Hidden in plain sight:

escaped slaves in late-18th and early-19th century Jamaica

Simon P. Newman

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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 THUS THIS VERSION SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED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

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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... (St. Jago de la Vega: Alexander Aikman, 1805), Paragraph XXXIV, 218; Paragraph XXII, 215; Paragraph XLVIII, 223; Paragraph XLIX, 223. See also Robert Worthington Smith, “The Legal Status of Jamaican Slaves Before the Anti-Slavery Movement,” The Journal of Negro History, 30, 3 (1945), 293-303. 5 of research based multi-media designed to show how white Jamaican’s saw and experienced the island’s black population. It is not my intention to privilege white men's experience and perception per se, but rather to illuminate the blind spots in their vision of the predominantly

African society they inhabited.6

To help illuminate the white gaze this essay will feature the imagined journey of a real person, Dr. John Quier in about 1780, as he travelled from his home in Lluidas Vale in St. John

Parish to Spanish Town and then on to Kingston. This device is not intended to represent Quier as a typical white man, but rather to use his and his imagined journey to represent the gaze of an established white resident and to thereby help us imagine how Jamaican whites saw their world.

Whenever possible this essay will utilize evidence of runaways who escaped around 1780 and from along Quier’s route, although it will necessarily draw on evidence from further afield both chronologically and geographically.7

In order to illuminate how white men like Quier saw Jamaica’s black population this essay will utilize contemporary literary and artistic representations of the island, In many cases these were inherently flawed, designed to communicate a particular vision of the island to white

6 The essay will utilize information about one thousand enslaved people whose escape was documented in runaway advertisements published in The Cornwall Chronicle, And Jamaican General Advertiser (Montgeo Bay), 22 July 1775 – 10 May 1777; 28 February 1781 – 29 September 1786; 12 February 1785 – 16 April 1785; 9 May 1792 – 14 June 1795; The Jamaica Mercury and Kingston Weekly Advertiser (Kingston), 7 April 1779 – 31 March 1780; The Daily Advertiser (Kingston), 1 January 1791 – 26 December 1791; The Gazette of Saint Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town), 22 February 1781 – 10 October 1782; The Royal Gazette (Kingston), 8 April 1780 – 21 October 1780; 1 January 1791 – 12 January 1792; 3 August 1816 – 17 August 1816; 12 May 1821 – 19 May 1821; 9 February 1822 – 12 October 1822; 8 March 1823 – 20 September 1823. 7 For more biographical details on Dr. John Quier see Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 259-64; Michael Craton, ‘Dr. John Quier, 1739-1822,’ Jamaica Journal: Quarterly of the Institute of Jamaica 8, 4 (1979), 44-7. 6 viewers and readers in Britain. Understanding how white and black Jamaicans actually saw and experienced their society therefore presents the historian with a challenge, and sources must be read skeptically in order that we may get closer to the actual experiences and perceptions of whites such as Quier as they moved through the Jamaican landscape. By using adaptations of contemporary sources, newly created visual materials and more modern source materials this essay will enable us to move closer not just to an understanding of what white men saw, but more crucially to a better sense of how enslaved Jamaicans–and especially those who sought long-term escape–were able to remain at liberty within sight of white men. The information contained in many runaway advertisements reveals more of this liminal space, and the ways in which white masters were often aware of the approximate location and possible activities of runaways yet were unable to reclaim them because so many other whites remained unaware or even uncaring of the fact that some of the black people they saw and even interacted with were in fact runaways.8

Although little more than twenty-five miles apart as the crow flies, Quier’s journey would have required him to travel close to double that distance over two days, from a valley in the

Jamaican interior across hills and then down to the island’s southern coastal plains. This journey might have taken place in 1780, almost fifteen years after Quier’s arrival and his settlement on

Shady Grove, a small pen attached to Worthy Park Plantation. Quier was a well-educated and

8 The objectives and format of this essay require the use of non-traditional sources for eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century history, including relatively modern sound and video recordings and photographs. While traditional standards of historical research, analysis and citation have been used for all of the newspaper advertisements, published and manuscript materials and drawings and paintings from the slave era, modern sources will be utilized rather differently, to create a sense of how Jamaica might have looked, sounded and felt. As such these modern sources are intended to help reconstruct some sense of the context in which a given group of people (primarily white men) experienced the environment and society they inhabited, thus enhancing our understanding and interpretation of traditional historical sources. 7 highly regarded physician who cared for enslaved, free colored and white patients alike, and he lived in Luidas Vale between his arrival in Jamaica in 1767 and his death in 1822.

Like many white men in Jamaica Quier spent almost his entire adult life in an African society. In 1788 only 178 (3%) white people lived in St. John Parish, and they were heavily outnumbered by 92 (1.5%) free people of color and 5,650 (95.5%) enslaved people. There would have been many days when Quier saw few if any whites, and the voices he heard were all speaking West African languages or heavily accented English.9

(2) William Berryman, "Old Harbour Market, Ponsie’s Tavern, Jamaica" (1808-15). Library of Congress.10

Thus, while he might sing or hum the songs and hymns of his native land, most of the music and singing Quier heard was African, from nocturnal funeral assemblies to the digging songs of gangs of enslaved workers. Quier and others like him were very well used to being surrounded

9 “Return of the numbers of White Inhabitants," 173. One former overseer recalled of mid- eighteenth century Jamaica that on five or so large, neighboring plantations “there are but fifteen or sixteen white People, and near 2000 Blacks.” Curtiss Brett Sr. to Curtiss Brett Jr., autobiographical letters describing Jamaica in 1749, CS1, 24. Manuscript owned by Dr. Martin Brett, quoted with his kind permission. Edward Long noted that “The Africans speak their respective dialects, with some mixture of broken English. The language of the Creoles is bad English, larded with the Guiney dialect, owing to their adopting the African words, in order to make themselves understood by the imported slaves; which they find much easier than teaching these strangers to learn English.” Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island... (London: for T. Lowndes, 1774), II, 426. 10 Recording of Isaac Bernard speaking a mixture of Akan-based Kromanti (Twi-Asante), and an archaic form of English lexicon creole. “The Kromanti Language of the Jamaican Maroons,” recorded in September 2009 by Prof. Hubert Devonish and the Jamaican Language Unit, Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, University of the West Indies, Mona. While this cannot be taken as an accurate representation of the very different forms of language and expression utilized by enslaved people in the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, it effectively communicates how a mixture of African and English linguistic forms often might have been largely inaccessible to white listeners. http://www.caribbeanlanguages.org.jm/node/298 8 by black men, women and children, almost all of them enslaved. He and other white travelers within Jamaica would have encountered mostly black people on plantations, roads and in towns.

If we are to imagine how Jamaican society looked, sounded and felt to its white inhabitants we must begin by questioning the veracity and value of many of our most cherished sources, the artistic and literary representations of slave-era Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.

A variety of motivations and agendas informed the construction of travel narratives, histories, diaries, correspondence and artistic images by those who recorded life and society in Britain’s most successful plantation slave society. The rise of British abolitionism and its use of visual representations of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade encouraged those who benefitted from slavery to present the British Caribbean as a peaceful and harmonious society. Moreover, in the wake of British acquisition of the Ceded Islands in 1763 (Grenada and the Grenadines,

Tobago, St. Vincent and Dominica) the government and private landholders sought investors and white migrants to relocate to these new territories. Agostino Brunias, who produced some of the best-known images of the British Caribbean, was hired by Sir William Young, the British

Governor of Dominica and President of the Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded

Islands. Brunias was both an artist and a publicist who presented the people and landscapes of the Caribbean in ways calculated to appeal to British settlers. Brunias’s art typifies British representations of Jamaica and the British Caribbean of this era in that they intentionally obscure

Jamaica as it was seen and experienced by its free and enslaved inhabitants alike. Enslaved

Africans and plantation labor dominated the British Caribbean, yet both are largely absent from 9 most of Brunias’s and other artistic representations of Jamaica and the other British Caribbean islands.11

James Hakewill’s painting of the Whitney Estate in Clarendon is a good example.

(3) James Hakewill, "Whitney Estate, Clarendon. – The property of Viscount Dudley & Ward," in Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, From Drawings in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, 1825). It is a well-balanced artistic work, with the Mocho Mountains of south central Jamaica defining a picturesque background, while a crisp, white and well-maintained stone wall and archway in the foreground invites the viewer into Viscount Dudley and Ward’s plantation. No more than ten people can be discerned, all black and well-dressed: these are not the members of the first, second or grass gangs who dominated the plantation community. The extensive plantation buildings dominate the center of the picture, and with the exception of a few slave houses on the right these are the structures of sugar production. The plantation landscape appears well-ordered and lightly populated, simultaneously pastoral and implicitly semi-industrial, and very few of the three hundred or so enslaved people who populated and powered this successful estate can be seen. Those in evidence appear to be moving at a leisurely pace, and the only hard labour in evidence in this bucolic scene is undertaken by oxen, while the only visible whip is in the hands

11 Sir William Young was the author of Considerations Which May Tend to Promote the Settlement of Our New West-India Colonies: By Encouraging Individuals to Embark in the Undertaking (London: for James Robson, 1764), in which he described the geography, the crops and the commercial possibilities of the islands, while barely mentioning the enslaved labor upon which they depended. For a discussion of Agostino Brunias see Amanda Michaela Bagneris, “Coloring the Caribbean” Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, c.1765-1800,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009). For excellent discussions of mis- representations of the Caribbean see Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Art and Letters, 1760- 1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and John E. Crowley, ‘Sugar Machines: Picturing Industrialized Slavery,’ American Historical Review 121, 2 (2016), 403- 436. 10 of the enslaved man driving them. Late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century images of

Jamaica and the British Caribbean rarely show enslaved people labouring to cultivate, harvest and process sugar cane: instead they are more commonly represented undertaking less arduous work such as driving animals, marketing or laundry, or at leisure in conversation, singing and dancing.12

Artists did produce images of enslaved and free people of color as higglers and marketeers, in part because they were ubiquitous on Jamaican roads and in urban areas, but also because this enabled the presentation of enslaved Africans–especially women–not as field slaves but rather as petty producers in familiar cultural and economic settings. Appearing well-dressed, content and healthy, these men and women were represented in ways that echoed William

Marshall Craig’s renderings of Georgian British hawkers for Richard Phillips’ Itinerant Traders of London. As such they represented enslaved Africans in ways that appeared familiar to British readers, and which were a far cry from the actual labor of the vast majority of black Jamaicans.13

(4) William Berryman, "Negro portraits" (1808-15). Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/96522174/

Literary conventions and intellectual trends reinforced artistic representations of the

British Caribbean as a less African and a less brutally exploitative labor regime than it was.

Literary tropes emphasized the natural bounty of the Caribbean, ascribing to nature rather than enslaved labor the island’s fruit and vegetation, as well as the vast quantities of sugar, cotton,

12 When slavery ended in Jamaica Whitney Estate still depended upon 304 enslaved people. See ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership,’ Jamaica Clarendon 284 (Whitney), https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/18322 (accessed 2 August 2016). 13 Richard Phillips, The Itinerant Traders of London in their Ordinary Costume, from Modern London; being the history and present state of the British Metropolis. Illustrated with numerous copper plates (London: Richard Phillips, 1804). 11 coffee and other crops flooding into European ports. At the same time, the Enlightenment encouraged an aestheticization of labor which elided slave labor and instead lauded the acumen of white planters and managers whose knowledge and expertise harnessed the natural bounty of the tropics. In representations of both the Caribbean and Britain agricultural peasants were expunged by pastoral artists and writers who waxed lyrically about natural bounty and about a redefined virtuous labor of reflection, reading, writing and intellectual expertise. Lady Maria

Nugent described the Jamaican countryside as a pastoral idyll: "Such hills, such mountains, such verdure; every thing so bright and gay, it is delightful!... and all so new to an European eye, that it seemed like a paradise." Only occasionally did Nugent refer to "the black population" who were conspicuously absent from most of her descriptions of her Jamaican sublime, despite their ubiquity. Her reference to slave quarters as looking "like thatched cottages" illustrated Nugent's construction of the enslaved and their environment in terms of an exoticized British pastoral scene.14

Even those contemporary images that did show the enslaved engaged in field work were problematic, such as William Clark’s representation of First Gang enslaved men and women hoeing cane holes in Antigua.

