Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica 9781409468912, 2015014015

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Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books – and the first in Art History – to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain’s global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill’s Jamaican landscapes and William Clark’s Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot, and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such – mainly white, male – artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to ‘civilize’ the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement. Charmaine A. Nelson is Professor of Art History, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada.

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica Charmaine A. Nelson

First published 2016 by Routledge Publishing 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge Publishing 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Charmaine A. Nelson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Charmaine A. Nelson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nelson, Charmaine. Slavery, geography and empire in nineteenth-century marine landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica / By Charmaine A. Nelson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6891-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Slavery in art. 2. Landscapes in art. 3. Imperialism in art. 4. Art and society—Québec (Province)—Montréal—History—19th century. 5. Art and society—Jamaica—History—19th century. I. Title. N8243.S576N45 2015 704.03′96073—dc23 2015014015 ISBN: 978-1-4-094-6891-2 (hbk) Typeset in Perpetua by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Mom (Barbara Elaine Nelson) and Dad (Maxwell Barrington Nelson) with love, respect, and gratitude

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Slavery studies and its absences 2 Contesting the erasure of black Canada and Canadian slavery 4 Postcolonial geography: Understanding landscapes as racialized 8 The case of two islands: Comparing Montreal and Jamaica 13 Societies-with-slaves vs. slave societies 15 Montreal and Jamaica: Colonized landscapes 17 The chapters 24 Terminology 29

xi xv 1

1

Colonialism and art: Landscape and empire Critical geography and art history: Of landscape representation, imperialism, and power 41 Art-making as empire-making:Whiteness, travel, and imperial vision 43 Montreal and Jamaica: Imperial connections 48 Transoceanic art 52 Maps, landscape painting, and topographical landscapes 54

41

2

A tale of two empires: Montreal slavery under the French and the British A transition of power: From French to British slavery 59 Liminal bodies:“Loose” women, drunken soldiers, and vagrancy 62 Adapting slavery under the British 75 Situating Montreal’s black minority 79 The face of slave ownership in Montreal: James McGill 86

59

3

Representing the enslaved African in Montreal Portraiture and slavery 111 Geographical alienation and the hierarchy of enslavement 116 Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, revolutionary St Domingue, and the politics of flight 119

111

viii Contents Critiquing Canadian museum practice:The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ installation of Portrait of a Haitian Woman 125 The conditions of African enslavement in eighteenth-century Montreal and St Domingue 126 Life after François:“Portrait” of a Montreal slave mistress 128 Minuets of the Canadians and African cultural survivals 133 The tambourine 140 Connecting black Canadian music to the African diaspora 143 4

Landscaping Montreal Montreal as British military stronghold 157 Re-imagining Montreal as a colonial trade and slave port 170 St Helen’s island 177

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5

Landscaping Jamaica John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus: Jamaica in the early modern British imagination 195 Sloane’s natural history 199 The Beckfordesque landscape tradition 200 Beckford, slavery, and sugar cultivation 203 The picturesque and Beckford’s debt to European landscape (painting) 205 The planter’s vantage point:The tropical picturesque 207

195

6

Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica: Pro-slavery discourse and the reality of enslavement William Clark’s Antigua 217 The tropical picturesque as pro-slavery discourse 223 Thomas Thistlewood andVineyard Pen 235 White male sexual exploitation of black women 240 Thomas Thistlewood, Agostino Brunias, and cross-racial sexual relations in the Caribbean 245 The price of excess:White male promiscuity and the spread of venereal disease 247 The state of Jamaican Slavery 249

7

8

James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour: Representing life on nineteenth-century Jamaican sugar plantations Sugar cane or slaves: Representing and sublimating labour 277 William Clark’s labouring slaves 285 Animalizing slaves, humanizing animals 291 James Hakewill’s white women 296 “I am the only woman”: Politeness and the erasure of black and coloured women 310 Riding side-saddle:White femininity, modernity, and privilege 317 Beyond sugar: James Hakewill’s vision of Jamaican settlements, livestock pens, and the spaces between Caretaking animals: Identity and penkeeping 341 The limits of mobility and the pervasiveness of surveillance: Exploring wainage 349

217

277

341

Contents

ix

“Other” whites: Representing British soldiers in the Caribbean 355 White anxiety: Cross-racial mixing and coloured populations 367 Conclusion: Deception in the life and art of the white Jamaican creole planter class Index Plates

395 407

Illustrations

Colour plates 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a HaitianWoman (formerly Portrait of a Negro Slave until 2011) (1786), oil on canvas, 72.7 × 58.5 cm, M12067, McCord Museum, Montreal James Hakewill, MillYard, Holland Estate, St.Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21), watercolour, 31.1 × 42.2 cm, B1977.14.1963, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven James Hakewill, Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica:The Property of G.W.Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21), watercolour, 31.1 × 41.9 cm, B1977.14.1960, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Cornelius Krieghoff, Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal (1845), oil on canvas, 20.32 × 25.4 cm, The Schulich Family Collection. Photo credit: Michael Cullen, TPG Digital Art Services William Satchwell Leney after Robert Sproule, View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830), hand-coloured engraving, 22.8 × 34.8 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 34, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal J.C. Stadler after George Heriot, Minuets of the Canadians, from Travels through the Canadas . . . (1807), engraving, 23 × 36.7 cm., M19871, McCord Museum, Montreal After Thomas Patten, An EastView of Montreal, in Canada, published for Carington Bowles at his map and print warehouse, No. 69 in St. Paul’s Church Yard, London (after 1760), hand-coloured engraving, 15.2 × 26.1 cm. Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 101, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s from part IV of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0056, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven James D. Duncan, View from St. Helen’s Island (1838), oil on canvas, 73 × 110 cm., 1998.1900, Château Ramezay – Historic Site and Museum of Montreal

xii Illustrations

10 John Seller, Novissima et Accuratissima Insulae Jamaicae descriptio, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675) engraving, 42.5 × 54 cm, PBE6862(26), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 11 William Clark, Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0001, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 12 Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica (1780), oil on canvas, 49.8 × 68.6 cm, B1981.25.76, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 13 William Clark, Exterior of the Boiling-House, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0031, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 14 William Clark, The Court-House, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0002, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 15 Charmaine A. Nelson, Rose Hall Plantation, Montego Bay, Jamaica (August 2014), photograph 16 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Harbour Street, Kingston, from part I of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0010, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Figures 4.1 Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal orVilla Marie in Canada, from Universal Magazine (November 1759), paper, 27 × 40.5 cm, G246:8/30, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 4.2 Thomas Davies, Montreal (1812), watercolour over graphite on wove paper, 34.2 × 52.2 cm, MBAC 6286, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 4.3 Thomas Davies, AView of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), watercolour over graphite on laid paper, 35.3 × 53.5 cm, MBAC 6272, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 4.4 Louis Dulongpré, Portrait of James McGill (1744–1813) (1800–10), oil on canvas, 83.8 × 67.8 cm, M970X.106, McCord Museum, Montreal 4.5 Robert Sproule, View of the Harbour, Montreal (1830), hand-coloured engraving, 22.6 × 34.8 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 33, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal 4.6 James D. Duncan, Steam Boat Wharf, 1843 (1843), lithograph with beige tint stone and watercolour on wove paper, 30.2 × 41 cm, 23150, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 4.7 William Satchwell Leney after Robert Sproule, View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (1830), hand-coloured engraving, 22.9 × 34.8 cm,

159 160 161 168

172 176

Illustrations

4.8

4.9

5.1 5.2

6.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

6.5

7.1

7.2

Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 35, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal Joshua Gleadah after James Gray, Montreal, from St. Helens Island, published by Willett and Blanford Bouverie, Fleet Street, London, UK (1 December 1828), aquatint, 23.75 × 40.2 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 74, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal James Hope-Wallace, NegroWaiter on Board the British America Steamer (16 July 1838), watercolour, pen and brown ink over pencil on wove paper, 16.5 × 24.6 cm, R9266–282, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa John Seller (Hydrographer to the King), Frontispiece, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675), engraving, 31.5 × 45.5 cm, PBE9845, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London Detail: John Seller (Hydrographer to the King), The Windward Pasage from Jamaica, Betwene the East End of Cuba, and the West End of Hispaniola, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675), engraving, 43 × 54 cm, PBE6862(27), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London William Clark, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–00037, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven William Clark, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0033, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, The BogWalk, from part 4 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825) hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0060, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Montego Bay, from Reading Hill, from part 2 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0024, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven William Clark, The Mill-Yard, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0027, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s – The Property of I. R. Grosett Esquire M.P., from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0042, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven James Hakewill, Holland Estate, St.Thomas in the East, Jamaica (1820), watercolour, 30.5 × 41.9 cm, B1977.14.1964, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

xiii

179

181

184 196

198

220

222

231

232

254

278 280

xiv Illustrations

7.3 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Williamsfield Estate, St.Thomas’ in theVale, from part 5 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0072, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 7.4 A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788), paper, 32.39 × 20.3 cm, ST West Indies Box 3(1), Huntington Library, San Marino, California 7.5 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm from part 7 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0116, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 7.6 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Rose Hall, St. James’, from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0045, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 8.1 D.T. Egerton after James Hakewill, Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at AgualtaVale, St. Mary’s, from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0039, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 8.2 Michael Hay, Plan of Kingston, to his Excellency Edward Trelawny Esquire . . . This Plan of Kingston is Humbly Dedicated . . ., engraving, 33 × 40 cm, DUC245:11/5, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 8.3 Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (1780), oil on canvas, 35.6 × 46.4 cm, B1981.25.77, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 8.4 William Clark, The Boiling-House, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0029, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

280 288

297

298

342 356 371

372

Acknowledgments

A research undertaking of this size and complexity would be impossible without the knowledgeable help and guidance of many individuals and the support of several institutions.This book has been created over the process of nine years (2006–15) and there are many people and organizations to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. The crucial early days of my initial research phase were spent in the collegial environment of the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, UK) where I was fortunate to be welcomed as a Caird Senior Research Fellow in 2006–07. The library, archival, and museum holdings introduced me to a plethora of new ideas and artists, like James Hakewill and William Clark about whom I have written extensively, and allowed me to be exposed to a host of incomparable art objects and primary sources materials. Amongst the many dedicated and generous staff members, I would like to thank Julie Cochrane, Hannah Dunmow, Alexandra Fullerlove, John McAleer, Amy Miller, Nigel Rigby, Martin Salmon, Gary Steele, Brian Thyme, and Barbara Tomlinson. Based in London, I also took advantage of the incomparable holdings of the British Library. I am thankful for the direction that their staff provided. The research for the book could not have been undertaken without the financial support that I received from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant (2009–12). At the mid-way point of this journey I also benefitted greatly from a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of California – Santa Barbara (2010). Again I was welcomed with warmth and generosity and my work was enriched from exchanges with many faculty and staff members who shared their critical insights on my project. I would especially like to thank Ann Bermingham, Jeanette Favrot, Laurie Monahan, Robert Ortega, Bruce Robertson, Jackie Spafford, Winddance Twine, and Miriam Wattles. My time in Santa Barbara allowed me to commute to complete essential research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Huntington collection introduced me to another set of invaluable primary sources, which became indispensable to my project. I am grateful for the support and direction of the many staff members who assisted me during that time. My research travels also took me to Jamaica in the spring of 2009 where my project was shaped by the holdings of two institutions, the National Library of Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica, both in Kingston. From the former, I would especially like to thank Genevieve Jones-Edman. While in Kingston I had the great fortune of being introduced to

xvi Acknowledgments

Valerie Facey who very graciously gifted me with a reprint of James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica. I am extremely grateful for this extraordinary gift, which became an indispensable resource throughout the remainder of my research and writing process. My research also entailed the examination of important resources held in American collections. My examination of shipping records from Philadelphia was facilitated by Jonathan R. Stayer, Supervisor of Reference Services, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, US. I am grateful for his expertise and guidance. The Yale Center for British Art is the only institution that owns some surviving watercolours from James Hakewill’s time in Jamaica. Lisa Thornell-Gargiulo (Senior Curatorial Assistant, Department of Prints and Drawings), Sarah Welcome (Senior Curatorial Assistant, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts), and Maria Singer (Imaging and Rights Assistant, Department of Imaging Services and Intellectual Property) facilitated my research into this collection. I extend my thanks. Closer to home I also relied upon documents housed in the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’Archives de Montréal. I offer my thanks to the archivists for their assistance. This book could only have been completed with the help of several of my colleagues at McGill University who work in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my wonderful colleagues Jennifer Garland, Ann Marie Holland, Raynald Lepage, and Richard Virr. Two brilliant graduate students served as research assistants on this project in the early stages: I would like to thank Kyle Vaughan Balderston and Mariya Paskovsky for their dedication to the research and their stellar contributions through the location and interpretation of essential primary research holdings. Ariane Côté also deserves my thanks for her translation of complex historical texts from French to English. And finally I am grateful to my other graduate research assistant Jessica Mach, who used her superior organizational and administrative skills to process the photography and copyright releases for the book. I would also like to thank Seymour Schulich for very generously providing me with an essential image. For years I have been lucky enough to share parts of this research as it unfolded through various conference papers and lectures and to receive invaluable feedback. Very early on I was invited to Halifax to present a lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I am grateful for their warmth and collegiality. During that visit the insights of Robin Metcalfe were particularly thought-provoking and motivating. I would also like to thank the organizers at NEMLA for inviting me to provide a keynote address and Vivien Green Fryd for inviting me to lecture and share with her students at Vanderbilt University. Over the last several years my undergraduate and graduate students have been subjected to many a lecture or discussion shaped by this research. I would like to thank them for their dedication, enthusiasm, and intelligence in helping me to think through the histories, issues, and problems discussed in this book. To the reader who provided critical feedback – not once, but twice – I thank you for your time, energy, direction, and sage advice. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my wonderful editor, Margaret Michniewicz, who kept the faith and kept me on track for

Acknowledgments xvii

many years. Thank you, Margaret! Thanks also to editorial assistant Alyssa Berthiaume for her guidance and support, to Jane Read for her superb editing and to the entire Ashgate team. And last but never least, to Barbara Elaine Nelson and Maxwell Barrington Nelson, my Mom and Dad, I thank you for your love, support, and intellectual companionship as well as for my Jamaican and Canadian roots, the foundation which inspired this book. My mom deserves further appreciation for reading and contributing to this book in progress. Thanks Mom! Charmaine A. Nelson, Montreal

James Hakewill, Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica: The Property of G.W. Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21), watercolour, 31.1 × 41.9 cm, B1977.14.1960, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Introduction

Trans Atlantic Slavery “broke the world in half ”, spanning more than four hundred years and causing cataclysmic ruptures of the social, political, cultural, and psychic contexts of vast populations.1 This race-based slavery solidified ideals of white superiority, legitimized the displacement of millions of Africans and created the Black Diaspora.2 Slavery acutely enshrined ideals of race, location, and power, while forcibly mixing indigenous populations, displaced Africans, other colonized groups, and European colonizers. However, colonial power was not solely the ability to lay claim to bodies, territories, and natural resources, but to be able to represent them as the possessions of European empires. In his book Culture and Imperialism (1993) Edward Said argued that the “great cultural archive” reveals intellectual and aesthetic investments in “overseas dominion”3 and analysed mainly literary texts to argue that “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them”.4 Said eloquently articulated the deep connection between imperialism and culture, calling for a much-needed shift in disciplinarity and methodology in order to render academic practice fit for the job of exploring and dissecting this bond. In the first instance, disciplinarity, Said advocated for a transformation that could refuse the insular recitation of canonical texts as referents only to their immediate or obvious European metropolitan contexts and in the latter, methodology, he called for the history of imperialism and its culture to be studied “as neither monolithic nor reductively compartmentalized, separate and distinct”.5 But whereas Said took as his key texts works of British and French literature, I would argue that the European imperial investment in culture for material, aesthetic, and ideological ends can likewise be easily, and perhaps more easily, recovered from the visual arts. A fundamental part of the British imperial programme was the harnessing of the critical potential of visual representation to document, observe, and disseminate images of the colonies; and it was thought, through this visual production, to know these places, and through this knowledge to achieve both an overarching control and exploitation. As such, art was at the heart of British colonial conquest. Noting the global significance of the Trans Atlantic World and its economic, social, and cultural systems, art historians Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz have argued for attention to this “overlooked

2 Introduction

geographical and historical context for understanding the development of European art and other forms of visual culture”.6 Slavery studies and its absences Although some Slavery Studies scholarship has dealt tangentially with visual art, there has been a rather obvious absence of art historical Slavery Studies. As Quilley and Kriz have argued, “the writing of art history has avoided analysing the contribution of visual images to discourses that are ethically problematic and riddled with taboos”.7 This absence is in part attributable both to the unsuitability of dominant methodologies and practices of Art History to accommodate questions of race, colonialism, and imperialism as well as the obvious racial exclusivity of the discipline itself which, compared to other fields in the Humanities, does not have a good track record in attracting, recruiting, and retaining blacks or people of colour faculty and scholars. To the extent that it is people of colour who have been at the forefront of critiquing the racism of western academic practice and rethinking practice through the discourse of race, then the absence of postcolonial Art Histories is fundamentally connected to the absence of people of colour scholars in the discipline. Yet, some art historical Slavery Studies does exist. However, to date most of this scholarship has focused almost exclusively on genres that centre on the human subject like the nude/naked, portraiture, and genre. Besides Jill Casid, Kay Dian Kriz, Geoff Quilley, Krista Thompson, and the joint effort of Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro MartinezRuiz8 (whom I cite throughout), art historians who have engaged explicitly with British Caribbean landscapes within the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery, this book is also indebted to the ground-breaking contributions of scholars like David Dabydeen,Vivien Green Fryd, Michael Hatt, Kirk Savage, Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Marcus Wood.9 However, postcolonial, postcolonial feminist, and critical race scholars whose work intersects with or focuses upon Trans Atlantic Slavery, myself included, have often been guilty of two false assumptions: one, that art historical scholarship on race necessitates a focus on the human subject, and two, that said subject needs to be black (or at least not white). Indeed, the majority of recent critical scholarship on race and the human subject in historical art focuses on the black subject.10 Although there are obvious and compelling reasons why scholars have focused upon racially marginalized subjects, the result is that whiteness has been left largely un-dissected and Critical Whiteness Studies has yet to make its mark in Art History.11 In comparison, this book seeks to challenge these assumptions and to ask: what happens if we look elsewhere? What does the colonial appropriation, use, and exploitation of land and its material transformation and representation as landscape have to teach us about the process of imperialism? In part I wish to bring an overdue Canadian focus to Slavery Studies and to the Visual Culture of Slavery more specifically in this instance, by considering what Art History has to offer through a postcolonial feminist reading of these landscapes. A further problem in Art History’s disconnect from Slavery Studies is the dominant alignment of slavery with economic, social, historical, and political concerns in ways that exclude cultural practice and production. This book is the first to combine comparative

Introduction 3

art historical research on the visual culture of Canadian slavery with tropical plantation slavery. Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd’s otherwise indispensable Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (2000), is composed of 17 sections and a huge 81 chapters, which deal with issues of ideology, policy, contact, resistance, administration, agriculture, economics, labour, plantations, trade, law, identity, sexuality, religion, resistance, health, reproduction, medicine, narratives, rebellion, abolitionism, and emancipation within and across indigenous, African, and European populations. However, none of the chapters deals explicitly with cultural practice or production, visual culture and art.12 The erasure of art and visual culture from Slavery Studies is only one part of the problem. To add to this, most scholarship on Trans Atlantic Slavery, even that which is North America-focused, disavows Canadian participation in favour of a tropical and semi-tropical plantation focus located mainly in scholarship on the American South, the Caribbean and South America. Gad Heuman and James Walvin’s The Slavery Reader (2003) boasts nine parts and 37 chapters which ostensibly oscillate between the British West Indies and the southern US, with Canada being erased from the American geography of slavery.13 Indeed, most Slavery Studies scholarship that mentions the American North or Canada, includes these regions as the spaces to which enslaved blacks in America fled for freedom (the terminus points of the Underground Railroad) and not places in which blacks (and Natives) experienced similar histories of enslavement. In contrast, this book seeks to destabilize this academic over-saturation and the metropole–colony dichotomy which it feeds, both of which have resulted in a literal social amnesia of other concurrent and intersecting forms, locations, and practices of slavery. I also wish to expand our contemporary sense of the reach and impact of Trans Atlantic Slavery rendering it commensurate with the experiences of historical imperial subjects. Slavery was not only localized in the form of racial exploitation through forced labour, material deprivation, and oppression, or the dispersal of commodified Africans, treated as cargo in the bowels of disease-ridden slavers. It was a global project, rendered as such through the agricultural products that slaves were forced to produce; the sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee, pimento, and rice which were shipped to commercial ports around the world, exchanged for other colonial products or money, and through the artistic representation of these interconnected geographical sites of empire and maritime commercial projects.14 We must not forget that although Canadian slavery looked different from the plantation slavery of the tropical Southern colonies which have come to stand for slavery, the forced importation of Africans for labour was an integral part of Canada’s colonial origins and nationbuilding project, by both British and French colonizers.15 And furthermore, Canadian merchants participated within the more normative forms of plantation slavery through their commercial investments in tropical colonies, which produced products like sugar.16 The colonial resource extraction, production, and exchange, which went hand in hand with slavery, operated in complex, intersecting, transnational circuits of imperial trade, often referred to as triangular trade. As Marcus Rediker has argued, this new economic order and global market hastened a system of international capital, which required, “massive fleets and their capacity to transport both expropriated laborers and the new commodities”.17 These various commercial ventures and industries were initially European, but

4 Introduction

later became creolized and were equally carried out at the initiative of colonial administrators, merchants, and settlers based within colonies like Montreal and Jamaica. The motif of the triangle has been used historically to aid in the visualization of the magnitude and form of this global intercontinental commercial movement of goods and humans, which was a part of European colonization, settlement, and trade. Triangular trade was the immense circulation of natural resources, manufactured products, and slaves.These trajectories between the continents of Europe and Africa and colonies in the Americas including the Caribbean moved human and natural cargo and fuelled the shifting economies of the imperial metropolises, creating obscene wealth increasingly dependent upon enslaved African labour and the extraction of the colonies’ resources. The nineteenth century saw the height and the dissolution of slavery, when British colonial practices were already deeply entrenched and globally dispersed. By the seventeenth century, Jamaica was widely heralded as the jewel of Britain’s imperial crown, largely due to the vast fortunes secured through slave-cultivated sugar.18 I would argue that this cycle of dependency and exploitation was acutely visualized in Western art and can be seen in the marine landscapes of British colonial settlements like Montreal, and linked economically, socially, culturally, and psychically both to other British colonies like Jamaica in the Caribbean and to the seats of empire, the metropoles, in Europe, like London. However, the singular form of a triangle is too simplistic to evoke the idea of multiple and simultaneous crossings and exchanges, the back and forth along diverging and complex branches. This has often led us to focus more on specific routes while avoiding and erasing others. I am interested in exploring some of the more neglected trajectories and expanding the “triangle” to include neglected parts of the Atlantic. Specifically, I am interested in how colonial trade between nineteenth-century Canada, Britain, and the West Indies, and its implications for the movements of humans, goods, and resources, was represented and produced in marine landscape paintings of Montreal, a colonial commercial and military port. I would argue that it is especially the trajectory between Canada and the Caribbean that has been both suppressed and overlooked in the art historical literature of these landscapes and indeed humanities literature generally, in part because of the dominance of scholarship which focuses upon links between either Europe and Africa or Europe and the Caribbean, preserving both the dichotomy of metropole/ colony and the slavery as tropical paradigm. Contesting the erasure of black Canada and Canadian slavery This book is also an attempt to contest the erasure of blacks, especially as regards the historical presence in the British and French colonized territories that came to be known as Canada. The necessity of the application of a critical postcolonial feminist methodology to an examination of Canada’s colonial histories has remained elusive to many scholars. Writing about the introduction of postcolonial methodologies within the historical study of Canada within the British Empire, Phillip Buckner has erroneously argued that “For a settler colony like Canada postcolonialism is an approach of limited utility, even if defined merely

Introduction 5

as the process by which a former colony attempts to emancipate itself from its lingering ties with Empire.”19 However, this conclusion only considers the ways in which Canada may have been marginalized within and by the British Empire, overlooking Canada’s role as a colonial state, which marginalized and oppressed internal “others” on the basis of racial and ethnic difference. As Eva Mackey has argued, The construction of Canada as a gendered body, victimised by external and more powerful others, creates a fiction of a homogenous and unified body, an image that elides the way the Canadian nation can victimise internal “others” on the basis of race, culture, gender or class. It appropriates the identity of marginalisation and victimisation to create national innocence, locating the oppressors safely outside of the body politic of the nation.20 This book recalls the specificity of Canadian participation in Trans Atlantic Slavery, to remember Canada as a part of the Black Diaspora and to use landscape art as a means through which to reclaim Canada’s historical colonial relationship and interconnection with the Caribbean. In part this task entails an expansion of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and a contestation of the often-narrowed focus of the Black Diaspora. I pursue my use of Gilroy’s concept in greater detail in Chapter 1 within the discussion of transoceanic art. But the second issue, that of the Americanized (meaning United States of America) deployment of the Black Diaspora, is a manifestation of scholarly bias and oversaturation that poses dire consequences for other locations and populations. Indeed, black American-ness is too often assumed to be not only African-American-ness, but also AfricanNorth-American-ness. And with this move, the two other North American nations – Canada and Mexico – and their histories of African enslavement, migration, labour, and culture, are not only marginalized, but also often utterly erased. But one cannot merely blame the US for such outcomes. Canada and Mexico share, arguably more than the US, a deep investment in the erasure of their histories of participation in Trans Atlantic Slavery. Indeed, the desire to deny slavery is not limited to temperate regions like Canada or the American North. In response to a debate that erupted when the text in a tourist brochure claimed that slavery in Bermuda had been “benign”, a Bermudian responded, “For some strange reason Bermuda has never dealt with slavery honestly, maybe because the Island is small and there’s a lot of guilt.”21 Home-grown Canadian slavery is usually erased in favour of a national celebration of Canadian abolitionism in the form of the Underground Railroad and the African-American slaves that Canadian abolitionists “saved”. The narrative goes hand in hand with the vilification of American plantation slavery. This erasure is only aided by the ways in which the Atlantic is studied. As Jessica Harland-Jacobs has argued, . . . students of the Atlantic have concentrated almost exclusively on what one might call the “central Atlantic” – Britain, France, the United States, and the Caribbean. The southern Atlantic and the northern Atlantic are consistently excluded from view.22

6 Introduction

Canadian denial of its colonial past can be measured in part by the extent to which the historical presence of blacks has been rubbed out of national consciousness along with the ongoing internal marginalization of black populations.23 The exclusion of Canada from Slavery Studies scholarship is also arguably due to the Canadian historiography of Trans Atlantic Slavery (or rather the lack thereof). Commenting on the suppression of the subjects of empire, slavery, and colonial trade within the context of the British Empire, Kriz has noted that “All too often the suppression is enacted retrospectively by those still wishing to erase a colonial past that included the brutal exploitation of hundreds of thousands of human beings.”24 Thus, Canada’s disappearing act from the realm of Slavery Studies is one manifestation of this inability to deal critically and honestly with a troubling collective past. But arguably the problem runs even deeper and connects to the question of the status of the black citizen within the Canadian nation. Although the first known black visitor, Mathieu da Costa, and the first known black slave, Olivier Le Jeune (whose presence date back to the early seventeenth century) clearly indicate the centrality of Africans within the Canadian colonial nation-building project, various academic disciplines that focus on the study of Canada have persistently expelled historical black Canadian-ness from national consciousness.25 The presence, histories and contributions of black populations, mainly identified as African-Canadian, whose roots in the nation date back to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century slavery, are often overlooked. Instead, the now dominant population of black Canadians, those whose presence date from the twentieth-century migrations mostly from the British and French Caribbean, are largely and erroneously thought of as the black Canadians. Besides undermining the immense diversity of black Canada, what this erasure also serves to produce is a lack of acknowledgement of the centrality of these earlier black populations to the British and French imperial projects. But furthermore, what is forgotten also is that these original, now African-Canadian, populations were also first often Caribbean. The pioneering early twentieth-century scholarship of William Renwick Riddell helped to confirm the frequency and normalcy of Canadian-bound shipments of cargoes of black slaves from the Caribbean.26 Unlike slave ships docking at southern American, Caribbean or South American ports, these Canadian-bound ships were not arriving directly from Africa and their human cargoes did not comprise the bulk of their saleable goods. Rather, so-called Negro slaves were one of a mix of colonial merchandise that ended up in the advertisements of the newspapers of colonial settlements like Montreal and Halifax. Meanwhile, products from British North America made their way to Jamaican and other Caribbean ports. The following advertisement appeared in the 3 October 1804 edition of the Jamaican The Daily Advertiser: Now Landing, and for sale, the cargo of the British schooner Rebecca, Cap-tain R. Ames, from Halifax, N.S. consist-ing of hogshead and tierces prime codfish barrels and half barrels salmon ditto and ditto alewives, and; 8½ m. red oak staves. Stewart & Wood.27

Introduction 7

The normalcy of the dehumanization of blacks was registered in the blasé nature of such advertisements that offered goods created from slave-produced plantation crops for sale in the same sentences as human beings. One sale at Halifax in 1769 was advertised as “two hogsheads of rum, three of sugar and two well-grown negro girls aged 14 and 12” to be sold to the highest bidder; clearly, noted Riddell, “a consignment from the West Indies”.28 In another example, a girl and boy aged 11 were advertised for sale by public auction at Halifax on 3 November 1760 along with “a puncheon of choice cherry brandy with sundry other articles”, merely two commodities amongst others.29 The Caribbean-ness or West Indian heritage of black slaves was also documented in other ways. As Riddell explained, a case in point was the sale in Halifax on 30 May 1752 of . . . a very likely negro wench, of about thirty-five years of age, a Creole born, has been brought up in a gentleman’s family, and capable of doing all sorts of work belonging thereto, as needle-work of all sorts and in the best manner; also washing, ironing, cooking, and every other thing that can be expected from such a slave [italics mine].30 “Creole” here is an indication of Caribbean birth and not race. Indeed, the frequent international movement of slaves into New France/Lower Canada/ Quebec and other parts of the territory also indexes the extraordinary diversity of black Canadian (slave) populations.31 Obviously then, in my discussion of black Canadians we are dealing with African, African-Canadian, African-American, African-Caribbean and possibly even other (African-South/Central-American, etc.) slaves. And, as I have argued elsewhere, this heterogeneity within blackness may actually be one key hallmark of the distinctiveness of black slaves and the practice of Trans Atlantic Slavery in Canada when compared to other locations of diaspora. Another and equally important mark that will play a large role in the readings of landscape art which are to follow is the absence of a mono-crop plantation economy, based upon its impossibility as dictated by the non-tropical climate. It was given this knowledge of the dominant trade in black slaves between the islands of the Caribbean and Canada’s internationally networked port settlements like Montreal (and Halifax), that I proposed what I think is both a worthy historical and theoretical endeavour; to conceptualize a second Middle Passage between the shores of the Caribbean and Canada, secondary only as regards the distance of this part of the Atlantic from the shores of Africa, the original site of enslavement. It was no less terrifying a journey across perilous waters, and into the unknown, only this time it was between two “New World” ports.32 The Middle Passage is a central concept in the study of Trans Atlantic Slavery and is at once a territorial location, a site of genocide, a locus of diasporic remembrance, and a means of theorizing the diasporization of Africans. Although it is geographically defined as the part of the Atlantic Ocean which was crossed by slave ships en route from Africa to the Americas with their cargoes of enslaved Africans, is it not an erasure of another site of the Atlantic that we have yet to explore the routes, practices and customs of the slavers that sailed from the Caribbean and other southern ports, north to Canada?

8 Introduction

In adopting this dominant definition – believing that the only possible Middle Passage is literally in the middle of the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas – we have problematically conflated its meaning as location and experience. But to the extent that the Middle Passage is also a process, the experience of being captured, restrained, commodified, and forcibly relocated for sale whereupon your person attains a market value as chattel, then the terrain has literally shifted and the space of the Atlantic Ocean between the shores of the Americas and other parts of the Americas is also a Middle Passage. Scholars have yet to research, theorize or conceptualize these secondary Trans Atlantic crossings through which ships departed from more southern “New World” ports and landed at northern ones like those in Canada and the north-eastern US. The black female represented in French Canadian François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave or Negress (1786), a painting, as I will discuss below in Chapter 3, that was recently and problematically renamed Portrait of a Haitian Woman in 2011 (Plate 1), might have been just such a survivor.This is the colonyto-colony focus that this book explores, disrupting the dominant metropole-to-colony focus that has reigned in British scholarship (pun intended). Postcolonial geography: Understanding landscapes as racialized I am arguing that the racialization of land, whereby a geographical location comes to be identified by and through specific populations, natural and human-made sites and landmarks, forms of social, cultural, and commercial interaction and exchange, results in the production of landscapes. Colonial landscape was that combination of cultural and scientific rendering of specific geographies which employed both the aesthetic, stylistic, and material tropes of Western “high” and popular visual art as well as the claims to accuracy, reason, and authority of the Western eye/I as proximate to and thereby mastering of that which it saw and claimed to know. The assurance of the veracity of a landscape provided through the label “on the spot” was more common on images of the colonies than European ones, since, as Quilley has argued, the “autoptic imagination” is not required here, not only because this subject, unlike the West Indies, is one which might be expected to be familiar to contemporary viewers, but also because an active spectatorial presence is not key to establishing the authenticity and stability of the political landscape represented.33 It is this assumed linearity of seeing, knowing, and possessing which my project seeks to recuperate and unbind. The embedded colonial power relations which produced the colonizing world as centre also justified, rationalized, and defined the world into which Europe violently intruded as colonizable; a process that “othered” geographies already occupied and lived in by a myriad of indigenous peoples and created the imperial centre–periphery model. Borrowing from J.B. Harley, I wish to think of landscapes as forms of spatial discipline.34 As Jill Casid has argued, “Postcolonial Studies challenge the centre–periphery model through which the imperial metropole imagines itself at the center of a world network and

Introduction 9

yet as separate and unchanged by exchange and contact with its colonies.”35 In the case of these landscapes, many of which represent Montreal as an active colonial port, I want to look for and acknowledge the signs of colonial trade and exchange, of militarization and settlement, of ethnic and racial differentiation, and of transoceanic connection which are everywhere evident and which assuredly would have been readily identified by the contemporaneous viewing publics of these landscapes. This book then, seeks to challenge this centre–periphery model in terms of notions of metropole and colony and the assumed unilateral direction of influence and exchange regarding definitions of the Black Diaspora which through the privileging of plantation economies and plantation slave labour, erase other forms, locations, and practices of Trans Atlantic Slavery and dislodge other locations of diaspora from transoceanic connection. Scholars of Trans Atlantic Slavery from various disciplines, including art historians, have been slow to decentre the “motherland” in such inquiries. In a recent example, in their extraordinary Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and HisWorlds (2007), Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz admittedly only concern themselves with “the transmission of drawn and printed images throughout the Atlantic world, mapping in detail their movement and exchange between London, the imperial center, and the colonial territories”, with an interest in how such art “played an active role in shaping attitudes toward the Caribbean in Europe [italics mine]”.36 Departing from this paradigm, I also wish to examine influence and exchange not solely as “reversed” patterns of colony to metropole, but as colony to colony within the British empire; these colony to colony trajectories opening further possibilities for the decentring of definitions and practices of place, within the constant imperial drive for the reference back to the “motherland”. In this way, relations between and across differentially othered or marginalized locations of empire, one constituted as “white” (Montreal) and the other as “black” (Jamaica) will be analysed and explored. Equally important to this investigation is a probing of the definitions and dominant scholarly foci of the Black Diaspora as regards the meanings and centrality of land and its artistic representation as landscape. Land is central to the theorization of diaspora in terms of ideas of home and place and the connected concepts of mobility, movement, displacement, and routes. However, Sarah Phillips Casteel has identified an over-emphasis on mobility and a de-emphasis on territory as a product of recent scholarly theorizations of diaspora.37 Yet another facet of this tendency is what Phillips Casteel sees as the dichotomization of the rural or pastoral with the urban as racialized spaces of white or people of colour bodies respectively; the latter groups also being those most readily aligned with immigrant and diasporized populations. Casteel has argued, Rural and wilderness spaces, by contrast, are frequently imagined in national narratives as the essence or heart of the nation, and for this reason they remain off-limits to minority presences even when – or perhaps especially when – the city is at its most accessible.38 But the rural = white, urban = black division of geography that has commonly played out in Canada is not equally true of other places. Writing about nineteenth-century British

10 Introduction

Honduras (Belize), Melissa A. Johnson has demonstrated how African and African Creole male slaves came to be associated with nature and “wilderness” due to their labour as “huntsman” in the mahogany industry.39 As the racist story went, it was the supposed animal-like nature of these men and not their skill and intelligence that allowed them to locate and harvest the lucrative trees. Their affinity for the bush, as recorded in the racial epithet “bushy”, placed them in opposition to “the cosmopolitan, urban-oriented European”, supposedly making them unfit for domestic agriculture or full participation in the economic, political, and social development or modernization of the colony.40 Thus, I would like to ask, what shifts when the rural/wilderness/pastoral is figured as “out there”, in a colony, a part of our (aka British) imperial narrative, but not our national one? What happens when the self, coded here as both British and white – the one doing the writing, seeing or the drawing on the spot (as many of the artists who are here examined) – is not of the place that it seeks to represent, but a foreign/immigrant body observing the unknown? And what happens when the bodies most dominantly connected to the land, the rural, the pastoral, and the wild, are black ones, those of the enslaved displaced and re-placed within the colony to work the land? Is the rural/wilderness/pastoral always already white, or is its racialization just the end result of nations with long histories of dominantly white presence formulated as their legitimate citizenry? Johnson’s example is an argument for the latter. And should we speak of a dominant white presence or a presence of dominant whites? The details do matter. In the first instance we would be arguing that the racialization of geography is more about population size and in the latter about a specific racial population’s power to legitimize their presence regardless of population. As I argue below, it may be both. In Montreal, we have a colonial settlement, wherein the majority of its immigrants fit somewhere in the spectrum of “degrees of whiteness”, whereas in the Jamaica of the nineteenth century, the outnumbered white Creoles were already working hard to fashion themselves as the only authentic West Indians and to possess the land through its representation in landscapes as rightfully theirs. And what of empires and their colonization of others, out there? What of colonies like Montreal or Jamaica? Is Canada’s cultural conflation as the “great white north” and its adoption of landscape art as the truest genre to express the nation a facet of this urban/ rural divide? And how did it or does it apply to the whitening of the urban colonial settlement of Montreal, whose nineteenth-century colonial populations included Native North Americans, diasporic blacks, and many Europeans, like the Irish for example, who were very far from being considered white?41 I wish also to explore the same understanding of this relationship between landscape and race in Jamaica, a British colony which in the nineteenth century was dominantly owned, through colonial theft and conquest, by white British (at first mostly absent and later present and creolized), but dominantly worked and cultivated by black slaves. Is the tropical rural/wilderness/pastoral of the nineteenth-century Jamaican landscape, mostly peopled by black diasporic subjects, a shift that upsets or perhaps points up the lie of our later Canadian alignment of urbanblack, rural-white divide? And contrarily then, can it be said that the concentration of commercial industry, colonial wealth, and imperial power in the nineteenth-century

Introduction 11

urban spaces of Montreal and Jamaica is what allowed whites to imagine port “cities” to be their spaces? This book also then explores the selective erasure and emplacement of racialized subjects within the landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica as they functioned to embed and police fragile and emergent alignments between landscape and belonging which shored up British imperial discourses of racialized possession and colonial entitlement. But we can go back a step and question the process of racialization itself in relation to colonized land and its representation as landscape. In other words, how does the relation to and representation of a human subject within the land/landscape determine the understanding of their race? Enslaved Africans in Jamaica were mostly required for the agricultural field labour necessary to produce crops like sugar and coffee on plantations that often encompassed thousands of acres of land. It is in part through landscape art that these initially and continually foreign black populations (for the slave ships kept coming) were indigenized in order to minimize the horrors of the British slave trade and slavery, especially during times of increasing metropolitan abolitionist pressure. In a world where black slaves became generationally whiter, (classified with names like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon) due to the institutionalized sexual exploitation of black female slaves, one way of telling black from white in colonial Jamaica was to observe a person’s relationship to the land. The white, mainly English plantocracy ruled all from the plantation Great House, the dusky Scottish ruled over the slaves as overseers, the brown Irish were indentured and, if they survived their contracts, made up the lowest class of “whites”. The coloureds, sometimes slave, sometimes free often inhabited (as children of the planter) but almost never ruled within the Great House, and the Negroes spent the majority of their days working in the fields. The mixed-race free person who could “pass” could become white and escape the plantation altogether. But the secret of their African heritage remained a biological threat that might manifest in subsequent generations. Montreal too had populations of English, Scottish, and Irish, but the poor French habitants were another population of disenfranchised whites. However, even marginalized whiteness (in a Catholic package) trumped blackness and Nativeness. Whereas Jamaican blacks needed to be made at home and at one with the land, Montreal blacks were arguably more useful in their foreignness. Montreal blacks were outnumbered and as a smaller percentage of the overall population and workforce, their exoticism was not only a part of their allure but contributed to their value on the market.42 Priced higher than the local Native slaves (panis/panise), Africans, especially females, became luxury items with symbolic value, signifying the colonial reach of their white owners. As investments would dictate, black female slaves, Negro or not, were apparently most often employed domestically (in the Montreal equivalent of the Great House), while men often worked outdoors in forestry, fisheries or plying their skills as coopers, carpenters, and other skilled or farm labour. To what extent then does the racialization of land have to do, not so much with the actual geographies, natural or human-made properties, and lived experiences of the place (as for example estate, settlement, island or colony) but with the place’s cultural representation as landscape? And if the racialization of land is a product of cultural representation, to what

12 Introduction

extent can we as viewers, then or now, trust landscape art as scientifically or socially accurate, as opposed to texts steeped in imagination, desires, and anxieties which often moved artists to incessantly represent or erase the colonial traces precisely most troubling to their white imperial identities. How did the representation of these landscapes participate in the imagination of these geographies as rightfully British, helping to naturalize a militarily enforced colonial conquest as normal; just the way empire does business? I wish to think of these artistic forays, by mainly British artists into their colonies and their representation of those lands as landscapes, as a part of the colonizing process, a form of imperial intrusion. Such forays could never have been seamless, combinations as they were of educated, white, colonial imaginations, well prepared to misinterpret, misjudge, and miscalculate everything “foreign” based upon a wealth of conscious and unconscious formal and informal racist norms, dictates, “science”, and “common sense”, which supported the very imperial drive which allowed them to contemplate such voyages in the first instance. This idea of intrusion is key. To position Europeans as intruders is to challenge all of the ways that they narrated and represented their colonial actions as legitimate; it is to interrogate the very processes of colonization by recuperating the original presence of Native bodies and questioning the forced removal and transplantation of Africans as “necessary” supplements for their imperial designs. Helpful here is Matthew Sparke’s use of Said’s concept of “rival geographies” through his analysis of the Beothuk woman Shawnadithit’s coerced mapping of Newfoundland.43 Rather than reading her maps, as successive scholars before him, as supplements or artefacts, Sparke sees instead her ability to decipher and reproduce European mapping while imparting her own indigenous knowing and sense of geographical order and embodied memory. He argues, Her mapping of Buchan’s party’s route also documents how the arrival and movements of the colonialists presented new spatial developments that were nonetheless interpretable within these older and more landed geographic terms. Clearly the Beothuk observed the men in Buchan’s party . . . and they saw them . . . as the map itself underscores, from a specifically Beothuk point of view [italics mine].44 The active visual nature of observing, seeing, and having a point of view – attributes that imply intelligence, will, agency, and action – are essential to my overall arguments about the specific colonial nature of landscape production and the visual intelligence which the European and Euro-American arrogantly assumed to be in their sole possession. If we understand that Europeans variously removed, repositioned, and transplanted the bodies of colonized subjects within their geographical representations (maps, landscapes, etc.) as they saw fit and as benefitted their imperial agendas, then a contestation of this spatial violence may involve the deliberate recuperation of the original emplacement of Native populations as well as the representation of the lived geographical occupation and resistance of forcibly indigenized populations (like enslaved Africans). As Kriz has noted in the case of the Caribbean, European colonization entailed a “brutal series of

Introduction 13

human displacements and replacements, which led to the forging of memories and histories that depended upon active forgetting [italics mine]”.45 Resistance then could begin by acknowledging and remembering alternative forms of non-European mapping and landscape representation and also include the study of how indigenous and black populations understood European practices of mapping and landscaping both on intimate (a plantation) or grander (an island) scales and how they resisted the imposed Eurocentric structuring and re-structuring of land both physically and as representation. And just as Europeans regularly used and discarded indigenous geographical knowledge once white geographical knowledge was secured, I would like in this book (to the extent possible) to similarly displace and treat as suspect European landscape representation and centre black and Native embodied geographical knowledge.46 The case of two islands: Comparing Montreal and Jamaica Slavery Studies scholars have rarely produced comparative scholarship between tropical/ semi-tropical and temperate slave-holding sites. Rather, the dominance of tropical plantation slavery (discussed above) has resulted in a bias towards intra-regional scholarship that examines slave systems deemed to be similar in culture due largely to location and climate.47 Besides erasing other sites of the Black Diaspora (like Canada), such academic fixation also works to produce the similarities that it seeks to analyse, since we get the results for which we have searched. Although not usually placed within the same academic context, Jamaica and Montreal make for a compelling comparison for several reasons. First and most obviously, they are both island settlements. Montreal, now a city, measures at 499.19km2 (192.738 square miles) and Jamaica, now a nation, is about twenty times larger, at 11,420km2 (4,411 square miles).48 The uniqueness of their geographies and their strategic placement within (Jamaica) or near (Montreal) the Atlantic Ocean made them both lucrative and tactical territories in terms of colonial Trans Atlantic trade and British military defence. In the age of the ship, empires were built through naval prowess and dominance, and the circulation of slave-produced products that was the backbone of European wealth necessitated easy access to waterways. Islands, with their abundance of land fronting on water, made for great options for ports, which were the basis for expansive colonial trade and protected harbours for navy vessels. As such, both islands became British sites, more so than other colonies, of what Antonio Benítez-Rojo referred to as la flota, the imperial infrastructure of colonial sea trade that included “ports, anchorages, sea walls, lookouts, fortresses, garrisons, militias, shipyards, storehouses, depots, offices, workshops, hospitals, inns, taverns, plazas, churches, palaces, streets, and roads”.49 But protection was necessary for this imperial infrastructure, much of which was built because of the presence of British soldiers (like parade grounds, monuments, forts, and barracks). This brings me to the second reason. Jamaica and Montreal, due to their importance to the British Crown, needed not just to be seized but to be defended in an ongoing fashion. As such, both islands housed significant regional military installations; in Montreal a British

14 Introduction

garrison was installed immediately after conquest of the French in 1760 and maintained until 1870.50 And as for Jamaica, as Roger Norman Buckley has noted, The rapid establishment of a lucrative economy based on plantations and the quantity production of tropical staples by African slave labor, combined with the need to protect this valuable commerce against foreign invasion and slave revolt, led to small but permanent garrisons of British regulars in Jamaica and the Leeward Islands by 1678.51 These British regulars did not leave the West Indies until 1962.52 The constant nineteenthcentury presence of British troops in both places added to the racial, ethnic, and class complexity of both islands. But it also resulted in a constant stream of soldier-artists who produced landscape art in the line of military duty as well as for personal reasons. Thirdly, Jamaica and Montreal are also linked by the original presence of indigenous populations – the Taino-speaking Arawak in Jamaica53 and the Laurentian-speaking St Lawrence Iroquoians who inhabited a village named Hochelaga on the island of Montreal54 – that were violently displaced, acculturated, Christianized, and devastated by European disease and, in the case of both islands, also enslaved.55 Jamaica was originally named Xaymaca, an Arawak name meaning “land of wood and water” or “a land of springs”.56 Columbus encountered the island in 1494, which he had heard about on his first voyage using intelligence gathered from the Natives at Cuba.57 As Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa have noted, within one hundred years of Spanish colonization, very few Arawak people had survived and a distinctive Arawak culture was no longer identifiable by the sixteenth century.58 Therefore, the Native presence, whether largely as ghosts in British Jamaica or as supposedly “domesticated Indians” in British Montreal, haunts the histories of both island settlements. The issue of indigenous presence is also central to a knowledgeable reading of Western landscape representation in another way. The process of colonization entailed the literal and material reconfiguration or re-landscaping of territory as well as its visual artistic re-presentation as a unique imperial possession. As I will discuss in greater detail below, on the ground this meant the implementation of certain disastrous ecological practices designed to re-script the territories, a grafting of the natural worlds of the metropoles onto the colonies. As Krista A. Thompson has argued, For centuries successive Spanish and then British colonial regimes and planters razed much of the indigenous environment to the ground, even burning remaining roots, and transplanted it with new agricultural specimens that they deemed beneficial to the propagation of the colony, whether as food crops for settlers, slaves, and sailors or as cash crops for export.59 And last, but not least, another connection between the two islands is that both were previously the possessions of other empires, Spain in the case of Jamaica and France in the case of Montreal.While Montreal was seized from the French by Britain in 1760, Jamaica, which had been a part of the Spanish Empire since Columbus had arrogantly re-named it

Introduction 15

Saint Jago in 1493, became a part of the British Empire in 1655.60 The previous imperial histories underpin a knowledgeable reading of the landscapes of both islands, since in part the work of imperialism is, as Said argued, the re-imagining, through re-imaging of geography.61 In both cases, after the dispossession of the French and Spanish respectively, the sought-after result was landscapes that would be read as uniquely and indisputably British. Britishness then could be achieved through the violent erasure and containment of Native subjects, the forced migration, management, and exploitation of black ones, and the whitening and indigenization of Europeans. The indigenization of whiteness was a means through which Europeans and Euro-Americans legitimized their presence in these colonies, representing white settlers as the rightful citizens, and reframing and rendering as inevitable the reality of the violent imperial intrusion through which colonization and white citizenship were secured. But as we shall see, this white indigenization process – which entailed not only the labour of imagining and imaging whites as rightful citizens of violently acquired lands, but ensuring their survival and procreation within them – was arguably more successful in Montreal than in Jamaica, in part because of the ways in which Jamaica, and the West Indies in general, came to be defined as a “white man’s grave” and partly because of the white male sexual appetite for women of African descent in the Caribbean.62 However, even with these four key issues uniting Montreal and Jamaica, the nature of slavery on each island and its relation to the creation of landscapes held some distinctions. These distinctions are perhaps why previous scholars have been discouraged from making such comparative inquiries. Perhaps most obvious, Montreal, as an island with a temperate climate, could not sustain a year-round plantation economy. Due to the temperatures in the fall and winter and the freezing of waterways, it could not even sustain year-round functioning ports. Since agriculture was a seasonal enterprise in Montreal, many slaves (African and panis) were used as domestic servants, as well as in outdoor labour such as field hands (described as “country work” in slave sale advertisements), fishing, mining, and fur trading. Seasonal impediments to farming in Montreal and other parts of what was to become Canada meant that African slaves were imported in far fewer numbers and were a smaller part of the overall population. Furthermore, unlike Jamaica where plantations were commonly thousands of acres and slaves lived in “Negro villages” comprised of small huts or shacks in a designated part of the plantation, the smaller number of slaves in Montreal rendered separate living quarters from the owners unnecessary. The commonality of black slaves in domestic labour combined with the long winters meant that they were also often invisibilized by the nature of their work indoors, as well as the climate. Therefore, unlike the American South, the Caribbean or places like Brazil, enslaved blacks in Montreal did not end up being frequently memorialized in landscape and genre images. Societies-with-slaves vs. slave societies However, it would be false to equate a minority population of slaves with a minority stake in slavery. It is this faulty logic that has allowed more recent populations of EuroCanadians to erase Trans Atlantic Slavery from Canadian history and collective

16 Introduction

consciousness altogether. Indeed, the nature of Montreal’s colonial economic, political, and social enterprises meant that its nineteenth-century (and earlier) populations were, deliberately or unintentionally, implicated in the practice of slavery both through the normative, internal practices of slave ownership (sale, rental, recapture, etc.) and through the island’s dependence upon international colonial trade with plantation-based economies. The interdependence of different British colonies in the Caribbean with the eastern shores of North America meant that not only were Montreal’s white captains of industry implicated through their ownership of slaves in Montreal and their direct stakes and investments in the business of tropical plantation slavery, but the average and much poorer, white population was also daily enmeshed in the business of slavery through their dependence upon and consumption of imported colonial goods, their work with or for ship captains or local merchants, their maintenance of the local businesses and livelihoods of the men and women who owned slaves, their participation within the local social customs, legislation, and policy which maintained racial hierarchy and the legalization of slavery, and their personal investments in their supposed racial superiority and distinction from the enslaved members of the colony. As Frank Mackey has bluntly argued, Never mind arguing that there were more slave-owners among one group than another, that those of a given religious persuasion, language, or culture were more “racist” than another, that slavery in Quebec was mild because it was not murderous, or that it was an anomaly of no consequence, given that slaves were relatively few. Virtually everyone, “good” and “bad,” was complicit, whether by active involvement, tacit acceptance, tolerance, indifference, or blindness.63 Furthermore, regardless of location, the legalization of slavery and “coercive labour” provoked social practices and behaviours which undermined, if not destroyed, the most basic ideals of humanity, or, as the abolitionist Thomas Pringle put it, “the spirit and character of slavery are every where the same, and cannot fail to produce similar effects. Wherever slavery prevails, there will inevitably be found cruelty and oppression [sic]”.64 Basically, living in nineteenth-century Montreal, so entangled were the colonial economies of the British Empire that it would have been impossible not to eat, wear, consume or partake in goods, products, services, and customs that were directly produced through the exploitation of enslaved Africans, either locally or internationally, on a daily basis. For instance, as I will discuss in greater detail below, the sugar cane production in islands like Jamaica produced the rum that was imported by merchants like the slave owner James McGill and consumed in the local grog shops and taverns and rationed to the British regulars posted to the garrison at Montreal. Thus although these soldiers were less personally familiar with enslaved Africans in British Montreal due to the slave minority within the settlement, they daily consumed the plantation by-product of a slave majority in British Jamaica. The more obvious ideological and material links between slavery and the Caribbean were declared by Peter Simmonds who wrote upon his arrival in Jamaica, “Here I am in Kingston the capital of Jamaica in a land of slaves.”65 The impossibility of escaping slavery was obviously true for

Introduction 17

the British Caribbean where even well-intentioned white women like Elizabeth Fenwick in Barbados discovered, as Beckles has articulated, that “The need to engage in productive activity, then, meant compliance with the logic of slavery – its modes of ideological rationalisation and social culture”.66 Furthermore, the local Montreal newspapers regularly reported on occurrences in Britain’s tropical colonies and advertised services like insurance and goods for sale from recently docked West Indian ships arriving from those same islands; goods that included slaves.67 I want, then, to contest the distinction that Ira Berlin made between “societies-withslaves” and “slave societies”.68 Although Berlin distinguished these terms within the context of his discussion of the charter generation of African Creoles who inhabited the Atlantic littoral prior to the concretization of the plantation system, the distinction may be disruptive to an understanding of the oppression of slave minority populations.69 While the division may seem like a logical way of defining slave-holding societies on the basis of the ratio of whites to enslaved Africans, the latter term privileges plantation economies wherein slaves were the majority population and also serves to problematically diminish the centrality and entrenchment of slavery within the cultures and economies of colonies where slaves were the minority. The terms can also erroneously be used to imply that the lives and experiences of the enslaved were worse in the contexts where they accounted for the majority of the population (slave societies). I have often cringed when white Canadians have used the “Well, how many slaves were there?” question as a means of diminishing the histories (particularly in discussions of violence and oppression) of Canadian slaving. In terms of the burdens of isolation, the nature of forced migration to unaccustomed climates and societies and multiple removals, the stigmatization and hyper-visibility which arguably increased the marginalization of their bodies, the homegrown practices of torture, abuse, punishment, ownership, Christianization, and “breeding”, and the dependence of the colony on slave labour (both internal and external), I would argue that “societies-with-slaves” were “slave societies”. Montreal and Jamaica: Colonized landscapes Montreal’s importance to the French and later British Empires is a part of a history of a much broader Western imperial drive. As Said has argued, At the center of these perceptions is a fact that few dispute, namely, that during the nineteenth century unprecedented power – compared with which the powers of Rome, Spain, Baghdad, or Constantinople in their day were far less formidable – was concentrated in Britain and France, and later in other Western countries (the United States, especially). This century climaxed “the rise of the West,” and Western power allowed the imperial metropolitan centers to acquire and accumulate territory and subjects on a truly astonishing scale.70 Montreal, long coveted by the British, was first settled by the French under Cartier in the sixteenth century and later reconfigured into a strategically important Euro-American river

