Hidden in plain sight: escaped slaves in late-18th and early-19th century Jamaica Simon P. Newman THIS ESSAY WILL BE PUBLISHED IN A FREELY AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS FORMAT, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, VIDEO AND SOUND EMBEDDED (See the William and Mary Quarterly’s digital reader). THUS THIS VERSION SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED ON ENLIGHTEN) Escape from slavery on the British island of Jamaica was both difficult and dangerous. Leaving the island was rarely an option, and the Maroons were bound by treaty and liberally rewarded for capturing and returning runaways who sought sanctuary in the island’s interior. The potential price of escape was plain to see, for the decaying heads and skulls of rebellious slaves were mounted on sharpened sticks and placed at crossroads or intersections all over the island. To white Jamaicans these grisly human remains were a familiar and even comforting part of the environment, but the enslaved must surely have seen them very differently as a constant reminder of the potential fate awaiting for those who resisted their enslavement.1 1 Cuba was more than 90 miles to the north and St. Domingue almost 125 miles to the east, and both smaller craft and ocean-going vessels were carefully monitored. A few advertisements indicate masters' suspicions that runaways were endeavouring to reach Spanish colonies and secure freedom by asserting that they were converted Catholics who were unable to practice their religion in Jamaica, but only a very small fraction of runaways attempted to make their own way to Cuba or other islands. See Linda M. Rupert, “Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 30, 3 (2009), 361-82. I am grateful to Casey Schmitt for sharing evidence of late-eighteenth century Jamaican escapees reaching Cuba, and of white masters endeavouring to recover them. See, for example, "Correspondencia de los Capitanes Generales de Cuba" 1767, Archivo General de Indias, CUBA, 1049, N.7; 2 (1) Joshua Bryant, "Five of the Culprits in Chains, as they appeared on the 20th September, 1823," (Demarara: Stevenson, 1824), John Carter Brown Library. Pierre Eugène Du Simitiere, Executed slave, Kingston, 1760. Library Company of Philadelphia.2 Some scholars have argued that such was the power and brutality of Jamaican whites that virtually all of the enslaved were cowed into submission. Resistance and escape were both difficult and dangerous, and the bodies of those who had tried and failed were a constant reminder of the potential price to be paid by enslaved people who challenged their subordination.3 "Correspondencia dirigida al gobernador de Santiago de Cuba, Juan Antonio Ayans de Ureta," 1774-1776, Archivo General de Indias, CUBA, 1142. British treaties with the Windward Maroons in 1739 and the Leeward Maroons in 1740 required the Maroons to returns any runaway slaves they encountered, and the Jamaican governor was empowered to appoint white superintendents to reside with the Maroons to ensure that this and other treaty obligations were enforced. See “An Act for Confirming the Articles executed by Colonel John Guthrie, and Cudjoe, the Commander of the Rebels,” and “An Act for Confirming the Articles executed by Colonel Robert Bennett, and Quao, the Commander of the Rebels,” Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Jamaica, From the Year 1681 to the Year 1768 Inclusive (Kingston: Alexander Aikman, 1787), I, 176-80, 182-5. 2 Recording of excerpts from Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 1, Friday 18 May 1750, p.300, Thomas Thistlewood Papers, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, http://brbl- dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3472441 (accessed 15 August 2016); Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 2, Wednesday 9 October 1751, p. 234, http://brbl- dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3472449 (accessed 15 August 2016). Voice of xxxxx. Other white people such as Matthew Gregory Lewis and Lady Maria Nugent commented on these grisly roadside displays. See Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (London: A. Spottiswoode, 1834), 181-2, and Lady Maria Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. Philip Wright (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 215. For further discussion see Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 130-6. 3 Trevor Burnard's compelling portrait of Jamaican slave-owner Thomas Thistlewood describes an all-encompassing brutal and violent system which "completely stripped slaves of their cultural heritage, brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal relationships extremely difficult," making resistance to white authority extremely difficult. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 195, 178. Vincent Brown describes white masters' use of "spectacular terror" to cow the enslaved into submission, and Burnard concludes that "Cruelty was so unexceptional as to be normal." See Brown, "Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society," Slavery 3 This essay will demonstrate that despite the significant dangers face by Jamaican runaways enslaved Jamaicans did escape, and some were able to remain at large on the island for extended periods. While relatively few attempted anything other than brief periods of petit marronage, as many as two percent of the enslaved were regularly absent as longer-term or persistent runaways. On the one hand this represented a small proportion of the enslaved population, and one which did not fundamentally threaten the slave system. On the other hand, if in 1788 two percent of the island’s enslaved were absent they would have numbered more than 4,500 runaways, a number almost equal to the island’s entire population of free people of color (4,829) and corresponding to more than one runaway per square mile of the island. Moreover, as newspaper advertisements confirmed, each year some long-term runaways would remain both at large and alive, gradually disappearing from plantation records and thus no longer recorded as runaways yet still present on the island as a cohort of long-term escapees.4 The Jamaican Assembly defined as rebellious runaways any enslaved people who were absent for ten days or longer or who were found eight miles or more from their place of and Abolition, 24, 1 (2003), 26; Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 265. 4 The figure of 2% is based on Richard Dunn’s data for Mesopotamia Plantation in Jamaica. Over the fifty years between 1780 and 1820, an average of 1.92% of the enslaved population were recorded in slave inventories as having run away. Dunn contends that these were not casual, short-term runaways, but instead were long-term and sometimes persistent runaways. See Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 337-42, 430, and data provided by Prof. Dunn to the author. Other data appears to confirm 2% as a reasonable figure: for example, in 1795 nine enslaved people were listed as having run away from Worthy Park Plantation, which represented slightly under 2% of the entire enslaved workforce (and a higher percentage of the adult enslaved population). See Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park 1670-1970 (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1970), 144. The Jamaican population in 1788 included 226,432 enslaved people, and 2% of this figure is 4,529. See “Return of the numbers of White Inhabitants Free People of Colour and Slaves in the Island of Jamaica” November 1788, National Archives, CO 137/87, 173. Jamaica is 4,213 square miles in size. 4 residence and work without the permission of their owner. Such authorization took the form of a hand-written pass or “ticket from his master, owner, employer or overseer, expressing particularly the time of such slave’s setting out, and where he or she is going, and the time limited for his or her return”. Jamaican slave-owners acknowledged that newly arrived Africans might well try to escape before they fully understood their situation, and the most severe penalties were reserved for runaways who had been on the island for at least two years and who were absent for more than three months. Enforcement, however, was patchy at best. A patrol system instituted in 1773 lasted only a couple of years before it was repealed as impractical and unenforceable. Checking each and every black person on the roads or around plantations and in towns was all but impossible, and Jamaican laws aimed against runaways voiced white aspiration rather than reality.5 How were runaways able to remain free for extended periods? By better understanding what white men did and did not see, we can achieve an enhanced understanding of how the enslaved took advantage of their numbers to create a liminal space within Jamaica's plantation society, a place in which runaways could hide in plain sight. Many hid themselves in plain sight, concealed amidst Jamaica’s large population of enslaved people and free people of color. This essay combines analysis of newspaper advertisements for one thousand runaways with utilization 5 A great many different laws were on occasion updated and consolidated in a single, comprehensive slave law, and this definition of runaway slaves was laid out in ‘An Act to repeal the several acts, and clauses of acts, respecting slaves, therein mentioned; and for the better order and government of slaves; and other purposes’, 15 March 1801, The Laws of Jamaica: Comprehending All the Acts in Force, Passed between the Fortieth Year of the Reign of George the Third, and the Forty Fourth Year of the Reign of George the Third, inclusive..