(5) William Clark, "Digging or Rather Hoeing the Cane Holes, Antigua," from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, In Which Are Represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the employment of the negroes... From Drawings Made by William Clark, During a Residence of Three Years in the West Indies (London: Thomas Clay, 1823). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

14 Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago. Reprinted from a Journal Kept by Maria, Lady Nugent, From 1801 to 1815, Issued for Private Circulation in 1839, ed. by Frank Cundall (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1907), 13, 36, 14. See also James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books, With Notes (London: for R. and J. Dodley, 1764), in which white planters’ agricultural knowledge and the natural bounty of the West Indies meant that “the Cane with little labour grows” (8). Enslaved African laborers are all but invisible. 12

Although Clark’s series was intended to accurately represent sugar agriculture and production, its target audience were Britons and the scenes were fanciful and idealized. This was incredibly arduous work, yet the enslaved in Clark’s picture do not appear unduly burdened. Working in the hot and humid climate of the late summer and early fall, these First Gang workers bear no sweat stains. Indeed, the fact that they are all fully clothed is inaccurate for most would have been wearing relatively little, and the scars of whip marks might well have been evident on the backs of some. The four workers near the center of the line who were falling behind might well have been whipped by a driver who was responsible for ensuring a steady and even rate of progress. A black driver was the dominant figure in the foreground, but he had turned his back on the work of the First Gang and was directing the setting of markers, an unused whip at his side. To the left an older woman provided water to a young boy, suggesting that rest and refreshment were easily available. In this artistic representation we cannot really see the brutal, back-breaking work of the First Gang, the kind of work that destroyed healthy young bodies in little more than a decade.15

Images of Jamaican urban scenes are no more reliable. When Hakewill sketched

Kingston in 1820 the city was likely home to well over twenty-five thousand people, most of whom were enslaved or free people of color. These numbers were swelled by transient sailors and soldiers and by visitors from around the island and beyond.

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15 William Clark, ‘Digging or Rather Hoeing the Cane Holes, Antigua’, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, In Which Are Represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the employment of the negroes... From Drawings Made by William Clark, During a Residence of Three Years in the West Indies (London: Thomas Clay, 1823). For a discussion of the work of cane-holeing see Simon P. Newman A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 204-8. 13

James Hakewill, "Harbour Street, Kingston," in Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, From Drawings in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, 1825), p.29. Bridgeman Art Library.

Hakewill presented the city’s widest and perhaps busiest street, just one block in from the piers and warehouses of Port Street, yet this painting imagines a sparsely populated scene of picturesque and well maintained buildings, with a wide and largely empty street and intersection.

Fewer than twenty Jamaicans can be seen clearly, half of them white and three of these British soldiers whose bright red jackets draw the viewer’s eye. The scene is genteel and as quiet as a small English market town, and even the presence of a handful of black people, mostly women and children, barely hint that this was the cosmopolitan metropolis at the heart of Britain’s largest and most successful plantation slave society.

(7) Hakewill, "Harbour Street, Kingston." Additional art work and video by Anthony King.

Kingston was a lively, crowded and largely black town. Residents and visitors alike would have routinely heard English, Dutch, Spanish, French, Portuguese and myriad West African languages and dialects being spoken.16

Quier’s journey to Kingston originated from Worthy Park Plantation in Lluidas Vale, St

John’s parish, which was not far from the geographic center of Jamaica. In the 1780s St John’s was still quite sparsely populated and had fewer roads and settlements than more established parishes. But as Quier made his way south and east into the longer established rural parishes of

St Catherine and St Andrew he encountered numerous and better maintained interlocking roads in the more densely populated hinterland of Spanish Town, Port Royal and Kingston, for this

16 The census in 1788 had recorded Kingston’s total population as 26,478. See ‘Return of the numbers of White Inhabitants," 173. 14 area comprised the beating heart of plantation Jamaica, filled with people, agricultural activity, commerce, and the movement of people and goods.

The first half of Quier’s journey would have been through a predominantly rural area, some of it forested and mountainous and the rest dominated by plantations and pens. In 1788 St

John’s, St Catherine’s and St Andrew’s combined population of 1,411 white people and 1,191 free people of color were heavily outnumbered by 20,567 enslaved men, women and children.

After he reached Spanish Town, and then Kingston the ratios were somewhat more even: in

Kingston’s small and thoroughly urban environs 16,659 enslaved people lived and worked among 6,539 white people and 3,280 free people of color. Perhaps Quier took for granted the island’s stark racial imbalance and visible African character: in 1788 there were 226,43 enslaved people in Jamaica, but at least 338,670 men, women and children had arrived from Africa over the preceding four decades. In his home parish of St John’s Quier’s norm was 1.5 white people and 48.1 enslaved people per square mile: 127.5 white people and 348.5 enslaved people per square mile in Kingston would have seemed noisy, crowded and rather more white than Quier was used to in his daily life in and around the plantations of Lluidas Vale. Perhaps the larger proportion of whites in and around Kingston struck Quier as anomalous, for he had likely grown accustomed to life in the predominantly African society of Lluidas Vale. Quier never married, but he had numerous relationships with enslaved women such as Dolly, Jenny, Susannah Price and Catherine McKenzie, and at his death he left property to partners, children and grandchildren. For Quier creolisation meant, at least in part, his own partial assimilation into

Jamaica’s African society and culture.17

17 "Return of the numbers of White Inhabitants"; B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 (Kingston: University Press of the West Indies, 1995), (1976), Table 6, 53; Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man, 262-3. For the 1,2070 known Transatlantic slave- 15

(8) Racial population densities (1788). Map by David Ely.18

Quier would have been constantly reminded of the black and essential African character of the society he inhabited. Sometimes he might have been awakened at night by the sounds made by enslaved people gathering together in the wooded hills and mountains that surrounded

Lluidas Vale, just as Thomas Thistlewood lamented in his diary “last night much Negroe musick, disturbed me”. “Music is a favourite diversion of the Negroes” observed one white Jamaican, and Britons believed of their enslaved laborers that “notwithstanding their constant Labour, they would revel and dance five or six nights in a week, were they permitted.”

(9) “See Dem Gyal a Molain,” Moore Town Maroons (1992).19

Having been in Jamaica for two decades, Quier could quite possibly tell the ethnicity of the music echoing around the darkened valley, but recognition did not make the sound coming from the darkness any more familiar or comforting.20

trading voyages to Jamaica between 1748 and 1787, which deposited at least 338,670 enslaved Africans on the island, see ‘Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search (accessed 1 August 2016). 18 These maps are based on the demographic data contained in “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. Maps by David Ely. 19 “See Dem Gyal a Molain,” Moore Town Maroons, Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music From the Earliest Free Black Communities of Jamaica (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1992). This was performed in 1977-78 by Moore Town Maroons, inhabitants of a community some distance from Lluidas Vale. However, it can convey a sense of music as it was performed by Africans and their descendants.. This is a “jawbone” piece, with some words in English (patois), and intended for recreational dancing. Instruments used include “printing” (from the Twi “oprenteng”) drums, a length of thick bamboo cane played with two sticks, and a machete struck with a piece of metal known as the “iron” or “adawo.” See Kenneth Bilby, sleeve notes, Drums of Defiance. 20 Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Thomas Thistlewood Papers, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Vol. 1, Monday 9 July 1750, 326, http://brbl- dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3472441 (accessed 12 September 2016); Anonymous, Characteristic Traits of the Creolian and African Negroes in Jamaica &c. &c. (1797), ed. Barry 16

This impression would have been confirmed in myriad ways throughout Quier’s journey to Kingston. He would likely have departed soon after dawn, perhaps hearing “A large Cone

Shell [which] is blown at Dawn of each Day, which can be heard at a considerable Distance, & immediately the slaves repair from their Huts or Cabins to the Field of Work.”21 As he set off through Worthy Park the plantation would have been coming to life:

every thing is in motion: the negroes are going to the field, the cattle are driving to

pasture, the pigs and the poultry are pouring out from their hutches, the old women are

preparing food on the lawn for the pickaninnies… and all seem to be going to their

employments…22

For the remainder of his journey Quier would ride through and experience both what he perceived as an exceptionally beautiful natural environment and a large number of humans, mostly black and enslaved, engaged in a wide variety of tasks and occupations on plantations, in towns, and on the roads that connected them.

(10) Dr. John Quier's route from the Vale of Lluidas to Kingston. Map and video by David Ely.23

Higman (Mona, Jamaica: Caldwell Press, 1976), 16; Curtiss Brett Sr. to Curtiss Brett Jr., autobiographical letters describing Jamaica in 1749, CS1, 25. Commentators wrote about how in musical performance “The Negroes of each Nation [are] by themselves,” and “the Negroes of each tribe or nation assemble in distinct groups with their several instruments.” See Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 1, Monday 29 April 1750, 292, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3472441 (accessed 12 September 2016); Anonymous, Characteristic Traits of the Creolian and African Negroes, 20. 21 Curtiss Brett Sr. to Curtiss Brett, Jr., autobiographical letters describing Jamaica in 1749, CS1, 24. 22 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 112-3. 23 This map is based upon two of James Robertson’s 1804 maps of the three Jamaican counties, which have been reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Robertson, To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the county of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: J. Robertson, 1804), and To His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, this map of the county of Surrey, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: J. Robertson, 1804). 17

Quier’s journey took in the full range of Jamaican environments. He set off from the enclosed high plane of the Vale of Lluidas, heading south out of the valley and on towards the plantations on either side of the Murmuring Brook. His journey would take him south east to

Spanish Town, and after spending the night in the island’s capital Quier would have then travelled east across the flatter coastal plains and skirting Kingston Harbour to Kingston itself.

Quier lived for over half a century in the Vale of Lluidas, never once returning to Britain, and he tried to describe the beauty and attractions of his home in accord with the literary conventions of his time. Writing for British readers Quier portrayed a bountiful pastoral idyll in ways that compliment a surviving watercolor painting of the area.

(11) Unknown, ‘Worthy Park in Lluidas Vale’, watercolour painting, in bound folder of maps and paintings of Worthy Park in bound folder, The National Archives, CO441/4/4 16 (Transferred to MPGG 1/56) (Transferred to MPGG 1/56).24

The Vale of Lluidas, in the island’s rugged heart ,remained relatively under-populated and inaccessible, with only a few poorly maintained tracks bisecting the deeply forested slopes and ravines. For a good part of his journey Quier would have been surrounded by plantations, pens and polinks. He began by heading south before turning south-east toward Spanish Town.

Buildings and crops alike were usually close to the roads upon which plantations relied, and island maps often showed roads running through or with buildings close to the roads that connected them.

(12) Detail showing Vale of Lluidas and Quier's home, James Robertson, ‘To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the County of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: James Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland.

24 Recording of John Quier to Dr. D. Monro, 1768, in Letters and Essays on The Small-Pox and Inoculation, The Measles, The Dry-Belly Ache, The Yellow, And Remitting, And Intermitting Fevers of the West Indies... (London: for J. Murray, 1778), xxvi-xxvii. Voice of xxxxx. 18

Many people used Jamaica’s roadways, many of them black and most of these enslaved, yet rarely are the numbers of such people or the range of their activities evident in contemporary illustrations. White planters, overseers, clerks and their families might travel to other plantations or between home and the island’s towns. Doctors travelled around the island, tending both white and enslaved black people at plantations. During war time militia men and soldiers were all the more likely to travel to and from the island’s forts and major towns, and when travelling in large numbers they were accompanied by enslaved baggage carriers. Small groups of Maroons travelled the island’s roads with impunity, often bearing arms. Free people of colour, many owning or working for small businesses might travel in order to take goods and supplies home or to urban markets, or to visit friends and family, some of them perhaps enslaved.25

Most of the people Quier would have encountered were enslaved. He might hardly have noticed yet another middle-aged African-born woman, for the island's roads were full of enslaved women carrying goods to and from neighbouring plantations or further afield to towns and urban markets. Carrying messages and goods such as food and textiles, enslaved women trudged to and from Jamaican towns. Betty carried a large bundle of cloth, and her journey from a plantation a

25 Jamaica’s roads were as important to the island as were the sea lanes connecting it with Africa, North America and Europe, and Edward Long commended “the vast improvement of the roads” in Jamaica, which “add lustre to any country and enrich it.” Long, History of Jamaica, I, 465-9. The Jamaican assembly had acknowledged that “the Opening, Laying Out, and Making Roads in this Island, has contributed greatly to the settling and cultivating the same, and to the Security, Ease and Convenience of the Inhabitants.” “An Act for making a Turnpike Road, from that Part of Pindars River called Grahams in the Parish of Clarendon, to the King’s Highway leading through Bodles Pen to Old Harbour in the Parish of St Dorothy,” Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Jamaica; From the Year 1681 to the Year 1769, inclusive (1760), (Spanish Town: Lowry and Sherlock, 1771), 33; “An Act for explaining and amending the several Highway Laws now in Force, and reordering the said Laws fore effectual,” Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Jamaica; From the Year 1681 to the Year 1769, inclusive (1760), (Spanish Town: Lowry and Sherlock, 1771), 178. 19 couple of miles east of Quier's home may well have meant that she shared the doctor's route to

Spanish Town. African-born and about thirty years of age, Betty had in fact escaped from

Stanhope's Plantation near the head of the Black River, and the initials of her owner were branded on her right shoulder.