18 Introduction

port by Champlain in the early seventeenth century.71 According to Hubert Charbonneau, Bertrand Desjardins, Jacques Légaré, and Hubert Denis, At the time, the colony called Canada, made up of the Laurentian lowlands, was entirely within the boundaries of what is now the province of Quebec. The colony had a surface area of 35,000 square kilometres and measured over 500 kilometres in length . . . The river proved to be an excellent means of communication, with good farmland on both sides.72 But after its conquest by the British in 1760, Montreal held a special place within the British Empire and within the context of British North America. Indeed, the first European colonies in North America were strategically settled due to their location along the eastern seaboard, which made both the construction of ports and their intra-territorial and international, transoceanic networking easier.73 A strong motivator in the competition to control the Maritimes was the exploitation of commercial fishing.74 In general Montreal, as other British North American ports, was seen as an opportunity for further wealth creation through the control of colonial trade and markets. And the empire that possessed Montreal would of course bias shipping and trade policies towards its own territories. Accordingly Britain, through various navigation acts, sought to control access to the provinces and the ports of the St Lawrence River.75 As such, the import of British goods dominated Canadian markets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, since few products were manufactured internally in the first half of the nineteenth century.76 With this awareness, Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire (later of Nova Scotia)77 commented on the British capture of Montreal, that the conquest . . . must be of inestimable value to Great Britain, as the peopling of this continent, cannot fail of creating a full employ for the manufactures of our country more especially for such as are employed in making the coarser woollens, and every species of iron ware; with an innumerable number of articles, which the inhabitants must be supplied with from Great Britain, for the cloathing themselves and families, for cultivating, and improving, the wilderness lands [sic]78. As an island settlement connected to the Atlantic by the mighty St Lawrence River, Montreal became, for whoever possessed it, a literal gateway to the northern territories of the North American continent. As the colonial infrastructure developed so too did the feasibility of trade increase. And although the cost of shipping up-river was significant due to the rapids, the building of the Lachine and Rideau canals, supported by an industrialist and sugar merchant like Peter Redpath (amongst others), soon made the river more passable and profits more certain. As Wentworth’s words prophesied, Montreal’s commercial value for the British was immediately exploited by General Amherst who encouraged the migration of merchants from other regions; a call which, despite the small population, distance from Britain, scarcity of primary commodities, and the impassable state of the St Lawrence River for several months of each year, was still heeded by entrepreneurs from

Introduction 19

New England, New York, and elsewhere.79 I wish to consider Montreal within its nineteenth-century British imperial context and so fittingly must consider the specificity and nature of British rule. As Said has argued, “England of course is in an imperial class by itself, bigger, grander, more imposing than any other; for almost two centuries France was in direct competition with it.”80 Since representation or narration has been a fundamental part of the consolidation and performance of empire, there are a considerable number of representations of Montreal, particularly prints and paintings, from the nineteenth century and a significant number include the St Lawrence River as focal point for scenes of active colonial trade, settlement, travel, tourism, and military activity. Cindy McCreery, writing about historical prints of world ports, has commented that such works “show ports as valuable commercial hubs and military targets, as centre of civilisation and lonely colonial outposts”.81 Ports were points of access and protection from the sea, but also a point of potentially lethal vulnerability. As Elinor Kyte Senior has noted, for Montreal, based at the intersection of three great waterways: the St Lawrence, the Richelieu-Lake Champlain-Hudson route and the Ottawa River, it was “a natural base for offensive operations”, but equally vulnerable to attack.82 Montreal’s frequent representation in the nineteenth century owes much to its military importance as connected to its geographical location and topography, but also to the fact that it was a globally networked port; a port which was the site of remarkable increases in commercial activity under the British regime.83 In Britain, it was the River Thames that was celebrated as “Britain’s life-blood, connecting London with the global market for Britain’s goods and influence”.84 And by the early nineteenth century, Montreal, because of the St Lawrence River, had established itself as a premier commercial centre, the largest city in British North America and a main point of defence.85 In 1809, long before Montreal was named an official port of entry in 1832, shipping on the St Lawrence was increasingly the domain of specialized firms that emerged to meet the demand of an increasing traffic of goods and commodities from British, West Indian, American, and other foreign ports, in part aided by the technological advances that introduced steam shipping and made the building of the Lachine Canal possible.86 These parallel lines of Montreal, military and commercial, represented in visual art were an integral part of the transformation of nature, envisioned as terra nullius, into colony or settlement, the Eurocentric idea of the land “civilized” and rendered useful for man’s benefit; land useful for the purposes of empire, land that signified progress and development through its reproduction of the metropolis in the colony and through its agrarian domestication, its ability not only to produce food for the colony at hand, but surpluses which could be sold and exchanged on the global capitalist market. According to Casid, this imperial Roman concept depended upon the idea of the use of land as progressive and developmental by way of man’s intervention in agricultural growth.87 This re-landscaping, integral to colonization, was itself the act of dispossession and re-possession, a dispossession of indigenous populations and presence and the installation of European populations, methods and ideologies.88 As Harley has argued, “in the ‘wilderness’ of former Indian lands in North America, boundary lines on the map were a medium of appropriation which those unlearned in geometrical survey methods found impossible to challenge [italics mine]”.89 Thus it is not only the fact of the map/landscape itself but also its place within a Eurocentric system of

20 Introduction

power/knowledge which make this type of cartographic representation so inaccessible and indecipherable to the very people whom they are employed to oppress. But the supposed emptiness of this “New World” had to be actively produced and reproduced in order to justify its colonization and re-settlement through the terminology of “discovery”; a terminology that itself was a part of the process of evacuation. Comparing James Hakewill’s landscape to David McNae’s survey (1810) of Golden Vale Estate in Portland, B.W. Higman has argued that the former “suggests a reluctance to include the slave village”.90 Partly on the basis of Hakewill’s repeated erasure of Negro villages,91 Higman contends that a clear distinction exists between, for instance, the cartographic representation of a map by a surveyor like McNae and the aesthetic representation of a topographical landscape by an artist like James Hakewill, making the former “a more faithful representation”.92 However, I would argue that the surveyor’s simulation of the impossible aerial/ God’s-eye view and the selective rendering (as coded symbols) or erasure of property as land and buildings, customarily liberated from active signs of human inhabitation, produced images which were equally, if not at times more biased, than topographical landscapes. It is in this sense that one can argue that the representation of geography as empty space is the necessary precursor to the actual physical act of emptying.To the extent that the artistic and scientific representation of indigenous populations was a lucrative business in Montreal and what would become Canada (as within the other so-called New World sites), it is important to contemplate when and how Native subjects were allowed to be made visible in British landscapes and to what ends. I would argue that nineteenth-century landscapes of Montreal functioned in part to “civilize” the settlement, and as such the Native subject was permitted as pacified and domesticated, a non-threatening colonized presence, which reinforced the triumph of empire and the progress, if not outright success, of the “civilizing mission”. The colonial Eden of this period then, was not a land always already abundant with food and vegetation to provide for the nutrition and protection of its white inhabitants, but one that, through aggressive global transplantation,93 and slave-driven agriculture and capitalist industrialization, could force the land into overproducing and providing also, for the right price, for colonial subjects out there. As Casid has argued, In the scene of the founding imperial gesture of sowing seed, to plant was to make colonies . . . with this materializing metaphor of the practices of agriculture and landscaping as heterosexual reproduction, to plant was also to produce imperial subjects to populate the colony or work the plantation machine.94 The clearing and landscaping, planting and transplanting, the building of fortifications, barracks, bridges, and wharves, all of this signalled an ownership of the land, a staking claim to place by interaction with its materiality and a replication of home. As such, following Casid, to what extent is the picturing of landscapes a condensation of these exact forms of colonial knowledge and production and to what extent is it the sublimation of other essential aspects of colonization?95 As the following chapters will reveal, while at times, marine landscape images of Jamaica and Montreal are replete with signs of colonization

Introduction 21

(settlement, trade, militarization, agriculture), equally as often, they seem to be deliberately vacated of the signs of the human toil or the explicit means of wealth production (the slave labour and the sugar cane cultivation) which the images and their contexts announce. As Kriz has argued, “In a slave economy social refinement depends upon disavowing the violence and coercion involved in the laborious extraction and transformation of raw materials into finished products.”96 This latter practice of erasure is of particular significance in the landscapes of the British architect James Hakewill and others within the Jamaican context, which I shall examine in great detail in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. Jamaica was arguably the most lucrative and thus important British colony due to its central role in plantation slavery. As Marcus Rediker has explained, Between 1700 and 1808, British and American merchants sent ships to gather slaves in six basic regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone/The Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa (Kongo, Angola). Ships carried the captives primarily to the British sugar islands (where more than 70 percent of all slaves were purchased, almost half of these at Jamaica).97 In A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (1825), Hakewill produced visual representations of the island’s natural and industrial landscapes. And although his presence on the island in the 1820s and his focus on the holdings of wealthy British planters could not help but result in the representation of sugar cane estates, more often than not his landscapes worked at erasing the presence of black slaves (tallies of whom Hakewill often gave precisely based upon the planters’ legal data), especially as labourers, and even erasing the very presence of the lucrative sugar cane plants. B.W. Higman describes Hakewill’s repeated absenting of what I would call the intimate plantation geographies of the enslaved as a cultivated pretension to highlight the decorative over the utilitarian for the benefit of his aristocratic patrons.98 Significantly, two extant watercolours, Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) (Plate 2) and Llanrumny Estate, St Mary’s, Jamaica:The Property of G.W.Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21) (Plate 3), reveal that the erasures of certain types of slave activity and plantation settings were not innocent but strategic; the ideological outcome of a pro-slavery disposition. Commenting upon a similar absenting, which he traced in the context of nineteenthcentury American landscapes of Southern plantations, John Michael Vlach has argued, Given that the fortunes of slave holders were in fact dependant on the efforts of a black majority – a population that on several noteworthy occasions opposed their captivity with acts of full-scale rebellion – members of the planter class were perpetually plagued with feelings of anxiety. It is thus understandable that they would commission images that focused solely on themselves, their families, and their buildings and spaces. The pervasive whiteness of an idealized planter’s prospect offered, at least in symbolic terms, a reduction of the ominous black threat. By rendering slaveholding estates in a manner that either hid or diminished the

22 Introduction

presence of African Americans, those paintings functioned as documents of denial. Such paintings offered a soothing propaganda that both confirmed and justified the social dominance of the planter class [italics mine].99 As an examination of the images of James Hakewill and Joseph Kidd reveals, these artists shared a decided colonial investment in ordering and regulating the landscape of Jamaica in ways that produced these works also as documents of denial. Harley’s arguments about maps apply equally here to landscapes (especially topographical ones); that the existence of these landscapes, both in terms of who had the knowledge to make (patronage) and read (audience) them was a privilege of an elite.100 Furthermore, this cultural and political access expressed through the graphic vehicle of geographical representation enabled this elite to act upon the bodies and the land of those they sought to colonize.101 This demonstration of Jamaica’s adaptability to British imperial will was manifest not only in terms of a natural abundance, but an agricultural one, represented as self-generating (for where are the slaves and where is the sugar cane for that matter?). But it was also made present in the orderliness and discipline of the urban landscape, the representation of its carefully planned settlements (for is this not a little Britain here in the West Indies?) and the establishment of necessary British legal, penal, and military institutions represented in the images by courthouses, gaols, ordnance yards, and barracks. This combination of places, objects, themes, and foci created the idea of the success of the civilizing mission of slavery, evidenced in the textual and visual representations of content and obedient slaves who lounged and rested far more than they worked. Indeed what Vlach has noted in the American context equally applies to Jamaica; that these images carried a heavy burden, that of signifying a peaceful and abundant tropical colony, a Jamaica where the inherent violence and the oppressive physical and mechanical instruments of slavery were no where visible, a land where the noise of animals grazing and winds in the transplanted palms hid the brutality of forced sexual exploitation and the refined technologies of torture and abuse.This was a Jamaica where, to paraphrase Hakewill, the happy Negroes were willing servants with good lives, nice homes, and bountiful provision grounds and their benevolent white masters, the white planters, were the true victims of the nosy, know-nothing abolitionists back in Britain. The representation of this Jamaica was reliant on what we could call a touristic gaze, one that was capable of attaining distance, creating strategic vistas, which were removed from or could selectively edit out the daily torture of Jamaican slave life. The touristic gaze of a white male artist like James Hakewill implies leisure, which was a far cry from the coerced mapping extracted from the Beothuk woman Shawnadithit discussed above. Indeed James Hakewill’s gaze, like that of William Beckford and Hans Sloane before him, was predicated on agency, freedom of movement, and choice, all attributes antithetical to the lives of enslaved Africans and colonized Natives at this moment. As I will argue below, this gaze was a construct accessible through the privilege of class, race, and to a large extent sex and gender, since it was mainly wielded by the upper-class whites, locals and visitors, who ruled over the perpetually dehumanized blacks and

Introduction 23

coloureds, not only through economic, political and physical power, and constraints, but through the ability to objectify humans through the aesthetic technology of the picturesque, deployed in landscape representation. In her important book An Eye for the Tropics:Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (2006), Krista Thompson has stated that “The origins of how the Englishspeaking Caribbean was (and is) widely visually imagined can be traced in large part to the beginnings of tourism industries in the British West Indies in the late nineteenth century”.102 However, I would argue that the visual and textual languages of this imaginary tropical Jamaica and its attendant touristic gaze came into existence long before and predates photography, at least as early as William Beckford. What she refers to as the radical transformation of the islands’ “much maligned landscapes into spaces of tourist desire” had been consistently in the works from the early nineteenth century with publications like James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the years 1820 and 1821 (1825), Cynric Williams’ A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from theWestern to the Eastern End, in theYear 1823 (1826), and Joseph Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns, Public Buildings, Estates, and Most Picturesque Scenery of the Island (1838–40).103 James Hakewill took up the mantle that John Seller, Hans Sloane, and William Beckford of Somerley had begun to fashion as far back as the seventeenth century. I am most interested in the ways in which Hakewill continued the tradition of a Beckfordesque colonial pastoral through the inclusion of visual images which settled the land into picturesque Jamaican landscapes, productive yet tranquil, tropical yet familiar, peopled with good British subjects and yet camouflaging slavery and its back-breaking labour and relentless punishment, torture, and abuse for his white readership. Furthermore, I shall bring a critical examination to bear upon the stark difference of William Clark’s contemporaneous Antiguan representations in his TenViews in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes, in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery. from drawings made by William Clark during a Residence of three years in theWest Indies, upon the Estates of Admiral Tallemach (1823) which contrastingly centred slavery and its black labour as the primary focus of his images; the figures being so paramount and so keenly represented that the works then occupy a space between genre and landscape art.104 In art historical circles, we are becoming more familiar with the critical postcolonial analysis of certain types of landscape representations of Trans Atlantic Slavery. Paintings like Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on (1840), exhibited at the Royal Academy London simultaneously with François Biard’s The Slave Trade (1840),105 is a well-known, spectacular rendering of the Middle Passage.106 Kriz has noted that historically far more abolitionist imagery was produced regarding the conditions of slavery in the colonies than were pro-slavery images, and as such, there are relatively few analyses of West Indian imagery, and specifically imagery designed to promote the colonial project in the West Indies compared with the relative

24 Introduction

abundance of scholarship devoted to studies of abolitionist icons, such as the kneeling slave and the slave ship, and images of slave atrocities . . .107 But it is precisely the explicit and obvious connection to slavery of Turner’s notable abolitionist marine landscape that I would like to move away from, to other types of art and sites of geographic resemblance that through art historical discourse have been rendered innocent and seemingly innocuous. In the landscapes of artists like Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, James Duncan, J. Henry Sandham, James Hakewill, William Clark, and Joseph Kidd we have the opportunity to partake in another type of critical postcolonial analysis, an exploration and understanding of the visual sights and signs of active daily, even mundane, colonial engagements (cultural, social, political, psychic, and commercial) across connected geographies of empire through a type of visual archaeology that is not a wishful projection onto the past, but a scholarly recovery of the traces and details left to us by these nineteenth-century actors and agents; the artists whose documentation, drawings, paintings, and writings, were witness, often daily, to these events. It is our generation and those of the more recent past that have seen fit to erase and neglect the deep and obvious colonial histories apparent in these imperial landscapes, especially in the Canadian context. And in so doing, we do not only deny the obvious colonial nature of our collective past, but of our shared present. As Quilley and Kriz have argued, The transformations, translocations, exchanges and deracinations within the Atlantic world, often inhuman and degrading, are not simply historical; to enquire how the production of history and visual culture – in formulating, representing and surrogating circum-Atlantic identities – was complicit in, or resistant to, the Atlantic slave trade is still sadly relevant to the present.108 It is this emptying out of such landscape art of its colonial specificity which has effectively removed it from serious contemplation as texts produced by and productive of colonial discourse. While it seems ridiculous that artworks that represent colonial ports and port settlements replete with merchant ships, slave ships, dockside activity, commercial traffic, and slave-produced cargoes, whether or not black bodies are present, have not been read as colonial – this is exactly what the traditional practice of Art History, a decidedly Eurocentric discipline with a history of racial exclusion, has enacted and exactly what this book is seeking to redress.109 The chapters In Chapter 1, “Colonialism and art: Landscape and empire”, I grapple with the concept of geography not only as place, but as the dominant material and representational practice that produces landscapes. I argue that the transformational capacity of landscape art calls for a consideration of how Montreal and Jamaica were changed under the weight of

Introduction 25

British colonization. The chapter also considers the embedded relations of land and imperialism, as they were taken up in practices like cartography, which was seen as essential to European military projects. As such I seek to point up the Eurocentric and subjective nature as opposed to the supposed universalism and scientific infallibility of Western geographical discourse. I also consider the intersection of travel and identity in the access, mobility, and vision of the mainly foreign, white male artists, many of them military men, who produced landscape art. Since Montreal and Jamaica do not seem like obvious bedfellows, I lay out the deep historical connections between both sites – economic, social, and cultural – and the similarities and differences that governed how each was colonized by Britain. I explain the methodological framework of the transoceanic as a means of exploring racialized Atlantic connections that encompass and yet transcend blackness. And finally, this chapter poses one of the fundamental questions of the book: how do landscape representations produce ways of knowing that are dangerous for how they have naturalized Western understandings of land as universal? Chapter 2, “A tale of two empires: Montreal slavery under the French and the British”, provides an overview of slavery in Montreal under the French since the seventeenth century and then examines how the French capitulation to the British in 1760 changed its governance. Since one of the main shifts that followed conquest was the establishment of a British garrison, I examine the role of British regulars and sailors as slave owners and how their standard rations of Caribbean rum, drunkenness, and debauched behaviour (including sexual excesses) intersected with their reputation as the exploiters and coconspirators of Montreal’s mainly racially and ethnically marginalized vagrant women. While the nineteenth-century black population of Montreal is also discussed in detail with a consideration of their visibility, location, and social status within the settlement, I conclude the chapter with an in-depth analysis of the slaving practices of one of Montreal’s most revered citizens, the wealthy Scottish merchant, politician, and benefactor of a university bearing his name, James McGill. Chapter 3, “Representing the enslaved African in Montreal”, examines two important works: François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) (until 2011 known as Portrait of a Negro Slave) and George Heriot’s Minuets of the Canadians (1807). In the case of the French Canadian Beaucourt’s portrait, this chapter recuperates the anonymized black slave woman’s identity and examines what was most likely her forced Atlantic migration from St Domingue, via Philadelphia to Montreal on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, compelled by the white artist and his wife. I provide a critical reading of the representation of slaves in Western portraiture, consider distinctions between tropical and temperate slavery in St Domingue and Montreal, and challenge the painting’s recent renaming by the McCord Museum (Montreal) as a disturbing example of the rather typical Canadian expulsion of and disassociation from Trans Atlantic Slavery. In the case of the British Heriot’s genre study, I consider the overlooked question of the African roots of Canadian music, examining the inclusion of three black male musicians (most likely slaves) in the midst of a large gathering of white dancers and merry-makers in Montreal. More importantly, I consider the relevance of the survival and preservation of

26 Introduction

African cultural forms as resistance to pervasive white oppression, surveillance, and interference. In Chapter 4, “Landscaping Montreal”, I examine how the British used maps and landscapes to reconfigure Montreal as an important colonial trade port and military stronghold. The images that I examine by artists like the British soldier Thomas Davies and the Irish immigrant Robert Sproule imposed a British imperial vision upon the former French settlement. But the geographic re-framing of Montreal was taken up from certain vantage points, mainly from the “mountain”, known as Mount Royal, or from across the St Lawrence River to the south-east on St Helens Island. As I analyse these Montreal landscapes and the significance of their constant inclusion of the St Lawrence River, I also question the recurring appearance of what the British artist George Heriot called “domicilated Indians”. I argue that artists like Davies and Sproule strategically included cheerful, “domesticated” Native subjects in their landscapes as tourist objects whose idleness placed them outside of the active modern trade that fuelled Montreal’s internationally networked Atlantic port and brought wealth and privilege to its white merchants. Furthermore, the non-threatening presence of Natives denied their violent displacement and enslavement at the hands of white French and British colonial regimes and sent the message to potential white immigrants and tourists that Montreal was a “civilized” space, suitable for travel, and settlement. I also examine the representation of James McGill’s Burnside Estate from the perspective of the mountain, and re-consider his patronage of portraitists as a means of portraying himself as a wealthy slave-owning merchant. Chapter 5, “Landscaping Jamaica”, explores the British imperial imaging and imagining of Jamaica from their defeat of the Spanish and possession of the island in 1655 up until the eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on three separate books: an atlas, John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas . . . (1675), a natural history, Sir Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica . . . (1707, 1725), and a picturesque narrative, William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1790). Although seemingly from three different genres, as I shall argue, these influential works demonstrate the ways in which the representation of Jamaican land and nature was very early mobilized for British imperialist ends; adapted not only to the specific needs of each genre, but to the intentions of the authors, the whims of their patrons, and the desires of potential audiences. Furthermore, I have argued that although only the two earlier books were illustrated, it is Beckford’s picturesque narrative – in which he had intended to publish the landscapes of the artist George Robertson – that provided the most indelible literary and visual template for James Hakewill’s nineteenth-century picturesque aestheticization of Jamaican plantations. In the remaining three chapters, 6–8, along with a range of other primary and secondary sources, my analysis is also largely informed by four nineteenth-century observers of Jamaican slavery: Gilbert Mathison, Matthew Lewis, the Reverend Thomas Cooper, and the Reverend R. Bickell.110 Although all middle- or upper-class white men with considerable or extensive exposure to the inner workings of slavery, their specific political views about the “peculiar institution” varied. While Mathison and Lewis, both planters, gained their insights through ownership of slaves, Cooper and Bickell took up religious service

Introduction 27

in the island colony, through which they were largely responsible for ministering to the enslaved populations. Although all four admitted that slavery allowed for horrendous moral corruption and physical abuse, the question of how to ameliorate the situation revealed a considerable difference of opinion. Indeed, the four men represented the full spectrum of attitudes, from pleas for “improvements” to stem the plight of population decrease to calls for outright abolition. While Mathison and Lewis largely argued for the former in order to maintain slavery as a profitable enterprise for planters like themselves, Cooper argued for outright abolition and Bickell held middle ground, expressing both concern and disdain for the enslaved.What is revealing is that all four observers, regardless of their position on slavery, wrote openly about the brutality of labour practices, the endemic nature of corporal punishment and sexual misconduct, and the concomitant degradation of white Creole Jamaican society.The value of their observations is significant given that their time in Jamaica slightly precedes and parallels that of James Hakewill. Chapter 6, “Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica: Pro-Slavery discourse and the reality of enslavement”, combines an analysis of two contemporaneous illustrated books, William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823) and James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1825). Contemplating Clark’s focus on the labouring bodies of enslaved blacks and Hakewill’s simultaneous erasure of them, I propose that the difference and distance between the ways that slavery in the two British island colonies was represented resides in part in the identity and intentions of the two white men who produced the two books. While both men moved to the Caribbean seeking economic opportunity, Clark became an overseer on Antiguan plantations, while Hakewill, an architect from a higher-class background, armed with the success of previous illustrated books, enjoyed a more leisurely, upper-class experience of Jamaica as the guest of the white planter elite during a two-year sojourn. Therefore, the chapter reveals Clark’s genre studies of black slave labour as a type of how-to manual for sugar cane production in contrast with Hakewill’s sanitized landscapes, which paradoxically focused upon sugar cane plantations without showing the labour of the slaves that produced them. Hakewill’s strategic erasures at this critical political moment between the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and full abolition (1833) led me to contemplate his illustrations as pro-slavery discourse mobilized in the service of the white Jamaican plantocracy and to examine, in detail, the material, social, and cultural realities of slave life in Jamaica that his images denied. Specifically, I take up the well- and oddly self-documented life of the Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth overseer, Thomas Thistlewood, to examine the types of material deprivation, social surveillance, and sexual exploitation to which enslaved blacks were commonly subjected and the dimensions and consequences of endemic white male sexual promiscuity. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to understand the taboo and albeit prolific sexual desire of white men for black and mixed-race women; desires that usurped and transformed the “proper” domestic roles of middle- and upper-class white women in Jamaica. Finally, exploring the dominance of white male–black female cross-racial sexual relations in the Caribbean, I use the Ceded Island genre studies of the Italian artist Agostino

28 Introduction

Brunias to contemplate the by-product of this “miscegenating” sex, the resulting sexual and romantic prominence of mixed-race or coloured females. In Chapter 7, “James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour: Representing life on nineteenthcentury Jamaican sugar plantations”, I return to a juxtaposition of Hakewill’s and Clark’s books. As a means of grappling with the peculiar fact that none of Hakewill’s 21 plates represents a black slave actually labouring in a sugar cane field, the chapter offers a detailed analysis of the few Hakewill plates that represent the sugar cane plant and/or slave bodies in close proximity to their most normative labour in the sugar cane fields. Providing a rationale for the elision of Jamaica’s primary economic engine, I explore Hakewill’s erasure of slave labour through an analysis of his aestheticization of the landscapes which also performed a tandem sanitization that was contradictory not only to Hakewill’s own accompanying text but to the physical spaces and daily activities of the plantations which he depicted. I therefore compare Hakewill’s denial of slave labour, and its replacement with idle slaves as staffage, to Clark’s dramatically different emphasis on slave labour through a narration of the life of the sugar cane crop from planting, through processing, to shipping. Furthermore, I argue that Clark’s representation of black slave labour transcended surface notation, instead attentively detailing the physical strain and peril involved in the cultivation and processing of sugar cane. This chapter also explores the ways in which the plantation system supported the animalization of the enslaved at the same time that white Creole Jamaican (and Caribbean) culture worked to elevate and insulate upper-class white women from “contamination” through proximity to the inner workings of slavery. I probe the falsehood of white female externality to the ideological and material practices of slavery and instead expose the nature of white women’s deep imperial investments, which included their active participation in the sex/gender displacement of black and mixed-race females (enslaved and free) from the category of woman. Furthermore, I question Hakewill’s minor inclusion of white female subjects – only twice in 21 prints – and compare Hakewill’s white women to some of the later images in Joseph Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica . . . (1838–40), with special attention to how class-based, social practices like riding sidesaddle became signs of white femininity, modernity, and class privilege in Jamaica. Livestock pens take centre stage in Chapter 8, “Beyond sugar: James Hakewill’s vision of Jamaican settlements, livestock pens, and the spaces between”. While the labour of sugar cane fields is erased in Hakewill’s book, I explore his ubiquitous representation of slaves tending to animals on pens (plantations that specialized in rearing livestock) or involved in wainage. Wainage, a term for the movement of loads (goods, crops, livestock, etc.) from one place to another, was a common form of labour for many Jamaican slaves. But I also reveal the ugly underbelly of Hakewill’s quaint images of this type of labour which existed in a world where the enslaved were subjected to extreme material deprivation – like the universal lack of shoes – while being habitually forced to cart the masters’ and mistresses’ goods over miles of treacherous terrain. Furthermore, I argue that Hakewill, in line with the pro-slavery ideology of his planter patrons, often strategically depicted slave penkeepers as idle staffage and that rather than offering the enslaved as potential owners of the animals, he invited his viewers to consume the slaves as “stock”,

Introduction 29

or just more holdings of a given plantation. Although some blacks did attain the status of independent penkeepers – often mixed-race children who gained inheritances from their wealthy white planter fathers – I also examine the ways in which the white Jamaican elites used their political clout and legal manoeuvring to limit or block the acquisition of wealth and property by free and enslaved blacks. Chapter 8 also turns our attention to another overlooked population in the Caribbean, lower-class white men, through an analysis of the role of the British soldier in nineteenthcentury Jamaica. Specifically, I bring a detailed analysis to bear on Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston (1825), which represented several uniformed soldiers amongst a collection of upper-class white males and enslaved blacks at the major economic intersection of Harbour and King Streets, in the capital of Kingston. Through an examination of the conditions, habits, and activities of the soldiers, I explore their presence in the spaces of taverns, lodges, and inns, as it intersected with their excessive alcohol consumption and their desire for sexual gratification. Noting their similarities to their military brethren in Montreal, I question their heightened access to black women, whether as “housekeepers” who could be rented through local newspaper advertisements or as prostitutes who worked in the island’s taverns. Moreover, I explore the ways in which the notorious alcoholic culture of the British military, coupled with the ubiquity of venereal disease, and the risk of largely untreatable ailments like yellow fever, combined to threaten the “progress” of empire and opens alternative readings of Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston in which the soldiers were not beacons of order, but potential sources of chaos and contamination. Finally, this chapter considers the alarming racial homogeneity of Hakewill’s black Jamaican subjects despite being produced in the midst of prolific cross-racial sex, the presence of a significant mixed-race population, and a detailed Jamaican racial nomenclature of degrees of blackness. The uniformity of complexion (dark brown), the lack of differentiation between skin and hair, and the disappearance of facial features contrast sharply with the earlier work of Agostino Brunias, whose images focused upon the mulattoes of the Ceded Islands, and William Clark, who portrayed a range of complexions for his black slave subjects in Antigua. Since Hakewill’s text confirms his first-hand experience with Jamaica’s coloured populations, I argue that the homogeneity of complexion imposed the lie of the uniformity of class amongst black Jamaicans and was the result of a pervasive white anxiety about the social mobility and engagement of mixed-race blacks with the elite white social order of the island. Terminology This book straddles two British colonies, focusing mainly upon marine landscapes produced between 1760 and 1825. Accordingly, I have tried to be attentive to the significance of the similarities and differences in the use of certain terms, issues, and definitions between the settlement of Montreal and the colony of Jamaica. Given the critical postcolonial methodology, which underpins the book, I hope that I have made it abundantly clear that I do not agree with the deeply racist practices, policies, politics, and terminology that were ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. However, as an art historian, a part of my goal is to expose

30 Introduction

and critique such discourses and their material and social outcomes. As such, I have endeavoured to faithfully reproduce the colonial racial terminology, which was in common usage in nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica. With regards to the naming of people of African descent in my discussion of slave advertisements, corporeal descriptions, and the common naming practices of slave owners, I have used “Negro” mainly to indicate a person of African descent who was deemed to be unmixed with other races. But by the nineteenth century, the word “Negro” had also become interchangeable with the word “slave”, as is demonstrated by Hakewill’s plantation tallies of “heads of Negroes”. Terms like “mulatto”, “quadroon”, “octoroon”, and “samboe”, etc., have been used to indicate a historical belief in the ability to measure the specific racial mixture of persons of African and European ancestry or as substitutes for a more catchall idiom like “coloured”. Unlike its later use in the American south where it was used to identify people of African ancestry or blacks, in Jamaica (and the British Caribbean) the term “coloured” referred to mixed-race populations with African and European heritage. The interchangeable terms “mixed-race” and “coloured” are also critical to my discussion of the hierarchization of blackness and the elevated social and corporeal status that attached to the offspring, which often resulted from the sexual encounters between enslaved black females and white males of various classes. While “black” is also used generally as a term that covers all people of African descent, I at times employ the dual form of “AfricanCanadian”, etc., to address the ethnic and cultural specificity and temporal connections of populations born in specific geographical contexts. In describing indigenous populations I have used both the nineteenth-century colonial term “Indian” and the more acceptable contemporary term “Native”. When discussing specific Native groups I have attempted to use the most appropriate linguistic and/or cultural names. In my discussions of the enslaved Native populations of Montreal, I have used the historical term “panis” for enslaved males and “panise” for females. While the term “white” is often used to describe people of various European origins, I also use more specific ethnic, national or regional terms like Irish, Scottish, English, French, Canadian, etc. Since sharp racial and ethnic hierarchies within whiteness governed Montreal and Jamaica such distinctions are not moot. The term “Creole” also reoccurs throughout the book. While Tim Barringer and Gillian Forrester describe “Creole” as referring to “anyone born or resident in the West Indies”, they also claim that it “could also be taken to refer more specifically to people of mixed racial heritage – for whom other terms, such as ‘brown’ and ‘mulatto’, were also used”.111 However, the latter usage of “Creole” as a racial type more aptly applied to the southern US needs to be distinguished from its use in the British Empire where mixed-race populations were more commonly referred to as “brown” and “mulatto” (as Barringer and Forrester indicate), but also frequently as “coloured” as well as a host of other terms (many of which I shall discuss below) meant to designate specific racial mixtures. The distinction between the term “Creole” and other racial terms is evidenced in a nineteenth-century Jamaican fugitive slave advertisement in which one of the two named runaways, John, was described as both a Negro and a Creole.112 In the nineteenthcentury British context “Creole” was not a racial term, but a way of indicating a person’s

Introduction 31

place of birth and therefore cultural inheritance. Although mainly used to refer to people born in the Caribbean colonies, the term was also sometimes used to identify Europeans born in non-tropical settler colonies like Canada.113 Creoles, then, could be of European, African or other racial origins. However, it is significant to note that in the Montreal context, the term was most often used to designate people who had been born in the Caribbean. Yet significantly, because “Creole” for whites indicated birth outside of Europe, the cultural biases and assumed superiority of whites born in Europe led to a stigma often being attached to the label. For nineteenth-century abolitionists based in Britain, the Creoleness of white Jamaicans came to stand for their cultural and social backwardness, their sexual abuses, and their stubborn and even immoral refusal to relinquish slavery. In terms of regional or geographical identifications, I have employed both the term “Caribbean” and “West Indian/Indies” interchangeably to designate the region in which Jamaica is situated. In discussing the territorial location of Montreal, when referring to its colonial origins within the French Empire I have used the name New France, while for its capture by the British in 1760 I have acknowledged its renaming as Quebec, and in the period from 1791 I have used the name Lower Canada. At times however, I use the current provincial name of Quebec and national name of Canada to refer to the historical territories once held by France and Britain. In Chapter 3 in my discussion of what is now the country of Haiti, I use the Native word “Hayti” to indicate the original naming of the island as well as its recuperated name post-revolution (Haiti). But when discussing the period prior to what is now known as the Haitian Revolution, I use “St Domingue” as the French colony was commonly known. Many of the images under discussion feature shipping containers with names like hogshead, puncheon, and tierce, with which many of us are today unfamiliar. I have endeavoured to utilize the precise historical language of colonial enterprise to describe these vessels, which were used to ship the goods like salted codfish, sugar, and rum between Jamaica and north Atlantic ports like Montreal.114 Lastly, I have endeavoured to place words like “New World”, “savage”, “pagan”, “primitive”, and “civilized” in quotes or to preface them with the word “so-called” to express my disapproval and scepticism of their veracity. Notes 1 Toni Morrison as cited in Viv Golding, Learning at the Museum Frontier: Identity, Race and Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 22. 2 Although there is no consensus on the number of Africans who were removed to the Americas, most agree that the figure is between 9.6 and 15.4 million, not including those who perished during the process of capture and the Middle Passage.Verene A. Shepherd, “Work, Culture, and Creolization: Slavery and Emancipation in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds.Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 31. 3 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. xxi. 4 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. 5 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xx.

32 Introduction 6 Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, An Economy of Colour:Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1. 7 Quilley and Kriz, An Economy of Colour, p. 2. I would argue that art history not only avoids troubling topics, but that the dominance of traditional methodologies and the overwhelming whiteness of the practitioners of the discipline itself have resulted in a deliberate cleansing of otherwise transgressive and challenging art and topics. Therefore, the problem is not merely about the avoidance of certain art, issues, and themes, but also in how art historians narrate and analyse them and the lack of racial diversity within the discipline. 8 Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and HisWorlds (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007). 9 See for example: David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992); Michael Hatt, “Sculpting and Lynching:The Making and Unmaking of the Black Citizen in Late Nineteenth-Century America”, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 1 (2001), pp. 3–22, and “Making a Man of Him: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture”, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder, Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (NewYork: Routledge, 2002); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race,War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory:Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (NewYork: Routledge, 2000); and Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 10 See for example: Ellwood C. Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (New York: G. Braziller, 1974); Alaine Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979); Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black inWestern Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (Washington, DC: Bedford Art Publishers in association with The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth-Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990); Thelma Golden, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York City: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994); Paul Gilroy, Picturing Blackness in British Art: 1700s–1990s (London: Tate Gallery, 1996); Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Charmaine Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject inWestern Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). 11 The obvious exception to this rule is Richard Dyer’s White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). However, more recent art historical critical whiteness studies scholarship includes Angela Rosenthal’s “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture”, Art History, vol. 27, issue 4 (2004), pp. 563–92, and Nelson’s The Color of Stone. 12 Verene A. Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). 13 Gad Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). Furthermore, section five “Slave Culture” is comprised of four chapters, which include analyses of folk culture, religion, music, and social custom. Visual art is again absent. 14 Of course the enslaved were employed in other forms of labour like ship-building, fisheries, domestic labour and mining. For more on the histories of slavery and mining see: P. J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) and Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty”: in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) 15 For more on slavery in Canada see: William Renwick Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1920), pp. 359–75; William Renwick Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 8, no. 3 (July 1923), pp. 316–30;

Introduction 33

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presse de L’Université Laval à Québec, 1960); Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français (Montreal: Presse de L’Université Laval, 1963); Leo W. Bertley, Canada and Its People of African Descent (Pierrefonds, Quebec: Bilongo, 1977); Marcel Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Editions Hutubise HMH Ltée, 1990); Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Maureen Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (New York: Garland, 1999); Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006); Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject. J.F. Bosher, Men and Ships in the Canada Trade, 1660–1760: A Biographical Dictionary (Ottawa: National Historic Sites, Parks Services and Environment Canada, 1992). Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 43. For a selection of books which discuss Jamaican sugar cane cultivation see: Sir Hans Sloane, Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and Trees, Fourfooted Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles etc. of the last of those Islands (London: Printed for the Author, 1707–25);William Beckford Esq., A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: with Remarks upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane, through the different Seasons of the Year, and Chiefly considered in a Picturesque Point of View; Also observations and Reflections upon what would probably be the Consequences of an Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and of the Emancipation of the Slaves, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Printed for T. and J. Egerton Whitehall, 1790); Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies: in TwoVolumes (Dublin: Luke White, 1793); Thomas Roughley, The Jamaican Planter’s Guide; or, a System from Planting and Managing a Sugar Estate, or other Plantations in that Island, and throughout the BritishWest Indies in General (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823); John Biggs, Observations on the Manufacture of Sugar and Rum in Jamaica (London: Fisher, Son and Co., 1845); Keith Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and the Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Phillip Buckner, “Introduction”, Canada and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 15. Eva Mackey, “Introduction: Unsettling Differences: Origins, Methods, Frameworks”, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 12. “Appendix 10: An Excerpt from the Royal Gazette (A Contemporary Update of James Macqueen’s Nineteenth-Century Views, January 20, 1994, Row Over ‘Benign’ Slavery Comment in Tourist Brochure”, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 159. Edward Bottone, a local celebrity known as the “Curious Cook”, printed the comment in a tourist brochure. While Bottone defended his choice of words, which he claimed was based on reading and research, he also conceded that the sources that he consulted “could have been misleading”, but went on to state, “I don’t think it’s a hot issue”. Bottone was obviously wrong since the following day, the newspaper announced the government decision to scrap the 30,000 copies of the existing brochure and re-print a new version. While the Tourism Minister, the Hon. C.V. (Jim) Woolridge had initially declined to get involved in the dispute (p. 160) with the government decision to re-issue the pamphlet, acting Tourism Minister, the Hon. Gerald Simons, and Human Affairs Minister, the Hon. Jerome Dill, stated that the original brochure “could clash with Government moves towards racial harmony”. “Appendix 11: A Second Excerpt from the Royal Gazette, January 21, 1994, Complaints Cause New Tourism Brochure to be Withdrawn”, The History of Mary Prince, p. 161. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “‘Hands across the Sea’:The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World”, Geographical Review, vol. 89, no. 2 (April 1999), p. 238. For more on the experiences of blacks in Canada see: David Divine ed., Multiple Lenses:Voices from the Diaspora Located in Canada (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2007) and Charmaine A. Nelson ed., Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, December 2010). Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 3. The first recorded black visitor to Canada is generally thought to have been Mathieu da Costa (de Coste), a young boy who was a part of an expedition either to Port Royal (on the north bank of Annapolis River) or which founded Port Royal in 1605 or 1606. While Leo Bertley has identified the expedition as that of

34 Introduction

26

27

28 29 30 31

32

Poutrincourt-Champlain, Daniel G. Hill has described it as the expedition of Pierre de Gua, sieur De Monts. Winks reproduces this latter name as Sieur Du Gua de Monts and names him as the Governor. Although da Costa’s non-African name locates a staple of slave practice – the renaming of blacks within a European tradition which was meant to strip slaves of personal identification and its suggestion of cultural heritage and autonomy – most scholars agree that he was most likely not a slave in the strictest application of chattel slavery which would later be introduced in the region. While there is general agreement that da Costa was valuable as a translator between the French and Mi’kmaq – a fact, which may indicate that he had visited the region before – scholars disagree on whether he remained a visitor or became a resident. As such, da Costa’s economic, linguistic, and social skills align with Ira Berlin’s definition of Atlantic Creoles. Bertley claims that he also visited Nova Scotia in 1606, became a charter member of The Order of Good Cheer (Canada’s oldest social club) and that when he died, he was buried on the grounds of the habitation. But Bertley provides no archival sources to substantiate these claims. However, da Costa’s burial location, if correct, is significant since it would indicate he had been baptized. See: Bertley, Canada and Its People of African Descent, p. XI; Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, pp. 5–6; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, p. 1; Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1996), pp. 251–88. See for example: Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, pp. 359–75; Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, pp. 316–30; William Renwick Riddell, “The Slave in Upper Canada”, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 14, no. 2 (August 1923), pp. 249–78; William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noire”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 10, no. 3 (July 1925), pp. 321–9. Stewart and Wood, “September 25. Now landing”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated, Huntington Library, San Marino, US. According to Cohen, a tierce is equivalent to 42 gallons. Dyche and Pardon explain that a hogshead held 63 gallons. Ronnie Cohen, Made in Britain: Not Made to Measure, available at http://ukma.org.uk/sites/default/files/Made-in-Britain_ Not-Made-to-Measure.pdf (date of last access 15 August 2014), p. 13; Thomas Dyche and William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary: Peculiarly Calculated for the use and improvement of such as are unacquainted with the Learned Languages (London: Printed for Catherine and Richard Ware at the Bible and Sun on Ludgate Hill, 1760), unpaginated. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 362. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 361. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 360. The phrasing “every other thing” has potentially disturbing sexual connotations. The words may be read as advertising sexual services as a part of the black female slave’s labour to her prospective buyers. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, pp. 327–8; and Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, pp. 360, 362. Not only were the black slaves within Canada from various regional origins, but white Canadian slave owners also owned slaves who lived outside of Canada. In one such case, the executors of the estate of John Margerum of Halifax who was deceased noted credits of £29 9s 4½d for the sale of a Negro boy at Carolina. See Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 362. I first introduced this concept in Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject, p. 57. There is then a wealth of documentation and historical evidence to be examined which would shed light on the origins, cultural and racial backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and trials of the many black slaves who were forced to undertake such crossings. It would be interesting for instance to determine how many of these slaves were born in Africa as opposed to the Caribbean, South or Central America, etc., and how many had already survived the initial Middle Passage. In the case of slaves being forced on not one but two traumatic crossings in a lifetime, any recuperation, if at all possible, of the mental state of such survivors would shed light on the psychic burdens of slavery as traumatic geographical displacement. Also, differences in ratios of male to female slaves and the ages of such slaves would contribute to an understanding of why they were relocated in the first instance. It would be imperative to investigate the state of these slaves and indeed merchant ships (since in the case of Canada, many of the slaves seem to have been secondary imports on merchant ships along with cargoes of rum, sugar, and molasses, etc.) in order to understand whether or not these secondary Trans Atlantic passages were indeed as horrific as the first. And finally, it would be pertinent for Slavery Studies scholars whose interests lie in biological history to investigate whether there are any discernable and measurable biological differences between slaves who survived or died during the second Middle Passage and slaves who embarked upon one voyage.

Introduction 35 33 Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations:The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth-Century”, An Economy of Colour:Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830, eds. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 123. 34 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 62. 35 Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xxi. 36 Tim Barringer and Gillian Forrester, “Introduction”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds.Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 2. 37 Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in ContemporaryWriting of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 2–4. 38 Casteel, Second Arrivals, p. 5. 39 Melissa A. Johnson, “The Making of Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century British Honduras”, Environmental History, vol. 8, no. 4 (October 2003), p. 109. Some of these stereotypes linking race with labour were early developed in a book by George Henderson (a Captain of His Majesty’s 5th West India Regiment) that provided a detailed analysis of the mahogany industry (p. 604). Captain George Henderson, An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras; Being a Brief View of its Commercial and Agricultural Resources, Soil, Climate, Natural History, Etc.ToWhich Are Added, Sketches of the Manners and Customs of the Mosquito Indians, Preceded by the Journal of aVoyage to the Mosquito Shore. Illustrated by a Map (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1809). 40 Johnson, “The Making of Race and Place”, pp. 607–8. 41 The whiteness of Irish people was not at all obvious or secure in the nineteenth century, in terms of complexion and affiliation. Hilary Beckles has demonstrated that the alignment of indentured Irish with enslaved Africans was ensured in part through their shared agricultural labour in Barbados. However, the romantic and sexual alliances between black men and Irish women and the political threat of their free, mixed-race offspring soon prompted English men to legislate Irish women out of the fields. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World:A Student Reader, eds.Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). 42 Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, pp. 5–6. 43 Matthew Sparke, “Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps: (Dis)Placing Cartographic Struggle in Colonial Canada”, Places through the Body, eds. Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 305. Sparke argues for rival geography through an analysis of the mapping of Newfoundland by Shawnadithit (the last of the Beothuk peoples). Witness to the systematic massacre of her people, Shawnadithit was taken captive with her mother and sister and given to John Peyton Jr.; he was the magistrate of the fishing community Twillingate and the man known to have murdered the Beothuk chief Nonosabasut, captured his wife Demasduit, and left their baby for dead.Years later, after the deaths of both her mother and sister to consumption, she was removed to St John’s where she was compelled to produce maps of Newfoundland. However, although unquestionably done under duress, Sparke argues convincingly that Shawnadithit’s maps reveal her agency and geographical knowledge as a surveyor and her ability to translate between Native and European geographical discourses (pp. 314, 317). 44 Sparke, “Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps”, p. 320. 45 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 15. 46 Sparke, “Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps”, p. 319. 47 For example, Klein and Engerman studied slave fertility between the US, the West Indies, and Brazil. See Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 35, no. 2 (April 1978), pp. 357–74. 48 Harry S. Pariser, Jamaica:AVisitor’s Guide (Edison, NJ: Hunter, 1990), p. 2.The up to date figure for Jamaica is 10,911 km2 (4,213 sq mi). 49 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Introduction: The Repeating Island”, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 8. 50 Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal:An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), p. 3. 51 Roger Norman Buckley, “Preface”, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida; and Barbados: University Press of the West Indies, 1998),

36 Introduction

52 53

54

55

56

57

58 59 60

61 62 63

n.p. It is interesting to note that while troops were immediately stationed at Montreal, the same did not occur in Jamaica until 23 years after the British conquest of the island that Columbus had renamed St Jago. This does not mean, however, that soldiers and sailors did not visit the island. Buckley records that the first regular British soldiers to be sent to the West Indies sailed in a fleet under the command of Sir George Ayscue and landed at Carlisle Bay, Barbados in 1652. Buckley, “Preface”, n.p. The Arawak lived in Jamaica for seven centuries prior to Columbus. Estimates of their population prior to Columbus vary tremendously from 20,000 to 600,000. Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, Language in Exile:Three Hundred Years of Jamaica Creole (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), pp. 7, 10. The Arawak migrated from the Orinoco region of the Guianas and Venezuela, with the first wave arriving in Jamaica around 650 CE and the second between 850 and 900 CE. Pariser, Jamaica, p. 12. Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), p. 146. This village of Hochelaga is the one, which Cartier encountered when he claimed to have “discovered” Montreal. At that time in the sixteenth century, the region was also inhabited by Algonkins, Montagnais, Mohawks, other Iroquois, and Huron, this last of which are purported to have destroyed Hochelaga between the visits of Cartier and Champlain. The Native term for Quebec City was Stadacona. The Natives enslaved at Montreal and throughout the rest of New France by the French were called panis (male) or panise (female), but came from various ethnic groups. In Jamaica, the Spanish were the first to introduce forced labour in mining, farming, building, and stock-breeding, which included the enslavement of Arawak people, Natives transplanted from other parts of the Caribbean, and the eventual importation of Africans. Lalla and D’Costa note, however, that the first blacks migrated to Jamaica were “creole Iberians” who had the same culture as their Spanish and Portuguese masters. The forced diversification of the population and the joint enslavement of Arawak and African resulted in “intermarriages”, the offspring of which the Spanish noted with terms like “mestizos, mulattoes, and half-castes”. Lalla and D’Costa, Language in Exile, pp. 9–11. Pariser uses the first name and Gardner the latter. Pariser, Jamaica, p. 1.William James Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Present Time; including an Account of its Trade and Agriculture; Sketches of the Manners, Habits, and Customs of all Classes of its Inhabitants; and a Narrative of the Progress of Religion and Education in the Island (London: Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, E.C., 1873), p. 2. Gardner, A History of Jamaica, p. 2. Columbus had sailed from Cuba on Saturday 3 May 1494 and had taken several days to reach Jamaica. According to Gardner, after being met by a fleet of some seventy canoes of indigenous people brandishing lances and swords, he was permitted to dock at what Gardner knew as Port Maria (today’s St Ann’s Bay), and went on to rename it Santa Gloria. Lalla and D’Costa, Language in Exile, p. 7. By 1615 an official report to the King of Spain claimed that only 74 Arawak survived on the island of Jamaica (p. 9). Krista A.Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics:Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 40. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. xiii. According to Lalla and D’Costa, by 1596 the Spanish population of Jamaica had declined to 130. By 1611 the population was made up of 74 Arawaks, 523 Spanish adults, 173 Spanish children, 558 black slaves, 107 free blacks, and 75 foreigners. In 1655, the Spanish governor estimated the population at about 8,000. A Spanish resistance continued until 1659. At the time of the British takeover, a small number of Portuguese Jews and Spanish poor, as well as some Maroons, remained behind. But it is the Maroons who are most credited with transmitting Arawak and Spanish culture to British Jamaica.The original Maroons, runaways from Spanish slave owners, presumably spoke no English at the time of British conquest and the British used Spanish interpreters and issued bilingual proclamations. As a group self-liberated from Spanish colonization, they were able to preserve their African cultures and languages, which they likely used to communicate with subsequent waves of British-colonized African runaways. Lalla and D’Costa, Language in Exile, p. 13. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 7. Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 158. Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery:The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), p. 6.

Introduction 37 64 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 120. Pringle was the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury and became the original editor of Mary Prince’s narrative (p. 24). 65 Journal of Peter Simmonds of Voyage from Falmouth to Jamaica in HM Packet Mutine, Lieutenant Paule Commr, October 1831, 19 × 23 cm, JOD/35, Caird Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. 66 Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean”, Caribbean Slavery in the AtlanticWorld: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 665. Elizabeth Fenwick was an English woman who established a school for white children in Bridgetown, Barbados in the nineteenth century. Many of her letters to her friend Mary Hays (1814–22) described her conflicted feelings about the slave system and her participation therein. A primary concern was her management of hired (rented) black female slaves that she employed as domestics. Fenwick complained of the prices for slave rental and also about the bad characters of the enslaved themselves whom she accused of being sluggish, inert, and self-willed. She also complained of habitual pilfering (p. 664). See A.F. Fenwick, ed., The Fate of the Fenwicks: Letters to May Hays, 1798–1828 (London: Methuen, 1927), pp. 163–4. 67 For instance, the Montreal Gazette printed a notice about ships being detained at Port Royal, Jamaica due to “high breezes”, a company advertised their rates for shipping insurance on cargoes from London, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, and other ports to Jamaica, and from Montego Bay came the news that Benjamin Johnson had been indicted for piracy and murder for acts committed on the schooner Friendship near Bermuda. “Kingston, (Jamaica,) July 18.”, Montreal Gazette, Thursday 15 September 1785, p. 2; “Insurance from London”, and “Insurance from Liverpool, Bristol. Glasgow, &.”, Montreal Gazette, Thursday 27 October 1785, no. 10, p. 4; “Montego-Bay, (Jamaica) July 30.”, Montreal Gazette, Thursday 17 November 1785, no. 13, p. 3. 68 Berlin, “From Creole to African”, p. 283. See also Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1, p. 99; Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1980), pp. 79–80. 69 Berlin, “From Creole to African”, p. 254. 70 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 7–8. 71 Alfred Sandham, Montreal and Its Fortifications (Montreal: Daniel Rose, 1874), frontispiece and pp. 7–8. I say Euro-American since Cartier’s encounter with Natives living in a wood fortification at the base of the “mountain” obviously indicates the pre-conquest indigenous use of the St Lawrence River in Native travel, exchange, and trade. 72 Hubert Charbonneau, Bertrand Desjardins, Jacques Légaré, and Hubert Denis, “The Population of the St. Lawrence Valley, 1608–1760”, eds. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 99. 73 Cindy McCreery, Ports of the World: Prints from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, c. 1700–1870 (London: Philip Wilson, 1999), p. 124. 74 McCreery, Ports of theWorld, p. 124. 75 Judith Blow Williams, British Commercial Policy and Trade Expansion 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 27. 76 Williams, British Commercial Policy, p. 25. 77 In 1796, Wentworth was the Governor of Nova Scotia when a group of 543 free Maroons from Trelawny, Jamaica were forcibly migrated to Halifax where they were put to work building the citadel, Governor’s House, and other sites. From the Spanish cimarrones, the maroons were self-liberated slaves who lived in self-sustained, mountainous communities. Abandoned by the Spanish after British conquest in 1655, their specific creolization and resistance led to unique cultural habits, social formations, and corporeal traits, which differed from later British-colonized Africans. Maria Nugent, wife of the Jamaican Governor in the early nineteenth century, described a dinner on 11 March 1802, at which the first course included jerked hog, which she described as “a way of dressing it by the Maroons”. Unhappy with substandard allotments of infertile land at Preston, NS, and the brutally cold winter of 1796–97, the Maroons agitated for migration to warmer climes. In 1800, most of the Jamaican Maroons left Halifax for Freetown, Sierra Leone. Their experience of colonization under two empires, their connection to Jamaica and Halifax, and ongoing colonial resistance, render their relationship to creolization an interesting domain for further research.

38 Introduction

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104

105

106 107

Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for The Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), p. 95. Williams, British Commercial Policy, p. 22. Williams, British Commercial Policy, p. 23. Williams has noted that under such conditions, the most basic of imported goods were luxuries. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxii. McCreery, Ports of theWorld, p. 10. Senior, British Regulars, p. 4. Gerald J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p.5. McCreery, Ports of theWorld, p. 25. Senior, British Regulars, p. 4. Tulchinsky, The River Barons, pp. 5–6, 69, 72. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 7. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 7. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 62. B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1988), p. 114. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, pp. 114, 117, 119. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 114. Casid has demonstrated how Caribbean landscapes were transformed through a global programme of aggressive transplantation through which plants like sugar cane, coffee, and indigo, originally imported for cultivation, came to be held as synonymous with the “tropics”, a literal grafting which ironically resulted in the idea of a natural “island paradise”. See Casid Sowing Empire, p. 7. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. xviii. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. xiii. Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 58. Rediker, The Slave Ship, p. 6. Rediker also explains that a sizeable number of slaves were sent to French and Spanish buyers under the special treaty accord called the Asiento. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 114. John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 2. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 59. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 59 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, p. 4. Adolphe Duperly’s Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica: A Collection of Views of the most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and other Interesting Objects, taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed under his Direction by the most eminent Artists in Paris (1840), also fits this category, but I have excluded it from this study because it is a photographic and not a print-based work. As the full title of Clark’s book demonstrated, unlike Hakewill and Duperly after him, Clark was invested in the representation of the economic backbone of the British West Indies, the sugar-making industry and the people who drove it, not the wealthy whites who claimed ownership of the estates and slaves, but the black slave labour on which every aspect of their colonial commercial ventures depended. The exhibition coincided with the first international convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, documented in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840 (1841). See: “Fine Arts: Royal Academy”, The Athenaeum, no. 655, 16 May 1840, p. 400; “Exhibition of the Royal Academy”, The Times (London), 6 May 1840, p. 6, both partially cited in Honour, The Image of the Black, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War I, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 162. A particularly rich critical reading of the painting is provided by Wood in Blind Memory, pp. 6, 7, 16, 41–68, 304, 306. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 2.

