased. However, the social “training” in deference that an appraiser would have received may have been present in how he approached his tasks, as eighteenth-century Virginian society’s commitment to class and status has long been established, in now-classic works by Kulikoff, Sydnor, Bailyn, Breen, Brown, and Isaac.4 Historians suggest that slaveholding did offer power aside from the wealth it represented. Fox-Genovese and Genovese wrote, “slaveholders cohered as a ruling class on the basis of their ownership of human beings.”5 Jack P. Greene revealed that “the status of independent men was defined to a significant degree by their capacity—their liberty—to have dependents and by the number of those dependents.”6 It is easy to understand how slaves, a primary source of economic power, would become the avatar of social status. Greene carefully describes the authority (juxtaposed with power) Virginia’s Chesapeake elites sought to earn, then wield. Power was a synonym for might, but authority was associated with “justice and right.” Authority granted power, but it was earned by respect and popular regard.7 Because their authority was derived from some degree of consent from some breadth of their neighbors, as opposed to hereditary claims or naked military prowess, ritual and the manipulation of symbols were important in maintaining authority.8 Kathleen Brown agrees and Drew Gilpin Faust emphasizes the gendered nature of slaveholder status, explaining that “consolidation of the power of the father with that of the political patron and slaveholder” occurred in Virginia as “planter power coalesced in 1705 with the reorganization of the colony’s law codes.”9 While historians agree that slaveholding surely brought some power, we still have not fully understood how, specifically teasing out power/status from wealth. Moreover, our work has multiple connections to other research presented in this volume, perhaps most obviously with the chapters authored by Kristin Condotta Lee and Phillip Reid. Like Condotta Lee, we rely on notoriously problematic but undeniably useful probate records. Like Reid, our work reminds us that “objects” have multiple, simultaneous lives, at once physical, practical, productive, symbolic, and social. In Reid’s work, the object is a ship. In our work, the “object” is, regrettably, a commodified and enslaved human being. Probate records provide access to one facet of the problem. If slaveholding sent a signal about one’s social rank that was subtly different from that of a person with similar wealth but fewer slaves, then after accounting for other factors or characteristics, Virginians could have conferred a higher social standing to a person who owned a larger number

218  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones of enslaved people than their neighbors expected. A postmortem status increase could have motivated increased ordinary deference: expending time and diligence in conducting a high-status person’s affairs. When confronted by an unexpected symbol of power and prestige—an unexpectedly large number of slaves—appraisers possibly could have responded habitually by extending deference to the deceased; deference that could include time-consuming exactitude and conscientiousness in the affairs of elite persons, resulting in demonstrably different probate appraisals. *** Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chattel slavery of Africans became the foundation of Virginia society, and grew increasingly intertwined with wealth, gentility, and other social institutions. Originally a raw economic measure, Virginians came to defend slavery on social and religious grounds. Slavery was a civilizing, Christianizing force for Africans, biblically supported as a social convention. It was a central element of the emerging American South as a properly regulated, Christian, society of traditional liberties; a bulwark against un-Christian, excessively democratic, chaotic extremes, and morally superior to emerging capitalist relations elsewhere.10 However, no matter how it was justified, slavery never separated from wealth. In Virginia, as elsewhere, wealth and slaveholding were closely parallel, if not completely synonymous; moreover, wealthy persons owned slaves, and wealthier persons typically owned more slaves than those less affluent.11 This tight association arose from a combination of circumstances. Enslaved people simultaneously served multiple purposes for their owners. First, enslaved people provided labor.12 Second, Virginians used enslaved people as a method of saving, as liquid assets that increased in value over time.13 Although the North American economy depended on British credit, formal capital markets were in their infancy.14 Therefore, wealthy Virginians often chose to invest in real estate, renovating their housing, amassing more and finer furnishings, or purchasing silver plate. Many Virginians also chose to buy human property. Barring accidents and illness, enslaved people who survived into adulthood could retain and increase their market value for years and were easily sold. The commodification of black bodies created durable, transferable, transportable wealth and, as historians have increasingly discovered, leverageable/ mortgageable wealth.15 For example, as the number of Virginia’s white women increased during the eighteenth century, women’s upwardly mobile marriage prospects faded, restricting a formerly common path. To maintain or increase position through advantageous marriage, daughters needed something more. While sons inherited land, real estate, and businesses, daughters were given enslaved people as dowries.16 Finally, slave ownership served Virginians as a display of wealth. Often, slaves

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 219 were employed in capacities that look more like conspicuous consumption than wealth-generating labor. For instance, although maintaining an eighteenth-century household required significant physical effort, most families managed without slave labor. Slave labor in the household created convenience for slaveholders, but also denoted status—freeing members of the family from the tedium and drudgery of housekeeping.17 Thus, wealth and slaveholding—and increasing wealth and increasing numbers of enslaved people—were so entangled in eighteenthcentury Virginia society as to seem largely indistinguishable. Yet they are not quantitatively indistinguishable. We use a sample of York County, Virginia, probate inventories drawn from between 1700 and 1800 to present quantitative evidence indirectly supporting the proposition that holding (more) slaves bestowed additional social status on Virginians, separate from other sources of status. Court-appointed estate appraisers returned inventories that were longer, more thorough, and more descriptive for decedents who owned an unexpectedly large number of slaves, after accounting for the decedent’s gender, urban/rural location, apparent inflation-adjusted wealth, the percentage of wealth the decedents held as slaves, and the year the inventory was reported to the court. Although probate inventories do not provide direct proof that appraisers took greater care because the decedent held more slaves, the weight of our evidence supports the proposition. Social deference to people of high status is a plausible explanation for the result and suggests a commitment, however subconscious, to the affirmation of slaveholder power at the local government level. *** Virginia’s society conditioned its members to be attuned to the social signals they and others sent and received. They paid particular attention to signals of others’ wealth and gentility—social standing, generally— especially relative to their own.18 However, even in an era and location when signaling status through the display of consumer goods and other assets was widespread and well understood, signaling is not perfect. Deviation between the number of slaves that appraisers expected to find at an estate and the actual number of slaves they found (the unexpected number of slaves) equates to a missed signal; it is a measure of “signal error,” metaphorically like radio static. The dead could no longer send additional signals regarding their “true” social standing. The only signals available were what the appraisers could extract from the material legacy. Our quantitative results demonstrate that this deviation forms a significant component of the length, thoroughness, and descriptiveness of the inventories appraisers returned. Why might this be the case? One potential explanation is that unexpected slaves meant unexpected, transferrable wealth, which could

220  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones indicate more potential for squabbling by high-status persons with an interest in the estate. To forestall the possibility of becoming entangled in the process, appraisers undertook thorough, detailed inventories at the time. A second potential explanation is that appraisers sought to finetune their own skill and knowledge regarding interpreting social signals. In a society not yet dominated by impersonal exchanges, understanding where people “fit” into society, and the consequent behavioral expectations by both parties would have been valuable. From that perspective, the long, thorough, descriptive inventories are the artifacts of appraisers’ heightened scrutiny as they sought to compensate for their signal-reading error. A third possible explanation is the ingrained, ordinary deferential behavior toward families of high status, with the deference manifesting itself through conscientious diligence. If slaves generated status for their Virginia owners and additional slaves generated additional status, then an unexpectedly large number of slaves indicated that the appraisers had undervalued the decedent’s (and his family’s) social status. Posthumously correcting their mistake, appraisers took special care in preparing these people’s inventories, other things being equal.19 The first explanation does not necessarily imply that slaveholding added to an individual’s social status. Rather, it implies that people will squabble over wealth. Critically, it is unlikely to be the answer because the entire point of this quantitative analysis is to appropriately adjust for each estate’s wealth. We obtained our result after taking differences in the decedents’ wealth into account. The second and third explanations do imply that the mere fact of holding more slaves elevated an individual’s social status independent of his income. That this is true for the third explanation is self-evident. Regarding the second explanation, appraisers would seek to improve their signal-interpreting prowess only if slaveholding related to status, apart from simply being a species of wealth. However, this second explanation falls short. We found positive and statistically significant relationships between the number of unexpected slaves and inventory length, etc. Fully interpreting this result means that not only were longer, more descriptive inventories returned for decedents with unexpectedly more slaves, but also shorter, less descriptive inventories were returned for decedents with unexpectedly fewer slaves. If the inventories were artifacts of appraisers reconciling expectations with reality, then we would expect to find longer, more descriptive inventories at both ends of the spectrum, correcting both the underestimates and the overestimates as they sought to “educate” themselves. Instead, we found that when decedents had unexpectedly fewer slaves, appraisers chose to deliver shorter, less descriptive inventories. That would be the expected outcome if appraisers “demoted” people’s status based on their slaveholdings, independent of wealth.

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 221 That leaves the third explanation: deferential behavior toward people of high status, wherein slaveholding independently elevated the social standing of the slave owner. *** A Note About Statistical Analysis Using Regression: This chapter’s basis is quantitative analysis of primary source documents—probate inventories— using statistics. In a deeply meaningful sense, statistical analysis of primary source documents is simply another aspect of textual analysis common to all historical research. At the most basic level, quantitative analysis of primary texts consists of reading and counting. It involves careful and critical reading of the original sources, deeply interrogating what the authors wrote and what they did not, and deciding how to assemble and present the evidence the documents reveal. The difference is that statistical analysis converts some of the primary source information into numerical data and uses well-established tools to uncover hidden pieces of narrative, separating idiosyncrasies from general trends. At the heart of this chapter is a question of statistical identification. Roughly, “identification” is about matching the data one has to the research question in a way that the available analytical tools will be most likely to give the best answer obtainable. One way to state our research question is: What were the separate contributions of wealth and slaveholding to social standing in eighteenth-century Virginia? Or, what would be the change in social standing if there were a small change in decedents’ slaveholding, and if we could hold constant the other explanatory factors? To answer the question, we must first separate “wealth” and “slaveholding.” They are not separate, but they are not identical. That implies that some degree of separation is possible through regression analysis. Regression analysis is one of the most commonly used statistical tools. It allows scholars to separately account for the simultaneous influences of several explanatory factors. Regression gives us an estimate to answer the following types of question: in explaining our observations of the number of slaves a decedent owned, •

What was the independent contribution of each of the following: • • • • •

the decedent’s gender? the year he died? whether he lived in the city or the country? the percentage of his wealth held as slaves? his overall wealth?

So, in the case of wealth, we use regression to ask, “What would be the change in the number of slaves owned by the decedent if there were a

222  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones small difference in appraised wealth, holding constant at their average values for all decedents: gender, year of death, location, and percentage of wealth held in the form of slaves?” Regression results will never fit every case perfectly. It creates an “estimate” or a “prediction” based on all the cases. Consider Sarah Green. She was female. She lived in the countryside. She died in 1759. Of her total wealth in the inventory, she held 74% of it in slaves. Her total wealth was almost £36, sterling, after adjusting for inflation. How many slaves would one expect her to own, based on the society around her, before her, and after her? Providing an answer is exactly what regression does. The regression estimate tells us that other people who had socioeconomic positions very similar to Sarah’s owned 6.10 slaves. That is the predicted, expected number of slaves owned, based on information from all of the inventories. The inventories give us the actual number of slaves Sarah owned, which we can compare to the expected, predicted number of slaves. Sarah actually owned six slaves. In that case, she unexpectedly owned “0.10” fewer slaves than one would have thought. Consider Gerard Roberts (d. 1757), a countryside male. He held 62% of his wealth in slaves with an estate value of £32 sterling. Regression estimates tell us that other people very similar to Gerard held 4.94 slaves. Gerard owned five slaves. In that case, he unexpectedly owned “0.06” more slaves than one would have thought. Repeating this for all 574 decedents in our data set generates a new category or characteristic: the number of unexpected slaves, given a decedent’s wealth, gender, etc. Of course, no one could have owned 6.10 or 4.94 slaves, but regression analysis cannot account for that. Those are the predicted values.20 In a world perfectly attuned to the desires of researchers, we would not want to use data recovered from a statistical exercise. Nor would we want data to be in the form “unexpectedly larger or smaller number of slaves.” Historically, we would want appraisers’ notes for every decedent, including personal observations about wealth, slaveholding, and how each appraiser adjusted his behavior. Statistically, we would like wealth and slaveholding to be separate, unrelated social processes. Unfortunately, the world cares very little about the wants of historians. Appraisers did not leave notes of that sort. Wealth and slaveholding are strongly related. One could choose to criticize quantitative analysis, whether historical or modern, particularly on the basis that researchers omitted an important factor in their analysis; that two seemingly related processes are actually caused by a third, unobserved process; that cause and effect simultaneously run both ways. In this instance, slaveholding and wealth “caused” each other. One needed to buy slaves, and appropriating the enslaved people’s production increased their owners’ wealth. Furthermore, both wealth and slaveholding simultaneously enhanced social standing, which in turn would have elicited social deference. Undeniably,

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 223 these problems are more severe in quantitative history than in other fields. Most solutions to these types of problems involve more data: more observations of a greater number of variables. However, historical data are what they are, and additional, quantitative data relevant to time and place are unlikely to be forthcoming. Nevertheless, noting the possibility of these problems is insufficient. One must demonstrate the nature and strong likelihood of these problems, and demonstrate that the impact of these problems would be fatal to the analysis. In this chapter, we recognize one type of simultaneity issue, the conflation of wealth and slave ownership, and quantitatively address it. Other empirical issues surely exist, implying that readers should take our results with a grain of salt. But that should be true of all analysis, quantitative or qualitative. Moreover, the impact of incomplete data influences qualitative analysis, too. Traditional historians continuously search for more letters, diaries, and pamphlets to include in their analysis. Often, extra evidence is simply not available. Similarly, new evidence could overturn the results of earlier scholars, but that does not deter scholars from publishing their work. Qualitative historians also struggle to extract meaning and accurate narrative from a tangle of sources. Like quantitative historians, sometimes they are more successful at the task than at other times. *** The first step in addressing our research question is to separate wealth and slaveholding as well as we can. One might imagine that there was a logical antecedence of wealth before slave ownership that would allow researchers to enforce a degree of separation between them. Quantitatively, this would allow researchers to use wealth as a factor to explain slaveholding. However, as Russell Menard strongly suggests, South Carolinians of the eighteenth century generated enormous amounts of credit through mortgaged assets to purchase slaves.21 Bonnie Martin writes that Europeans of various nations had developed their colonies—including the purchase of slaves—through mortgaging assets from their earliest years of expansion.22 Martin details the use of “purchase money mortgages” in eighteenth-century Virginia, in which buyers purchased slaves on installment plans secured by the slaves themselves.23 David Hancock argues that such publicly recorded mortgages almost certainly understate the actual amount of local credit generated in this market—much of which could have gone to purchase slaves.24 The size and longevity of these often highly local credit markets render assumptions about wealth as a precondition to slave ownership very problematic. Fortunately, we do not need to solve this conundrum. Regardless of whether wealth anteceded slave ownership or not, we can separate wealth and slaves at the time of the probate inventory. With this information

224  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones about many decedents, we can estimate the number of slaves a decedent “should” own, given the choices of others in his position, to estimate how many slaves he would have owned if he generally behaved as did his neighbors. Drawing on this estimate, we can calculate whether the decedent’s expected number of slaves is greater or lesser than his actual number of slaves; that is, the decedent’s unexpected number of slaves. This factor, the unexpected number of slaves given personal and economic characteristics, is our degree of separation between wealth and slaveholding. Clearly, the analysis hinges on two ideas: first, that appraisers would have formed some prior expectation of a decedent’s estate, and second, that we can approximate their expectations. The probate inventories do not provide direct evidence for either idea. However, given the appraisal process and the data we can extract from the inventories, we believe that we can demonstrate both. As economists, other social scientists, and business researchers use the term, “expectations” refer to individuals determining what they believe will be the most likely future values and outcomes of socioeconomically significant variables. As a large literature demonstrates, whether humans form expectations is not in doubt. Instead, researchers study how we form expectations, the processes by which we update those expectations, the limits of our forecasting capability, and the impact our expectations have on future outcomes.25 In ordinary life, most people would never have a compelling reason to create careful expectations of the wealth of most other people within their community. However, fulfilling an obligation to the court to appraise an estate was not part of ordinary life. Appraisers were members of the community appointed and paid by the court to provide this service. The appraisers submitted their inventories to the court as testimony, swearing to the diligence, completeness, and accuracy of their efforts. They were people from the community. In most cases, they would have been acquainted with the decedent and likely knew something of his business and possessions.26 Seemingly every researcher who works with early American probate records discovers that the same people appear repeatedly as appraisers within each generation. That many of these individuals repeatedly served as appraisers testifies to their general accuracy. Alice Hanson Jones concludes, “the inventories were taken seriously, made conscientiously, and that the values are close approximations to the market values of the decedents’ wealth. The inventories appear to be conservative estimates of portable wealth in all regions.”27 It is reasonable to conclude that semiprofessional appraisers would have had some idea of the decedent’s estate when they began the inventory process—they would have formed an expectation. What might the appraisers have known relative to the data available to us? From the inventories, we extracted the appraisal’s year, the decedent’s

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 225 gender, his/her location in town or county, the value of the estate, and the percentage of the estate’s value held in slaves. As community members and knowledgeable persons, the appraisers would have known the first three pieces of information. Although they would not have known the exact value of the last two variables, likely they had an approximate value in mind. Undoubtedly, the appraisers began the process with more information than this, but these are data that appraisers could both be expected to know and consider while conducting their appraisal, and are available to us. We use these data from the original sources to construct our approximation of the appraisers’ expectations: our “best guess” of the appraisers’ “best guess.” We demonstrated this procedure with the examples of Sarah Green and Gerard Roberts, discussed previously. *** Thus, we have “identified” the problem. We have successfully—albeit imperfectly and incompletely—separated wealth and slaveholding. We argue that this estimate, “the unexpected number of slaves owned,” is the difference between the reality of the inventories and our best approximation of what the appraisers would have expected to find in the decedents’ estates. The second step in the analysis would be to demonstrate that slaveholding, separate from wealth, elevated social standing. Based on what we can learn from the text of the appraisers’ inventories, how did the appraisers’ behavior change when a decedent owned unexpectedly more slaves, given what they probably knew of the decedent’s life and circumstances? Higher social status would come with greater deference. They could show deference to the high-status dead by taking more pains in conducting the decedents’ (and their families’) business, such as appraising their estates. The estate inventories are not the sort of original source document in which the appraisers would have had cause to write, “The decedent was of higher status than we expected due to his ownership of many slaves, and therefore we showed more deference by compiling a very careful inventory.” Instead, evidence from the probate records is indirect. After accounting for other social and economic characteristics, if appraisers returned longer, more thorough, and descriptive inventories for decedents with an unexpectedly large number of slaves, it could be evidence that appraisers granted more deference to greater slaveholders, implying that slaveholding elevated an individual’s social status independent of wealth and other characteristics. From textual analysis of the inventories, we extracted several different variables to measure the length, precision, completeness, and descriptiveness of the inventories. We used the same set of explanatory factors as before: year, gender, location, percent of wealth held as slaves, and

226  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones wealth, plus one more factor—the unexpected number of slaves. The regression estimates of the independent contribution of “unexpected number of slaves” to explaining the textual variables give us the answer to our research question. *** Researchers have extensively documented problems using evidence from probate inventories to draw inferences about the underlying population and society.28 Fortunately, most of these problems are not relevant to our present analysis. We avoid these pitfalls because we do not use the inventories to draw inferences about the kinds and amounts of possessions owned by broader society outside of the sample, or about the characteristics of people in broader society who owned particular varieties or amounts of goods. Our concern is what appraisers chose to list in the inventories, given that the court had ordered a particular estate to be inventoried. Thus, we focus on the appraisers and the inventories as records of their choices, not as indicators of who might have owned what outside of the households “sampled” by the probate process. *** The probate court inventories of York County, Virginia, form a tractable data set for our research questions due to (a) complete digital transcriptions; (b) many inventories spanning a long period, with a (c) great volume and variety of items in the inventories, and (d) all inventories from the same geographic area, within the same social and legal context. Therefore, we had no need to account for the substantial social, legal, and economic differences among the colonies. What we lose in generality we may gain due to depth. Over the 101 years to which we restricted ourselves (1700–1800), we obtained 686 inventories. After discarding entries missing key pieces of information, we obtained a subsample for quantitative work of 547 inventories. We extracted several demographic, economic, and slaveholding variables from the inventories’ data. We categorized whether the decedent was female based on first name and on any internal word usage, such as “she,” “her,” or “widow.” We categorized an inventory as “rural” if it was returned from York County, rather than Yorktown or Williamsburg, the two urban areas (partially) contained by the county. We calculated the apparent inflation-adjusted value of the inventoried possessions: the variable “Real Wealth.”29 We counted the number of slaves listed in each inventory. Using these variables, we calculated the amount of wealth held in forms other than enslaved people (“Non-slave Wealth”) and the percent of total wealth each decedent held as enslaved people (“Percent Wealth as Slaves”).