(13) Annotated detail of James Robertson, ‘To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the County of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: James Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland. But looking like so many other enslaved women and men sent out on errands or to work as higglers, Betty may well have blended into the island's population and she appears to have remained free for two months or longer.26

Enslaved people were regularly sent out on errands, carrying messages and goods backwards and forwards, and thus were a constant presence on island roads. Thomas

Thistlewood’s detailed diary records that he constantly sent and received all manner of items via enslaved women and men:

(14) William Berryman, ‘At Lindos Gate, Looking to Kingston’ (1808-15). Library of Congress.27

Enslaved people provided communication between whites who were often miles apart, and since much of this kind of exchange was casual, local and on a small scale it was informal and without proper documentation. While still in or close to Lluidas Vale Quier might well have recognized

26 "RAN AWAY, about five weeks since, a negro woman named BETTY,' advertisement placed by Alexander Stanhope, Gazette of Saint Jago, 29 August 1782, 4. The advertisement was reprinted twice in September. 27 Recording of excerpts from Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 21, 26 August 1770, 142, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079831 (accessed 17 August 2016); Vol. 29, 3 January 1778, 7, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079870 (accessed 17 August 2016); Vol. 29, 25 January 1778, 18, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079870 (accessed 17 August 2016); Vol. 30, 9 March 1779, 38, http://brbl- dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079876 (accessed 17 August 2016); Vol. 30, 5 October 1779, 163, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079876 (accessed 17 August 2016). 20 many of the people he encountered on the road going about such business, but as he ventured further from home he would have known few if any of the enslaved people he saw. Well used to sending and receiving messages and goods in this manner, he would likely have assumed that many of these people were acting on the instructions of their masters.

Occasionally runaways were spotted on the roads but were not taken up either because it was not clear to the observer that they had escaped. Four months after Quaw had escaped his master placed a new runaway advertisement for the creole man stating that Quaw had been seen on the road by the Banbury Esstate “on his way to the Magotty.” Toney, a “stout young Creole

Negro Man... was seen by several Gentlemen” in the much-travelled Sixteen Mile Walk as the runaway made his way towards Spanish Town, yet he was not taken up. Also spotted on the

Sixteen Mile Walk was eighteen-year-old Caesar, who some six months after his escape was spotted on this road carrying tobacco. Carrying goods and appearing to be about legitimate business may have helped such runaways. A Coromantee named Roe had been at liberty for over four months when he was seen on the road by the Barbican Estate “with a load of Pines, and at another time with Grass.”28

Quier and other white Jamaicans thus expected to see enslaved and free people of color on Jamaica’s roads, often carrying goods to and from plantations, provision grounds and markets. Foremost among these were the higglers, the free, the enslaved and the runaway

Jamaicans who travelled the island’s roads as vital agents of the internal marketing system.

Moving between plantations and towns, and between provision grounds and markets they

28 “RUN AWAY from Peter Peeke... JACK and QUAW,’ Gazette of Saint Jago,11 October 1781, 2; “RUN AWAY from Orange Grove... TONEY,” Gazette of Saint, 18 October 1781, 3; “RUN AWAY... the 3d of January last, A Negro Man, named Caesar,’ Royal Gazette, 8 July 1780, Supplement, 10; “RAN AWAY... ROE,’ Royal Gazette, 12 October 1822, Postscript, 22. 21 performed a vital role, and in the process developed extensive knowledge of the island’s roadways. A great deal of the foods and domestically manufactured goods such as baskets, pots, jars and various wooden and leather items that were consumed on the island were produced by enslaved men and women, and then carried to consumers and markets by higglers. Slave owners, especially urban white women and free women of color, found higglering to be a lucrative occupation for some of the people they owned.29

(15) James M. Phillippo, "Female Negro Peasant in her Sunday and Working Dress," in Phillipp, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: John Snow, 1843), 230. William Berryman, ‘Negro man carrying plantains on pole’ (1808-15). Library of Congress. Richard Bridgens, ‘Sunday morning in the country,’ in Bridgens, West India Scenery... from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in... Trinidad (London, 1836). British Library.

In contemporary paintings of higglers and hawkers the individual vendor and her labor were subsumed by the commodity or service they provided: individuals faded into a world of linens, fruit and other commodities. On his journey to Kingston Quier might have seen hundreds of higglers on the roads and many more in Spanish Town and Kingston, and they likely appeared to him as faceless purveyors of the foodstuffs and other goods consumed by white and black

Jamaicans alike. While presented by artists in terms that deemphasized the labor involved, this was arduous work. Higglers might carry goods over long distances, and in urban environments higglers who carried goods on trays and in baskets would sell their wares on the streets, sometimes setting up on corners or in markets. The majority of higglers were women who found that it gave them an unprecedented freedom of action and movement, rivalled only by that of

29 Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,” Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 57 (1960), 7-8. 22 skilled male artisans permitted to hire themselves out. Small wonder that female runaways found higglering such an attractive option.30

Some higglers were engaged in full-time commercial activity, while others undertook this as a secondary activity beyond usual plantation duties. Damsel was regularly utilized as a higgler by Thomas Thistlewood, and in addition to a variety of roles on his plantation Damsel took to the road to sell goods for him. Each time Damsel returned from higgling Thistlewood recorded what she had sold and how much money she had made: on the final day of 1767, for example,

Thistlewood recorded with some satisfaction how much money Damsel had earned for him over the preceding twelve months: “Recd. by Damsel 2 bitts for Indian Kale Sold, equals 212 bitts in all [for the year].” While Damsel undertook such work only occasionally, the output from larger plantations sometimes warranted full-time higglers.31

30 Mark W. Hauser asserts that “Everybody in Jamaica was dependent on the internal economy,” and higglers played a vital role in facilitating this. Mark W. Hauser, ‘Linstead Market Before Linstead? Eighteenth-century Yabbas and the Internal Market System of Jamaica,’ Caribbean Quarterly, 55, 2 (2009), 90. Michael Mullin noticed that many female runaways became higglers: see Michael Mullin, ‘Women, and the comparative study of American Negro slavery,’ Slavery & Abolition, 6, 1 (1985), 34-5. For more on Jamaican higglers see Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); Lorna Simmons, “Slave Higglering in Jamaica, 1780-1834,” Jamaica Journal: Quarterly of the Institute of Jamaica, 20, 1 (February-April 1987), 31-8; Lorna Simmonds, “The Afro-Jamaican and the Internal Marketing System, 1780-1834,” in Kathleen E.A. Monteith and Glen Richards, Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002), 274-90; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Jamaican Internal Marketing Pattern: Some Notes and Hypotheses,” Social and Economic Studies, 4, 1 (1955), 95-103; Sheena Boa, “Urban Free Black and Coloured Women: Jamaica, 1760-1834,” The Jamaican Historical Review, 18 (1993), 1-6; Mintz and Hall, “Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,” 3-25; Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 29-31. 31 Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 18, Thursday 31 December 1767, 287, http://brbl- dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079829 (accessed 16 August 2016) 23

Quier would surely have seen a great many higglers, amongst whom were concealed some runaways. In January 1791, for example, an advertisement for two enslaved women who had escaped noted that both were “used to higling” and thus were “well known all over the

Island.” The first was Phillis, a forty-year-old Mundingo woman with “her country marks in her face,” and she eloped with her baby Lucy. The second was another Mundingo higgler named

Amy, who six months earlier had escaped with a small child and who was “well known about the island.” This advertisement was reprinted thirty-eight times over nearly five months, after which

Phillis and Mary may have been recaptured or their owner tired of the expense of advertising for them. While masters and owners believed that enslaved people’s higgling meant that they would be well-known, recognizable and thus vulnerable to recapture, it was also true that this activity had given enslaved people intimate knowledge of the island’s roads and plantations, a network of family and friends, and the expertise necessary to remain at liberty, providing for themselves and their families. Castile had been absent for nineteen months when her master advertised that “She is supposed to be higgling from Saltponds to Spanish Town.” But such knowledge did not necessarily lead to recapture, and a month later Castile's master was still advertising for her.

Higgling could provide long-term support for runaways, especially women. In fact higgling may well be the primary reason why women comprised almost one-quarter of runaways. Susanna had been gone for three years when she was highlighted in a runaway advertisement, but despite knowing that “she passes as an Higgler, and is supposed to be harboured about Golden-Valley or Mount-Pleasant, Blue Mountains,” her master struggled to recapture her. Such references to long-term runaways higgling were fairly common.32

32 “RUN AWAY... Phillis,” Daily Advertiser, 4 January 1791. The advertisement was reprinted several times each week until Thursday 5 May 1791; “RAN AWAY... Castile,” Daily Advertiser, 22 July 1791, 3; “FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD... SUSANNA,” Royal Gazette, 23 February 24

Higglers were based in towns as well as the countryside, and the owners of urban runaways sometimes indicated that they believed escaped slaves might be in towns and on roads in this ubiquitous occupation. Nelly, a creole washerwoman and seamstress in Kingston escaped from her owner in Kingston in June 1790, and a year later he advertised on the anniversary of her escape indicating that she “goes about higgling, frequently to Westward, and comes down to the

Plantain Boats” to purchase fruit and then sell it around the island. Tom, a twenty-five year old

Chamba with country marks escaped from his Kingston owner in December 1791. Tom had previously worked in a canoe between Kingston and Port Royal, but since eloping “is well known in Kingston of late as a higgler, and in Port-Royal where he is at present supposed to be harboured”. The fact that so many owners indicated in advertisements where runaways had been seen or were suspected to be higgling suggests that although whites and maroons might at any time challenge and take into custody any they suspected of crimes or of escaping, runaways were often working Jamaica’s roads with relative impunity.33

As he passed through a cluster of plantations between the Luidas River and the Mountain

River in St. John's Quier would have seen hundreds of enslaved people working in plantation gangs, with smaller groups and individuals engaged in a wide range of activities. A short distance south of his route was Dillon's plantation, and if Quier had caught sight of a creole woman near the slave quarters he would likely have assumed she was charged with food preparation or care of young children or another plantation activity.

(16) Annotated detail of James Robertson, ‘To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the County of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: James Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland.

1822, Postscript, 20. Women constituted 231 (24%) of the runaways in this sample whose gender was identifiable. 33 “ABSCONDED... A Creole Negro Woman named NELLY,’ Daily Advertiser, 13 June 1791, 1; “RAN away... TOM,” Daily Advertiser, 23 December 1791, 2. 25

But the woman might have been Fanny, the property of a Kingston attorney. Six weeks after her escape the attorney advertised for Fanny, describing her as a "sickly looking wench", and noting that she might well have returned to her previous home at Dillon's plantation. A month later she may have still been free, perhaps sometimes seeking refuge around and about the plantation’s slave quarters. Runways were often reported by their masters to have run away to plantations at which family members were held, or to plantations at which they themselves had previously been held and at which friends and relatives still lived and worked.34

As he drew closer to Spanish Town, Jamaica's capital and second largest town, Quier would have noticed increased traffic on the roads amidst a more densely populated landscape. As well as enslaved people bearing goods and messages to and from Spanish Town, the roads at times teemed with field workers and craftsmen. Carpenters, masons and others walked to and from jobs, often bearing their tools, plantation hands made their way to different parts of plantations and provision grounds with hoes, bills and other items, and others carried grass, animal feed and fish and fowl. Quier likely saw a number of carpenters like Andrew and

Scotland, apparently walking towards their work with their tools. In fact these two men were making their escape from Smith's which lay amidst a cluster of plantations and pens just west of

Spanish Town. They were able to get a good distance from home, and their owner believed

Andrew had returned to Kingston where he had formerly been enslaved, while Scotland had

34 "FROM the Subscriber... a Sambo woman slave named FANNY," Jamaica Gazette, 1 November 1788, 6. The advertisement was repeated each week for a month. 26 taken refuge in the mountains of St. Catherine. Having walked away, probably with the tools of his trade, Scotland was able to remain at liberty for at least one year and perhaps longer.35

(17) Annotated detail of James Robertson, ‘To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the County of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, const from actual surveys... (London: James Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland.