Introduction 39 108 Quilley and Kriz, An Economy of Colour, p. 9. 109 On the failures of Western art to represent horrific (colonial) subjects like the Middle Passage, and the failure of Art History to analyse taboo subject matter like slavery and pornography, see Quilley and Kriz, An Economy of Colour, pp. 2, 6, 8. 110 Gilbert Mathison, Esq. Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1811); Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824); R. Bickell, The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica. in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825); Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 111 Barringer and Forrester, “Introduction”, p. 3. 112 Thomas Hynes, “27th Sept. Twenty Dollars Reward. Ran away”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated. John ran away with Jack, who was described as a Negro as well as a very good-looking and smart Congo boy. 113 John Lambert, Travels Through Lower Canada, and the United States of North America in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808: To which were added Biographical Notices and Anecdotes of some of the leading Characters in the United States; and those who have, at various Periods, borne a conspicuous Part in the Politics of that Country (London: T. Gillet for Richard Phillips, 1810), vol. 1, p. 278. 114 Hogsheads and puncheons were large casks used to ship liquid or solid commodities like rum and sugar. According to Cohen, from 1688 to 1803 the following measures existed: 8.5 gallons = 1 firkin; 2 firkins = 1 kilderkin; 2 kilderkins = 1 barrel; 1.5 barrels = 1 hogshead; 2 barrels = 1 puncheon; 2 hogsheads = 1 butt; 3 puncheons = 1 tun. After 1803: 4.5 gallons = 1 pin; 2 pins = 1 firkin; 2 firkins = 1 kilderkin; 2 kilderkins = 1 barrel; 1.5 barrels = 1 hogshead; 2 barrels = 1 puncheon; 2 hogsheads = 1 butt; 3 puncheons = 1 tun. According to Dyche and Pardon, a hogshead held 63 gallons and a puncheon 84. See: Cohen, Made in Britain, online, p. 13; Dyche and Pardon, A New General English Dictionary, n.p.

1

Colonialism and art Landscape and empire

Critical geography and art history: Of landscape representation, imperialism, and power My readings of landscape, many topographical in nature, are dependent on a critical rethinking of geography and its central, strategic role in empire-building and colonization. Irit Rogoff defines geography as an epistemic category indelibly linked to race and gender, which classifies, locates, and produces identities and histories.1 Implied in Rogoff’s theorization is geography’s legacy as a tool, weapon or vehicle of imperial power. The fact that Rogoff approaches geography in part through human presence and classification alerts us to the entanglement of geography with human experience, her naming of race and gender, direct allusions to power. In the same vein, Said argued, Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings [italics mine].2 As briefly mentioned above, I am particularly interested in exploring the latter two and how they, images and imaginings, both imply and manifest one another as well as how they represent, relate, disavow or produce the material effects of colonial violence for which European imperialism became famous. Edward Casey’s idea of re-implacement articulates the process of vision and transcription that is essential to the practice of landscape painting. The term refers to how places are altered and transmuted as they are represented as maps and landscape.3 As such, even topographical landscapes are not “true”. A contemplation of the transformative nature of the representation of place or land is integral to this book’s focus upon representations of a place called Montreal and another called Jamaica. If landscapes as representation transform geography, then we cannot discuss Montreal and Jamaica as static, either in the material sense of on-the-ground changes of British colonization or in the cultural transformations of geographic rendering as images on paper or canvas. Also useful is Jill Casid’s discussion of landscape and “the effects of imperial territorialization on land and bodies”.4 Casid’s

42

Colonialism and art

theorization of Western landscape traditions as inextricable from empire-building, or the anticipation of empire as J.B. Harley would have it,5 allows for a re-reading of marine landscapes in terms of colonial conceptions of nature, population, trade, and settlement. Imperial territorialization was all about control: control of land, control of population, control of military, social and commercial systems. Western practices like cartography became standardized and uniformly deployed as tools of increasingly militarized and violent imperial expansion because of their regulatory functions, their ability to render visible, chartable and measurable not merely what was there but to re-imagine and re-present land itself as useful colonial apparatuses. As Harley has argued, Cartography has become preeminently a record of colonial self-interest. It is an unconscious portrait of how successfully a European colonial society had reproduced itself in The New World, and the maps grant reassurance to settlers by reproducing the symbolic authority and place names of the Old World.6 My analysis of these landscapes is setting out to demonstrate that much Western premodern landscape painting, although full of aesthetic intention, was also derived from these same cartographic principles, whether explicitly topographical in nature or not. To represent a landscape in geographical terms was a mechanism for ordering what was seemingly beyond human control, the expansiveness of nature itself. It was through land’s submission to the scientific rigours of geographical representation that it could become knowable. Nature could through geography become exploitable knowledge.Vision is implicated here on multiple levels and at distinct moments. Firstly, vision was paramount in the process and practices of seeing as surveillance and reconnaissance, in the field when the artist/soldier’s task was to regulate space through the production of a two-dimensional cartographic order out of a three-dimensional material experience. In this stage, the proximity of the artist’s body to the land that was being reproduced was what provided the seal of authenticity and the sense of authority. Secondly, the landscape image was intended to be seen; by military officers, by tourists, by wealthy businessmen, by monarchs. In this moment, the viewer’s ability to visually read and decipher the cartographic code, to distinguish the foreground from background, water from rock, east from west and small from large, is what provided them access to see what the artist intended, and to participate in the three-dimensional illusion of place on flat canvas or paper. Casey’s re-implacement is arguably a product of both moments, that of the artist in the field translating what they are seeing into strokes on a surface, as well as the viewer in his or her salon seeing those strokes and recognizing them as natural or man-made attributes of a certain geographic location. As the coerced Beothek mapping of Newfoundland discussed in the introduction reveals, neither process (production or reception) was universal knowledge, but rather landscapes were, initially at least, a culturally specific form of European knowledge that could be learned, and as Shawnadithit’s example reveals, subverted. How meanings were transmuted had as much to do with what was represented as it did the identities, subjectivities, and locations of who was doing the

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looking. While thinking through these cultural processes, I wish to question, as Casid, how these landscapes of Montreal functioned as an “imperial mode that defined and transformed” the geopolitical space of this colonial settlement, a contact zone at the supposed margin of the British Empire?7 How do these landscapes reveal their debt to imperial geography and its colonial production of place as knowledge? Art-making as empire-making: Whiteness, travel, and imperial vision While McCreery has argued that the plethora of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints of ports should be used to investigate the “complex history of man’s relationship to the sea”, I would argue also that the significance of this male dominance in terms of representing the sea within these intersecting landscape and cartographic genres and the ability to have certain masculinized marine experiences should also be an urgent point of investigation in and of itself. Furthermore, we must contemplate the sea, and the control thereof, as a fundamental means of empire-building. The European drive for colonial domination and the human desire to marginalize and exploit others through the global capitalism of slavery was only possible through the military prowess of European navies (and European sponsored companies with fleets of merchant ships).8 These prints are often connected materially to other two-dimensional landscape representations, the preliminary drawings and (watercolour) paintings often produced on-site by the artists. Such was the case with James Hakewill whose watercolour Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St.Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) was undoubtedly one of several watercolours from which the design of the final print by Sutherland of Holland Estate, St.Thomas in the East – Property of G.W. Taylor Esq. MP was chosen for the illustrated book A Picturesque Tour of Jamaica . . . (1825). The physical proximity of the artist to the land he/she represented was a fact often advertised in the naming of the prints themselves with the label “on the spot”. This was due to the importance placed on the authenticity attributed to a work on the basis of the connection between the artist’s physical presence and their assumed objectivity of vision.9 It is interesting to contemplate the expectation of accuracy and objectivity in the rendering of place for the viewing publics of these works, especially when one considers that these viewers were often not from the places represented and that they would, in their lifetimes, for the most part, have no opportunity to visit these locales for themselves. To this end McCreery has argued, In addition to the history of individual ports, prints express the symbolic importance of this region celebrated as a land of liberty, free enterprise and social equity.This “New World” alternative to the prejudices, restrictions and hierarchies of the Old World continues to appeal to immigrants today.10 While landscape prints undoubtedly held a special appeal for prospective travellers, in assuming a uniform symbolism of liberty for all viewers, McCreery has not accounted for

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the extreme diversity of potential viewing audiences across race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and class in the Americas and how identity fundamentally impeded or actualized one’s ability or desire to travel at all or to certain regions. Indeed, identity largely determined whether and if one had any mobility at all, and what type of mobility was attainable. Obviously, enslaved African and Native viewers in Montreal, along with many indentured Irish or Asian ones in Jamaica (for example), would certainly not have seen landscapes of American ports uniformly as seats of liberty, enterprise, and equality. McCreery’s statement utterly excises slavery and racial codification as the basis of colonial expansion that installed new hierarchies and restrictions with dire consequences for colonized populations. But furthermore, she ignores these populations as potential consumers of the landscapes. These populations were not just objects in a landscape, humans reduced to staffage by the visual technology of the picturesque, they were actors, agents, subjects, and, importantly, potential viewers, consumers and patrons of such landscape, however clandestine. Although their mobility was usually determined by others, coerced and in the guise of property or traveller as opposed to tourist, the Beothek woman Shawnadithit’s experiences should remind us that black and Native populations, under colonial domination, developed resistive vision, which manifested in their daily lives as people who needed (for survival) to observe and study the white colonialists, the reconfigurations of their homelands and the new terrain into which they were often relocated. This resistive vision was a survival mechanism and as viewers we must be cognizant that landscapes would have signified differently for them due to their experiences of the Americas as un-free, inequitable, prejudiced, restricted and, above all, racially hierarchized. But while imperialism undoubtedly displaced the colonized, it also removed the colonizers from their homes. In the cases of the artists who were also frequently authors of published or personal texts, these mainly white men of British origins were often equally not of the places that they professed to record with scientific accuracy, social objectivity, and aesthetic integrity. In many instances these artists were the human element of a military infrastructure, deployed to various colonies to produce the overseas dominion of which Said so ably wrote. As Harley has argued, Surveyors marched alongside soldiers, initially mapping for reconnaissance, then for general information, and eventually as a tool of pacification, civilization, and exploitation in the defined colonies. But there is more to this than the drawing of boundaries for the practical political or military containment of subject populations. Maps were used to legitimize the reality of conquest and empire.11 Within these contexts, the air of scientific authority that attached to such images often surpassed or rivalled the expectation or desire for aesthetic accomplishment and pleasure and we must not separate the claims that these images made from the identities of their mainly white male producers and the privilege which attached both to their sexed and racial identities. Indeed, these landscapes came to be read as accurate largely because they were produced by white men who were sanctioned within a colonial system

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established upon the de-legitimization of indigenous knowledge and the evacuation of indigenous lands. Of course we must contend with degrees of privilege, since there is a vast distance between a lower-middle-class, recent Irish immigrant like Robert A. Sproule in Montreal and a more securely middle-class, educated, professional architect like James Hakewill who sojourned like a tourist on the sugar plantations of the white planter elite in Jamaica for two years. But what they both shared was an imperial mobility and an artistic education or knowledge, which they used as a means to produce and circulate their art, all of which was determined in part by their identity and location. The artworks, in many cases topographical landscape prints, which they produced were by their nature, of course, mass-produced and more widely disseminated than paintings and held military, colonial, commercial and touristic functions, acting as records of military victories, encouraging immigration, advertising a port’s commercial possibilities or serving as souvenir or token of a longed-for destination.12 But one of my key aims is to explore how they also at times served as pro-slavery texts, justifying the continuing exploitation of blacks, rebuffing external anti-slavery pressure, championing the supposed plight of the victimized white planters and merchants, and vilifying the geographically absent abolitionists. As Gerald Finley has noted, topographical landscapes were frequently commissioned by members of the English court from the first half of the sixteenth century.13 Appreciated for both descriptive and strategic content, they came to be widely viewed and collected.14 According to Finley, The walls of Lord Burghley’s house, Theobalds, were hung with a series of landscapes “of the most important towns in Christendom”. In another compartment of the house were pictures which “depicted the kingdom of England, with all its cities, towns and villages, mountains and rivers”.15 With Queen Elizabeth I a frequent guest, we can imagine the ways that the topographical landscapes were used to facilitate a very personal narrative of the British Empire and all of its free and enslaved inhabitants as her subjects. Furthermore, the inclusion of representations of the holdings of other European empires – the most important towns of Christendom – served to normalize and celebrate the ideals of European religious superiority underpinning the shared imperial project. Substantial prints of North and South American ports began to be produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such topographical works as representations of actual geographies, however biased, were interpreted in more literal and therefore personal ways. Familiar and exotic (depending upon the location), they were avidly collected as tokens of far-off lands or as commodities in their own right. Collected in folios, illustrated travel and natural history books or adorning the walls of domestic interiors, such landscapes became a key means for Europeans and Euro-Americans to experience empire. Initially, Britain was only a secondary force in the print industry. But this changed when London rose to prominence as the centre of the print-selling world in the late eighteenth century, with major print sellers boasting large shops in which customers

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could explore prints on a range of topics.16 Britain’s ascendency in printmaking coincided with its maritime dominance, since with the expansion of London’s port it became the foremost centre of colonial trade and the most influential port in the world by the early nineteenth century.17 Customers could buy prints one at a time or in groups and the print seller was often also the publisher, with a direct stake in the successful circulation and reception of the works. With a wide variation in price and quality, specializations arose, with some collectors focusing upon specific artists, patrons, genres or themes. As McCreery has argued, “Views were bought as souvenirs of recent visits, reminders of profits made, battles won, and adventures enjoyed and anticipated.”18 Amidst the array of choices were landscapes, but specifically marine landscapes that focused upon the dock activities of active port settlements, representing the commercial shipping of the colonial markets.19 While in the early moments of American colonization, printmaking was necessarily farmed out to British workshops, by the mid-1800s engraving workshops were being established in North American settlements.20 In Montreal, the English-trained Adolphus Bourne was one of the first to establish himself as a printmaker. Working in wood engraving and lithography, his name first appeared in a city directory in 1820.21 But as I shall discuss in detail below (Chapter 2), arguably his most successful series would come in 1830 with the local publication of a series of six prints of Montreal by the recently arrived Irish painter Robert A. Sproule. Similarly, nineteenth-century Jamaica was largely bereft of local printmakers. James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1825) was initially published in London between 1824 and 1825 in seven folios containing three plates each22 and his prints engraved by several British artists including J. Cartwright, Clarke, D.T. Egerton, Fielding, and the majority (16 of the 21) by Sutherland.23 It was not until the late 1830s that the Frenchman Adolphe Duperly of Paris established his photography and lithography business in Kingston, Jamaica and began to publish works like Isaac Belisario’s Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica (1837–38) which boasted 12 lithographs.24 As for the printmaker(s) that produced the images in William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), they are as yet unknown.25 Historical landscapes, although sometimes created by female amateurs (often tourists and more rarely professionals) were a decidedly male preserve and topographical paintings even more so, due to their explicit military links to standardized geographical knowledge.26 Many such paintings of Montreal were produced by white men of British military affiliation – Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh, Roman Catholic and Protestant – trained in topography and posted to Canada between 1760 and 1870 when the British garrison was charged with defending the province and maintaining internal security.27 For many, their art-making was part duty, part leisure, an outlet from the monotony of an often peaceful three-year posting far from home. Some of these soldiers were single, some married; but most of the latter could not afford to relocate their wives and children, only six per cent of whom, according to Senior, were provided with rations and quarters for their families.28 Besides band concerts, troop reviews, and theatre shows, art-making was one of the more respectable

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activities, a past-time that would have kept many from the temptations of excessive drunkenness in the taverns or sexual indulgences in the brothels, the latter two being activities for which Montreal soldiers became notorious (see Chapter 2).29 For these military artists, as well as for other professionals and amateurs who made their names painting landscapes of the settlement, the port and its active waters became a key focal point of many of their works. Many of these landscapes depict the commercial, touristic, military, and everyday activities of life on the St. Lawrence River. One simple reason for this is that Montreal, like Jamaica, is an island and furthermore the settlement was built directly fronting the St. Lawrence River. Therefore the presence, proximity, and necessity of water were arguably strongly felt in the daily lives of its inhabitants and visitors. But this focus is also attributable to the specific imperial relationship of the St Lawrence (and its connection to the Atlantic) with the settlement of Montreal in terms of its economic survival and strategic military significance as an important internationally networked port within the British Empire. The creation of new cultures, societies, arts, religions, and peoples is a product of the massive upheaval, relocations, and hybridizations which occurred, were remembered and produced, within what can be called transoceanic art. The social complexity of nineteenth-century Montreal is not to be underestimated, since it included an indigenous presence (that had not been exterminated as in the Jamaican case), and a French colonial population some of whom (due to their marginalization post-1760) held an ardent distaste, even hatred, for the British who were at times seen as an occupying force. Add to this a variety of European or Euro-American immigrants, Scottish, Irish, English, Welsh, other Europeans, Christian and Jewish and also the Americans. The entrenched practice of Trans Atlantic Slavery had also by this point brought continental and diasporized Africans from various other “New World” sites (especially America, other parts of Canada and the Caribbean) to Montreal, blacks who were both enslaved and free.30 People from all walks of life settled or passed through Montreal, many coming into and out of the settlement through her bustling commercial harbour. As a traveller to Montreal in Alfred Sandham’s book Ville-Marie, or, Sketches, of Montreal Past and Present (1870) described, To stand at a street corner for a moment is to see pass by the Indian woman in her heavy blanket, the French habitant, Scotch, Irish, English residents, and emigrants of all social conditions, the American from the United States, officers of the British Army, Priests in their robes, the Sisters of charity, groups of neat-looking soldiers, and the burly policeman, clad in his dark blue military uniform.31 Montreal was a transnational site of empire and although this social transformation is apparent in the emergence of entirely new art forms like those produced by Native populations for a tourist market and those produced by enslaved Africans which recalled their memories of the motherland, it was also evidenced in the shifts in established landscape genres produced by the dominantly white artists working in the colony.32

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Montreal and Jamaica: Imperial connections A large part of this project, then, entails not the imagining, but the re-imagining, or better still, the re-membering of Montreal as a globally connected site of empire. I say re- because it is not located in our time, not a twenty-first-century fabrication grafted back onto history. Rather, a postcolonial reading of these landscapes reveals their original historical debt to empire, a certain and knowledgeable engagement with the material, social, political, and cultural stuff of empire. That our scholarly legacies do not acknowledge culture’s debt to imperialism was Said’s lament when he wrote: “Imperialism’s culture was not invisible, nor did it conceal its worldly affiliations and interests”33 and “Yet scarcely any attention has been paid to what I believe is the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience”.34 Our task is then, not the creation of an imperial legacy within this visual art but, to my mind, a knowledgeable critical engagement with the objects which is based upon the prolifically documented colonial discourses and imperial structures of the period in which they were produced and as such is a fundamental part of what they are. This is an engagement which requires that we no longer privilege the “metropole” over the “colony” and, in the case of Montreal, that we do not retroactively extract Canada from its position in the Trans Atlantic World and the Black Diaspora. Furthermore, we should not unbind, after the fact, one colony from another in ways which privilege colonies that through population and policy (as influenced by climate and the usefulness of certain immigrants and slaves) were to become white over those that were to become black. This project does not require a false suturing together of disparate geographies and regions – Montreal and Jamaica, Canada and the West Indies – but rather a careful postcolonial visual and material archaeology35 capable of acknowledging and reading the ways in which the two were historically powerfully connected, through the colonial discourses of trade, commerce, militarism, tourism, politics, and culture. Montreal was historically linked to Jamaica through the direct sea trade of its local merchants, many of whom grew rich from their traffic in sugar and other plantation crops. By the mid-eighteenth century the West Indies and the Southern American colonies were essential components of Britain’s trading partners. Indeed, a publication from 1776 acknowledged that corn and lumber were amongst the Montreal products being shipped to the West Indies.36 Meanwhile, on its own, the West Indies accounted for one quarter of British imports, and when combined with the Southern American colonies, one fifth.37 But the West Indies was also an entrepreneurial hub for further commercial exploitation, re-exporting British goods to other colonial territories as well as importing necessary items from North America like food, live animals, and timber.38 As the Scottish itinerant artist George Heriot noted when discussing the fishing, drying, and salting of cod in the context of the Grand Banks in his illustrated book on the Canadas, “The dried fish sent to the West Indies is packed in casks; and is inferior in quality to that carried to Europe”.39 Indeed, the commonly used preparation methods of fish, meats, and other easily spoiled produce, which allowed them to be shipped or stored over long durations, required imported West Indian preservatives. In June 1830 when Walter Henry departed on a fishing trip from

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Montreal, he and his companions brought with them “material for preserving our fish – namely; salt, sugar, spices, and a large cask of vinegar”.40 The interdependence of Montreal and Jamaica grew in the period between the American Revolution and 1822, when Britain punitively excluded American vessels from West Indian trade, turning instead to British North America.41 As Judith Blow Williams has argued, the British Islands imported all personal necessities and plantation requirements, “in short all things necessary for life”.42 However, these necessities were not just for the whites, but also for the racially marginalized blacks who bought vast quantities of checked linen, striped hollands, fustian, blankets for their bedding, longells and bays for warm clothing, coarse hats, woollen caps, cotton and silk handkerchiefs, knives, razors, buckles, buttons, tobacco pipes, fishing tackle, small glasses, thread, needles, pins and innumerable other articles, all of British growth or manufacture [sic].43 Although it is important, especially within the context of slavery, to remember Africans as consumers, their access to colonial markets would have varied widely depending upon their legal status (enslaved or free), the leniency of their owners if enslaved, their ability to gain access to currency (for example through huckstering as it was known in Barbados or higgling in Jamaica) and their racial identification and status (that is, Negro, mulatto, coloured, etc.).44 Economically, neither settlement was passive in its relationship to the metropole. By the nineteenth century, the increasing confidence of Montrealers and Jamaicans in their financial dealings with the Crown indicate the generational growth and importance of the white Creole populations that began to assert, not only the specificity of their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities, but their economic rights as trading partners with British businesses and firms. In the 1830s, Nevis, Bermuda, and Jamaica imposed a duty upon imported goods of British manufacture, against the wishes of the Crown; the Jamaican duty of 1 per cent applying to locally consumed goods.45 Of course Britain insisted that even higher duties be enforced against goods from foreign empires. Similarly, ships from the US were normally barred from entering the St Lawrence ports. But once Britain repealed punitive tariffs against American goods, Canadians demanded the repeal of navigation laws since they no longer benefitted from protected trade.46 Both Montreal and Jamaica had British garrisons, their soldiers trained in landscape representation through the imperial discourses of geography, cartography, and topography. Marine landscapes captured the St Lawrence River and its Montreal port and represented its strategic commercial and military significance, bound within colonial relations of power to other sites of empire. These landscapes regularly include merchant ships (which carried both human and other cargoes), dockside labour and social activity, the garrison, barracks, fortifications, and soldiers. Whereas in the case of marine landscapes of Jamaica, any deep-sea sailing ship depicted can be assumed to have been a part of some aspect of the slave trade, likewise, the same type of ships that appear in Montreal marine landscapes were also implicated in triangular trade, including slaving. As

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Marcus Rediker has explained, the slave ship was a variant of the European deep-sea sailing ship and the stage for the emergence of a new economic order.47 By combining the cast-iron cannon with the deep sailing “round ship”, Europeans created a sailing machine of incomparable speed and violence.48 The ultimate incarnation of the slave ship, also known as the Guineaman – “the full-rigged, three-masted, cannon-carrying ship” – was central to the creation of a new order of global capital.49 But while some merchants in the African trade, like the Liverpool-based Joseph Manesty,50 opted to have their slave ships custom-built in a variety of places or imported the materials to build them in Britain, other merchants bought ships used in other trades and converted them for slaving.51 Since the ships arriving at Montreal from the British Caribbean were often primarily carrying cargoes of slave-produced products and secondarily, cargoes of slaves, many of the vessels, which were not purpose-built for slaving regardless on their return voyages became slavers.52 Such was likely the case with the British schooner Rebecca. Captained by R. Ames, the ship arrived at Jamaica from Halifax, Nova Scotia carrying codfish, salmon, alewives, and red oak staves.53 But the advertisement dated 25 September 1804 and placed by Stewart and Wood noted that the ship would sail again for Halifax early the following month and invited the public to apply for freight or passage.54 As the groundbreaking research of Riddell attests, many such ships came back to ports like Halifax and Montreal with Creole slaves.55 The knowledge of the variability of the “slave ship” then becomes a key aspect of the informed analysis of such marine landscape images. To analyse these images not solely in terms of an emptied-out depoliticized aesthetics or formal methodology, but rather within their colonial contexts, addressing their implications for processes and practices of empire, is, I believe, what Said meant when he argued for an analysis capable of reconnecting cultural forms to “their actuality”.56 Imperialism implies a contest over lands and expansion from a central source outward, which encompasses not only the concept of land as property, but also the idea that human beings can be reduced to chattel or commodities. The practice of imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with Trans Atlantic Slavery, has also implied a differentiation of human types; a colonial differentiation, which produced the Western idea of race, producing a self and an “other” and with it forms of racism and xenophobia.57 Colonialism or colonial discourses need to be thought of as necessary conditions of European imperialisms and their race-based expansionism. Although Said argued that “the term ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism’, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory”, I would differ, instead seeing colonialism or a colonial discourse as the necessary framework from which an imperial logic emerges and not its after-effect. The fact that, for centuries, various European nations endorsed a practice through which they settled and controlled distant lands upon which other peoples already lived, could only be justified and authorized by a racial and cultural logic of superiority of the European invaders and conquerors; a sense of the violence, oppression, and marginalization as necessity, as the God-given right of whites. As Said has

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noted, this logic incorporated and yet transcended the material world of economics and profits to another level of human experience: There was a committment to [imperialism and colonialism] over and above profit, a committment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and, on the other, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule and subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples.58 But the imperial process, although unified, was not singular, but undertaken differently by different nations and within empires based on the needs or usefulness of a specific colonial possession. The usefulness of a land or territory for the metropolis was of paramount importance in such considerations, as were the concerns of how best to exploit a particular colony to its maximum effect as far as labour, settlement, immigration, resource extraction, policy, and governance. The distinctions in how the British approached the settlement and maintenance of a colony like Montreal in North America, as opposed to a “plantation” like Jamaica, has everything to do with the ruling elites’ understanding of how best to exploit the inherent and rapidly hybrid possibilities of that particular site, out there.59 These possibilities often had to do with the geography of a colony, the literal physical characteristics of a piece of land, its elevations, proximity to waterways and internal water bodies in terms of its accessibility for immigration and suitability for settlement, but also in terms of irrigation for agriculture, the shipping of colonial goods, and its strategic military location in terms of further conquests or safety from attack. But also of paramount importance was its global location in terms of its climate. Climate is perhaps the most critical factor in modern Trans Atlantic imperial expansion in terms of the enormous wealth accrued through the hybridized mono-crop agricultures of British colonies like Jamaica. Climate was a determining factor in what animal and plant life was naturally occurring or what could be imported and reared through adaptation in the territory. It was Jamaica’s tropical climate and rich soils that allowed for the systemic transplantation of foreign crops like sugar cane, to be grown through plantation gang labour systems with enslaved imported Africans. The concentrated importation and “breeding” of slave labour in the West Indian plantations resulted in the demographic dominance of black populations in these colonies, unlike Canada and Montreal where the temperate and vast seasonal shifts of the climate did not allow for agricultural plantation systems to flourish and as such necessitated a smaller importation of African slaves and a comparatively larger migration of populations of Europeans who would come to be known as white. But climate also acted as a deterrent to migration since diseases like yellow fever, which plagued whites in tropical locations like Jamaica, became the origin of the concept of the Caribbean as the white man’s grave. The colonial legacies of British imperialism demonstrate the inter-relation of geography and racialized bodies and the necessity of both in the assumption of power. But it is the systems of knowledge through which power was constituted, deployed, and re-deployed that I am

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most interested in, the forms of knowledge, which manifested as visual culture in the representation of marine landscapes as the geographies of empire. As Said has argued, Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like “inferior”, or “subject races”, “subordinate peoples”, ”dependency”, “expansion”, and “authority”. 60 Transoceanic art So how does one position and analyse art within this complex, multi-locational field? One consideration is that my methodological framework forces us to rethink the terms through which we imagine and conceptualize art and visual culture as regards how it is produced, by whom and for what audiences, and in terms of how it travels and circulates, not only as a material object itself, but as a repository of ideas. The term “transoceanic” is useful as a means of thinking about how art was produced simultaneously in multiple locations connected by their relationship to (British) imperialism and the colonization, which produced a Trans Atlantic World in part through the colonial commerce established in circuits between Europe, Africa and the Americas, often referred to as triangular trade.61 Although the term “transoceanic” owes an obvious debt to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (which Quilley and Kriz also acknowledge),62 my use of the term is also different. Gilroy uses the concept of the Black Atlantic to point up the racialization of geography (here the Atlantic) and to reclaim it for Africans for the role the ocean played in their forced dispersal within slavery that resulted in the creation of the Black Diaspora. In comparison, the concept of transoceanic is more concerned with the process of crossing, mobility, trajectories, and cultural and economic exchanges. Furthermore, whereas Gilroy’s Black Atlantic assumes its form/shape between Africa–the Americas–Europe, taking its outline from the dominant triangular movement of ships, transoceanic allows for a more expansive form/shape. For instance, Gilroy is not concerned with the north-eastern portion of the Atlantic, the part that borders Canada and the US that leads from the ocean into the St Lawrence River towards the island of Montreal. When Gilroy mentions Canada it is within the context of intercontinental travel with the US, a discussion about the mis-perception of black Americans looking across the Detroit River to Windsor and imagining Canada as a place free of anti-black racism.63 But arguably, this forgotten north-eastern zone is also the Black Atlantic where ships from the Caribbean travelled to Montreal loaded with cargoes of rum, sugar, molasses, and enslaved people of African descent and where other ships travelled from Montreal and other parts of British North America to Jamaica and other Caribbean islands with cargoes of wood, fish and other “northern” necessities. In this way, “transoceanic” can be used to literally pry open the

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Atlantic to further and fuller exploration of neglected but interconnected sites within this colonial moment. However, while the black in Gilroy’s Black Atlantic states a specific and necessary racial claim and illuminates the centrality of diasporic blackness within Western modernity, the concept of transoceanic, although certainly applicable to peoples of African descent, is not limited to an exploration of blackness.Therefore, a part of its attractiveness for this project is that it allows for an exploration of various races and the uneven imperial process of creolization itself. Linda M. Rupert’s definition of creolization is particularly suited to my project. She contends that At its most basic, creolization refers to processes of sociocultural exchange and adaptation that occurred among all the diverse peoples of the early modern world who were thrust together with the rise of European overseas empires . . . Such cultural intermixing shaped every colonial society in the Americas, although it varied according to the specific ethnic, racial, and imperial configurations of each settlement.64 As such the term “transoceanic” signals mobility, and connection across distance, upsetting simple assumptions of nationally discreet as opposed to global imperial cultures and complicating relations between metropolises and colonies as assumed centres and peripheries. A transoceanic reading of visual culture assumes not only the mobility of the art object once produced, but also the mobility and unfixed-ness of the ideas that led to its production and the mobility or multiple positions of the viewers who consume it. In the visual arts as studied in Art History, as in literature, there has been a scholarly tendency to falsely separate cultural production through national territorial boundaries, which have not accounted for the movement and transfer of imagination, ideas, skills and indeed producing subjects. Such a separation has been forged between Canada and the Caribbean, partly through the tropical climate and plantation labour biases of Slavery Studies discussed above, resulting in a retroactive unbinding of powerfully connected colonial territories. This book seeks to reconfigure that divide and as Phillips Casteel has argued (following Glissant), I would like to suggest that without neglecting cultural, historical, and aesthetic divergences between North America and the Caribbean, it is illuminating to consider the function and treatment of landscape as a site of diasporic emplacement in a comparative hemispheric context.65 The idea of conquered lands as being distant or far-flung is not inconsequential, but a trait of this particular type of imperialism, which, according to Said, was best characterized by the over-seas rule established by Britain, France, and America.66 The ability to conquer, harness, control and represent these distant lands, and to garner the necessary at-home support of the people, is not merely a consequence of brute force (although that is certainly a fundamental part of the equation) but also a product of the hegemonic

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control of linguistic, cultural, imaginary and psychic realms, or what Said called “a structure of attitude and reference” through which European imperialism was produced as a normal and logical manifestations of a God-given white superiority. To consider nineteenth-century landscape paintings of Montreal and Jamaica as transoceanic is to acknowledge that the connections between various “national” or disparately governed regional sites of empire are as important as the connections within them. It is to unbind the uni-directional assumption of the metropolis as the centre being fattened but somehow not transformed by the societies, cultures, politics, and people of the colonies. It is to insist on the significance of the connections forged between various so-called peripheries out there and their impacts upon each other and upon the motherland as worthy of contemplation. And furthermore that the representation of a landmass re-named Montreal might reveal as much about a British West Indian colony re-named Jamaica or a hectic British port as it does about its own location. As Said has argued, So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future; these territories and histories can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history.67

Maps, landscape painting, and topographical landscapes Marine landscape painting, as the representation of geography, is also a product of the power relations articulated by Rogoff, which I have cited at the beginning of this chapter. However, Casey distinguishes between two prolific Western forms of geographical representation: maps and landscape painting. He argues that “Whereas maps orient us in the practical world, landscape paintings possess the decidedly nonpractical function of helping us to appreciate the natural world’s inherent beauty and sublimity.”68 For Casey the difference between the two is largely a matter of their function and consumption, the former more practical and so-called scientific, the latter explicitly aesthetic and disinterested. The field that resides in the middle for Casey is topographical landscape. Often undertaken in explicitly colonial contexts by military men, this form of production had intentions for the mapping and representation of place. Topographical landscape is simultaneously scientific in its use of cartographic principles and aesthetic in its use of artistic ones. It combined supposedly precise articulations of natural and man-made materials forms – precise in detail, shape, size, scale, proportion – representations of buildings, towers, forts, waterways, mountains, hills, rocks and valleys as well as flora, fauna, sea and sky, all rendered in the presumed heightened reality of three dimensions. Cartography’s claim to authority and the role of the map, to “present a factual statement about geographical reality”,69 prompted Harley to question the “slipperiness” of maps, their social construction as a re-description of the world in terms of relations of power, cultural practices, and priorities.70 It is the presumed authority of maps, derived largely from the “strenuous

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standardization”71 of modern cartography, which resulted in what Harley called cartography’s art of persuasion.72 My desire then to read maps and (topographical) landscapes not as objective scientific knowledge but as subjective visual culture, is a way to focus our attention on their problematic designation as “authoritative resources”73 and to expose and analyse instead their political, social, and cultural influence and the ways that they, as forms of knowledge, produce, and imply ways of knowing that are particularly dangerous and sinister when deployed in the context of imperialism and the colonization of “other” populations who: (1) refuted this knowledge, (2) could not “read” or decipher this knowledge (at least initially), and (3) had their own sophisticated geographical knowledge systems. I proceed from Harley who aligns neatly with Said’s understanding of the role of culture within imperialism in his statement, “As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapon of imperialism”.74 It is in this sense that cartographical knowledge as map-making and landscape production can be positioned as an “intellectual weapon” and a “form of elite knowledge”; the combination of the two makes an understanding of its effects on those it marginalized even more urgent.75 Notes 1 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’sVisual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). 2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 7. 3 Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 4 Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xiv. 5 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 57. 6 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 46. 7 Casid, Sowing Empire, p. xxi. 8 For more on European companies in the age of empire see: Stephen R. Bown, Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600–1900 (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2009) 9 Cindy McCreery, Ports of the World: Prints from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, c. 1700–1870 (London: Philip Wilson, 1999), p. 12. 10 McCreery, Ports of the World, p. 123. 11 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 57. 12 McCreery, Ports of theWorld, p. 14. 13 Gerald Finley, George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 4. 14 Finley, George Heriot, p. 4. 15 Finley, George Heriot, p. 4. 16 McCreery, Ports of the World, p. 12. 17 McCreery, Ports of the World, pp. 18, 23. 18 McCreery, Ports of the World, p. 14. 19 McCreery, Ports of the World, pp. 38–9. 20 McCreery, Ports of the World, p. 12. 21 Mary Allodi, “Bourne, Adolphus”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11 (1881–90), available at http:// www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bourne_adolphus_11E.html (date of last access 1 December 2013). For 1842–43, Bourne is listed under the category of “Engravers and Lithographers” as follows “Bourne, Adolphus, 120, Notre Dame street” and for 1843–44 under the same category as “Bourne, Adolphus, 142 Notre Dame street”. In the first instance he was listed with “Mathews, George, St. François Xavier street” and in the latter with the same George Mathews who specified his location as

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Colonialism and art 11 St. François Xavier Street. Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1842–3, containing an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, a classified business directory, and a supplementary directory of professional and business men in Chambly, Laprairie and St. Johns (Montreal: Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and Robert W.S. Mackay, 115 Notre Dame Street, undated), p. 193; Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1843–4, containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, second, a directory of the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, etc., in the city; and, third, a classified business directory, in which the names of the subscribers are arranged under their proper business trade. accompanied by a new map of the city (Montreal: Printed and Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and by Robert W.S. Mackay, undated), p. 267 both at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/ (date of last access 21 August 2015). David Boxer, “Foreword”, in James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990). J. Cartwright was presumably active from at least 1801. The most likely Clarke seems to be G.R. Clarke, a nineteenth-century British painter and illustrator. The most likely Fielding seems to be Theodore Henry Adolphus Fielding (1781–1851), who himself published collections of landscape aquatints such as A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes (1821), Picturesque Illustrations of the River Wye (1822), and Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire Illustrated (1822). Sutherland may refer to Thomas Sutherland (b. 1785) who engraved hunting scenes, horses, and stagecoaches. However, it may also refer to Duchess Elizabeth Sutherland (1765–1839), a painter and engraver of landscapes who published Views on the Northern and Western Coasts of Sutherland (1807). Stephen Bury, ed., Benezit Dictionary of British Graphic Artists and Illustrators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 217, 233, 384–5, 445–9. From the date of Belisario’s book, Duperly was obviously in business from at least the late 1830s. Kay Dian Kriz, “Making a Black Folk: Belisario’s Sketches of Character”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the BritishWest Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2008), p. 117. However, another source dates the start of Duperly’s firm to the 1840s. See “Adolphe Duperly and Sons”, The Royal Commonwealth Society Photographers Index, Cambridge University Library, available at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/rcs_photographers/entry. php?id=165 (date of last access 2 January 2014). I have been unable to identify the printmaker(s) who produced the images for William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua. . . . However, I learned that the staff at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, US) and the British Library (London, UK) have also been unsuccessful in this regard. E-mail, Sarah Welcome, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts,Yale Center for British Art to author, 11 August 2015. For more on a rare example of an early white female professional landscape artist in the Canadian context, see Kristina Huneault, “Placing France Hopkins: A British-Born Artist in Colonial Canada”, Local/Global:Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), p. 3. Senior, British Regulars, p. 148. Senior, British Regulars, pp. 9, 147, 149. Senior has argued that the increase in breweries and distilleries in early nineteenth-century Montreal has a correlation with the consumption of soldiers, who became notorious for excessive drunkenness. Their overindulgence in alcohol had become so common by 1840 that general orders were issued by the commander of the forces about precautions to be taken to care for men in states of inebriation, in order to prevent sudden death. For insight into the historical complexity and heterogeneity of black enslaved populations in Montreal (and Canada), see Charmaine Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 57, p. 198 (endnotes 65 and 67). Alfred Sandham, Ville-Marie, or, Sketches of Montreal Past and Present (Montreal: G. Bishop, 1870), p. 182. While the pioneering work of Ruth Phillips has examined some of the historical hybridized artistic production of Natives in Canada, far less attention has be given to the unique visual and expressive cultures of black Canadians in the nineteenth century and earlier.The position of many enslaved females within white households and the responsibility of childcare and household maintenance meant that black women would have produced fabric art such as linens, quilts, clothing, and toys, as well as other household goods like candles and soap. Black male slaves arrived in Montreal (and elsewhere in what would become Canada) trained in carpentry, metalwork, coopering, and other skills essential to the plantation economies from which many of them had been extracted. See Ruth B. Phillips, “Nuns, Ladies and the ‘Queen of the

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33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

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Hurons’: Souvenir Art and the Negotiation of North American Identities”, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, Local/Global:Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxi. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 5. I am grateful to Robin Metcalfe for pointing out to me, during a lecture that I gave during the early stages of this research (at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada in January 2008), that an archaeological practice was precisely what I was undertaking. Anonymous, “Montreal”, The North-American and the West-Indian Gazetteer, unpaginated. S.B. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960), p. 7. One telling sign of the interconnection of colonial trade was the ascendency of cotton, which in 1803 surpassed wool in British exports, relying of course upon slave-produced cotton grown in the overseas markets of the US. The prevalence of cotton triggered a demand for suitable dyes, attained from tropical colonies like indigo from Guatemala and logwood from Jamaica. Saul, Studies, p. 8. George Heriot, Travels Through the Canadas, containing a description of the picturesque scenery on some of the Rivers and Lakes, with an account of the Productions Commerce and Inhabitants of those Provinces (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1813), p. 36. Walter Henry, Trifles from my Port-folio, or Recollections of Scenes and Small Adventures during Twenty-Nine Years’ Military Service in the Peninsula War and Invasion of France,The East Indies, Campaign in Nepal, St. Helena During the Detention and Until the Death of Napoleon, and Upper and Lower Canada: In Two Volumes (Quebec: William Neilson, 1839), pp. 58–9. Judith Blow Williams, British Commercial Policy and Trade Expansion 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 12. Williams, British Commercial Policy, p. 9. Williams includes in this list: objects made from wool, linen, silk, iron, brass, copper, leather, glass, chinaware, clocks, watches, jewels, wrought plates, medicines, gunpowder, bricks, paint, oil, cordage, sugar pots, drips, hoops, candles, pipes, cards, swords, pistols, walking canes, grindstones, paving stones, books, toys, stationery, cutlery, Birmingham and haberdashery wares, all sorts of household goods and furniture, wearing apparel, cabinet ware, chariots, and chaises. Williams, British Commercial Policy, pp. 9–10. See John Campbell, Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade; The comparative Importance of the British and French Islands in the West-Indies: with the value and Consequences of St. Lucia and Granada truly stated: illustrated with copper plates (London: Printed for R. Baldwin in Pater-noster Row, 1763), p. 24. Upon his first visit to his plantations in Jamaica, the absentee planter Matthew Lewis commented that it was better if slaves only collected one week’s provisions at a time since their thoughtlessness and improvidence led them to sell any excess food to the “wandering higglers, or at Savanna la Mar, in exchange for spirits”. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 55. Williams, British Commercial Policy, pp. 13–14. Williams, British Commercial Policy, p. 29. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 41. Rediker, The Slave Ship, p. 42. Rediker, The Slave Ship, pp. 42–3. As Rediker notes in detail, in 1745 Manesty ordered two ships “for Affrica trade” from John Bannister of Newport, Rhode Island. Manesty was the primary owner of nine vessels and a minority owner of others. He specified the type of wood to be used (white oak timber), the shape, dimensions, and size of the hold (a key aspect regarding the ship-board incarceration of the enslaved), the size of the masts and yards, the property of the wales and the nature of many other features. He also specified that the timbers be made in a fashion to support rails around the vessels, as Rediker notes, most likely to support the addition of netting designed to prohibit slaves from committing suicide by jumping overboard. Manesty also expressed concern for the speed and stability of the ships, since a rapid Atlantic crossing and reduced motion would benefit the health of the human cargo and thereby increase his profits. Rediker, The Slave Ship, pp. 50–51. Rediker, The Slave Ship, p. 52. In the eighteenth century, slave ships were built in places like New England, especially Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina (p. 53). Rediker’s The Slave Ship is the first book to explore the history of the slave ship in general. His research and earlier works that examined specific ships focused upon ships that sailed between Europe, Africa, and the tropical colonies, primarily as slave ships. As such, we still do not know enough about the experience

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Colonialism and art of the enslaved as secondary cargo on slavers and other types of merchant ships moving between tropical plantation colonies and ports connected to the northern Atlantic, an experience which would have been the norm for the enslaved people of African descent who arrived at Montreal. Stewart and Wood, “September 25. Now landing”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated, Huntington Library, San Marino, US. Stewart and Wood, “September 25. Now landing”. William Renwick Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1920), pp. 359–75, at p. 360. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 14. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 10. I describe the possibilities as hybrid since, as Jill Casid has convincingly argued, what came to be the most notable and wealth-generating produce and crops of the British West Indies and islands like Jamaica were indeed, like sugar cane, not native plants at all, but colonial transplants. See Jill H. Casid, “The Hybrid Production of Empire”, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 9. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, An Economy of Colour:Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 6–9. Quilley and Kriz developed the term “transoceanic” for an analysis of art and visual culture from the work of Joseph Roach. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Quilley and Kriz, An Economy of Colour, p. 9. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 18. This discussion is based around the jazz musician Donald Byrd’s youth in Detroit, Michigan (US) where he recounted looking across the river at Windsor, Ontario (Canada) which came to represent Europe for him, or a place where blacks received better treatment. But he later conceded that these conceptualizations of Canadian race politics as better than the US were false. Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), p. 6. Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in ContemporaryWriting of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 15. Casteel credits her insight from a reading of Edouard Glissant’s “Quebec”, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. xi, xxiii, 10. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 61. Casey, Representing Place, p. xiv. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 35. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 36. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 36. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 37. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 55. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 57. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 56. Even when this elite knowledge is somewhat democratized and placed in the hands of more common soldiers, they were still subject to the authority and rule of the elite (military, aristocracy) to whom they gave allegiance.

2

A tale of two empires Montreal slavery under the French and the British

A transition of power: From French to British slavery The slave regime under the British in Montreal was not the first practice of slavery in the region. Indeed, when the British seized control of the territory in 1760, the French had already been slaving for over a century. As I will discuss in detail below in this chapter, despite ongoing military conflicts and competition over territories in the Americas, the French and the British suspended their ethnic, social, cultural, and religious differences to cooperate for the safety and security of the white plantocracy during the evacuation of the white French Dominguan planter elite to nearby British Jamaica during what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804).1 The suspension of deep-seated intraEuropean animosities in the face of resistance from self-liberated slaves illustrates the ways in which the French and British upper classes made decisions based upon shared economic, political, and social interests to protect white lives and to defend the faltering institution of slavery, but also to consolidate colonial ideals of whiteness. Thus, although fierce adversaries in other regards, Winks has argued, one thing about which the French and British agreed upon was the necessity of the preservation of slavery, After 1760, with slavery specifically protected by the terms of the treaty of capitulation between Britain and France, and with Canada under the same control as the more prosperous, slaveholding colonies to the south, priests had less opportunity to turn to the attack even had they wished to do so. Further, they were as susceptible as other men to the racial thought of the times – thought that even in nonslaveholding France led in 1763 to a prohibition upon all Negroes, slave or free, who would sail from the colonies to France, in order to prevent any mixing of blood and the debasing of French culture. Slavery was a social reality, and as such the church accepted it.2 Although sublimated in the colonial histories of the Trans Atlantic World today, slavery was an inherent part of the earliest colonizing process in what is today the nation of Canada. In the early sixteenth century the Portuguese initially targeted the Native populations for slave labour and by the beginning of the seventeenth the French followed suit. Olivier Le Jeune, as he was renamed, is the first known black slave to be documented in New France (now the province of Quebec). But more importantly, his passage directly from Africa and his

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sale at auction in New France locates the institution of slavery as an accepted part of the reality of young settlement.3 It is important to note also that, unlike the British, the French also enslaved various Native peoples. Whereas generations of white historians of Canadian slavery as well as the lay public have been prone to downplay the nature of slavery in New France (if they acknowledge it at all) and to mis-characterize it as more humane than other forms (particularly that of tropical plantation practices like Jamaica), Winks has contested this self-serving logic, arguing that Despite these “humane and familial traits” found in slavery as practiced in New France, the slaves themselves cannot have thought the system so agreeable, for there were numerous attempts to escape, especially by Negroes. Fugitives, and the growing willingness of some of the colonists to connive with them, led intendant Hocquart to issue an ordonnance in 1734 directing all captains and officers of militia to help an owner find a missing Carib slave and imposing penalties on any who aided his escape. Thereafter advertisements for runaways normally were accompanied by warnings to ship captains against carrying them out of the province and to the public against employing them.4 As the French colony’s role shifted from resource extraction to settlement in the early eighteenth century, successive colonial administrators petitioned the French Crown for the right to import slaves.5 The shift to royal control (from Compagnie des Cent-Associés) in 1663 ushered in an aggressive new era of colony-building under Louis XIV. According to Winks, in the 1680s, Jean Talon, “the Great Intendant”, “brought in purebred livestock, tested seed grain, encouraged the development of industry, investigated the fisheries, tapped the filling reservoir of skilled workers, and endeavoured to begin trade with the French West Indies.”6 With the simultaneous exploitation of trade, mining, fisheries, and agriculture, there was more work than labourers and in 1688 the colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste de Lagny (Sieur des Bringandières) petitioned the governor, Jacques-Réné de Brisay (Marquis de Denonville), and the intendant, Jean Bochart de Champigny, to appeal to France for slaves.The petition explicitly advocated for the importation of African (Negro) slaves, citing the extraordinary expense of labour in the colony as a hindrance to enterprise, which could be remedied through slave labour. The already established trade routes between New France and the French holdings in the Caribbean were cited as evidence of the feasibility of transportation. According to their petition, We believe that the best means to remedy this is to have Negro slaves here. The Attorney General of the Council, who is in Paris, assures us that if His Majesty agrees to this proposition, some of the principal inhabitants will have some [slaves] bought for them in the Islands as vessels arrive from Guinée, and he will do so as well.7 Although wary that Africans would not be able to withstand the climate, Louis XIV gave his assent on 1 May 1689.8 While the growth of theories of racial suitability and climate

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were evident in this political exchange, they would become even more prevalent and heated later in the early nineteenth century when the issue was the suitability of free(ed) black migrants as settlers, not slaves.9 No doubt the reassurances of Francois Ruette d’Auteuil, the attorney general of the colony’s Sovereign Council, that large numbers of Africans were thriving in New England and New Netherlands were as persuasive in his lobbying of the court in France as they were with colonialists upon his return to New France in 1689.10Although the need for large numbers of slaves was again disrupted by the dramatic reversal in France’s designation of colonies as mere service posts for the “motherland”, by the early eighteenth century, slavery continued to grow slowly to service the demand for domestics and field hands of the wealthier classes.11 At the same time, slavery was again upheld when the intendant Jacques Raudot issued an ordinance confirming its legality on 13 April 170912 declaring that “All the Panis [Indians] and Negroes who have been bought, and who shall be bought hereafter, shall be fully owned as property by those who have purchased them as their slaves”.13 The legal regulation of slavery that emerged in this period demonstrates the need to formally distinguish free from enslaved, which was a consequence of the growth of the slave population.14 Although slavery in New France appears to have been at least officially regulated under a series of French laws entitled Le Code Noir, the extent to which the code was actually adhered to in Montreal is unclear.15 Initially instituted to police the traffic in slaves between French African and Caribbean holdings in March 1685, it became applicable to Louisiana and to an undetermined extent to New France in March 1724.16 The code established laws that regulated the lives and bodies of slaves. Many of the allowances for punishments were acts that scarred, marked, or otherwise mutilated slaves’ bodies, creating highly visible corporeal signs of possession.17 Under Le Code Noir, slaves were meubles, moveable personal property, holding no legal autonomy and being governed by laws of personal property.18 Slaves could not sue or be sued, but could be criminally prosecuted. Their testimony in court was only used to aid the judge in the comprehension of other testimony. Furthermore, as elsewhere in the Trans Atlantic World in New France, this chattel status was secured through the process of sale when slaves were publicly sold alongside livestock and other commodities. As Winks has argued, Nonetheless, slaves were sold, of course, often side by side with livestock, since no public market was set apart expressly for their sale. Few were disposed of by lot – the largest sale was of five slaves in 1743 – and families seldom can have been divided. Most slaves were purchased before they were twenty years old and remained with one family, to be willed to the next generation if they survived. In one thirty-year period, only 137 slaves were announced for sale in the newspapers. Under the French, the average panis cost four hundred livres while the Negro brought nine hundred livres; again, the latter’s greater expense helped to protect him against abuse [italics mine].19 But Winks’ contentions are somewhat misleading. For instance, his argument that the small lots of slaves put up for sale indicated the preservation of slave families assumes that the black slaves imported to the region from places like the Caribbean had not already, from

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embarkation in Africa or the Caribbean, been separated from family. To the contrary, evidence makes clear that across the Trans Atlantic World, economic motivations like resource extraction, wealth production, and stabilization or vengefulness on the part of white slave owners commonly trumped any humanitarian sentiments in the decision-making processes concerning the purchase and relocation of slaves. Thus the decision to purchase a young female slave as opposed to a male would not only have been driven by a desire for a certain type of labour, but by a determination to “breed” the woman in order to produce more wealth since her children would legally become the owner’s property. Winks also did not comment upon the repercussions of the youth of slaves, and that, since many were under the age of 20, they were by implication children separated from their families. Furthermore, the idea that the monetary value of a slave insulated them from abuse is deeply problematic and patently false. Slavery did nothing if not to provide an excuse for whites to invent and perfect various types of sadomasochistic corporal punishment. There were many types of abuse and torture created for different types of “crimes” which could be used indiscriminately against different categories of slaves, even pregnant ones.20 Through simultaneity of visual (at auctions) or textual (in slave sale advertisements) public displays and economic exchange, slaves became equated with animals or “stock”, a characteristic, which Montreal shared with Jamaican (and other Caribbean) plantation slavery. But while the enslaved might at times have stayed in the possession of one white family, becoming heirlooms passed down in wills upon the death of an owner, this certainly did not mean that they were not separated from their own families. Indeed, the distinct nature of slaving in Montreal (and what was to become Canada) and the smaller slave holdings of individual owners meant that the enslaved were routinely and callously separated – at times across great distances – from their kin and other loved ones. Many slaves of African descent, whether from the Caribbean, the US or elsewhere, were alienated from familial bonds within the very process of their forced migration to Montreal. Liminal bodies: “Loose” women, drunken soldiers, and vagrancy Contrary to Winks’ assertions, the cases of two enslaved black girls, Louison and Isabella, expose the instability of slave life and the normality of isolation from kin. Both seemed to have been sold alone. Louison was described as “a negro woman” of about 17 years and Isabella or Bell as a “mulatto slave” of about 15 years.21 Both were also sold to male buyers; Louison to a captain in the navy in the Montreal garrison on 6 June 1749 and Isabella to the lieutenant governor of Québec, Hectore-Théophile Cramahé,22 on 14 November 1778.23 As will also be discussed in detail below in the context of Jamaica, Louison’s possession by a sailor should alert us to the specific nature of the socio-economic, sexual demands that those transient males, as a part of the British military infrastructure, placed upon transoceanic centres, especially those with garrisons like Montreal and Jamaica.24 As Mary Anne Poutanen has described, the settlement swelled and shrank with the ranks of military men, based upon the ebb and flow of conflict.25 Since according to Senior only