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 227 We used the specific regression estimator known as negative binomial regression. Negative binomial regression is appropriate when the variable one wants to explain is a “count” variable, such as the number of slaves owned by a decedent or the number of words in an estate inventory are count variables. For the entire subsample, wealth, slaveholding, and gender were closely associated. Female decedents tended to be poor, and the poor overwhelmingly did not own slaves. Among the top tier of wealth, not only was slaveholding much more widespread, but also the number of slaves held was nearly an order of magnitude greater. Although there was little difference between the urban and rural percentage of slaveholding decedents, rural slaveholders owned noticeably more slaves. If one fails to adjust for differences in income, the data appear to show a sharp difference between males and females. A greater percentage of men held slaves, and men held more slaves. Analysis of correlation coefficients (not shown) allows us to conclude that, within the sample of inventories, wealth and slaveholding were related, but they were certainly not identical. We turned to calculating the number of “unexpected” slaves held by a decedent. The first step in this process was to estimate the number of slaves an appraiser might expect a decedent to own. We present this estimate in Table 10.1. The results in Table 10.1 are generally unsurprising.30 As a decedent’s wealth increased, the number of slaves he owned increased at a decreasing rate. Similarly, the number of slaves owned increased as the decedent’s percentage of wealth held as slaves increased. Female decedents owned fewer slaves than did males. Curiously, a rural location indicates the decedent owned fewer slaves, after accounting for these other factors. We hypothesize that this may be because town dwellers may have purchased a slave for social status reasons, while a county dweller in similar circumstances might spend less time “in society” and feel less need for such an expensive status symbol. Furthermore, several of the great slave owners maintained a primary residence in one of the towns, while their human property was distributed across their land holdings. Therefore, all their slaves would be counted for such “urbanites.” More curiously, the years in which the inventories were taken, they had very little impact on the number of slaves listed by appraisers. Armed with this estimate, we calculated predicted number of slaves and subtracted this from the actual number of slaves listed in the inventories. A positive value indicates that the decedent owned “unexpectedly” more slaves than their neighbors in similar circumstances, and a negative value indicates that s/he owned “unexpectedly” fewer slaves than predicted. ***

228  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones Table 10.1  Negative Binomial Regression Results to Estimate “Unexpected Number of Slaves” Dep. Var.

Num. Slaves

Real Wealth

6.14E-05 19.13 –1.42E-10 –15.56 0.038 23.16 –0.36 –3.09 –0.17 –1.86 –0.21 –1.25 0.00006 1.25 185.7 1.24

Wealth Squared Slave Percent of Wealth Female Rural Year Year Squared Constant Regression Dispersion Number LR Chi2 Prob>chi2 Log likelihood Pseudo R2 Alpha Likelihood-ratio test of alpha=0: chibar2(01) Prob>=chibar2

*** *** *** *** *

Neg Binom Mean 547 828.79 0 –887.394 0.32 0.21 176.85 0.00

Z-statistics in italics. *, **, *** = Significant at 90%, 95%, 99% levels.

We turned to estimating the impact of the number of unexpected slaves on the thoroughness and exactitude of the inventories. We calculated several dependent variables; the observations we wish to explain with the data. The first was “Line Count,” the number of lines listing possessions in each inventory. Because the lines varied between listing single or multiple possessions, we also calculated the number of words in the possession lines of each inventory (“Word Count”).31 We paid special attention to tables and chairs. They were convenient “common denominator” possessions that allowed us to quantify appraisal differences across inventories. Throughout the eighteenth century, most households could have afforded some form of seating and an elevated surface. Indeed, more than 80% of the inventories included tables and/or chairs.32 They were both fine imports of exotic woods and

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 229 luxurious coverings and rough, homemade items. Sometimes, appraisers chose to carefully count and describe them; other times they simply listed “lots,” “parcels,” or “lumber.” We counted the number of table and chair lines in each inventory (“Table & Chair Lines”), as well as the sum total of tables and chairs (“Num. Table & Chair”).33 For our last measure, we summed the number of adjectives across the table and chair lines for each inventory. We adjusted this variable (“Adjusted Descriptor”) to account for the 109 inventories that listed no tables or chairs or listed them without adjectives. We assigned a value of zero to those inventories lacking tables or chairs; otherwise, we assigned a value of one plus the number of descriptors.34 Table 10.2 presents our regression results, using the same explanatory variables as in Table 10.1 with the addition of “Unexpected Number of Slaves.”35 Wealth was a key determinant of the length and level of detail in an estate’s inventory. Higher appraised estate values led appraisers to return inventories that were (at a decreasing rate) longer, had more possession lines, and more carefully enumerated and described tables and chairs. We found that being a female decedent had an insignificant effect on the length and level of detail of the inventories. Income, not gender, was the driving force of the length and meticulousness of the appraisal. A rural location was strongly significantly, but negatively, related to the thoroughness of the inventories. This result is consistent with Shammas’ finding that rural households had less opportunity for social interactions and the display of gentility, and tended to have fewer fine possessions.36 The inventory’s year (and squared year) had a significant effect in only some models. When significant (Line Count, Word Count, and Adjusted Descriptors), appraisers returned inventories that were increasingly shorter and with more terse descriptions of tables and chairs as the century progressed. Likewise, the percent of wealth an estate held as slaves was significant in only three models. Appraisers spent more effort counting and describing chairs and tables as estates held a greater portion of their wealth as slaves. The primary result relevant to our research question is this: in all five of our models, the effect of the unexpected number of slaves was positive and strongly significant. When a decedent owned more enslaved people than others in similar circumstances, appraisers responded by returning longer, more wordy inventories that included more thoroughly counted and described tables and chairs. The impact would have been subtle, as the estimated effects are not quantitatively large and could easily escape qualitative notice. One unit more in the unexpected number of slaves would have had the average marginal effect of estate appraisers (a) adding 0.76 additional lines to the inventory, (b) writing an additional 6.45 words, (c) adding 0.07 additional table/chair lines, (d) listing an extra 0.32 tables/chair, and (e) using 0.12 more (adjusted) adjectives to describe

Neg Binom mean 547 366.25 0 –2416.87

***

***

***

***

***

***

5.80E+04 0

0.41

Neg Binom mean 547 324.04 0 –3559.76

**

***

**

**

***

***

***

Z-statistics in italics. *, **, *** = Significant at 90%, 95%, 99% levels.

0.39 Alpha Likelihood-ratio test of alpha=0: 7927.76 chibar2(01) 0 Prob>=chibar2

Regression Dispersion Number LR Chi2 Prob>chi2 Log likelihood

Constant

Unexpected Slaves

Year Squared

Year

Rural

Female

Slave Percent of Wealth

Wealth Squared

5.76E-05 14.19 –1.46E-10 –12.84 0.0003 0.25 –0.06 –0.84 –0.48 –7.23 –0.28 –2.1 7.78E-05 2.07 0.02 7.37 248.90 2.17

6.09E-05 15.13 –1.56E-10 –13.83 –0.0005 –0.46 –0.009 –0.12 –0.57 –8.54 –0.76 –5.76 0.0002 5.75 0.02 6.93 672.27 5.8

Real Wealth

***

Word Count

Line Count

Dep. Var.

189.54 0

0.34

Neg Binom mean 547 300.2 0 –1113.35

5.23E-05 12.84 –1.30E-10 –11.23 0.003 2.3 0.059 0.57 –0.82 –9.73 –0.25 –1.38 7.27E-05 1.42 0.02 6.26 213.32 1.36 ***

***

**

***

***

Table & Chair Lines

Table 10.2  Regression Results Using “Unexpected Number of Slaves”

3409.89 0

1.04

Neg Binom mean 547 221.4 0 –1866.42

6.32E-05 9.51 –1.58E-10 –8.48 0.004 2.34 0.05 0.38 –0.84 –7.66 0.02 0.08 –2.89E-06 –0.05 0.02 5.38 –18.73 –0.1 ***

***

**

***

***

Num. Table & Chair

957.06 0

0.71

Neg Binom mean 547 257.92 0 –1370.44

5.57E-05 9.95 –1.39E-10 –8.89 0.005 3.07 0.06 0.48 –1.03 –10.41 –0.70 –3.41 0.0002 3.44 0.02 5.7 608.64 3.38

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

Adjusted Descriptor

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 231 tables and chairs. Though small, these effects are highly unlikely to have occurred due to random chance. One might explain the word count and line count results by pointing out that appraisers often listed enslaved people one person per inventory line, by a single name. However, the average marginal effect was less than one extra line and more than six extra words. Furthermore, that would not explain the furniture results. Therefore, we conclude that appraisers returned longer, more thorough, and more descriptive inventories when the decedent owned more slaves than the appraisers expected. The regression results provide indirect evidence of our thesis. Ownership of enslaved people bestowed social status in eighteenth-century Virginia beyond wealth and displays of gentility; more slaves only increased social standing. York County’s estate appraisers showed deference to slave-owning/high-status decedents by taking the time and effort to record more thorough and precise inventories. *** For decedents possessing an unexpectedly higher number of slaves, appraisers wrote inventories that were longer, had more words, took more careful account of tables and chairs, and used more descriptive words to describe them, after accounting for the decedent’s gender, location, wealth, the percent of wealth held as slaves, and the year. That is, if a decedent had more slaves than one would expect based on these characteristics, then appraisers turned in longer, more detailed inventories after adjusting for wealth and everything else. People who held an unexpectedly larger number of slaves received more care and attention from estate appraisers, even after death. This care and attention is consistent with the common deference shown in Virginia society to persons of high social status. Therefore, one conclusion consistent with our results is that York County appraisers thought one’s social status rose with the number of slaves one owned, independent of wealth. We interpret these findings as indirect evidence supporting the thesis that eighteenth-century York County society awarded status to slaveholders independent of other grantors of social standing, and that society elevated people higher as the number of slaves they owned increased. Using easily overlooked evidence in a novel way, we provide a new line of support for some of the more established claims about the Chesapeake. In eighteenth-century York County—in a sense, as early as the eighteenth century—whites accepted command over slaves as more than convenient labor and a necessary evil. Agents of the local government understood mastery over human beings as more than an economic arrangement and type of wealth. They took a decedent’s number of slaves as a symbol and signal of social standing, and awarded him the privileges and perquisites of rank, even after his death.

232  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones Our work also provides a local look at trends that historians are identifying at the broader scale when they discuss how the commodification of black bodies created American capitalism and society. Historians are increasingly showing slavery as the organizing force behind the US “politics, legal structures, and cultural practices,” revealing the scale of its “remarkable power to determine the life chances of those moving through society as black or white.”37 Indeed, the story these data tell goes beyond class hierarchies, the “airs” of the gentry, to the status slaveholders held in eighteenth-century Virginia, even in death. It opens an additional window into the state’s institutionalization of the slave power. Virginians deferred to local slave power in their handling of even the most mundane governmental tasks. In the years before “second slavery,” when “King Cotton” drove American capitalism to new heights, slaveholding provided an intangible benefit that slaveholders enjoyed in addition to the wealth that slavery represented and generated. And their affairs took up institutional space—here, in the form of local governance—because they were considered the most important members of their society. The probate records reveal the institutionalization of slave power at the county level, even if this reification of slaveholder power was not mercenary or conscious on the part of local officials. The commodification of black bodies in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake conferred benefits on slaveholders that rippled beyond the wealth that such property represented, and even officials at the most local level worked to affirm that status.

Notes 1. Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 133. 2. Richard R. Beeman, “The Varieties of Deference in Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 311–40, quotation page 322; Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 272–74. 3. See a special issue on “Deference in Early America: The Life and/or Death of an Historiographical Concept,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 227–411. 4. Beeman, “Deference,” 410. See Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952); Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Kathleen Brown, Good Wives Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 233 of Virginia, 1740–1790 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1982); and Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 276. 5. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 2 (1987): 211. 6. Jack P. Greene, “Independence, Improvement, and Authority,” The Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman, Thad Tate, and Peter Albert (Charlottesville: University Press Virginia, 1985), 19. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Zbigniew Mazur, “Power Play: Social Dissent and the Gentry Hegemony in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” American Studies in Scandinavia 38, no. 2 (2014): 66–67. 9. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 323; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 32. Recently, Cary Carson summarized similar arguments in “Banqueting Houses and the ‘Need of Society’ among Slave-Owning Planters in the Chesapeake Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no 4 (2013): 725–80. 10. For examples, see Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order;” Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11. For example, see James L. Huston, “Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War,” The Journal of Southern History 65, no. 2 (1999): 249–86; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 129–30, 140–57; Gerald Gunderson, “The Origin of the American Civil War,” Journal of Economic History XXXIV (December 1974): 915–50; and Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 46; Lois G. Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly 4 (1977): 542–71; Lois G. Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake,” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989); Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2008). 13. See Slavery’s Capitalism, eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 14 and especially 107–21 (Bonnie Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)); Bonnie Martin, “Silver Buckles and Slave: Borrowing, Lending, and the Commodification of Slaves in Virginia Communities,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies, eds. Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 30–52; Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76, no.

234  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones 4 (2010): 817–66; Russell R. Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom: Capital and Growth in Early South Carolina,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1994): 659–76; David Hancock, “ ‘Capital and Credit with Approved Security’: Financial Markets in Montserrat and South Carolina, 1748–1775,” Business and Economic History 23, no. 2 (1994): 61–84. 14. Wendy Lucas and Noel Campbell, “By a Hogshead of Oyster Shells, a Worthless Old Ox-Cart, and Ducks: The Economic World of Williamsburg Brick Maker Humphrey Harwood,” Journal of Early American History 7, no. 1 (2017): 141–76. 15. Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism;” Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine;” Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom;” Hancock “ ‘Capital and Credit with Approved Security’.” 16. Jean Butenhoff Lee, “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest Practices in Charles County, Maryland, 1732–1783,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, eds. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 306–41; Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake.” 17. For example, see Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 88–89; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul; Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 92–93; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small World: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 86. 18. We found economists’ “signaling theory” to be very useful. For an introduction to this large literature, see Michael Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–74 and Michael Spence, “Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets,” The American Economic Review 92, no. 3 (2002): 434–59. 19. Throughout this chapter when we discuss the research question or quantitative evidence, we maintain the assumption of “all other things being equal”; ceteris paribus, to borrow useful terminology from economics. For this chapter, this means that we have accounted for variation among decedents’ (a) inflation-adjusted, apparent wealth (in natural logarithms), (b) the percentage of that wealth held as enslaved persons, (c) rural or urban location, (d) gender, (e) year of death (in natural logarithms), (f) and both the wealth and years of death squared. 20. The predicted values are somewhat analogous to a class section’s exam average equaling 71.6 points, even if the structure of the exam made it impossible for anyone to earn fractions of a point. 21. Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom,” 675. 22. Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism,” 107–8. 23. Ibid.; Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine.” 24. Hancock, “ ‘Capital and Credit with Approved Security’,” 67. 25. To access this literature, see G. W. Evans and S. Honkapohja, Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); R. E. Farmer, The Economics of Self-Fulfilling Prophesies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936); R. E. Lucas, Jr., “Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique,” in Studies in Business Cycle Theory, ed. R. E. Lucas, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976); Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice, eds. R. E. Lucas, Jr. and T. J. Sargent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); J. F. Muth, “Rational Expectations

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 235 and the Theory of Price Movements,” Econometrica 29 (1961): 315–35; T. J. Sargent, Macroeconomic Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1987). 26. Alice Hanson Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, vol. I (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 15–17. 27. Ibid., 17. Gloria L. Main, “Probate Records as a Source for Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 1 (January 1975): 89–99. Main concurs, writing in footnote 4 (p. 91) that “receipts of . . . sales occasionally appear . . . and they generally attest to the soundness of the appraisers’ judgements.” 28. See, for example: Early American Probate Inventories, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1987); Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Amy Friedlander, “House and Barn: The Wealth of Farmers, 1795–1815,” Historical Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1991): 15–29; Gloria Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Paul Shackel, Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993); Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer; Kevin Sweeny, “Using Tax Lists to Detect Biases in Probate Inventories,” in Early American Probate Inventories, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1987); Carr and Walsh, “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth,” 81–82; Anne E. McCants, “The Not-so-Merry Widows of Amsterdam, 1740–1782,” Journal of Family History 24, no. 4 (1999): 444. 29. To make better monetary comparisons across time, we converted the inventory values into a single, inflation-adjusted monetary unit. We converted nominal sterling values into real sterling values using Phelps-Brown and Hopkins price index data (E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Price of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” Economica 23, no. 92 (1956): 296–314). The resulting value of an estate’s wealth is the number of Phelps-Brown and Hopkins composite consumption units an estate could purchase if prices of the items in the unit were at their average from the period between 1451 and 1475. This figure, the appraised real wealth of an estate, is a complicated variable working best as a basis for relative comparison rather than as an absolute figure representing wealth. Contact authors for details on conversion. Despite the complications and shortcomings, calculating real apparent wealth is a necessary step to comparing estate values across time. “Real wealth” is the apparent wealth of the estate as documented by the inventories. The net worth of each estate would have been different because Virginia’s inventories typically omitted real estate and financial claims. However, apparent wealth is not insignificant trivia. For example, no matter the net worth of an estate, a decedent whose inventory included numerous enslaved people was—at some point—able to accumulate wealth or access large amounts of credit. 30. We could search for additional variables to include to improve the match between prediction and data, but that would not be good statistical practice. For each of these variables, we have a logically compelling case for inclusion. They represent facts about the decedent that appraisers both could be expected to know and expected to consider while conducting their appraisal. 31. We did not count articles or prepositions.