Perhaps not surprisingly, highly skilled and valuable plantation workers appear regularly in runaway advertisements. The elopement of carpenters, stone masons, sugar boilers and the like were more likely to prompt their owners to advertise than were the elopements of field hands, and when they could owners indicated where they believed the escapees to have gone.

While some of these skilled workers may have abandoned their crafts, others were – much to their owners’ chagrin – continuing to do such work, often passing as free people who could work for hire, or as skilled slaves who were authorized to hire themselves out. African-born Titus and

Peter were described by their master as “a good boiler” and “an extraordinary good boiler” respectively. Their value was enhanced by the fact that Titus “can turn his hand to almost anything on a sugar estate” while Peter was “a compleat sawyer.” The runaway advertisement describing them appeared nearly ten months after their elopement, and their master noted the men “took with them very good cloaths, and it is supposed pass for free people.” They had been seen on the Barrack Road in Westmoreland and on the road to Little Bogue in St. James, and their owner thought it possible that they were travelling about the island hiring themselves out as skilled free men, or as enslaved men who had permission to hire themselves out.36

35 "RUN AWAY from the Subscriber in November last," Gazette of Saint Jago, 3 May 1781, 3. This advertisement and then two subsequent advertisements were reprinted regularly for over a year from the time of escape, the last known advertisement appearing 3 January 1782. 36 “Run away... TITUS and PETER,” Cornwall Chronicle, 11 December 1781. 27

May was a plantation carpenter who eloped with four other people including his wife

Lettice. It is possible that May had run away before, given that he was branded on both cheeks and one of his ears had been cropped “which he endeavours to hide with a handkerchief.” The runaways were well known in Sixteen Mile Walk and Spanish Town, and their master

“suspected there are white people privy to their being run away.” When white men like Quier travelled across the island they expected all enslaved people they encountered who were working for whites to be legitimately owned or employed by those whites, and the thought that other white or free people of color might knowingly employ runaways enraged masters. A thirty-year- old slave driver named Cromwell was reported by his owner “to be harboured at the Red Hills of

William Fleming, a free mulatto” while a mason named Jemmy had run from the Industry Estate and a year later was believed by his owner “to be harboured by some free people about the Little

Bogue Estate in St. James, where he was seen last week”.37

Other skilled enslaved men might pass as free, and appear as such to whites who not only saw but employed them. Quaw, a mason, ran from his owner’s plantation in Trelawny: this master was clearly worried that Quaw would emulate his brother, also a mason, who had eloped four years before and was now “passing for a free man by the name of THOMAS.” Fribble, “an excellent cooper,” had been hired out to Montpelier Estate but had then taken advantage of having a ticket and eloped. It was possible that Fribble was continuing to work on and for plantations, using the ticket to pass as an enslaved man who was entitled to hire himself out.38

37 “RUN AWAY... MAY... JOHN... CUFFEE... CUDJOE... LETTICE,” Royal Gazette, 8 April 1780, 2; “RUN AWAY in May 1779... Cromwell,’ Royal Gazette, 8 July 1780, Supplement, 10; “Run away, from Industry Estate... JEMMY,” Cornwall Chronicle, 28 February 1781. 38 “Run away... Quaw... THOMAS,” Cornwall Chronicle, 16 October 1784; “Run away... FRIBBLE,” Cornwall Chronicle, 14 February 1782. 28

While Quier and other white Jamaicans would have encountered many enslaved people on the roads, he would have seen a great many more on and around the plantations and pens that he rode through and past. He might regularly have heard gangs of slaves singing “Digging

Songs,” using the rhythm of call-and-response to help regulate their work rate, perhaps even enjoying what Edward Long and other whites regarded as the “natural good Ear” of enslaved

Africans.

(18) “Half a Whole,” Field Workers’ Digging Song, 1981.39

Seeing black Jamaicans engaged in routine and familiar activities, he would have thought little of people carrying plantation tools, materials and crops, or perhaps craftsmen with their tools, or enslaved people accompanying free black or white people. Others might have carried wood, fish, hay or other commodities for plantation communities. Amongst this large and seemingly legitimately industrious population were concealed runaways, and many advertisements indicated that runaways were likely sheltered on or near plantations by partners, family, friends,

African countrymen or Middle Passage shipmates.40

A stone’s throw from Quier’s route a field hand named Cuffee, a wainman named Dick and a waiting boy named Fortune escaped from Smith's plantation outside Spanish Town at

39 “Half a Whole,” Field Workers’ Digging Song, recorded by John Storm Roberts in Maryland, St. Andrew’s Parish, Jamaica, in 1981. Track 4, John Crow Say: Jamaican Music of Faith, Work and Play (New York: Ethnic Folkways Records, 1981). 40 Edward Long, “Music,” Materials on the History of Jamaica in the Edward Long Papers, British Library, Add. Ms. 12403, MF Reel 3, No. 422, 335. For more on Jamaican Digging Songs see Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (London: David Nutt, 1907), 157-89; Jean D’Costa, “Oral Literature, Formal Literature: The Formation of Genre in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27, 4 (1994), 663-76; Helen H. Roberts, “A Study of Folk Song Variants Based on Field Work in Jamaica,” The Journal of American Folklore, 38, 148 (1925), 149-216. 29 much the same time as the carpenters Andrew and Scotland, and they too were able to remain at liberty for some time. Their owner thought that Cuffee and Dick were being harbored a few miles to the north in St. Thomas in the Vale, while Fortune was harbored closer by in or around

Governor's Mountain in St. Catherine's. Advertisements for Smith's runaways continued for about three months until he published a new advertisement, indicating that Cuffee, Scotland,

Fortune and Dick were still at liberty, and a driver named Quamina who was Dick's brother had also escaped. Unusually this new advertisement indicated that Dick, Quamina, Scotland and

Cuffee "have been out a sufficient time to come under the law of the island to punish them with

Death," yet balanced this threat with a promise to forgive any of these runaways who returned within the month. The reprinting of this advertisement for a further three months suggests that

Smith's combined threat of punishment and offer of forgiveness had failed.41

With hundreds of enslaved men, women and children on and around large plantations, and with smaller groups on polinks and pens that were not always policed by whites, it was possible for runaways to lives on or near to plantations and pens for lengthy periods. To many of the whites who saw them, these runaways might appear indistinguishable from the larger enslaved community. Consequently it was possible for some to remain at liberty for very lengthy periods. Mary Gold had been absent from Orange River Plantation for more than a year when her owner readvertised for her, claiming that she had been “harboured some time past at a penn in

Liguanea” during which time she had become pregnant and was now “big with child”. This was

41 Dick and Cuffee were listed in "RUN AWAY from the Subscriber in November last," Gazette of Saint Jago, 3 May 1781, 3. Dick and Fortune were listed in "RUN AWAY from Bennett Smith," Gazette of Saint Jago, 5 July 1781, 2, which was reprinted until at least 4 October 1781. Dick, Cuffee and Fortune were all listed in a subsequent advertisement which appeared weekly from 11 October 1781 to at least 3 January 1782; "RUN AWAY from Bennett Smith," Gazette, 11 October 1781, 3. This advertisement was reprinted more or less weekly until at least 3 January 1782. 30 possible because of the support of enslaved and free family members and friends, but also through the complicity – whether intentional or not – of free people and whites who benefited from the labor or the goods provided by runaways. Twelve-year-old John Coromantee was believed by his master to be harbored by “one Webly”, the overseer on on a pen in the Walks.

Bacchus, a thirteen-year-old Chamba boy was “supposed to be harboured by a Mr. J.W.,” while

Dickey “was taken up, and harboured by one John Demerlin who lived upon Good Hope Estate”: allegedly Dickey had abandoned plantation work and was now waiting on Demerlin as a personal servant. Thus white complicity was on occasion directly in evidence, as when John

William Harris left his post as bookkeeper on Eden Estate and “enticed away with him a Mulatto

Boy named HENRY BUCKLEY, 16 years of age.”42

Enslaved Jamaicans might also harbor runaways, and this regularly happened following the death of a planter or pen owner. While some properties passed quickly into the hands of a new owner with little disruption to the lives and families of the enslaved, others passed into administration resulting in the sale of land, equipment and people. Whether fear of such disruption or eagerness to take advantage of a relative vacuum in leadership, some enslaved people contrived to escape shortly after their masters died. Two such men were George and Will, who escaped from Peter Ramsay's plantation, which was immediately adjacent to Quier’s route along the road into Spanish Town. It had been the work of seventeen-year-old George "to attend and wait on" the late Peter Ramsay. He eloped from Ramsay's estate at about the same time as

42 “Run away... MARY GOLD,” Royal Gazette, 8 April 1780, Supplement, 8; “RUNAWAYS... a BOY NAMED JOHN COROMANTEE,” Gazette of St. Jago, 8 August 1782, 3; “Run away... BACCHUS,” Cornwall Chronicle, 22 February 1786; “Run away... DICKEY,” Cornwall Chronicle, 14 April 1783; “ONE DOUBLOON REWARD. WHEREAS JOHN WILLIAM HARRIS... and... HENRY BUCKLEY,” Royal Gazette, 27 April 1822, Postscript, 27. 31

Will, and for about four months he was able to remain free in Port Royal and Kingston. Several months later he escaped again.43

Following Ramsay's death eighteen-year old Will was allowed by Ramsay's executor to hire himself out. This enabled Will to use the written permission he had from the executor to move freely between his home, Spanish Town, Port Royal and Kingston, and he might have been one of many such men and women seen on the roads by Quier and other white travellers. In this case, however, Will used this freedom of movement to escape. According to a succession of advertisements Will was regularly seen in and around Kingston and Port Royal where he passed as free.44

Will remained free for at least one month before being recaptured, but six months later he appeared in a new advertisement placed by his late owner's brother and executor stating that Will had once again escaped. This time Will did not have permission to hire himself out, and the advertisement stated that he "is supposed to be harboured on board one of his Majesty's ships of war at Port-Royal.' Two months earlier the Royal Navy had defeated the French navy at the

Battle of the Saintes, but Jamaica remained vulnerable to a Franco-Spanish invasion from

Hispaniola. With a great many white sailors and soldiers succumbing to tropical diseases,

43 "Five Pounds Reward. RUN AWAY about three months ago... GEORGE," Gazette of Saint Jago, 23 May 1782, 2. This advertisement was reprinted weekly for one month. Then three months later a new advertisement appeared, stating that George had again escaped "a few days ago." "FIVE POUNDS REWARD, RUNAWAY a few days ago... GEORGE," Gazette of Saint Jago, 12 September 1782, 3. 44 "RUN AWAY, SOME time ago, from the Estate of PETER RAMSAY," Gazette of Saint Jago, 20 December 1781, 2. This advertisement weekly for one month, and was also printed in Royal Gazette, 29 December 1781, 4. 32 recruiters were eager for any free black recruits and may not have always been too particular about paperwork.45

Quier might well have seen black and white seafarers and soldiers before he reached coastal towns, and these might occasionally have included recent or longer-term escaped slaves.

A suspected runaway who “calls himself JACK GRIFFIN” was taken up at one plantation “in company with two Sailors.” This advertisement does not make clear whether the sailors were white or black, and if the latter whether or not they were free or enslaved. But given that enslaved men regularly worked on smaller coastal and deeper water vessels it would not have been unusual to see such men in sailor’s garb travelling to and from families and their home towns and plantations. And then as Quier made his way along the coastal road between Spanish

Town and Kingston, and then approached Kingston itself, it is unlikely that he or other whites would have been able to identify runaways among this shore-side, coastal and deep sea workforce.46

Either fear of punishment or actual punishment sometimes triggered escape. Just beyond the western outskirts of Spanish Town lay John Taws' estate, from which August eloped despite birth defects to his right leg and foot meaning that he "walks lame." Twenty-three years of age he had been newly branded with Taws' initials "for a former defection and robbery", so escape was not new to August. Taws believed that August might have sought refuge with his uncle, an

45 A new advertisement placed by W. Ramsay in June 1782, stating that Will had secured "a permit" from William Mitchell, and that he might subsequently have joined the navy. "RUN AWAY, about two months ago," Gazette of Saint Jago, 27 June 1782, 2. This advertisement was reprinted once, a week later. 46 “TAKEN UP... JACK GRIFFIN,” Royal Gazette, 6 May 1780, Supplement, 2. 33 enslaved man in Kingston, or with two other runaways who accompanied him, both of whom had previously attempted to join the crews of Royal Naval vessels.47

Large group elopements were unusual but did occur. At least thirteen enslaved people escaped from March's plantation, again just west of Spanishtown. Jack Pot, Carthagene and

Quaw were middle-aged or older men; Friendship was an older woman; Jemmy, Joe, Toby,

Quamin, Dick, Quaw and the "new negro man" Sampson were all younger men; while women

Sanga and Sappho, a "new Negro woman" who had recently been branded with her master's initials, were young women. The runaways may have escaped en masse but they then headed in different directions. March believed that two were harboured near or around the Caymanas a few miles the other side of Spanish Town and just north of Quier’s route to Kingston, while most of the others had been seen or were suspected to be harboured in or around either Spanish Town or

Kingston. Sampson, for example, despite being a recently arrived African, had been seen carrying wood into Kingston. Riding along the roads into and out of Spanish Town and Kingston

Quier would have seen many enslaved people carrying commodities into the towns, and he might hardly have noticed a man such as Sampson. March took advantage of placing this long advertisement to note the continued absence of several long-term runaways including Cudjoe who had been at liberty for almost seven years and was believed by his owner to be "near Mr.