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6 per cent of soldiers were provided with the rations and lodgings to support families, most soldiers and sailors were unmarried or too poor to re-locate their wives or kin.26 Deprived of their legally sanctioned sexual partners and requiring permission from their captains to marry,27 many expected to have their sexual needs met while abroad by the local women they encountered during their various transatlantic deployments and were prepared to defend their access in violent contests with local police.28 As Senior has described, “most of these soldiers, unless they chose to lead a somewhat monastic life, found their way to a favourite tavern once their afternoon duties were over and remained there until tattoo beat a return to barracks at eight o’clock.”29 With the tavern as a sort of second home, the in-built temptations of drunkenness and sex were ever-present. As one commanding officer put it, the common soldier frequented the grog shop and the brothel and had no recreation but sensuality.30 Cornelius Krieghoff’s Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal (1845) (Plate 4) animates this aspect of the soldier’s life.31 Montreal taverns were a popular meeting place for prostitutes and their clients, often soldiers.32 Later known as St. Jacques Street, St. James was an east/ west artery that ran parallel to Notre Dame, to its north.33 Indeed, the only clients in the sparsely decorated tavern are four white soldiers all surrounding a small square table; three seated and the one farthest right, standing. Two of the seated men sport black pants, red coats and hats with a red and white checked pattern topped by a black band. But the seated soldier with his back to the viewer wears the same black coat and red and black hat as his standing companion. Krieghoff also clearly depicted the seated man’s white belt and blue pants with red piping, which we can only assume he shares with his standing companion whose lower body is blocked from view by the body of a white female waitress. Dressed in their uniforms one is positioned with his back to the viewer. The discarded wooden cane and white gloves on the floor in the left foreground indicate that the men have abandoned their practised, disciplined facades for the enjoyment and camaraderie of their free time. While we can infer by the face of the seated male on the left that he is engaging the soldier beside him (with back to the viewer) in conversation, the other two men are more preoccupied with the lone female subject. A white female waitress, an empty tray in her right hand, faces the viewer her head tilted to her left away from the invasive yet playful gaze of the lone standing soldier who peers into her face around the right side of her body as he grasps her (with his left hand) just under her left breast.34 Her tilted head and the position of her own left hand on top of his can be read in multiple ways. Her expression is neither smile nor scowl. But the two drinks visible on the table (one in the right hand of her suitor), as well as her empty tray indicate that she has already delivered the soldiers’ drinks. The obvious sexual desire of the standing soldier can be read as unwanted and unsolicited sexual contact or amorous play. But there is something discomfiting in her stance and the tilt of her head is neither fully coy nor distressed. Soldiers and sailor alike came to expect the availability of sexual services in such places. As Poutanen has explained, “Madams located their disorderly houses close to military installations and to drinking establishments which also served as meeting places for street prostitutes and their clients, usually soldiers and sailors. Sometimes, tavernkeepers

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kept prostitutes to entice clientele to their premises [sic].”35 However, Krieghoff’s painting is ambiguous in its depiction of the young woman. The key to Krieghoff’s puzzle may be the fourth chair, overturned on the floor. The narrative implies that it is the seat of the now standing male, but its position on the floor may indicate his haste to stand or perhaps, more sinisterly, operates as evidence of his drunken and disorderly behaviour. If the young woman is the target of the drunken soldier’s unwanted public caress, her hand on his may not convey her returned affection. Instead, her fingers placed against his palm may evoke her desire to rest his groping hand from her chest. Krieghoff represented Dolly’s Tavern as a relaxing and convivial space for the white soldiers, but a sexually charged space of potential danger and exploitation for the young white female server who had to physically deflect unwanted sexual contact while working to earn a living amidst the drunken and promiscuous soldiers. And as Poutanen describes, the same strict laws, which pertained to civilians did not govern soldiers caught in lewd acts with local prostitutes.36 However ambiguous Krieghoff’s message, it was one that appealed to the military mind since the painting was initially owned by Brigadier General Frank Stephen Meighen (1870–1946).37 To combat such behaviour, officers recommended the construction of sports facilities like cricket grounds as a competing diversion to tempt the soldiers away from intemperance. Lieutenant General William Rowan specifically requested that bowling alleys be constructed prior to the arrival of two regiments from the West Indies to stave off the “usual amount of desertion”.38 Although the church and the officer core sometimes teamed up to keep the soldiers out of brothels and to save the resident women from debauchery, in a settlement where too many had too little to meet even their most basic social and material needs, the supply of sex rose up to meet the demand from the transient population of military and sailors.39 This sexual labour, unpaid or for “compensation”, mainly fell to the “othered” women of the colony, whether by racial, ethnic, class or other marginalization. In the case of Jane Rodgers, it was only after her husband’s (William Dunn) incarceration for grand larceny that she rented a room in a house on St. Paul Street in which she entertained soldiers.40 Similarly, Catherine Raigan also began entertaining soldiers in a rented a room in a house on St. Paul’s Street near the Quebec Barracks only after being widowed.41 Prostitutes also literally went where the soldiers were, plying their trade in the barracks.42 And some soldiers lived with or married prostitutes.43 Poutanen explains that vagrant women frequented spaces where potential clients congregated, like the low tippling houses along the waterfront that catered to thirsty and randy sailors, who disembarked from the fleets of foreign ships visiting the port after long ocean voyages; the cellars under the public markets reputed to be the haunt of soldiers and thieves; or the wooden sheds along the Lachine Canal that were favoured by Irish workers.44 While breweries and distilleries emerged in the early nineteenth century to meet the “large demands of the resident soldiery”, as in any other port city, the hospitality

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businesses like taverns, brothels, inns, and “disorderly houses” (or maison de débauche) also sprang up in close proximity to the water, literally welcoming and enticing the soldiers and sailors upon disembarkation.45 Montreal in general was often seen as a zone of intemperance and immorality from which soldiers needed to be protected. However, according to Poutanen, “Although brothels were located throughout the urban landscape, certain localities of Montreal came to be known as red-light districts.”46 Unsurprisingly, by the turn of the nineteenth century, Montreal’s red-light district had developed “around the Quebec Barracks near the waterfront in the old city.”47 Located in the “dirtiest part of the city”, Water Street, a notorious haunt where cheap liquor was easily accessible, produced worry for the officers who lamented its close proximity to the barracks on the same road.48 Capital Street became so notorious that a petition presented to the House of Assembly in 1816 demanded that a portion of its taverns be closed.49 Also in 1816 one visitor noted that on a stroll down Notre Dame Street the first six buildings were taverns directly across from the barracks50 and by 1844 a total of 182 taverns dotted the Montreal landscape.51 This area that John McGregor described in his book British America (1832) as the lower town, was fronted by a “filthy bank” and “covered in gloomy-looking houses, with dark iron window shutters”.52 As I shall discuss below, the representation of this area of Montreal by James Duncan in Steam Boat Wharf, 1843 (Chapter 4) parallels James Hakewill’s depiction of the similar waterfront district of Kingston, Jamaica in Harbour Street, Kingston (1825) (Chapter 8). Liminal, from the Latin limen, means “threshold” and can refer to the transitional in both spatial and temporal senses.53 However, the common example of the threshold of a house – the space between the interior and exterior – does not fully capture the violent displacement which is central to the construction of liminal bodies. Montreal’s liminal bodies, which included “loose” women of various backgrounds and drunken soldiers, helped to produce the category of vagrant, which was heavily regulated through local policing and legal structures. While John Anthony Cuddon argues that liminal spaces can be thought of as places where marginalized subjects gain access to “resources and strategies of self-transformation that upset the fixed polarities of colonial discourse”, I am concerned with how the nineteenth-century political, judicial, cultural, and social orders of Montreal positioned certain subjects that could not be contained by dominant definitions as liminal.54 Although these liminal subjects employed various tactics to manoeuvre and resist their marginalization, their existence was often precarious, leaving them exposed to various forms of violence and premature death. The Trans Atlantic World of empire-building made liminal subjects equally of local indigenous populations, foreign “undesirable” whites (like the Irish), and forcibly transplanted Africans. Although racially and ethnically different, these groups shared a displacement from secure positions of wealth accumulation within the growing landscape of global capital. Unsurprisingly, prostitutes (like soldiers) were often accused of and arrested for intemperance. Bridget Howe and Lydia Corneille were two such women whose alcoholism led to premature deaths in the Common Gaol, deaths that were at least partly attributed to intemperance.55 But while often stereotyped as racial or ethnically backward or socially

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deviant, these people were merely those that Montreal’s socio-economic order (as largely defined and regulated by the minority white British elite) refused to fully accommodate and support through “legitimate” means. As Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers have argued, “On the streets British soldiers garrisoned in the town were visible reminders of British rule. Until their departure in 1871, they were also frequently a source of disorder, cavorting with prostitutes and seducing local women”.56 Indeed, soldiers even participated in sexual assaults designed to force young women into prostitution.57 Due to their status as slaves and their African heritage, both Louison and Isabella fell into this sexually “othered” category of liminal subjects, whether or not they were able to escape the stigma of the label of vagrant. However, whereas Poutanen has shown that for many white women in Montreal, “prostitution was not a vocation but a way to solve economic problems”; 58 for enslaved women, their sexual labour for their masters (or other men whose sexual access was authorized by their owners) was an expectation of their slave status, which was only terminated at the master’s discretion. The female prostitutes of nineteenth-century Montreal were identified by various means including being visible in certain streets, having a certain walk, behaving in certain ways or the manner of dress.59 However, while Poutanen has demonstrated that lower-class white women could redeem themselves and escape the label of “fallen woman” by marrying and pursuing a more sober course, I would argue that enslaved women, perpetually at the mercy of their owners, continually bore the stigma of a compromised sexuality that was conflated with their marginalized racial identities.60 Clear primary source evidence exists that in regions where tropical plantation slavery flourished, like Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua, military men regularly serviced their sexual needs through the letting (rental) or purchase of enslaved women of African descent. Furthermore, taverns, lodging-houses and inns on Caribbean islands were known to provide more than just alcohol or lodging, and were also notorious bases of organized prostitution. Montreal, as a garrison town filled with British regulars was no different, with, for instance, the “notorious” Capital Street (near the old market) boasting 18 taverns.61 As Poutanen has explained, The worlds of the brothel and of the street therefore intersected: prostitutes solicited in the streets to entice men to the brothels where they worked, and streetwalkers and clients searched for uninhabited buildings, where they remained until forced out by the authorities. Elizabeth Austin, Elmire Perrault, and two soldiers broke into an abandoned house belonging to notary Pierre Beaudry; police removed them from the house a few days later and arrested the women after Beaudry complained to a justice of the peace.62 The compounded public shaming, activated by both official penal records and by the rejection of these supposedly unrespectable women by the white bourgeois-controlled Montreal women’s charities, would have resulted in further ostracization.Within this context where soldiers and sailors actively sought out socially vulnerable women to fulfil their sexual needs, Louison’s purchase by a navy captain was almost assuredly a strategic choice on his

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part; one that would have provided him with the double duty of both domestic and sexual labour. In Jamaica, this category of female domestic slave, often mixed race females, soon came to be known by the euphemism “housekeeper”.63 Indeed, this navy captain may have deliberately purchased Louison to meet his sexual needs in order to avoid exposure to the sexually transmitted diseases associated with streetwalkers, prostitutes, and vagrant women. But surely the sexual promiscuity of the soldiers and sailors made them guiltier of infecting these women than the other way around.64 But it is Isabella’s case in particular that highlights the normality of perilous upheaval in the life of an enslaved female. In the course of several years, she was sold at least four times, her first and last documented owners – Captain Thomas Venture and Captain Peter Napier – being military men or sailors.65 The prospect of having four different male owners was extraordinarily destabilizing for any slave in terms of relocation, separation from loved ones and familiar environment, climate, food sources, self-care practices, etc., all leading to potentially dramatic changes in lifestyle. The fact that many of the slave owners in Lower Canada/Quebec were military men of various ranks (cadets, captains, officers) increased the vulnerability, exchangeability, and potential for forced mobility of the slaves they owned, since the soldiers’ postings were largely not within their control. But slaves owned by people of non-military backgrounds also experienced the same upheaval.66 However, this changing of hands was especially dangerous for female slaves for whom sexual exploitation and abuse was a daily reality. Indeed, for a female slave, the act of being passed as property from one man to another must have been a completely terrifying, traumatic, and demoralizing experience. The extraction of sexual labour from enslaved and free black females was an institutionalized form of sexual violence practised across all regions in the Americas, and Montreal was no exception. Amongst the non-francophones who worked in the sex trade in nineteenth-century Montreal, Poutanen lists people of African origin, alongside the Irish, Germans, Maltese, and Italians.67 Although Montreal contained three nunneries by 1832, McGregor judged their ability (or perhaps willingness) to dispense care and instruction to this population of needful women or “ameliorating the suffering of others” as unworthy of applause.68 Of several such charities, Poutanen has noted that the Sisters of Providence appeared to be less preoccupied with respectability than the others.69 With the absence of truly compassionate and religiously unbiased Montreal charities to aid them,70 vagrant women often sought refuge in police stations or jails, which Poutanen describes as, “over-crowded, vermin-ridden and foul-smelling at any time during the year”.71 McGregor noted that although separate, the “substantial, respectable-looking” buildings of the courthouse and the prison were “standing in range between Notre Dame Street, and the Champ de Mars”.72 The central location of the prison and courthouse must have facilitated the rounding up and incarceration of vagrants. Poutanen also notes that between 1810 and 1842, of the more than 2,500 arrests for vagrancy, the majority were single Irish women, many of whom were accused of soliciting.73 The conflation of vagrancy with prostitution is also revealed in the habitual congregation of soldiers with vagrant women at the Priests’ Farm at the edges of the city near the “mountain”.74

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Many vagrant women, often only recently landed at Montreal, had sailed from Britain in an effort to reunite with family members who had already made the journey. However, their attempts at family reunification documented in information-wanted notices were often thwarted by the further relocation or premature deaths of loved ones. As Elizabeth Jane Errington has explained, “Between 1815 and 1845, local newspapers in Upper Canada (and indeed, throughout North America) printed hundreds of similar notices of newly arrived wives looking for husbands, sisters or brothers looking for siblings, and mothers and fathers looking for their children.”75 For instance, an advertisement of 8 June 1836 placed by a woman in the Christian Guardian in York sought the public’s help in locating her sister, Leticia Ingham, whom she suspected of living in or near Montreal.76 Another advertisement printed in the 14 August 1830 edition of the Niagara Gleaner on behalf of Ann Dunlop of Aughnacky, Ireland sought news of her son, Thomas Wright, whom she had missed meeting in Montreal.77 Since the cost of their travel from Europe had often consumed all of their financial resources, such women were regularly left destitute and, in the absence of their relatives’ aid, often fell prey to soldiers and other men who exploited their economic need for sexual gratification.78 But while the sexual exploitation of black and Native female slaves became largely hidden from Montreal society within the confines of their individual enslavement, the exploitation of Irish and other poor white women garnered more public sympathy and was rendered visible within the framework of the prison system as “refuge”. This sympathy was a result of Irish women’s status largely as newly arrived immigrants, but it was also due to their (however displaced) whiteness. As Poutanen argues, the social and economic options of a recent Irish female immigrant varied greatly from that of a francophone woman with extended family and community ties.79 While temporary confinement within a prison may have seemed preferable to sleeping on the streets, especially in the impossibly cold winter months, the appeal for institutional help no doubt opened these women up to sexual assault and abuse at the very hands of the court officials and policemen who were supposed to aid them.80 The case of Martha Hyers is worth citing at length. As Poutanen relates, Martha Hyers, a single, illiterate, black woman with an eight-year history of prostitution and vagrancy, was well acquainted with this institution. For the last five years of her life, Dr Arnoldi treated her for a variety of ailments associated with undernourishment and recurrent exposure to cold and for venereal disease each time she was imprisoned. During her last arrest in November 1841, Hyers languished in jail before succumbing to illness resulting from chronic hypothermia and neglect.81 Perversely then, the socio-economic implications of the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism would have made it harder for a poor, free black women to survive in Montreal than an enslaved one, for whom clothing, shelter and food was often contractually provided by her owner. This also may have been the case for Ann Taylor, “the coloured woman” who was discovered by a watchman at midnight sleeping on a bench in New Market after having

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sex with a soldier.82 In contrast, the sale of Isabella to Lieutenant Governor Cramahé obligated him to “feed, lodge, entertain and treat the slave humanely”.83 And yet, regardless of such contracts it would be naïve to think that owners always fulfilled such legal obligations. Since soldiers abandoning their wives were a frequent occurrence, it would follow that military men also sold their female slave concubines before departing Montreal for other deployments.84 Furthermore, as I will discuss at length below (Chapter 6) in relation to the rampant sexual promiscuity of Thomas Thistlewood, the 29-year-old English overseer who worked at Vineyard Pen, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica from 1750 to 1751, Hyers’ infliction with recurring sexually transmitted disease is indicative of yet another toll of the sexual exploitation visited upon vulnerable black females.85 The constant co-mingling of vagrant women and soldiers in nineteenth-century Montreal opens up the possibility of new readings of depictions of military men in the settlement. Robert Auchmuty Sproule’s86 View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830) (Plate 5) was originally sold as one of six views “comprising some of the principle Streets, Public Buildings and Squares in Montreal [sic]”.87 Educated as a painter at Trinity College in Dublin, he immigrated to Canada in the late 1820s and became known for his miniature paintings on ivory and for his watercolour landscapes of Montreal.88 The prints were a team effort since, as Mary Allodi explains, “Bourne printed and published six Montreal scenes, engraved by William Satchwell Leney after water-colours by Robert Auchmuty Sproule”.89 As a part of the first set of single-sheet views of a Canadian city to be printed in Canada, the images would have been used to demonstrate the ongoing improvement and “civilization” of the settlement, within the confines of a British definition of progress.90 Although recently arrived from Ireland in 1826 where he had been born in Althone in 1799,91 unlike many of the Irish women who became vagrants and had to rely upon sex work or an exchange of sexual favours for survival, Sproule had arrived in Montreal with his artistic training already in place and immediately advertised his skills in the 30 September 1826 edition of the Montreal Herald as a miniaturist who had studied with the best masters in London and Dublin.92 According to McGregor, the Champ de Mars, planted with Lombardy poplars and surrounded by “handsome genteel” houses on the west side, was a pretty but unfashionable esplanade where “the troops are reviewed” and “the military bands usually perform in the evenings, during summer and autumn”.93 The position of the buildings at left with their domes and spires orients the image as a westward-facing view. Five distinct rows of uniformed soldiers can be seen drilling in a line that cuts through the middle ground of the print. While all of the soldiers wear blue pants, the posterior four rows wear red jackets while the front row sports white. Composed of musicians including drummers and wind instrument players, this front row delivers the rhythm to which the others march. The parade ground held special significance as a space of homo-social initiation and performance. As Senior has noted, Troops newly arrived at the Montreal station always preened themselves for their first review on the Champ de Mars where they not only sought to win the approval of the senior officers of the headquarters’ staff, but also used the occasion to put

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on their best show for the citizens of the city in which they would likely spend the next three years.94 While the cross-topped buildings proclaimed the governing presence of Christianity, the prominent Union Jack flying unfurled atop a flagpole at the far left proclaimed the Britishness of the settlement. A higher-ranking soldier with arm extended gives orders from horseback from the right side of the field. And on the left a lone Canadien – a French Canadian of the poorer classes – is seen approaching a staircase, at the top of which waits a British sentry at his post. However, in contrast to the orderly bodies of the white soldiers Sproule depicted an interesting set of characters in the central foreground of the image. Of this group, a respectably dressed white mother, with her hair cleanly styled and drawn up into a bun, seems to be guided by her excited white son – his accelerated movement captured in the dynamic, active motion of his legs – towards the right side of the image. Although her un-chaperoned state and modest clothing evidence her lower-class status, at first glance, she does not seem to be one of the “non-respectable poor” who were targeted by the legal term “vagrant”.95 But what did a prostitute look like? Poutanen asserts that even police officers found it difficult to distinguish between “vagrant women, prostitutes, and other popular-class women”.96 A significant population of Montreal’s prostitutes was comprised of widows, deserted women or wives with incapacitated or infirm husbands. For such women, prostitution (especially within the context of the brothel) allowed them to create income while still maintaining household duties and tending to children.97 Furthermore, as Poutanen noted, “Streetwalkers also solicited in green spaces located in the old city like that of the Champ de Mars”, creating anxiety amongst “respectable Montrealers” who were loath to share such spaces with filles publiques.98 Given this context, regardless of the presence of the boy, Sproule’s placement of the lower-class, white woman in the midst of the parading soldiers – as with the young white female server in Krieghoff’s Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal – creates tension around the ambiguity of her character. Closer to the picture plane, Sproule represented three subjects who would have more readily been subjected to the policing strategies against vagrants, discussed above. While the standing male figure to the left is surely another Canadien, the three figures to the right are Native, a man, woman and child. The white woman and child seem to be purposefully and hurriedly, moving through the space of Champ de Mars on their way to someplace else. The woven basket draped over her right arm indicating that the likely destination is a local market or some other type of shopping. In contrast, it is the French Canadian and the Natives who seem to linger or loiter without any clear purpose. The specificity of their dress and possessions – the pipe, red cap and sash of the Canadien and the blanket coat, moccasins, jewellery, adornments, and plumed hat and pipe of the Natives – would have surely seemed “exotic” to the foreign eyes of European or some Euro-American viewers. Their reasons for being on the military parade are unclear, rendering their inactivity the product of a purposeless wandering and idleness, the very definition of vagrancy. Indeed, as I will discuss at length in the case of James Hakewill’s Jamaican landscape prints, it is the

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deliberate imposition of the mischaracterization of idleness by white colonial elites upon the lower classes, free or enslaved, that enabled their disenfranchisement and subsequent punishment through social, legal, and judicial systems. Known as Canadiens, the lower classes of French were displaced both from upper class French populations and British ideals of whiteness. On French migrant labourers in the nineteenth-century US, Susan Ouellette argues that Anglos had a poor opinion of them since their “ethnicity became synonymous with ignorance, cultural stagnation and poverty.”99 But similar stereotypes prevailed in Quebec (later Lower Canada), particularly within the realm of labour and production like agriculture, which compared the French habitant unfavourably to their English-speaking neighbours.100 As Frank Lewis and Marvin McInnis have explained, “It is widely accepted that in the first half of the nineteenth century the habitant farmer of French Canada was inefficient in comparison with Canadian farmers of British origin. The French-Canadian has almost universally been described as backward, unenterprising, untutored, and resistant to improved techniques of husbandry”.101 Unable to relocate as easily as the French upper classes after British conquest, the poorer classes of French where left to adjust to a life under British rule which placed their ethnic and cultural practices in relief with the ruling class. According to Ouellette “French Canadians were judged unlettered, priest-ridden undesirables. Moreover, their stubborn refusal to assimilate. . .marked them as dangerous and subversive elements.”102 Also (and ironically) seen as outsiders, Natives in British North America, like blacks in Jamaica, were specifically targeted for their supposed idleness.While recording his impression of Niagara Falls the white male tourist George Sala documented his perceptions of an “Indian” as a “shiftless and degraded vagrant, who does not wash himself, who is not at all scrupulous about taking things which do not belong to him, who will get blind drunk on rum or whisky whenever he has a chance”.103 Meanwhile, during his wanderings in the Canadas, Heriot characterized the “Indians of Montreal” as being loath to work, preferring “indolence” to what they saw as “slavery”.104 But from most accounts, both of these descriptions also applied to the British soldiers and sailors who were dispatched to guard and protect the colonies and their “legitimate” white inhabitants. John Lambert’s assessment conflated inactivity with a lack of discipline and sexual excess when he observed that the “idle officers” spent their time flirting with the local women.105 Despite her child and possible spouse, the proximity of the Native woman to the soldiers and their reputation for drunkenness and sexual excess begs questions about her reason for being on the parade ground. As Poutanen has explained, certain spaces of the city became synonymous with vagrancy, and vagrant women “moved through the city, congregating in the old town around the waterfront near the barracks and behind it in the Champ de Mars”.106 As such, at least to the local viewers of Sproule’s print, the Native woman’s position on the Champ de Mars and her proximity to the British soldiers would have placed her motives and her morality in question. More so even than Davies’ chaperoned upper-class white woman in AView of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), the white mother’s outing without the presence of an adult white male conveyed the message of the security and civility of Montreal’s public spaces which were depicted as being suitably cultivated and refined to

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accommodate the independent mobility of the “proper” single white woman/mother. But while Sproule’s image represented the vagrancy of the Canadiens and Natives as a product of their own ethnic and racial difference, in reality, it was the economic, social, political, and cultural dominance of white British males that secured the disenfranchisement of these populations who along with blacks occupied the margins of Montreal society. Despite the seeming orderliness of the British soldiers, as mentioned above, these men were also associated with various types of disorder including intoxication and sexual recklessness with precisely the type of supposedly idle woman that Sproule represented as a Native mother. Sproule’s depiction of the Native child strapped in a cradleboard further conveyed the Native couple’s distance from European and Euro-American cultural norms.107 As Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne described in a passage on “Canadian Indians”, In long journeys, the children are carried in upright baskets, fastened round the mother’s neck by a deer-skin thong.The papooses, or very young infants, are placed in a sort of flat cradle, and secured in such a manner with flexible hoops, that they cannot stir hand or foot; they are slung round the squaw’s neck with the back of the child to the back of the mother, and the face turned outward.108 While the Hawthornes noted the fondness of “Indian mothers” for their offspring, their perceptions were not necessarily the norm amongst whites. Rather, as Joan Sangster has argued, Colonizers often characterized indigenous women’s bodies as primitive, unusually strong, and close to nature . . . Prevailing colonialist images, whether the sexualized “squaw”, or the idealized “Eskimo” mother with papoose must therefore be seen as . . . a racialized distortion of women’s bodies.109 The British soldiers’ tendency for mayhem worked to raise the ire of military officers, magistrates, and the local elite alike. John Lambert, who travelled to the “New World” after his cousin’s appointment to the British Department of Trade, characterized them as too immoral and idle to contribute to the transmission of knowledge, which would aid in the process of civilization.110 The misdeeds of the common soldier were aptly connected to excesses of alcohol consumption. One tourist named Thomas Johnston noted that, although the chief drink was grog, rum and wine were fairly cheap and accessible while gin and brandy were more expensive.111 Edouard-Zotique Massicotte specifically blamed the British military for the introduction of rum, which he referred to simply as “la jamaïque” (the Jamaican), for undermining French athletic prowess.112 The abundant importation and dominance of Jamaican rum in the settlement no doubt prompted this shorthand label. Indeed, rum was so commonplace in Montreal that an advertisement directed to the publisher, Fleury Mesplet, of the Montreal Gazette, which inquired about a recipe for mixing grog with rum, gained a reply in just eight days.113 Placed in the Thursday 29 December 1785 issue of the Montreal Gazette, the advertisement read:

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Having a quantity of Rum in my Vault, of a quality indeed but little better than Grog: I bought a few Puncheons of Spirits of exceeding high Proof: – Now, I shall take it as a favor, if any of your Correspondents will, through the Channel of your Paper, give me the simplest Rule for ascertaining the Proportion in which these Liquors must be mixed.114 According to Lambert the easy access to cheap rum was also to blame for the difficulty in retaining servants.115 As was the case in other parts of the British Empire, like Jamaica, the British military at Montreal received alcohol as a part of their normal rations. According to Lieutenant John Knox, a British officer who oversaw the transfer of power, “On 25 September 1759, as the British prepared to winter in Quebec, [James] Murray ordered that soldiers who served as woodcutters be given a gill of rum per day, plus five shillings per cord.”116 But as Johnston noted, even outside of standard military rations, “The low price of rum has often encouraged the immediate use of it; many drink too freely”.117 Rum, largely imported from Jamaica, was used as a drug to tranquilize the men and inoculate them against the hardships of their daily lives – which included boredom, anxiety, danger, substandard accommodation and rations, and prolonged separation from loved ones and home. As Thomas explains, local magistrates (comprised of the white elite) waged a type of legal war against the ordinary soldier. By appealing “to the letter of the law” they stripped them of the privileges of the “bedding, firewood, and the use of kitchen facilities” that they had previously enjoyed. In November 1764,Thomas Walker (a justice of the peace appointed by Governor James Murray) “and four other magistrates went so far as to imprison Captain Benjamin Charnock Payne, of the 28th Foot, for his refusal to vacate lodgings which a merchant claimed to have rented to another”.118 Accordingly, not all of the officers agreed with the practice of alcohol rations. For instance, as Lieutenant Colonel John Beckwith wrote to Gage on 2 April 1761, from La Prairie, near Montreal: Some time ago I gave out orders forbidding any persons to sell any Spiritous Liquors to any of the Soldiers on pain of the Severest punishment; . . . I am Con-vinced Rum is the Bain of the English Army and Could wish there was none Allowed to Come into the Country whilst we remain in it [sic].119 Knox also documented the role of rum and alcohol in the mental deterioration of his soldiers. During the siege of Quebec by the French, in April 1760, Knox observed, “Immense irregularities are hourly committed by the soldiery, in break-open store and dwelling houses to get at liquor: this is seemingly the result of panic and despair, heightened by drunkenness [sic].”120 Therefore, some like Knox suspected that it was the intemperance in drink that led to the sexual excesses. As such the formal drilling of the British troops in Sproule’s View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830), although broadly seen as a way to impart physical and mental discipline, stamina and strength, could instead, also be read as a means of deprogramming and stripping them of their social vices and insalubrious habits which led them to overindulgence in drink and sex and to congregate with supposedly unsavoury types like vagrant women and prostitutes.

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Another place where the endemic Trans Atlantic sexual exploitation of black women is revealed is in the literary genre of slave narratives. While slave narratives written by black males often hinted at the sexual violation of enslaved females through discussions of female kin, Mary Prince’s narrative more directly exposed the vulnerability of black women to the sexual predilections of white slave-holding men.121 As the only known slave narrative composed by a Caribbean woman, Prince’s unparalleled narrative, published after she had “escaped” to London, not only shed light on the distinctions of slavery across various tropical sites, but also revealed the unique suffering of enslaved women.122 Born in Bermuda, Prince was sold several times to different owners who forced her to relocate to Turks Island and eventually Antigua, separating her from her parents and siblings.123 Beginning in early adolescence, Prince was purchased by a succession of white male slave owners including Captain I – of Spanish Point, Bermuda with whom she lived for five years, Mr D – of Turk’s Island, and Mr John Wood of Antigua.124 Although the nineteenth-century literary conventions imposed upon the unique genre of the slave narrative mandated that sexual violence be sublimated in order to protect the morals of supposedly delicate upper-class white female readers, Prince still managed to convey to her white abolitionist editors the nature of her sex-specific sufferings at the hands of her various white male owners.125 For instance, of Mr D – , Prince related his “ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water”.126 Later while in the possession of Mr and Mrs Wood in Antigua, upon her marriage to the free black man Daniel James, Prince recounted how her enraged mistress “stirred up Mr. Wood to flog me dreadfully with his horsewhip”.127 Since the Woods’ possession of Prince resulted in their control of her body and its biological and physical outputs, their rage at her self-directed marriage was unsurprising.While Mrs Wood expressed alarm that the marriage would bring her and her family into an untenable proximity with a black man, Daniel James, her real fear seemed to stem from the potential loss of Prince’s labour if it was diverted to the care of her own household with her new husband.128 But I would also like to suggest that Mrs Wood was likely enraged by Prince’s sexual desirability, both to her own white husband, and to an industrious, free black man, and this although Prince was, in Mrs Wood’s eyes, a mere black slave woman. Thus, what the narrative could not state directly was that Prince was no doubt the victim of ongoing rape and sexual violence. As such, the fact that Prince never described her own pregnancy or motherhood may indicate that she practised some form of reproductive resistance common amongst enslaved women in various parts of the Atlantic world. However, it might equally indicate that an illness, injury or the nature of her labour had rendered her infertile. Commenting upon the context of nineteenth-century Jamaica, the Reverend Thomas Cooper claimed that Negroes in Jamaica were “a very unprolific race [sic]”.129 However, he astutely noted that the cause was not biological, but social. Cooper argued that the fertility issues were caused by “the brutalizing and demoralizing system of government under which they live, which is notoriously most unfriendly to the production of life, and, in several ways, tends directly to its destruction”.130 Crucially though, Prince ensured that her sexual plight and her resistance to it was, however subliminally, recorded in her narrative. For instance, of the behaviour of Mr D – Prince related, “This was worse to me than all the licks. Sometimes when

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he called me to wash him I would not come, my eyes were so full of shame. He would then come to beat me.”131 But much like Prince in the Caribbean context, we cannot rule out the possibility that her resistance to the sexual aggression of her male owners triggered Isabella’s frequent exchange in Quebec. Adapting slavery under the British The pioneering research of Marcel Trudel has determined that by 1759, slaves totalling 3,604 of both Native (panis) and black origin lived in New France, with 52.3 per cent residing in or near Montreal.132 Of the almost 4,000 slaves, 1,132 were classified as Negroes, meaning of African origin.133 The merchant class owned more than a quarter (1,068), however, the gentry, governors, notaries, doctors, military, and clergy also held slaves.134 While Winks’ observation that the French preferred panis and the English, particularly after the British conquest of the colony in 1760, preferred blacks, suggests a connection between the desirability of slaves and the ethnicity of their white owners,135 Elgersman has suggested that the split was more economically driven. Elgersman argues that “Blacks constituted the slave minority, and, as ‘object de luxe’, they served as symbols of wealth more than generators of wealth or stabilizers of wealth as were the Panis.”136 The wealthy colonists’ preference for black slaves seems to be supported in the price disparities between the two groups.While black slaves could cost as much as 900 livres, the price ceiling for panis was 400.137 Blacks and panis also seemed to have been distinguished by labour. While slaves were generally sought after for agriculture, mining, and fishing, most black slaves in New France appear to have served primarily as domestics.138 Of the almost 4,000 slaves, reportedly 22.8 per cent (821.7) performed field labour, only 192 of whom were Negroes. This may partially account for differences in life expectancy between the panis at 17.7 years and blacks 25.2.139 Yet another important distinction is the male to female ratio of slaves within the black population. Although Elgersman has argued, using primary records like slave sale and fugitive advertisements, that there was a likely imbalance of considerably more black men than women, the fugitive slave advertisements provide a biased archive since far more male than female slaves ran away.140 However, if such a sex imbalance did exist, its combination with the already existing equation of the black slave with luxury, would have rendered black female slaves particularly fashionable and noteworthy possessions. As mentioned above, at the capitulation of Montreal in 1760, the British did not seek to disrupt French slaving practices, but to continue and expand slaving to incorporate their own already established systems. The expanse of territory that was claimed and renamed Quebec, and later split in December 1791 through the Constitutional Act into the regions of Upper and Lower Canada, encompassed a part of what are today the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and a portion of the Maritimes.141 Peter Browne has explained the transition of power that ensued: Following the capitulation of Montreal on 8 Sept. 1760, Canada was subjected to a military régime. The colony was divided into three independently administered

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districts – Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal – which were placed under Murray, Ralph Burton, and Thomas Gage respectively, each of them being in turn responsible to Amherst, the commander-in-chief, in New York. On the establishment of civil government, proclaimed in Britain on 7 Nov. 1763 and inaugurated in Canada on 10 Aug. 1764, the districts were united into the province of Quebec. Provision was made for Murray, as governor, to be assisted by two lieutenant governors, but these positions were discontinued after both Gage and Burton declined to fill them.142 Of Murray, Browne has noted that “From November 1740 to December 1742 he was in the West Indies, where he took part in the attack on Cartagena (Colombia) and the Cuban operations”.143 It is likely then that Murray’s earlier posting to the West Indies influenced his opinions on how to oversee and facilitate the new province’s trade with the British Caribbean colonies. When the British seized New France and renamed it Quebec, they took control of a white francophone population who had been slaving since the seventeenth century. To British colonial officials a smoother transition of power would have seemed more likely by guaranteeing the least interference within the private realm of the upperclass French, their wealth acquisition, and their personal property. After all, in their competition for global dominance, Europeans were quite accustomed to fighting with, ousting, and seizing territory from one another. As Bradbury and Myers have argued, The Conquest changed Montreal only slowly until the early nineteenth century. The Sulpicians remained the seigneurs of the town. Matters of family, money, and property continued to be organized largely in accordance with tradition and the rules of the Custom of Paris, whereas British law was applied in criminal matters.Thus immigrants arriving from the British Isles or the American colonies had to learn about the ways that French law organized questions of commerce, family, and property.144 Although ideas about degrees of whiteness existed, unlike their colonization of non-European populations, conflicts between the British and the French were not based upon race as outward marks of a supposed biological difference and inferiority, but more commonly on the differences of ethnicity, culture, and religion. The absorption of the French into the British Empire did not merely entail the wholesale imposition of a British system of colonization, but rather an assessment of French colonial practices and policies and strategic decisions to abolish certain traditions and continue others. Unlike the seventeenth-century British conquest of Jamaica when the ruling-class Spanish population was largely expelled from the colony, within the context of the conquest of New France, the British had to prepare for the management of a conquered population within.145 The British could not afford to displace 70,000 white inhabitants since they required their labour, and the repopulation of the settlement through the migration of loyal British subjects was a risky and unsure prospect.146 As Charbonneau et alia have argued, under the French regime

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Populating the colony proved to be difficult. Regardless of the agricultural potential, French interest in the valley rested primarily in the fur trade, since furs were used to fabricate felt hats, a popular style in Europe at the time. The French authorities were not ready to defray the costs of colonization, having just emerged from 40 years of war. Hence, they passed this on to private interests who, in exchange for the monopoly over the fur trade, were required to recruit, transport, and establish colonists.147 Arguably then, it would not have benefitted the British to disrupt the slave-holding practices of the French, especially since they too were deeply invested in the Trans Atlantic trade. As such, Philip Girard has explained that The recognition of slavery in all the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century was based on customary practice rather than any solid foundation in statute or common law. The Articles of Capitulation signed at Montreal in 1760 stated that all “negroes and panis” should remain “in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong”, with liberty to sell them and instruct them in the Roman Catholic faith.148 But the imposition of a new British system governing slavery did not lessen the oppression for the enslaved population and the most obvious and daring form of resistance, running away, persisted under the British regime. As Winks has noted, In the period from the summer of 1769 to the summer of 1794, for example, advertisements for missing slaves were scattered through the Québec Gazette. One may presume that there were also many unsuccessful attempts at escape or short-termed flights that did not receive public notice. In 1769, Joseph, a Negro who spoke French and English, ran away from Montreal. Slaves escaped in 1771 and 1778, four times in 1779, in 1781, three times in 1783, in 1785, three times in 1788, in 1789, 1790, and 1794. In all but one instance they were Negroes who spoke English, French, or Dutch, rather than panis. One Ishmael ran away from his owner, John Turner, twice on occasions nine years apart. Indeed, advertisements for runaway slaves were more frequent during this time than were those for the sale of slaves.149 The fact that the majority of the fugitives were so-called Negroes seems to indicate that enslaved peoples of African descent were less amenable to a life of perpetual bondage than their Native counterparts, or at least more likely to resist through flight. Interestingly, while the typical runaway in Jamaica was the African, since the majority of black slaves in Montreal were creolized (either from the Caribbean or what would become the US), the high rate of flight may indicate that Montreal’s black slaves suffered more greatly than their Caribbean Creole counterparts from isolation, abuse or other factors which propelled them to risk further violence by escaping. And furthermore, the fact that some of the escapees were known to be Dutch speakers indicates that they may have had Dutch owners and/or

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were previously enslaved in a Dutch colony like Curaçao or Suriname and had later been migrated to Montreal. While the majority of fugitive slaves in Montreal were not African-born due to the fact that Africans likely represented the smallest percentage of the enslaved population, the ethnic demographics of fugitives played out differently in Jamaica. Jamaican planters and overseers quickly recognized that plantations with greater numbers of African-born slaves were more likely to have rebellions.150 It follows too that they had greater numbers of runaways. One such case was “a negro named William, of the Moco Country” Jamaica. Described as a five-feet, four-inch high (1.63m), stout, chair-maker who had been branded “on the right shoulder A M’N” (for his owner’s name A. M’Naughton), the distinguishing mark of his African birth origin was his “filed teeth”.151 Clearly, newly arrived Africans had an immediate memory of freedom and of home elsewhere and were unaccustomed to lives of perpetual bondage. As a consequence, Jamaican slavers paid careful attention to the diversity (ethnicity and birth origin) of their slaves, developing ethnic characterizations about things like labour productivity and a population’s potential for resistance.152 In Jamaica the ethnicity of a slave was taken as a predictor of resistance, and Coramantee slaves (Akan from West Africa’s Gold Coast)153 were considered particularly threatening.154 But resistance was not always physical. Enslaved Africans deliberately maintained their ethnicity in various ways including the preservation of their African names and naming practices and the clandestine practice of religion.155 Besides the age, sex, racial type and (imposed) name of each slave, A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St.Andrews (1788) included two columns where administrators indicated whether the slave was African or Creole.156 Slave owners and overseers also bestowed names that included a slave’s ethnic background.157 Managing a balance between Creole and African slaves on a plantation therefore became a way to stave off the potential for rebellion. But such ethnic differentiation and bias also existed amongst the enslaved. As the Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis soon found upon his first journey to the island, Creole slaves held biases against newly arriving Africans.158 No doubt such internal disputes may have been strategically supported by white slave owners in the hopes that a “divide and conquer” policy would be prohibitive to a cross-ethnic, cross-birth origin politics of solidarity and collective action amongst the enslaved. But clearly such divisions were not always maintained. A runaway slave advertisement published in 1803 in Jamaica’s The Daily Advertiser described “two negroes”, Jack and John, who had run away from the brig Neptune, “the former is a Congo, a very good looking smart boy”, and the latter “a Creole of SpanishTown”.159 Clearly in this case, the men’s ethnic and cultural differences did not prevent them from conspiring to flee together. The period after the province of Quebec was inaugurated saw an expansion of British economic investment and growth. As John G. Reid and Elizabeth Mancke have argued, In the 1780s British commitments expanded rapidly. Colonial settlements multiplied along the Atlantic littoral, on the upper St. Lawrence, and along the north shores of the Great Lakes. Continental outreach soon extended to the Pacific, fuelled both by

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the legacy of the French regime with its Montreal-based networks of trade and by the inland expansion of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) after 1763.160 British migration was encouraged and the Quebec population of about 500 Britons in 1765 rapidly grew to about 10,000 in 1791.161 Slavery continued to flourish throughout the British Empire, especially in its tropical colonies, despite the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. In Quebec, the enslavement of Africans, first introduced and normalized under the French, continued to persist under the British until the end of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. Furthermore, the British not only provided legal sanction and protection for French slave-holding practices, but individuals of British origin (like James McGill discussed below) adopted the French practices of parallel African and Native enslavement, elsewhere unobserved in the British Empire. The Maritimes and Upper Canada (declared after the spilt of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada in 1791) also supported the enslavement of people of African descent. As Adele Perry has argued, “The legal status of chattel slavery was unclear in Upper Canada until the Assembly of Upper Canada, at the urging of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, passed a 1793 statute mandating its eventual extinction.”162 Situating Montreal’s black minority Despite the many similarities and parallel colonial trajectories (discussed above) of the British-controlled islands of Montreal and Jamaica, there existed a sharp distinction in the visibility of enslaved people of African descent within each site. Jamaica, due to its fundamental economic role as a site of a pervasive mono-crop agricultural infrastructure for sugar, one of the most lucrative and highly consumed commodities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quickly became a colony with a black majority. Through the forced migration of Africans, mainly as agricultural labourers directly from the African continent, the black population quickly outnumbered the white and for centuries the British struggled even to maintain (much more to reproduce) a “healthy” white settler population in Jamaica. A part of the problem of what Trevor Burnard has called the “fragile” and “battered” state of Jamaican white settler marriage and reproduction had much to do with the insatiable and open (although taboo) sexual desire of white men for black women, a topic that I shall take up in much greater detail below in chapters 6, 7, and 8.163 By comparison, the majority of slaves of African descent that arrived at Montreal were Creoles, American-born people (in the continental sense) who had already been separated, at times by many generations, from Africa. Of this population of slaves largely referred to as Negro, the minority would have been African-born. Although to date no demographic scholarship exists on the precise ethnic makeup of the enslaved (or free) black population in Montreal (or elsewhere in what was to become Canada), the two dominant incoming populations would surely have been African-Caribbean and African-American. However, of these populations who were migrated from the Caribbean or the US, a small portion would still have been African-born.164 Therefore, the British island settlement of Montreal

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possessed a small but extremely heterogeneous population of enslaved (and free) blacks. In his discussion of the living arrangements of blacks, enslaved and free, Mackey noted that in 1833 the newly married John Broome and Jane Wilson, who hailed from Barbados and Bermuda respectively, were tenants in the house of Mary Ann Drummond and Jacob Grant on St Constant Street.165 The cook from St Domingue, John Francis (aka John François or Jean François St. Elistan) was also a tenant in the same household throughout the 1840s. Mackey also mentions a West Indian labourer named Abraham Low who, after relocating from Quebec to Montreal near the end of 1814, boarded in a house on McGill Street coowned by John Trim, his wife and the husband and wife, Henry Moore and Margaret Plauvier.166 In Montreal, slaves resided with their owners, either in the same home or on the same property. This was also the case in Jamaica. However, Jamaican plantations resembled small villages. As Hall has explained, “Planters were a new kind of capitalist, and Jamaica and the West Indies were the cradle of the modern world. Planters were manufacturers as well as farmers, merchants as well as landlords, managers of complex units of land and people.”167 Jamaican plantations were customarily composed of hundreds if not thousands of acres of land, with the Great House, houses for the managers, works (mill, distillery, etc.), and separate Negro villages where the slaves lived on property which was customarily chosen for ease of surveillance from the vantage point of the oftenelevated Great House. The architectural order of the plantation was deliberate. As Matthew Lewis explained of his own Jamaican plantation Cornwall in Westmoreland, “the works were built in the immediate neighbourhood” of the Great House “for the convenience of their being the more under the agent’s personal inspection (a point of material consequence with them all, but more particularly for the hospital).”168 But in comparison to a context like Montreal, as Lewis noted, “none of the domestic negroes sleep in the house, all going home to their respective cottages and families”.169 Therefore, “living with” the white slave master/mistress surely meant something entirely different in Jamaica than it did in Montreal where a large portion of the population was concentrated within a walled settlement, which comprised only a very small fraction of the southeastern part of the island.170 While increasingly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Montreal inhabitants lived outside of the fortified settlement, such dwellings were more sparsely scattered on either side of the mountain. As the nineteenth-century visitor James Logan described of hiring a “calash” and driving around the mountain, “There are a good many cottages in the neighbourhood, which are neat and cleanly, although most of them want the air of comfort so characteristic of the French cottages. They belong chiefly to Irish [sic]”.171 Blacks who were first enslaved in the Caribbean – particularly as field slaves – and later migrated to Montreal would have potentially experienced a very difficult transition in terms of acclimatization to living in such close quarters with their owners and adjusting to the pervasive white social scrutiny at home and in the settlement at large. As Mackey has articulated, “Whether property owners or tenants, blacks were scattered around the city. There was no area to which they were restricted, none from which they were barred.There

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was, however, a banding together of unrelated blacks in shared lodgings, which might hint at problems of discrimination in rental housing.”172 Mackey’s last assertion is undoubtedly too understated. Any society that allowed for the enslavement of populations strictly on the basis of race, also of necessity contained segments of the population with ill feelings, biases, and sentiments of racial superiority, if not outright racial hatred towards slave populations. Arguably, the enslaved in Montreal would have been under greater daily surveillance, in terms of their literal physical proximity to their white owners, than in a colony like Jamaica. However, in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century period, since so much of the island was uninhabited by whites, despite the disadvantages and limitations of the climate, escape into unpopulated territory or territory populated by Natives may have been easier. But realistically, the ability to run away into isolated regions of the island would only have been helpful if a fugitive could survive off the land. Yet unlike Spanish and later British Jamaica, it would appear that Montreal developed no self-sustained Maroon communities (of black and/or Native slaves) to which fugitive slaves could safely flee, indicating that the prospect of sustaining an independent community within a region renown for terribly harsh winters was so nearly impossible that flight meant attempting to remove oneself from Montreal altogether.173 The Montreal Gazette issued its first paper on 25 August 1785.174 That the first runaway slave advertisement appeared the following month, by 29 September 1785, demonstrated the local white settlers’ knowledgeable use of print technology (as in other colonies in the Americas) to perpetuate the colonial racial order through which their ownership of black bodies was justified and secured. Placed by a Robert M. Guthrie, the advertisement offered a five-pound reward for the return of a “Mullatto [sic]” named Tom Brooks and his accomplice, “one Richard Sutton”.175 Brooks’ description as a mullatto (of mixed African and European ancestry) almost assuredly indicates his Creole status; although in which region in the Americas he had been born is not indicated by the identification. With the frequency of slave trading between Montreal and Caribbean and American sites, an African-Canadian status was certainly not a given.While Guthrie’s description of Brooks as speaking “English and French perfectly” may indicate that he was born in the region, Brooks could just as likely have moved to Quebec at a young age, had a facility for languages or been raised in another colony where one or both languages had been spoken. Interestingly, the lack of a racial identifier for Sutton most likely indicated his whiteness since the terms “Negro” to describe so-called full-blooded black slaves and panis(e) to describe Native ones were in common use. Furthermore, that the advertisement was a reprint from the Quebec (City) supplement originally published the previous week (on 22 September 1785) importantly indicates that the men had escaped detection for at least one week, and secondly that the white slave-owning population understood that fugitives used their ingenuity and alliances (cross-racial and others) to cover considerable distances in an effort to escape. But the fact that the advertisement was not reprinted in the subsequent (6 October 1785) edition of the Montreal Gazette indicates that Guthrie may have given up reclaiming Brooks as his property or that fellow Quebec citizens had conspired with him to identify and return the runaway.

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The advertisement described Brooks as being “Aged Thirty years, about five feet eight Inches high, strong made, had on a Mixed Brown Coat and Weastcoat, Green trowsers, a white Beaver hat with broad Gold-lace [sic]”.176 While the description of Brooks’ dress provides interesting details about the understudied realm of slave dress in Canada, it also demonstrates the level of heightened surveillance to which slaves were subjected.177 In his study of slave dress in Jamaica, Steeve O. Buckridge has distinguished the definition of dress from that of apparel or costume, arguing “We can, then, assert that dress includes many forms of adornment: hairstyles; coloured, dyed or bleached skin; pierced ears; scented breath as well as garments; jewellery; accessories; and other modifications of and items added to the body.”178 Although it is unclear if enslaved blacks in Montreal were made to fabricate their own clothing from natural sources or from materials provided by their owners, surely many of the females imported from the Caribbean would have arrived with such skills already honed from their time in colonies like Jamaica179 where oznaburgh fabric was a common cloth ration provided to the enslaved by the planters, and trees like the laghetto or lace-bark were regularly used by women to manufacture materials for clothing.180 That Guthrie was able, in a very detailed fashion, to recall the dress in which his slave departed, speaks to his knowledge of Brooks’ likely meagre possessions and also to the type of detail that was needed to ensure the proper function and outcome of the fugitive slave advertisement; the capture and return of the runaway. As various scholars have ably demonstrated, fugitive slave advertisements that often relied heavily upon exhaustive recollections of slave dress also provide us with glimpses of slave ingenuity through documenting the theft of various forms of dress for use in disguises which often included cross-dressing or cross-racial performance.181 Much evidence clearly indicates that enslaved people across the Americas carefully planned their escapes, a part of the proper preparation being the process of securing articles of dress with which to transform their bodies and camouflage their identities once out of sight of their owners. Buckridge has explained the symbolic power of dress for political subversion and resistance: The significance of dress in colonial society provided possibilities for resistance, because the semiotic process was never fully controlled by the ruling elite. As a result, dress and the body, as signifiers of contrasting and complex meanings, enabled oppressed people (including slaves) to symbolically and covertly resist, to make satirical and politically subversive statements about their identities in relation to the dominant power.182 Buckridge’s acknowledgement of the tendency of the enslaved to deliberately manipulate their dress also speaks to the fact that it is one of the few elements of self-care over which they had some level of control. The significance is even greater for sites like the newly constituted province of Quebec and the island colony of Jamaica, which had no sumptuary laws. As McGregor noted regarding Quebec in his book British America (1832), the admonitions of priests restrained more than sumptuary laws ever could.183 The potential for

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manipulation of dress as a subtle or overt form of resistance may have been behind the “broad Gold-lace” on Brooks’ white beaver hat, an adornment that seems quite conspicuous and fashionable for a slave. It was indeed common for runaway slaves to attempt to “pass” as another identity.The racial notion of passing – for instance a black person passing as white – an act sometimes attempted by enslaved or free mixed-race people whose facial features, hair texture, and complexions allowed them to deny their African racial ancestry, was expanded within the practices of the fugitive. Indeed, Joan E. Cashin has noted that slaves were also known to cross-dress their way to freedom. As such, both cross-racial and cross-gender/sex performances – sometimes both at the same time as was the case of a black man whose cross-dressing and powdering of his face allowed him to pass as a white woman – were common across the Americas since deception and concealment of one’s slave status became a means of ensuring a safe escape from enslavement.184 As mentioned above, it is in part hard to pinpoint the origins or ethnicity of the mulatto Brooks because of the normalcy of moving enslaved people of African descent into and out of the region. In the 1780s John Wentworth, then Surveyor General of the King’s Woods in North America (later appointed the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia in 1791) retained two slaves for himself (Matthew and Susannah) and sent a large shipment of 19 “Negroes” from Halifax to Suriname (Dutch Guiana).185 As Wentworth described, they were “all American born or well seasoned . . . perfectly stout, healthy, sober, orderly, industrious and obedient [italics mine]”.186 Wentworth’s description demonstrates his comfort and facility with the colonial language of slave ownership and exchange; his ability to highlight the suitable physical and behavioural codes which conveyed the enslaved person’s ability to serve and obey their new master/mistress.While “stout” pointed out their physical strength and endurance, the other descriptions were meant to put the buyer’s mind at ease as regarded their temperament, character, and fitness. But the phrase “well seasoned” held more sinister connotations. Often interchangeable with the term “breaking” or “broken”, “seasoned” implied that these slaves had suffered physical or psychological discipline through which their behaviour had been securely modified to suit the ends of the white master class. Explaining that they had been christened on 11 February 1784, he went on to lament that he could not free them and instead wished to be assured of their humane treatment, which he deemed a favour that the purchaser could bestow upon him. The reference to the slaves’ Christian status was also likely included to appease and reassure the new owner. His description continued: Isaac is a thorough good carpenter and master sawyer, perfectly capable of overseeing and conducting the rest and strictly honest; Lymas is a rough carpenter and sawyer; Quako is a field negro has met with an accident in his arm which will require some indulgence. The other men are sawyers and John also a good axeman. Abraham has been used to cattle and to attend in the house, &c. All the men are expert in boats. The women are stout and able and promise well to increase their numbers. Venus is useful in the hospital, poultry yard, gardens, etc. Upon the whole they are a most useful lot of Negroes.187

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Wentworth’s letter would have helped the new owner to orient the slaves within the configuration of their new tropical labour regime. As I will discuss in greater detail below in the case of Jamaica, the economic motivations of slavery commonly won out over prevailing social norms of the gendered division of labour practised in white bourgeois society. Wentworth’s detailed description of the skills of the slaves sheds light on the parallels between temperate and tropical labour regimes and the identical or transferable skills which the enslaved introduced into their new surroundings. For instance, while Isaac and Lymas may have been able to escape field labour due to their skills as carpenters, Quako, the infirm field slave may have been useful only as a watchman or some other less strenuous position. Furthermore, Wentworth’s hint that Isaac should be placed in a supervisory role, indicated that he might have been taken up as a driver (discussed in Chapter 6) in the tropical colony, – the fearsome black male slaves who, under the white overseer, urged their fellow slaves to work through violence and intimidation. Abraham’s animal husbandry and house labour skills made him an ideal candidate to work as a penkeeper or a house slave, both more desirable options to field work. Crucially though, Wentworth’s role as Surveyor General of the King’s Woods in North America from 1766 also indicates that, much like the black Belizean male slaves who became renowned huntsmen in the mahogany industry, he likely used male slave labour to help harvest the pine trees which were used to construct the masts of Royal Navy ships. As Fingard has argued, Wentworth “regularly traversed the forests to oversee the protection of white pine and to reserve what he considered to be fine quality timberland for the use of the Royal Navy.”188 While four of the seven men were specified by name as possessing skills beyond field labour or sawyers, only one woman of seven received such special mention. Venus would have been viewed as a valuable commodity since her knowledge included animal husbandry, agriculture, and medicine. However, the new owners would have interpreted Wentworth’s silence surrounding the other women as a sign of their fitness for field labour. As shall be discussed below in the case of Jamaica, it was black women, not men, who became the dominant field labourers in the Jamaican sugar industry. But regardless of Venus’ many skills, Wentworth made sure to telegraph her sexual utility along with that of the other black women by describing their fitness as “breeders” who would “increase their numbers”. Wentworth, who lamented his need to sell the slaves and documented their Christianization, nonetheless encouraged the sexual exploitation of the females for profit as a normal part of their gendered labour. His ability to reconcile the two was a testament to his hypocrisy, something that he shared with the vast majority of other white slave owners. His knowledgeable discourse of the expectations of “natural increase” from his base in Halifax demonstrated the ubiquity of sexual exploitation as a deliberate tool for “breeding” in slaveholding societies across the Americas, whether temperate or tropical sites. The frequent international movement of slaves into Quebec and other parts of the territory indexes the extraordinary diversity of black slave populations.189 Obviously any discussion of enslaved blacks in the region must contend with African, African-Canadian, African-American, African-Caribbean and possibly even other (African-South/CentralAmerican, etc.) people. Indeed, this heterogeneity within blackness is one key mark of the

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distinctiveness of black slaves and the practice of Trans Atlantic Slavery in Montreal (and Canada) when compared to other locations of the Black Diaspora like Jamaica. Although it is beyond the scope of this book, given the dominant trade in black slaves between the islands of the Caribbean and Canada’s internationally networked port settlements like Montreal, I would like to reiterate my call for the conceptualization of a Second Middle Passage between the shores of the Caribbean and Canada as a worthy historical and theoretical endeavour; secondary only in historical context, but no less tumultuous a journey across perilous waters, only this time between two “New World” ports.190 Compared to Jamaica, the demographic minority status of black slaves in Montreal resulted ironically in their heightened visibility and exoticism within the settlement and their tandem invisibility, for the most part, in local art and visual culture. For example, in comparison to James Hakewill’s illustrated volume A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (1825) – discussed in great detail below in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 – which regularly featured enslaved blacks within detailed images of sugar plantation landscapes, there are few known images of enslaved people of African descent in British Montreal within the main period under inquiry (1760–1833). But of course, the scant evidence of their visual representation does not mean that they were not present, and it certainly does not mean that they were not represented more than we currently know.191 Additionally, some of the less refined or amateur images of enslaved blacks in Montreal no doubt exist in the sketchbooks of soldiers, sailors, and tourists now held in British archives, libraries and museums, as yet undetected. To complicate matters further, in considering the typical topographical landscapes and genre studies of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century period, the absence of black slaves as labouring staffage in Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1825) or their presence as focal points in William Clark’s TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823) does not reflect the extent to which these images telegraph a Trans Atlantic narrative of the colonial trade of goods which was fundamentally underpinned by the parallel trade in Africans. These images, which imagine Montreal as uniquely British, were born of the Black Atlantic and, with or without the representation of black bodies, speak to the constitution of the Black Diaspora in Montreal. Accordingly, black slaves in Montreal do not show up as staffage in the landscapes because they were a slave minority, demographically less present, although arguably for the same reason, hyper-visible. But the plethora of Montreal marine landscapes and genre scenes of markets imply their presence since: (1) the standard use of black female slaves as domestics in white households meant that black women would have frequented the local markets, doing the shopping for their white households, (2) fugitive slaves, known to try to escape on ships docked in Montreal harbour, would have been exceedingly aware of and familiar with the port, (3) free black British sailors were of course arriving on ships from various parts of the Trans Atlantic World, (4) enslaved black “cargo” was continuously arriving on ships also stocked with slave-produced plantation crops and goods, and (5) estates and estate homes like those of the slave owner James McGill’s Burnside would have been tended and staffed by slaves.