236  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones 32. We counted tables, chairs, couches, benches, and stools, including tea tables. We omitted other specialized tables, stools, and benches. One hundred and nine inventories (19.9 percent) listed none of these items. Most likely these items were distributed before death or the appraisers deemed them worthless. 33. We filled missing values in theses series with the median values. 34. We counted disparaging adjectives, such as “old,” “small,” “worn,” “broken,” and “indifferent.” 35. We obtained qualitatively similar results (unpublished; available from the authors) using other statistical estimators and regressors. 36. Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. 37. Slavery’s Capitalism, 1.

Bibliography Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017. ———. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Knopf, 1968. ———. “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, edited by James Morton Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Beeman, Richard R. The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. ———. “The Varieties of Deference in Eighteenth-Century America.” Early American Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 311–40. Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Butenhoff Lee, Jean. “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest Practices in Charles County, Maryland, 1732–1783.” In Colonial Chesapeake Society, edited by Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Carr, Lois G. “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake.” In Women in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989. Carr, Lois G. and Lorena S. Walsh. “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake.” In Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. ———. “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1658–1777.” Historical Methods 13, no. 2 (1980): 81–104. ———. “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in SeventeenthCentury Maryland.” William and Mary Quarterly 4 (1977): 542–71. Carson, Cary. “Banqueting Houses and the ‘Need of Society’ among SlaveOwning Planters in the Chesapeake Colonies.” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2013): 725–80.

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 237 Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Early American Probate Inventories. Edited by Peter Benes. Boston: Boston University, 1987. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 2005). Evans, G. W. and S. Honkapohja. Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Farmer, R. E. The Economics of Self-fulfilling Prophesies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene Genovese. “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 2 (1987): 211–34. Friedlander, Amy. “House and Barn: The Wealth of Farmers, 1795–1815.” Historical Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1991): 15–29. Gilpin Faust, Drew. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Glasson, Travis. Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Goetz, Rebecca Anne. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Greene, Jack P. “Independence, Improvement, and Authority.” In The Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman, Thad Tate, and Peter Albert. Charlottesville: University Press Virginia, 1985. Gunderson, Gerald. “The Origin of the American Civil War.” Journal of Economic History XXXIV (December 1974): 915–50. Hancock, David. “ ‘Capital and Credit with Approved Security’: Financial Markets in Montserrat and South Carolina, 1748–1775.” Business and Economic History 23, no. 2 (1994): 61–84. Hanson Jones, Alice. American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods. Vol. I. New York: Arno Press, 1977. Huston, James L. “Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War.” The Journal of Southern History 65, no. 2 (1999): 249–86. Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1982. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul; Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Keynes, J. M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936. Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Lucas, Jr., R. E. “Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique.” In Studies in Business Cycle Theory, edited by R. E. Lucas, Jr. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. Lucas, Wendy and Noel Campbell. “By a Hogshead of Oyster Shells, a Worthless Old Ox-Cart, and Ducks: The Economic World of Williamsburg Brick Maker Humphrey Harwood.” Journal of Early American History 7, no. 1 (2017): 141–76.

238  Wendy Lucas and Kelly Houston Jones Main, Gloria L. “Probate Records as a Source for Early American History.” William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Jan 1975): 89–99. Martin, Bonnie. “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves.” In Slavery’s Capitalism, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. ———. “Silver Buckles and Slave: Borrowing, Lending, and the Commodification of Slaves in Virginia Communities.” In New Directions in Slavery Studies, edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. ———. “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property.” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 817–66. ———. Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Mazur, Zbigniew. “Power Play: Social Dissent and the Gentry Hegemony in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” American Studies in Scandinavia 38, no. 2 (2014): 66–78. McCants, Anne E. “The Not-so-Merry Widows of Amsterdam, 1740–1782.” Journal of Family History 24, no. 4 (1999): 441–67. McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small World: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Menard, Russell R. “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom: Capital and Growth in Early South Carolina.” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1994): 659–76. Muth, J. F. ‘Rational Expectations and the Theory Of Price Movements.’ Econometrica 29 (1961): 315–35. Phelps Brown, E. H. and Sheila V. Hopkins. “Seven Centuries of the Price of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates.” Economica 23, no. 92 (1956): 296–314. Ransom, Roger L. Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice. Edited by R. E. Lucas, Jr. and T. J. Sargent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Sargent, T. J. Macroeconomic Theory. New York: Academic Press, 1987. Shackel, Paul. Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2008. Slavery’s Capitalism. Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Spence, Michael. “Job Market Signaling.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–74. ———. “Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets.” The American Economic Review 92, no. 3 (2002): 434–59. Studies in Business Cycle Theory. Edited by R. E. Lucas Jr. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.

Institutionalizing the Slave Power 239 Sweeny, Kevin. “Using Tax Lists to Detect Biases in Probate Inventories.” In Early American Probate Inventories, edited by Peter Benes. Boston: Boston University Press, 1987. Sydnor, Charles S. Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.

Part V

Capital Networks, Capital Control

11 Conveyance and Commodity The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800 Phillip Reid Principal motivations for undertaking the enterprise that became the British Atlantic world were the desires for wealth, imperial prestige vis-à-vis rivals, and religious chauvinism. Principal means available were the royal treasury, a sophisticated, if risky, system of private credit, kin and religious networks strong enough to withstand transatlantic stretching, the ability to navigate vessels out of sight of land, and vessels capable of making ocean crossings while carrying enough people, and their necessities, to make such crossings both possible and worthwhile—at least potentially. Without sufficient numbers of affordable, seaworthy vessels capable of transporting people and goods across a dangerous ocean at tolerable risk, such an enterprise would not have been possible. This technology, whose basic form was roughly a century old when the English imperial venture moved westward beyond Ireland, would prove adaptable enough to meet the needs of an empire expanding demographically, geographically, and economically for two centuries. No dramatic technological rupture occurred in the merchant ship in that long period. When we delve into the reasons for that, and explore the adaptations mariners did make to the vessels, along with the changes in markets and business networks and concentrations of wealth connected to them, we gain a richer understanding of how this world worked, how it responded to its endemic challenges as well as to changes in those challenges, and how it approached the use of technology.1 When we consider that all of the people and goods and ideas of the Atlantic world came together, voluntarily or not, for better or for worse, aboard the ordinary merchant ship, we can begin to explore how all the networks holding together this new world intersected in the complex web of the ship’s rig. People who had never met each other—in many cases, had never even heard of each other’s existence—met, traded, exchanged ideas, had sex, or killed each other because some of them were transported somewhere else on a ship. The biological, cultural, political, and economic ramifications of those encounters were the creation story of the Atlantic world, a story loaded with opportunity and promise and fraught with anxiety, pain, and disaster. Europeans transported their

244  Phillip Reid notions of power and hierarchy and their material culture aboard ship. Non-Europeans, whether African or American, first encountered those alien cultural tropes aboard ship; the first non-Europeans carried aboard ship were captive prizes brought home as exotic curiosities and trophies of successful adventures. *** As the Atlantic economy developed, and slave-raised crops began to displace cod as the top New World commodities, the trade in captured Africans grew concomitantly. The first encounter between the wretched survivors of the Middle Passage, cleaned and oiled for presentation, and those who would buy them and use them usually took place on the deck of a ship. And yet, the merchant ship would prove problematic to the imposition and preservation of such black-and-white dichotomies; Atlantic merchant crews were typically polyglot and multicolored, despite the predilections of exclusivist mercantile economic “theory” and despite the rapid and deep development of racism. Some of the Africans stacked in chains belowdecks on their first Atlantic crossings—and their sons and grandsons—later found themselves free to move about the decks of ships they operated as sailors or masters, even if they were not free in the eyes of the law or the minds of their “masters” ashore.2 Merchant ships were not only the means of transporting the wealth of the elites and the elites themselves. They were also the means of stealing that wealth, of smuggling wealth between people and places outside the law, and of escape from bondage, servitude, and unhappiness.3 The merchant ship was both the tool of the established order and routinely transgressive of it. While the foregoing establishment of the merchant ship as a main stage for the acting-out of world creation in the early modern Atlantic is important, it leaves the ship as just that—a stage, a passive setting for the actions of people, and a vessel for the transport of goods.4 To move beyond that requires moving into the history of technology, a field concerned with the human use of ideas, skills, and materials to manipulate the physical environment. What the activity of technology looks like in a given society is as ideologically determined as any other aspect of that society, so that understanding the culture well enough to understand the ideologies at work in it is required for understanding its technology.5 In turn, that society’s use of technology affects it in ways both foreseen and unforeseen, and historians of technology attempt to trace connections between those causes and effects.

An Evolutionary Technology6 The merchant ship in the British Atlantic exhibited strong continuities throughout the period, as well as some significant adaptations and the

Conveyance and Commodity 245 relative ascendance and descendance of certain types relative to others. While there is still work to do in interpreting all of that in historical context, what we can state with confidence tells us much about how the merchant ship served as an intersection of all the elements of this new world, from the physical to the personal to the commercial, and how it played a part in those networks not just as a conveyance but as a commodity. To understand how those networks developed and changed over time, and how the merchant ship continued to connect them even as they grew and multiplied, it is helpful to start at the beginning of Atlantic colonization. The earliest merchant ships employed in the enterprise of the British Atlantic were the fishery transports serving the seasonal Newfoundland Grand Banks cod fishery, and the small galleons sent out on reconnoitering missions.7 These ships had to be stout and capacious enough to survive the unforgiving North Atlantic sea conditions and to carry enough men and fish to make the voyage worthwhile. Like almost all ships that served the British Atlantic throughout this period, though, they would be considered small to a modern eye. Their hulls were well-rounded, for capacity and sea-kindliness, not maximum speed. Their rigs carried a combination of square (actually trapezoidal) and lateen (triangular) sails, the combination hit upon in the fifteenth century by Iberian, Basque, French, and later northern European mariners and shipwrights as a versatile hybrid of two traditions, both of which served widely in the ancient Mediterranean. The single large square sail had been in use on northern European merchant vessels since ancient times as well. For long-distance ocean work, a rig made up of several, not one, square sails, with a lateen sail as a mizzen (aftermost) sail, allowed for efficient downwind sailing, in which the wind pushes on the sails from behind, and the vessel sails in the same direction to which the wind is blowing, more or less. It also allowed for better maneuverability than relying on steering gear alone; the lateen mizzen served as a wind-rudder of sorts, allowing easier balance of the overall sail plan and less effort for steering, especially in harbors and river mouths and other restricted areas where the ship had to maneuver in fairly close quarters. With the rig split into several sails, instead of one or two, the crew could adjust the sail plan (what sails were up, and how much of each sail was presented to the wind) according to conditions—which, in the Atlantic, changed frequently on most routes, most of the time. These ships were not built from plans. The exact form of the curves that gave the hull’s shape was determined largely by the experienced eye of the shipwright. Artisanal craftsmen acquired sophisticated skills in an apprentice-journeyman-master system, usually without any academic instruction or reliance on written references. The work was performed and supervised by a few highly skilled craftsmen rather than divided up into discrete semiskilled tasks. That is how technology was

246  Phillip Reid developed, implemented, and disseminated in the ancient and early modern worlds. *** While there were identifiable characteristics of design and construction associated with the traditions of specific European competitors, shipwrights moved around the Atlantic world like other Europeans, and ships did so as a matter of course.8 Maritime predation was a major component of the chronic imperial warfare in the Atlantic, and it took place on a large scale, with thousands of ships captured in major wars. There was little way that techniques and preferences were going to remain unknown to foreigners. Archaeologists have recently made strong cases for the blending of typically Dutch characteristics with those of English and French building traditions.9 That is not surprising, given the preeminence of Dutch merchant shipping in the seventeenth century and the large numbers of Dutch ships captured in the Anglo-Dutch Wars sparked, to a large extent, by English commercial jealousy. Dutch emphasis on economy of construction, aided by their simple building techniques, wind and water power, and access to affordable timber, had them turning out unarmed or lightly armed—and thus relatively lightly built—merchantmen with high capacity for size.10 These ships, along with Dutch credit and access to markets, allowed the Dutch to consistently undercut the shipping rates of their rivals. Indeed, the Dutch merchant fleet was instrumental in creating and sustaining not just the Dutch Atlantic but the Iberian, French, and English Atlantics as well—a fact that infuriated the governments of their rivals and garnered grudging respect from proponents of English maritime trade.11 By 1700, with the supply of captured Dutch merchantmen dwindling, English, French, and English American shipwrights were building vessels exhibiting typical characteristics of both their own traditional practices and those of the Dutch.12 Among those traditional practices for the English were stout construction and stout armament—the latter of which required the former, as the weight and recoil of cannon placed significant strain on the ships’ timbers. That made English ships expensive, but they were favored for the dangerous Mediterranean trades, bedeviled as they were by the statesponsored corsairs of the North African coast (the notorious “Barbary pirates”). To a significant extent, the preference carried over into Atlantic service, where the arming of merchant ships, and the stoutness of construction necessary to allow it, persisted as the rule rather than the exception throughout the period. It only waned after 1750, as the Royal Navy proved able to project its power much more effectively westward and southward. The fact that the ordinary merchant ship of, say, 1740 still resembled a small warship as much as it did, reflected the risks of its operating environment, and provided one means of response to some

Conveyance and Commodity 247 of those risks. Indeed, perhaps the most common hull type of the British Atlantic merchantman in the eighteenth century was called at the time “frigate-built,” as it incorporated prominent design and construction features of the frigate, a small warship enjoying wide favor in both the British and French navies.13 English and American owners did, however, adopt some general modifications to their ships along Dutch lines, it would seem making them somewhat more capacious for their size, and reducing draft (depth of the hull below the waterline) somewhat in the process, which had advantages in negotiating river mouths and sounds partially obstructed by sandbars, as was common on both the east coast of North America and the coast of the Netherlands. An unarmed merchant ship of, say, 1760 would have reflected the influence of improved Royal Navy protection, in both patrols and convoys, as well as the growth of the marine insurance market.14 To some extent, too, the Navigation Acts that set of protectionist trade laws intended to drive the Dutch out of English imperial markets, may have blunted market pressures toward cheaper ships—though not enough, it would seem, to prevent some significant attempts at economy, especially later in the period as markets grew.15 When we consider where ships were built, and for whom, in the British Atlantic, and how that changed—and did not—over time, we reveal an important example of overall economic trends in the Atlantic empire— trends that would ultimately have profound political ramifications. The earliest ships were built in England. The ships sent out to scout the coasts and islands for possible settlements were chartered—leased—by royally chartered monopoly companies. Within a decade of establishment, though, New England had a shipbuilding industry, and it only grew over time. Before the English shipbuilding industry had even caught up to the Dutch, it faced competition from within its own empire. Still, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reflected the inequalities of wealth and relative positions within credit and business networks between England-based and colonial-based interests. Typically, the larger vessels built before 1750 in English-British America were built for English owners looking to save money by having vessels built in America—savings they were likely to realize. Smaller vessels, intended for coastal and island trade, were usually owned by British Americans. After 1750, this imbalance of ownership of larger vessels was no longer. By 1767, perhaps a third of British ships were American built.16 *** One reason for the early emergence of the British American shipbuilding industry was that, while the eastern seaboard had what seemed like limitless supplies of suitable timber, it was not cost-effective to ship sufficient quantities of timber back to England for ship construction. It was,

248  Phillip Reid however, cost-effective to build the ships in New England (and, later, in the Delaware Valley), despite high labor costs in British America. Colonial shipbuilding reminded maritime interests in England that connections between the home island and its possessions across the sea were real, for better or for worse. The Thames shipbuilding lobby and its supporters railed and petitioned against American shipbuilding, arguing— rightly—that it violated the principles of how empire was supposed to work, with colonies supporting, not competing with, the industries of the mother country by supplying it with raw materials and with markets for the finished products. Colonial shipbuilding turned this on its head. An American-built British ship was a tangible example of the limits of mercantilist theory in the real world of early modern empire-building. British merchants, however, continued to order more and more ships from American yards. Merchants in London and Liverpool and Bristol wrote to correspondents in the colonies, inquiring after prices and builders and placing orders. Transfers of credit, money, and goods followed those letters. The ultimate result of those mostly intangible networked transactions was the construction and launch of a new ship from a New England or Delaware Valley yard. The shipwright might have to negotiate further with the prospective owners, though, even after he had agreed to undertake the job. Owners generally wanted the most capacity they could get out of a vessel. The shipwright was happy to deliver that, so long as the owners’ specifications did not contradict his principles of sound design and construction. If they did, he might well insist on a modification to the original agreement to accommodate his own building standards.17 After all, it was his reputation, as much as theirs, that would go down the ways when the ship was launched, and follow the vessel from port to port. Reputation was important to those serious about building and sustaining their businesses, and reputation would get around through the maritime networks of merchants, masters, and sailors. After the long-distance financial transactions were set in place, the building of a ship would draw together a local network of craftsmen; the principal shipwright was in charge, but he did not do all the work himself. Riggers and block-makers, caulkers, masons (to build brick ovens), glaziers, sailmakers, painters, and chandlers—all might present their bills for goods and services before the ship was finished.18 It was unlikely that either the shipwright or any of the other tradesmen and local merchants involved in the ship’s construction would be paid entirely in currency. Shipbuilding agreements typically specified a price per ton, expressed in pounds sterling or dollars, along with what part was to be paid in currency and what part to be paid in goods. Pounds sterling were in perennial short supply, and the most common substitute for them was “West India goods”—sugar products. Shipbuilding was an important New England industry from the earliest decades, but it

Conveyance and Commodity 249 was not the top New England industry of the eighteenth century. That distinction belonged to rum distilling. The produce of the cane, grown in the Caribbean islands, was a form of currency in itself, with sugar and molasses in constant demand on the eastern seaboard. Since the 1640s, when the New England colonies were still new, the English West Indies had been producing sugar, beginning on Barbados. As sugar production ramped up, the average size of ships produced in New England decreased, as the industry focused on turning out vessels for trade to the islands, whose ports were scattered and where individual cargoes were likely to be small (though valuable).19 The connections between New England–built ships and West Indian sugar were strong and lasting. As the sugar planters turned the maximum amount of land over to sugar production, they needed lumber for building and provisions for food and other supplies. Those commodities, in large part, were produced in the eastern seaboard colonies and brought to the islands in American-built ships, which traded not just with the British islands but also with those of the French, Dutch, and Spanish, whose islands were also producing sugar. As the sugar islands needed inter-island shipping, it was common for owners to instruct the master to sell the ship, too, if he could get a good price for her. The ship, then, as well as her cargo, was a salable commodity. *** As sugar eclipsed Virginia tobacco as the chief export commodity of English America, it provided the opportunity for New England and the Delaware Valley to develop a thriving maritime economy—one that would mature into a fully developed network of commercial enterprises that did not fit comfortably into a traditional mercantilist model of empire. That economy, of course, depended on the African slave trade. Merchant ships of what to us would be of decidedly modest size eventually transported around 12 million Africans across the Atlantic. Most of the survivors ended up on sugar plantations in the West Indies, where their life expectancy was short, and what they could expect in that short life was nothing anyone would want. While the experience of the merchant ship for mariners was as a workplace of hard, dangerous labor, the experience of it by African prisoners, chained belowdecks for most of the passage, was as an infernal conveyance of abject terror and unimaginable misery.20 For perhaps one in seven of them, it was the last place they would ever see. For those who survived, the ship, while not the site of their first encounters with Europeans, was the site of extended contact and interaction, as the passage took several weeks or even a few months, depending on conditions. That contact and interaction were, of course, an experience of unremitting brutality, and a foretaste of more of the same for those who reached their unknown destinations.