Curtin's penn" at the Slipe, about fifty miles to the west. Molly, "an elderly wench," had been gone for eight years, but her whereabouts were unknown.48

The Jamaican capital Spanish Town would have been familiar to Quier as the seat of government and of island courts, yet he and most visitors regarded it as somewhat dilapidated

47 "RUN AWAY this day... AUGUST," Royal Gazette, 30 September 1780, 15. This advertisement was reprinted once, a week later. 48 "JACK POT...," Royal Gazette, 5 April 1791. 34 and faded in comparison with the thriving and much larger Kingston. The capital had irregular, narrow streets, and buildings in varying states of disrepair, the majority of them inhabited by

“free Negroes, Mulattoes, and Slaves” and visitors were unimpressed by Spanish Town’s “air of gloom and melancholy.” Only the governmental buildings and open spaces at the town's center gave an air of grandeur, and again Hakewill's representation was more evocative of Georgian

England than Jamaica. Yet when the Assembly and courts were not in session there were even fewer white people in Spanish Town and it was easier for runaways to blend into an urban space dominated by enslaved black and free people of color.

(19) James Hakewill, King George’s Square, St. Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town), in Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, From Drawings in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, 1825). Bridgeman Art Library. Additional art work and video by Anthony King.49

Two miles to the north lay densely covered hills, while the town itself descended from a flat plain to the banks of the River Cobre. From here it was an easy ride along the road that ran alongside the river to Kingston harbour.50

The road from Spanish Town to the Ferry and then on to Kingston was “covered with sugar estates, penns, negro settlements, &c.” and the roads and countryside were far more populous that Quier’s home. Here, and indeed throughout his journey, Quier would have heard the loud crack of whips, for not only were these used to cajole or punish enslaved workers, but also as a means of attracting the attention of the enslaved, perhaps to call them to meals or back to work. While this was "a sound particularly disagreeable to a stranger's ear," to resident whites

49 Sound recording excerpted from "Kingston Downtown on Market Street," Jamaican Vibrations, https://www.asoundeffect.com/sound-library/jamaican-vibrations-sound-effects/ 50 Long, History of Jamaica, II, 3; Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 160; Long, History of Jamaica, II, 4. 35 like Quier "it may justly be stated that it is mere noise." Nowhere on Jamaica were the roads and countryside more crowded than here, and runaways did not hesitate to join the throng.

(20) Annotated detail of James Robertson, ‘To His Royal Highness the Duke of York, this map of the County of Middlesex, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: James Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland.

As Quier rode eastwards out of Spanish Town he may have passed people like Barbary, a young enslaved woman who had escaped from Simon Taylor on Chaloner Arcedeckne's estate just east of Spanish Town: Taylor believed that Barbary was seeking refuge in the capital with her aunt

Bessy Byfield. No more than a mile from Arcedeckne's was Jacob Hill's estate, and just a few months before Barbary's escape Maria had eloped from Hill. African-born with country marks upon her face, Maria had Hill's initials branded onto both of her shoulders. She had previously been owned by a Kingston merchant and might have made her way back to friends and a familiar way of life there, although Hill thought it more likely that she was being in the Red Hills, just north of the route between Spanish Town and Kingston. Hill believed that Maria was being harboured there by an enslaved man named Sharper, perhaps her partner.51

As he journeyed to the south and then to the east Quier might well have seen some newly arrived Africans being led to the plantations and pens of their new masters. Having been purchased from recently arrived slave ships, groups of Africans were guided to plantations, pens and towns by other enslaved people belonging to their new master. After months of hellish

51 Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago. Reprinted from a Journal Kept by Maria, Lady Nugent, From 1801 to 1815, Issued for Private Circulation in 1839, ed. by Frank Cundall (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1907), 36; H.T. De La Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: for T. Caldell, 1825), 18; "RUN AWAY from Simon Taylor... a Negro Wench named BARBARY," Gazette of Saint Jago, 12 July 1781, 2; "RUN AWAY... MARIA," Gazette of Saint Jago, 22 February 1781, 3. This advertisement was reprinted twice appearing over three weeks in total. 36 incarceration on the West African coast and then in the bowels of slave ships it is not surprising that some of these new arrivals seized their opportunity to escape. In the spring of 1780, for example, “A New Negro Man” ran away “on the road as he was conducting from Kingston, where he had been purchased about ten days before out of the Ann.” With no name and his age and height uncertain, he could be identified only by the country markings on his temples which were shared by thousands of African-born enslaved Jamaicans. Similarly a young Eboe man who appears to have arrived on the Backhouse in July 1793 and then been sold by Wedderburn and

Company was “Lost” on his way to his new master’s property. Wearing no more than “a frock of very common oznaburg” he had begun the journey with a piece of card secured by ribbon around his neck bearing the name and address of his new owner.52

(21) Richard Bridgens, ‘Negro Heads,’ in Bridgens, West India Scenery... from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in... Trinidad (London, 1836). British Library.

If newly arrived Africans were to elope and then remain free for any length of time, most would have done their best to avoid white people on the island’s roads, but any who had been on the island for more than a few months may have been more able to disguise their status and seek refuge with countrymen or shipmates. George Gordon purchased a Fantee man from the cargo of enslaved people brought to Jamaica on the Brooks in December 1775, and had his initials

52 “RUN AWAY on the Road,” Royal Gazette, 6 May 1780, 2. The sale of the enslaved Africans who had arrived in the Ann was advertised by Smith, Leigh and Co.: see “FOR SALE... FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY Choice Windward Coast SLAVES,’ Jamaica Mercury and Kingston Weekly Advertiser, 18 March 1780, 1. See also Ann, Voyage Identification Number 92474, ‘Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search (accessed 12 August 2016); Cornwall Chronicle, 18 July 1793. See also Backhouse, Voyage Identification Number 80416, ‘Voyages: The Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search (accessed 12 August 2016). “Country marks” were hardly unusual in such an African society, and the African character of the Jamaican enslaved was reflected in the runaway population analyzed for this essay: 431 (43%) of runaways were identified in some way or another as being African-born. 37 branded onto the man who he named Huntly. Nine months later Huntly eloped from John

Whitaker, a surveyor who had rented the enslaved man. Gordon believed that Huntly had either

“taken the road” to St Elizabeth or was “entertained by some of his countrymen.”53

In addition to newly arrived Africans, many enslaved people were re-sold or moved between places of employment, resulting in constant traffic on the roads and the opportunity to escape. Often masters’ first response to such elopements was to send other enslaved people out to search for the runaways. Thomas Thistlewood, for example, recorded in his diary that he sent

Lincoln out in pursuit of runaways: “[Monday 2 July and Tuesday 3 July 1770] “Coobah runaway... Lincoln out looking [for] Coobah... [Sunday 1 December 1771] Lincoln out yet looking for Coobah, he has never Come home Since Thursday Morning, although Strictly

Charged to Come home on Saturday Evening.” Given that masters tended to entrust "the most confidential people upon a plantation" with pursuit of runaways, this strategy may have worked well, with those sent out in pursuit either forcing or persuading runaways to return. But the practice may also have provided some enslaved people with either an opportunity to themselves escape, or to pretend that they had been sent out by their owners in pursuit of other runaways.

Thus one master placed a runaway advertisement in The Gazette of Saint Jago de la Vega for two runaways, Handel and Cuffy, “a stout, young creole negro man” sent out “in quest of

Handel, and has not returned.” Tom had been absent for four months when his owner advertised

53 “Run away... a Negro man of the Fantee country,” Cornwall Chronicle, 30 November 1776. This advertisement identifies Huntly as having been “bought out of the ship Brooks, Capt. Noble, last December”. See also Brooks, Voyage Identification Number 92522, ‘Voyages: The Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search (accessed 12 August 2016). 38 for him as “a sensible fellow” who his owner believed “pretends to be looking for a runaway

Negro.”54

The presence on the roads of so many enslaved people sent out on errands by their masters provided cover for some runaways. Jack, a sixteen-year old “of the Congo country” was sent by his master to Spanish Town in order to collect “some papers of consequence.” However, having received the papers Jack seized his opportunity to elope, and his master was convinced that “as he may have such papers about him, he may expect to pass unmolested on that account.”

Some tickets and passes were genuine but misused: a thirty-five year old Coromantee enslaved man Galloway had “a ticket to go to Kingston” but his master had “forgot to limit the time of his returning,” which gave the enslaved man his opportunity to travel freely on the roads as he made his escape. Similarly Polydore, an African-born carpenter and “a most artful villain” made use

“of a letter he received from the overseer at Stewart-Castle the time of his elopement, directed to

‘Mr. McGibbon at Windsor by Polydore’”. Adept at escaping and remaining free, four years earlier Polydore had eloped and remained free for twenty months, during which time he had lived and worked in Kingston under the name John Brown. The letter provided Polydore with the opportunity to once again escape. Edward, “a runaway cooper from the Shrewsbury estate,” went to the owner of another plantation and asked for a paper to enable him to return to his master.

However, once possessed of this pass Edward “gave up all idea of returning to the estate... and whenever his proceedings were enquired into by the magistrates, he stated himself to be on the

54 Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Vol. 21, Monday 2 July and Tuesday 3 July 1770, 106, 108, http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/11882750 (accessed 15 August 2016); Vol. 22, Sunday 1 December 1771, 176, 216, http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4079832 (accessed 15 August 2016); William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, Volume II (London: for T. and J. Egerton, 1790), 322; “ABSENTED the First of January 1781,” Gazette of Saint Jago, 22 March 1781, 3; “Ran away... about Christmas last,” Cornwall Chronicle, 4 April 1793. 39 road to his trustee, and produced my letter as a proof of it.” Nineteen-year old Dinah, who had escaped from him six months earlier “informs any person meeting her that I have given her a ticket to work out, which is false.”55

Should Quier have bothered to challenge anyone like Jack, Dinah or Polydore and inquired as to their business on the roads he would likely have accepted the papers they carried as evidence that each was about their master’s business. A seemingly legitimate document was a passport to travel freely on Jamaica’s roads, for there were no official forms, simply small pieces of paper written by a wide range of people with varying skill, and so falsifying papers was not difficult for anyone who was literate. When Sarah Warren was taken up as a suspected runaway she carried with her a manumission document that she eventually admitted “was written by her father... for the purpose of passing her about free of molestation.” The language of the advertisement suggests that Warren's father was either a white man or a free person of color, and it provides evidence of the complicated relations between such people and enslaved women, and the ways in which both whites and free people might aid and harbor runaways.56

As Quier drew close to the Ferry he passed the Caymanas, an area homes to several large plantations. Many hundreds of enslaved people worked these plantations, and while some ran

55 “Run away from the Subscriber... Jack,” Jamaica Mercury, Supplement, 8 May 1779, 2; “RAN AWAY... Galloway,” Gazette of Saint Jago, 23 May 1782, 2; “Run away, from Stewart- Castle Estate... Polydore,” Cornwall Chronicle, 24 May 1786; Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 236; “Nightingale Grove Pen, St. Andrew’s, Jan. 26 1791. RAN away... DINAH,” Daily Advertiser, 27 January 1791, 3. 56 “SARAH WARREN (formerly named ROSE),” Royal Gazette, 9 February 1822, 8. For discussion of relations between enslaved women and free men, see Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 107-143; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1630-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 63-65, 120-150; Christine M. Walker, "Pursuing Her Profits: Women in Jamaica, Atlantic Slavery, and a Globalising Market, 1700-60," Gender & History 26 (November 2014), 478–501. 40 from these communities other runaways may have sought sanctuary among them or even have been captured there. A "new negro man of the Congo country" who gave his name as John was taken into custody on one of the Caymanas estates in February 1780. John claimed that he had eloped following the death of his master. Philip, on the other hand, was a "new Negro man, of the Mundingo country" who escaped from Taylor's Caymanas estate. Bearing a branded mark on his right shoulder and "a good many country marks" on his face, Philip was supposed by his owner to have headed towards Liguanea of Above Rocks north of Kingston. Daphney was an elderly African-born Papaw woman who had escaped from her owner in Kingston almost a year earlier, and he believed that she passed as a free woman named Mary Dennest. Her husband

Quashie was an enslaved boiler at Ellis Caymanas, and Mary's owner believed that she regularly travelled from there to a variety of detinations, perhaps passing as a free higgler. Mary might have been one of the many higglers Quier would have seen on the roads, especially near Spanish

Town and Kingston.57

(22) William Berryman, ‘Maroon. Buckra reading their pass.’ (1808-15). Library of Congress.