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The face of slave ownership in Montreal: James McGill James McGill (1744–1813), a wealthy Scottish Montreal politician, merchant, and landowner,192 was the head of a household that included several slaves of both Native (panis/e) and African descent.193 As Bradbury and Myers explain, A small but influential group of Scottish, English, and American merchants arrived following the Conquest and the American War of Independence.This English-speaking mercantile elite enriched itself through trade, often in furs, and secured influence and appointments from British authority. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were transforming the city’s cultural landscape as they oversaw the building of institutions, urban spaces, and homes reflective of their imperial vision.194 McGill provides an excellent example of the British appropriation of the French practice of the parallel enslavement of people of African and Native descent. Primary sources not only confirm his ownership of several slaves in the period when Montreal was a British possession,195 but his legal representation of white fellow citizens in the sale of slaves at Montreal.196 Indeed, McGill’s familiarity with slavery may have in part been attributable to his Scottish heritage. Whereas scholars have long assumed that the English were the dominant British slave owners, recent research has revealed that at the moment of the abolition of slavery in 1833, in relation to population size, the highest rates of slave ownership were in Scotland.197 Meanwhile, his 1776 marriage to the French gentlewoman Marie-Charlotte Trottier Desrivières, née Guillimin (1747–1818), demonstrates the extent to which class and race affiliations trumped national origins, ethnic animosities, and religious preferences in the white consolidation of imperial wealth and power.198 The common mixing of the “leading French and English families” meant that by 1837 most were related at some level.199 As Bradbury and Myers contend, a significant population chose marriages, which “moved between these religious and linguistically distinct institutions”, some even “marrying in a Presbyterian church and buying a pew and holding funerals in a Catholic one”.200 Like many other white men of the Montreal merchant classes, McGill prospered through his exploitation of the fur trade. But also similar to other Montreal-based merchants, he diversified, expanding into the lucrative transoceanic trade in Caribbean tropical, slave-produced, plantation goods. An extant business ledger from 1797 records McGill’s consistent trade in large shipments of plantation-derived crops like rum and other lesser shipments of molasses and tobacco.201 According to Cooper, The warehouses on Rue Saint-Paul were the centre of the McGill empire. Furs from Detroit and Michilimackinac were exported to Great Britain. Some went by devious ways to New York and John Jacob Astor. The suppliers of furs, the Indians, were carefully cultivated, silver jewellery being bought for them in Montreal. Imported from the West Indies were tobacco, sugar, molasses, and rum; from Britain, metalware, textiles, and powder and shot [italics mine].202

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According to Cooper, by 1803 McGill had retired from the fur trade, which was superseded by his continued participation in “ordinary colonial trade”.203 But in contexts of nontropical slavery like Montreal, commerce and enterprise, although in part based on agriculture, were not centred primarily upon the economic engine of a mono-crop plantation infrastructure. As such, although many of Montreal’s wealthy merchant elite were landowners with substantial property holdings, labour demands did not necessitate the use of hundreds or thousands of slaves per property owner, and the organization of labour did not call for the structuring of separate housing or so-called Negro villages for slaves nor the allotment of provision grounds where slaves were expected to grow their own food in their “spare time” as was the common practice in British Jamaica.204 Unsurprisingly then, the residences for all of the people that McGill enslaved were listed as Montreal, and they most likely lived either within his residence or on his property.205 By Montreal and “Canadian” standards, possessing more than two slaves at a time was a significant number. An examination of the details of McGill’s slave ownership sheds light on the specific nature of slavery in British Montreal. Trudel lists McGill’s slave count as seven, including an unknown panis who was baptized and buried in 1778 at the age of 10, and a Native female named Marie of “Potamiane” origin (panise) who was baptized and buried in 1783 at the approximate age of 10 or 12. He also owned three so-called Negresses: Sarah who was purchased from Jean-Louis Cavilhe in 1788 at the age of 25, Marie-Louise whose burial was noted as 1789, and Marie-Charles McGill (also known as Charlotte)206 who married Joseph-François on or before 1803. Lastly, McGill owned a Negro named Jacques who was baptized in 1806 at about the age of 40 and who was buried in 1838 at about the age of 80, an extraordinary age for anybody at the time, let alone a slave. However, Mackey’s research has determined that Sarah, Marie-Charles, and Charlotte (hereafter Charlotte) were one and the same person. He agrees that the woman was purchased as Sarah and was bought at the age of 25 in 1788, but adds that she was a free woman in 1802 when, under a new name of Charlotte Cavilhe, she married Joseph-François.207 McGill then owned, at different times, at least five slaves. Sarah’s name change as a free woman, to Marie-Charles or Charlotte and her last name from McGill back to that of her former slave owner Cavilhe, may have provided for her a way to claim a new-found independence which, although not entirely separate from the strictures of white ownership, allowed her to designate a preference in affiliation; here to a former slaver owner instead of the latter, James McGill. A change in her husband’s name at their wedding, from Joseph-François to Joseph Frank, may have had a similar motivation, and may not merely have been a straightforward anglicization. Jean-Baptiste-François presents another and more explicit case of defiant self-assertion through re-naming. As the former slave of Benoite Gaétant, the widow of the artist François Malépart de Beaucourt (discussed in detail in Chapter 3), Jean-Baptiste-François first appears in Montreal records in 1796 as a 14-year-old being baptized at Notre-Dame Church.208 But by 1801 he had become a free man and was known instead as Jean Beaucour dit l’Africain upon his marriage the same year, and thereafter as Jean-Baptiste L’Africain.209 L’Africain was one of three black men who worked on John Molson’s steam

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ship Accommodation, the first of its kind in British North America.210 Although the ship was launched on 19 August 1809, L’Africain and Robert Ashley were already in Molson’s employ from 1 July 1809.211 It is hard to overstate the symbolic and material significance of the ship and the sea for blacks in diaspora. Throughout the Black Atlantic, black men, free or enslaved, often gravitated to work in ports or on ships, the latter in part with a mind towards escape and eventual freedom. But whites who invested in black slave labour likewise understood the lure of the sea as a means of escape for blacks and therefore increased both surveillance and punishments for slaves venturing near or out onto the sea. Bonham C. Richardson has explained, that “As early as 1717, any black man traveling from St. Kitts to Nevis via small boat was liable to be whipped unless accompanied by a ‘credible white man’. Later in the century, St. Kitts slave fishermen were not allowed to go to Nevis unaccompanied to haul their seines.”212 In fact, the history of black male resistance in the form of escape from slavery is inseparable from the history of male slaves learning to be sailors or to impersonate them. As Gilroy has argued, . . . it has been estimated that at the end of the eighteenth century a quarter of the British navy was composed of Africans for whom the experience of slavery was a powerful orientation to the ideologies of liberty and justice. Looking for similar patterns on the other side of the Atlantic network we can locate Crispus Attucks at the head of his “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars” and can track Denmark Vesey sailing the Caribbean and picking up inspirational stories of the Haitian revolution . . . There is also the shining example of Frederick Douglass, whose autobiographies reveal that he learnt of freedom in the North from Irish sailors while working as a ship’s caulker in Baltimore . . . Douglass . . . escaped from bondage disguised as a sailor and put this success down to his ability to “talk sailor like an old salt”.213 Within the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery which was sustained by the perpetual enslavement and objectification of Africans, the choice to append to one’s name the title L’Africain acted as a defiant assertion of racial, ethnic, and cultural pride and alignment with the much-maligned continent and the prolifically enslaved Black Diasporic population. Furthermore, the shift away from the master/mistress’s family name when he dropped Beaucour(t), was a shift towards a self-defined identity free from the impositions of white ownership. Mackey’s speculation of L’Africain’s origins as French West Indies makes sense. Haiti in particular would ring true. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3, the enslaved population in Haiti was, more than in other Caribbean islands, African-born. This was in part due to the brutality of the island’s plantation slave labour practices, which produced a terrifyingly high slave morality rate. As such, if L’Africain had been born in or passed through Haiti, he would have had living family members and fellow slaves who were born in Africa and he too may have been Africanborn. But regardless of whether or not Jean-Baptiste was actually African-born, his self-naming performed a defiant racial affiliation with the African continent as his place of origin.

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L’Africain’s potential French West Indian or Haitian birth is also intriguing given the fact that his first recorded presence in Montreal in 1796 placed him squarely within the period of British rule. Since French vessels were, at least officially, unwelcome in the British ports, how did L’Africain, and the many other enslaved French West Indians and free blacks, end up in British Montreal? While some were surely enslaved prior to 1760 under French rule, others would have been their offspring and still others would have entered the colony through inland trade and travel from the US (or such parts of British North America which were to become the US). But another often-forgotten, if not sublimated, route into the colony of Montreal was smuggling. As I mentioned above, French vessels and their cargo would have been officially unwelcome in British Montreal. However, within the uneven spaces of empire, colonies also functioned through legal and illicit trade. As Rupert has articulated, . . . the relationship between official and extra-official trade was complicated and multifaceted. Smuggling often complemented rather than replaced officially sanctioned commerce. Both types of trade often involved the same participants. Intercolonial commerce was especially prevalent across the Americas, where the needs and wants of colonial denizens often conflicted with the restrictive mercantilist policies of imperial powers.214 Still other French blacks were likely displaced from French-controlled Caribbean islands to British ones like Jamaica, through legal or illegal means, before entering Montreal. Writing about Jamaican slavery in the early nineteenth century, the Reverend Bickell provided a summary of the diverse group of slaves that were documented in the published workhouse lists.215 When slave owners conspired with the public to catch runaway slaves, the workhouse was the usual place that an owner suggested the captured party be lodged.216 Workhouses also functioned as a penal institution where slave owners could have their slaves punished and tortured; generally those that they deemed disobedient, unruly, rebellions or troublesome.217 As such, the assortment of the enslaved inhabitants of the lowly workhouse indicates not only the diversity of the Jamaican slave population, but also the existence of resistance across a wide variety of different ethnicities and birth origins. But it also announces that the cruelty of whites was wielded against a wideranging population. Bickell noted that the published Jamaican workhouse lists that he consulted included not only an array of Africans but a variety of Creoles (Caribbeanborn) as well. He mentioned Congo, Coromantee, Creole, Creole of Bermuda, Curaçao Creole, Creole Negro, Creole Sambo, Eboe, elderly Creole, French Creole, salt-water Creole, Hittoe, Moco, Mundingo, Mulatto Creole, Mungola, Nago, Papa, young Creole Negro man. While the diversity of Africans is indicated with names like Coromantee and Eboe, the racial/complexion identification of the slaves is also noted with words like Sambo and Mulatto.218 But the most striking revelation from this list is the diversity of non-Jamaican enslaved Creoles. It no doubt speaks to a large, if perhaps informal, interisland slave trade.219 Furthermore, and pertinent to my point about L’Africain’s origins, Bickell mentioned that Negroes from St Domingo (later Haiti) were on a Jamaican estate

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in St George’s and belonged to French “refugees”; no doubt wealthy white planters who had fled the revolution.220 Returning to the issue of McGill’s slaves,Trudel’s use of the terms “Negress” and “Negro” for the black slaves in McGill’s household likely indicates that the primary sources from which he drew noted that they appeared to be of a so-called full-blooded Negro type. This implied that they were not of mixed-race heritage, or that they did not visually appear as such. If they had, they may have been listed instead by a name like “mulatto”. Charlotte and Marie-Louise appear to have been in McGill’s possession at the same time. And although Charlotte was a free woman, married in 1802 and no doubt residing with her husband, she may have known of McGill’s Negro male slave Jacques, even if she did not necessarily overlap with him in terms of her own enslavement.221 However, it is significant that the known burial dates of all of the slaves seem to indicate that the panis and blacks were not in the McGill household at the same time. McGill’s two panis child slaves died prematurely even before reaching adolescence. But as mentioned above, with an eighteenth-century mortality rate of only 17.7 years, enslaved Natives did not have a long life expectancy in the settlement. The loss of life of two Native child slaves in a fairly short span of time and, for McGill, the loss of the labour that he had purchased may have promoted a shift towards the acquisition of enslaved peoples of African descent, based upon a growing understanding that Africans had a greater resistance to European diseases like smallpox.222 The cases of the anonymous panis who died at 10 and Marie the panise who died at a similar time of life seem to indicate that McGill may have offered baptism to them once they had already taken ill, since their baptism and burials occurred in the same years. Marie the “Potamiane”, furthermore, may have been purchased in 1783 to replace the labour lost at the death of the anonymous panis in 1778. It is of particular significance that Charlotte was married only after she became a free woman. Although the European imperial project was built upon the idea of a great “civilizing mission” with the central tenet of a vast programme of forced Christianization, within the practices of the various Christian denominations on the ground, enslaved Africans did not have unimpeded access to church sacraments. Indeed, whites carefully monitored and often obstructed black access to religious rites like marriage. For instance, writing about the access of slaves to marriage in Jamaica, the Reverend Bickell commented about a case in which a white female owner had deliberately interfered in the domestic realm of enslaved blacks, leading to the inevitable disruption of the black family. He recounted a case in which a “decent free man, a tradesman” who had been living with a slave belonging to a “white lady” had wanted to purchase her in order to free her and legitimize their relationship through marriage. But when he asked her white mistress for permission, her asking price was 200 pounds – a grossly inflated sum since the normal price for a domestic slave was 100–130 pounds – making it impossible for the black man to either emancipate or marry his enslaved partner.223 While the precise motivation for this white female slave owner’s interference would be difficult to ascertain, there is considerable evidence that white women in Jamaica were well aware of the sexual attention that their white male relatives heaped upon black free and enslaved women. As I will

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discuss at length in Chapters 6 and 7, despite the fact that white male cross-racial, sexual desire was often manifested in coercive or outright violent ways, white women commonly reacted with jealously, retaliating against the black female victims of sexual exploitation as opposed to their husbands, uncles, fathers and brothers, the white male perpetrators. Another poignant example of the divisiveness of marriage for enslaved blacks shows up in the gut-wrenching narrative of Mary Prince. Born into slavery in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, as the property of Charles Myners, while still a child, Prince was bequeathed at his death to Captain Darrel and “given” to his granddaughter Betsy Williams.224 Rented out at the age of 12 to a Mrs. Prudent who used her as a baby nurse, Prince’s life would change drastically upon Williams’ death.225 Sold at a public auction in Hamble Town226 and separated from her parents and siblings, Prince would spend the following years in the possession of several vicious white owners who regularly employed various forms of physical torture and psychological terror against her.227 While in the possession of the white married couple, the Woods, Prince married a free black man named Daniel James, a cooper, violin maker and carpenter (like her father).228 Prince’s description is worthy of full consideration, Some time after I began to attend the Moravian Church, I met with Daniel James, afterwards my dear husband. He was a carpenter and cooper to his trade; an honest, hard-working, decent black man, and a widower. He had purchased his freedom of his mistress, old Mrs. Baker, with money he had earned whilst a slave. When he asked me to marry him, I took time to consider the matter over with myself, and would not say yes till he went to church with me and joined the Moravians. He was very industrious after he bought his freedom; and he had hired a comfortable house, and had convenient things about him.We were joined in marriage, about Christmas 1826, in the Moravian Chapel at Spring Gardens, by the Rev. Mr. Olufsen. We could not be married in the English Church. English marriage is not allowed to slaves; and no free man can marry a slave woman [italics mine] [sic].229 Prince’s lack of consultation with her owners inspired their wrath. Sending for her new husband they threatened and scolded the free black man, questioning his right to marry their slave and attempting no doubt to infantilize him. Prince noted that her mistress, Mrs Wood, was “more vexed” about her marriage than her husband, and “stirred up” Mr Wood to flog Prince with a horsewhip.230 Despite the likely motivation of jealousy at Prince’s desirability in the eyes of a free black man, Mrs Wood’s seemingly ceaseless venom was likely also triggered, as Prince aptly noted, by the fear that her domestic slave’s time and labour would now be shared with a free black man and her energies diverted to the keeping of their marital home. The Reverend Thomas Cooper argued that this conundrum was evidence of the falsehood of Negro marriage since the male slave had no control over his household, wife, and children and the wife’s energies were first and foremost always directed towards the master’s or mistress’ ends.231 The horror of being punished for her

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defiant self-assertion in the midst of the joy at their recent marriage must have been extremely traumatizing for Prince and James. As she commented, “It made my husband sad to see me so ill-treated.”232 Indeed, Prince noted that her married life lacked happiness due to the Woods’ incessant interference.233 The accounts of Bickell and Prince point out the complex relationship of the enslaved to Christianity and to the sacrament of marriage. In this light, the married status of James McGill’s former Negress slave Charlotte takes on new and complex meanings. The date of the wedding, 1802, is also significant. If Charlotte was indeed 25 in 1788, that meant that she was 39 when she got married in 1802. Thirty-nine would have been considered an advanced age for a black slave. To be married at this stage in her life may have indicated that McGill had prohibited her from doing so at an earlier time. The fact that Charlotte’s husband, Joseph-François, was not listed amongst McGill’s slaves would not necessarily indicate that he was not himself enslaved at one time. However, it is equally possible that he could have been a free black man who had never been enslaved or, similar to Mary Prince’s husband Daniel James, that he had once been enslaved, but had freed himself or been manumitted. Trudel lists Joseph-François as a journeyman (journalier), the father of two children Joseph (1803) and Pierre-Augustin (3 November 1805) with Charlotte, and the godfather (parrain) of the Negress Marie-Félicité Coudrin (1808).234 The couple’s first-born, Joseph, died on 19 March 1805. The brothers then were not raised together due to Joseph’s premature death at the age of only 18 months. These circumstances meant that Charlotte and her husband were left to mourn the death of Joseph mere months before the birth of PierreAugustin. Charlotte’s age, and perhaps that of her husband, may have detrimentally impacted the health of their child. Furthermore, although there may be no way of knowing the cause of death, malnutrition was customary amongst slaves across the Trans Atlantic World,235 a circumstance often prompted by the greed of white slave owners, which had disastrous long-term consequences for enslaved mothers and their children. Although counter-intuitive, white slave owners customarily deprived their slaves of proper nutrition, especially high-grade protein. Even though Charlotte was a free woman by the time her children were born, as a person who had spent the majority of her life in slavery, the type of nutrition that McGill would have provided would have impacted her health (including her fertility). Notes 1 Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World”, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), pp. 583–614. 2 Robin Winks, “The Blacks in Canada: A History”, International Journal of Canadian Studies, vols 33–34 (2006), p. 23. 3 The first known black slave, Le Jeune was apparently brought to New France from Madagascar as a boy of about nine years old by what Bertley describes as an invading force led by the Kirke brothers and became the slave of David Kirke. Le Jeune passed from Kirke to Olivier Le Tardif (the head clerk of the French colony) to the Couillard family. Guilaume Couillard may have granted his freedom before his death in his thirties in 1654.This speculation stems from his description in his death certificate as domestique as opposed to esclave. Bertley indicates that his family name referenced Father Le Jeune, the Jesuit Superior who ran a school that he attended. This would make Olivier Le Jeune one of the first students of a Western

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educational establishment in the history of Canada. See Leo W. Bertley, Canada and Its People of African Descent (Pierrefonds, Quebec: Bilongo, 1977), pp. XI–XII; and Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, pp. 1–2. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 24. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, pp. 3–4. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 16. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 16. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 17. A second assent was given in 1701. Rushforth dates the initial royal assent to 1688. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 153. Such debates were evident with the influx of black loyalists to the Maritimes in the wake of the War of 1812 and with the migration of enslaved black freedom-seekers to Canada from the US through the Underground Railroad after British abolition in 1833. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 153. See Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, pp. 5–6. According to Rushforth, Raudot’s reassertion of slavery in the colony coincided with the collapse of the European market for North American furs. As such, Raudot’s was likely motivated not only by the desire to protect white slave-holding interests, but also by the need to strategize new sources of commercial development for the colony, sources which no doubt necessitated slave labour. See Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 136–7. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 136. Rushforth has argued convincingly against the idea that panis, Native slaves, were members of a specific tribe known as the Pawnee. Rather, despite substantial diversity in origin, panis was the generic term under which all slaves of Native origin were subsumed (p. 165). It would also appear that many an ordonnance was in response to the problem of fugitive slaves. Winks asserts that black slaves enjoyed privileges normally reserved for whites such as acting as witnesses at religious ceremonies and serving petitions against free persons. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, pp. 10–11. The code was mainly introduced to discourage slave revolt and violence by slaves against whites. Although scholars have speculated on the enforcement of Le Code Noir in New France, as early as 1689 the Governor of New France Jacques-Réne de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, aided by the incumbent Attorney-General, Charles-François-Marie Ruette d’Auteuil, petitioned the King that both slavery and the Code should be adopted in New France. See: Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, pp. 5–7; Maureen Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 14–15. For instance, thefts of sheep, pigs, and sugar cane could be punished with branding. Fugitives in absence for a month were to have their ears cut off and be branded on one shoulder. Violence against the master or his family, especially if blood had been spilled, was punishable by death. Even in death the slave’s body could act as a sign of ultimate commodification and possession since such death sentences were often carried out as spectacular public displays. William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noir”, Journal of Negro History, vol. 10, no. 3 (July 1925), pp. 323–5. This terminology shifted across different parts of the Americas and under the governance of competing empires. For instance, Daniel Schavelzon argues that in Argentina the enslaved were exhibited at the market in Buenos Aires as “rationale bales” (fardos racionales). Daniel Schavelzon, “On Slaves and Beer: The First Images of the South Sea Company Slave Market in Buenos Aires”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, vol. 7, no. 2 (July 2014), p. 126. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 15. It is clear that white slave owners did not let pregnancy dissuade them from punishing enslaved females, even though the potential death of the unborn child (and the expectant mother) was legally tantamount to the destruction of their property. For instance, Mary Prince related witnessing the savage whipping of a pregnant fellow slave named Hetty, who was “stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy”, and “tied up to a tree in the yard”, after which she was “brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child.” See Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 67.This type of heinous and spectacular brutality against (pregnant) black females persisted well after the end of slavery. In 1918

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while eight months pregnant, Mary Turner was lynched after protesting the death of her husband, Hayes Turner, at the hands of a white mob in Georgia. On 19 May 1918, in front of a crowd that included white men, women, and children, Mary was captured, hung upside down from a tree, doused with accelerant and set on fire. While still alive her belly was cut open with a hunting knife, causing the unborn child to fall to the ground. When the child cried, it was stomped to death by the mob. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 201; Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). See William Renwick Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 8, no. 3 (July 1923), pp. 319, 323–4. During his service as a soldier, Cramahé was posted to Cartagena (Colombia) and Cuba (1741–42) where he would have become familiar with plantation slavery in colonies with sizeable if not majority slave communities. Promoted to captain on 12 March 1754, Cramahé accompanied his regiment to America in 1758 where he took part in the siege of Louisbourg, Ile Royale (Cape Breton Island), and Quebec. Leaving behind his military career, Cramahé stayed in Quebec, accepting a post as Brigadier-General Murray’s secretary. Cramahé was eventually appointed Lieutenant Governor on 6 June 1771, a post that he held until April 1782. Pierre Tousignant and Madeleine Dionne-Tousignant, “Cramahé, Hector Theophilus”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cramahe_hector_theophilus_4E.html (date of last access 13 September 2014). Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, pp. 318–9. Although Riddell claimed that Isabella’s slave sale was the first after British conquest, perhaps it was the first completed with proper legal documentation, which was recoverable in Riddell’s time. As Poutanen points out, besides soldiers and sailors the men included in this transient population were migrant workers like those who worked on the construction of the Lachine Canal and harbour restoration. Mary Anne Poutanen, “‘To Indulge their Carnal Appetites’: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal” (PhD dissertation, Université de Montréal, Départment d’histoire, 1996), p. 85. Mary Anne Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship, Kinship, and Community: Gender, Homelessness, and Mutual Aid in Early-Nineteenth-Century Montreal”, eds. Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, Negotiating Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), pp. 41–2. Poutanen names the heightened presence of troops during the War of 1812 and the rebellions of 1837–38. She also states that more than one thousand soldiers lived in the Quebec Barracks in Old Town between 1839 and 1854. She further notes that more than one thousand soldiers were quartered at the barracks each year between 1839 and 1854. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 160–1. Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1981), pp. 148–9. Senior notes that of the thousand or more soldiers based at Montreal each year from 1839 to 1854, only six per cent received army rations and barrack lodgings for families. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 42; Senior, British Regulars, pp. 148–9. Before marrying, a soldier had to apply to his commanding officer who then investigated the woman’s moral character. Senior also noted that when recruiting for the newly formed Royal Canadian Rifles, the policy was changed to permit 12 wives per 100 soldiers to receive army rations and barrack accommodations, rather than the usual 6. Furthermore, the regiment was deliberately formed with senior soldiers who had already given 15 years of service, to attract more stable, sober men. Senior, British Regulars, pp. 35–6. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, pp. 42–3. Poutanen mentions a group of soldiers rescuing a vagrant woman from an arrest by Sub-constable James McGough as well as a large group of soldiers and vagrant women who “repelled the constabulary” after being reported for stealing apples from Pierre Parent’s farm (p. 42). Senior, British Regulars, p. 149. Poutanen argues that the records demonstrate that many soldiers were caught in brothels after their eight o’clock tattoo. As such, she contends that either late passes were easily obtained or military regulations were commonly ignored. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 128. Private report on desertion by Lieutenant General William Rowan to General Brown, adjunct general, Horse Guards, 1 March 1851 (Eyre Papers); cited in Senior, British Regulars, p. 149. There are no listings for Dolly’s Tavern or for any tavern on St. James Street in the Montreal business directories for 1844–45 or 1845–46. There was however, an establishment called Dolly’s Chop House listed as “Isaacson, R.P. (Dolly’s Chop House,) St. François Xavier street, opposite post office” in the

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1843–44 directory. It could be that Krieghoff invented the name of the tavern or that he created the genre scene as emblematic of life in Quebec as opposed to a specific scene composed from something he had witnessed in a real location. It may also be that the owner of the Dolly’s Tavern did not subscribe to Robert W.S. Mackay’s directory and therefore was not listed. Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1843–4, containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, second, a directory of the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, etc., in the city; and, third, a classified business directory, in which the names of the subscribers are arranged under their proper business trade. accompanied by a new map of the city (Montreal: Printed and Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and by Robert W.S. Mackay, undated), p. 253; Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1844–5, containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, second, a classified business directory, in which the names of subscribers are arranged under their proper business heads; and, third, a directory to the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, &c. &c. in the city. (Montreal: Printed and Sold by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street and Robert W.S. Mackay, 115 Notre Dame Street, undated), p. 260; Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1845–6; containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally; second, a classified business directory, in which the names of subscribers only are arranged under their proper business heads; and, third, a directory to the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, &c. &c. in the city. (Montreal: Printed and Sold by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and Robert W.S. Mackay, 115 Notre Dame Street, undated), p. 273 all at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/ lovell/ (date of last access 21 August 2015). Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 152. Patrick Heenan, “Montreal: Old Montreal”, International Dictionary of Historic Places, vol. 1, Americas, ed. Trudy Ring, Noelle Watson, and Paul Schellinger (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 397. Krieghoff produced other paintings which featured soldiers including Interior Scene of Soldiers (1845) which represents three seated, uniformed soldiers in the presence of a fourth standing man who appears to be a pipe-smoking French habitant and The Jealous Husband (c. 1847) which featured a uniformed soldier in an inappropriately romantic embrace with a young female in the interior of a house as a disgruntled male, the female’s husband, with blue cap and red sash enters through the open door. Grasping the young woman’s right hand in his left, the soldier places his right hand to his chest and presses his face close to hers, appearing to make an earnest plea for her affections. The painting clearly implies that, unbeknownst to them, the young couple in the furtive embrace, are about to be caught. While the woman in the The Jealous Husband and Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal (1845) appears to be the same person, the male in the later work seems not to be the sexually aggressive standing soldier with the black jacket and red and black hat, but one of his two seated, red-haired companions who instead sport red coats and hats comprised of a red and white checked pattern, topped by a black band. The similarity of the couple in the later painting to subjects in the earlier work, make it possible that Krieghoff intended these images as a part of a narrative set. Both Interior Scene of Soldiers and The Jealous Husband are owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 109. In 1817,William Waters was accused of harbouring prostitutes in his pub across from the Quebec Barracks. Interestingly, he was not only accused by a police official, Town Sergeant Bernard Kelly, but also by two tavern keepers, David Baird and William Ireson (p. 109). Poutanen explained that, unlike the Montreal men who were regularly charged for being “loose, idle, and disorderly, or vagrants” for their lewd acts with local prostitutes, soldiers seemed to act with impunity and were customarily escorted back to the barracks. Indeed, soldiers and police seemed to be at odds in the settlement. The soldier Patrick Prindle bayoneted Sub-constable Thomas Dalhanty when he tried to rescue a woman from being “ill used”. Prindle then fled to the guard gate where he was admitted and protected by the Sergeant of the Guard and his fellow soldiers. While the soldiers were armed with bayonets, the police carried only staves and rattles. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 159. “Cornelius Krieghoff (1815–1872)”, Galerie Alan Klinkhoff, at http://www.klinkhoff.com/gwk/home/ gwkexhbrowse.asp?WID=1214&artist=75&lrg=y (date of last access 18 January 2013). The painting was then passed down to Meighen’s daughter, Gwyneth Frances Meighen, and then to the subsequent owner who placed it up for auction. Private report on desertion by Lieutenant Rowan to Brown; cited in Senior, British Regulars, p. 150.

96 A tale of two empires 39 Senior relates that the Roman Catholic Church, seeking to save women from a life of prostitution, dispatched four nuns (two English and two French) from Le Havre to run a house of refuge in Montreal for dispossessed females. Unsurprisingly, the refuge was located, along with the main British barracks, in the settlement’s most inhabited Quebec suburb. Senior, British Regulars, p. 149. 40 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 98. 41 Poutanen, “ To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 126. Raigan was the widow of the soldier Daniel Burke. 42 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 149. John Anderson, acting sergeant of the Royal Artillery, complained that he had witnessed Nancy Murray frequenting the Quebec Barracks where she slept with different soldiers (p. 166). 43 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 160. 44 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 28. 45 Senior, British Regulars, pp. 146, 150. 46 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 108. 47 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 109. 48 Senior, British Regulars, p. 146. 49 Poutanen, “To Indulge the Carnal Appetites”, p. 153. Another tactic in curbing the ubiquity of prostitution and intemperance was to attempt to control the growth of the tavern industry at the source. In 1812, justices of the peace refused to license new taverns. An 1839 report by the Committee on Tavern Licenses claimed that the number of taverns exceeded the needs of the population (p. 154). 50 Anonymous, Rambles, aVisitor to Montreal, 1816, n.p.; cited in Senior, British Regulars, p. 149. 51 Anonymous, Montreal Pocket Almanac, 1844, p. 26; cited in Senior, British Regulars, p. 149. 52 John McGregor, British America, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1832), vol. 2, p. 504. 53 Teresa Gómez Reus and Terry Gifford, “Introduction”, Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces, eds. Teresa Gómez Reus and Terry Gifford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 3. 54 John Anthony Cuddon, “Liminality”, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th ed. (Oxford:WileyBlackwell, 2013), p. 398. 55 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 100–1. Howe’s cause of death was cited as “intemperance, disease, and destitution”, and Corneille’s as “dropsy induced by intemperance” (p. 101). 56 Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities in Nineteenth and TwentiethCentury Montreal”, Negotiating Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), p. 9. 57 After a man lured the young Julie Doyer of Quebec City to Betsey Martin’s brothel, Martin stole her clothing and allowed a number of soldiers to sexually assault her. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 103. 58 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 104. 59 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 150–1. It was not uncommon for prostitutes to expose themselves, in the streets or from within their homes. Marguerite Depaté was incarcerated for displaying her unclothed body in front of a window from inside a building on Notre Dame Street. Catherine Ryan wore a red shawl and a plume of black feathers. 60 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 105. 61 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 28. 62 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 29. As Poutanen explains, the vulnerability of such women was increased since charities like the House of Industry (founded in 1819) refused to provide aid to “disreputable” people. But she also argues that vagrants often avoided state-run or religious charities due to their Draconian policies, which sought to reconfigure the poor according to bourgeois models (p. 30). 63 Christer Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder”, Atlantic Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (April 2009), p. 49. 64 For instance, in her study of Fort Wellington (the British garrison located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River at Prescott) between 27 July 1840 and 3 January 1846, Duffin has discovered that of the 278 soldiers admitted for a total of 462 times to the garrison hospital, venereal disease was cited as a factor in the admission in 27 cases. Syphilis and gonorrhoea were specifically named in 23 cases involving 17 different men. In another nine cases, venereal disease was considered and then rejected as the diagnoses. Jacalyn Duffin, “Soldiers’Work; Soldiers’ Health: Morbidity, Mortality, and Their Causes in an1840s British Garrison in Canada”, Labour / Le Travail, vol. 37 (Spring 1996), pp. 42, 55.

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65 Riddell documented Isabella as first being sold by Captain Thomas Venture to George Hipps at auction, but gave no date. Hipps, described as a merchant butcher, then sold Isabella to the lieutenant governor on 14 November 1778, who later sold her to Peter Napier, a captain in the British Navy, on 20 April 1779. Cramahé paid 50 pounds Quebec money (or 200 Spanish piastres) for Isabella and sold her to Napier “with her clothes and linens” for 45 livres, Quebec or Halifax money. See: Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, p. 324. 66 Riddell documented the “hiring out” of a Negro male slave known as Louis Lepage by Jean Baptiste Vallée of Quebec on 27 December 1744 to Francois de Chalet, Inspector General of the Compagnie des Indes, “to serve him as a sailor for the remaining term of de Chalet’s tenure of the Ports of Cataraqui (Katarakouye, i.e., now Kingston, Ontario) and Niagara”. Other cases include a Negro female slave named Flora who was relocated from L’Assomption to Montreal (both Lower Canada, now Quebec) when she was sold along with a Negro male named Caesar to Solomon Levy, by James McGill, acting on behalf of Thomas Curry. A Negro woman named Sarah was moved from Saratoga to Montreal when she was sent by her owner Hugh McAdam to be sold by his friend John Brown to James Morrison of Montreal on 20 February 1785. William Ward of Vermont sold three Negro slaves (Tobi aged 26, Sarah aged 21, and a child) on the open market in Montreal after purchasing them, along with a fourth Negro (Joseph aged 22), from Elijah Cady of Albany, New York. And finally, Caleb Jones moved a Negro female slave named Nancy Morton from “Mary Land” to New Brunswick. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, pp. 322–3, 327–8; and William Renwick Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1920), pp. 359–75, at pp. 370–1. 67 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 48. Although Poutanen’s extraordinary study, supported by a huge amount of archival research, sheds light on many important facets of the identity of male and female sex trade workers in nineteenth-century Montreal (like ethnicity, marital status, and occupation), she does not explicitly examine race. 68 McGregor, British America, vol. 2, p. 508. 69 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 93–4. 70 As Poutanen explains, the Montreal charities that aided vagrant women or those involved in the sex trade were largely funded by private philanthropy. One such charity, established by Agathe Henriette Latour (the widow McDonell), in the suburb of St. Antoine was known by three names: the Repentant Female Society, Magdalen Asylum, and the Penitent Females’ Refuge. The Montreal Ladies Female Benevolent Society opened in 1816, serving indigent women and children through moral education. And the Montreal House of Industry attempted to reinforce gendered labour roles by teaching spinning, knitting, and needlework. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 15–6. 71 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 31. The houses of correction lacked sufficient ventilation in the summer and heating in the winter. Furthermore, food consisted of bread and water during the week and meat added “to a watery broth” on Sundays and holidays (pp. 31–2). 72 McGregor, British America, vol. 2, p. 508. 73 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, pp. 32–3. Poutanen notes that of the women that were repeatedly arrested for vagrancy-related offences, the majority were both non-francophone and single women. 74 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 33. Poutanen notes that prostitutes regularly sought out the farmers’ fields and orchards around the city as refuges which could provide food (fruit, vegetable, and milk) and shelter. Priests’ Farm was the property of the Seminary of the Sulpicians, which was comprised of various buildings, gardens, and orchards. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 142, 156. 75 Elizabeth Jane Errington, “‘Information Wanted’:Women Emigrants in a Transatlantic World”, eds. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), p. 12. 76 Errington, “Information Wanted”, p. 20. 77 Errington, “Information Wanted”, p. 21. 78 Poutanen names widows, wives with unemployed husbands, deserted women, and women escaping abusive spouses as amongst those who ended up in prostitution. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 86. 79 Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 88. She notes that recent female immigrants were often perceived as unskilled and entered what was in Montreal a precarious labour market.Their situations were

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worse if they emigrated in late autumn since employment opportunities disappeared in the winter months (pp. 92–3). The experiences of a woman like Bridget Howe, if recoverable, would shed light on the nature of the interactions between these vulnerable women and the penal system in nineteenth-century Montreal. Howe was arrested at least 29 times for vagrancy, eventually suffering a death “hastened by disease, destitutions and alcoholism” at the age of 26. She spent most of her last six years in jail. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, pp. 32–3. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 31. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 162. Since this incident took place in 1819, several years after Mackey argues that the institution of slavery had died out in Quebec, Ann Taylor was most likely a free woman. Mackey claims that slavery had largely ended in Montreal by the turn of the nineteenth century. Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery:The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), p. 6. Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, p. 324. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 41. Poutanen’s examination of admission records for Montreal General Hospital indicate that many streetwalkers, in their teens or early twenties, sought treatment for venereal disease. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 80–1. Sproule’s second name appears as Auchmaty (Harper) in some sources and Auchmuty (Landry) in others. See: J. Russell Harper, “Sproule, Robert Auchmaty”, Early Painters and Engravers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1970); and Pierre B. Landry, “Sproule, Robert Auchmuty”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7 (1836–50), at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sproule_robert_auchmuty_7E.html (date of last access 1 December 2013). “Views of Montreal, Robert A. Sproule”, Canadian Courant, 14 November 1829; cited in Jacqueline Riddle, “Uncovering Slavery and Empire: Six Views of Montreal in 1830”, Legacies Denied: Unearthing the Visual Culture of Canadian Slavery, ed. Charmaine A. Nelson (Montreal: Printed for author by McGill Copy Service, 2013). The views included: Place d’Armes, Montreal; View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal; SaintJames Street, Montreal; Nelson’s Monument, Montreal, Notre-Dame Street looking West; View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island; and View of the Harbour, Montreal. Harper also notes that Sproule married Jane Hopper in Montreal in 1831. Harper, “Sproule, Robert Auchmaty”, p. 295; Charles P. De Volpi and P.S.Winkworth, Montreal: A Pictorial Record: Historical Prints and Illustrations of the City of Montreal, Province of Quebec, Canada, 1535–1885, 2 vols (Montreal: Dev-sco Publications, 1963), vol. 2, p. 6. Mary Allodi, “Bourne, Adolphus”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11 (1881–90), at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bourne_adolphus_11E.html (date of last access 1 December 2013). Allodi, “Bourne, Adolphus”; cited in Riddle, “Uncovering Slavery and Empire”, p. 116. Harper, “Sproule, Robert Auchmaty”, p. 295. Landry, “Sproule, Robert Auchmuty”. McGregor, British America, vol. 2, p. 505. Senior, British Regulars, p. 164. Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 44. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 152. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, p. 99. Poutanen, “To Indulge their Carnal Appetites”, pp. 110, 145. Poutanen notes that Jeanette Chenette, Phillis Locas, and Jane Eggs, known prostitutes, were all arrested in October 1828 on the Champ de Mars (pp. 155–6). Constable Louis Malo arrested Angélique Cataford, Louise Perrault, Marie Gagnon, Catherine Clarke, Marie Casavant, and Marie Gagnier on the Champ de Mars and imprisoned them in the common gaol for being vagrants and women of bad fame (p. 166). Susan Ouellette, “Mobility, Class, and Ethnicity: French Canadians in Nineteenth-Century Plattsburgh”, NewYork History, vol. 83, no. 4 (Fall 2002), p. 368. Frank Lewis and Marvin McInnis, “The Efficiency of the French-Canadian Farmer in the Nineteenth Century”, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 40, no. 3 (September 1980), p. 498. Lewis and McInnis, “The Efficiency of the French-Canadian Farmer”, p. 497. Ouellette, “Mobility, Class, and Ethnicity”, p. 367.

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103 George Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of the War (London: Tinseley Brothers, 1865), pp. 184–5; cited in Karen Dubinsky, “Local Colour: The Spectacle of Race at Niagara Falls”, Racism, Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada, eds. Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson (Concord: Captus Press, 2004), p. 227. 104 George Heriot, Travels Through the Canadas, containing a description of the picturesque scenery on some of the Rivers and Lakes; with an account of the Productions, Commerce, and Inhabitants of those Provinces (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1813), p. 128. 105 John Lambert, Travels Through Lower Canada, and the United States of North America in theYears 1806, 1807, and 1808:To which were added Biographical Notices and Anecdotes of some of the leading Characters in the United States; and those who have, at various Periods, borne a conspicuous Part in the Politics of that Country (London: T. Gillet for Richard Phillips, 1810), vol. 1, p. 289. 106 Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship”, p. 28. 107 I have used the term “cradleboard” instead of “papoose” since the latter was an Algonquin term for indigenous children. The word was then taken up by Europeans and Euro-Americans and used generically to refer to Native children and the cradleboard in which they were carried. As such, the use of the term by whites served to homogenize Native cultures and erase culture specificity. I am grateful to Anna January for directing me to this history. Charles L. Cutler, Tracks that Speak: The Legacy of Native American Words in North American Culture (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2002), p. 172. 108 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (Boston: The Boston Bewick Company, 1836), vol. 2, p. 476. 109 Joan Sangster, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, The Labouring Body, and Working-Class History”, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on CanadianWomen’s History (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2011), p. 411. 110 Lambert, Travels Through Lower Canada, vol. 1, pp. 280, 284. 111 Thomas Johnston, Travels Through Lower Canada interspersed with Canadian Tales & Anecdotes, and Interesting Information to Intending Immigrants (Edinburgh: J. Glass: 1827), p. 41. 112 Edouard-Zotique Massicotte, Athlètes canadiens français recueil des exploits de force, d’endurance, d’agilité, des athlètes et des sportsmen de notre race, depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Montreal: Librairie Beauchemin Limitée, 1900), p. 13; cited in Senior, British Regulars, p. 146. 113 The reply, which provided two formulas, came early in the New Year. See Basto, “Mr. Mesplet”, Montreal Gazette, Thursday 5 January 1786, no. 1, p. 4. 114 Spadille, “Mr. Mesplet”, Montreal Gazette, Thursday, 29 December 1785, no. 19, p. 4. 115 Lambert, Travels Through Lower Canada, vol. 2, pp. 76–8. 116 John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America for theYears 1757, 1758, 1759 and 1760, ed. Arthur G. Doughty (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1915), vol. 2, p. 145; cited in Paul E. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army”, Journal of Military History, vol. 60, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 445–70, at p. 468. James Murray was appointed Governor of the District of Quebec on 27 October 1760. 117 Johnston, Travels through Lower Canada, p. 96. 118 Lewis H. Thomas, “Walker, Thomas”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/ en/bio/walker_thomas_1788_4E.html (date of last access 1 December 2013). As Thomas further relates, “Relations between the merchants and the military became so acrimonious that Murray asked Walker and three other magistrates to come to Quebec on 13 December to explain their actions. But on the night of the 6th masked men broke into Walker’s house, beat him severely, and cropped one of his ears. Murray wrote in his report that some 20 men had been involved in the attack and that suspicion had fallen on members of the 28th.” 119 Gage Papers, vol. 7, CL; cited in Kopperman, “The Cheapest Pay”, p. 455. 120 Knox, An Historical Journal, p. 401; cited in Kopperman, “The Cheapest Pay”, p. 454. 121 Mary Prince was sold at auction for 57 pounds (37 pounds Bermuda currency) in Hamble Town, Bermuda to a Captain I – of Spanish Point, after which she was separated from her mother and her sisters. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 62–3. 122 Prince accompanied Mr and Mrs Wood to England on a journey undertaken to enrol their son in school and take their daughters home. Although Prince claimed that she hoped for a cure for her rheumatism, she also desired emancipation and a return to Antigua and her husband as a free woman. Despite several attempts to purchase her freedom in Antigua and in London, the Woods refused to accept her money or

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that of others on her behalf. In the end, after repeated intimidation tactics in which the Woods threatened to throw her into the streets, Prince took her freedom and sought refuge with the Moravian Missionaries, gaining assistance from “some Quaker ladies” and the Anti-Slavery Society. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 81, 85–6, 89, 91. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 57. Prince was born in Brackish-Pond, Bermuda on a farm belonging to Charles Myners. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 63,70, 71, 75, 78. After Charles Myners’ death and the “division of the slaves”, Mary was bequeathed to Captain Darrell who gave her as a “pet” to his granddaughter Miss Betsey. Betsey’s mother, Mrs Williams, rented Prince to a Mrs Pruden who used her as a baby nurse (pp. 57–9). Prince was also forced to acclimatize to different labour regimes. While with Pruden she was a baby nurse, under Mr D – in Turk’s Island she worked in the salt ponds for ten years, and with the Woods she was their primary domestic, doing house and field labour for 13 years (pp. 75, 88). For example, the preface, through which an authorial sanction was bestowed, was written by the abolitionist Thomas Pringle. By way of authentication, Pringle offered that the narrative “was taken down from Mary’s own lips by a lady who happened to be at the time residing in my family as a visitor”. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 55–6. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 77. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 85. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 85. Prince claimed the Mrs Wood had said that she would not “allow a nigger man’s clothes to be washed in the same tub where hers were washed”. Prince astutely deduced that Mrs Wood was fearful that “I should lose her time, in order to wash and do things for my husband”. Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824), p. 9. Cooper was employed in 1817 by Robert Hibbert Esq. of East Hide near Luton, Bedfordshire to go to Jamaica “for the express purpose of ascertaining the practicability of improving, by means of religious instruction, the condition of the Negroes on his estate of Georgia, in the parish of Hanover” (p. B). He was allowed to adopt his own course of study (tuition) as long as it did not interfere with the running of the plantation. Given a house situated about a mile from the Negro village, he remained independent from the other whites connected with the slaves. Arriving at the estate on Christmas Day of 1817, he stayed for upwards of three years and then returned to England. His book advocated for the intervention of the British Parliament to remedy the evils of slavery by taking steps towards a gradual abolition. He went so far as to advise that Mr Wilberforce and others would benefit from an open, all-access trip to the West Indies to bear witness to the state of slavery first hand (pp. 28, 39–40). Robert Hibbert, relative of Thomas Hibbert (another Jamaican planter whose monument was represented in James Hakewill’s plate Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at Agualta Vale, St. Mary’s) and George Hibbert (a key player in the London factoring business) published a written response to Cooper’s book. Catherine Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire in the Era of Emancipation”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 18. Cooper seemed to be ignorant of practices of abortion as resistance. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 77–8. Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français (Montreal: Presse de L’Université Laval, 1963, pp. 26, 27, 42, 45, 46.); and Marcel Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Editions Hutubise HMH Ltée, 1990). See also Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, p. 15; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed., (Montreal; McGill-Queens Press, 1997), p. 9. Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français, (1960, 1963); cited in Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 9. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 10. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 9. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, pp. 5–6. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, p. 5. Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 10. Another key factor in the differences between panis and black slave life expectancies was the Native susceptibility to European diseases like smallpox. Winks documented the death of 58 Natives and only 2 Negroes to an epidemic in 1733 and later 56 Natives and 6 Negroes in 1755.

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140 Early census records in the colony are not a reliable source since they did not distinguish the enslaved by race. According to Elgersman, an examination of some twenty advertisements about the sale or escape of slaves in the Quebec Gazette between 1778 and 1794, reveal a 12:8 male to female ratio. However, female slaves ran away more infrequently than males, in part because they were loath to flee without their children or young relatives in their care. Furthermore, male slaves across the Americas regularly attempted to pass for free and to gain access to ships as sailors, an option not readily open to women. Elgersman contends that notarized documents about the appraisal and sale of slaves reveal a similar imbalance of 2:1. See Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, pp. 16, 19, note #42. 141 As an act of the British Parliament, the Constitutional Act, which came into effect on 26 December 1791, allowed for the reorganization of British North America into Upper Canada and Lower Canada, “under the pressure of thousands of Loyalists seeking refuge after the American Revolution.” Pierre Tousignant, “Constitutional Act, 1791”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, at http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ articles/constitutional-act-1791 (date of last access 20 November 2013). 142 According to Browne, Murray was “Appointed governor of the garrison of Quebec on 12 Oct. 1759, he became governor of the District of Quebec on 27 Oct. 1760 and governor of the province on 21 Nov. 1763.” G. Peter Browne, “Murray, James”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/ en/bio/murray_james_4E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). 143 Browne, “Murray, James”. 144 Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 8. 145 When the Spanish resistance was finally crushed in 1659, they left behind a small marginalized population including Portuguese Jews, Spanish poor, and Maroons. See Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaica Creole (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 13. The section on Jamaica in the “gazetteer” claims that the population of Jamaica in 1655 at the time of British conquest was only 3,000 including 1,500 slaves. Anonymous, The North-American and the West-Indian gazetteer. Containing an authentic description of the colonies and islands in that part of the globe, shewing their situation, climate, soil, produce, and trade: with their former and present condition. Also an exact account of the cities, towns, harbours, ports, bays, rivers, lakes, mountains, number of inhabitants, &c (London: G. Robinson, 1776), n.p. 146 Hubert Charbonneau, Bertrand Desjardins, Jacques Légaré, and Hubert Denis, “The Population of the St. Lawrence Valley, 1608–1760”, eds. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 104. Charbonneau et al. contend that the British conquest prompted the departure of 2,000 people including one third of the nobility (p. 131). 147 Charbonneau et al., “The Population of the St. Lawrence Valley”, p. 99. Charbonneau et al. contend that the first official colonization policy, implemented by Louis XIV and his minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, prioritized the health of the population in France over its colonies, which were expected to grow through natural increase (p. 100). 148 Philip Girard, “British Justice, English Law, and Canadian Legal Culture”, Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 262. 149 Winks, “The Blacks in Canada”, p. 24. 150 Steeve O. Buckridge, “Dress as Resistance”, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), p. 71. 151 A. M’Naughton, “Kingston, September 10. Four Doubloons Reward. Ran Away”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated. 152 Frank Cundall, ed., “Introduction”, Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for the Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), p. xl; Buckridge, “Dress as Resistance”, p. 70. Rev. R. Bickell The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts. with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), pp. 38–47. 153 Diana Paton, “Tacky’s Rebellion (1760–1761)”, The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez, vol. 2, L–Z (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 623. 154 Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 24, 26. According to Richard Sheridan, the Maroon leaders were mainly comprised of Akan-speaking Coromantee slaves from the Gold Coast. Richard Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution”, Origins of the Black Atlantic, eds. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 27.

