In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750-1786

by Douglas Hall

Thomas Thistlewood came to Jamaica from Lincolnshire, England in 1750, and lived as an estate overseer and small landowner in western Jamaica until his death in 1786. Throughout his life he kept a record of his daily activities and his observations of life around him. These diaries, about 10,000 pages, were deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives. They contain a rich chronicle of plantation life – its people, social life, agricultural techniques, medicinal remedies and relations between slaves and their owners. The wealth of information left behind in the Thistlewood’s diaries has been fashioned by Professor Hall into a remarkable account of planation life in Jamaica at the height of its era of sugar plantation prosperity. It gives historians and students of history a new perspective on the social history of mid eighteenth century Jamaica, the Tacky Rebellion, and the tenuous relations between planters and the Maroons. This reprint contains a revised index.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Laura McNeal · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be clear, when I give this book three stars, I'm trying to choose the least offensive rating. I didn't "like it." I hated it. But I appreciated what it taught me in the same way that a person might appreciate the knowledge gained from a tour of Auschwitz. Douglas Hall deserves five stars for sorting through this massive archive of diaries and summarizing, quoting, annotating, and footnoting the thoughts of a slave-owning monster who like other monsters of history did not doubt or question his supremacy or his appetites but who, through his diary, gives us a glimpse of individual lives that would otherwise be completely blotted out. I can't help but offer this book up to anyone still mulling Kanye West's incendiary comment on the persistence of slavery: "When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... For 400 years? That sounds like a choice." The ratio of slaves to white owners in Jamaica at the time this diary was written was 10-1 and at times 15-1, which begs the question Kanye asked: how and why did this particular power remain so long in the hands of the outnumbered? I can't begin to answer that very complicated question in full, but this book does offer two paralyzingly sad components of an answer (beyond the fact that the white planters owned all the weapons and ships), and it suggests that the female slaves were not mentally enslaved (as Kanye theorized). On the contrary, many of Thistlewood's female slaves were astonishingly, incredibly, persistently rebellious, but they lived on an island from which there was no escape from men of every ethnicity, who caught them, returned them, and beat them.

The two other components that are possibly less well known are these:

1) most babies borne by slaves in 18th-century Jamaica died. They died of lockjaw; no one understood that cutting the umbilical cord with a dirty knife infected the babies with tetanus.

2) while babies who were fathered by white owners were sometimes manumitted (set free) and sometimes gained greater privileges (such as indoor work rather than field work), Thomas Thistlewood does not always claim--in fact, rarely claims--paternity for the babies born to slaves he has raped (something we know because in his diary he recorded the names of the women he "took" and he also named the women who gave birth and what happened to those babies).

These two things combined mean that while slaves and freed people of color in Jamaica vastly outnumbered white British slave owners and their family members in residence, they were not part of anything resembling a regenerative family cycle, in which the parents could (hypothetically) hope that their children's lives would be different. The cycle for Thistlewood's female slaves was to be nearly constantly pregnant, to give birth, to lose the child within a week or two, to run away, to be returned, to be flogged, to run away, to be returned, to be flogged, and sometimes (I would not say these depressing things if they weren't horribly, horribly true) the cycle was to run away while pregnant and to be flogged while pregnant.

Here are the names of women sold to Thomas Thistlewood, the ones who were not mentally enslaved, who had no choices at all (if I may say so, Kanye), some of whom, astonishingly, ran away again and again, were flogged not just once but repeatedly for "impudence," or for not cleaning the kitchen, or for pretending to be sick, and some of whose descendants miraculously survived. These women deserve their own monument, with their names chiseled in stone. Maybe Nike could help fund it.

Damsel, purchased 1765
Nelly, Damsel's child
Juno, Damsel's child
Abba
Sukey
Jenny, Abba's child
Phibbah, Abba's child
Prue, Abba's Mary's child
Mary, Abba's child, blind* (raped by Thistlewood when she came of age)
Phoebe
Charity, Phoebe's daughter
Franke, Phoebe's daughter
Fanny
Betty, Fanny's daughter
Fanny, Fanny's daughter
Bess, "A gift from Mrs. Bennett to Phibbah in 1765"
Mirtilla
Nanny
Maria
Franke
Peggy (blind in one eye)

Note: if you are lucky enough to be a student at Yale, you can look at the original sources of this book--13 boxes, stretching for 9.26 linear feet--which were bought at auction by the Beinecke Library in 2011.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

So informative but holy moly was Thistlewood a creep.

[Kadian Dennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very eye opening. Was very intrigued by the way Thistlewood wrote about the interactions with the slaves. Don't see much difference between then and now

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot but it’s horrifying. Glad he kept records only for what it teaches us.

[Karst]

Harrowing diary of a Jamaican slave-owner in the late eighteenth century.