250  Phillip Reid Cargoes of slaves were only loaded after some significant modifications to the interior of the ship had been made by the ship’s carpenter and his mate. Those included flat platforms with iron ringbolts for the prisoners to lie on, with the chains of their manacles passed through the ringbolts. They included temporary bulkheads (analogous to walls) belowdecks to keep the prisoners locked in and separated by gender. They also included barricadoes, barricades on deck behind which the crew could take shelter and fire on the prisoners in the event of an uprising. It is significant that these rather major modifications were usually erected for a specific voyage and dismantled after the surviving prisoners were off-loaded at the American destination. It is an important example of the fact that, as a rule, ships throughout this period were not specialized in the way that most of ours are; they were not configured to carry one type of cargo all the time. That reflects the nature of British Atlantic markets and goods, and allowed the ship a versatility that helped her owners mitigate commercial risk and take advantage of frequently unpredictable market opportunities.21 That slaver, once the carpenter and his mate had removed all the specialized structures of the recently completed nefarious enterprise (and the ship had been washed, hosed, and pumped out belowdecks to flush out the filth and stench), would be ready to carry other cargoes to her next port-of-call—usually, naturally enough, the sugar produce of the islands, which the survivors of her slaving voyage were doomed to cultivate and process for the rest of their short, wretched lives. While it is true that merchant ships in the eighteenth-century Atlantic were built to carry general, mixed cargo (with the exception of dedicated fishing vessels), they were usually put into service on a specific route, and that route frequently featured a consistent export commodity, such as tobacco. Those commodities did create pressure for two types of specialization: containers for transport and sizes of ships. Tobacco (and sugar and rice) were transported in wooden casks or barrels (the components of which were also common salable commodities carried aboard merchant ships). The sizes of those barrels were roughly standard in the British Atlantic and had been for centuries, thanks to the wine trade with Iberia and France. Once plantation products had become major commodities, they were being transported in hogsheads, a size of cask long used for wine. Tobacco, though, was a dried leaf, not a liquid like wine or a dense granular substance like sugar. During the eighteenth century, it was packed more and more tightly, so that it was more efficient and cost-effective to transport. That was not only a commercial consideration; these ships used their cargoes for ballast—the weight carried low in the hull that provided stability at sea, counteracting both the tendency to roll in the waves and to heel (lean over) as the wind exerted more pressure on the sails. In that sense, then, cargoes were an integral part of the ship, and the safety and comfort of that ship at sea depended heavily

Conveyance and Commodity 251 on the proper stowage of a proper mix of cargo. Crews knew how to arrange casks in the hold by weight and to make sure they did not shift in a seaway—which could, in a worst-case scenario, cause the ship to capsize—and that they provided properly balanced stability for the ship. Thus, a ship’s master needed to find cargo suitable not just for profit but also for a safe voyage. Perhaps the most important difference in doing long-distance business then and now is that in the eighteenth century, communication only moved as fast as the fastest ship. Information received by merchants from their contacts around the Atlantic might well be useless once it had been received. Owners sent their ships to markets loaded with goods they hoped would sell profitably and where they hoped masters could procure a profitable cargo for the next leg or return voyage. They relied on correspondence with other merchants and on the trust they placed in the master as their employee (and perhaps partner) to increase the likelihood that the voyage would make rather than lose money. The more complete and competent the information network that intersected aboard a ship, the higher that likelihood. *** The records make clear that there was a rough standard size for a certain type of vessel engaged in a certain trade in the eighteenth century. Those standard sizes increased modestly over time—but only modestly. At the same time, the population and markets of the British Atlantic grew dramatically, especially after the 1750s and the British victory over France in the Seven Years War, when the British American economy matured. The reconciliation between those two seemingly contradictory facts is that the size of the merchant fleet increased to keep up with demand. The size limitations on merchant ships were imposed by the risk environment, not by technological capability.22 Larger ships are more expensive to build; merchants were making money in shipping. As the business grew, and as risks were mitigated at least somewhat, owners felt more comfortable (and were better-able) to invest in slightly larger vessels. At the same time, the evidence as a whole points toward a general increase in capacity for size (though we still have work to do on that).23 This was probably one of the motivations for adopting the Dutch influence, and it made for a more efficient commercial conveyance for owners, as it increased the amount of cargo the ship could carry without appreciably increasing the price of the ship, or the cost of the labor needed to operate her. As sizes of typical merchant ships increased, even modestly, though, that trend exerted pressure to modify the ships’ sailing rigs to some extent. In general, we observe a trend toward more and smaller sails as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth and as the eighteenth progressed. That is one of the most obvious differences between a typical

252  Phillip Reid merchant ship of, say, 1650 and one of 1750. Mechanical advantage—the ability to magnify human muscle power by mechanical assistance—was strictly limited. It consisted of block-and-tackle pulley systems, which can at most multiply human effort by a factor of three before becoming cumbersome and slow to operate. A larger ship needed more sail area to move her at the same speed. Once the mechanical advantage of tackles had been maximized, though, the only way to handle a bigger sail was with more people. Owners, however, were motivated to keep crew sizes as constant as possible even while increasing the capacity of the ship. The only viable solution was not bigger sails, but more, smaller ones. It might have been more work to have to adjust more sails each time the rig needed adjusting, but it was work the crew was physically capable of doing. Ton-per-man ratios—the number of tons of ship per sailor aboard—did, in general, increase in the eighteenth century—again, especially after 1750. Split rigs were the only way that was possible with even modestly larger ships. With increases in ton-per-man ratios and a movement toward more complex sail plans but smaller individual sails, scholars need to undertake a comparative labor study of earlier and later ships, in an effort to determine whether later eighteenth-century economization efforts placed more work on the individual sailor, less work, or just somewhat different work. Comparing those findings to what the documentary evidence tells us about wages and crew sizes should be revealing. To complicate this issue, we are obliged to note that, in the mideighteenth century, as rigs generally grew more complex, two-masted rigs on middling-sized ocean-going vessels increased in popularity vis-à-vis three-masted rigs.24 That would seem to contradict the aforementioned trend. Clearly, the move here was toward simplicity, with its attendant reduction in rigging costs, but in general, these later rigs were more complex than earlier ones. The issue bears technical investigation, but it is likely that the split-rig trend allowed a two-masted rig on this size of vessel to carry comparable sail area to an earlier three-masted rig without employing sails too large and powerful for the crew to handle. Indeed, this setup might reveal itself to have been ideal for the size, in that it mitigated the disadvantage of the more complex rigs—more sails and lines to work for the same sail area. This is conjecture. Moving beyond that, by calculating sail areas and relative power as well as relative workloads from reliable documentary and archaeological evidence, could tell us more than we currently know about how and why these people made significant alterations to their technology. It should be evident from the foregoing that the merchant ship was an intersection of economic forces such as labor supply and cost, merchants’ capital resources, and technological ingenuity. It was also an intersection of cultures. That may seem removed from rigging, but in fact it is not. The labor culture of the eighteenth-century sailor incorporated a

Conveyance and Commodity 253 tolerance for personal physical risk and hardship much higher than ours.25 That stemmed from a different set of expectations and acclimations, of course; early modern peoples were accustomed to discomfort, effort, sickness, pain, and death in everyday life that we are not—at least in the affluent societies of our world. They performed hard labor in grueling conditions—or so it would seem to us—as a matter of course, whether that meant splitting fence rails with a maul, chopping sugar cane, or climbing the rigging of a sailing ship rolling in a seaway to haul in a heavy sail. What is revealing about shipboard technology in the period, though, is that it did not incorporate safety precautions that were easily within the technological and economic reach of maritime interests. That does not mean that no one was interested in safety at sea, but it is telling that the public agitation for safer ocean navigation had to do with technology external to the ship—primarily lights and hazard markers— rather than such contrivances as we take for granted, such as life buoys, harnesses, and jacklines (ropes or cables run between strong points on deck, to which sailors’ harnesses are clipped, to keep them from going overboard). It would be reasonable to posit that, as unorganized labor in a hierarchical world of strictly limited opportunity, subject to the will and interest of capitalists, sailors had to accept whatever conditions they found aboard. That, however, they did not. The literature is replete with examples of the ways in which mariners typically exerted their wills and made clear what they would and would not accept. They expected fair treatment from ships’ owners and their fellow mariners, including masters. Fair treatment from owners generally included a sound ship, properly fitted-out, manned, and provisioned. Fair treatment from their fellow mariners meant fairly and evenly applied discipline and, for masters, adherence to the stipulations of their contracts. Admiralty law included protections for sailors as well as masters and owners, and sailors’ grievances were routinely brought to court. Sailors expected no “fair” treatment, though, from the sea. The work culture of those who embraced the life and committed to it at least for some period of time was based on a distinctive brand of fatalism, combined with an acceptance of risk and consistent display of fortitude in the face of danger. Musing on the possible reasons for the absence of watertight bulkheads in British Atlantic merchant ships, Benjamin Franklin acknowledged the role of mariners’ culture in such matters when he wrote that “our seafaring people are brave, despite danger, and reject such precautions of safety, being cowards only in one sense, that of fearing to be thought afraid.”26 Eighteenth-century sailors routinely demanded better pay, better food, fairer discipline, and their fair share of rum. They would never have demanded watertight bulkheads, life buoys, harnesses, or jacklines. In fact, at times their officers had to restrain them from “skylarking,” a form of play in which young sailors who had learned the rigging amused (and impressed) themselves and each other by climbing

254  Phillip Reid and swinging through the rigging in the manner of other primates, incurring significant—and unnecessary—personal risk in the process. We need to consider one more convergence of external forces for which the ship was a nexus: the natural forces of the ocean. It might seem more logical to have done that at the beginning, as those forces were in place and constant before the enterprise of the British Atlantic commenced. Considering it here instead helps to emphasize a constant that none of the adaptations to the merchant ship or the conditions of her service could alter: the limitations on ship performance imposed by the Atlantic itself. The most important of such limitations was on speed. While we would do well to analyze more data, the work already done makes a strong case that typical passage times on Atlantic commercial voyages did not increase in this two-century period.27 At first glance, that would seem to point toward technological stagnation. Yet speed, in the regular merchant service, was not a primary objective, because it was too costly, given other imperatives and the operating conditions these ships had to contend with. While the most capacious shape for any given length, breadth, and depth is a box, a sailing vessel must be at least somewhat hydrodynamically efficient in shape to make any way through the water, and it must have some curve in its bottom to be stable enough for ocean work.28 That means that its shape is fundamentally a compromise between the demands of the owners for cargo capacity and the physics of ocean sailing. Structural considerations came into play as well; full ends increased buoyancy and helped resist hogging—the drooping of the ends of the ship relative to her midsection, due to insufficiently supported weight. Full ends also contributed to capacity—but not to speed. Speed was, in fact, a fairly low priority in the design of the ordinary merchant ship, relative to capacity, seaworthiness, structural integrity and longevity, and an easy motion in a seaway. The shipping industry did not suffer as a result, especially in the Atlantic, because sailing conditions were fickle enough to cancel out a “good day’s run” with another day of calms or storms. Ships’ logs make this clear. A clean, well-rigged, and well-sailed merchant ship of ordinary size could maintain a speed of ten knots in the right conditions.29 A ship at that speed could have completed a 3,000-nauticalmile Atlantic crossing in 12.5 days. The right conditions, though, never lasted, and a typical voyage took more like three weeks on the short side and six to eight on the long side. The continents surrounding the Atlantic generate powerful air masses that collide and conflict with the moist maritime air of the ocean. Coastal junctures of contrary currents, such as the Grand Banks and Cape Hatteras, create their own volatile weather systems. The Atlantic gyre, the roughly spiral clockwise movement of water around the basin, leaves a large area of light, fickle breezes and calms in the middle of the North Atlantic. After contending with

Conveyance and Commodity 255 the surface manifestations of these forces, the average speed of the average ship for a transatlantic passage was more like two or three knots. A slightly faster hull design, then, would have cost owners capacity for what normally would have amounted to no real gain. It may be—though this must be tested—that the modest size increase we have noted helped offset any cost in speed exacted by greater capacity for size. If so, that was a net win for owners. *** The limitations of the ordinary merchant ship in this period are obvious to us. It seems like modest technology, in every way, from its size to the materials from which it was made, and its modest capacity, to its speed, or lack thereof. Yet there is no evidence that these limitations hindered the development of the world it served. When the British Atlantic shipping industry needed more carrying capacity to meet the demands of growing populations and their markets, it did not scrap its old models for new ones. It built more of what it was already building, because it worked. Some strong forces remained mostly constant throughout the period in the Atlantic, from the weather to the hazards of the coasts to the maritime predation that accompanied chronic warfare. Some materials remained in ready supply, along with the skills and equipment needed to harvest, process, and use them—wood, natural-fiber rope, canvas, pine tar and pitch, the saw and the adze, the inherited craft of plank-on-frame carvel construction. Yet those materials and skills could have produced much larger and much faster ships than they did. It is the constancy of the risk environment—commercial and physical—that determined the material form and composition of the ordinary merchant ship more than anything else. It is probable that modest alterations of that risk environment, from the expansion of insurance and the improvement of naval protection in the later eighteenth century, to the accumulation of more capital by successful owners, encouraged the modest adaptations we have noted, intended to improve efficiency and contain costs. It is not to minimize the cost of its success to judge the British Atlantic to have been a successful enterprise—on a grand scale. The revolution of the late 1770s that rocked the empire was itself largely a result of that success; colonial outposts had begun making their own way—and making their own ships—almost as soon as they had established their settlements, and by that time, the British American economies, and their polities, had matured past the point at which its elites were willing to live under the old terms of colonial dependency. Carrying that success, literally and figuratively, was the ordinary merchant ship, a valuable commodity loaded with other valuable commodities.

256  Phillip Reid

Notes 1. See Phillip Reid, “A Very Good Sailer: Merchant Ship Technology and the Development of the British Atlantic Empire, 1600–1800” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2017). 2. On black mariners, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Michael J. Jarvis, In The Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 3. The literature on smuggling and the circumvention of mercantilist maritime protectionism is illuminating and fascinating and historiographically impressive given the intrinsic difficulty of studying illicit activities. See Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV, 1998); “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 141–80; Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Victor Enthoven, “That Abominable Nest of Pirates: St. Eustasius and the North Americans, 1680–1780,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 239–301; and Alan Karras, “Transgressive Exchange: Rewriting Atlantic Law in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, February 12–15, 2003. 4. Having said that, one Atlantic history in particular is exceptionally helpful in understanding communication by ship: Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986). 5. The intellectual underpinnings of this approach may be traced from Eric Schatzberg’s Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), to Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 6. Economic and technological historian Joel Mokyr uses the terms “macroinvention” and “microinvention” to distinguish revolutionary from evolutionary technology in his The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Kindle Edition, location 299. 7. On the cod fishery, see Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For a study of a small early seventeenth-century English galleon by the ship historian who helped design a currently operational replica of her, see Brian Lavery, The Colonial Merchantman Susan Constant 1605 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988). 8. For details on distinctive design and construction features of specific European peoples, see R. C. Anderson, “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part I,” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 2 (1921): 38–45; “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part II,” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 6 (1921):

Conveyance and Commodity 257 172–81; “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part III,” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 10 (1921): 308–15. 9. See Warren Riess with Sheli O. Smith, The Ship That Held Up Wall Street (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015), and David Moore, “Anatomy of a l7th Century Slave Ship: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of the Henrietta Marie” (unpublished MA thesis, East Carolina University, 1989). 10. For an expert English-language introduction to Dutch building, see Albert (Ab) Hoving, 17th Century Dutch Merchant Ships: Text, Photos, and Plans for the Ship Modeler (Florence, OR: Sea Watch Books, 2014). 11. See Klooster, Illicit Riches, already cited; and The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 12. See Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (St. John’s, Canada: International Maritime Economic History Association, Research in Maritime History Number 48, 2012), 47. This is the most important book on its subject. 13. For descriptions of defining features of the main types of eighteenthcentury merchant hulls, see David R. MacGregor’s summary in Merchant Sailing Ships 1775–1815: Their Design and Construction (Watford, UK: Argus Books, 1980), 20, derived from Frederik H. af Chapman’s Architectura Navalis Mercatoria, an English translation of which, currently in print, is Architectura Navalis Mercatoria: The Classic of Eighteenth Century Naval Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006). 14. Christopher J. French posits the increased effectiveness of convoys in “Productivity in the Atlantic Shipping Industry: A Quantitative Study,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 613–38. On insurance, see A. H. John, “The London Assurance Company and the Marine Insurance Market of the Eighteenth Century,” Economica n.s. 25 (1958): 126–41. 15. Davis writes that the stifling of foreign competition effected by the Navigation Acts removed any motivation to experiment with cheaper fluit-like cargo carriers in the transatlantic trades—see 57. The continued reality of maritime predation, though, would have pressured strongly against it anyway. 16. Alan McGowan, The Century Before Steam: The Development of the Sailing Ship 1700–1820 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1980), 26–27. 17. This led to a modification of specifications, insisted upon by the shipwright, in a ship being built for Daniel Flexney in London by Charles West of Philadelphia. Letter, John Reynell to Daniel Flexney, John Reynell letter book 1738–1741, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, 1677–1930, Coll.l 140, Series 1, vol. 4, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 18. Chits for payments due all these tradesmen and more may be found in the individual collections comprising the Brown Family Business Records, John Carter Brown Library. See Bibliography. 19. Charles Carroll, “The Forest Society of New England,” in America’s Wooden Age: Aspects of Its Early Technology, ed. Brooke Hindle (Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1985), 32–33. 20. For important recent work on the experiences of African prisoners and mariners on slave ships—and on the ships themselves—see Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007); Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the World of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 21. On commercial risk, see Phillip Reid, “Something Ventured: The Ordinary Merchantman of the British Atlantic as a Technology of Risk Mitigation,

258  Phillip Reid 1600–1800,” Journal of Transport History 38, no. 2 (December 2017): 196–212. 22. See Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 55–76. 23. See John McCusker, “The Tonnage of Ships Engaged in British Colonial Trade During the Eighteenth Century,” in Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 1997), 26–47. 24. See Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 73–74. 25. The literature on the social and labor history of early modern seafarers is extensive. For the Atlantic merchant service in this period, we are even fortunate enough to have some published primary sources. Some important examples are Robert Barker, The Unfortunate Shipwright or Cruel Captain (London, 1795, Google Books digital facsimile); Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen & Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, 2 vols, transcribed by Basil Lubbock (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1934); and Samuel Kelly, Samuel Kelly: An Eighteenth Century Seaman, ed. Crosbie Garstin (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925). Important secondary sources include Bolster, already cited; Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998); Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 26. “A Collection of Papers on Naval Architecture,” Part I, Paper IV, Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, reprinted in London by European Magazine, Pamphlet, vol. 744, no. 3, Library of the American Philosophical Society, 23–24. 27. James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton analyzed a limited data set to reach the conclusion that passage times remained constant. Their argument is convincing, but it would be useful to expand their study. See Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 197, table 17. Speed data, though, are fraught with problems, as Howard I. Chapelle (in a book published prior to Shepherd and Walton’s but not cited by them) discusses at some length in The Search for Speed Under Sail, 1700–1855 (New York: Norton, 1984), originally published in 1967. 28. The principle has to do with the fact that a displacement hull—one that cannot plane on top of the water—cannot escape the wave it creates with its own bow. The formula is 1.34√LWL (length at the waterline). There is an exception: the modern hull with a bulbous bow, but it is not applicable to vessels of this period. 29. An accessible and legible example is the logbook of the George (ship), 1805– 1806, Am. 6823, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Bibliography Account Book of David Lowell, 1781–1801. MSS 1229.1. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. Adams, Jonathan. A Maritime Archaeology of Ships: Innovation and Social Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2013.