102 A tale of two empires 155 Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America”, The William and Mary Quarterly,Third Series, vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 252, endnote #4; Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 47–76, at p. 52; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441– 1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 6–7. 156 The list divided the enslaved into three age groups: 1 month to 6 years, 6 to 14 years, and 20 to 55 years. The list also documented slaves as able-bodied or old and infirm. A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788), ST West Indies Box 3(1), Huntington Library, San Marino, California, US. 157 The records for Hope Estate indicate the following ethnically marked names: Eboe Sampson (#116), Angola Sampson (#117), Eboe Toney (#120), Eboe Fanny (#266), Eboe Nancy (#276), Congo Sukey (#283), Angola Sukey (#284), Eboe Phillis (#301), and Eboe Dolly (#302). A List of Negroes. 158 Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 80, 117. Lewis implied that the Creoles were more assimilated and contented with their lot as slaves. He mentioned that on one occasion when he dispensed gifts of jackets to the males and cloth to the females, the Creoles were delighted by the show of deference towards him by the Africans (p. 80). On 24 February 1816 he recorded that the Creoles took pleasure in the mortification of the Eboes, “for the two bodies hate each other” (p. 117). Similarly, Buckridge, following Gardner, contends that Creole slaves referred to African slaves with derogatory homogenizing terms like “Guinea birds” or “salt water nagurs”. William James Gardner, History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Present Time; Including an Account of its Trade and Agriculture; Sketches of the Manners, Habits and Customs, of all Classes of its Inhabitants; and a Narrative of the Progress of Religion and Education In the Island (London: Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, E.C., 1873), pp. 175–6; Buckridge, “Dress as Resistance”, p. 70. 159 Thomas Hynes, “27th Sept. Twenty Dollars Reward. Ran away”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated. 160 John G. Reid and Elizabeth Mancke, “From Global Processes to Continental Strategies: The Emergence of British North America to 1783”, Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 22. 161 Roderic Beaujot and Kevin McQuillan, Growth and Dualism:The Demographic Development of Canadian Society (Toronto: Gage, 1982), pp. 12–4. 162 Adele Perry, “Women, Gender, and Empire”, Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 226–7. The fervent public resistance of Chloe Cooley to her potential sale and relocation to the US in part motivated Simcoe’s actions. Another case involving an enslaved black person and the Canada/US border was that of John Anderson. In 1853, Anderson killed a white plantation owner in the process of escaping from slavery in Missouri. Anderson made his way to Windsor, Canada West. Arrested in 1860, Missouri authorities sought extradition, which the premier of Canada West, John A. MacDonald, avoided by referring the matter to the courts. Although the Upper Canada Court of Queen’s Bench decided that Anderson was extraditable (under the Webster-Ashburton Treaty as implemented by the Fugitive Offenders’ Act of 1849), in January 1861 an application was made to the English Court of Queen’s Bench for a writ of habeas corpus directed at the sheriff at Toronto by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, requesting that he bring Anderson before the English court. While the English court heard no Canadian counsel, they granted the request. However, a rehearing at a Toronto court rendered the earlier decision moot when Anderson was released on a technicality. Girard, “British Justice”, p. 268. 163 Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica”, Journal of Social History, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), p. 66. 164 The migration, free and forced, of people of African descent to Canada took different forms in different regions at different historical moments. In the Maritimes, a large population of liberated blacks arrived after being promised their freedom in exchange for their loyalty to the British Empire during the War of 1812. These approximately 2,000 “black American refugees” arrived at Halifax and about 400 left immediately for New Brunswick. They encountered considerable difficulties and resistance in receiving the material and social assistance and provisions, which the British colonial authorities had promised. Significant populations of African-American slaves also fled to Canada, mainly to the south-western region of

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Upper Canada, in the period between the British abolition of slavery and the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861). By navigating their flight through the clandestine abolitionist system known as the Underground Railroad, their freedom was secured when crossing the border since Britain had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833. However, the promise of freedom in Canada did not include racial equality. As Errington has noted, many newly liberated slaves arrived in Canada to experience the rapid entrenchment of segregated schooling, worship, housing, and employment.They also suffered through humiliating public debates about their “suitability” as free settlers. Tellingly, about 20 per cent of the approximately 20,000 black Upper Canadians chose to return to the US at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, as Errington notes, “disillusioned with their experiences under British rule” (p. 155). Elizabeth Jane Errington, “British Migration and British America, 1783–1867”, Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 154–5. For more on the history of institutional racism in employment against black Canadians see Colin McFarquhar, “The Black Occupational Structure in Late-Nineteenth-Century Ontario: Evidence from the Census”, Racism Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada, eds. Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson (Concord, Ontario: Captus Press, 2004). Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 158. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 158. During the War of 1812, Low served in the militia in the Quebec District from December 1812 to 4 November 1814 (p. 475, note #97). Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire”, p. 16. Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 56. Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 56. McGregor described the location of the settlement as being at latitude 45° 30′ and longitude 73° 25′. McGregor, British America, vol. 2, p. 504. James Logan, Notes of a Journey through Canada, the United States of America, and the West Indies (Edinburgh: Fraser and Co., 1838), p. 35. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 157. Although more rarely researched or discussed than Maroon communities in the Caribbean (ie. Jamaica) or South America (ie. Brazil and Suriname), maroonage did exist in mainland North America. Nubia Kai claims that maroon activity was concentrated in three key areas: “The Dismal Swamp region covering southern Virginia and northern North Carolina, southern Louisiana, and north-central Florida and the Everglades”. In the early eighteenth century, fugitive slaves fled British-governed Georgia and the Carolinas for freedom in Spanish-held Florida. With the offer of political asylum and freedom, these Black Seminoles joined forces with the Lower Creek Natives or Native Seminoles, “a large heterogeneous confederation of native people living in Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas who belonged to the Muscogee language group: the Hitchiti, Muscogee, Oconic, Kialegee, Alabama, Natchez, Apalachicola, Mikasuki, and Alachua”. Together they maintained their freedom and independence and prevented British expansion into the region. With the joint enslavement of blacks and Natives in New France and later Quebec, alliances would have been struck between both groups. However, to date there appears to be no evidence that a fully formed Maroon community ever took shape. See Nubia Kai, “Black Seminoles: The Maroons of Florida”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Special Issue: Remapping the Black Atlantic: Diaspora, (Re)Writings of Race and Space, vol. 8, no. 2 (July 2015), p. 147. The Montreal Gazette was initially published by the French printer Fleury Mesplet. Moving to Montreal from Philadelphia, he first published a French-language paper on 3 June 1778 called Gazette du commerce et littéraire. Later renamed Gazette littéraire du district de Montréal, the publication ceased in June 1779. With his death on 24 January 1794, his widow continued publishing the paper until 13 February. Edward Edwards, Montreal’s postmaster, resumed the publication on 3 August 1795. See Mackey, Done with Slavery, pp. 312–3. Sutton was described as a carpenter, “who had on a Blue Jacket, a pair of white trowsers and new hat [sic]”. Robt. M. Guthrie, “Run Away”, Montreal Gazette, no. 6, Thursday 29 September 1785, p. 4. To my knowledge, the only publications on slave dress in Canada are: Charmaine Nelson, “Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada”, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010); Emma Bardes, “The Great White North: Visual and Material Evidence of Black Slavery in the Quebec Winter”; and Grace Fu, “A Comparative Analysis of Nova Scotian and Southern US Slave Dress

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in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century”, Legacies Denied: Unearthing the Visual Culture of Canadian Slavery, ed. Charmaine A. Nelson (Montreal: Printed for author by McGill Copy Service, 2013). Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), p. 3. Buckridge understands apparel to be more limited than dress in its exclusion of bodily modification. Costume is similarly a narrower field since it refers to out-of-the-ordinary social roles or activities. Cooper mentioned that slaves were not provided with ready-made clothing, but that the owner supplied the materials from which the slaves had to make their clothing or pay someone to do so. Cooper, Facts, p. 33. Steve O. Buckridge, “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress”, Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (September 2003), pp. 62, 65. Buckridge argues that Jamaican slave owners, who were required by law to provide sufficient clothing for their slaves, resorted to the importation of cheap, coarse European fabrics and some Indian cotton. However, the extreme labour regimes and the nature of the labour would have “rotted or destroyed the meager clothing rations slaves received” (p. 62). Mary Prince recalled how her mother dressed her and her siblings in “the new osnaburgs in which we were to be sold”, prior to their public auction in the marketplace at Hamble Town. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 61–2. For scholarship on fugitive slave advertisements, see for example: Jonathan Prude, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750–1800”, Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 1 (June 1991), pp. 124–59; Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Southern History, vol. 61, no. 1 (February 1995), pp. 45–76; David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth Century Mid-Atlantic”, TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly (April 1999), pp. 243–72; Marcus Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway:The Iconography of Slave Escape in England and America”, Blind Memory:Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Robert E. Desrocher Jr, “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 59, no. 3 (July 2002), pp. 623–64. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, p. 78. McGregor, British America, vol. 1, p. 569. Joan E. Cashin, “Black Families in the Old Northwest”, Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 15 (Fall 1995), p. 456; cited in Buckridge, The Language of Dress, p. 81. Judith Fingard, “Wentworth, Sir John”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/ bio/wentworth_john_1737_1820_5E.html (date of last access 3 January 2014). Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 366. Although Riddell claims that Wentworth sold 19 slaves, only 18 names are provided. Riddell lists Abraham, James, Lymas, Cyrus, John, Isaac, Quako, January, Priscella, Rachel, Venus, Daphne, Ann, Dorothy, and four children, Celia, William, Venus, and Eleanora (p. 366, note #11). Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 366. Fingard, “Wentworth, Sir John”. See: Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, pp. 327–8; and Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, pp. 360, 362. Not only were the black slaves within Canada international, but white Canadian slave owners also owned slaves who lived outside of Canada. In one such case the executors of the estate of the deceased John Margerum of Halifax noted credits of £29 9s 4½d for the sale of a Negro boy at Carolina. See Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 362. I first issued this call in the book Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 57. I have first-hand experience of the ways that the unwritten, race-blind cataloguing policies of many Canadian museums impede research on racially marginalized populations. Even when historical (or any) images of black subjects exist within a collection, they are often catalogued only in terms of other markers of identity like sex, gender and class. This is certainly a manifestation of the greater problem of Canada’s myth of racial tolerance and the denial of the nation’s colonial origins. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 23. While the English are generally thought of as the quintessential slave owning class of the British Empire (the Scottish as the overseers and the Irish as the indentured servants), recent research has revealed that at

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the time of abolition, in relation to population size, the highest rates of slave ownership were in Scotland. These findings have emerged from the research of Catherine Hall and Nick Draper who are examining the records of the Slavery Compensation Commission, which consist of 1,631 ledgers, the T71 files, held at the National Archives (Kew). The commission was in charge of the dispersal of £20 million (£16 to £17 billion in contemporary currency) to the 46,000 British slave owners as compensation for the loss of their slave “property”, which consisted of 800,000 people of African descent. This compensation package was 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. These documents are particularly significant since they form what is arguably the most comprehensive census of British slave ownership at the moment of its demise on 1 August 1834. David Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership has been Buried: Now its Scale can be Revealed”, The Guardian, 12 July 2015 at http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed (date of last access 14 August 2015). Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 9. Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, p. 377. On 16 December 1784, James McGill represented Thomas Curry of L’Assomption in the sale of an enslaved man named Caesar and an enslaved woman named Flora, both described as “Negro”, to a Montreal merchant named Solomon Levy for the amount of 100 pounds Quebec currency. Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France”, p. 327. David Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership has been Buried”. at http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed (date of last access 14 August 2015). Marie-Charlotte (a Roman Catholic) and James (an Anglican born into the Church of Scotland) were married on 2 December 1776 by the Anglican pastor Reverend David Chabrand Delisle. McGill then became stepfather to two of Marie-Charlotte’s sons, François-Amable and Thomas-Hippolyte. Thomas eventually named his son, James McGill Trottier Desrivières, after his stepfather. Upon his death in 1813, McGill’s key beneficiaries were his wife, François-Amable, and James McGill Trottier Desrivières. But as Cooper notes, he also left bequests for “Old friends . . . the Montreal poor, the HôtelDieu, the Sisters of Charity of the Hôpital Général (Grey Nuns), the Hôpital Général of Quebec, and two Glasgow charities.” John Irwin Cooper, “McGill, James”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcgill_james_5E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). Another sign of McGill’s religious flexibility was in his contribution of £200 each to the Poor Protestants of Montreal and the Poor Roman Catholics of Montreal. James McGill Collection, MS 435, container 1, file 10 (1813), transcript of James McGill’s will by Alice Lighthall, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Senior, British Regulars, p. 42. Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 9. James McGill, Cash Book, accession #: 0000–1207.01.0, McGill Archives, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. This particular ledger is named as being produced in Montreal and begins on 1 June 1797. The currency of the ledger was British pounds, shillings and pence (£ s d). Examples of rum transactions include, Folio 2: notation 11, 9 June 1797, for 15 puncheons from Quebec; notation 3, 13 June 1797, received 90£ 7s 6d for sale of two puncheons (241 gallons); Folio 10: notation 2, 13 July 1797, received 41£ 12s 6d for a puncheon of rum (111 gallons); notation 11, 14 July 1797, received 41£ 12s 6d for a puncheon of rum (111 gallons); Folio 20: notation 11, 14 August 1797, received 118£ 13s for three puncheons of rum; notation 11, 15 August 1797, received 82£ 5s for two puncheons of rum (235); Folio 30: notation 28, 15 September 1797, for seven puncheons spirits in exchange for rum 830 gallons (373£ 10s); Folio 31: notation 77, 15 September 1797, to sales of rum for acct. of P. Lawrie 665£ 18s 9d for 19 puncheons (2,131 gallons). The ledger also lists payments for the trade of tobacco, molasses, and sugar although the last is of a quantity, which may indicate personal consumption as opposed to trade. See Folio 4: notation 22, 22 June 1797, payment for tobacco purchased (372£ 15s 7d); Folio 20: notation 2, 15 August 1797, to merchandise received for 109 gallons of molasses (24£ 10s 6d); Folio 15: notation 16, 31 July 1797, to A. & I. Robertson for sugar loaf (1£ 18s 4d). The ledger also holds other entries related to McGill’s participation in sea trade. For instance, payments to a cooper named James Jackson who was most likely employed to make the puncheons for McGill’s trade in rum and molasses, etc., are noted, such as: Folio 5: notation 1, 26 June 1797, Todd McGill Dn. To James Jackson, cooper 53£ 6s 9d, and a second notation 1, 26 June 1797 for James the cooper’s wages since April 6£ 9s 7d; Folio 27: notation 25, 7 September 1797, James Jackson, cooper, paid him 2£. Other entries relevant

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203 204

205 206 207 208 209 210

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212 213 214 215

to sea trade include payments for canal tickets and the crews of vessels: Folio 12: notation 3, 24 July 1797, paid a canal ticket for three boats 3£ 15s; Folio 13: notation 3, 25 July 1797, paid a boat crew returned from Kingston 8£. There is no indication if Kingston here referred to the formerly named Cataraqui in Upper Canada (which had been renamed King’s Town in 1783) or Kingston, Jamaica. Cooper also notes that during the occupation of Montreal by the troops of the Continental Congress from November 1775 to May 1776, during which time McGill’s home became a “loyalist rendezvous”, his cellars were ransacked and 14 puncheons of rum were stolen. According to Lee and Barringer, a puncheon, which was 90–100 imperial gallons, was the standard measure for rum. Cooper, “McGill, James”; Alexander Lee and Tim Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 318. J.I. Cooper, “McGill, James”. With the Consolidated Slave Act of 1792, slave owners were required to provide provisions grounds to their slaves at the ratio of 1 acre for every 10 slaves.Verene A. Shepherd, “Work, Culture, and Creolization: Slavery and Emancipation in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro MartinezRuiz (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 33–4. Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, p. 377 Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, p. 108. Mackey, Done with Slavery, pp. 72, 443 (note #130). Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 168. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 72. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. Richard Rogers, another black man, joined the labour force in 1810. Based on journal entries for payments, Mackey indicates that two other black men may also have joined the ship’s workforce at a later date; Joseph, who may have been Native or black and Black Jack (p. 478, note #6). Mackey’s source is: MA, Molson Archives, LAC, MG28 III 57, v. 46, Journal 1808–10, entries under dates 18 June and 9 July 1810. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. L’Africain and Robert Ashley were paid 1£ 16 s 8d for 11 days’ work or 3s 4d per day. Although the nature of the work is not known, Mackey speculates that they may have been put to work building a cabin since they were employed before the official launch of the ship. He also notes that L’Africain was listed as John African in the journal entries. Mackey’s source is: MA, Molson Archives, LAC, MG28 III 57, v. 46, Journal 1808–10, entries under dates 1 and 29 July 1809. Bonham C. Richardson, Caribbean Migrants: Environment and Human Survival on St. Kitts and Nevis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 75. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 15. Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern AtlanticWorld (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 4–5. Bickell was a member of the University of Cambridge, the late Naval Chaplain at Port-Royal, sometime curate of that parish, and had previously served in the same capacity for the city of Kingston. He was very likely in Jamaica at the same time as James Hakewill (1820–21) since he served two years and three months of his service in Port-Royal and left the parish in April 1823. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 92. As the Rev. Thomas Cooper explained, a curacy was implemented in order to have Christian instruction for the slaves on the plantations. Appointed by an act of legislature and paid 500 pounds, the curate (junior to a rector) was appointed to a region and invested with the task of preaching on the plantations to the slaves who wished to attend his services, if permission was first received from the owner. However, Cooper argued that the legislation had failed since some curates were “lukewarm” and many planters opposed their work. As evidence he recounted the challenges of the curate for Hanover parish who gained permission to preach on one plantation for every ten that he approached. In Cooper’s assessment, the curates had been diminished to assistants of the rectors. Furthermore, he stated that a bylaw, which required rectors to set aside two hours every Sunday for the religious instruction of slaves, was not being observed. Cooper, Facts, pp. 11–12. (It should be noted that here and in the rest of this volume, the sources consulted did not necessarily specify the currency in which transactions were conducted: this includes the purchase of slaves and plantation estates, payment of salaries, etc.)

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216 Cooper, Facts, pp. 57–8. 217 Cooper explained that workhouses were used as punishment for “incorrigible” slaves who were sent at the whim of the overseer or master/mistress for any length of time without the intervention of a magistrate. He also noted that slaves were chained together, two by two, and forced to repair the roads in the day and locked up at night. After witnessing a gang at work on a trip to Lucea, Cooper described the restraints as follows: an iron ring is locked around the neck to which a stout chain is attached, leading from one slave’s neck to the other, males and females are shackled in the same way. Cooper, Facts, pp. 27, 57–8. 218 Bickell, TheWest Indies as they are, pp. 38–47. Such terms also appeared in slave advertisements. Published in the same newspaper, one Jamaican example listed “a sambo man named John Edwards”. Another listed a “sambo man named George, a creole of this island, about five feet four and half inches high marked SIP4 on top on the left shoulder, and on his right a heart and M.” And a third described “a slender made artful sambo man, named Edward”. Geo. Moravia, “27 September 1804. Went Away”, Levy Hyman, “Kingston, 10th Sept. 1804. Ran Away”, and John James Clarke, “Hampstead-Park Pen, September 17, 1804. One Hundred Pounds reward. Elope”, The Daily Advertiser, vol. 15, no. 237, Wednesday 3 October 1804, unpaginated. 219 Eltis et al. argue that the earliest inter-island slave trade was developed by the Spanish to transport the indigenous peoples that they had enslaved to the principal Spanish settlements on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic).David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16. Philip D. Morgan contends that a robust inter-island slave trade existed between various islands, citing Curaçao, due to its free trade, as a hub. But he also mentions that before Cuba had established a direct Atlantic trade in African slaves, Cuban slavers had purchased their slaves from neighbouring islands with “well-established markets” like Jamaica and Dominica. Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments”, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures, eds. David Eltis and David Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 133. Richardson noted that the development of inter-island slave trading, which allowed slavers to move the enslaved from one island to another, was directly connected to the British abolition of the slave trade from Africa in 1807. Richardson, Caribbean Migrants, p. 76 220 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 126. I have added the quotes to refugees to express my discomfort and disagreement with Bickell’s designation of a wealthy group of privileged white male and female slavers as victims of a revolution, which ultimately liberated the Africans whom they and their ancestors had enslaved and brutalized for decades. 221 Mackey provides the date of Sarah’s/Charlotte’s wedding, but not her manumission. 222 Kenneth Kiple and Virginia Kiple, “The African Connection: Slavery, Disease and Racism”, Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, vol. 41, no. 3, 3rd Quarter (1980), pp. 211–222. An enslaved person’s ability to survive smallpox also became a means of identification for slave owners and catchers since the disease often left pronounced marks on the skin. One nineteenth-century Jamaican advertisement described “a sambo man named John Edwards” who was “much marked with the small pox”. Moravia, “27 September 1804. Went Away”. 223 Bickell, TheWest Indies as they are, pp. 34–5. 224 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 57. 225 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 58–9. 226 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 62. 227 Prince describes being stripped naked in public and flogged, being regularly punched and beaten in the head, being hit in the small of the back with a man’s boot, witnessing the constant torture of other slaves, being deprived of proper nutrition, sleep or rest, and medical attention, and being forced to work after floggings. This ongoing torture suffered consistently over the period of years, resulted in chronic back pain, rheumatism, and irreparable damage to her vision. Although she does not mention it, her body must also have been riddled with scars from the constant beatings and whippings. Furthermore, it would seem a normal outcome that she would have developed a nervous (mental health) disorder. The nature of the attacks from her owners was so unpredictable and their demands so impossible to fulfil that she must have existed in a constant state of terror. Although the nature of her labours – both domestic and agricultural – were commonly gruelling, Prince discovered a new level of suffering when she was sold

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to Mr D – on Turk’s Island. Put to work immediately with her fellow slaves in the salt ponds, she described developing painful boils from the constant immersion of her skin in the salt water for hours at a time. As she recalled, the boils would at times eat away at their flesh, down to the bone, causing the sufferers “great torment”. Prince also witnessed the cruel torture of an elderly, disabled slave named old Daniel. Mr D – would have him stripped, laid down on the ground and beaten with “a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw” (p. 74). This torture was followed by the application of a bucket of salt. As Prince related, because old Daniel’s wounds were never allowed to heal, they became infested with maggots. Writing about Jamaica, Thomas Cooper also described a slave who was “a notorious runaway” being strategically whipped consecutively so that the flesh was allowed to partially heal between floggings, after which “maggots had bred in the lacerated flesh”. In another particularly savage incident, when Prince was in the possession of Mr and Mrs I – she witnessed the torture of a fellow female slave named Hetty. After a cow had gotten loose, Mr I— “flew into a terrible passion” and ordered that the pregnant Hetty be stripped and tied up to a tree in the yard. Prince then related how he repeatedly flogged her with a whip and a cow-skin, even taking breaks from his own exhaustion only to start again. When he was done, Hetty, streaming with blood, “was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after a severe labour of a dead child” (p. 67). Not long after, Prince described how Hetty became swollen and died after “the water burst out of her”, perhaps a reference to massive internal bleeding or a haemorrhage, suffered in the wake of the savage beating (p. 67). The vengefulness and blood lust of Mr and Mrs I – demonstrate that the motivation for Hetty’s (and Prince’s) abuse was not to modify their behaviour. Indeed, their hatred of blacks and their inability to see their slaves as humans led to barbaric punishments that actually damaged their own economic interests. With Hetty’s death and the death of her unborn child, who also would have been their property, Mr and Mrs I – allowed their hatred of blacks to dispossess them of not one, but two black slaves. Thomas Cooper also described the flogging of pregnant slaves in Jamaica. He recounted the experience of two pregnant slaves who were punished for appealing to the overseer to leave the field and labour due to rain. Denied permission, they attempted to complain to the magistrate but were seized by a neighbouring overseer who restrained them in stocks before sending them back to their own plantation where their overseer again restrained them in stocks before having them flogged. When they appealed to the estate’s attorney, although he conceded that the punishment was severe, he nonetheless blamed the women for appealing to the magistrate before coming to him. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 65–74; Cooper, Facts, pp. 20, 21. Moira Ferguson, “Introduction to the Revised Edition – The Voice of Freedom: Mary Prince”, in Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 20. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 84. The Moravians were also established in Jamaica. The planter Matthew Lewis, owner of Cornwall Estate in Westmoreland, noted that they had taken up residence on a neighbouring plantation, Mesopotamia, and offered morning and evening lectures to the 300 slaves on the estate. However, in his estimation only 10 to 12 slaves reputedly attended each session and only about 50 had ever been baptized. Lewis contemplated allowing the Moravians to establish themselves on his plantation but thought it best to allow the Church of England clergymen the first opportunity (pp. 113–114). Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 85. Cooper, Facts, p. 46. One of Cooper’s main preoccupations was the impossibility of Negro marriage and family structures, which were under constant threat of interference from slave owners. Although he knew of no legal prohibitions or protections for slave marriage, he believed that marriage could not be fully established amongst slaves since it would alter their civil condition, something which the planters were determined to prevent. Instead, slaves participated in “mock marriages” which he decried as a type of farce since the edict that no man should be able to put asunder the marriage was patently false because the master or mistress had the right to separate any couple at their whim. Further, noting the ubiquity of corporal punishment undertaken by overseers and drivers, especially with field slaves, Cooper charged that slave marriages could not be respected in the gangs and became a curse and not a blessing (pp. 41, 43). Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 85.We should also consider what it meant for black women and men to attempt to create a healthy sexual relationship in the midst of such constant abuse and terror. Daniel James would have seen his wife naked and, unless she deliberately hid her scars from him (which may indeed have been impossible), he would have known in intimate detail the horror of the marks left by

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the whip and the cow-skin. Of Jamaica, Thomas Cooper claimed that he “never saw a Negro, who, when uncovered, did not exhibit marks of violence, that is to say, traces of the whip, on his body”. Although the strictures of white abolitionist sanction did not allow Prince to say so openly, she surely suffered repeated rapes and sexual violence while in the possession of some, if not all, of her white owners. Besides the delight of white slavers in stripping slaves naked prior to delivering public floggings, the vengefulness of her various white mistresses towards her likely signals their displeasure at their white husbands’ desire for the black Mary Prince. How did black men, themselves victims of physical abuse and sexually specific torture, react when faced with the scar-riddled bodies of their black slave wives? How did slave women, traumatized by institutionalized rape, find a way to be sexually intimate with the men that loved them? These are impossible questions. But studying the impacts of slavery in all of its horrid dimensions necessitates that we ask them. Cooper, Facts, p. 22. On the understudied topic of the sexual abuse of enslaved black males, see Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2011), pp. 445–64. 233 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 85. Tellingly, Prince related that despite the Wood’s constant complaints about her work ethic, they refused to sell her, although they sold five slaves while Prince was in their possession. In a moment of concession, Mr Wood agreed to allow Prince’s husband to reside in their yard (p. 85). 234 Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, p. 108. Under the entry for Joseph-François, Trudel also indicated “il ne sait signer”. This may refer to the lack of a signature in a church document. Trudel also notes that PierreAugustin was baptized. 235 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 71. Upon being sold to yet another slave owner, a Mr D – on Turk’s Island, who put her to work in the salt ponds, Prince’s food seemed to consist mainly or only of corn. She and the other slaves in Mr D—’s possession were given boiled Indian corn for breakfast and corn soup for lunch. For dinner Prince recalled being given raw Indian corn, which they had to pound in a mortar and boil for dinner. The use of the mortar was obviously physically taxing after a day of gruelling labour. The obscenity of making his slaves work this hard to prepare their dinners after an arduous working day that began at four o’clock in the morning reveals the utter wickedness and lack of compassion of white slave owners (pp. 71–2). For more on the topics of slave fertility and maternity and the relationship to nutrition, see: Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 35, no. 2 (April 1978), pp. 357–75; and Richard H. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health and Mortality of American Slaves, from Childhood to Maturity”, Journal of Economic History, vol. 46, no. 3 (September 1986), pp. 721–41.

3

Representing the enslaved African in Montreal

Portraiture and slavery Since Montreal was a settlement with an enslaved black minority, visual representations of this population do not abound in Canadian art, as is the case in the Jamaican representations, which will be discussed below. However, there are significant artworks, which have recorded the presence of black female and male slaves in Montreal.Two of the most important are François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) (Plate 1), produced by the French-Canadian artist (born in New France, later Quebec), and George Heriot’s Minuets of the Canadians (1807) (Plate 6), produced by the visiting Briton. As a portrait and a genre study respectively, they not only tell us about how black subjects were taken up by white Montreal-based artists across different genres, but they disclose critical information about the cultural and social lives of the enslaved within the Montreal settlement at the turn of the century. The fact that they were imaged at all and the nature of how they were represented speaks to the desire of the French-Canadian Beaucourt and the British Heriot to convey the racial, cultural, and sexual distinctiveness of the enslaved inhabitants of Montreal. I will begin with a discussion of Beaucourt’s portrait. An understanding of the role, function, and tradition of portraiture in eighteenth-century Europe, informs a critical reading of this painting. According to the Earl of Fife, writing in 1796, “. . . before this century, very few people presented themselves to a painter, except those who were of great families, or remarkable for their actions in service to the country, or some other extraordinary circumstance . . . as lately . . . every body [sic] almost who can afford twenty pounds, has the portraits of himself, wife and children painted [italics mine].”1 Likewise, this portrait cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the power dynamics within slavery. As Beckles has noted, Neither colonial statutes or slave codes, then, invested slaves with any rights over their own bodies, but rather transferred and consolidated such rights within the legal person of the slaveowners. This direct translation of legal entitlement into social power and authority meant that white men especially were located at a convergence where the

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racial, sexual, and class domination of slave women provided a totality of terror and tyranny [italics mine].2 While the two quotes cited above may initially appear to be worlds apart, I would argue instead that they are indelibly linked. The Earl of Fife explored the shifts in portrait production, which were changing the make-up of late eighteenth-century patronage. Meanwhile, centuries later, Beckles’ quote defined the nature of power and disempowerment within the context of slavery. Where the two converge is precisely where art meets slavery. But whereas the machinations of power are more obvious in Beckles’ quote, Fife’s quote also speaks to the issue of power. It reveals the extent to which access to cultural capital had been a privilege unattainable to the masses, jealously guarded and only accessible through a strict hierarchy based upon arbitrary ideals of social status and questionable notions of accomplishment. The dangerous authority elucidated by Beckles – the consolidation of legal and social power in the body of the white slave owner – seems oceans away from the type of cultural authority embodied in the art patron. Within the realm of portraiture, the art patron’s power was exerted over the artist whom they contracted and ultimate control over and approval of the likeness for which they paid was commonplace. However, in the unique and far more complex case which I explore here, the words of Fife and Beckles converge less abstractly since the art patron, the artist, and the slave owner, François Malépart de Beaucourt, were one and the same. With attention to the specificity of slavery in both Montreal and St Domingue/Haiti, I will argue that the subject matter (whom the portrait represented) and production (the conditions under which the portrait was made) of Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman must be situated within the complex social, political, and cultural environment of the late eighteenth-century Trans Atlantic World of which the enslavement of Africans was an essential part.3 The realm of eighteenth-century oil portraiture of which Fife wrote was one of mainly wealthy and often bourgeois or aristocratic patronage. Within the European and Euro-American contexts, these mainly white patrons sought out recognized artists for whom they would sit for hours while their likenesses were memorialized. Since within the process of patronage, most often the sitter was the patron, related to the patron or affiliated with the patron, it should come as no surprise that the entire point of the cultural exercise of portraiture was to achieve the most pleasing and flattering likeness. Although this type of historical “high” art portraiture was dominated by white sitters, Africans did become customary staples in the family and individual portraits of elite whites. According to Beth Fowkes Tobin, Several eighteenth-century portraits and conversation pieces contain the figure of the black servant. Most frequently a boy or an adolescent male, the servant is dressed in livery and wears either a turban or a skullcap. Both head coverings are exotic and allude to the Turkish, Moslem, and Mughal cultures of the Levant, northern Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. This conflation of Arabic, African, and Indian origins is typical of

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many eighteenth-century representations of black servants. What seems to matter is not that these servants are African, Muslim, or Indian, but that they are exotic, that they originate in tropical, fertile, and remote lands.4 In comparison, although much more rare, individual portraits of enslaved African subjects do exist. The scarcity of such works makes them mines of potential knowledge about the lives, experiences, and marginalization of black slaves as well as their encounters with white “high” art practice. The newly renamed Canadian painting Portrait of a HaitianWoman is just such a mine. Besides the odd nature of the original title, Portrait of a Negro Slave, the most remarkable elements of the painting are the exposure of the black woman’s breast and its deliberate juxtaposition with the prominent tray of tropical fruit.5 Noting the importance of the foreignness of black subjects, Tobin has argued, “Their status as exotics is reinforced by the frequency with which they are associated in prints and paintings with the consumption of foreign luxury goods such as sugar, tea, tobacco, and coffee, all commodities associated with the dark others of the world.”6 Beaucourt’s choice of tropical fruit obviously has the same function. The original title, Portrait of a Negro Slave, is an important testament to the legacy of slavery in which the painting participated. Significantly, the artist most likely did not choose this name. Rather, the anonymous nature of the title actually flags the painting as an oddity, recalling instead the sedimentation of memory over time and the practice of oral history; more than likely, people knew the artist to have painted his slave and knew the sitter to be an enslaved woman. In stark contrast, the great families that Fife recalled were people who wanted to be remembered as individuals. Portraiture as a genre is by definition the representation of a historically specific individual – a person who actually lived. The purpose of a portrait, then, is to capture specificity and likeness. As such, the traditional practice of titling portraits has been to bestow the name of the individual who was represented. As I will argue further below, although this portrait represents a dark-skinned black woman who once lived, the erasure of her individuality at the level of the title and the recollection instead of her race (Negro) and social status (slave) were directly informed by her abject position as an enslaved black woman. I also wish to argue, following Beckles, that the concentration of legal and social authority in the body of the white slave owner can be read not only in the life history of the woman depicted in the portrait, but in the process of cultural production itself and through the way that the black female sitter is represented; even more so since one of her owners was the artist himself, François Malépart de Beaucourt. It was through the making of the portrait itself and the ways that painting a slave did not correspond to the established practices and interactions of white patron–white sitter, that we can witness the colonial delineation and re-entrenchment of the clear social demarcations between white and black, free and enslaved, male and female. I also wish to read in this portrait the likely transit, the forced migration, of this woman from St Domingue (later Haiti) to Montreal and therefore to question and critique the portrait’s recent renaming as a means of expelling slavery from Canadian history. As Cooper has argued, “Canadian

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history, insofar as its Black history is concerned, is a drama punctuated with disappearing acts . . . Black history is treated as a marginal subject. In truth, it has been bulldozed and ploughed over, slavery in particular.”7 The problem of the erasure of blacks from Canadian history powerfully intersects with and cannot be separated from the erasure of Canadian slavery. As I will argue below, the renaming of this portrait by the McCord Museum (Montreal) and the nature of its recent installation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are actions, which continue this pathological Euro-Canadian amnesia.8 Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) was, until 2011, known as Portrait of a Negro Slave or Negress.9 Painted by the eighteenth-century French Canadian artist François Malépart de Beaucourt, this rare, early oil painting of a black female slave is an anomaly within the elitist Western practice of “high” art portraiture.10 Its anomalous nature resides in the fact that it is a fully finished, individual representation of a specific slave subject. Furthermore, it is the most professionally rendered image of a slave within the Quebec and Canadian context known to date. Due to its uniqueness, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore eighteenth-century conditions of slavery, including the intersectionality of race and sex in the identities and experiences of enslaved black females. As mentioned above, it can hardly be overstated that individual representations of slaves, servants or generally lower-class sitters were a decided rarity within eighteenth-century Western portraiture. While portraiture functioned dominantly as a genre through which individuality and social status could be celebrated, the ability to sit for a renowned artist was in itself a declaration of wealth, privilege, and cultural capital. In the context of early Quebec art, Barry Lord has noted, The people who actually did the productive work in Québec were obviously not in a position to pay the rates of $100 to $200 . . . Scratching out a living as habitants, or cutting trees and hauling lumber to British-owned ships for transport to factories in England, they were lucky if they could meet the basic cost of living at the best of times.11 Within the context of Quebec and Montreal, the clientele of what few portraitists existed in the period were dominantly of the bourgeois mercantile classes. French, Scottish, English or otherwise European by birth, their cultural traditions and aspirations were tied to the artistic traditions of their homelands. But whereas the portraits which wealthy whites commissioned of their white family members adorned the most grand areas of their homes and places of business, the rare slave portrait, usually commissioned and owned by the slave owner, also functioned as a testament to the owner’s status and the hanging of such portraits (often in less grand areas of the family estates and houses) echoed the diminished significance of the enslaved sitter. Since slave societies were organized to allow slaves to accrue wealth for the master/mistress and not customarily for themselves, slaves generally lacked the capital to pay for portraits (or any “high” art), and arguably, also the coveted knowledge to desire them. Furthermore, whether in a plantation setting like St Domingue or a northern settlement like Montreal, as discussed above

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in Chapter 2, slaves lived with their owners and therefore lacked the private residences in which to hang art works. In sum, they did not possess any true agency in the commissioning or production processes and would not necessarily have been compensated for their time like professional models. This disenfranchisement was only exacerbated in cases like that of Beaucourt when artist and patron were one and the same. Up until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the practice of portraiture (especially that of oil painting) in Britain and across Europe had remained the secure cultural domain of the considerably wealthy, the genealogically privileged, the noteworthy or the notorious. Writing in 1796, the Scottish Earl’s elitist lament cited above located an anxiety over the democratization of the genre, which hinged upon the dismantling of its traditionally exclusive class and racial affiliations. Fife’s distress locates a particular social unease over the reordering of a prestigious visual practice which had for centuries relied upon and helped to produce the strict class and racial hierarchization of humans. It is important to point out a few key issues. First, whereas the painting was only recently renamed Portrait of a Haitian Woman, for years it circulated as Portrait of Negro Slave and Negress. Both of the earlier titles highlighted the relevance of the female sitter’s race and slave status, at the same time as they rendered her anonymous. Second, the sitter’s anonymization was undoubtedly related to her marginalized status in Quebec and St Domingue (Haiti). Since a portrait is by definition a representation of a specific person, created over a period of sittings with the artist, it is a given that the artist knows the name of their sitter and that the portrait, the sitter’s likeness, is customarily named after them.Third, the sitter was usually also the patron or a relation or affiliate thereof, and as such, had control over the commission and their likeness. In contrast, portraits of slaves turned the traditional Western practice on its pretty elitist head. While none of the three names of the portrait recuperates the sitter’s identity, she was also not the patron of the artwork and therefore, as a slave, would have had no control over her likeness and no say in whether or not she wished to pose for Beaucourt or to pose in this way, with her breast exposed. Clearly then, her lack of agency makes the exposure of her breast even more exploitative.12 White female subjects simply were not customarily represented in this fashion within Western portraiture of this time.13 The examination of another contemporaneous Beaucourt portrait highlights the discrepancy between his depictions of black and white female sitters. His portrait of Madame Eustache Trottier Desrivières Beaubien, née Marguerite Malhiot (1793) represents a decidedly upper-class white female sitter, elegantly dressed and posed as if ready to welcome us for coffee and conversation.14 She is doubtless an upper-class woman as indicated by her dress, pose, and refined domesticity. That she has the leisure time to welcome us for coffee further underscores her upper-class status. But the most striking break from his earlier work is the stark difference in the handling of the dress for the two women. The black woman’s portrait is bluntly characterized by the strategic exposure of flesh, the juxtaposition of her bared breast with the tray of “exotic” fruits. However, in dramatic contrast the portrait of Marguerite is characterized by the absence of flesh; her face, the triangle between her chin and neck, and her hands. Or as Lord has put it, Beaucourt “has also bared her breast, as he wouldn’t have done with a white woman.”15

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Indeed, the sexually charged nature of the portrait points up the precarious status of black female slaves and their vulnerability to sexual exploitation and rape within the institution of slavery.16 As I have argued elsewhere, slavery necessitated a perverse intimacy. That is, slavery was built upon the constant physical, sexual, and biological coerced intimacy between whites and blacks wherein black bodies became the necessity of white power, society, sexuality, economy, and family.17 Due to the practice of “breeding” slaves, all aspects of female slave life came under invasive scrutiny from slave owners, including sexuality, marital status, workload, and diet.18 Therefore, the exposed breast of the enslaved black female in the Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) indexes her sexual labour and “breeding” potential as active considerations in her value and exchange. Geographical alienation and the hierarchy of enslavement Within the annals of Canadian Art History, Portrait of a HaitianWoman (1786), a rare visual document of a slave in early Quebec, has traditionally been discussed almost entirely in terms of its stylistic and tonal properties, the location represented in the portrait, and the status and oeuvre of the painter. For example, Dennis Reid, author of the canonical text A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1988), described it as an object that the artist painted possibly “while sojourning in Guadeloupe”.19 However, within the politics of New Art History, solely biographical and formal analysis have become problematic in their inability to critically address the politics of race, sex, and social status which informed the portrait within the contexts of eighteenth-century Quebec and St Domingue. As I shall discuss in greater detail below, only recently has it been confirmed that the portrait was produced in St Domingue. Prior to having this information, I would argue that the speculation on a tropical location – although legitimately triggered by the lush mountainous landscape, the tropical fruit still life, and the quality of light captured in the landscape vignette beyond the black woman’s bare right shoulder – also served to expel Trans Atlantic Slavery and the presence of black slaves from Canadian territories and narratives. Furthermore, regardless of where the portrait was actually painted (St Domingue, Quebec or elsewhere), the lush tropical vignette would have most likely been a later addition, which did not necessarily correspond to the location of production since portraits were customarily painted in the artist’s studio. Yet, not content only to disrupt Canadian slavery, Major-Frégeau also erased its Caribbean practices, arguing that the black female sitter could be a perfectly free young West Indian.20 I would argue that the use of the expression “un jeune antillaise parfaitement libre” is troubling for the ways that it performs a transformation of the sitter (named as a slave in the dominant title) into a free woman through a retroactive erasure of slavery that was, in this late eighteenth-century moment, an entrenched and brutal institution of Western imperial power that was prolific in the Caribbean and, as I will explore below, undeniably genocidal in St Domingue (Haiti).21 I would like to suggest then, that the recent renaming of the portrait functions in a similar way performing a double erasure; erasing Canadian slavery with the addition of the word “Haitian” and erasing Haitian slavery by replacing

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the word “slave” with “woman”. And it is through this disavowal that slavery can be always elsewhere. As Lord has astutely argued, Why is this foreign setting necessary? Along with the imported fruit and the colourful costume, it helps to make the subject exotic, unfamiliar, yet appealing. To imperialists and to their comprador allies . . . the working people of the colonies always appear as exotic, and it is one of the artist’s services to them to picture colonial people in this way.22 But returning for a moment to the landscape vignette, although a part of a portrait, it offers an opportunity for me to address some of this book’s key questions, which were posed in the introduction. Specifically, my questions stem from a desire to understand how the racialization of geography parallels or is bound to the racialization of populations and how this racialization of place and person has historically, in the Trans Atlantic World, served the imperial ends of the colonizer who manipulates the perception of foreignness or indigeneity to suit their own imperial agenda. Furthermore, the situation is far more complex than the uniform association of a race with a certain colonial geography. Rather, a prolific stratification within blackness was pervasive across the Americas through which African or racially unmixed black slaves became mainly associated with field labour, and the coloured or mixed-race slaves (often children of the planters/slaveowners) became associated with domestic labour. To this end, we can ask how Beaucourt’s insertion of the tropical landscape vignette and the tropical fruit still life functioned within the portrait as regards the geographic emplacement or displacement of the black female sitter, a Dominguan slave? How does her identity relate to this landscape? Did the perception of her identity shift depending upon the origins or location of the viewers of this portrait, Montreal or St Domingue? And how did the French imperial imaging and imagining of the territory of St Domingue produce her identity, not merely as a female slave, but as a black woman of supposedly compromised sexuality? Beaucourt’s landscape does not provide us with much to go on. Indeed, it is merely a dark-coloured triangulated peak overhung by a diagonal slash of white-grey cloud and a modulated blue sky. No structures or specific plant life are discernable. Rather, the rendering conveys the sense of a mountain dense with vegetation. As I shall discuss in greater detail below, Jacques Des Rochers has confirmed Beaucourt’s presence in Cap François, St Domingue in the late 1780s and in so doing, the settlement is the most likely site of the portrait’s production. In Leonora Sansay’s novel Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo . . . (1808),23 her white American protagonist Mary remarked of Cap François, “I feel like a prisoner in this little place, built on a narrow strip of land between the sea and a mountain that rises perpendicularly behind the town.”24 Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny also recalled the tall mountains that lay behind the town.25 But the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Creole lawyer and writer Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry provided a more detailed description. During an approach to the settlement from the

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Spanish to the French part of the island he celebrated the latter’s cultivation as “civilization”, mentioning the plantations, fields, and woods discernable in the mountains as signs of man’s industry.26 Michael Drexler emphasizes the importance of Cap François within the colonial project of the French Empire, arguing that “The natural landscape of St. Domingue was also transformed into the largest and most productive sugar manufactory in the New World, at its height producing around 40 percent of the sweetner consumed in Europe. Cap François, now Cap Haitien, became the region’s busiest port”.27 Clearly then, if Beaucourt created a plein air portrait or super-imposed the Cap François landscape into the painting at a later point, although the idea of a mountainous landscape was preserved, all signs of its noteworthy agricultural production and human settlement were vanquished, replaced instead by a hazy, unspecified, generic landscape. Was the female in the portrait a field slave from one of the neighbouring plantations in the vicinity of Cap François? Did Beaucourt, consciously or not, represent the region where she once resided? Dominguan hierarchies of complexion make it unlikely that the sitter was a house slave. As Vincent C. Peloso explains, besides the nursing and care of white children, “house slaves were conditioned to lead a less physically strenuous life. The routines of the house included childcare, laundering, house cleaning, dressing and feeding the owner’s family, and caring for the house animals.”28 As in other Caribbean and mainland tropical colonies, Dominguan house slaves would customarily have been mixed-race, and even the very children of the white male planters, overseers, and other plantation staff. Being mulatto (or jaune) was a racial term that implied a social or cultural status above the fullblooded African.29 As Philippe Girard explains, Mulattoes prided themselves on their French heritage (they were, after all, the descendants of French planters).They understood Creole but refused to speak it save to their black servants. They were pious Catholics that sneered at Voodoo . . . To be mulatto was to be rich, and wealth was the only factor that could trump skin color.30 The dark brown complexion of Beaucourt’s sitter makes it more unlikely that she was of mixed racial heritage or a house slave. However, the refined material used to carefully wrap her head, her gold earrings, necklace, and clean white blouse are certainly not the typical dress of a field slave.31 Beaucourt’s sitter then seems plucked from the plantation fields and dressed up to serve, not the agricultural crops typically harvested from the mountain peaks beyond her right shoulder, but the tropical fruits which Casid notes had “so radically transformed the landscapes of the Caribbean islands”.32 While the cultivation of sugar, coffee and other Dominguan agricultural commodities necessitated a great deal of toil, the tropical fruit that the sitter presents were transplants, which generally required less labour. Hence, in an oddly contradictory image, the dark-skinned field slave is transported to the house, bearing nonplantation fruit and exposing her breast, both for the white master’s delectation. Such fruit was not a deliberate product of the plantation-lined mountain described by Moreau de Saint-Méry. Rather, Beaucourt’s hazy, un-topographical representation of the mountain is an aestheticization, which refused to delineate the specific boundaries of the Dominguan

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plantations from where this enslaved woman likely originated.The lush, dense undifferentiated field of the mountain, which only implies vegetation, is not, however, plantation. As such, the fruit presented to the viewer becomes a marvel of nature, and a product of the pastoral, not a product of agricultural industry.33 Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) alienates the dark-skinned black female from the geography of her residence and labour, a displacement facilitated in part by François and his wife’s own foreignness to the island, but also by the unorthodox nature of the portrait itself, in which the enslaved sitter was not the patron and powerless to determine the nature or context of her likeness. While outsiders to the island, the Beaucourts likely did not reside there long enough to fully digest the intricacies of the intensely hierarchized slave system. However, white Creole Dominguan viewers would very likely have found such a portrait strange. For one thing, the ideology of white supremacy dictated that the idea of the superior attractiveness of the coloured over the full-blooded Negro be vigorously maintained.This racialized sexual hierarchy of course served to maintain the fiction of an incontestable white beauty. White Dominguans, accustomed to their “lesser” mixed-race relatives as domestic help, would most likely have found the splendour of the well-groomed and pretty African house slave off-putting. However, with the arrival of the portrait in Montreal, the intricacies of Dominguan (and Caribbean) slave labour hierarchies and their rootedness in race mixing and complexion may have been lost on most upper-class whites. This is not to say that white slave owners in Montreal did not employ colonial racial terminology in their labelling of people of African descent. However, the small size of the black slave population and the demand for labour meant that, in Montreal, whites seeking to own slaves could not afford to get hung up on the issues of race mixture or complexion. Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, revolutionary St Domingue, and the politics of flight While the artist François Malépart de Beaucourt was a part of Quebec’s bourgeois class, the black woman he portrayed most likely became a part of its slave class. Detailed records compiled by Marcel Trudel reveal the likely sitter as Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, one of two black slaves documented as the property of the artist’s white wife, Benoite Gaétant.34 As corresponds with her complexion in the portrait, Marie was identified as négresse and listed as belonging to the widow of the painter.35 Although Frank Mackey asserts that the Beaucourts owned a third black female slave, Catherine Guillet born in St Domingue to African parents,36 he agrees with my assertion of the sitter’s identity, arguing that if the person in the portrait was one of the black slaves owned by the Beaucourts, “then the only possibility is Marie-Thérèse-Zémire”.37 According to Mackey, Marie was said to be 25 in April 1796 and 29 at her death on 15 December 1800.38 This means that she would have been 15 when the portrait was painted in 1786. Since Catherine is believed to have begun her life in Montreal as a slave of the Beaucourts in the 1790s, both she and Marie would have lived in the same household.39 While studying abroad at Bordeaux in France, under the instruction of Joseph-Gaétant Camag(n)e, François met and married his instructor’s daughter. Mystery surrounded the

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couple’s whereabouts between the dates of 1784 (when François finished his sojourn in Europe) and 1792 (when they finally reappeared in Montreal).40 However, Major- Frégeau deduced that they stayed in Philadelphia for a brief period early in 1792 and more recent findings have placed them in St Domingue (formerly Hayti and later Haiti) on the eve of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Specifically, the recent change to the portrait’s title was prompted by research conducted on another Beaucourt portrait, also owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, of a white male subject done in the following year entitled Portrait of an Architect, Master of a Masonic Lodge in Cap François, Saint Domingue (Now Haiti) (1787).41 At the time, St Domingue, comprising one third of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, had been nick named “the pearl of the Antilles” due to its status as France’s richest colony.42 According to Rushforth, “In the early eighteenth-century French Atlantic, the most successful colonies thrived on the production of agricultural staples with African slaves, generating massive wealth for many private investors and starting to yield a significant revenue base for greater France.”43 Known by the colonial name of Saint Domingue or Santo Domingo, it was largely renowned for its sugar cultivation.44 Girard has argued that the Caribbean Atlantic system, and colonies like St Domingue, were characterized by five major elements including: (1) the colonial bond, (2) international trade relations with Europe, (3) the ubiquity of plantations as the preferred means of production, and (4) the institutionalization of African slavery to meet the labour demands and remedy the excessive mortality rates of white settlers. On the fifth and final element Girard explained the racial dynamic in which the Beaucourts would have found themselves. In turn, the arrival of five million African slaves in the Caribbean (one million of them in Saint Domingue), along with preexisting Native American settlements, European immigration, and widespread miscegenation, explains the fifth element that characterized integrated Atlantic societies such as Saint Domingue: the intricate fusion of races and ideas from three continents into a manifold Creole culture.45 Concomitantly, based on the research findings of this other portrait, the curator Jacques Des Rochers has placed Beaucourt in the Dominguan city of Cap François (today Cap Haitien) on the eve of the Haitian Revolution46 by confirming his membership in the Haitian Masonic Lodge la Vérité in 1788.47 The revolt of enslaved Africans against their white French slave owners had far-reaching and chilling repercussions for white colonialists everywhere. But in Cap François, Beaucourt and his wife unexpectedly found themselves in the heart of a roiling centre of an ever-increasing bloody conflict.48 On 1 January 1804, the black General Jean-Jacques Dessaline issued an official Declaration of Independence from France, restoring the island’s original name of Hayti, refusing the practice of slavery, and becoming the first nation born of a slave rebellion.49 Besides playing a crucial homo-social networking role, Harland-Jacobs has argued that Freemasonry was an important imperial institution invested in the “development of intracultural or internal connections, which served to link those who were invested in an empire’s well-being”.50 As McClellan has noted, “Masons and the Masonic movement

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made themselves strongly felt in Saint Domingue . . . twenty lodges arose in eighteenthcentury Saint Domingue with perhaps another forty colonial chapters dependent on them . . . There were a thousand Masons in Saint Domingue.”51 Beginning in 1717 with the founding of the Grand Lodge in England, the Masons soon founded lodges in Ireland (1725) and Scotland (1736), with the first overseas lodge, the East Lodge at Fort William, realized in Bengal in 1728.52 But it was arguably the development of “travelling warrants” and their use by British regiments which most effectively facilitated the Freemasons’ imperial expansion. It was the Minden Lodge, No. 63 established by officers in His Majesty’s 20th Regiment of Foot that made the first transatlantic crossing in 1775 to Quebec, later relocating to Halifax (1789) before moving on to St Domingue and Jamaica in the 1790s.53 This last transit placed the soldiers and their lodge squarely in St Domingue during the revolution where, according to Harland-Jacobs, the “regiment helped to quell an insurrection ‘among the disaffected negroes and brigands’”.54 Although Des Rochers has confirmed Beaucourt’s membership in la Vérité Lodge, the dates of the Regiment and their travelling Minden Lodge also overlap with Beaucourt’s stay in St Domingue. Arguably, even more so than the traditional lodges, such travelling lodges established and maintained by soldiers, held even more explicit imperial mandates, which sanctioned and enacted the violent strategic marginalization of colonial subjects.The familiarity of shared culture, race, class, religious principles, and customs combined with the comforting and solidarity-promoting practice of rituals would have bonded the men, providing a means through which they could imagine a stable and secure existence in a tumultuous and unfamiliar world.55 According to Harland-Jacobs, Arguably, the comfort of Masonic and other types of ritual was especially important to men whose occupations were inherently imperial – soldiers, merchants, and colonial servants, who regularly moved from one side of the world to the other. Likewise, colonists – who moved less often but experienced permanent dislocation – would also have been comforted by the familiarity of Masonic rituals.56 The networking capabilities of the Masonic order together with their commitment to brotherhood and cooperation would have made them a haven and organizational platform for white Europeans and Creoles fleeing St Domingue during the revolution. According to Gaffield, “Throughout the Haitian Revolution, French planters had fled to locations throughout the Caribbean and North America.”57 Sensing the impending defeat of the French army, local planters and other whites tried to escape the social, material, and physical consequences of a military loss. While the Beaucourts may have fled initially to a neighbouring island like Jamaica, one of the primary destinations of fleeing whites, their goal seems to have been a return to North America.58 Although a British colony, Jamaica’s proximity made it a desirable haven for escaping French whites.59 But while many initially fled there, the clandestine policies of the white Jamaican ruling class did not benefit the displaced French colonialists. Indeed, British politicians attempted to play both sides of the revolution to their benefit, signing several secret treaties with Toussaint Louverture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

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centuries, which aided Louverture’s army “in exchange for promises of friendship and the containment of the revolution”,60 while at the same time harbouring whites fleeing from St Domingue. Although whites with colonial interests, and despite Francois’s previous residence in the British controlled colony of Quebec, as people of French heritage the Beaucourts were by birthright seen as enemies of the British Empire and a long sojourn in Jamaica may not have seemed prudent. Indeed, the British governor to Jamaica, George Nugent, argued that vigilance was necessary to prevent the newly arriving French from spreading improper subjects throughout the island.61 But if the French whites were a source of unease for the Jamaican ruling class, how much more so were the Dominguan slaves and free blacks? Although a large number of enslaved Africans were able to escape their white oppressors, remain in St Domingue, and align themselves with the liberators, others were not so lucky and were instead forcibly migrated with their fleeing white owners. Still other free blacks were able to escape alongside whites. Many white Jamaicans considered these black Haitians to be inherently contaminated by ideals of liberation, resistance, and rebellion, a “contagion” that white Jamaicans could not risk their own slaves contracting. Writing in 1803, Nugent explained: “The French Emigrants at Kingston &c, are constantly importing their Slaves from St. Domingo, who are of the worst Description”.62 However, Gaffield has argued that the so-called slaves to whom Nugent referred were actually free blacks who, through the conflation of slavery and blackness, were “symbolically denied this freedom”.63 It appears then that Marie (and perhaps also Catherine Guillet) unfortunately came into contact with François and Benoite in Haiti during this time of great turmoil and that she was most likely painted in St Domingue. I would also like to suggest that at this moment, prior to the victory of the black liberators, it is quite possible, even probable, that the Beaucourts purchased Marie (and possibly Catherine) and forced her to accompany them back to Montreal. The nature of black flight to Jamaica during the revolution also supports my contention. At the end of the revolution, Dessaline, fearing the depletion of the Dominguan labour force, petitioned Nugent to return the people of colour to St Domingue. But it seems that Nugent only partially complied, sending back the free people of colour numbering about 170, but refusing to return enslaved blacks. As Girard has argued, “These (willingly or not) eventually accompanied their masters as they left Jamaica to settle more permanently in Cuba and the United States.”64 I would add to this short list Canada of course, always forgotten in these sordid histories of transatlantic migrations. After the creation of these portraits in 1786 and 1787 respectively, Reid contends that the Beaucourts made their way to Philadelphia in 1792.65 The Beaucourts’ sojourn in Philadelphia seems to have been very brief. Major-Frégeau confirmed that their stay spanned only January and February, during which time Beaucourt placed advertisements in the local newspaper, the General Advertiser, offering his services as an artist and instructor.66 Indeed, Beaucourt first placed an advertisement on 3 January 1792 which ran repeatedly throughout January and into February of 1792. Apparently, he

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sought to capitalize upon his newly honed European training by presenting himself as a French rather than a Canadian or Quebec-based artist. Beaucourt, French Painter, Member of the Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Civil and Naval Architecture of Bourdeaux [sic] Begs leave to inform the amateurs of those arts, that he paints Portraits in oil; also executes historical, and landscape painting. He undertakes to paint theatrical scenery. Having made geometrical and aerial perspective his particular study, he has met with considerable encouragement in several Cities of Europe, viz. Paris, Petersburg, Nantz, Bourdeaux, &c. in which he has followed his art as a profession [sic]. He understands the art of ornamenting, in the newest stile and taste, apartments, by painting to imitate either architecture, baso-relievos, flowers, or the arabesçue stile [sic]. He will undertake to teach a few students in any branch of drawing agreeably to their wish and taste. Apply at No. 46, Shippen’s-street. January 3.67 It is also worth noting that Beaucourt was not shy in soliciting multiple types of employment (portraitist, painter, theatrical scenery, home design and tutor) for several genres and styles of art. Furthermore, his self-representation as a European-trained professional with an established reputation based on “considerable encouragement” from clients in European cities was meant to entice new patrons through a disassociation with the supposed provincialism of North American culture. However, the couple’s quick relocation to Montreal likely indicates that Beaucourt was unable to establish a lucrative career in Philadelphia, despite his insistent advertising.68 Notwithstanding the official 1805–06 US embargoes against trade with Haiti, Philadelphia merchants (as other Americans) developed a special relationship with Haitian commercial interests.69 In addition to being the post-revolutionary base of the French merchant Joseph Bunel de Blancamp,70 the island played a central role in the city’s growing transatlantic trade prowess both pre- and post-revolution.71 In exchange for their American apples, onions, lard, flour, and other foodstuffs and exports, Philadelphian ships returned from St Domingue laden with sugar, molasses, rum, and coffee.72 Indeed, Pennsylvanians imported the largest quantity of coffee between 1790–91 and 1791–92, dominating the US market with 32.5 per cent and 53.1 per cent shares respectively.73 According to Dun, “Philadelphia’s mercantile community saw the island as an economic opportunity. Hundreds of voyages were made to the troubled colony, even after various outbreaks of violence there.”74 As McDonald argues: When that conflict erupted, the island dominated world production of sugar and coffee and was a major supplier of indigo and cotton. Historians have focused on the revolution’s effect on the sugar industry, in large part because that was where most destruction occurred, yet Saint Domingue’s share of the global coffee market was proportionately twice that of its share in total sugar production, and coffee growing sectors of the island sustained less damage and recovered more quickly.75