The Ferry was the primary hub on the route between Spanish Town and Kingston, and both a transit point and a destination for runaways. When Paul, a "horse ferrier or negro doctor" escaped from Kingston, his owner advertised indicating that Paul was likely "harboured about the Ferry." Similarly "a young negro wench" named Phebe escaped from the estate just north of

Spanish Town of her recently deceased owner, allegedly making her way to her partner's "Grass

Piece" or hay field near the Ferry. Like most whites on the island’s roads Quier would have had

57 "TAKEN-UP... JOHN," Royal Gazette, 15 April 1780. John had been apprehended in February, but had still not been claimed two months later; "Run away... PHILIP," Royal Gazette, 29 April 1791; "RAN AWAY, About eleven months ago... DAPHNEY," Jamaica Gazette, 27 August 1788, 7. The advertisement was reprinted weekly for a month. 41 neither the time nor the inclination to check the papers of each and every enslaved person he saw at hubs like the Ferry. Moreover, Jamaican law exempted enslaved people “going with firewood, grass, fruit, provisions, or small stock, and other goods which they may lawfully sell.”58

As Quier rode east from the Ferry towards the island's largest town the roads grew even busier. Kingston was Jamaica's largest market town, as well as a financial and mercantile center, and it was the hub for both free and enslaved people, white and black. The proximity of Port

Royal, especially when a Royal Naval fleet was docked, and the presence of soldiers, sailors and shore workers all made the area busier still. Each day thousands of people clogged the avenues into Kingston and Port Royal and the town's major thoroughfares. Quier might well have seen women like Hope and Present, two newly arrived Nago women with country marks on their faces, making their way westward out of Kingston to cut and gather firewood. The women had been in Jamaica only three or four months, and they seized their opportunity to escape, and were last seen on the Spanish Town road near Kaylet's Pen. Out on this busy road, they were just two more enslaved women carrying the firewood that Kingston needed.59

(23) Annotated detail of James Robertson, To His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, this map of the county of Surrey, in the Island of Jamaica, constructed from actual surveys... (London: J. Robertson, 1804). National Library of Scotland.

As he approached Kingston Quier would have seen men, women and children working on the pens that ringed the city, including Ford's, Maxwell's, Edwards' and Manby's north of the

Spanish Town road. He might barely have noticed someone like a boy named Joe who had

58 "Run-away... PAUL," Jamaica Gazette, 8 October 1788, 6. This advertisement was reprinted six times over a month; "RUN AWAY... PHEBE," Royal Gazette, 22 July 1780, 12; “Consolidated Slave Act of Jamaica, 1792,” quoted in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West-Indies (London: for John Stockdale, 1793), II, 164. 59 "Run-away... Hope and Present," Jamaica Gazette, 26 July 1788, 2. 42 escaped from Kingston and taken refuge at Ford's Pen, "where he passes for free." And once

Quier entered Kingston the colors and sounds of the Jamaican countryside would have given way to the chaos and confusion of a bustling urban center, which by the 1770s boasted between two and three thousand buildings.60

As he drew closer to both Kingston and Port Royal Quier's attention likely shifted to the ever closer waters of Hunt’s Bay and the Caribbean beyond.

(24) Port Royal and Kingston Harbour,’ (1782). ‘A view of the town and harbour of Montego Bay, in the parish of St. James's, Jamaica, taken from the road leading to St. Anns’ (1770). Library of Congress.

Quier would have seen many more people and far more activity than is suggested by these images. He would have seen the large ocean-going craft around and in Kingston and Port Royal harbors, and if a naval fleet was present a host of large warships would have dominated the ocean vista, often eager for recruits to replace those dying of Caribbean diseases. In peace time the large vessels that brought enslaved Africans from Jamaica and took sugar, coffee and other crops away would have been the largest ships in sight. Some runaways, almost all of them young and male, were able to take advantage of ships’ captains constant need for labor, and despite legal prohibitions and a system designed to prevent escape off the island, a few runaways were able to quit Jamaica rather than seeking to remain free of their masters while still living on the island.61

60 "Ran Away... JOE," Royal Gazette, 17 March 1781, 8. This advertisement was printed four times over the course of one month ; Long, History of Jamaica, II, 103, 61 Thus, for example, David Furtardo advertised for eighteen-year-old Daniel, a carpenter, reporting that Daniel had run away and subsequently “been seen on board his Majesty’s ship the Diana at Port Royal, while Cromwell, a twenty-six-year-old Coromantee eloped in April 1780. Cromwell’s master Richard Bennett supposed that Cromwell “will pass as a free man, with intent to get off this island as steward of a ship to New-York, where he has a wife and children.” “Whereas on Friday night... a runaway mulatto boy named DANIEL,” Royal Gazette, 11 43

Drawing closer to the water most of the movement Quier saw would have been that of a host of small craft including fishing boats, droggers and other craft ferrying people and goods around the island.

(25) Detail of "This map of the county of Surry [sic] in the island of Jamaica," Thomas Craskell, Sir Henry Moore, James Simpson and Daniel Fournier. Library of Congress.

This would have been an almost entirely black scene, with virtually all small craft manned by enslaved men and free men of color, and as Quier drew closer to the ocean he would have been able to see and hear them more closely. Again, however, artistic representations tend to privilege white men and marginalize if not eliminate the black population who dominated the waterfont.

As Quier approached Kingston the city’s harbor opened up to his right, and he would have started seeing more and more of the men who worked the sea and those who supported them, including all manner of dock workers and ancillary workers such as sail-makers, riggers and even washer women. The urban sea front and docks created a bustling, crowded environment, and while white European sailors were always in evidence there were also black ocean-going sailors, some of them enslaved like Olaudah Equiano.62

(26) Richard Jones, ‘A correct draught of the harbours of Port Royal and Kingston, with the keys and shoals adjacent &c. from a late accurate survey, by Mr. Richd Jones, engineer.’ (London, 1756).

November 1791; “RUN AWAY... CROMWELL,” Royal Gazette, 13 May 1780, Supplement, 2. “An act to prevent the captains...”, 23 December 1784, The Laws of Jamaica: Comprehending All the Acts in Force, Passed between the First Year of the Reign of George the Third, and the Thirty-Second Year of the Reign of George the Third, inclusive... (St. Jago de la Vega: Alexander Aikman, 1802), II, 356. 62 Equiano’s initial labour as a slave was on merchant and Royal Naval vessels took him to British, North American and Caribbean ports. See Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (London: for the author, 1789), I, 93-179. 44

The waterfront and urban areas in general were often densely populated and loud environments, overwhelming the senses of those arriving from the relative quiet of the countryside. Such busy and crowded scenes provided both opportunity and cover for many of

Jamaica's runaways. Just as slave owners often identified particular plantations and pens as the suspected destination of runaways, so too did they suggest that other escapees had found refuge on the waterfront and in towns. Some escapees had worked in or near the waterfront and possessed valuable skills: Will, a thirty-seven year old creole was identified by his owner as “a sailmaker by trade.” It seems likely that Will was used to hiring himself out, and having been absent for three months his owner suspected that the escapee was making his own way. After

Kent eloped from a pen near Spanish Town a runaway advertisement suggested that “he has been seen lately on the wharfs in Kingston, assisting the seamen,” while fourteen-year-old John “was seen at Port-Royal, in the King’s Yard, on Thursday and Friday last.”63

In and around Kingston would have seen many different groups of enslaved men, women and children and smaller communities of free people of color, all providing potential refuge for runaways whose true status was hidden to whites such as Quier. The large community of fishermen was one such group. Johnny was “supposed to be harboured about the Bay by some of the fishermen”, while Edward was “supposed to be harboured by some of the fishermen at Old

Harbour.” Apollo’s master had utilized the enslaved man as a carpenter but he was “also a good fisherman, at which business it is supposed he employs himself, as he has been seen lately at the east end of Kingston with fish.” Harry was one of a group of three enslaved men who escaped in

July 1784, and when his master advertised for the runaways seven months later he reported that

63 “Ran away... WILL,” Royal Gazette, 12 May 1791; “RUN AWAY... KENT,” Gazette of St. Jago, 30 August 1781, 2; “RUNAWAY... JOHN,” Gazette of St. Jago, 19 December 1782, 3. 45

Harry “is frequently seen at Orange Cove fishing, and at Lucea Bay selling fish.” Croydon was, his master admitted, “a compleat fisherman, makes seins, trummels, nets, fishpots, &c. and fishes with hook and line.” Recognizing that Croydon’s skill rendered him both valuable and well able to make a living for himself, his owner included in this runaway advertisement the prices at which he would sell or rent Croydon.64

Women, too, might find work or refuge with partners in the dock and shore communities.

Prue, “a creole Negro wench... with a downcast look” was reported by her master to have been seen “in the King’s Yard at Port Royal, and is supposed to be harboured by the sailors or caulkers in said yard.” After Sukey eloped with her seamstress mother Cuba, their owner reported that the young woman had “often been caught on board sundry vessels” in Kingston and

Port Royal harbor. Fanny had been absent for six weeks when her master advertised for her announcing that she “has been seen several times at Port-Royal in the King’s Yard, with a

Sailor’s Jacket on.”65

The militia, provincial troops and British army regulars provided further opportunities for escaping slaves. There were both black and white soldiers in Spanish Town and in forts scattered all over the island, with a particularly heavy concentration around Kingston and Port Royal harbors. Their numbers were enhanced by the civilian ancillaries who gathered around all early modern armies. These include many black people, such as free black soldiers and Pioneers, enslaved workers hired out or conscripted to help in manual work such as baggage carriers and

64 “Run away... JOHNNY,” Cornwall Chronicle, 8 April 1777; “RAN AWAY... EDWARD,” Royal Gazette, 1 June 1822, Postscript, 20; “Run away... APOLLO,” Jamaica, 16 June 1779; “Twenty Dollars Reward. Run away...HARRY,” Cornwall Chronicle, 12 February 1785; “Run away... CROYDON,” Cornwall Chronicle, 23 May 1783. 65 “Run away...PRUE,” Jamaica, 18 December 1779; “Run away... CUBA... and SUKEY, her daughter,” Jamaica Mercury, 20 November 1779; “RUN AWAY... FANNY,” Gazette of St. Jago, 13 December 1781, 3. 46 the construction of defensive works. The constant military activity between 1754 and 1815 clearly created opportunities not just for male runaways associated directly with the army, but also for women and men as part of the large community of ancillary workers. When Casandra escaped from her master in Kingston he reported that she was “supposed to be harboured in or about Stoney Hill Barracks.” Similarly Abba ran in the summer of 1790, and a year later her master advertised for her reporting that she had “been lately seen at Stoney Hill Barracks, at which place it is supposed her husband is a pioneer.” On occasion soldiers formed relationships with free black and enslaved women. Consequently, the communities of people in and around

British military posts included many enslaved black people engaged in a variety of different tasks, particularly in and around Spanish Town, Kingston Port Royal. The opportunities for runaways to disappear into this large and chaotic scene were considerable.66

Some British officers owned enslaved people who acted as personal servants, while the troops as a whole relied on washerwomen and those who made or sold food and other goods and services. Phurah was one of the enslaved people belonging to army officers who eloped, escaping from her owner Captain Samuel Rutherford in Spanish Town. Born in Trenton, New

Jersey, she had likely been brought to Jamaica by Rutherford who was an officer in the 1st

Battalion of the 60th Regiment. This regiment was based in the West Indies but officers like

Rutherford often passed through and saw service in North America, and he may have seen service there in 1779-80. Twenty-year old Phurah was noticeably North American and might be identified by the fact by the fact that she “speaks remarkable good English... and dresses in the stile of English servants.” Rutherford thought that Phurah would “change her name and attempt