Conveyance and Commodity 259 Anderson, R. C. “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part I.” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 2 (1921): 38–45. ———. “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part II.” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 6 (1921): 172–81. ———. “Comparative Naval Architecture, 1670–1720, Part III.” Mariner’s Mirror 7, no. 10 (1921): 308–15. Bailyn, Bernard and Patricia L. Denault, eds. Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Barker, Robert. The Unfortunate Shipwright: Or Cruel Captain. London, 1795. Google Books digital facsimile. Barlow, Edward. Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen & Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703. 2 vols. Transcribed by Basil Lubbock. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1934. Bennett, Jenny, ed. Sailing Into the Past: Learning from Replica Ships. Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2009. Boardman, Timothy. Log-Book of Timothy Boardman. Albany, NY: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1885. Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Brown and Benson Records, 1783–1792. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Brown and Ives Records, 1796–1914. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Brown Family Records Collection, 1735–1750. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Brown, Benson and Ives Records, 1792–1796. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Nicholas Brown and Company Records, 1762–1783. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. The Records of Nicholas and John Brown, 1746–1763. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. The Records of Obadiah Brown and Company, 1760–1762. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Obadiah Brown Records, [ca. 1746]—1760. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Carroll, Charles. “The Forest Society of New England.” In America’s Wooden Age: Aspects of its Early Technology, edited by Brooke Hindle,13–36. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1985. Cecelski, David S. The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Chapelle, Howard I. The Search for Speed Under Sail, 1700–1855. New York: Norton, 1984. Chapman, Frederik H. af. Architectura Navalis Mercatoria: The Classic of Eighteenth Century Naval Architecture. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006. Christopher, Emma. Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Coates and Reynell Family Papers, 1677–1930. Coll. 140. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

260  Phillip Reid Joshua Coffin Papers, 1647–1862. MSS 457. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. Crowninshield Family Papers, 1697–1909. MH 15. Phillips Library, PeabodyEssex Museum.1727–1891. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. St. John’s, Canada: International Maritime Economic History Association, Research in Maritime History Number 48, 2012. Derby Family Papers, 1716–1925. MSS 37. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. Earle, Peter. Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775. London: Methuen, 1998. Enthoven, Victor. “That Abominable Nest of Pirates: St. Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680–1780.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 239–301. French, Christopher J. “The Longevity of Ships in Colonial Trade: Some Further Evidence.” International Journal of Maritime History 3, no. 1 (June 1991): 155–63. ———. “Productivity in the Atlantic Shipping Industry: A Quantitative Study.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 613–38. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. George (ship) logbook, 1805–1806. Am. 6823. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. George Boyd Letter Book, 1773–1775. New Hampshire Historical Society. Gilje, Paul. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Hackett Family Papers, 1718–1839. MSS 228. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. William Hale Correspondence, 1791–1839. 1984–025. New Hampshire Historical Society. Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage Through the World of the Slave Trade. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Hindle, Brooke, ed. America’s Wooden Age: Aspects of its Early Technology. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1985. Hoving, Albert (Ab). 17th Century Dutch Merchant Ships: Text, Photos, and Plans for the Ship Modeler. Florence, OR: Sea Watch Books, 2014. Jarvis, Michael J. In The Eye Of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. John, A. H. “The London Assurance Company and the Marine Insurance Market of the Eighteenth Century.” Economica n.s. 25 (1958): 126–41. Karras, Alan. “Transgressive Exchange: Rewriting Atlantic Law in the EighteenthCentury Caribbean.” Paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, February 12–15, 2003. Kelly, Samuel. Samuel Kelly: An Eighteenth Century Seaman. Edited by Crosbie Garstin. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925. Klooster, Wim. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. ———. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV, 1998.

Conveyance and Commodity 261 ———. “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800.” In Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, 141–80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Lavery, Brian. The Colonial Merchantman Susan Constant 1605. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988. MacGregor, David R. Merchant Sailing Ships 1775–1815: Their Design and Construction. Watford, UK: Argus Books, 1980. McCusker, John J. Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World. London: Routledge, 1997. ———. “The Tonnage of Ships Engaged in British Colonial Trade During the Eighteenth Century.” In Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World, 26–47. London: Routledge, 1997. McGowan, Alan. The Century Before Steam: The Development of the Sailing Ship 1700–1820. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1980. Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kindle Edition. Moore, David. “Anatomy of a l7th Century Slave Ship: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of the Henrietta Marie.” Unpublished MA thesis, East Carolina University, 1989. Orne Family Papers, 1719–1899. MSS 41. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. Pope, Peter E. Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. Reid, Phillip. “The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800: A Call for Further Research,” International Journal of Maritime History 29, no. 4 (November 2017): 911–26. ———. “Something Ventured: The Ordinary Merchantman of the British Atlantic as a Technology of Risk Mitigation, 1600–1800,” Journal of Transport History 38, no. 2 (December 2017): 196–212. ———. ‘ “A Very Good Sailer’: Merchant Ship Technology and the Development of the British Atlantic Empire, 1600–1800.” Unpublished PhD diss., Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2017. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Riess, Warren C. with Sheli O. Smith. The Ship That Held Up Wall Street. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015. Sahlins, Marshall. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Schatzberg, Eric. Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Shepherd, James F. and Gary M. Walton. Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

262  Phillip Reid Shipbuilding Agreement, 1739. Acc 2005.004. Phillips Library, Peabody-Essex Museum. Shipping Papers: A Topical Collection, 1707–1886. 1989–112. New Hampshire Historical Society. Smelser, Marshall and William L. Davisson. “The Longevity of Colonial Ships.” American Neptune 30 (1973): 16–19. Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture. Collection of Papers on Naval Architecture. 3 volumes. London: The European Magazine, 1791–1793. Truxes, Thomas M. Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Vickers, Daniel with Vince Walsh. Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

12 “Unless Speedily Relieved from Old or New England, the Commoner Sort of People and the Slaves Must Starve” The Changing Nature and Networks of the Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 Ryan McGuinness In 1689, Edward Littleton, a Barbadian plantation-owner and agent to the English government, wrote a famous pamphlet titled Groans of the Plantations. While intended to dissuade English lawmakers from passing additional impositions on exported sugar, Littleton’s work also provided an extensive list of economic problems that allegedly plagued the isolated Caribbean colony of Barbados. He disliked England’s mercantilist colonial strategy and specifically attacked its view on imports: In former times . . . the things we wanted were brought to us from the Places where they might best be had. But now we must have them from England . . . . We are sure it makes the Prices excessive to us. Littleton concluded that “English ships and English Men should not be permitted to trade to their best convenience and profit, is a thing we simply cannot understand” and will inevitably bring “the once flourishing English colonies . . . to ruin.”1 Littleton’s concerns were important and represented a common worry across the island throughout much of the seventeenth century, as most of the 66,000 people on Barbados relied upon the cheap and easy movement of imported provisions for their nutritional wellness. Unlike Jamaica, the island’s small size (166 square miles), high population density, and sugarcane-filled fields made self-sufficiency impossible. Thus, artificial limitations or disruptions to the provision trade could signal disaster for the inhabitants of England’s most profitable seventeenth-century colony. Most historians have since taken Littleton’s negative descriptions at face value and conclude that the late seventeenth century represented

264  Ryan McGuinness an era of commercial struggle and insular decline. Vincent Harlow, for example, believed that the era’s mercantilist policies stifled the import trade and “placed them at the mercy of the English merchants,” which altered island conditions “considerably for the worse.”2 Recently, however, a group of economically trained historians have challenged this 300-year-old notion. Nuala Zahedieh’s detailed work on London’s 1686 port records show that Littleton’s descriptions did not accurately reflect the robust nature of Barbados’ commercial situation.3 David Eltis built upon this work in a series of articles in which he argues that the mid1680s represented “something of a boom period” for Barbadian trade.4 These conclusions, however, only capture a broad image of Barbados’ import trade during the 1680s and 1690s, a dynamic and critical period in the island’s development as England’s premier Caribbean colony. No study yet conducted has specifically analyzed the island’s provision imports, the creation of its commercial network, or how the movement of these goods changed throughout the late seventeenth century. This historical lacuna leads to numerous unanswered questions: What did the island’s yearly provision trade look like in terms of size and scale between 1680 and 1698? Was this indeed “something of a boom period?” What range of consumable goods did the Barbadians import and where did they originate? How did the island’s commercial networks change over time, especially when domestic revolution and international war inevitably closed certain markets and altered vital shipping lanes? And, finally, how accurate was Littleton’s prediction of commercial ruin? In this chapter, I address these questions by aggregating the import data from Barbados’ surviving Naval Office’s Returns into a single database in order to compare changes to its provision trade over time.5 After a short introduction that outlines early modern England’s approach to nutritional science, the first analytical section examines Barbados’ commercial networks between 1680 and 1688, a nine-year period in which the island experienced sustained economic expansion. The second section addresses the commercial limitations that inevitably resulted from the Nine Year’s War (1689–1697) and how the Barbadians coped with these changes. Finally, I conclude with a brief analysis of the interwar recovery period between 1698 and 1700, before the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) once again threatened Barbadian trade. Overall, this work details Barbados’ place as a provision-needy nexus at the center of a vast, but fragile, trans-Atlantic world. *** Early modern nutritional theory and the Galenic model of humoral physiology heavily influenced the Barbadians’ approach to diet, dictating the foods and drinks each specific island social group could consume. In this system, an individual’s good mental and physical health consisted of

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 265 maintaining a unique and predetermined balance between the four bodily humors (blood, phlegm, choler, and bile) and four climatic temperatures (hot, cold, moist, and dry).6 When applied to diet, one had to also consider harmonizing the four recognized tastes (bitter, sour, salty, and sweet) with the nature of his or her work. Manual laborers, for example, had particularly strong stomachs and required a combination of heavier, saltier, and darker foods, while the wealthy had weaker constitutions that were better suited for light, sweet nourishment and white meats. A failure to properly adhere to these rules would lead to stomach pains, indigestion, illness, or an alteration in mood, usually toward melancholy. Thus, Barbados’ three different population groups (free white, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans) purchased and ate specific foods based on their tropical location, social position, and labor. Barbados’ free white population was large by Caribbean standards and consisted of a few hundred elite sugar planters, 13,000 farmers and small plantation owners, and nearly 4,000 urbanites that lived in the island’s towns and villages (or 17,187 total individuals according to the 1684 census).7 The wealthy plantation owners, living a relatively passive and inactive lifestyle, required a luxurious diet centered on wine and white meat. Thomas Moffat, author of Health’s Improvements, wrote that the wealthy were naturally “tender persons” who only needed “thin and light” sustenance, such as “veal, lamb, capons, chickens, poacht’egs, partridges” and small quantities of fresh fish to maintain optimal health.8 Andrew Broode, a noted physician, recommended that elite individuals living in “hote and moiste” climates should eat “fruytes and herbes and . . . muste refrayne from eating of olde flesshe,” and “Fysshe of muddy waters be nate good for them.”9 Physicians also argued that they should avoid salt, because it was not healthy for idle individuals. Thus, elite planters primarily consumed the fresh food produced on their own plantations, as they almost universally penned an array of livestock that included pigs, goats, sheep, and a variety of fowl, and had access to island fruits and locally grown vegetables, like corn, potatoes, and cassava. Furthermore, their large fields often contained wheat, which could be grounded into flour and used to make bread, and their many cattle yielded fresh milk and butter.10 Finally, their diet also consisted of enormous amounts of imported alcohol, especially Madeira’s famous fortified wine. Physicians praised Madeiran wine, as it “doth quycken a mans wyttes, comfort the herjt, scowre ye lyuer . . . reioyce al the powers of man . . . ingendre good bloude . . . [and] nurysshe the brayne and all the body” and held up exceptionally well in the tropics.11 Elite planters also regularly drank “Brandy, Claret wine, White wine, and Renish wine,” as well as “Sherry, Canary, [and] red sack.”12 These drinks, however, were less popular due to the belief that Continental wines were less “fulsome” and “neither keep nor agree well with our stomachs.”13

266  Ryan McGuinness For the remaining 17,000 free white Barbadians, imported provisions accounted for the bulk of their nutritional energy, as the food and drink that entered the island’s markets specifically did so to keep a laboring colonial population healthy. Galenic nutritionists believed that salted meats and bread represented the two pillars of any laborer’s diet. Boorde wrote that “Beefe is a good meate for an Englysshe man . . . yf it be moderately powdered that the groose blode by salt may be exhaustyd, it doth make an Englysshe man stronge.”14 Thomas Moffat, on the other hand, described bread as “the meat of meats,” while Thomas Cock wrote that “had Gods providence confined us only to this Aliment . . . we had no cause to complain of his bounty.”15 Other recommended foods for laborers included cheese, pulses, butter, oil, and starchy vegetables such as corn.16 Cheese was particularly beneficial for this group, as Thomas Tryon wrote that it “is an hard tough strong Food, very nourishing and substantial, and excellent for healthy working People,” giving them “sound Bodies, and brisk lively Spirits, able to endure Labor and Travel.”17 Nutritionists also looked favorably upon oil, “far exceeding Butter or the Fat of Flesh.”18 Like their wealthier brethren, they also washed their food down with large quantities of alcohol, but generally drank a less expensive combination of imported beer, ale, or cider, and local distilled liquors, such as perino (cassava) and mobby (sweet potato). Because most of these consumables were not locally mass-produced, the island’s free white farmers, planters, and artisans greatly depended upon the open and fluid movement of imports for their nutritional health. While it is relatively easy to assess the dietary habits of free white Barbadians, the records provide little evidence concerning the provisioning of the indentured servant population. However, due to a lack of enforced regulations and a general disdain for the group’s many Irish Catholics, contemporaries reported that its diet was especially poor and limited. Sir Thomas Montgomery, the island’s unpopular Attorney General, wrote that white servants “want the merest necessaries of food and raiment.”19 Henry Pittman’s account of his stint as an indentured servant in the mid1680s provides some insight into this group’s diet. Pittman reported that his notoriously cruel master fed each servant “five Pound of salt Irish Beef, or salt Fish a Week . . . and Indian or Guiny Corn ground on a Stone and made into Dumplins instead of Bread.”20 Thus, Pittman’s meager diet primarily consisted of approximately 260 pounds of imported salted meat and a small amount of corn, most of which was likely raised locally. Finally, enslaved Africans dealt with a similarly insufficient diet, as elite planters were not legally obligated to provide them with food.21 According to Henry Drax, each enslaved laborer on his plantation received “weekly one pound of ffish or two Mackrell, if Large, othedervise three, and owerseers and head Boylers Duble that allowance.”22 As supplements, he supplied “Every Negro two quarts of Molases Weekly . . . you

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 267 must allow Saltt when they want it and twice or thrice every year geive a barrel of palm oyle amongestt them if Easely to be procured.”23 Outside of salted fish, basic ground provisions, and some locally produced rum, most plantation owners expected the enslaved to obtain additional food on their own. To meet these needs, black laborers maintained small gardens of root vegetables, especially cassava, which they could make into bread, and Indian corn, which they ground into a porridge-like mush called loblolly; raised their own livestock; picked fruit; fished; and created an elaborate system of underground markets. Thus, imported goods represented a small but important part of the enslaved diet, as much of their protein, salt, and oil came from abroad. Overall, imports played an integral role in keeping Barbados’ inhabitants healthy and productive, as island merchants requested provisions that best suited the island’s demographics and its hot and humid tropical environment. Salted meats and fish supplied most fieldworkers (both free and unfree) with their foundational protein, thus representing the most important and widely distributed import, while free white inhabitants also required imported bread, pulses, butter, cheese, oils, and alcohol to maintain proper levels of health and productivity. The island’s wealthiest plantation owners, however, represented an exception, as their more leisurely lifestyles meant that their bodies craved fresh local foods, not old, processed meats and dairy products. Yet they still demanded large quantities of imports, especially Madeiran wine. Thus, every Barbadian population group relied upon the consistent arrival of imported provisions for their health, welfare, or pleasure, meaning that the island’s short-term success and long-term survival centered on the easy, cheap, and rapid movement of these goods throughout the Atlantic world. *** The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 represented a watershed moment in Barbadian trade. Before that time, trade within the English Caribbean was surprisingly multinational and freed from the constraints of England’s mercantilist policies, with the disruptions caused by the English Civil War and the resulting Protectorate leaving Barbadian planters and merchants to actively trade on their own terms for much of the 1640s and 1650s. During this period, they turned to the Dutch for cheap, highquality provisions and, in exchange, sent much of their sugar to Amsterdam. The Restoration, however, made the relationship between Barbados and the London metropole increasingly complex, as Charles II and his officials viewed England’s colonial possessions as a “Spring of Wealth” for an administration in desperate need of funds and sought to control the movement of trans-Atlantic goods with the Navigation Acts.24 Island historiography has traditionally viewed these Acts as detrimental to Barbados’ economic expansion by causing a substantial contraction