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The extensive nature of this trade relationship meant that ships were constantly moving between Philadelphia and Dominguan ports in the period in which the Beaucourts were reputed to have spent time in both locations, providing ease of access for a potential direct transatlantic crossing. As Dun attests, From August 1789 to the end of 1793, vessels coming from the island made up between 18 to 25 percent of all arrivals to the city from foreign ports . . . The combined burden of those vessels totaled more than 56,500 tons. From 1789 to 1792, the tonnage arriving from Saint Domingue accounted for 7 to 15 percent of all imports to Philadelphia . . .76 More precisely, according to Dun, of the 655 foreign vessels arriving at Philadelphia in 1792, 155 of them were from St Domingue, making up 23.7 per cent of the foreign total.77 Thus the established trade route between St Domingue and Philadelphia gave the Beaucourts substantial opportunities to escape to the colony through the city’s harbour. Since announcements in the Montreal Gazette advertising François’s artistic services began appearing in June 1792, the couple’s (and possibly Marie’s) stay in Philadelphia would have been short-lived. Given this fact, the couple had likely arrived in and departed from Philadelphia at some time between late 1791 and June 1792. The Health Officer’s port of entry records for Philadelphia covering January to June 1792 indicate a steady stream of ships arriving from various Caribbean ports including “St. Kitts”, “St. Martins”, “St.Thomases” or “St.Tomases”, “Curraseau”, “Martinico”, “St. Croix”, “Antagua” and the further afield “Bermuda” and “Suranam [sic]”.78 More importantly for my point, a total of 27 vessels originated from Cap François, the port city at the northern tip of the colony where Des Rochers has placed Beaucourt in the late 1780s. And a further eight ships arrived from the more southern Port au Prince.79 However, given the tumultuousness of the time, it is unlikely that the Beaucourts would have crossed the colony to depart from Port au Prince when the port at Cap François offered such an easy escape route. Besides a tally of the arriving ships, the Health Officer’s records for Philadelphia also included the number of passengers and servants on each vessel.80 Given that Major-Frégeau traced Beaucourt’s advertisements in the Philadelphia newspaper to early 1792, the artist may actually have arrived in late 1791. With this in mind, if we allow for the passage of a slave with François and his wife, between November 1791 and January 1792, a total of four documented ships arrived from Cap-François, all with three or more passengers: the brig Hetty, captained by Cristopher Clousi(?) on 3 November with 7 passengers, the brigantine Minerva captained by Thomas Anderson on 12 November with 27 passengers, the brigantine Commerce sailed by Captain Jones on 23 November with 7 passengers, and the schooner Industry captained by Richard Stites(?) on 4 January with 7 passengers.81 Unfortunately, it may prove impossible to pinpoint the exact ship, if any, that the Beaucourts and possibly Marie arrived on at Philadelphia since existing records for the Health Officer’s Register of Passengers’ Names only begins from 25 October 1792, the point after which the Beaucourts were already settled in Montreal.82

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Critiquing Canadian museum practice: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ installation of Portrait of a Haitian Woman It is important to note that the recently renamed portrait of the black female sitter has been installed in the “Founding Identities Gallery” of the new Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion of Quebec and Canadian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Indeed, Portrait of a Haitian Woman and Portrait of an Architect . . ., placed side by side, are the first portraits that one encounters when entering this third-floor gallery at the right side. Although a fair amount of explanatory text accompanied the two paintings, the combination of this juxtaposition, the additional display of other historical oil portraits and what was left unsaid about Portrait of a Haitian Woman, arguably served to entrench centuries-old, colonial racial ideals about black women as sexually lascivious and deviant. I would argue that in the original configuration, Portrait of a Haitian Woman invited a dangerous misreading. Part of this misreading was triggered by the presence of other oil portraits, in particular, of female sitters. Amongst the five other portraits of women, there are three white women, one Métis woman, and one Native woman.83 While the three white women are all rather opulently dressed – their manners, expressions, contexts and props displaying their class status and privilege – the Native woman, like the black woman, can be read more as object than subject. Indeed, Paul Kane’s Caw-Wacham (1848) is a literal product of colonial ethnography, a work derived from his trek (sponsored by the Hudson Bay Company) into the Canadian west to preserve visual images of a supposedly dying race. Positioned in profile, the Native woman literally becomes the object of an assumed white nineteenth-century pseudo scientific gaze, the flattened portion of the upper part of her head (a product of bodily manipulation) a spectacle of her racial and cultural otherness and supposed inferiority, situated perfectly by Kane for the “refined” whites who would have been her dominant viewers.The Métis portrait of Mrs. Colin Robertson, née Theresa Chalifoux (1833) aligns in race and class with that of the white women. But for the didactic panel that recounts an incident of racist hostility in the form of a letter written by one of her husband’s white male acquaintances upon meeting her, the nineteenth-century viewer (like most today) would have had difficulty reading her as anything but white and upper-class.84 In contrast to these other portraits, the probability of Portrait of a Haitian Woman’s misreading, was due to its ahistorical installation triggered in part by the museum’s refusal to reference slavery in the otherwise extensive didactic panel. But while the Canadian erasure of slavery has become arguably (if sadly) normal, astonishingly, the museum extended this disavowal to Haiti, one of the most oppressive sites of tropical plantation slavery in the Americas. While François’s time in St Domingue, his creation of the second portrait, his membership in a Haitian Masonic lodge, and even the nature of his signature were all mentioned in the original didactic panel, nowhere in the text was there any mention of the contemporaneous existence of slavery in both St Domingue and Quebec nor of the fact that François and his wife were the owners of three black slaves, two female, in Montreal. As such, without the discussion of slavery, the exposure of the black woman’s breast has no logical explanation that is external to the sitter. Rather, since the fullness of the exposure

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of the woman’s right breast rules out the possibility of a “wardrobe malfunction” or accidental exposure, the portrait reads as if the woman has deliberately removed her breast from her shirt in order to offer it, along with the tray of fruit, for the consumptive sexual pleasure of the implied white male heterosexual viewer.85 The fact that the initial and primary viewer was very likely the artist himself, the woman’s owner, by and for whom this sexual display was originally orchestrated, was not information that the museum initially offered to the visitor. As such, I would argue that most museum visitors would inevitably read this work, in its initial installation, as an expression of the intrinsic hypersexuality of the black female sitter, a sexual deviance activated and normalized by the woman’s smiling face and easy manner, also orchestrated by the white male artist. The conditions of African enslavement in eighteenth-century Montreal and St Domingue As mentioned above, if the sitter is indeed Marie, as a slave her lack of autonomy made the exposure of her breast even more problematic. Lord concurs, adding that her visual exploitation was likely intended as an advertisement of the artist’s European-honed talents for prospective clients back in Quebec. And furthermore the white couple’s possession of such fashionable and exotic help would have augmented their own class status and established the rightness of the suitably bourgeois prices for paying sitters. According to Lord, De Beaucourt’s slave is certainly exploited to the full in his picture of her . . . We can picture a patron of de Beaucourt, such as the card-playing comprador Trottier dit Desriviéres, ogling the young girl’s body as he waited to arrange for his own portrait. The ageing seigneur might reflect that he was evidently dealing with an artist who could afford such fashionable and attractive help.86 We should also consider how the portrait would have reinforced the possibility of Marie’s real-life scrutiny and sexual violation as she would most likely have been forced to work as a domestic in the home (and studio) of the artist and would therefore have come into contact not only with him and his wife but with her own likeness and Beaucourt’s expectant clientele as they inspected her real body in direct relation to the depiction of her unclothed likeness. Again, the nature of this portrait and the likely enslavement and impoverishment of the sitter makes it very likely that the black woman neither commissioned nor owned the painting. Rather, it is far more likely that Beaucourt kept the painting for his own social, cultural, economic, and sexual ends.87 Marie’s potential discomfort, shame, and fear within such a scenario must have been psychologically devastating. If Marie is indeed the female slave that Trudel records as being in the possession of the couple in Montreal, her Dominguan/Haitian origins align with the dominant source of black slaves that were being imported into Quebec and the rest of British North America that was to become Canada, the Caribbean. For example, with regard to the sale of slaves at Halifax, Riddell described a consignment from the West Indies in 1769 that included plantation-produced goods like rum and sugar along with

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“two well-grown negro girls aged 14 and 12”.88 Riddell also documented another sale in Halifax on 30 May 1752 of a 35-year-old “likely negro wench” of Creole birth.89 Creole here is an indication of Caribbean birth. While Winks cites the largest sale as five slaves in 1743, the conditions of purchase of the female slave whom Beaucourt painted were likely much different since she was most probably purchased in St Domingue where many more slaves were needed to maintain the plantation economy. Beaucourt’s absence from Montreal (in the years before the portrait was made) for study and his marriage to his white French wife makes it plausible, even probable, that Marie was forcibly migrated with and by the couple to Montreal.90 Yet it is important to note that even if the Beaucourts removed this black woman from St Domingue, she may not have been Creole. Malick W. Ghachem’s research has shed light on the extreme brutality of the Dominguan slave system. Referring to the demographic dominance of the slave population he has noted: Striking as these figures are, however, they do not reveal the colony’s extremely high slave mortality rate relative to other New World slave societies. During their first three to five years of labor in Saint-Domingue, newly purchased Africans died on average at a rate of 50 percent. Never was slave mortality higher than during the 1780’s. During that decade, the importation of Africans to Saint-Domingue served not to augment the total number of slaves but rather to replace those who perished as a result of overwork, neglect, and abuse on the colony’s plantation fields.91 As such, due to the constant influx of newly arriving Africans, there exists a very large possibility that this black female sitter was born, not in St Domingue, but in Africa and that she had already survived one Middle Passage. Her possible transit to Montreal then falls into my conceptualization of the category of a Second Middle Passage, articulated above. Also as mentioned above, the change in title from the word “slave” to “woman” serves problematically to liberate the sitter. But the insertion of the word “Haitian” is equally questionable since it literally shifts the ground beneath the black woman’s feet, insisting that she could not have resided or been enslaved in Quebec, that she could not possibly have been a slave of both St Domingue/Haiti and Quebec as the above-mentioned entry in Trudel’s dictionary proclaims. The St Domingue of the 1780s which the Beaucourts would have encountered was a brutal slave society where the slave mortality rate had never been higher and where the enslaved population far outnumbered the whites.92 Indeed, at the close of the revolution the Haitian population had decreased by 50 per cent.93 But the dramatic shift from white to black demographic dominance had occurred in the late seventeenth century, spurred by the prevalence of the slave trade, when the whites made up 29 per cent, the enslaved Africans 66 per cent and the free coloureds 3.6 per cent of the 13,656 population.94 But the Beaucourts arrived after the most lucrative years of sugar exportation, a period that not only increased white colonialist profits, but also led to a sizeable population growth. According to Bonham C. Richardson, by 1789 the population of St Domingue was 40,000 (7.69 per cent) whites, 28,000 (5.38 per cent) free blacks, and 452,000 (86.92

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per cent) enslaved blacks.95 Laurent Dubois claimed that the population was comprised of 31,000 whites (5.92 per cent), 28,000 free coloureds (5.34 per cent), and 465,000 slaves (88.74 per cent).96 The twentieth-century historian James A. Padgett placed the racial demographics for the same year at 40,000 whites, 40,000 free coloureds, and 700,000 enslaved Africans. With this data, the slaves made up an even higher percentage of the overall population at 89.74 per cent and the free blacks and whites at only 5.13 per cent each.97 Critically also, Padgett described the population of free people as mulattoes. According to John Lobb, at the time of the revolution, “The colony was stratified . . . into three classes: the whites (French and Creole overlords), the affranchis (freed mulattoes and blacks with limited rights and privileges), and the Negro slaves.”98 “Mulatto” was the colonial name for people of mixed African and European ancestry. Although most strictly defined as people having one parent from each of the two racial groups, the term came to more loosely signify people of white and black ancestry whose bodies were deemed to demonstrate visual signs of their racial hybridity mainly in their complexions, hair texture, facial features, and other areas like eye colour. Given these racial demographic data alone, chances were extremely likely that any black Dominguan woman that François painted was a slave. When one further considers that the black female sitter’s dark complexion placed her outside of the normative racial description of the affranchis, the probability that she was not enslaved is further diminished. But what is more alarming, since the result of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), was the liberation of African slaves in Haiti and the founding of the first universally democratic nation in the Western hemisphere – a nation without slavery – this black woman’s possible forced migration to Quebec holds multiple tragedies. The first is her forced exile from family, friends, community, and environment and her movement from a familiar life (however harrowing) to another, unfamiliar and foreign. And the second is that, given the dates of François and Benoite’s departure from St Domingue, had this black woman been left behind and survived the revolution, she would have lived out the rest of her life as a free woman.99 Life after François: “Portrait” of a Montreal slave mistress Upon his return to Montreal likely sometime in the spring of 1792, Beaucourt resorted to the tactic, which he had employed in Philadelphia. On 7, 14, and 28 June he ran advertisements in the bilingual Montreal Gazette newspaper, again soliciting both patronage and students.100 Although he again proclaimed his membership in the Bordeaux Academy, he added that the Academy was “aggregated to that of Paris” and described himself as a Canadian painter, not, as previously, a French one.101 It would appear that with this second opportunity, Beaucourt had properly gauged his market since within months (if not weeks) he began to receive significant commissions for religious paintings and portraits of clergy and private citizens.102 However, almost exactly two years after his return, Beaucourt died in Montreal on 24 June 1794. In the aftermath of his death, it would appear that his widow, socially adroit and economically astute, maintained or increased her wealth.

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Benoite outlived her husband François by some 50 years. But more significant for my purposes, despite having experienced first hand the increasingly untenable nature of the Atlantic slave regime during her trip to St Domingue with François in the 1780s, she also independently continued her role as slave mistress. Mackey notes that over the next few years she owned several slaves including in 1801 a 12-year-old Negress named Catherine.103 Although it is unclear how she gained her liberty, Catherine was later, at the age of around 18, documented as Catherin Guillet, a free woman. In 1806, employed as a servant of the former slave John Trim at the age of about 18, she married William Wright, a former slave of the loyalist merchant James Dunlop.104 With a mere two and a half years elapsing between his emancipation and his initial purchase of land in April 1796,105 Mackey describes Trim as a person with a “dedication to the acquisition of real estate”.106 Mackey notes that Catherine and William likely lived at the home (on McGill Street) of Trim and his wife Charlotte (which they co-owned with another free black couple, Henry Moore and his wife Margaret Plauvier)107 until they purchased their own home in September 1820.108 Of note here is that Catherine, who was in the employ of Trim and his wife from 1805 to 1820,109 likely ended up doing for Trim much the same labour that she had done for Benoite, only this time for pay. Also of significance is the fact that Trim, a former slave, was able to hire a servant just 11 years after gaining his own emancipation in 1793.110 The fact that Trim and his wife collaborated successfully on several occasions with other free blacks in business ventures would indicate that they were able to work respectfully with other blacks (to function in an economic and legal world dominated by whites) and, furthermore, that they were open to business prospects from which they and others could reap the shared benefits. It is likely then that Catherine enjoyed a degree of respect and equity between herself and her free black employers (themselves also former slaves) that she had not and could not fully achieve as the slave of Benoite.Thus, while liberty provided some level of choice and social mobility – Trim was able to accrue property and wealth and Catherine was able to choose to whom she would sell her labour – substantial impediments still persisted for Montreal’s black population after emancipation. Benoite employed a notary, Louis Huguet-Latour, to draw up an estate inventory and marriage contract, between her and Gabriel Franchère, both dated 19 June 1810.111 Catherine’s relationship to her former white owner seemed to have transcended that of mistress and slave. Although it is clear that Catherine was in Benoite’s possession from around the age of 11, she may have been with her from a much earlier time and taken on the role of a kind of “pet” or even, possibly, a daughter.112 When Catherine Guillet and William Wright had a daughter named Marie Charlotte Wright, it was Julie Victoire, Benoite’s stepdaughter (the daughter of her new husband Gabriel Franchère), who acted as sponsor at the baptism.113 After being widowed in 1825, Catherine remarried Jacob Abdella, a cook of Mediterranean origin, variously described as hailing from Malta, Gibraltar, and Italy, the following year.114 The legal marriage of Catherine to Jacob demonstrates that British Montreal was more lenient in the legal and religious sanctioning of the kind of romantic and sexual cross-racial relationships between black women and white men that abounded, though in much more

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clandestine ways, in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean. It appears that Jacob likely met Catherine through Trim, since he had also boarded at Trim’s home on McGill Street where Catherine was employed and most likely also lived.115 The “white” Jacob renting from the free blacks,Trim and his wife Charlotte, also further indicates that more equitable living situations of cross-racial cohabitation were possible in British Montreal. Furthermore, the second marriage of Trim after Charlotte’s death, to the white French-Canadian woman Fleurie Deniger, again demonstrates that legalized cross-racial marriages between black men and white women in British Montreal were less taboo than in British Jamaica or the British Caribbean generally.116 However, the marriages of Catherine and Trim, both black, to their white partners also indicate another societal shift in a Montreal that was fast becoming post-slavery. As more and more blacks gained their liberty and the institution of slavery died out, so too did the connection between biological and social blackness wane. In the context of what was to become the nation of the Dominican Republic (the eastern portion of what Columbus renamed Hispaniola), Silvio Torres-Saillant has argued that the failure of the plantation system resulted in the dominance of free blacks and a break down of “rigid racial codes”.117 Torres-Saillant elaborated: The disruption of the plantation economy and its demographic impact on the population facilitated a split between biological blackness and social blackness. As the racial oligarchy originally generated by the plantocracy crumbled, pigmentation ceased to shape political action . . . social position had come to supersede skin color in the articulation of identity for people of African descent [italics mine].118 Of course this shift in the Dominican context would have manifested in different social, cultural, and political outcomes due to the racial demographics of the island and its black majority population. However, the impact of freedom on the black populations and their less-impeded access to economic markets (as seen vividly in John Trim’s rapid acquisition of wealth),119 allowed black Montrealers to aspire to a new social status with a political voice and to make life choices (like the choice of “white” marriage partners) with far less white interference.The rising social status of blacks as free people also of course impacted whites like the Mediterranean Jacob Abdella and the French-Canadian Fleurie Deniger, two arguably ethnically marginalized white citizens who also began to see free blacks as legitimate marriage partners. Interestingly, as regards the colonial construction of whiteness and her participation in colonial economies, Benoite’s estate inventory included a parasol, six coffee spoons, and one pair of sugar pliers (six cuillères à caffée, une paire de pinces à sucre).120 The parasol was also a staple of upper-class white and coloured female dress in Jamaica and other regions of the Caribbean, as I will discuss in detail below. She also seems to have astutely brokered her own dowry since both documents indicate that her future husband was to pay her the sum of 6,000 pounds “old exchange rate” based upon another contract which had been drawn up on 25 January 1809.121 Despite her earlier ownership of Marie-Thérèse-Zémire and Jean-Baptiste-François in the 1790s, the documents make no mention of any slaves in

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her personal inventories. But the absence of Marie-Thérèse-Zémire from this inventory makes perfect sense since, as Trudel documented, the enslaved black woman had died 10 years earlier and was buried on 16 December 1800 at l’Hôpital-Général.122 My analysis of Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) explores the convergence of different types of authority in the body of the artist. Surpassing the normal control over the artwork, since Beaucourt was also most likely the patron of this portrait and the owner of the represented slave sitter, his accumulation of power was disturbing and veritably insurmountable for the black female sitter. As the patron, the artist, and the slave owner, Beaucourt embodied an astonishing and dangerous convergence of cultural, social, and legal authority, which was arguably manifested in its most explicit symbolic form in the object of the painting. Not merely attributable to his occupation and professionalization as a European-trained painter, it was Beaucourt’s (and his wife’s) social status and identity as whites of upper-class backgrounds which provided the artist with the ability to purchase another human being and to demand that she sit for him in the compromised fashion which he dictated. Oddly then, since the artist and the patron were likely one and the same, this portrait circumvented the traditional artist–patron relationship, effectively disempowering the sitter, an enslaved black woman who would not have had the ability to contest her representation without penalty. When I say contest, I mean it both in the social and in the legal sense. Recall where I began my analysis of this painting with Beckles’ quote about the consolidation of social and legal control over enslaved Africans in the hands of white slave owners. This strategic disenfranchisement meant that this black female sitter would have had difficulty in resisting her owner’s desire to render her likeness on both material and legal levels. If she had physically resisted attending the sittings – by fleeing, by hiding, by retaliating, by refusing to comply – the legal infrastructure of slavery which assured Beaucourt the right to own her, also sanctioned her effective torture and abuse for just such acts of resistance. But whereas the portrait itself exists as a symbolic concretization of Beaucourt’s accumulation of power, the actual process of producing this portrait must also be read as a form of colonial and patriarchal violence, reliant upon and supportive of the racial, sex, and class distinctions between white men and black women.The portrait visually commemorated and celebrated the white man’s ability to exploit black female sexuality. I have also attempted to untangle and substantiate the Canadian art historiography that placed the Beaucourts in Philadelphia in 1792. As I have argued, St Domingue’s transition into the Republic of Haiti did not entail a cessation of its international trade relations with assumed enemies. Quite the opposite; wealthy and established colonies like British-controlled Jamaica actively worked to create new treaties featuring trade agreements meant to further increase their wealth. Meanwhile, despite the posturing of federal politicians in the US, port cities like Philadelphia continued or even increased their trade with the “rebel”-controlled nation. Furthermore, both the Haitian connection to Jamaica and to Philadelphia offer plausible scenarios for the Beaucourts’ escapes and returns to Montreal with Marie. But this story is really the tale of two types of authority, individual and institutional. While the individual power with which I have been most concerned is that of the artist and

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the slave owner, the institutional power with which we should feel uneasy is the museum. Museums are very powerful institutions. They have the ability to narrate a nation, to define its inhabitants and, significantly, to participate in the designation of citizen and foreigner. They have the authority to build cultural canons, to designate what is and is not art and to place that art within complicated hierarchies. I believe that, given the ongoing Euro-Canadian denial of Canada’s colonial past, works like Portrait of a Haitian Woman and Caw-Wacham should absolutely be displayed. However, it is necessary for them to be installed within contexts that allows for them to be re-read against the grain in postcolonial feminist ways that challenge the blatant racism of their original contexts, producers, and audiences. The Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s use of didactic text for Bowan’s Mrs. Colin Robertson arguably, and without much effort, achieves precisely this outcome. However, with the erasure of Haitian slavery, the simultaneous refusal to claim ownership of Canadian slavery, and the renaming of Portrait of a Negro Slave to Portrait of a Haitian Woman by the McCord Museum, the current installation falls far short of this goal, arguably serving only to re-mobilize and re-entrench the centuries-long misrepresentation of black women in the West. Therefore, unless you are a viewer who comes to this museum already armed with a wealth of knowledge about Montreal, Quebec, and Caribbean slavery, the Haitian Revolution and colonial identity politics, the most accessible reading of this portrait is a deeply troubling one that is both colonial and patriarchal. In consideration of these aforementioned problems, I wrote to the curators of the McCord Museum, Christian Vachon (Curator, Paintings, Drawings and Prints), and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Jacques Des Rochers (Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art) requesting that they consider changing the title of the painting back to the previous Portrait of a Negro Slave or to something which clarified its Canadian connection, like Portrait of a Slave of Haiti and Quebec, or that recognized the name of the sitter, like Portrait of a Negro Slave (Marie-Thérèse-Zémire).123 I explained that the deletion of the word “slave” was a dangerous move since it stripped the painting of a crucial vehicle of contextual analysis regarding the exposed breast as the result of a coercive master/slave relationship. Without the word “slave”, audiences are prone to take up a colonial reading of the black female sitter as morally compromised and responsible for the sexual invitation of her exposed breast and smiling face. Des Rochers responded by adding a significant cartel enrichi, which expanded upon the context of the portrait’s production.124 It is worth quoting at length. It reads in part: This was the way the artist introduced himself to the public in the March 23, 1785 edition of the Saint-Domingue weekly Affiches americaines. In publishing what was in effect an advertisement for his services in the local publication, Beaucourt would scarcely have been able to deny the reality of slavery. Among the items mentioned in the newspaper were announcements of slave auctions, descriptions of runaway slaves (who usually bore the initials or name of their “owner” stamped on their chest), generally followed by notices of lost animals! The section devoted to runaway slaves bears witness to their struggle against their oppressors. The resistance would lead to the establishment of the world’s first Black Republic, Haiti, in 1804.

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Beaucourt left the West Indies for Philadelphia before returning to Montreal, where he died in 1794. The will of his widow, Benoite Gaeten, tells us that the couple owned slaves. Did those slaves accompany them on their various moves? If such was the case, the portrait, which was painted in the West Indies, could only be that of Marie-Therese Zemire, then 15 years old. However, given the model’s maturity, the possibility seems unlikely. Originally entitled The Negress, the painting was included in the Inventory of the David Ross McCord collection that was drawn up in the 1890s. It is the oldest known portrayal of a black slave in Canadian painting [italics mine].125 While the new text implicates Beaucourt and his wife in the practices of Trans Atlantic Slavery in St Domingue, it stops short of clearly confirming the presence of Marie-ThérèseZémire (and their other black slaves) in Montreal. Furthermore, given the subjective nature of painting, the extraordinarily high mortality rates amongst the enslaved in St Domingue, and the use of enslaved black females as “breeders”, it is problematic to assume that a 15-year-old black female slave in 1780s St Domingue had any resemblance to a 15-yearold in recent history.126 Minuets of the Canadians and African cultural survivals Since slavery created a perverse intimacy, through which whites imposed themselves upon blacks on a biological level, it should not be surprising that cross-racial contact also became a staple of social custom and interaction within the context of slavery.127 Specifically, the music and dance customs of enslaved Africans and their white owners became intertwined across the Americas, creating creolized forms. Despite the pervasiveness of Eurocentric ideals of cultural superiority, white desire for African rhythms, music, dance, and expressive culture was undeniable. George Heriot’s Minuets of the Canadians (1807) is indicative of this cultural exchange and transformation.128 Heriot’s print was one of 28 published in his book entitled Travels through the Canadas . . . (1807).129 Based upon an original watercolour, which dates from 1801, the print has significant differences from the earlier work, which I shall discuss below.130 Several handcoloured versions of the individual print also exist and I shall derive the analysis, which follows from one such version held at the McCord Museum, Montreal. In a preface written in Quebec in 1806, Heriot explained his desire to convey the picturesque qualities of the St Lawrence River and its surrounding nature, which he described as both awful and sublime.131 However, the condescending racial tone of his text is early established when he describes the region as having “hitherto been visited by a small portion only of civilized men”.132 Heriot’s consultation of secondary sources, combined with his “residence in Canada for several years”, allowed him to lay claim to an authority based upon witnessing and direct observation, which aligned him with the dominant ideology of vision as knowledge that pervaded European travel writing of the time.133 Heriot’s colonial gaze was fixated not only upon the blacks he encountered, but largely upon the Natives who he described as “domiciliated Indians”.134 His inability to distinguish the specificity of the various Native

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groups led him to bemoan the supposed lack of variety of their character and custom and to claim that they were “incapable of attaining any great degree of improvement”.135 Of course, such a claim in and of itself originated from a racialized cultural hierarchy with Europe as the paradigm. The print Minuets of the Canadians (1807) was included in Chapter XII.136 Heriot argued, “The whole of the Canadian inhabitants are remarkably fond of dancing, and frequently amuse themselves at all seasons with that agreeable exercise.”137 It is at either side of this passage that Heriot included two black and white prints, scenes of dancing: La Danse Ronde, Circular Dance of the Canadians, and Minuets of the Canadians.138 The importance that Heriot attached to capturing the cultural rituals of the Canadians is revealed in the larger size of these fold-out plates.139 Both prints reveal Heriot’s encounter with black people in Quebec. The former print includes a gathering of twenty-six mainly white men, women, and children, with about half holding hands and dancing in an oval shape to the music of a sole male fiddler seen standing just outside of the ring on the left side of the image. To the right at the outskirts of the central activity, two standing male subjects in profile can be read as black, one slightly lighter in complexion and perhaps racially mixed and the other, further from the dancing and closer to the edge of the print, darker and with a broader nose. Although their dress and behavior (pipe smoking) mirror other white male subjects in the image, their positioning at the fringes of the dancing (literally at the edge of the right side of the page) and their physical exclusion from the ring, signal their social distance from the other white merry-makers.140 But where as La Danse Ronde included two black male subjects, Minuets of the Canadians represented more. At least three musicians are clearly indicated at left: a standing white male in a coat and plumed hat shakes a tambourine above his head, a seated white male in a coat plays a fiddle, and a standing black male in a busy-looking horizontally striped coat and vertically striped pants plays another tambourine with his foot. Two other black men are visible on the left side of the image; one to the left of the tambourine player represented as a floating head and unclothed shoulders and the other at right as an upturned bodiless face.141 African music and dance traditions survived the Middle Passage and, although transformed under the burden of slavery, due to African resistance were not broken by white interference. As Philip Morgan has argued, A basic musical grammar, as it were, with an emphasis on the importance of music and dance in everyday life and the role of rhythm and percussion in musical style, survived the Middle Passage. Even complex musical instruments made the crossing, although more notable is how slaves adapted traditional instruments, invented new ones, and borrowed Anglo-American ones.These adaptations, inventions, and borrowings, however, were interpreted according to deep-level aesthetic principles that were fundamentally African.142 To “Anglo-American” above, should be added, Franco-, Latino-/Ibero-, Luso-, etc., in correspondence with the various colonizing empires in which the same cultural transmissions

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occurred. The control and regulation of slaves across colonial contexts extended to every facet of social and cultural life. Whites often displayed an invasive, anthropological interest in black music and dance cultures, resorting to spying on Negro villages or quarters to study black rituals and cultural forms like instrumental music, dance, and singing. Like most European visitors to the West Indies of the time, Sir Hans Sloane displayed an interest in the African slave presence. Sloane wrote Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica . . . (1707 and 1725),143 a lavishly illustrated two-volume folio, after being dispatched from Plymouth to act as the personal physician of the newly appointed Governor of the Jamaica, Christopher Monck, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle.144 His representation of sheet music and musical instruments, coupled with sexualized descriptions of slave festivals and feast days full of singing and dancing, worked to replace the drudgery and danger of endemic, inhumane forced labour with seemingly carefree, hypersexualized and happy slaves. But both Sloane and his white male co-conspirator Mr. Baptiste, whom he enlisted in the process of surveillance, displayed their exteriority and ignorance of the African cultural performance and rituals, to which they were only partially privy, with the clumsiness of their Eurocentric translations which fail both linguistically and emotively to capture the gathering.145 Whites frequently sought to prohibit enslaved Africans from congregating and indulging in music and dance. Such prohibitions were at times motivated by fear and at others by Eurocentric ideals of cultural superiority. Writing about the slaves on his plantation Cornwall in Westmoreland, upon his second visit to Jamaica in 1818, the planter Matthew Lewis recounted: They thought, that it would be highly proper to treat me with a nightly serenade just by way of showing their enjoyment on my return; and accordingly a large body of them arrived at my doors about midnight, dressed out in their best clothes, and accompanied with drums, rattles, and their whole orchestra of abominable instruments, determined to pass the whole night in singing and dancing under my windows.146 During the 1833 trial of her editor, Thomas Pringle, Mary Prince testified that “She knows Christmas time. The natives then have a ‘stir up’; they dress in white, and dance; but if the ministers know of their dancing they prevent it”.147 However, at other moments, whites displayed a clear desire for black cultural life, even to the point of participating with slaves. For instance, within the context of Virginia, Morgan has demonstrated that the Virginian jig, a style supposedly lacking in method or regularity, was directly informed by white contact and participation with blacks.148 According to a slave named Dick his white master loved to listen to the banjo on moonlit nights and watch his slave women dance. Whereas the secretive voyeuristic surveillance of Sloane and Baptiste of the enslaved in Jamaica is obviously invasive, the desire of Dick’s white master to watch his female slaves dance should also not be considered innocent or innocuous. Indeed, given the utter control that whites exerted over every aspect of slave life, the possibility of coerced “festivity” looms like a shadow over this otherwise romantic moonlit scene. Dick further related that his master could “shake a desperate foot at a fiddle” and outperform others at a “Congo

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Minuet”.149 The master’s enjoyment of and pleasure in the African rhythms of his slaves here culminates in the ultimate transcultural amalgam, a Congo minuet, bridging the French social dance with the traditions of this Central African region.150 Returning to the role of coercion in African musical performance, George Pinckard offered another example of the ways in which the African love of music and dance was sometimes turned back against blacks as a means of manipulation and control. In 1796, Pinckard related witnessing newly arrived Africans on a slaver in a Jamaican harbour, dancing to the music “of their beloved banjar” on the deck.151 He further described that they were not allowed to remain in the place where they had slept. However, rather than a celebration of their expressive culture, the dancing was a form of exercise enforced by the white crew, for the maintenance of the health of the black “cargo” prior to sale. As such, the presence of a banjar in this context, as opposed to a European instrument, is intriguing and we should ponder if the instrument was taken aboard in Africa at the point of embarkation and, if so, if it was a strategy of coercion adopted by the white captain or a crew member, or if it was confiscated from an enslaved person. Equally as likely, a crewmember may have gone ashore and obtained the instrument in Jamaica while waiting to offload the ship. Another example of white male demands for black female cultural performance occurred in Jamaica on the plantation named Cornwall in Westmoreland, owned by Matthew Lewis. In his journal Lewis recalled that on 6 January 1816, in the evening of a festival day to celebrate his recent arrival (1 January), he desired to see girls dance. There was unanimous sentiment among the slaves that Psyche, the house slave, was the best dancer on the plantation. At his request she was called. Lewis appreciated her efforts recording that she was “light, graceful, easy and spirited”. He rewarded her with a handful of silver.152 Lewis is rare amongst many nineteenth-century white observers for his expression of ignorance and his ability to admit that despite appearances of what seemed to him to be a lack of deliberate and organized movement, an understanding of the dances that he witnessed was outside of the scope of his knowledge. He conceded: “to me they appear to be movements entirely dictated by the caprice of the moment; but I am told that there is a regular figure, and that the least mistake, or a single false step, is immediately noticed by the rest.”153 Lewis was also observant of the African-derived instruments, which were used to create the music for the dance. He recorded them as “Gambys” (Eboe drums), “Shaky-shekies” (a bladder with pebbles in it), and “Kitty-katties” (a flat piece of board beaten upon with two sticks), accompanied by a female singer who was “answered by a chorus”.154 But another way that whites enjoyed African music was to hire enslaved musicians for their own dances and balls. In early nineteenth-century Montreal where most black men alternated between work on boats, as domestics, or as waiters and porters in hotels, the role of musician offered less physically arduous employment with the possibility of more social latitude.155 Much like Heriot’s Quebec scene, Morgan has revealed that black slave musicians regularly provided the music at white gatherings in Virginia and South Carolina.156 While the French horn is mentioned amongst the instruments, the most popular were the European fiddle and the African banjo, the coexistence of the two another sign of the creolization of music culture in the Americas.157

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Franco- and Anglo-African exchanges have particular resonance for Heriot’s image, which captured just such a scene. Since the print dates from very early in the nineteenth century and the British conquest took place in 1760, we must consider the layering and intersection of two dominant European traditions, British and French (as well as others), along with the African musical traditions, which may have been manifest in Heriot’s cross-racial band. The large enclosed room with high ceiling is the setting for the festivities. While three white couples can be seen indulging in the dance, only the couple at the far right, comprising a man with a red belted jacket and plumed hat and a woman in red jacket and yellow skirt, can be seen touching hands.158 While the couple at left is face to face, in the central couple, the male is in the act of dancing at a right angle to the bonneted woman with his shoulder directed towards her face, his hands extended gracefully out from his sides in a careful manoeuvre. Although the print offers no indication as to the location of the festivities, the much-cited alternative name of the image, Dance at the Château, may indicate that Heriot witnessed the event at the home of a wealthy citizen in an urban setting, perhaps Château Ramezay on Notre Dame Street within the walls of the settlement.159 But whereas white artists in other African-dominated slave colonies deliberately worked to re-imagine Africans as the natural peasants of an urban space, it is unclear if artists such as Heriot felt the need to indigenize black subjects in Canada in the same way.160 Arguably the rarity and exoticism of black slaves had been a hallmark of their economic and symbolic value in the region throughout the period when the French Empire governed slavery. Heriot has indicated that the floor may soon be full of more dancers. Between the couples at centre and right, a man in a blue suit can be seen beckoning a woman in a green dress forward to the floor, with a hand on her wrist and another at her back. The obvious merriment of the gathering is explained in part by the crowd’s enjoyment of the music. But the tambourine-playing black male musician is not the only one in the scene. Indeed, two other black male subjects are visible on the left side of the image; one to the left of the tambourine player represented as a floating head and unclothed shoulders and the other at right as an upturned bodiless face. Given the date of the image and the historical enslavement of Africans in Quebec, which dates back to the early seventeenth century, it is not inappropriate to assume that the trio of black men was slaves, or at least former slaves.161 Heriot’s earlier travels to the Caribbean no doubt heightened his awareness of people of African descent. In 1777 he had departed London for the West Indies. Although his brother John, who had joined the marines, was also in the region at that time, Heriot’s specific reasons for the journey are as yet unclear.162 One of Heriot’s earliest known works is a watercolour entitled White River, St. Mary’s, Jamaica (c. 1780). The bluntness of his graphic style, especially in the delineation of the waterfall and river, the cursory nature of the staffage and the awkwardness of their shadows indicate that he was still in a phase of experimentation and self-education. But his more careful rendering of the trees and other plant life support his assertion that “During my residences in the tropical Climates, I employed myself chiefly in the study of Natural History, for which in the West India Islands this is a large field.”163 During the eighteenth century, Jamaica became established as the key sugar-producing colony of the British Empire and, as shall be

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discussed in great detail below, the wealth produced by the colony’s sugar estates was possible through the slave labour of imported Africans who comprised the majority of the population. After experiencing himself as a white minority within a black enslaved majority in Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies like St. Eustatius and Grenada, the reverse experience in Quebec of a black slave minority – also significantly Caribbean in origin – may have struck him as an interesting reversal.164 Indeed, after four years in the Caribbean, Heriot would most certainly have been able to identify certain cultural traits and customs (like dress, dance, singing, instruments, musicianship, accents, vocabulary, and language) as uniquely African-Caribbean. His watercolour entitled Negro Dance, West Indies (c. 1820) confirms his observation and representation of such African cultural survivals.165 As mentioned above, it is important to note that the print Minuets of the Canadians was derived from an earlier watercolour painting. The original watercolour dates from c. 1801 and had significant differences.166 While the musicians’ number, race, instruments, and mode of play are the same, the orientation of the room is substantially different and only two black men are present; the black tambourine player and the black man to his right. Therefore, while we cannot know why Heriot decided to retroactively include the third black male, undeniably the decision resulted in an increased visibility of the men of African origins amongst the white merrymakers.167 There are several things worth noting about how Heriot represented these musicians and the black male presence at the dance. First, whereas Philip Morgan’s research on the Chesapeake and Lowcountry regions of the US seems to indicate that enslaved blacks were used as musicians at white gatherings, the presence of a multi-racial band of musicians in Heriot’s scene may indicate an even deeper level of creolization of African and European music culture in Quebec, one likely triggered by the relative shortage of African slave (musicians) in the region (when compared to the demographic majorities of enslaved blacks in the American South and the Caribbean) and the subsequent need for musicians of any racial backgrounds to literally work together. Second, while the white male plays his tambourine in a traditional manner with his hands, it is the flamboyantly dressed black male’s exuberant playing with his outstretched right leg and left arm that literally becomes the apex of the image. Indeed, Heriot’s representation of the black man’s clothing (in the coloured print), made him unquestionably stand out both in terms of dress and actions. The importance of this figure to the overall narrative and composition should not be overlooked. The foursome (the white woman and three children) in the right foreground, are counterbalanced by the black musician’s position and actions within the left background of the image. Arguably though, it is he who is the most extravagantly dressed and although several of the women also wear stripes, the busyness of his competing vertical and horizontal ones, combined with his acrobatic tambourine playing, makes him impossible to miss. While it would be easy to attribute the specificity of the black tambourine-player’s dress and actions to Heriot’s artistic choice, they may instead be an indication of the specific African-Canadian creolization of cultures that occurred within the context of Quebec slavery.

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In the almost utter absence of control over their lifestyles, labour, intimate relationships, diet, and experiences, enslaved Africans ingeniously sought to take charge of whatever aspects of their bodies, lives, and cultures possible. While this creative cultural resistance was evident in defiant practices of grooming and self-care like hair care and styling, which celebrated the specificity of African hair textures, it was also apparent in the technical and aesthetic prowess of the dress cultures that emerged in spite of the poor-quality cloth rations of slave owners or the natural fibres harvested, produced and even dyed and perfumed by the enslaved.168 Such dogged resistance and cultural creativity was even detectable in the walking styles of the enslaved. Writing about Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century, Edward Long described a female dancer who “In her paces . . . exhibits a wonderful address, particularly in the motion of her hips, and steady position of the upper part of her person”.169 Interestingly, Long expressed appreciation for the way this dance move was kept in “exact time with the music”, an ability he claimed that was honed at a young age since the practice commenced “so early in life”. But incredibly, what he went on to call a wriggle, he also detected as an attribute of “ordinary walking”, that “few are without”.170 What is fascinating here is that the enslaved Africans’ desire for individuality persisted as a creative and courageous care and performance of self, even in the face of extreme forms of strategic social and cultural deprivation and homogenization enforced by whites and enacted through corporal punishment. Indeed, the control and suppression of black selfcare was at the heart of slave practices. In a discussion of the corporal regimentation of labour in Jamaica whereby the sound of the whip was used to summon slaves to the fields, the Reverend Bickell wrote: at the unwelcome sounds, Afric’s dusky daughter must start from her gloomy abode; no children crying for food can detain her, (though on some properties women having young children do not got to work before breakfast); no time allowed for platting the hair and washing the skin; but with her hoe in one hand, and an infant in the other, or often tied up in a cloth behind her, she makes the best of her way to take her place, her unequal share of the task [italics mine].171 Given such insurmountable obstacles, the manifestation of African cultural expression on and through the body was for Stuart Hall a result of a specific type of cultural exclusion and prohibition. As Hall has argued, Displaced from a logocentric world – where the direct mastery of cultural modes meant the mastery of writing, and hence, both of the criticism of writing (logocentric criticism) and the deconstruction of writing – the people of the Black Diaspora have, in opposition to all of that, found the deep form, the deep structure of their cultural life in music.172 Blacks were then forced to write on and with the only surface that they could access, their own bodies. Given the context of the pervasiveness and violence of white

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dominance in the Trans Atlantic World, a dominance which is reflected in Heriot’s print in terms of the majority presence of white subjects and the actual context of Western art production, it is important to question whether or not the unconventional tambourine-playing of the black man would have been read by Heriot’s largely white audience as outlandish and even comical, a decision which may have had more sinister motives. As Kriz has argued, “Imaging black street performers and hawkers as childlike and comic provides an alternative to refinement as a mechanism for containing their rude energy and the ever-present threat of colonial violence.”173 However, it is equally possible that the act of playing his tambourine with his foot was, for this black musician, like the wriggle in the walk observed in blacks by Long in Jamaica, a deviant mode of self-individuation in the process of African cultural preservation and memory; an act of ultimate resistance in the slave-holding settlement of Montreal in which he was a racial minority. The tambourine It is also of great significance that the black musician is playing a tambourine. According to Michael J. Morgan, Though stripped of their possessions when forced onboard slave ships, West Africans could not be stripped of their culture. In the New World Colonies, Africans and their descendants reconstructed a number of traditional African instruments. Of these, drums were probably the most important.174 The toombah or tambourine was a central part of the music created at African gatherings in the Caribbean.Writing in Antigua in the late eighteenth century, John Luffman disdainfully described watching Africans dancing to “their own country tunes” played on “the banjar” (sic) made from a “large calabash, to which is prefixed a wooden neck”, accompanied by the drumming upon an instrument called a toombah (sic), which he described as similar to the tabor and having “gingles of tin or shells”.175 Meanwhile, in St Vincent, Sir William Young, the Commissioner and Receiver for sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St Vincent, and Tobago,176 provided a detailed description of the ways in which African musical traditions had been sustained: In the evening I opened the ball in the great court, with a minuet with black Phillis . . . our music consisted of two excellent fiddles . . . and . . . tamborin . . . there stood up about eighteen couples . . . This moment a new party of musicians are arrived with an African Balafo, an instrument composed of pieces of hard wood of different diameters, laid on a row over a sort of box; they beat on one or the other so as to strike out a good musical tune. They played two or three African tunes; and about a dozen girls, hearing their sound, came from the huts to the great court, and began a curious and most lascivious dance, with much grace as well as action; of the last, plenty in truth [sic].177

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Young’s recollections are informative in several ways. Not only did he record the African familiarity with and mastery of European dances like the minuet in the Caribbean context, he provided detailed descriptions of the African diasporic musical instruments and their construction and method of use. Furthermore, unlike Heriot’s Quebec scene in which no black or white bodies are touching, it was Young himself that commenced physical crossracial interaction at the ball when he danced with black Phillis. In breach of a colonial taboo, his description of her as black, as opposed to coloured, mulatto (or any number of other names for mixed-race people), signals that she was most likely a so-called fullblooded Negro or at least visually appeared as such. As Morgan has argued, the balafo was a cousin of the xylophone and just one in a range of variously shaped and sized drums, which were re-created across the Americas.178 Amongst the others were the tabor, toombah, gombay, and tomtom.179 Therefore, the distinctiveness of the black man’s dress, musicianship, dancing, and the choice of the tambourine may denote Heriot’s attempt to capture the continuity of African music culture in the diaspora through a representation of its uniquely African-Canadian incarnation in Quebec. It is significant to note that the vision of the other two black males is focused not on the dance floor, but on their tambourine-playing fellow slave. Both represented in profile, their eyes seem trained upon his tambourine. Heriot’s choice here is not necessarily about the prowess of the black tambourine player. Rather, given the taboos about cross-racial romantic and sexual contact between Europeans and Africans, the lack of vision of two of the black males is not inconsequential. Prohibitions on miscegenation (sex between different races) could be found across the colonies of the various European empires and while the black slaves could be in attendance as musicians, their presence as participants in this whitedominated minuet could only have been mitigated by the attendance of black or similarly racially marginalized women.180 In particular, anti-miscegenation laws and policies were meant to impede black male/white female sexual and romantic contact and coupling and to render consensual cross-racial relationships illegitimate.181 As such, by focusing the gazes of these two black males on the tambourine, Heriot imagines them as being purely and “appropriately” consumed by the performance of the black musician, rather than with the large gathering of white women. In contrast, the presence of two particularly amorous white couples, with the women seated on their male partner’s laps, demonstrates the sexual possibilities available for white males at the dance.182 Therefore, we should not read the absence of the black males from partnered heterosocial dancing as a sign of cultural ignorance. Recall Young above citing Africans dancing a minuet in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, writing about Christmas festivities amongst Jamaican negroes and mulattoes in 1788, Peter Marsden remarked that “They dance minuets with the mulattoe and other brown women, imitating the motion and steps of the English, but with a degree of affectation . . . But their own way of dancing is droll indeed [sic] [italics mine]”.183 Unlike other white observers, Marsden deserves credit for being astute enough to discern that the “failures” of the Africans’ minuet were deliberate and designed to convey their easy mastery of a dance that they deemed to be beneath their cultural abilities and traditions. The white Marsden’s significant discomfort at being so openly mocked by his supposed

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racial inferiors was registered in his need to position the Africans’ own dancing styles as worthy of his ridicule and derision. He continued, “. . . they put themselves into strange postures, and shake their hips and great breasts to such a degree, that it is impossible to refrain from laughing, though they go through the whole performance with profound gravity [italics mine].”184 Also significant is Marsden’s notice of the minuet as the dance of choice. As mentioned above in the Virginian context, the minuet was a European dance, which Africans mastered and transformed across various sites of the diaspora. The affectation of the blacks in their performance of the minuet in the homes of white Jamaicans and Europeans, while wearing British dress, was a transgressive act that arguably flaunted their ability to master European dances as well as their disdain for the ideal of supposed white cultural superiority.185 But Marsden’s use of the word “affectation” also disrupts the neat idea of the colonized subject as being unaware of their bodily performance within the colonial process of mimicry. Franz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha and others like Kay Dian Kriz have taken up mimicry as a complex colonial operation through which the white colonizing body positions itself as centre and superior through the imitative acts of the colonized, which it demands, only to judge as, always already a failure.186 While mimicry has been defined as being reliant upon slippage or the preservation or reification of difference between the colonized and colonizer, menace occurs when the “other” is deemed to be beyond recognition and control.187 I would like to offer that it is the third category further developed by Kriz which best describes the affectation which Marsden observed in the Christmas performance of the assembled Jamaican Negroes and mulattoes: mockery. According to Kriz, mockery is useful to “distinguish representations of black performers who consciously parody white culture from those images . . . in which mimicry is produced as an effect of the representation itself.”188 Marsden notes that the Negroes and mulattoes consciously mocked the white onlookers through his choice of the word affectation. The term connotes an exaggerated or even outlandish performance, which would have emphasized aspects of the European dance as worthy of ridicule. This affectation also positions the black body as a knowing subject, one that embodied knowledge about the colonizer, as well as a self-conscious body, one that not only understood itself to be under surveillance, but that understood the nature of that surveillance. As such, Marsden’s recognition of black affectation is a rare moment of white acknowledgement of a returned gaze, which questioned and challenged the assumed priority and superiority of whiteness. I would argue, then, that Marsden’s reading of affectation in the dance is precisely his recognition of mockery and, furthermore, that what prohibits mockery from becoming menace is Marsden’s quick and decisive decision to deride the cultural practices of the blacks, which his desire for the preservation of his white superiority calls him to diminish as “droll indeed”.189 In an analysis of Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, drawn after Nature, and in Lithography (1837–38), Kriz has argued that the inscrutability and whiteness of the masks worn by the black Actor-Boy performers rendered them unsettling

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in their “unreadable blankness”. 190 In contrast, the gathered blacks that Marsden watched were not masked and their black and brown bodies were clearly visible and readily apparent as the bodies performing the dance. As such, the way that they danced the minuet (with affectation) and the effects of their performance (mockery) emanated directly from their own African bodies. Therefore, their ability not only to master and perform the dance, as the whites would have, but also to choose to alter it in deliberate ways to make fun of the supposedly culturally superior expression, would have been explicitly conveyed to their white onlookers. And lastly, the bodiless nature of two of the black males is materially and symbolically significant. Materially, their obscured bodies open up the likelihood that they are not guests but also musicians whose instruments are simply hidden by the assembled crowd. While it is unclear if black musicians would have been paid in Quebec, the practice in Chesapeake and the Lowcountry was to pay the slave a nominal sum, to aid with the upkeep of their instruments or to rent the slave from his or her master for the occasion.191 Symbolically, their decapitated heads and diverted gazes render them as men without full vision, bodies, and concomitantly without sex. Likewise, a portly white man (who is also not dancing) is positioned between the black male subjects but closer to the picture plane, his body separating the black subject furthest to the right from the dancers in Heriot’s La Danse Ronde, Circular Dance of the Canadians. The white male’s body literally blocks a significant portion of the darker skinned black man’s body from view. Although the crotch of the black man’s pants is visible, the tilt of his head upward and the direction of his gaze away from any of the assembled merry-makers, renders him sexually contained. The lighter skinned black male is closer to the gathered group but the connection of the white dancers’ hands maintains his exclusion from their dance. In contrast though, he does not look up and away from the gathering as the other black male, but rather, with arms folded across his chest and hands hidden from view, he appears to look intensely, even longingly, at the assembled dancers. While the maleness of Heriot’s blacks can only be gauged from their closely cropped hairstyles,192 their missing bodies also subliminally signal the absence of their genitalia and as such, the erasure of the source of a prolific white fear of a fictive black male sexuality and cross-racial desire.193 Connecting black Canadian music to the African diaspora Unlike the US, the historical African roots and contributions of Canadian music have yet to be explored. Much work is still to be done in examining primary sources for descriptions of African musicians, instruments, dance, and social custom in Canada. If Heriot’s work is indicative, then the frequency of cross-racial musical collaboration would have been higher in Quebec (and Canada) than in other colonial contexts and the effects of such cooperation may prove distinct to this region.Through enforced illiteracy, a lack of leisure time, strategic material deprivation, and systematized torture, whites ensured that enslaved Africans lacked equitable access to cultural expression and self-representation. It is this privileged white

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cultural access that resulted in the racial marginalization of these black subjects. It is not incidental, then, that Portrait of a HaitianWoman (1786), a representation of a black woman, and Minuets of the Canadians (1807), a representation which included three black men, were created by white Montreal-based artists, one French and the other British.We must acknowledge the centuries of harm created by the ability of whites to maintain, or more accurately to hoard, a privileged cultural access, which went hand in hand with a material and psychosocial access to African bodies and cultures. It is this access that resulted in the racial “othering” of these black populations, the consequences of which we are still grappling with today. Yet however changed, African cultures were not broken by slavery. And Heriot’s representation of African musicians is, in and of itself, recognition of African historical presence and the deep cross-racial desire for African expressive culture. Notes 1 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 2. 2 Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure:The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World:A Student Reader, eds.Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 693. 3 The Taino are the most commonly cited original inhabitants of the island known originally as Ayiti. The island was renamed La Española by Columbus and came to be known as Hispaniola. The names Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo were also used; terms that sometimes conflated both sides of the Frenchand Spanish-occupied island. However, by the eighteenth century, the western third of the island was commonly known as Saint Domingue. After the 1804 declaration of independence by General Jean Jacques Dessaline, the nation was renamed Hayiti, a recognition of its pre-conquest identity. 4 Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Bringing the Empire Home: The Black Servant in Domestic Portraiture”, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 27. 5 For more on the specific use, symbolism, and meanings of the fruit still life, see Charmaine A. Nelson, “The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly”, Representing the Black Female Subject inWestern Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). 6 Tobin, “Bringing the Empire Home”, p. 27. 7 Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique:The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Montreal: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 7. 8 I am grateful to Rinaldo Walcott for his insightful comments about the nature of the reoccurring EuroCanadian desire to erase the memory of African slavery and the concomitant anti-black racism as a type of pathology. 9 The painting, signed and dated 1786, is owned by the McCord Museum, Montreal (69.1 × 55.6 cm, M12067) but is currently on long-term loan to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it is on display in the re-installed Quebec and Canadian Permanent Collection, in the new Clair and Marc Bourgie Pavilion that opened 14 October 2012. I am grateful to Christian Vachon for generously sharing his knowledge with me. Telephone conversation with Christian Vachon, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, McCord Museum, Montreal, 14 May 2012. 10 Beaucourt, the son of a French soldier and amateur painter, was born on 25 February 1740 in La Prairie, Quebec and died in Montreal in 24 June 1794. Although most accounts claim that François’s father Paul Beaucourt (1700–56) was a French military man, they disagree as to whether he was in naval or army service. Posted to New France in 1720, he settled in La Prairie (near Montreal) where his son was eventually born. Taking up painting after his discharge, Paul was his son’s first art teacher but would later encourage him to pursue formal training, which he did in Bordeaux, France. François enrolled at the Académie de peinture, sculpture et architecture civile et navale in Bordeaux in 1775, to which he was

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elected in 1784. Barry Lord has indicated that the addition of the de by François to his last name was an aristocratic pretension, which reveals the painter’s class aspirations. Donald Blake Webster, Georgian Canada: Conflict and Culture 1745–1820 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1984), p. 141; Barry Lord, The History of Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), pp. 31–2; and Jacques Des Rochers, “Portrait of a Haitian Woman: A Loan from the McCord Museum”, M:The Magazine of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (September – December 2011), p. 15. Lord, The History of Painting in Canada, p. 43. Lord’s reference to the rates for portraits pertains to the Canadian portraitist Théophile Hamel (1817–70), born near Québec City. For a fuller discussion of the meanings and implications of the exposed breast in the portrait, see: Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art”; and Nelson, “The Fruits of Resistance”. Exemptions from this norm would be so-called fallen women who were courtesans or prostitutes. You do find images of white women as allegories (that is, nymphs, Venuses) that allowed for a more explicit heterosexual male viewing pleasure. However, by definition, allegories are not real women and therefore not portraits. Jim Chevalier argues that, by 1744, a Swedish visitor to French Canada reported that breakfast included bread, brandy, chocolate, and, especially for ladies, coffee. Jim Chevalier, “The Queen’s Coffee and Casanova’s Chocolate: The Early Modern Breakfast in France”, Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900, eds. Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 199. Lord, The History of Painting in Canada, p. 44. Lord insightfully expands on this point through an equation of the treatment of the black female body with pornography. In a critical analysis of the work he equates the portraits function with “prettifying” the oppressed colonial for the pleasure of the patron classes. Since the children born to female slaves, regardless of the race or social status of the father, became the property of their owners, slavery created an economic incentive for the endemic sexual exploitation of black women. Slave owners openly “bred” their female slaves for “natural increase”. So-called natural increase was, of course, not natural at all, but involved the deliberate sexual exploitation, through rape, concubinage, and coercion, of enslaved black females. See: Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 35, no. 2 (April 1978), pp. 357–74; Richard H. Steckel, “Birth Weights and Infant Mortality among American Slaves”, Explorations in Economic History, vol. 23 (April 1986), pp. 173–98; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (NewYork:W.W. Norton, 1999); Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure”; and Nelson, “Racing Childhood”. Nelson, “Racing Childhood”, p. 39. White, Ar’n’t I aWoman?, pp. 67–8. Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 40. Other scholars concurred with Reid’s assessment that the portrait was not produced in Canada. Major-Frégeau suggested that the work was painted in or based upon experience in the West Indies. Gérard Morisset’s research, which proposed that the fruits and the landscape were suggestive of experience in the West Indies, predated Reid’s speculation. However, at the same time, Morisset claimed that the painting was “supposed to have been painted in Montreal”, but did not provide any evidence. John Bentley Mays went even further than Reid, claiming that François Malépart de Beaucourt had travelled on sugar boats from France to Guadeloupe, but again without providing primary source evidence. See: Madeleine MajorFrégeau, La vie et l’oeuvre de François Malépart de Beaucourt, 2nd ed. (Quebec: Ministère des Affaires culturelles Dépot legal, Bibliothèque nationale du Quebec, 1979), p. 60; Gérard Morisset, “An Essay on Canadian Painting”, Painting in Canada: A Selective Historical Survey (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946), p. 22; and John Bentley Mays, “From Pine Tress to Palm Trees”, The Globe and Mail (5 March 1988), p. C5. Major-Frégeau, La vie et l’oeuvre, pp. 59–60. Major-Frégeau uses the expression “un jeune antillaise parfaitement libre” in a manoeuvre that denies the prolific and entrenched institution of slavery, especially in the Caribbean. In a similar tactic, Webster argued, without providing evidence, that the black female sitter in the portrait was known to be living in Montreal in 1832 “probably having been freed long since”. The assumption of the woman’s manumission, along with her presence in the city a full 46 years after she had

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Representing the enslaved African in Montreal been painted, was strategic in that it implied the benevolence of her white slave holders that was supposedly evidenced not only through her freedom, but by the fact that she had survived into old age. Webster, Georgian Canada, p. 141. Major-Frégeau, La vie et l’oeuvre, pp. 59–60. Lord, The History of Painting in Canada, p. 44. Considering the work as a Canadian production, Lord astutely noted the exoticization of the black female sitter as a way to create a racial and geographical distance between her represented body and that of her white viewers. Leonara Sansay, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo in a Series of Letters,Written by a Lady at Cape François to Colonel Burr Late Vice-President of the United States principally during the Command of General Rochambeau (Philadelphia: Published by Bradford and Inskeep, R. Carr Printer, 1808). Michael J. Drexler, “Leonora Sansay’s Anatopic Imagination”, Urban Identity and the Atlantic World, eds. Elizabeth Fay and Leonard Von Morzé (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 151. Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, A Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715–1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, eds. Gordon M. Sayre and Carla Zecher, trans. Gordon M. Sayre (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 101. Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue, eds. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite (1797–98; repr. Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1958); cited in Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 41. Drexler, “Leonora”, p. 145. Vincent C. Peloso, Race and Ethnicity in Latin American History (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 40. Philippe Girard, Haiti the Tumultuous History: From Pearl of the Atlantic to Broken Nation (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 63. Girard, Haiti the Tumultuous History, p. 63. I have elsewhere speculated about the possibility that the earrings and other jewellery were a gift or bribe meant to illicit the sitter’s cooperation, or a tactic of coercion for sexual services; a common occurrence between slave owners and enslaved females across the Americas. For instance, in the context of his breeding list, which I will discuss in further detail below in Chapter 6, the Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis detailed the bribes that he offered the enslaved women on his plantation. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 237; see also: Charmaine A. Nelson, “Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada”, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). The latter was, of course, also common amongst free people engaged in sexual relations, as was the case with the peddler Abraham Davies who sought to purchase sex from the daughter of the brothel keeper Sarah Murphy with the gift of earrings. Poutanen, “‘To Indulge their Carnal Appetites’: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal” (PhD dissertation, Université de Montréal, Départment d’histoire, 1996), p. 91. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 7. Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations:The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth-Century”, An Economy of Colour:Visual Culture and the AtlanticWorld, 1660–1830, eds. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 116. Trudel lists the artist and his wife’s family name as Beacours. The other slave is listed as a male, JeanBaptiste-François nègre, who was reportedly baptized on 14 April 1791 at the approximate age of 14 with Beaucourt’s wife acting as his godmother. The boy was listed as the property of the widow of the painter. This would have made him only nine years old when François painted Marie. As such, since she was considerably more adult, this rules out the likelihood that the two shared anything but a bond of friendship or a mother–son relationship. See Marcel Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Editions Hutubise HMH Ltée, 1990), pp. 105, 379. A contradictory account problematizes the validity of Marie as the model for the portrait. Benoite Camagne mentions a “Catherine Cora negresse” as the woman represented in the portrait. See Archives judiciaires ed Montréal, Greffe de Patrice Lacombe, acte numéro 70 (le 5 juillet 1832) cited in Major- Frégeau, La vie et l’oeuvre, p. 60. Mackey relates that Jean-Baptiste-François had become a free man by 1796 and was known as Jean Beaucour dit l’Africain upon his marriage in 1801 and thereafter as Jean-Baptiste L’Africain. Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery:The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), p. 72. Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, pp. 114, 379. Trudel also claimed that Marie had been buried on 16 December 1800 at l’Hôpital-Général.