66 “RUN AWAY... CASANDRA,” Daily Advertiser, 9 March 1791, 3; “RAN away... ABBA,” Daily Advertiser, 29 June 1791, 3. 47 to pass for a free woman.” Sixteen-year-old Brandon, better known as Brandy, had been “some time a waiting boy to an officer of the guards at New-York” before being brought to Jamaica and then sold. Brandy’s owner thought it likely that Brandy preferred serving military officers to the labour of the enslaved in Jamaica, and that “he may attempt to impose himself on some gentlemen of the army here.”67

The Jamaican governor and British army officers regularly conscripted enslaved men to work with or for the British army, sometimes informally and at other times as Pioneers, the auxiliaries to regular troops who would undertake heavy work. This continued throughout the imperial wars of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and beyond, and since

Pioneers were employed around and off the island some appear to have gained a taste for life beyond plantation slavery. Military work provided some enslaved men with the opportunity to escape. James Wright advertised for two enslaved Congo men who had been drafted into military service and had promptly escaped. Orange had been pressed “to carry baggage for some of the

Trelawny Militia” while Plymouth had been “Pressed by some of the Militia.” Dublin was hired out by his owner as a Pioneer with the 16th Regiment but then escaped from the Lucea Barracks, and three months later his master still had not recovered Dublin.68

67 For more on the King’s Rifle Corps (60th Regiment), see Edward Hutton, A Brief History of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 1755-1915 (Winchester: Warren and Son, 1917), and Stuart Salmon, “The Loyalist Regiments of the American Revolutionary War, 1775-1783,” (PhD. diss., University of Stirling, 2009), 28-30. Nine months before Phurah eloped a young “likely NEGRO BOY” named Trip escaped from Ralph Phillips, also a Captain in the 60th Regiment. It is unclear whether Trip was American-born, an African or a creolized Jamaican. “RUN AWAY... TRIP,” Royal Gazette, 22 July 1780, Supplement, 12; “RUN AWAY... PHURAH,” Gazette of St. Jago, 26 April 1781, 2; “ABSENTED himself... BRANDON,” Royal Gazette, 24 June 1780, Supplement, 10. 68 “Run away... ORANGE... PLYMOUTH,” Jamaica Mercury, 18 December 1779; “Ran away... DUBLIN,” Cornwall Chronicle, 19 July 1793. 48

Others escaped in order to join the military themselves. James Baxter, a carpenter who

“sometimes calls himself Alexander McCrea” had been escaped for eleven years when he was retaken in 1779, having recently arrived in Spanish Town passing as a free man serving “as a soldier in the St. Ann’s Foot” militia. Once taken up he was deployed as an enslaved auxiliary carpenter working on new defensive works around Kingston Harbor, but soon after escaped once again. American-born John Russell “was formerly very fond of playing the fife, but has lately commenced preacher.” He had escaped once before and joined the Pioneers, and his master suspected that Russell “will attempt to pass as a free person... and may attempt to enlist into his

Majesty’s service.” Particularly impressive was Jack, a twenty-year-old Congo escapee, with his owner’s initials branded upon his shoulder. Passing by the name of John Murray he had promptly enlisted and went “down to the Musquito Shore” to participate in the British capture of Omoa from the Spanish in October 1779. Similarly an unnamed “creole Negro fellow” might, his owner believed “avoid detection by passing for a free man, (having already attempted to enlist in the newly raised Corps, by the name of JAMES MOORE). Slave-owners sought to regain runaways who joined the British military and to punish those who recruited or employed them, as when Captain Samuel Barton was convicted in May 1783 of “enlisting and detaining two negro slaves, the property of Mr. Henry Markall.” These runaways “had imposed themselves upon the defendant as free persons,” but because Barton had failed to identify them as runaways and then refused to surrender them to Markall he was convicted and fined.69

69 “Run away... JAMES BAXTER,” Jamaica Mercury, 27 September 1779; “FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD... JOHN RUSSELL,” Royal Gazette, 3 August 1816, 7; “Run away... JACK,” Jamaica Mercury, 16 November 1779; “Run away... JAMES MOORE,” Jamaica Mercury, 4 December 1779; “WEST INDIA INTELLIGENCE, St. Jago de la Vega,” Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (London), 26 August 1783, 3. Barton served in “Major Lewis’s battalion of Jamaica Rangers, the first permanent free black unit of the British army. 49

With dusk falling there might have been a funeral taking place in the "Negro Burying

Ground" which was located on the western edge of Kingston and a couple of blocks south of the road.

(27) Michael Hay, Plan of Kingston (Kingston, 1745). Library of Congress.

Although the enslaved may well have moderated their funerary practices because of the proximity of whites, the sight and sound of the ceremony would nonetheless have struck Quier as being rather more African than European. A decade before Quier arrived in Kingston Olaudah

Equiano had witnessed a Jamaican slave funeral ceremony, most likely in the Kingston burial yard, noting that the enslaved "still retain most of their native customs: they bury their dead, and put victuals, pipes and tobacco, and other things, in the grave with the corps, in the same manner as in Africa.” And then a decade after Quier's journey William Beckford reported that "When the body is carried to the grave, they accompany the procession with a song; and when the earth is scattered over it, they send forth a shrill and noisy howl, which is no sooner re-echoed, in some cases, than forgotten." Following interment in the grave "the face of sorrow becomes at once the emblem of joy. The instruments resound, the dancers are prepared; the day sets in cheerfulness, and the night resounds with the chorus of contentment."70

Kumina rites combined African and some European Christian elements, but even after after two decades in Jamaica Quier might still have found himself unnerved by the sound of call-

70 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, II, 101; Beckford, A Descriptive Account, 389-390. For more on funerary rites see Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, and Brown, "The Reaper’s Garden: Last Rites and First Principles in Jamaican Slave Society," (paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania, Sept. 2007, by permission of the author). For a colorful, somewhat problematic yet revealing description of Jamaican funeral rites as practised in the early twentieth century, and bearing striking resemblance to those of the eighteenth century, see Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). 50 and-response singing, the strange shouts, screams and music and the sight of those present

“running, leaping, and jumping, accompanied with many violent and frantic gestures and contortions.”

(28) Kumina Country Song, recorded c. 1956.71

While funerals on the outskirts of Kingston may have been somewhat more muted than those that took place out of sight in rural areas, the African practices of Jamaica’s black population still shaped them. Musicians were of central importance, and were highly valued by the community for their skill. Might Dick, who since escaping from Smith's plantation along Quier's route had been earning "his maintenance" as a musician be one of those performing at the graveside in the fading light? Or did the musicians include somebody like the "famous banjaw man" Vulcan, who had eloped from a plantation in south-western Jamaica a couple of years earlier?72

After the relative peace of Quier’s journey through rural plantations, the noise of

Kingston may at first have seemed overwhelming during the days and nights Quier might have spent in the town. When Curtis Brett arrived in Kingston from London he was struck by the diversity of the European, but most especially the African populations:

71 “Kumina Country Song,” Track 3, Side 1, Folk Music of Jamaica, recorded by Edward Seaga (Washington, DC: Ethnic Folkways Library, 1956). While it is unlikely that this piece was performed at eighteenth-century Jamaican funerals, it was described by its performers as a spiritual Kumina “country’ song, performed in “country” or in “language” using many identifiably African (Congo) words. It is used here to give a sense of spiritual musical performance. See Edward Seaga, sleeve notes. 72 Robert Renny, An History of Jamaica. With Observations On The Climate, Scenery, Trade, Productions, Negroes, Slave Trade, Diseases of Europeans, Customs, Manners, And Dispositions of the Inhabitants… (London: for J. Cawthorn, 1807), 169; "RUN AWAY from the Subscriber in November last," Gazette of Saint Jago, 3 May 1781; "Ran away, from Canaan Estate... VULCAN," Cornwall Chronicle, 10 May 1777. See also Elizabeth Pigou, “A Note on Afro-Jamaican Beliefs and Rituals,” Jamaica Journal: Quarterly of the Institute of Jamaica 20, 2 (May-July 1987), 23-6; Anonymous, “Kumina,” Jamaica Journal: Quarterly of the Institute of Jamaica 10, 1 (1977), 6. 51

(29) Hakewill, "Harbour Street, Kingston," artwork by Anthony King.73

Roughly half of the city’s population were free, whether white, mulatto or African, and by 1788 over 40% of Jamaica’s free people of color lived in Kingston. Many of these free people themselves owned slaves, and in pens near the Kingston waterfront Quier would have seen and heard dozens and even hundreds of newly arrived Africans being readied for sale. An experienced doctor and planter, he likely could tell which groups had come from such regions as the Gold Coast, or the Bight of Biafra. He would have seen soldiers and sailors, a profusion of men and women in and around the docks, and many people selling and buying in both large and smaller less formal markets.74

On Sundays in particular enslaved people would have flocked to Kingston and other

Jamaican towns, and in particular to the market areas not only to buy and sell produce and goods, but also for food, sociability, music and dance. As one observer noted “The Negroes are the only market people,” and enslaved and free people of color hawked all manner of foodstuffs in the markets: fish and shellfish, poultry or all kinds, and meats including beef, goat mutton, veal, pork, lamb and turtle. Grain, butter and vegetables from North America were for sale alongside fruits and vegetables from all over the island.75

(30) Agostino Brunias, ‘Linen Market, Dominica,’ Paul Mellon Collection , Yale Center for British Art. W.E. Beastall and G. Testolini, ‘Negroes Sunday Market at Antigua’ (London, 1806). Royal Museums Greenwich.

73 Reading of excerpt of Curtiss Brett Sr. to Curtiss Brett, Jr., autobiographical letters describing Jamaica in 1748, CS1, 12-13. Voice of XXXXX. 74 Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, 173. 75 [Janet Schaw], Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the Years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews & Charles M. Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 88; Long, History of Jamaica, II, 34-6. 52

Adolph Duperly, ‘Marketplace, Falmouth, Jamaica, 1844,’ in Duperly, Excursions in Jamaica (Kingston, 1850).76

Artistic representations of Caribbean markets tend to impose an order and regularity that white men in Caribbean found lacking. Brunias and other artists represented color, abundance and a generally happy and well-dressed population of enslaved and free people of color. Perhaps modern Jamaican and West African markets give a better sense of the sensory overload of eighteenth-century markets in which everyone from chimney sweeps to fruit vendors to livestock jostled for attention, while white men and women were largely absent: whites tended to “walk but little” even over short distances, travelling the city streets in small carriages. The markets belonged to enslaved and free people, not to whites.77

Riding along Port Royal Street facing the city’s great harbour, Quier would have seen it all. A generation earlier this one street had housed newly arrived Africans in slave yards only a stone’s throw from the homes of some of the wealthiest men on the island, such as the merchant

Samuel Dicker or Robert Stirling who owned several sugar estates and some 750 slaves.

Between these two extremes many more had lived and worked along Port Royal Street, such as the free black woman Phiba who owned one slave, the tavern keeper Philip Weston, the sailmaker John Kendrick, and the silversmith Daniel Silva. All told in the middle of the eighteenth century there had been some fifty shops and businesses on Port Royal Street alone, a number that had risen by the time our traveller rode along the street a generation later. Sailors, fishermen, joiners, coopers, wheelwrights, shipwrights, sail-makers, caulkers, block-makers, turners, cabinet-makers, tailors, cartmen, seamstresses, washerwomen and more filled this and

76 Reading of excerpt from Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 101, 178. Voice of XXXXX. 77 Curtiss Brett Sr. to Curtiss Brett, Jr., autobiographical letters describing Jamaica in 1748, CS1, 13. 53 neighboring streets, many of them the enslaved assistants to free white and black owners.