268  Ryan McGuinness in production and trade. Yet the raw macroeconomic data from the Returns instead suggest that the opposite was true by the mid-1670s, with the island’s robust and expanding markets reaching a commercial peak a decade later. Importantly, the most substantial gains occurred in the import trade. Governor Jonathon Atkins (1674–1679) estimated that “about 150 sail come to the Island every year” by 1676, with ships ranging in size “from 20 to 300 tons” (or about 10,176 tons overall).25 The Returns show that these numbers rapidly increased after 1681, peaking at 423 ships and over 27,200 tons in 1686. When aggregated, at least 2,491 trading vessels, with a carrying capacity of 163,807 tons, arrived in Barbados during the seven-year period between 1682 and 1688.26 Thus, the Returns show that Barbados experienced a 250% growth in its import trade within a decade, pushing Bridgetown, Barbados’ main port town, past Bristol as the second largest entrepot within the English Empire. Importantly, much of the tonnage during this period consisted of provisions, as the Barbadians welcomed the arrival of countless tons of food from throughout the greater-Atlantic world. Meat made up the bulk of food-related imports. Based on Lorena Walsh’s calculations that each laboring person required 0.45 hogsheads of meat per year, Barbados’ population of approximately 17,000 free, non-elite white inhabitants needed to annually import approximately 7,650 hogsheads to maintain optimal health.27 Even with an additional 1,238 hogsheads added on to this total for the maximum amount required by the island’s indentured servants (5 pounds per servant per week), the Barbadians appear to have had little trouble reaching the necessary amounts throughout much of the 1680s, as they imported an average of 8,931 hogsheads worth of valuable meat proteins each year. Bread and flour, the two next most important nutritional supplements for laborers, also regularly appear within the island’s trade records. While quantities could vary greatly, an average of 643 hogsheads of bread and 910 hogsheads of flour arrived annually. Merchants accompanied these goods with dairy products, such as butter and cheese (875 hogsheads), vegetables (1,197 hogsheads), and a few miscellaneous items, like oil (313 hogsheads) and the vaguely defined “provisions” (951 hogsheads) for a total of 13,521 hogsheads (or 400 pounds per person) worth of foodstuffs per year. In addition, as Table 12.2 depicts, white Barbadians also imported great quantities of alcoholic beverages. Indeed, even with Madeira wine (6,248 hogsheads per year) removed due to its luxury status, they received an average of 3,343 hogsheads of beer, cider, and spirits per year during the 1680s. In total, each white Barbadian averaged nearly a hogshead worth of imported food and drink (500 pounds), with the best years, such as 1685, peaking at 1.22 hogsheads (611 pounds). Table 12.1 also provides some insight into the enslaved population’s diet, as salted fish accounted for 20%–25% of each year’s total imports

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 269 Table 12.1  Quantity of Provision Trade in Barbados, 1680–1688 (in hogsheads) Year

Meat

Fish

Bread Pulses Flour Butter Corn Cheese Prov. Oil Total

1680 9,607 3,751 369 255 1681 3,628 2,637 196 179 1682 8,956 5,112 1,162 326 1684 8,333 3,762 702 291 1685 12,990 4,924 999 400 1686 7,715 4,574 670 282 1687 9,508 3,905 551 412 1688 8,5060 3,989 243 287 Avg. 8,931 4,215 632 313

724 674 263 207 431 353 224 38 694 2,129 1,520 75 1,343 316 569 145 1,125 871 491 116 1,278 459 1,102 157 1,235 412 1,201 217 550 302 1,898 64 951 713 936 131

194 825 945 485 326 1,191 361 246 591

166 165 241 331 511 570 294 220 313

16,210 8,676 21,160 16,277 22,753 17,988 18,096 16,299 17,736

Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1682–1688. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1682–1688; Richard Bean, “Food Imports into the British West Indies: 1680–1845,” in Rubin, Vera, and Arthur Tuden (eds.). Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 581–91. Because the measurements used to ship each item often vary, I have converted all values into standard hogsheads (500 pounds) for ease of comparison.

Table 12.2  Alcoholic Beverage Imports, 1680–1688 (in hogsheads) Year

Wine

Ale

Cider

Spirits

Beer

Total

1680 1681 1682 1684 1685 1686 1687 1688 Avg.

5,453 4,402 6,051 6,005 5,006 7,586 6,725 5,669 6,248

2,243 527 472 196 429 696 839 1,684 1,121

1,004 24 430 103 102 79 74 575 321

139 45 150 77 294 401 398 206 227

2,243 2,364 2,260 1,385 2,123 1,400 1,880 217 1,839

11,082 7,362 9,363 7,766 7,954 10,162 9,916 8,351 9,591

Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1681–1688; Bean, “Food Imports,” 582.

(or 4,215 hogsheads per year). With approximately 46,000 unfree laborers living on the island, each received approximately 50 pounds worth of imported protein, a total that matches up surprisingly well with Drax’s recommended weekly rations.28 In addition, the Returns also describe the Atlantic-wide origins for each specific type of food imported into Barbados. While the trade between Barbados and England was unsurprisingly significant, the intracolonial trade played a particularly essential role in provision imports, with approximately 1,190 ships and 60,210 tons of goods coming from local Caribbean and American mainland sources over the seven-year period. This suggests that much of the expansion in the import trade occurred due to the maximization of local commercial networks, a process that finally reached its full potential by the mid-1680s. Barbados

270  Ryan McGuinness had maintained mutually beneficial relationships with numerous mainland colonies since at least the 1660s, as island emigrants represented many of the earliest mainland settlers. The Carolinas, originally settled with Barbadian capital and manpower in an expedition led by Sir John Colleton, supplied timber, firewood, and small amounts of rice, while the Chesapeake colonies, where some 2,000 emigrants from Barbados settled during the Interregnum period, sent ground provisions, meat, and tobacco.29 In a good year such as 1684, for example, the Chesapeake colonies sent as many as 22 ships and 1,032 tons of imports, a quantity that easily exceeded the combined totals from the other middle and southern colonies. Pennsylvania, initially settled by Quakers in the early 1680s and filled with converts that emigrated from a Barbadian society that did not support their pacifist ideals, first traded with Barbados in 1684 but soon came to play an exceedingly important role in the island’s provision trade. One official reported that early Pennsylvanian farmers had “improved tillage to the degree that they have made bread and flour and beer a drug in all markets in the West Indies.”30 Beginning with only 3 ships and a combined tonnage of 175 in 1684, the colony sent 19 ships and 1,167 tons to Barbados by the century’s end.31 Increasing trade with New England also represented a key addition to the island’s import trade. With a strong intercolonial relationship that dated back to the early 1640s, the many coastal towns strewn along New

London (234, 29,570) Outports (162, 13,185) Ireland (258, 17,745) Atlantic Islands (193, 13,229) Africa (57, 6,599) New England (559, 35,100) Mainland Colonies (299, 13,331) Carib./Berm. (405, 12,575) 0.00%

5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00% 30.00%

% Tonnage

% Ships

Graph 12.1  Origin of Ships and Tonnage Imported to Barbados, 1682–1688. Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1682–1688. The numbers in parentheses represent the total number of ships and quantity of tonnage that reached the island from each location.

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 271 England’s shoreline consistently shipped a wide array of provisions to Barbados. Boston and Newport, Rhode Island achieved especial prominence in this regional trade, as the latter benefitted from connections established through Quaker networks. Together, they delivered thousands of barrels of “refuse cod” each year for consumption by the enslaved, while the northern port of Piscataqua sent more expensive fish, such as “hake, hadock, and polock, and some mackrell” to the island’s free white settlers.32 They also offered midsize planters and farmers much-needed basic staples, such as beer, bread, flour, peas, and small quantities of meat. Moreover, the wealthy often unofficially sent “small ships and barks that go to New England for provisions.”33 Contemporaries often noted the importance of this region to the Barbadians. A 1678 deposition, for example, claimed that New England was “the key of the Indies, without which . . . the Caribbee Islands are not able to subsist.”34 Another wrote that New England’s fisheries were more valuable to the Barbadians “than the golden mines of the Spanish Indies.”35 This is evident in the Returns, as they show that New England ports accounted for 25.80% (559) of the ships and 24.83% (35,100) of the tonnage sent to the island during the 1680s.36 The surrounding Caribbean islands also played a significant role in Barbados’ import trade. With various connections established through additional Barbadian emigrant networks, they accounted for 18.69% of the ships (405) and 8.90% of the tonnage (12,575).37 These numbers suggest that the ships involved in local Caribbean trade were small, quick, and cheap to operate, with the average vessels ranging between 18 and 28 tons and smaller ones as low as 6 or 8 tons. Most Caribbean imports came from Bermuda and the Leeward Islands, with Jamaica, Saltertudas, St. Lucia, Tobago, and Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American coast formerly inhabited by yet another group of Barbadian emigrants, also contributing. In addition to large cargoes of salt from Saltertudas and livestock from Bermuda, the Barbadians also regularly transported goods from the provision farms they established on St. Lucia, St. Vincent’s, and Tobago.38 England, and especially London, formed the final branch of Barbados’ importation network and represented the island’s single most important late seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic commercial relationship. While London and the outports combined to send only 18.28% of the period’s ships, they provided almost one-third of the tonnage (42,735 tons). London offered the islanders a variety of essential provisions, including “bread, flour, beer, cheese, and butter,” as well as many of the luxuries that the island’s wealthy sugar planters regularly requested, such as honey, East Indian spices, nuts, onions, aqua vitae, and Champagne.39 Furthermore, English ships also transported goods from the Atlantic islands, which provided large quantities of “wine from the Maderas and Horses, Cattle, Assinegos, from the Island of Cape Verde.” When combined with

272  Ryan McGuinness Faial, the Atlantic islands regularly sent more shipping and tonnage to Barbados than the aggregated totals of England’s outports.40 The Barbadians also relied heavily on the English ships that arrived from Ireland, which supplied 12.56% of the island’s overall tonnage during the 1680s. With Europe experiencing a rare period of sustained peace, Ireland boomed as “the home to a provisioning industry that grew into the largest exporter of packaged foodstuffs” and “set the standard for quality and longevity in the Atlantic market.”41 One visitor to Barbados noted that “the inhabitants are not able to subsist” without “their bread, clothing, malt, flesh, and pease from Ireland.”42 Edward Littleton, emphasizing the scale of this trade, claimed that “we take thousands of Barrels of Irish Beef” each year.43 In fact, as many as 14,500 barrels of beef and 2,000 barrels of pork arrived in Barbados in any given year.44 Overall, Ireland sent approximately £27,000 worth of salted meat to Barbados in the five years between 1683 and 1687, with the value rising over 150% to £42,000 between 1698 and 1702. Butter and cheese also entered island ports in considerable quantities, with the islanders annually importing between £3,000–£6,000 and £2,000–£5,000 worth of these two foods respectively.45 Thus, when viewed holistically, this study reveals four important trends relating to Barbados’ import networks during the 1680s. First, Barbados experienced substantial commercial growth, as the number of ships carrying imports grew from 150 in 1676 to a projected 464 in 1687 and their resulting tonnage from approximately 10,175 tons to a projected 30,000. Second, Tables 12.1 and 12.2 combine to show that the Barbadians consistently imported a specific range of goods that included salted meats and fish, bread, cheese, vegetables, Madeira wine, and a variety of ales, ciders, and beer. The provisions that arrived at the island highlighted the era’s continued belief in the Galenic approach to science, as island merchants received food that nutritional scientists believed best fit a tropical environment and an agricultural population. Third, Graph 12.1 provides basic insight into the legal trading networks utilized by late seventeenth-century merchants. With Barbados as their central nexus, they opportunistically created a vast commercial system that rapidly moved goods between trans-Atlantic, Caribbean, and colonial mainland ports. Finally, Barbados’ imports during this time gravitated toward an ideal ratio of 1.5:1 for colonial to English ship origins and 1:1.5 for the subsequent tonnage. When these four principles worked in tandem, as they did during the 1680s, trade remained robust and expansive; however, when any of them became compromised, trade declined and the islanders could experience a dangerously limited economy. *** The second decade of this study represents a complex period in which the robust and expansive trading networks of the 1680s came under intense

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 273 pressure from both internal and external sources. A disgruntled Parliament overthrew the unpopular James II in November 1688 and replaced him with William of Orange, who promptly instituted a new foreign policy that made English participation in the Nine Year’s War (1689–1697) a foregone conclusion. Unprepared for conflict, England’s position of strength in the Caribbean quickly deteriorated, as Louis XIV immediately authorized the French navy to attack English and Dutch possessions. By September 1689, it had launched successful attacks against St. Eustatius, an important Dutch harbor for illicit trade and the English half of St. Christopher’s. Moreover, French privateers had gained firm control over important Caribbean waterways and used them to raid English shipping, taking 62 ships at a loss of £332,800 overall and £73,050 to the King’s Customs. Finally, a catastrophic defeat at Beachy Head in 1690 cost the English control of the Channel, cutting off communication and trade with its trans-Atlantic possessions.46 As Table 12.3 suggests, most Barbadians immediately felt the strain of France’s Caribbean transgressions, as English and Barbadian merchants struggled to reestablish their disrupted commercial networks. The nadir of this era for Barbados came in 1690, when France’s informal blockade upon the island led to distressingly low shipping figures. Lieutenant-Governor Edwin Stede (1685–1690) despairingly wrote: “some French men-of-war of thirty and forty guns visited us from Martinique. [T]he French within one hour had taken . . . much needed provisions, before our eyes. We have no shipping to carry our produce and bring us necessaries.”47 The Returns support Stede’s panicked letters home, as they show projected totals of only 194 vessels, able to carry 6,478 tons, landing at Barbados in 1690. This 38% decline in ships and 60.26% drop in tonnage since 1688 dramatically hampered the arrival of needed provisions. Salted meat, for example, dropped to 1,500 projected hogsheads, a decrease of almost 85%, while corn declined 90%, butter 66%, and cheese 50%. When combined with reduced quantities of imported alcohol, as depicted in Table 12.4, the average free white Barbadian received Table 12.3  Barbadian Provision Imports, 1690–1698 (in hogsheads) Year Meat Fish

Bread Peas Flour Butter Corn Cheese Prov. Oil Total

1690 1691 1695 1696 1697 1698

297 591 173 241 800 727

1,815 7,299 1,269 4,135 4,409 9,054

3,335 5,653 984 716 2,915 8,026

197 787 94 166 530 1,323 433 130 73 444 99 53 52 224 964 48 76 749 364 25 153 1,118 1,419 488

31 174 21 83 56 691

290 4,765 80 0 800 1,570

209 7,221 203 21,101 54 3,250 184 6,647 178 10,372 286 23,534

Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690, 1691, 1695–1698. While whole returns exist for 1691, 1696, 1697, and 1698, those for 1690 and 1695 should be viewed with caution, as they respectively only account for 75% and 50% of each year.

274  Ryan McGuinness Table 12.4 Quantities of Alcoholic Beverages Traded to Barbados, 1690–1698 (in hogsheads) Year

Wine

Ale

Cider

Spirits

Beer

Total

1690 1691 1695 1696 1697 1698

1,399 5,033 2,925 2,351 1,253 4,510

72 3,410 0 1,342 385 97

42 462 16 133 106 41

8 229 70 62 26 165

926 76 506 9 3 649

2,447 9,210 3,517 3,897 1,773 5,462

Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690, 1691, 1695–1698. 1690 and 1695 are both incomplete and contain 75% and 50% of the Returns, respectively.

only 0.38 hogsheads (189 pounds) worth of imported foodstuffs (a 62.20% decrease), while an enslaved or indentured worker received a mere 34.04 pounds of salt fish. Two of the primary economic reasons for Barbados’ rapid and dramatic commercial decline was that trade suffered from increased localization, as over four-fifths of all ships originated from a colonial port, and limited tonnage (avg. 34.3). Only 29 vessels came from trans-Atlantic ports, with three arriving from Madeira and one, disappointingly filled with tallow, coming from Ireland, a country mired in its own three-year civil war between Jacobite and Williamite forces.48 Thus, with so few transoceanic ships reaching Barbadian ports, islanders looked elsewhere for their imported foodstuffs, while simultaneously participating in a series of innovative policies that helped to overcome some commercial deficiencies. At first, island merchants sought to limit risk by increasing their reliance upon New England for provisions. This, however, had also become increasingly difficult by the summer of 1690. Vessels leaving ports like Boston and Salem for Barbados had to sail past numerous well-guarded French islands, while also evading privateers and foreign naval vessels.49 Moreover, the Royal Navy had appropriated much of New England’s commercial fleet, leaving merchants with smaller ships (30 tons each) and a “great want of shipping.”50 Thus, while the Barbadians relied upon New England for a greater percentage of their ships (39.31%) and general tonnage (35.05%), these numbers were illusory, as low overall shipping totals meant that few provisions reached the island from this region. The skeletal shipping statistics from 1690 make it clear that colonial merchants struggled to find available shipping that could safely traverse the dangerous waters en route to Barbados. Newfoundland, the island’s most valuable fishery, did not send a single ship, while the other mainland colonies followed New England’s lead and dispatched small vessels laden with few provisions. The Chesapeake colonies, for example, managed to send 14 ships, but these barely averaged 20 tons and carried mostly

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 275 tobacco and barrel staves, while Pennsylvania and the Carolinas combined to send nine small ships (22-ton average) that were mostly filled with wood. Inter-Caribbean trade, on the other hand, continued to function relatively smoothly, as the surrounding islands supplied over 20% of the ships and 13% of the year’s total tonnage. Yet these ships contributed little in the way of provisions due to their own needs during a period of general undersupply. Overall, the disrupted trade networks led to severe limitations on imports that inevitably caused local prices to skyrocket. The Barbadian government, for example, complained that the cost of meat had tripled, increasing from 20 to 60 shillings per barrel of salt beef. The islanders also experienced a 250% increase in the price of fish per quintal, a 1,700% rise in cost of Indian corn per bushel, and, as Governor Kendall (1690–1694) reported, similar price hikes in “all other commodities in like proportion.”51 A government-mandated embargo, passed in London in September “on all vessels except coasting craft and ships trading to Northern Europe,” only made matters worse.52 Kendall lamented that “the high price of freight, and the scarcity of provisions . . . has caused great misery, and unless speedily relieved from Old or New England, the commoner sort of people and the slaves must starve.”53 Surprisingly, the Returns show that conditions on Barbados had greatly improved by January of 1691 and that trade, under ideal conditions, could approach figures reminiscent of the early 1680s. In that year, 328 ships, with space for 18,905 tons of goods, arrived in Barbados from ports spread across the Atlantic world. While the increasing number of vessels and tonnage was important, it was their expanding pointsof-origin that was most significant. London, the outports, and Ireland reemerged as integral commercial hubs, accounting for 71.5% of Barbados’ import tonnage (11,549 tons) and 37.20% of its ships (121 vessels). The English trade, primarily responsible for manufactured goods and clothing, had shifted focus and now offered a variety of cheap provisions, especially biscuits, peas, wheat, and oatmeal. More importantly, Ireland once again provided the all-important quantities of beef, pork, butter, cheese, bread, and beer that the Barbadians had lacked for the past two years. Beef imports soared by nearly 400%, cheese by 600%, peas by 200%, flour and bread by 50%, and general provisions by over 1,000%. Trade from the Atlantic islands of Madeira, Faial, and Cape de Verde also nearly tripled in both ships (6.40%) and tonnage (6.88%), as wealthy islanders could again purchase Madeira wine. Meanwhile, the English also shipped 10 times more cider, 47 times more ale, and 28 times more spirits than during the previous year. Localized trade from the Caribbean and mainland colonies remained substantial throughout 1691 but, as Graph 12.3 shows, had become less important as an overall percentage. While trade with the mainland colonies decreased only slightly, Caribbean trade experienced a substantial

276  Ryan McGuinness reduction, accounting for only 12.80% of the ships and 3.62% of the tonnage. No longer fearing French interference, shipping from distant colonial locations reappeared in Barbadian ports. Newfoundland fisheries, for example, sent 10 vessels and well over 5,650 hogsheads of fish to the island, providing each enslaved individual with an average of 57.69 pounds of the salted protein. The central and southern mainland colonies almost doubled the number of vessels and tonnage they sent to Barbados, while accompanying their traditional cargos of tobacco and fuelwood with increasing quantities of provisions. Virginia, for example, sent 633 barrels of beef and pork and 1,119 bushels of corn, along with some flour, peas, and beer, while New England (33%), Carolina (200%), New York (300%), and Pennsylvania (60%) also expanded their volume of trade within an increasingly safe Caribbean Sea.54 This sudden bout of commercial success resulted from both a change in England’s commercial mentality and a general shift in the war’s momentum. By the end of 1690, the English Navy had regained initiative in the West Indies, retaking St. Christopher’s and St. Eustatius with substantial Barbadian support, while adding the French island of Marie-Galante. On the European front, the Williamite war had effectively ended after the first week of July in 1690, with the Jacobites’ failure forcing James into a second exile. The English also benefitted from Louis XIV’s indecisiveness, as he failed to implement a cohesive policy in the West Indies, diverting the French Navy from the English and Dutch islands to Hispaniola and Spain’s treasure fleets.55 Domestic politics and public opinion also pushed the English government into taking a more aggressive approach to trans-Atlantic trade, which resulted in the implementation of merchant convoys in the fall of 1690 to protect all commerce sent across the Atlantic.56 Finally, with the Caribbean reopened to Dutch and English commerce, the Barbadians resumed illegal commercial practices, particularly on Curacao and St. Eustatius, to overcome some of their deficiencies.57 According to an English captain, illicit trade had become “little less than an open trade” and was so valuable that if the aforementioned islands were “sunk under water, it would be better for England by 5 or 600,000 pounds in one year.”58 Occasionally, Barbadian merchants even welcomed illegal privateers and merchants from as far away as the Red Sea and Russia in hidden coves along New England’s, New York’s, and Pennsylvania’s unguarded coastlines.59 These changes, when combined with subtle alterations within their own commercial networks, allowed the Barbadians to start shifting back to earlier trade patterns. While the Returns show island merchants still struggling to reassert peacetime economic norms between 1695 and 1697, with shipping figures remaining depressed throughout, there were distinct signs of improvement. As Graph 12.2 depicts, the percentage of New England ships rose during the final few years of conflict, jumping from approximately 25% of all arrivals to well over 30%. Moreover, the

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 277

London Outports Ireland Atlantic Islands Africa New England

Mainland Col. Carib./Bermuda 0.00%

5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00% 30.00% 35.00% 1690

1691

1695-1697

1698

Graph 12.2  Origin of Ships as a Comparison over Time, 1690–1698. Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1690–1698.

mainland colonies supplied 19.60% of the vessels and almost 13% of the tonnage, both period highs, with Pennsylvania, New York, and the Chesapeake colonies reemerging as key commercial partners. Finally, the Returns show that the Barbadians shifted away from trading with their neighboring Caribbean colonies, as neighboring islands went from supplying nearly 18% and 9% of the shipping and tonnage, respectively, in the 1680s to only 10% and 4% between 1695 and 1697. This suggests that renewed English control of the Caribbean convinced merchants previously engaged in localized Caribbean trade to seek the more bountiful ports of English North America, thus explaining the expansion of trade with the mainland colonies and the switch from importing nonnecessities, like tobacco, to foodstuffs. While the overall importation numbers continued to remain somewhat limited due to a 5% decrease in transoceanic trade, the records nonetheless suggest improving commercial conditions across the region by the war’s end. With England in control of the Atlantic, Barbadian trade slowly creeped back toward the ideal 1.5:1/1:1.5 ratio that defined the 1680s. Moreover, the average size of the ships involved in the trade almost doubled between 1695 and 1697, increasing from an average of 48.3 tons to 92.7 tons, greatly surpassing even the 65.7-ton average from

278  Ryan McGuinness the previous decade. Thus, the low overall volume remained the only lingering deficiency, as the islanders received an annual average of 184 ships during this three-year period, proving that available wartime shipping was still hard to find and that the Barbadians would have to wait until the conflict ended before they could properly recover. *** On September 20, 1697, France, England, Spain, the Dutch Republic, and the Holy Roman Empire formally signed the Treaty of Ryswick and brought the Nine Year’s War to its anticlimactic end. With an international desire to reestablish the status quo, little land changed hands and life for many returned to its prewar condition. On Barbados, however, mixed reports emerged in the war’s aftermath, with contemporary island sources describing bleak local conditions and limited recovery: “Instead of employing 500 or 600 sail of ships annually, we do not employ much above 200, to the great diminution of navigation and trade, and hindrance of the consumption of very much of the native commodities of England.”60 The Returns, however, indicate the misleading nature of such reports and instead suggest tremendous postwar commercial expansion, as the English gladly took advantage of Barbados’ demand for provisions and its own increased merchant marine. In 1698, for example, Barbadian merchants welcomed 356 ships carrying 23,534 hogsheads of provisions and 5,462 of alcoholic beverages. As Tables 12.3 and 12.4 show, merchants received particularly large quantities of those foods best suited for field laborers, such as meat, bread, fish, flour, butter, cheese, and general provisions. When broken down by population group, free white islanders could again obtain between 500- and 600-pounds worth of imports per person, an amount exceeding even the best figures from the 1680s, while the enslaved population had access to 81.95 pounds of salt fish per person. Moreover, as Graph 12.2 demonstrates, transoceanic markets regained their prominent role in Barbadian trade. London and the outports reemerged as important network hubs, combining for 17.97% of the island’s total shipping and 33.10% of its tonnage, while Irish ports increased their trade by sending 3.56% more ships and 5% more tonnage than during the previous three years. Meanwhile, Madeira and Cape de Verde continued to supply the islanders with wine and livestock at a steady rate of just over 7.5%. This meant that the Barbadians no longer needed to rely so heavily on New England’s imports, which dropped nearly 5% from the mid-1690s and 4% from the 1680s. They did, however, seek to maintain ample relationships with the middle colonies, especially Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Chesapeake region, while welcoming the return of

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 279 40.00% 35.00% 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00%

1680s

1690

1695-97

1698

Graph 12.3  Origin of Imports as a Function of Time over Four Periods. Source: TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1680–1698.

substantial shipping from the neighboring Caribbean. Thus, the Returns, as depicted in Graph 12.3, suggest that Barbadian merchants successfully reestablished their prewar commercial networks, while also returning to the golden origin-of-trade ratios of 1:1.5 for ships and 1.5:1 for tonnage. Importantly, this commercial Renaissance does not appear to have been a singular event. Even though only a quarter of the 1699 Returns exist, the numbers hint at shipping and tonnage totals that would dwarf those from 1698. Between January 2 and March 25, 119 ships, with a carrying capacity of 11,997 tons, arrived at Barbadian ports; these numbers project to approximately 450 ships and 45,000 tons over the course of a full year, with 36,300 tons of them consisting of food and drink. Thus, with peace established and the Atlantic once again opened to the free and congenial movement of goods, Barbadian trade was not only thriving but also showed signs of continued expansion and growth. Unfortunately, this boom was short-lived, as a new conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession, abruptly halted all economic progress in 1701 and forced the islanders to once again adjust to life within a Caribbean at war. *** This analysis uses Barbados’ surviving Naval Office Returns to examine the island’s changing provision importation networks during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Despite what discontented islanders

280  Ryan McGuinness like Littleton communicated back to London, the Returns show Barbados reaching a peak commercial period during the 1680s, as the islanders utilized a number of commercial relationships to acquire unprecedented quantities of imported provisions, including salted meat and dairy products from Ireland and England’s mainland colonies, wine from Madeira, livestock from Cape de Verde, and luxury foods from London and the English outports. In addition, the Returns show that island trade reached its most balanced levels when the ratios of colonial to English trading vessels reached 1.5:1 and 1:1.5 for tonnage. Between 1681 and 1688, for example, the island welcomed 40.31% of its shipping and 57.13% of its tonnage from English points-of-origin, which resulted in a well-supplied and well-stocked island. The Revolution of 1688 and the Nine Year’s War, however, dramatically altered Barbados’ delicate balance of trade. England’s initial struggles against the French Navy in 1689 and 1690 threw the island’s commercial networks into disarray, making it both expensive and dangerous for merchants to import goods to the Caribbean. This forced the Barbadians to disproportionately rely on lower-risk trade from neighboring settlements that either did not historically supply provisions or were unable to handle the additional demand. The trade ratios fluctuated wildly during the war years, but between 1689 and 1697, only 31.81% of ships and 47.76% of tonnage originated from trans-Atlantic ports.61 The inevitable result was a decreasing supply of needed provisions and soaring prices on those that did reach the island. At a local level, the Barbadians countered import scarcity by leaning heavily on a surprising level of self-sufficiency, the omnipresent interloper trade, and collaborating with England on establishing a convoy system. Thus, by 1691, the situation had improved markedly for the island’s inhabitants. As the Nine Year’s War entered its final stages, Barbadian commerce began to gradually shift back toward normalcy. While still seeing few ships arrive from transoceanic ports, the islanders did welcome an increasing percentage of ships and tonnage from the colonial mainland, suggesting that these routes were becoming increasingly reliable and safe. The European-wide peace that followed the war’s conclusion in 1697, however, finally solved all supply problems. By the end of the century, this tranquility, when coupled with previous supply deficits and England’s growing merchant marine, resulted in a sudden explosion of commercial activity that pushed trade back to prewar trade ratios (between 1698 and 1699, 40.63% of ships and 58.13% of tonnage derived from England/trans-Atlantic ports) and surpassed the decade’s shipping and tonnage totals. Thus, while the Returns show that Littleton’s claims of disastrous decline have periodic moments of truth during the 20 years between 1680 and 1699, his descriptions of Barbados lack nuance and overall accuracy. In a peaceful Atlantic, Bridgetown represented one of the most important entrepots within the First English Empire, easily outpacing Bristol as the nation’s second busiest. While war

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 281 interrupted this success, it was only temporarily, as English and Barbadian merchants teamed with island planters to reestablish high levels of trade that allowed the small island to regain its place as England’s most important and influential Caribbean colony by the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. Edward Littleton, Groans of the Plantations (1689), 1, 19. 2. Vincent Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 259–67. 3. Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 144. 4. Eltis’ works, however, generally focus on the island’s export trade. David Eltis, “New Estimates of Exports from Barbados and Jamaica, 1665–1701,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 4 (October 1995): 645–46; “The Total Product of Barbados, 1664–1701,” Journal of Economic History 55, no. 2 (June 1995): 324. 5. First established in the Navigation Acts of 1673, the Naval Officer kept quarterly shipping lists that catalogued vessels entering and leaving colonial ports. In their most complete form, they include information on dates of entry, ships’ names, home port, tonnage, build, captain, guns, imports, last port of clearance, next destination, and exports. Copies exist in the National Archives (henceforth TNA) under call-number CO 33/13 and 33/14. 6. Thomas Tryon, The Good House-Wife Made a Doctor (1692), 157–70. 7. Newberry Library, Ayers MS 827, 1684 Census 8. Thomas Moffat, Health’s Improvement: or, Rules Comprising and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing All Sorts of Food Used in This Nation (1655), 32, 285–86. 9. Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Healthe (1542), Chapter 23. 10. Moffat believed that milk “nourisheth plentifully, encreaseth the brain, fatneth the body, restoreth flesh, asswageth sharpness of urine, [and] giveth the face a lively and good colour.” Moffat, Improvement, 119–25. 11. Boorde, Regyment, Chapter 10. 12. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Iland of Barbadoes (1657), 33–38. 13. Royal Society (henceforth RS), EL/15/74, June 27, 1675, Lister’s Letter to Oldenburg. 14. Boorde, Regyment, Chapter 16. 15. Moffat, Improvements, 236; Thomas Cocke, Kitchin-Physick (1676), 64–65, 75. 16. Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36–116. 17. Tryon, House-Wife, 72. 18. Ibid., 69–71, 115–18. 19. TNA, CO 29/4, August 3, 1688, Montgomery to Lords of Trade. 20. Henry Pittman, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pittman (London, 1689), 11–12. This rough diet made Pitman very ill. When he asked Robert Bishop, his master, to replace cornmeal with more expensive imported flour, Bishop replied that his servants “should not have

282  Ryan McGuinness [it] so good,” beat Pitman with his cane, and confined him “close Prisoner in the Stocks.” 21. Newberry Library, Case K 383.015, Anon., “An abridgement of the laws in force in Her Majesty’s plantations” (1704). 22. Imported salt fish was notoriously unpleasant and almost nutritionally worthless, as its proteins are extremely unstable and would have likely broken down on the journey between Newfoundland and Barbados. Its place within the enslaved worker’s diet stemmed from its cheap price. Costing approximately 10 shillings per quintal, planters could feed a workforce of 50 for about £35 per year. In comparison, the Assembly lamented that they had to set aside £10 for each indentured servant. TNA, CO 31/2, September 16, 1685, Assembly to James II. 23. Henry Drax, “Instructions on the Management of a seventeenth-century Barbadian Sugar Plantation” (1679), 5. Drax was famous for his “favorable” treatment of his enslaved workforce. Other plantation owners were far less generous. 24. William Wood, The Great Advantages of Our Colonies and Plantations in Great Britain (1728), 91. 25. I based this value on the period’s average tonnage of 67.84 applied to the 150 ships that Atkins claimed arrived at Barbados. TNA, CO 1/37, July 4, 1676, Atkins to Lords of Trade. 26. This accounts for an average of 356 ships and 23,401 tons of carrying capacity per year. 27. Lorena Walsh, “Feeding the Eighteenth-Century Town Folk, or Whence the Beef?” Agricultural History 73, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 273. 28. The population numbers are based on the 1684 census (Newberry Library, Ayers MS 827). 29. TNA, CO 5/1308, April 22, 1697, Andros to Council of Trade. 30. TNA, CO 323/3, March 6, 1700, Quary to Commissioners of Customs. 31. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1684–1698. 32. TNA, CO 5/1045, November 28, 1700, Bellomont to Council of Trade. 33. John Cary, “An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes, for Carrying on the Present War Against France,” (1695): 17; Child, “New Discourses,” 206; CO 1/47, June 11, 1681, Dutton’s answers to heads of inquiry. 34. TNA, CO 1/42, October 17, 1678, Deposition of Captain Breedon. 35. Jonathon Barth, “Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 2 (April 2016): 269. 36. Child, Josiah, A New Discourse of Trade wherein is recommended several weighty points [. . .] (London: John Everingham, 1693), 207. 37. Caribbean shipping, as enumerated in the Returns, is substantially underreported. Planters often owned small private sloops that stealthily moved a variety of goods from neighboring islands into the small bays and unguarded inlets near their plantations to avoid paying duties. Officials never registered these small ships, as it was “so very intricate and troublesome” to record them all. TNA, CO 152/6, May 24, 1705, Johnson to Council. 38. TNA, CO 33/13 and 33/14, 1684–1691. 39. TNA, CO 33/14, 1684; Littleton, Groans, 24. 40. TNA, CO 29/2, June 14, 1676, Atkins to Council of Trade. 41. Thomas Truxes, “Ireland, New York, and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” American Journal of Irish Studies 8 (2011): 11–13. 42. TNA, CO 1/43, September 15, 1679, Talbot to Southwell.

Barbadian Import and Trade, 1680–1700 283 3. Littleton, Groans, 23. 4 44. TNA, CO 33/14, 1684. 45. R. C. Nash, “Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 3 (July 1985): 332. 46. TNA, CO 5/1, September 1689, Account of ships taken by French privateers; William Morgan, “British West Indies During King William’s War,” Journal of Modern History 2, no. 3 (September 1930): 378–86; James Pritchard, “The French West Indies During the Nine Years’ War, 1688–1697: A Review and Reappraisal,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 45–48. 47. TNA, CO 28/1, February 11, 1690, Stede to Lords of Trade. 48. TNA, CO 28/3, September 8, 1696. 49. TNA, CO 5/1305, November 21, 1689, Merchant Petition. 50. TNA, CO 1/68, September 11, 1690, Merchant Petition. 51. TNA, CO 29/4, August 22, 1690, Kendall to Lords of Trade. 52. TNA CO 324/5, September 18, 1690, Council Minutes. 53. TNA, CO 29/4, August 22, 1690, Kendall to Lords of Trade. 54. TNA, CO 28/3, September 8, 1696, Council to Council of Trade; CO 33/13. 55. Morgan, “King William’s War,” 380–90; Pritchard, “The French West Indies,” 45–47. 56. TNA, CO 1/68, December 9, 1690, Merchant Petition to the King. 57. TNA, CO 152/37, July 4, 1690 and August 3, 1690, Codrington to Lords of Trade; CO 153/4, November 25, 1690, Ibid.; CO 152/4, May 5, 1701, Ibid. 58. TNA, CO 323/6, November 4, 1709, Holt to Bilton. 59. TNA, CO 5/713, June 25, 1695, Memorial of Thomas Laurence. 60. TNA, CO 28/4, December 6, 1700, Barbadian Agents to Council of Trade 61. The statistics from 1691 are not included in these calculations, as the naval convoy’s considerable success led to results that were not indicative of wartime trade patterns.