Beyond them all were a dozen or more ocean going ships as well as numerous smaller craft, and planters were eager for the news, people and goods that came to Kingston by sea.78

A great many black people, most of them enslaved, inhabited homes that were often little more than shacks on the northern and eastern side of Kingston. Laws such as “An act for remedying the inconveniences which may arise from the number of negro huts and houses, built in and about the towns of St. Jago de la Vega, Port-Royal, and Kingston” reflected white

Jamaicans’ concerns about these communities, not least that “runaway negro and other slaves, from different parts of the island, [were] daily resorting to and being harboured in the said huts or houses.” Enslaved people who escaped from urban owners often had occupations and skills that were in demand in urban environments, and a constantly shifting and relatively large population of free people of color and enslaved people concentrated in a small area provided excellent cover for runaways. Serving boys and waiters, hairdressers and barbers, fishermen and washerwomen, carpenters and joiners and others like them who eloped might hope to hire themselves out passing as free or enslaved people with permission to work for others. At the same time rural runaways sometimes came to urban areas in the hope of securing similar employment for themselves, and the degree of independence that came with it.79

Quier and other whites who visited or lived in urban areas would constantly interact with enslaved and free black people, from stable boys, waiters and maids in the inns, coffee houses

78 Trevor Burnard and Emma Hart, ‘Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina: A New Look at Comparative Urbanization in Plantation Colonial British America,’ Journal of Urban History, 39, 2 (2013), 222-3. 79 The Laws of Jamaica: Comprehending All the Acts in Force, Passed between the First Year of the Reign of George the Third, and the Thirty-Second Year of the Reign of George the Third, inclusive... (St. Jago de la Vega: Alexander Aikman, 1802), 2nd ed., II, 88. 54 and private homes they visited, to the fruit, food and drink sellers on the streets from whom they purchased refreshments, and in the streets Quier would have seen constant activity with boys carrying messages, fishermen bringing in their catch, washerwomen carrying clothes, higglers and others marketing goods, and carpenters and others engaged in construction. Some of these people were runaways, but even when masters suspected where a runaway was and what they were doing such knowledge did not assure recapture. The large community of free and enslaved black people in Kingston, Spanish Town and other urban centers provided a significant degree of cover.

(31) 80

Robin, a Congo waiter who was branded on each shoulder with the initials of his owner, eloped from Spanish Town. Despite being spotted in Kingston, he remained at liberty for at least ten months. Tom Hall had been hired out as a coach man in Kingston when he ran away, after which he was spotted in the eastern end of the city as well as being “often seen going in and out of the gaol, to visit some of his comrades there.” Bute eloped in January 1791 had been a carriage boy in his youth and then “hired as a postilion and waiting man to sundry gentlemen in

Kingston.” The previous year Bute had begun training as a carpenter, increasing his marketable skills. Three months later Bute’s owner readvertised for him, stating that “he has been seen with his wife in Kingston,” a higgler named Fanny. Quaw, “a young Mungola Barber and Waiting

Man” had escaped from the Richmond Vale estate but was then “seen some days ago in Spanish

Town, and probably is either there or in Kingston.” But despite knowing where Quaw had been seen and was likely working, ten months after he had eloped the young man remained free.

80 Sound recording excerpted from "Kingston Downtown on Market Street," Jamaican Vibrations, https://www.asoundeffect.com/sound-library/jamaican-vibrations-sound-effects/ 55

Carpenters, bricklayers and other men involved in construction dominated the ranks of the skilled men who escaped from and to urban environments. Enslaved men dominated the

Jamaican building trades and were sometimes able to remain free for extended periods, passing as free men or as enslaved workers authorized to hire themselves out, or on rare occasions working for free black men who knew they were runaways. Duke, a Moco mason, was “well known in Kingston, Port Royal, and Liguanea, where he has been working these twelve months past as a free man.” Billy, an escaped Coromantee mason “was seen lately in St. George with two mason’s trowels,” while “a complet Carpenter and a very good joiner” named Charles

Moore” escaped from Spanish Town and “passes himself as a free man.”81

Maids and other women employed in domestic work also ran away. Phibby was a Congo

“negro wench” who eloped from her master in Kingston who reported that she was “harboured at the east-end of the town, and has frequently been seen there.” Barbary, also described as “a

Negro Wench,” escaped from the home of her master, a Spanish Town attorney who believed that Barbary was “harboured in this town by her aunt BESSY BYFIELD,” yet such knowledge had not immediately and easily led to her recapture. Nelly, a washerwoman and seamstress in

Kingston had been absent for a year when her master advertised for her, noting that although she remained based in Kingston Nelly “goes about higgling, frequently to Westward, and comes down to the Plantain Boats.” Hannah, another Kingston-based seamstress had also been absent

81 “RAN AWAY... ROBIN,” Gazette of St. Jago, 25 April 1782, 3. Robin eloped on 5 March 1782, but Singer continued advertising for him between 25 April 1782 and 16 January 1783; “Run away... TOM HALL,” Jamaica Mercury, 30 July 1779; “Fifteen Dollars reward... BUTE,” Royal Gazette, 2 March 1791; “FIFTEEN DOLLARS REWARD,” Daily Advertiser, 29 April 1791, 3; “RUN AWAY... QUAW,” Royal Gazette, 15 April 1780, 8. Quaw escaped in December 1779, but his owner William Brown was still advertising for him in mid-October 1780; “RAN away... DUKE,” Daily Advertiser, 18 October 1791, 3; “Run away... BILLY,” Jamaica Mercury, 3 June 1779; “RUN AWAY... CHARLES MOORE,” Gazette of St. Jago, 30 May 1782, 2. 56 for a year when her master once again advertised for her: eighteen newspaper advertisements over the following month may still not have secured Hannah.82

Both women and men who had escaped might seek to make their way selling goods in

Jamaican towns. Jamaican urban selling and markets were essential for the distribution and marketing of slave and plantation-raised produce. Noisy, chaotic and crowded, markets undoubtedly served as cover for some runaways. When Phoebe and Barbara absconded from a plantation in St. David’s their master suggested that both “were harboured about the Negro-

Market of Kingston.” Eleanor ran from Henry Hart in St. Elizabeth’s Parish and six moths later was, he reported, “seen selling Soup in the Kingston Market.” Similarly Frances who had eloped in Kingston was reported in an advertisement ten months later to have “been frequently seen in the Spanish Town Market”. After Fanny was taken up near Morant Bay, she refused to “tell her owner’s name” and then told her captor that she had been supporting herself by “sell[ing] things about Kingston streets.” Gloster had been absent for three months and his Kingston owner reported that the runaway “is supposed to skulk in the day-time about the land on Barbican Penn near Fort-Rock, to cut wood, and bring to Town in the evening for sale”.83

82 “RAN AWAY... PHIBBY,” Daily Advertiser, 20 December 1791, 3; “RUN AWAY... BARBARY,” Gazette of St. Jago, 12 JULY 1781, 2; “ABSCONDED... NELLY,” Daily Advertiser, 13 June 1791, 1; “ABSCONDED... HANNAH,” Daily Advertiser, 31 August 1791, 3. This advertisement was reprinted up until 28 September 1791. 83 “ABSCONDED... PHOEBE and BARBARA,” Royal Gazette, 17 August 1816, Supplement, 14; “RAN AWAY... ELEANOR,” Royal Gazette, 29 June 1822, Postscript, 24; “RAN AWAY... FRANCES,” Royal Gazette, 9 March 1822, Additional Postscript, 26; “Take up... FANNY,” Jamaica Mercury, 2 July 1779; “Run away... GLOSTER,” Jamaica Mercury, 13 May 1779. Mark W. Hauser, “Linstead Market Before Linstead? Eighteenth-century Yabbas and the Internal Market System of Jamaica,” Caribbean Quarterly, 55, 2 (2009), 89-111; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Jamaican Internal Marketing Pattern: Some Notes and Hypotheses,” Social and Economic Studies, 4, 1 (1955), 95-103; Sidney Mintz and Douglas Hall, ‘The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,’ Yale University Publications in Anthropology 57 (1960), 3-25; Lorna Elaine Simmonds, ‘The Afro-Jamaican and the Internal Marketing System, 1780- 57

Urban runaways included a good number of children. Whym, “a new negro boy of the

Moco country” absconed from his Kingston master in April 1791, despite being able to speak

“very little English.” Fanny, “a new negro Girl of the Congo country” absconded after leaving her master’s house on King Street with a message. Fanny's master suspected she had eloped in fear of punishment because she had been “detected with a small piece of paper’d gold in her pocket.” Munimia, a Mundingo, was only twelve or thirteen when she eloped, while thirteen- year Nancy, a Coromantee, also ran from Kingston and was seen “after her elopement in company with a negro wench” heading towards Vere. It cannot have been easy for recently arrived African children to escape and survive urban environments, but while some may have left towns others may have found sanctuary and aid in urban black communities that included countrymen and women and perhaps shipmates who might harbor them. And on occasion white people or free people of color might also help runaway children. Charles Nicholson was sure that a boy named Cudjoe who had run from him in Port Royal was “encouraged in his elopement by a certain White Woman in this town.” When Jenny escaped in Kingston in April 1791 her master reported that she had frequently been absent for weeks at a time over the previous year, and he suspected that “she is inveigled by some white person.” Lucy had been absent for three years when her mistress advertised for her, suggesting that Lucy was being “harboured by some white person in Spanish Town”. Runaways could be anywhere, on and around plantations, on the roads, in towns and on boats and the waterfront. When white Jamaicans like Dr. John Quier

1834,’ in Kathleen E.A. Monteith and Glen Richards, Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 274-290. 58 travelled around Jamaica they may often have seen runaways, more often than not without realizing it.84

* * *

When Harriet Tubman first carried herself from the plantation societies of the American

South to the nominally free soil of the North she recalled experiencing the greatest euphoria of her life, which was all too quickly supplanted by the deepest despair. "I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there." We usually conceive of freedom for enslaved people in terms of their escape to a place in which their bondage ends. But Tubman’s lament reminds us that freedom can also be about ending one’s enslavement without relocating, and remaining in what has become one’s home and enjoying personal independence alongside family, friends and community. While long-term Jamaican runaways rarely experienced

Tubman’s elation at reaching “free soil,” they did not necessarily experience her anguish at leaving behind family, friends and home. Most Jamaican runaways did not remove themselves from plantation slave society, instead seeking to achieve and sustain a degree of freedom in a liminal space within yet separate from slave society. Hidden from former masters runaways often were close to family, friends and community who might aid or at least provide camouflage. To run away in eighteenth-century Jamaica and then to remain at liberty was no easy task, and yet–

84 “ABSCONDED... WHYM,” Daily Advertiser, 14 April 1791, 3; “RAN AWAY FANNY,” Daily Advertiser, 6 September 1791, 3; “RAN AWAY... MUNIMIA,” Daily Advertiser, 9 September 1791, 3; “RUN AWAY... NANCY,” Royal Gazette, 23 September 1780, Supplement, 11; “WHEREAS a negro boy named CUDJOE,” Daily Advertiser, 12 November 1791, 4; “RUN AWAY... JENNY,” Daily Advertiser, 5 May 1791, 3; “Run away... LUCY,” Cornwall Chronicle, 27 August 1782. 59 as the runaway advertisements that filled Jamaican newspapers attest–many did elope, and some were able to remain at liberty for extended periods. However, although runaways had successfully challenged an individual owner’s mastery of their bodies, very few were able to fully escape the slaveocracy’s power over them and they remained enmeshed in a slave society.85

Jamaican runaway advertisements reveal a tension between resistance and accommodation, and a surprisingly high proportion of longer-term runaways appear to have found refuge within the very society from which they had escaped, often for long periods and perhaps whole lifetimes. At least sixty-seven (6.7%) of the runaways in this sample were absent for twelve months or longer, a further 68 (6.8%) for between six and twelve months, and 135

(13.5%) for between one and six months. Yet as this essay has shown, many of these escapees were known or suspected to be living and working elsewhere on Jamaica, functioning members of as much as rebels against the society they inhabited.86

White Jamaican planters passing through familiar environments and seeing men, women and children going about the myriad activities undertaken by the enslaved might not even notice the runaways who were sometimes present in or near plantations. When visiting towns planters may have felt a greater sense of security amidst a great number of white people, while at the same time experiencing the sensory overload of a great many people filling the streets and urban spaces. It is hardly surprising that so many of Jamaica's runaways appear to have headed towards the chaos and confusion of towns, blending into larger populations of enslaved and free people.

85 Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn: W.J. Moses, 1869), 19-20. 86 Length of time at liberty can be ascertained either by an advertiser stating how long a runaway had been free, or by calculating the length of time between absconding and the final advertisement which might appear many months later. However, some of the advertisements in this sample come at the end of a run, or there is no information available about how often they were repeated. Therefore these numbers of long-term absentees were probably higher. 60

These men and women had run away from their own enslavement but they had not run away from slavery and plantation society. Rather, they had changed their status within it, seeking to pass either as the enslaved property of other people or as free people. If successful they were able to quietly live their lives beyond the notice of their owners and the authorities. Such runaways were camouflaged rather than hidden, blending into the island’s huge black population. If it took courage to escape from slave society, as many in North America did, then how much more courage did it take for an enslaved person to seek a degree of self determination and personal liberty deep within the heart of Jamaica’s plantation society?