Bibliography Barth, Jonathon. “Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 2 (April 2016). Bean, Richard N. “Food Imports into the British West Indies: 1680–1845.” In Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, edited by Rubin Vera and Arthur Tuden, 581–90. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1977. Cary, John. “An Essay on the State of England in Relation to its Trade, its Poor, and its Taxes, for Carrying On The Present War Against France.” 1695. Child, Josiah. A New Discourse of Trade wherein is recommended several weighty points [. . .] (London: John Everingham, 1693). Accessed 18 January 2020. Early English Books Online, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=eebo;idno=A32833.0001.001 Cocke, Thomas, Kitchin-Physick, 1676. Drax, Henry. “Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation.” 1679. Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

284  Ryan McGuinness Eltis, David. “New Estimates of Exports from Barbados and Jamaica, 1665– 1701.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 52, no. 4 (October 1995): 631–48. ———. “The Total Product of Barbados, 1664–1701.” The Journal of Economic History 55, no. 2 (June 1995): 321–38. Harlow, Vincent T. A History of Barbados, 1625–1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926. Kander, Astrid, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde. Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2013. Kiple, Kenneth F., The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Koot, Christian J., “A ‘Dangerous Principle:’ Free Trade Discourses in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands, 1650–1689.” Early American Studies (Spring 2007): 132–63. Littleton, Edward. The Groans of the Plantations. London, 1689. Moffat, Thomas. Health’s Improvement. 1655. Morgan, William Thomas. “British West Indies During King William’s War (1689–97).” The Journal of Modern History 2, no. 3 (September 1930): 378–409. Muldrew, Craig. Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Nash, R. C. “Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 42, no. 3 (July 1985): 329–56. Pittman, Henry. A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pittman. London, 1689. Sheridan, Richard B. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775. Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974. Tryon, Thomas. The Good House-wife Made a Doctor. 1692. Zahedieh, Nuala. The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Contributors

Victoria Barnett-Woods received her PhD from the George Washington University. Her current research project, “Reading the West Indies: Empire Slavery and the Rise of the Novel” explores the complicated cross-pollination of the imperial history in the Caribbean (English, Spanish, French, African diaspora) and the “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland. Chelsea Berry received her doctorate in History from Georgetown University, where she studied and taught on the early modern Atlantic world. She is Assistant Professor of History at Randolph College. Her research projects explore the relationships between ideas on poison, medicine, and sorcery in the Atlantic through the lens of poison trials in eighteenth-century Bahia, Martinique, and Suriname. Kelly Houston Jones is Assistant Professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. Her research interests include American slavery, the American South, and African American History. She has published a number of articles about slavery, material culture, and the American South. Most recently, she has published in Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas and the journal Agricultural History on bonded and enslaved women working on cotton plantations. Kristin Condotta Lee is a lecturer at the University College at the Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a consultant for the Surrey Calendar Colonia Project, sponsored by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Her manuscript project, Foreign Imports: Migration, Materiality, and Early New Orleans, explores the critical connection between Irish immigrants and material networks in late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century New Orleans. Wendy Lucas is Chair and Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas. She has published multiple articles on early American history, using quantitative analysis to examine testimonials, depositions,

286  Contributors probate records, and other important historical documents that construct a narrative about the colonial New World. Christopher Magra is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Interested in merchants and maritime, his research and publications explore early American social history as it relates to maritime economics. His book, The Fisherman’s Cause: Atlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution won the Winslow House Book prize in 2009. Ryan McGuinness received his PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh, where he conducted research on seventeenth-century Barbados. His dissertation, “ ‘They Can Now Digest Strong Meats’: Two Decades of Expansion Adaption, Innovation, and Maturation on Barbados, 1680–1700,” examines the different Atlantic networks that contributed to Barbadian colonial expansion. Rebekah Mitsein is Assistant Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Her current research project traces how African peoples, places, and discourses shaped eighteenth-century British texts and influenced Enlightenment ideas about the self and the world. Phillip Reid is an independent historian who works on British Atlantic ship technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He received his PhD from Memorial University in New Foundland and Labrador. Reid’s most recent work, “Notes from a Published Treatise in an Ordinary Eighteenth-Century Shipwright’s Journal” has been published in Mariner’s Mirror. Orianne Smith is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Associate Professor of Gender and Women Studies at University of Maryland in Baltimore County. Her work, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters 1786–1826, was published in 2013. Her current book project traces the gendered and sociohistorical significance of the Romantic preoccupation with magic and witchcraft. Barry L. Stiefel is Associate Professor at the College of Charleston, where he researches and teaches the unique intersection of Historic Preservation and Urban Studies. In 2014, Stiefel authored two monographs: Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture, 1450–1730 and Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic Word: A Social and Architectural History. Leah M. Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia State University, where she teaches courses in early American literature, African American literature, and film studies. She has a forthcoming book

Contributors 287 from Bucknell University Press entitled, Literary Landscapes: The Geographic Imagination in Early Women’s Fiction of “America.” Lisa Vandenbossche received her doctorate degree from the University of Rochester and is Assistant Professor at the College of Coastal Georgia. Her work includes the examination of maritime labor and advocacy in the late eighteenth century. She has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Index

abolition: Abolitionist Bills 160; in Caribbean 160, 162; in Europe 157; in North America 147 – 9, 156 – 7 Africa 79, 82, 84, 87, 89, 91 – 2, 94 – 5, 102; representations of African peoples 79, 81, 84, 85, 94, 103 – 5, 109, 111, 112 – 14, 115, 116 Akan 107, 113 – 14, 116; language 106 – 7; see also West Africa Alexander, James 202 American War for Independence 154 – 5 Americas, the 79, 80 – 2, 84 – 5, 87, 89, 91 – 2, 94 – 5 appraisers 216 – 18, 219 – 20, 224, 229; and “deference” 217 – 18, 219 – 21, 224 – 5, 229 – 31; and expectation of wealth 224 – 5, 229 Atlantic Ocean 19 – 20, 31, 79, 91 – 2, 94 Atlantic Studies 5 – 6, 105, 117 Barbados 263 – 4; economic growth 268, 272, 279 – 80; and England 271 – 2; and France 273; and New England 269 – 71, 274 – 5, 276, 278 – 9; and other islands 271; population 265, 268; slave law 126 – 7; and trade 267 – 8, 269 – 70 Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko 79, 85 – 6, 95 Benin 102, 109, 115, 117; bronzes 102, 109, 112, 115; see also West Africa black medical practitioners 56, 58, 60 – 1, 64 – 7; connections to American healing practices 61, 62 – 3, 64; connections to European healing practices 62; and poisoning 57, 58, 65 – 6; scholarship on 57; social networks of 57, 59 – 60, 61 – 2, 65 – 6; titles of practitioners

across Americas 58 – 9, 67; trials against 57 – 8, 60 – 1, 64 – 6; and witchcraft 57, 62 Blair, James 197, 203 Bosman, Willem 103 – 6, 113 – 17; New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea 103, 104, 112 – 14, 115 – 17 Boston 176, 179, 181, 183, 184 Bosworth, Nathaniel 180 – 1 Brazil 56, 87; Bahia 56; black medical practitioners in 56 – 67 British Admiralty 253 – 4 British Guiana: Berbice 132 – 5 buccaneers 2 – 3 calundús 56, 61 – 2 cheese 266, 273 chocolate 173; chemical composition of 175; commercial trade in 174 – 5, 177 – 8, 180, 183; consumption of 175; manufacturing in North America 174, 176, 180; and medicinal use 175 – 6 Clark, Daniel Jr. 198 Clark, Daniel Sr. 198, 205 cocoa beans 174; amount imported in North America 174 consumable trade goods 147 – 8, 149, 152 – 4, 156 – 8, 160 – 4, 173, 176, 179 – 84, 264 – 5, 268 – 74 contact zone 82, 102, 103, 105, 111 contagion: rhetoric of 22, 25, 27, 29, 31; transcultural writing as 21 Cook, Captain James: journals 20, 22 – 4, 27, 30 – 1; relationship with British Admiralty 19 – 20, 22; relationship with indigenous peoples 20, 22, 23 – 5, 28 – 9, 32 corn 266

Index  289 cotton 194 – 5, 199 – 200 cultural capital 56 – 7, 61, 64, 65, 66 “cultural economy” 5 Dampier, William 85, 87 Davis, Caleb 176 – 7, 178 – 9, 180, 183 – 4 Defoe, Daniel 87; The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 85; Robinson Crusoe 79, 85, 86 – 7, 95 De la Beche, Henry 130 – 2; Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica 130 Delaware Valley 248 – 9 De Warville, Jacques Pierre Brissot 156 – 7 domestic labor 195 dress, fashion 199 – 202, 205; men’s fashion 201 – 3, 205 – 6 Dutch trade 267, 271, 273, 276 Dutch West India Company 105, 110, 113, 115, 116 Earle, William 37 Edo 102, 107, 109; see also West Africa Edwards, Bryan 45 English Civil War 267 Enlightenment 103, 111 feitiçaria 56, 62, 66; see also Obeah fetish objects 103, 106 – 11, 123 – 5, 130 – 2, 134 – 5; and animism 106; criminalization of 127, 128; and gris-gris 106; and Obeah bag 126, 129 – 30, 135; see also Obeah fish 245, 270 – 1 Fitzpatrick, John 198, 200 – 1 flaxseed 195 – 8 flour 173 Franklin, Benjamin 159, 253 French Revolution 156, 159 Fuentes, Marisa 126, 132 furniture 228 – 9 geographic imagination 79, 82, 84 – 6, 91, 94, 103 Gomes, Paulo and Ignacia 56 – 7, 60 – 2, 64 – 5 Gothic genre 37, 44, 48, 51 – 2 Haiti 178, 183 Haitian revolution 37, 157 – 8, 159 – 60, 162

Hawkesworth, John 21, 24, 28 honey 162 immigration 193, 199; material goods and 193 – 4, 197, 203 – 6 indigenous peoples and indigeneity 147, 149; Arioi, the 21; sexual relations with 24 – 6, 30 – 2; see also Native Americans Inquisition in Americas 56, 58, 60, 62, 66 Ireland 193, 196, 272; Irish beef 272, 275; Irish immigration to United States 194 – 206 Irish linen 194, 198 – 200, 202, 206; foreign demand of 195 – 6, 199; and global trade market 194 – 5, 198; and hygiene 195, 199, 202; and laundering 202 – 3, 205; production of 195 – 6; repair of 203 – 4; shoppers of 202; social value of 203 – 6 ivory 102, 107, 111 – 12, 115 Jamaica 126, 130 – 2, 135 – 8; Maroon population 46, 51 Jefferson, Thomas 157 – 8 Juan Ferdinando Island 86, 87 – 9 Labat, Jean-Baptiste 1 – 3 Littleton, Edward 263, 272, 279 – 80; Groans of the Plantations 263 Long, Edward 44 – 5, 47 – 8 maple 147 – 64; and abolitionists 156 – 8, 159, 162; as alternative to sugar 147, 153, 154, 156 – 8, 160, 162, 164 – 5; early colonial production of 152, 164; indigenous production of 149 – 52, 164; and the “maple sugar bubble” 149, 161; and mass manufacturing 154 – 5, 156 – 7, 158 – 9, 162 – 4; and moral consumerism 148 – 9, 155 – 6, 157, 159, 162, 164 – 5; and patriotism 158 – 9; sap 147, 150 – 2; as source of income 152, 154; and trade 148, 153 – 4, 163; tree 147, 149 maps 79 – 81, 83, 84, 89 – 91, 92; mapmaking 81 Martinique: black medical practitioners in 57, 58, 60 – 1, 62 – 4 Massey, Samuel 173, 176, 178, 183 – 4 material culture 194, 202 – 3

290 Index Material Studies 7 – 8, 91 mermaids 81, 83 – 4 mimesis 82 mirror 80, 82; as metaphor 79, 80, 82, 83, 87, 92, 94 Moll, Herman 79, 84 – 5, 87, 92

Pietz, William 103, 124 Potosí 92 probate records 194, 201 – 2, 205, 216, 217 – 19, 223 – 6, 231 – 2; and regression analysis 221 – 2, 226 – 7; and statistical analysis 221 – 3, 224

Native Americans 79, 81, 85, 86, 94, 147, 149, 196 – 7, 198 – 9; and contact with Europeans 152; and trade 198 – 9; see also indigenous peoples and indigeneity Naval Office Returns 264, 268 – 9, 271, 273 – 80 Navigation Acts 247, 267 – 8 New Orleans 193, 196, 199, 201, 205 – 6; climate 200; dressers in 194, 202 – 5; history of 196 – 7; immigration to 196, 204 Nine Year’s War 264, 273 – 5, 278, 280 nutrition 264 – 5; and class 265; Galenic model of humoral physiology 264 – 5, 272

Quakers 156, 159, 161 – 2, 270 – 1; British 161

Obeah 38, 45, 123 – 38; in Barbados 126 – 7; in British Guiana 128, 132 – 5; and Christianity 123 – 4; as countersurveillance 131 – 2; and drums 126 – 7, 128; gender 38; in Grenada 127; in Jamaica 126, 135 – 8; as justice 130, 132, 133 – 5, 137 – 8; laws against 42, 124, 126 – 7, 132 – 5; medicinal knowledge and 123, 125 – 6, 136 – 7; plantocratic fear of 125 – 6, 128, 129, 131 – 2, 134, 136; and poisoning 126 – 8, 131; practitioners of 38, 41 – 2, 123, 129 – 30, 132 – 3, 135 – 8; in Saint Lucia 128; in Saint Vincent 127; as spiritual system 38, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133 – 6, 137; trials against practitioners 132 – 8; and witchcraft 38 – 9, 42, 45, 50, 52; see also Feitiçaria Oberea, Queen 21 oceanic travel 194, 206 Pacific Islands: Hawaii 23, 25, 31 – 2; Tahiti 21; Tasmania 29 Pacific Ocean 19 – 20, 87, 92 Picts 85 – 6 Pierpoint, Jonathan 180, 182

rice 250 rum 248 – 9, 252 Rush, Benjamin 157 – 9 salted meat 266, 272, 273 self-Other dichotomy 79, 82, 83, 91 Seven Years’ War 152, 197, 251 shipbuilding industry 177, 247 – 9, 255; Thames shipbuilding lobby 248 ships 243 – 55; American built 247 – 8; British merchant vessels 243 – 50, 254 – 5; and cargo 249, 250 – 1; as commodity 245, 247 – 9, 251, 255; construction 245 – 7, 248, 250, 252, 254 – 5; cultural value of 243 – 4, 248, 252 – 3, 255; Dutch influence on 246 – 7, 251; frigates 247; the Kingston 178 – 9; the Matilda 180; the Raven 180; and sailors 252 – 4; sails 245, 252; the Sally 181; ship contracts 177 – 8; shipwrights 245 – 6, 248; and speed 253 – 5; structures of 245 – 7; technology of 243 – 6, 250, 251 – 3, 255 slavery 89, 164 – 5, 196, 197, 201, 216, 218, 222, 232, 244; and “civilizing mission” 218; and conspicuous consumption 218 – 19; and economy 218, 222 – 3; enslaved peoples 155 – 6; and gender 227, 229; medical practice in 62 – 3, 66; and miscegenation 37; the New York Slave Rebellion 155; and nutrition 266 – 7, 268 – 9; and power 217 – 18, 220, 232; punishment against the enslaved 61; and real estate 218, 219, 223, 229; slaveholding estates 216, 219 – 20; and status of slaveowners 216 – 17, 219 – 20, 222, 224, 225, 231 slave trade 249 – 50; vessels 249 – 50; see also ships

Index  291 Smith, Charlotte: connection to Jamaica 45; Letters of a Solitary Wanderer 43; and Macbeth 41, 43, 46 – 7, 50 – 2; Minor Morals 39 – 40; The Story of Henrietta 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46 – 7, 48 – 52; views toward gender 38, 44 – 5; views toward slavery 38, 42 – 4, 47; and witchcraft 39 – 40, 41, 46, 52 South Sea Project 87, 92 St. Helena 87 – 9, 91 sugar 147, 152, 248 – 9; and boycotts of 148 – 9, 154, 159 – 60; and production in India 160; production of 147, 160 – 2, 163, 165; and slavery 147, 148 – 9, 160; Sugar Acts 153; sugar beet 147 – 8, 162 – 4, 165; sugar riots 160 Suriname: black medical practitioners in 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Tacky’s Rebellion 41 – 2, 123 – 4 Thistlewood, Thomas 128 – 30 tobacco 249, 250, 270 trade: African and European 103, 105, 109 – 11, 116 – 17; gold 103, 104, 111, 115, 117; importance of in Americas 22, 24; indigenous women as objects of 20 – 2, 25 – 7; ivory carvings 107; moveable goods 20, 23, 244; networks 24 – 5, 27, 29, 31 – 2; routes 19; sexual 20, 32 trade markets 173 – 4, 176, 198, 199, 203, 205, 206, 243, 244 – 5, 247 – 8, 255, 263 – 4, 266 – 8, 270 – 7, 279 – 81; experiential knowledge of 176 – 7, 180 – 4; fluctuation in 179 – 82; hemispheric 174, 176, 178 – 9; long-distance 177, 182; market conditions in Atlantic trade 179 – 84; provision imports 264 – 7,

268 – 72, 274 – 6; role of sea captains 173 – 4, 177 – 84; transatlantic 180; and war 178 – 9, 272 – 8, 280 – 1 transatlantic slave trade 84, 87, 89, 91 – 2, 194 – 206 travel writing 20, 22, 27, 30 – 1, 103 – 6, 110 – 11, 112 Twi language 106; see also West Africa Van Nyendael, David 109, 112, 115 venereal disease 20, 25 – 6; and morality 27 – 8, 31 – 3; prevention of 22, 26, 30 Virginia 216 – 17, 231; black medical practitioners in 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65 – 6; enslaved spiritual practice in 63; and gentility 216, 219, 229, 232; law and punishments against enslaved 66; and “men of influence” 216; runaway slave advertisements in 65; social life 216, 219, 227, 231; York County 216, 219, 226, 231 War of the Spanish Succession 264, 279 weaving 195 West Africa 102, 111; art in 102, 107, 109, 111 – 14; belief systems in 103, 104, 105 – 6, 108 – 9, 112, 113 – 15, 117, 125; iconography 105, 107 – 8, 109; material culture in 102 – 5, 108, 109, 112, 113; music in 112 – 13, 117; trade with Europeans 102, 103, 105, 109, 111 Wilson, Kathleen 24, 30 wine 265, 271, 273 – 5 witchcraft 40 – 1 Yoruba 106, 107, 108, 113 – 14; art 108; see also West Africa