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36 Mackey, Done with Slavery, pp. 140, 466 (note #12). Mackey’s sources were: KBCV, Court of King’s Bench, civil side, BANQ, TL 19, S4, John Trim v. Simon Clark, 1823, no. 162, deposition of Catherine Gayet (Guillet), 23 September 1828; HDM, Hôtel-Dieu de Montreal, admission registers, Book R, 6 April 1838. 37 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 466 (note #13). I first identified the sitter as Marie-Thérèse-Zémire in an article in 2004: Charmaine Nelson, “Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art”, Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahier de la femme, Women and the Black Diaspora, vol. 23, no. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 22–9. 38 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 466 (note #13). Mackey’s sources were: BANQ, register of HôpitalGénéral chapel, 16 December 1800; HDM, Hôtel-Dieu de Montreal, admission registers, Book E, 19 April 1796. 39 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 140. 40 There is much disagreement over the precise dates of Beaucourt’s departure from Europe. Barry Lord puts his European dates even longer at 1771 to 1786. Meanwhile, Michael Measures places him in France from possibly 1763 and claims that the December 1784 Minutes of the Bordeaux Academy, to which Beaucourt had been elected in 1783, recorded his plans to depart for America and his leave of the Academy. See: Lord, The History of Painting in Canada, p. 32; and Reid, A Concise History, p. 40. 41 Portrait of an Architect, Master of a Masonic Lodge in Cap François, Saint Domingue (Now Haiti) (1787), oil on canvas, 70.2 × 57.2 cm, purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest, 2006, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 42 Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World”, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), pp. 583–614, at p. 587. 43 Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 174. 44 The eastern two thirds of the island was the site of the first Spanish colony in the Americas and is today known as the nation of the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo is the capital city. 45 Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal”, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), p. 553. 46 Des Rochers, “Portrait of a Haitian Woman”, p. 15. Evidence of Beaucourt’s Masonic membership also exists in his signature, which sometimes included the Masonic symbol of three dots in a triangle. See Madeleine Major- Frégeau, “Malpeart de Beaucourt, François”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, vol. 4, 1771–1800, at http://www.biographi.ca/EN/009004–119.01-e.php?id_nbr=2044 (date of last access 4 January 2013). 47 The first Masonic lodge in St Domingue was founded in Les Cayes in 1738 and in Cap François, Saint-Jean de Jérusalem Ecossaise, in 1749. James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 106. 48 Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution 1789–1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp. 47–50. 49 Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 597. While Dessaline’s declaration and his earlier proclamation (19 November 1803) promising loyalty and security to inhabitants of all colours were intended to deconstruct the deep-seeded Dominguan practice of racism, the emergent naming practices amongst his own generals indicate just how entrenched were such colonial social hierarchies. While the generals who were free prior to the revolution were known as ancien libres, those generals freed by the abolition of 1793 were referred to as nouveau libres. That the lighter-skinned mulattoes were also commonly the ancien libres and the darker-skinned noires the more recently freed nouveau libres meant that this social hierarchy was also clearly a racial one. By 1806 these groups became official enemies when, upon the assassination of Dessaline on 17 October, Hayti was divided into two republics led by generals Henry Christophe (considered Negro or dark-skinned) who presided over the north and Alexandre Pétion (a so-called mulatto) who ruled over the south (pp. 596, 597, 611). For more on this class-racial hierarchy see also Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, p. 555. 50 Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “‘Hands across the Sea’:The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World”, Geographical Review, vol. 89, no. 2 (April 1999), p. 239. 51 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, pp. 105–6. 52 Harland-Jacobs, “Hands across the Sea”, pp. 239, 241.

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53 Harland-Jacobs, “Hands across the Sea”, p. 241. This regiment was also later stationed in Europe, Egypt, Malta, India, and Bermuda (p. 242). 54 Harland-Jacobs, “Hands across the Sea”, p. 241. Although strictly speaking a brigand was a robber, the British also seemed to use the term in reference to free(d) people of colour (like the blacks of Haiti) who were characterized as criminals. See: Samuel Johnson and John Walker, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane; George Cowie and Co. Poultry, 1828), p. 83; and Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 598. 55 Although the Masons did not subscribe to a particular religion, they strove to unite men of various religions, sects, and denominations while providing access to the various aspects of religion (sermons, rituals, feast days, etc.) and supporting its members’ spiritual needs. Harland-Jacobs, “Hands across the Sea”, pp. 244–5. 56 Harland-Jacobs, “Hands across the Sea”, p. 244. 57 Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 590. 58 According to Gaffield, in the first half of 1803, French planters made up the majority of people arriving in Jamaica. Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, pp. 590, 594. 59 Besides Jamaica, the closest neighbouring established colony to which white Haitians also fled was Cuba. Recalling the common ground of recent mixed-race exiles who had settled in Cuba, Dessaline’s second in command, Nicolas Geffrard (himself mixed-race), wrote to the Spanish governor in Santiago de Cuba in 1803 encouraging Spanish commerce in Dominguan ports by promising the containment of the revolution. The Spanish did not respond. Dessaline’s letters to US president Thomas Jefferson likewise went unanswered. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, pp. 568–9. 60 Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 587. But the British intervention in the revolution extended beyond mere policy to military action when, in late July 1803, the British naval squadron at Jamaica blockaded Cap François. Their disruption of business in one of the island’s major trading ports prevented the French army from receiving necessary supplies, hastening their defeat. However, a seeming contradiction of this manoeuvre was Governor Nugent’s documented concern for French colonists. Apparently, in 1803 Nugent was in the rare position of having been solicited for aid by all three of the competing factions of St Domingue: the French army, the white planters, and the liberators. Sending his emissaries James Walker and Hugh Cathcart to Haiti on 27–30 August 1803 to negotiate a treaty with General Dessaline, the pair conveyed the Jamaican governor’s two stipulations, the first being that whites be allowed to retain possession of their estates. Second, trying to seize an upper hand in their war with France, Nugent also stipulated that the British should be allowed to take over military bases in Haiti (Tiburon and Môle Saint-Nicolas) for the duration of the war in order to disrupt privateering from Cuba. While allowing for whites to return to the towns, fearing a return to the structures of slavery that the revolution had dismantled, Dessaline blocked the return of whites to the plantations. On the second point, Dessaline also rejected the idea of the foreign military presence in and occupation of Haiti. While Dessaline clearly advocated for Haitian sovereignty and resisted British interference in their military and commercial affairs, he also made it clear to Nugent that a free Haiti could co-exist with a slave colony, Jamaica, so long as the two were joined in their hatred of France. Regardless, after Dessaline’s assassination in 1806, the British unilaterally implemented their articles of the proposed 1804 treaty and did not formally acknowledge Haitian independence until 1826, only after France’s acknowledgement of 1825. However, the French recognition was contingent upon a large penalty, paid to reimburse French slave owners for their losses. See Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, pp. 591, 593–5, 604, 613, and 614. For more on Dessaline’s position on Jamaica, see Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, pp. 554, 567. 61 Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 590. 62 Letter, George Nugent to Robert Hobart, 4 March 1803, CO 137/110, p. 57, NA, National Archives, UK; cited in Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 590. 63 Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 590. 64 Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, pp. 575–6. 65 Reid, A Concise History, p. 40. Unfortunately, Reid did not offer any primary source evidence to substantiate this claim. 66 Major-Frégeau, “Malpeart de Beaucourt, François”. 67 “Beaucourt, French Painter”, General Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), Tuesday 3 January 1792, issue 394, p. 3. Bordeaux is misspelled in the advertisement as Bourdeaux. Beaucourt had earlier placed a similar

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advertisement in the 23 March 1785 edition of the St Domingue weekly Affiches americaines. It read: “Monsieur Beaucourt, Painter, member of the Royal Academy of Bordeaux and recently arrived in the Colony, would be pleased to put his talents at the service of art lovers. He paints every kind of picture, including portraits in oil and miniatures, as well as historical and architectural subjects, decorative and ornamental works, landscapes, seascapes, florals, and so on.” Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, cartel enrichi, displayed with Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786). Beginning on 3 January 1792, Beaucourt ran the same advertisement a total of 22 times in the General Advertiser. It appeared on 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, and 31 January and again on 2, 4, and 11 February. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, pp. 578. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, p. 580. Blancamp, who had been Louverture’s ambassador to the US in 1798, later served Dessaline as Haiti’s diplomatic attaché during negotiations with Jamaica. Indeed, Blancamp’s prominence under the Dessaline regime belies the academic tendency to mischaracterize the 1804 massacre as the indiscriminate extermination of all whites. But, rather as Girard has argued, Dessaline spared whites whose professions he found indispensable, such as surgeons, or who existed largely outside of the daily brutality of the plantation system, such as priests. Dessaline also spared the mixed-race descendants of French colonialists, non-French whites, and French people who had aligned with the new republic. Indeed, the killings were not an expression of wholesale racial vengeance, but a considered programme of violence and retribution against those who had systematically orchestrated centuries of the most brutal oppression of Africans on the island, French planters. See Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, pp. 579–80. James Alexander Dun, “‘What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!’: Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution”, TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly,Third Series,The Atlantic Economy in an Era of Revolutions, vol. 62, no. 3 (July 2005), p. 475. Dun, “What Avenues of Commerce”, pp. 474, 476, 485. According to McDonald, in the late eighteenth century, coffee importing had become such a lucrative business in the US in part since its demand led to a market for re-exportation. See Michelle Craig McDonald, “The Chance of the Moment: Coffee and the New West Indies Commodities Trade”, TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, The Atlantic Economy in an Era of Revolutions, vol. 62, no. 3 (July 2005), p. 441. McDonald, “The Chance of the Moment”, pp. 444–5. McDonald puts the actual amount at between 1,400,000 and 1,600,000 pounds weight (635 and 725 metric tons respectively) of coffee in 1790–91 and between 450,000 and 500,000 pounds weight (204 and 227 metric tons respectively) for 1791–92. Dun, “What Avenues of Commerce”, p. 476. McDonald, “The Chance of the Moment”, p. 464. Dun, “What Avenues of Commerce”, p. 477. Dun, “What Avenues of Commerce”, p. 478. In the period between 1789 and 1805, the highest percentage of foreign trade from Dominguan ports occurred in 1796 when 282 of 817 vessels constituted 34.5 per cent. Even in 1804, the year of Dessaline’s massacre, 36 of 551 foreign ships still arrived from Dominguan ports, making up 6.5 per cent of foreign trade. See Table I, “Total Entries to Philadelphia from Foreign Ports and Ports in Saint Domingue, 1789–1805”, in Dun, “What Avenues of Commerce”, p. 478. Health Officer’s Account of Passenger Entries (series #41.9) January–June 1792, pp. 8–12; Record Group 41, Records of the Navigation Commission for the Delaware River and its Navigable Tributaries, Port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, US. I am extremely grateful to Jonathan R. Stayer, Supervisor of Reference Services, for his knowledge, guidance, and careful attention to this research. Significantly, the Health Officer’s records also indicate three vessels arriving from St. Domingo/St. Domingue in the same six-month period in 1792. It is unclear, then, if these two names were to indicate a port on the eastern two thirds of the island, the Spanish-controlled part. But given that the other Dominguan vessels were specified more precisely by port, this could well be the case. It appears that the term “servant” may have been used to encompass bound employees and slaves. The records for the period of January – June 1792 indicate that 27 Philadelphia-bound vessels departed from the port of Cap François, with 19 having three or more passengers and only four with one passenger. Regarding the argument about the potential of a brief Jamaican detour, two ships arrived from Jamaica in June 1792; the first with six passengers, a brig named Little Sarah captained by James Lowry

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Representing the enslaved African in Montreal on 23 June and another with three passengers, a brig named Triumph originating from St. Anns (sic), Jamaica and captained by Abner Sothrop (?) on 26 June. However, these dates seem to be too late to support this theory. Letter, Jonathan R. Stayer to author, 28 August 2012. The portraits of white women include:Théophile Hamel’s Louise-Adèle Taschereau (between 1849 and 1853) and Madame Charles-Hilaire Tetu, née Elizabeth O’Brien, and her son Eugène (1841), and Antoine Plamondon’s Madame Louis de Lagrave, née Jane Normandeau (1836). The portrait of the Métis woman is James Bowman’s Mrs. Colin Robertson, née Theresa Chalifoux (1833). The portrait of the Native woman is Paul Kane’s CawWacham (1848). Mrs. Colin Robertson is described as the wife of the Chief Factor of Hudson’s Bay Company, and the insulting remarks made about her, by her husband’s likely white acquaintance, implied that Mr. Robertson’s attempts to “civilize” her for refined white company would inevitably fail. The original use of the term “wardrobe malfunction” was in reference to the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime fiasco of Janet Jackson’s performance with Justin Timberlake, wherein the white male pop star ripped the material off the black female superstar’s right breast, exposing it to millions of viewers. It is noteworthy in this context of my reading of Portrait of a Haitian Woman that the subsequent fallout from this incident and the accusations of sexual impropriety were mainly placed on Jackson’s shoulders, while Timberlake initially feigned ignorance and offloaded responsibility for this element of the performance. In a subsequent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Jackson stated that “all of the emphasis was put on me, not on Justin” and when asked directly by Oprah if she felt that Timberlake had “left her hanging”, Jackson responded “to a certain extent, yeah”.Timberlake later reportedly stated that if the responsibility for their performance was 50–50, he had only taken 10 per cent of the blame. Lord, The History of Painting in Canada, p. 43. It is quite possible too that Beaucourt’s wife inherited the painting since the inventory compiled after Beaucourt’s death and before her second marriage to Gabriel Franchère lists “six paintings” (six tableaux). Inventory and Wedding Contract for Benoit dit Gaetan Benigne, 19 June 1810, Faubourg Saint-Joseph, Montreal, prepared by Notary Louis Huguet-Latour, Inventaires après décès de la région de Montréal, 1791–1840, Centre d’archives de Montréal, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. I am grateful to Ariane Côté who translated these complex historical texts from French to English. William Renwick Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1920), pp. 359–75, at p. 362. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces”, p. 360. Reid, A Concise History, p. 40. While studying art abroad in Bordeaux under Joseph-Gaétant Camag(n)e, François met and married his teacher’s daughter in 1773. Since Trudel lists Benoite Gaétant as the slave owner, another possibility, though slight, is of course that Marie had resided with her mistress in Europe before the marriage to François. Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 36. Ghachem aptly notes that this extraordinary loss of life in St Domingue in the 1780s did not include the mortality rates of the Middle Passage, which he estimates for French ships at the rate of 13 per cent. At the time, the transit time between Africa and the French Caribbean was an average of 70 days. Ghachem, The Old Regime, p. 36. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines”, p. 575. Governor Nugent’s envoy Edward Corbet, who first reached Haiti in January 1804, estimated the surviving population at 150,000 although other sources placed it much higher at 300,000. Ghachem, The Old Regime, p. 35. Ghachem points out that, in 1681, with a population of 6,648, whites had dominated, making up 65 per cent of the population while the slave population was 31 per cent and the free coloureds were 3 per cent. Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 166. Free black populations were composed of some Negroes but mainly mulattoes (people of mixed African and European ancestry) who were known as affrachis, and the white population may have been closer to 30,000. I am grateful to Patrick Bellegarde-Smith for these insights. E-mail exchange between Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and author, 15–16 May 2012. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 30; cited in Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica”, p. 601. ˘

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97 See James A. Padgett, “Diplomats to Haiti and their Diplomacy”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 25, no. 3 (July 1940), p. 265. 98 John Lobb, “Caste and Class in Haiti”, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 1 (July 1940), p. 23. 99 This last observation is critical since slavery was not formally abolished in Quebec until 1833, like the rest of the British Empire. 100 While the first advertisement was printed in English, both subsequent ones appeared in English and French. See: The Montreal Gazette, Thursday 7 June, 1792, no. XXIV; Thursday 14 June, 1792, no. XXV, and Thursday 28 June 1792, no XXVII, HSSL Micr AN63 M65 G39 Microfilm, Montreal Gazette, 7 July 1791–30 December 1799, Reel 2, microfilm 412, McLennan Library, McGill University, Montreal. 101 It is interesting to note that while exploiting his European training even more fully in the Montreal advertisement (with the nod to Paris) than in the Philadelphia one, at the same time Beaucourt thought it wise to identify himself as a Canadian. Born in Quebec, he of course had rights to such identification, but the question is: on what basis did he judge it to be more financially and culturally lucrative for him to do so? While in Philadelphia, Beaucourt had wished to capitalize upon the appearance of his foreignness from North America; a foreignness mainly possible and plausible because of his French (Canadian) identity. However, once back home in Montreal, as the first Canadian-born person to gain professional training in Europe, his foreign instruction was more than sufficient to indicate a superior cultural status while his Canadianness indicated his connection to and familiarity with the people, traditions, and customs of Quebec. 102 Major- Frégeau, “Malpeart de Beaucourt, François”. 103 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 140. Mackey has found evidence that Catherine was a patient at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu in 1801 and again in January 1802 when she was identified as Gaëtan’s slave Marie, age 11. Mackey’s source is HDM, admission registers, Book G, 12 March 1801, and Book D, 1 January 1802. Mackey deduced that the two names belonged to the same woman since, at the birth of her first child in 1807, Catherine Guillet was identified as Marie Catherine. Mackey’s source is BANQ, register of NotreDame Church, 24 April 1807. 104 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 140. Mackey provides as the source BANQ, register of St. Gabriel Presbyterian Church, 26 May 1806. 105 Trim, Moore, and Plauvier pooled their resources to buy “their own place on Cote-Ste-Catherine (Outremont), on a long, narrow strip of land, 70’ wide by 12 lineal arpents deep (roughly 21 by 700 metres) [sic]”. The property had fruit trees, which suited Trim who had agricultural interests as well as being a “curer of hams”, “dry salter”, and “trader”, the last which was often used to describe a tavern keeper/ grocer. The group paid 600 livres cash “on the spot” and Trim was the only one of the group, besides the notaries, to sign the deed with his name. As Mackey relates, the others signed with a cross. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 148. Mackey’s source is BANQ, Louis Chaboillez, no. 1366, 27 March 1795; notary P. Lukin Sr., no. 747, 21 April 1796. 106 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 144. 107 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 148. In 1798, the group bought an old wooden house for $350 on St. Augustin Street (later McGill Street) where they had previously lived as renters, before moving to Outremont. The property was on the east side and backed onto the land previously owned by the Récollets priests. Interestingly, Henry Moore is not listed as a buyer. Instead, it is Trim and Margaret Moore, identified as “Nègre et Négresse”, who are listed on the document as the buyers (pp. 469–70, note #42). Mackey’s source is BANQ, notary P. Lukin Sr, no. 1251, 27 July 1798. 108 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 158. 109 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 158. 110 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 148. 111 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’Archives de Montréal, CN 601, S243 Louis Huguet-Latour Inventaire (Inventory and Wedding Contract) des biens meubles appartenant à Dame Benigne Benoit dit Gaetan, veuve Beaucourt (widow of Malpeart de Beaucourt, François), 19 juin 1810, #542. Amongst her inventoried possessions were significant amounts of clothing (over twenty dresses of muslin, satin, and taffeta), furniture (several mattresses, beside table, cupboard), kitchen and household equipment (two stoves with ovens, cast iron kettle), linens and towels and some jewellery. 112 Although the latter relationship is less likely, there seemed to have been a genuine affection between the two women. In Benoite’s will, she left six pounds to Catherine who was identified as Catherine Cora, a black woman married to the Negro Jacob of the St. Joseph (or Récollets) suburb. Furthermore, although

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Representing the enslaved African in Montreal Benoite left all of her furniture and clothes to her in-laws, she directed them to remember Catherine Cora if they found them unsuitable and wished to give them away. Mackey also noted that when Catherine was about to leave Montreal in 1855 (at about age 66), she employed Jean-Baptiste Franchère, the same person who had acted as the executor of Benoite’s will more than twenty years before. Mackey, Done with Slavery, pp. 140, 467 (note #21). Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 140. Mackey’s source is BANQ, register of Notre-Dame Church, 5 July 1810 and 18 May 1811. Mackey, Done with Slavery, pp. 140, 158. Mackey’s sources are: BANQ, register of St. Gabriel Presbyterian Church, 12 February 1825; register of Notre-Dame Church, 16 October 1826. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 158. Jacob Abdella had first married the American-born Mary Downing in January 1823. However, tragically, she died a mere five months after their union. Mackey describes the Trim’s residence on McGill Street as a boarding house where various races of men and women cohabitated often over the period of years. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 159. Mackey relates that Trim and his second wife Deniger had three children (p. 159). In particular, the sexual unions of black men and white women provoked a great deal of anger and vengefulness amongst elite white males in the Trans Atlantic World. Beckles has related that in seventeenth-century Barbados, Irish female indentured servants originally made to labour side-by-side with Africans in the sugar cane fields were removed once the island’s English elite noticed that romantic relationships were forming between Irish women and African men. Unlike the mixed-race children born to enslaved African women and free white men, the offspring of Irish women and African men, free coloureds, were seen as a potential challenge to the dominance and authority of the British whites. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds.Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity”, Latin American Perspectives, Race and National Identity in the Americas, vol. 25, no. 3 (May 1998), p. 134. Some of the factors in the breakdown of the plantation system which Torres-Saillant names included a depopulation of the eastern territories under Governor Antonio de Osorio in 1605 and also “occasional foreign invasions, pirate raids, and various natural disasters” (p. 134). Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness”, p. 135. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 144. The parasol was not only a form of decoration or dress, which could be complementary to a woman’s clothing, but skin protection. It was the staple of upper-class white women who wished to preserve their light complexions, described as “fair”, a term that conflated lightness with beauty. Meanwhile, sugar and coffee at this time were being imported from tropical plantation colonies, which were sustained by slave labour. Furthermore, Benoite’s marriage contract stipulated that there was to be no community property between the parties (n’y aura pas de communauté de biens, entre les dits) and that each was to take individual responsibility for previous debts. Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, pp. 114, 379. No date of death or burial is provided for JeanBaptiste-François. Letter, author to Christian Vachon, Curator, Paintings, Drawings and Prints, McCord Museum, and Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 8 February 2014. E-mail, Jacques Des Rochers, Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, to author, 28 March 2014. Cartel Enrichi (didactic panel), “Founding Identities Gallery”, Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion, Quebec and Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Moreover, the idea of a portrait as a true likeness of the sitter is further complicated by the universal control that Beaucourt wielded over Marie due to the fact that she was not the art patron. Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject, p. 39. Heriot’s drawing was engraved by J.C. Stadler and “printed for” Richard Phillips of 6 New Bridge Street, London. George Heriot Esq., Deputy Post Master General of British North America, Travels through the Canadas, containing a Description of the Picturesque Scenery on some of the Rivers and Lakes; with an account of the Productions,

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Commerce, and Inhabitants of those Provinces.To which is subjoined a Comparative View of the Manners and Customs of Several of the Indian Nations of North and South America (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, No. 6, Bridge-Street, Blackfriars, 1807). The watercolour measures 21.4 × 32.8 cm. See Gerald Finley, George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 53, 244. The book also included detailed descriptions of two of the islands of the Azores, since Heriot was presented with an opportunity to visit during his voyage to America. Heriot, Travels through the Canadas, A2. This comment was not only directed at the supposedly uncivilized Natives, but also at the less-than-desirable whites. Heriot concluded that the inhabitants of Canada had “little inclination for novelty or improvement, and exhibit no great portion of genius”, which he blamed mainly on a “want of education”, examples, and opportunities (p. 255). Heriot, Travels through the Canadas, p. v. Heriot, Travels through the Canadas, p. iv. Heriot, Travels through the Canadas, p. v. One area of Native culture in which Heriot conceded an impenetrable (for him) complexity was language. He described the inhabitants of the Americas as having an “infinite diversity of tongues” (p. vi). However, his struggle to subsume Native culture within European discursive structures was evidenced in a part of the title of his final chapter, XX: “Indian languages in general capable of being arranged under rules of grammar” (p. xii). The unquestioned rules of grammar were, of course, those of European English. The plate is tucked between pages 258 and 259. Heriot, Travels through the Canadas, p. 257. Coloured prints of Minuets of the Canadians, like the one at the McCord Museum (23 × 36.7 cm, M19871), also exist. According to Christian Vachon, as with the museum’s print, antiquarians often removed maps and other prints from books and coloured them to make them more desirable for individual purchase. Telephone interview between author with Christian Vachon, Curator Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, McCord Museum, 14 May 2012. While the plates of the dance scenes measure 27 × 41 cm, the vast majority of Heriot’s plates are 21 × 27 cm, the standard size of each page. The other plates that warranted a larger size are: View of Quebec, taken from Point Levi (frontispiece), S.W. View of Pico (between pages 14 and 15), Encampment of Domiciliated Indians (between pages 271 and 272), Costume of Domiciliated Indians of North America (between pages 292 and 293), and Map of the River St. Lawrence (between pages 600 and 601). There is one white male smoking a pipe in the image. Cast in shadow, in the right foreground, he is seated on what appears to be a sawed-off hogshead. A fourth man, in the centre of the image, may also be of African descent. Pictured in profile with curly hair and a “swarthy” complexion, he holds a long instrument to his lips and appears to put out a candle. However, his complexion, significantly lighter than the three dark-skinned black males, would seem to indicate a light-skinned or mixed-race black male or a dark-skinned European. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 593. Sir Hans Sloane, Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles etc. of the last of those Islands (London: Printed for the Author, 1707–25). As Kriz argues, Sloane’s book was the first major publication to combine a travel narrative with a natural history of plants and animals identified by the pre-Linnaean Latin tags. See Kay Dian Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Voyage to . . . Jamaica”, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the BritishWest Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 13. The Duke died ten months after their arrival. Five months after his death, Sloane and the Duke’s widow began the return voyage to accompany the Duke’s body back to Britain. See Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, p. 9. For example, the direction on the sheet music that “You must clap Hands when the Base is plaid, and cry Alla, Alla [sic]” demonstrates a European failure to understand the emotive and spontaneous quality of African rhythm and spirituality. Therefore, movement and vocalization that had meaning and place as ritual, spirituality or as visceral response to the beat of an instrument became translated as an instruction, which needed to be transcribed and memorized.

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146 Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 224. 147 “Appendix 6: Court Case Involving Mary Prince, Wood v. Pringle, 1 March 1833”, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 147. In an attempt to preserve their “good name” and that of other slave owners, Prince’s former owners, Mr and Mrs Wood of Antigua, launched an offensive after the narrative was published. Besides suing the editor Thomas Pringle for libel, they accused Prince of all kinds of indecent, gross, and immoral behaviour and denied the years of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, torture, and neglect that they had inflicted upon her. Pringle, “Supplement to the History of Mary Prince”, pp. 100–2. 148 Morgan Slave Counterpoint, p. 418. Morgan describes a man named Fithian dispersing a group of Negroes who had gathered in a schoolroom on a Sunday evening to fiddle and dance, only to find two white men amongst the merrymakers. 149 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 419. 150 Meredith Ellis Little, “Minuet”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 12, pp. 353–8. According to Stinson, the French Court Minuet was designed for dancing in a “carefully prescribed step pattern”. Russell Stinson, Bach Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 97. 151 George Pinckard, Notes on theWest Indies, 2 vols (London: Baldwin, 1816), vol. 1, p. 102; cited in Michael J. Morgan, “Rock and Roll Unplugged: African-American Music in Eighteenth-Century America”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994), p. 651. 152 Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 52. 153 Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 53. 154 Lewis, Journal of aWest India Proprietor, p. 53. 155 Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. I would speculate that the jovial nature of many social gatherings, which included musical accompaniment and alcohol, may perhaps have mediated the racist behaviour of whites who were likely more prone to reward the black musicians with generous tips or other “payment” like food or liquor. 156 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 419. 157 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 419. 158 Although the prints in the book were black and white, the individual coloured print that I describe is owned by the McCord Museum, Montreal: George Heriot, Minuets of the Canadians (1807), 23 × 36.7 cm, Gift of Sir Frederick Williams Taylor, M19871. 159 Built in 1705 by Claude de Ramezay (1659–1724), Governor of Trois-Rivières and Montreal and acting Governor of New France, the Château Ramezay served as the governor’s residence until 1745 when it was sold to the Compagnie des Indes, which used it to store various goods like cloth, liquor, and pelts. It was subsequently used as the British governor’s house, then as a headquarters for a brief American occupation and around 1784 as the Baron de Saint-Léger’s private residence. See: Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), p. 119; and Yves F. Zoltvany, “Ramezay, Claude de”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ramezay_claude_ de_2E.html (date of last access 27 January 2014). 160 Kriz discusses Belisario’s indigenization of blacks in post-emancipation Jamaica in his publication Sketches of Character (1837–38), which transformed them into a “black folk”. Kay Kriz, “Making a Black Folk: Belasario’s Sketches of Character”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven: published for the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art by Yale University Press, 2008). 161 The original watercolour is different from the later print in several ways. While the number of musicians, their races, instruments and style of play are the same, the orientation of the room is changed in the later print and only two black men are present in the original; the black tambourine player and the black man to his right. Also of note, this tambourine-less black male is still represented at the back of the crowd, only his shoulders and head visible, but he is now clothed. See illustration #15 in Finley, George Heriot, p. 53. 162 Finley, George Heriot, pp. 19–20. Finley mentions that John witnessed the hurricane of 1780 in Barbados. 163 Finley, George Heriot, p. 20. 164 Finley, George Heriot, p. 21. Finley believes that Heriot travelled to Grenada between 1777 and 1779 and again in the 1820s. There is a surviving watercolour entitled Grenada, Harbour of St. George (c. 1820) (pp. 21, 29).

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165 Finley catalogued the painting as the property of the Old Watercolour Society, New York, but unfortunately did not reproduce the work, which is listed as “whereabouts unknown”. Finley, George Heriot, p. 267. 166 The watercolour measures 21.4 × 32.8 cm and is held in a private collection. Finley, George Heriot, pp. 53, 244. 167 See Finley, George Heriot, pp. 53, 244. 168 For more on the hair care and styling practices of enslaved Africans in the Americas, see Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Southern History, vol. 61, no. 1 (February 1995), pp. 45–76. Regarding the accessibility of fabric in the Ceded Islands, see Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Regarding clothing and dress traditions of the enslaved, see: Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Past and Present, no. 148 (August 1995), pp. 149–86; Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’: Race, Clothing and Identity in The Americas (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)”, History Workshop Journal, no. 52 (August 2001), pp. 175–95; Steve O. Buckridge, “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress”, Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (September 2003), pp. 61–73. Buckridge explains that, although oznaburgh (osnaburg) fabric was a staple cloth ration provided to slaves with which they were expected to make their own clothing, many enslaved Africans in Jamaica also used their resourcefulness and ingenuity to fabricate their own materials, dyes, and even perfumes from various plant substances. Chief among the natural materials was that derived from the lace-bark tree or laghetto and less so from banana fibres. According to Edward Long, vegetable soaps for laundering clothing were derived from coratoe cactus and the broad-leafed broom-weed, and perfumes were also created from musk wood and rose wood, both for the body and for clothing (pp. 62, 63, 65, 68). Rev. Bickell also mentioned that slaves in Jamaica usually made their own clothing from once-yearly cloth rations of “coarse blue baize, and coarse Oznaburgh, with coarse hats and woollen caps”. Reverend R. Bickell, TheWest Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), p. 54. Oznaburgh was also imported to British North America. See “Andrew Cuenod, Hath Lately IMPORTED from London and Cork, &c.”, Nova-Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser, vol. 1, no. 38 (Tuesday 12 September to Tuesday 19 September 1769), p. 303. 169 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London: Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p. 242; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 655. 170 Long, The History, p. 242; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 655. The wriggle that Long detected in the walk of Africans in Jamaica would be equal today to the deliberate “limp” of black men in parts of the Black Diaspora, especially in the Canadian and American contexts. 171 Bickell, TheWest Indies as they are, p. 49. 172 Stuart Hall, “What is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”, The Black Studies Reader, eds. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 259. 173 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Published for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2008), p. 145. 174 Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 650. 175 John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua together with the customs and manners of its inhabitants, as well white as black: as also an accurate statement of the food, cloathing, labor, and punishment, of the slaves: in letters to a friend written in the years 1786, 1787, 1788 (London: Cadell, 1789), pp. 135–6; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 652. 176 Young was eventually appointed Lieutenant Governor of Dominica in 1768 and of Tobago in 1770. He was created a baronet in 1769 and resigned both posts in 1774. Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, pp. 37, 210, note #5. 177 Bryan Edwards, A History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London: Stockdale, 1793–1801), vol. 3, p. 276; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 659. It is intriguing that Young’s dance partner, Phillis, was identified as black and not as mulatto or mixed-race.Within the stark racial hierarchies that pervaded Caribbean society, the term “black” usually connoted a so-called full-blooded Negro racial type, which would have made Phillis (in many quarters) an unsuitable dance partner for an upper-class

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Representing the enslaved African in Montreal white man likeYoung. Furthermore, since mixed-race or coloured people were more likely to be free than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, it is interesting to contemplate if Phillis was a slave. Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 651. Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 651. Mohammed argues that the older colonial term for cross-racial sex was “amalgamation”, the term “miscegenation” dating only from 1864. Patricia Mohammed, “‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired”, Reconstructing Femininities: Colonial Intersections of Gender, Race, Religion and Class, Feminist Review, no. 65 (Summer 2000), p. 23. For an understanding of how the English prohibited cross-racial relationships between African men and Irish women in Barbados, see Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’”. A standing couple in the left foreground positioned vertically between the two black males at left seem poised to kiss, the white man’s right hand on the white woman’s left hip. A seated couple between the female dancers of the couple at left and at centre seem equally amorous, their faces close together as they embrace. And finally, another seated white couple can be seen at right, positioned between the joined hands of the dancing couple at the right. They are arguably the most expressive, the male represented in the act of bestowing a kiss on the cheek of the white female seated on his lap. Peter Marsden, An Account of the Island of Jamaica with Reflections on the Treatment, Occupation, and Provisions of the Slaves (Newcastle: Hodgson, 1788), pp. 33–4; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 658. Marsden, An Account of the Island of Jamaica, pp. 33–4; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 658. It is important to note that these festivities were not common but occurred during the three-day holiday granted to slaves at Christmas time. Marsden, An Account of the Island of Jamaica, pp. 33–4; cited in Morgan, “Rock and Roll”, p. 658. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 120. This definition of mimicry included Bhabha’s now-famous “almost the same, but not quite” and “almost the same, but not white”. See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 89; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin,White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 120. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 120. Kriz develops the idea of mockery as a way to read Belisario’s Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica (1837–38), which contained 12 lithographs. See Kriz, “Making a Black Folk: Belisario’s Sketches of Character”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, pp. 117–155. Kriz defines menace as arising from excessive forms of mockery that threaten the notion of mimesis. See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 120. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement, p. 137. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 419. For more on the hairstyles of enslaved Africans, see White and White, “Slave Hair”, pp. 47–72. It is a grave colonial irony that while white males institutionalized the rape of African women within Trans Atlantic Slavery, they simultaneously and aggressively vilified the sexuality of Africans. Whites theorized black sexuality as pathological and produced countless scientific, medical, legal, and cultural representations of black sexual excess. Slavery was positioned as a benevolent “civilizing mission” that, through Christianity, could reform the supposedly pagan African. See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

4 Landscaping Montreal

Montreal as British military stronghold Produced through cartographic knowledge, topographical representations – maps, drawings, prints, and landscape paintings – held colonial importance with administrative, jurisdictional, and economic references. But they also had immense military significance since they emphasized landscape features of strategic military significance.1 But if we take these images not as “topographical truth” but, as Harley has argued, as “a social construction of the world expressed through the medium of cartography”,2 then what do they have to reveal to us about the world of nineteenth-century Montreal or, better yet, how Montreal was produced through the colonial discursive structures of an imperial British military presence? The colonial beginnings of Montreal stem from Jacques Cartier’s travel to the region, which was sponsored by France in 1535 and during which he encountered the wood-fortified Native settlement of Hochelaga at the base of “the mountain”.3 Samuel de Champlain later visited the settlement in 1609 and again in 1611 when the French imperial desire for a more concrete commercial exploitation of the region was manifested in the clearing of land for a trading post.4 The subsequent erection of a European-style fortification around the settlement that was re-named Ville Marie – one that the nineteenth-century historian Alfred Sandham notes was brick and mortar – signals the production of a militarized geography in relation to perceived British and Native threats.5 Although the British did not seize the settlement from the French until 1760, an awareness of potential conquest seemed to loom from early in the eighteenthcentury.6 The French capitulation to the British forces on the morning of 18 September 1760 marked an immediate and dramatic shift in the colonial imagining and imaging of Montreal. Topographical landscapes produced between the significant dates of 1760 (the date of the British takeover) and 1817 and 1821 (the former being when the fortification was removed and the later, the date when Citadel Hill was razed) represented Montreal as a formidable fortified British commercial and military stronghold with natural and man-made sites of surveillance and assault and visible signs of French marginalization and British imperial might. 7 Sandham described the fortification as extending,

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. . . along the river front from the corner of the old barracks, to the foot of McGill Street, along which it passed, enclosing part of the present Victoria Square, thence along Fortification Lane, across the Champ de Mars, onward through St. Louis Street, to Dalhousie Square, and then returning to the barrack corner.8 A British military officer, Thomas Patten’s An East View of Montreal, in Canada (after 1760) (Plate 7) combined an array of natural and imperial symbols to remake the settlement into a product of British imperial control. His painting, reproduced as a print, attained a fairly wide distribution and helped to disseminate the message of Montreal’s recent British possession.9 According to Sydney Francis Wise, at this time Thomas Gage, who had commanded the rearguard when Jeffery Amherst took Montreal, had already been appointed the military governor of Montreal.10 The print, which was produced both in colour and black and white, circulated in the royal cartographer Thomas Jefferys’11 book entitled Twelve Remarkable Views in North America and West Indies.12 The visual intersection between the North American and West Indian landscapes which were included, largely through their shared investment in transoceanic trade and exchange, points up the profound colony-to-colony cultural and economic connections which need to be recuperated and better understood.The images are filled with British Navy vessels and secondarily with merchant ships and smaller boats embarking upon more local traffic. However, together they announce the success of the British imperial project through the interconnected axes of military conquest, commercial exploitation, and settlement. What the colonial landscaping of Montreal symbolizes, although largely hidden from the eye behind the fortification, is the same imperial dream of agricultural cultivation, the domestication of the land as sign of the progress of “civilization” articulated in Casid’s definition of plantation (discussed further below in the Jamaican context) and represented in the farmed land and pasture of the Bethlem and New York prints of Twelve Remarkable Views . . .. It is not insignificant that a British print issued around the time of the French capitulation should document Montreal from the vantage point of the St Lawrence River and the perspective of one of the bulky and conspicuous British navy ships pictured, still at sea. The image is one of an eastern approach, providing a clear view of the long south-facing settlement wall. A line drawn from the red ensigns with Union Jacks, between the two dominant navy ships on the river and the one, which flew above Citadel Hill, slightly right and below the centre of the print, form together a triangular anchor of British military and naval power. The fact that it is a navy ensign, as opposed to the Union Jack that flies over the building on Citadel Hill, indicates further the specific navy possession of the site as opposed to another branch of the military.13 Given Montreal’s specific imperial usefulness as an already established and well-networked port, the presence of British Navy vessels is unsurprising. The flag with a Union Jack in a field of red was known as a plain red ensign. According to British maritime law and custom, an ensign is a flag generally used to designate a warship, a government vessel or a civilian one.14 Derived from the squadronal system of the Royal Navy in 1627, the three colours (red, blue, and white) were a part of an organizational

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device to officially differentiate between British vessels.While the colour originally adhered to a place in a hierarchy, from the most senior being red, to the most junior, being white, between 1653 and 1864 the order changed to red, white, and then blue.15 While the Union Jack would be placed within a field of one of these three colours, the choice of red, white or blue represented the rank of the admiral in command.16 As such, the four red ensigns visible in the image – the one flying over Citadel Hill just right of centre in the middle ground, and the three flown at the backs of the large navy vessels – signify that a highranking naval official had charge of the ships and the settlement itself.The fortification then, at this moment of imaging, is not a wall to uniformly keep the enemy out, but a strategically permeable membrane, which allowed for a reinforcing of the symbolic and material order. Montreal is here protected from those who would assault her and yet open to friends of the British Empire. Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal or Villa Marie in Canada (Figure 4.1) provides another perspective, aerial, of the settlement around this time. Published in November 1759 slightly before British occupation, the representation of the fortified town, speaks to the colonial desire for possession, which predated actual conquest. Laid out from west to east in a misshapen rectangle parallel to the river, the plan provided a bird’s-eye view of the fortified settlement.17 The legend in the top left corner described the four-foot-thick (1.20-metre) masonry wall and the eight-foot-deep (2.40-metre) dry ditch, deliberately highlighting the impediments and risks of

Figure 4.1 Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal orVilla Marie in Canada, from Universal Magazine (November 1759), paper, 27 × 40.5 cm, G246:8/30, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

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forbidden entrance to those who did not access one of the several gates legitimately. Besides Mr. Linieres’ Gardens to the north-west of the wall and the General Hospital and Mr. de Callieres’ house to the south-west of it, the settlement was dominantly contained with the boundaries of the protective fortifications. Works of Thomas Davies, like Montreal (1812) (Figure 4.2) and A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) (Figure 4.3), are interesting to examine within the context of the early years of British control of Montreal. Davies was born in England around 1737 and died there at Blackheath 1812. His artistic training as a topographical landscape painter was directly owed to his military education at the Royal Military Academy, which he commenced as a cadet in Woolwich in 1755.18 As Elinor Kyte Senior has noted, British officers, especially those in the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, had the advantage of specialized training in drawing and mapmaking at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where every officer had to try his hand at watercolour painting and to acquire a certificate of diligence from the drawing masters.19 In a world before the invention of photography, drawing, and painting were seen as amongst the most accurate methods of landscape representation based on surveillance and reconnaissance. Indeed, as a part of their official duties, British soldiers and sailors,

Figure 4.2 Thomas Davies, Montreal (1812), watercolour over graphite on wove paper, 34.2 × 52.2 cm, MBAC 6286, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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Figure 4.3 Thomas Davies, A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), watercolour over graphite on laid paper, 35.3 × 53.5 cm, MBAC 6272, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

like W. Sidney Smith RN, often produced sketchbooks filled with topographical landscapes of the colonies to which they were dispatched.20 In a sketchbook dated 1826– 35, Smith’s landscapes also document the British surveillance of Spanish and French colonies, since his landscapes included representations of Cuba and Haiti as well as St. Thomas and Jamaica, this last both from Portland Rock and Annatto Bay. This artistic and scientific training was designed to teach military men to identify and recreate objects, man-made and natural, of strategic significance, and to impart the ability for direct and simplified renderings. However, by the nineteenth century, this topographical language had become a part of the gentleman amateur artistic convention. In his journal from 1831 which he referred to as “such an irregular thing”, Peter Simmonds narrated his journey with text and images from Falmouth to Jamaica on one of HM packet ships for his sisters, Miss Gooding and Miss Simmonds.21 Simmonds’ personal illustrated journal sheds light on the nature and culture of nineteenth-century ship travel from Britain to the Caribbean. The ship, headed by Captain Paule, was likely transporting a sizeable cargo since in Simmonds’ estimation the crew outnumbered the travellers, who were bound for Barbados, Mexico or Jamaica. Amongst the “passengers” that Simmonds listed were “5 sheep, 5 turkey, a goat, a very useful personage, ducks, fowls, pigs . . . also a large Black newfound land dog named Neptune”, and three British soldiers dispatched to Barbados: these were the six-foot-tall ensign in the 36th Regiment, Robert Gibson of London, nicknamed Longshanks; an assistant surgeon in the army, Mr. Stewart; and an army surgeon, Mr. Holden, who had just

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returned from the Cape of Good Hope and a new colony, Swan River.22 But also, significantly, his journal included topographical sketches of various profiles of Jamaica, Barbados, St Vincent, and Grenada. After being promoted to Second Lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Artillery in 1757, one of Davies’ first experiences was a posting to Halifax. It is of certain significance that Davies, later in 1759, served with Captain William Martin’s company on Lake Champlain and at the capture of Montreal in 1760.23 He would have witnessed and participated in the British takeover of the French settlement, including the fear and trepidation of the population which included French, other Europeans, Natives, and Africans. Davies had a long life for a military man, being promoted all the way up the ranks to Lieutenant General in 1803.24 The fact that Davies produced these landscapes seemingly fifty years apart may indicate that he was able to produce drawings or even paintings of Montreal landscapes in the 1760s which he later worked up into more finished works, or that his 1786–90 visit to Canada brought him back to Montreal and provided later artistic opportunities.25 However, his time in Montreal and his ability to represent the settlement was directly owed to his military training in Woolwich. Stylistically, these landscapes not only mapped nineteenth-century Montreal, they also applied an established picturesque European painting aesthetic and taste onto the settler colony. Davies’ watercolours A View of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) (Figure 4.3) and the later Montreal (1812) (Figure 4.2) presented the settlement from opposite views, the earlier work from St Helen’s Island and the later work from the “mountain”. Davies two vantage points were the vantages points from which the settlement was most commonly represented. As colonial surveyor Joseph Bouchette noted, “The summit . . . commands a grand and most magnificent prospect, including every variety that can embellish a landscape”.26 Indeed, the two views actually mirror each other and provide a viewer with the ability to deduce the vantage point from which the other image was constructed. As Colin M. Coates has explained, Montreal was clearly a colonial landscape, one predicated on its links to overseas markets and inland supplies of fur and other goods. It was an example of a successful urban landscape, a transplantation of European townscapes overseas – at least when seen from the safety of Mount Royal or St. Helen’s Island.27 Indeed, the beauty of Montreal was something best enjoyed at a distance. The streets of eighteenth-century Montreal (and surely too into the nineteenth) were generally unsanitary, and prone to disease, a place where farm animals cohabitated with people, garbage and excrement lined the streets, and fire posed a constant danger.28 Furthermore, as I have already discussed in Chapter 2 above, the prevalence of vagrancy and the ubiquity of drunkenness and prostitution meant that the streets of Montreal were also constantly sullied with vomit and other forms of bodily fluid. Thus the images produced from the mountain and St Helen’s Island literally sanitized the settlement by erasing its filthy streets from view and providing the viewer with a pleasantly aestheticized and distanced vantage point.

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Davies, who died in 1812, did not live long enough to see the removal of the fortifications (1817) or the razing of Citadel Hill (1821). As such, both landscapes represented the fortified city with the British flag flying prominently over Citadel Hill. It is significant that both works seem to document the Quebec Gate Barracks, the later work, Montreal (1812), from an elevated vantage point looking down at it from a position slightly to the north-west and the earlier work, A View of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), from a point south-east across the St Lawrence River on St Helen’s Island, the site of the second major military establishment in the settlement and, as Senior has noted, the main ordnance depot for the Montreal station.29 The Quebec Gate Barracks was not only materially imposing in terms of the overall size of the settlement but, with the Union Jack flying above it, served as yet another constant symbolic reminder of the French defeat at the hands of the British and the subsequent transfer of power and property. As Senior has argued, the Quebec Gate Barracks and the Champ de Mars parade ground reminded the French of British conquest, since these were the two greatest direct confiscations of property following the British occupation of Montreal.30 Davies’ earlier view seems to verify Senior’s contention that Montreal’s British military presence was boldly made visible in the imposing barracks to all visitors approaching from the St Lawrence River.31 Positioned on the north bank, the Quebec Gate Barracks was a well-equipped permanent station providing for the social and military needs of 500 men from the 15th East Yorkshires and 75 Royal Artillerymen. Within its stone walls were a commissariat store, bakery, brew house, stables, fuel yard, and a small theatre. And just to the east were positioned the garrison hospital and a jolly boat waiting to take men to other quarters on St Helen’s Island where artillery reinforcements were stationed.32 The fact that Davies was a military man with an intimate knowledge of British military installations at Montreal makes his artistic choices with regard to A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) particularly interesting. As will be discussed in further detail below, St Helen’s Island was one of the most popular vantage points from which to represent the island settlement of Montreal. As a British artillery post, it was inhabited by soldiers and Davies would no doubt have had an opportunity to visit the small St Lawrence island in an official capacity during his initial deployment to Montreal in 1759–60, if not again later. But although British rule is certainly celebrated in the image, Davies chose not to narrate a landscape about British military prowess. Instead, the use of a white civilian couple, male and female, in the right foreground of the landscape stages a tranquil repose in nature. The relaxing mood of the print is heightened by the poses of the lounging couple (Figure 4.3). While the man with black hat and dark jacket is seated with his back to the viewer, the white woman at his right is depicted as an upper-class lady as signalled by the style and quality of her pale blue dress, the demure posture of her clasped arms, her finely coiffed hairstyle and hair adornment, the locket around her neck and the deliberately cultivated paleness of her white skin. Although the seated couple is positioned close together, their poses do not convey immediate interaction.While the female is positioned in profile looking north-west, the male’s face is utterly obscured from the viewer, who is positioned behind him; this due both to the man’s dark wide-brimmed hat and also to the direction of his head and gaze which is north and away

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from the picture plane. The couple is engaged in consuming the landscape laid out before them and their attention is directed at the walled settlement and not to each other. While James Hakewill’s Jamaican landscape print Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s,The Property of C.N. Bayly, Esq (1825) (Plate 8) (which I will discuss in greater detail below), featuring two lounging so-called Negro slaves in the presence of five cows, invites the viewer to contemplate the enslaved Africans as just more of the white plantation owner’s stock, Davies’ treatment of his white couple not only elevated them in terms of class as indicated in the quality and refinement of their clothing, but racially, in terms of their deliberate juxtaposition with the two “domicilated” (as George Heriot described, in Chapter 3) Natives passing by in a canoe on the St Lawrence River. For Davies’ potential European and Euro-Canadian viewers, the headdresses of the Native duo would have provided a stark contrast with the upper-class Western dress of the leisurely white couple. Furthermore, the peaceful coexistence of the Natives and the whites worked to inform potential tourists and travellers that any threats of Native violence against colonists had been contained. Although seemingly on the outskirts of a forest on St Helen’s Island, Davies’ placement of the white couple emphasized their immediate access and proximity to “civilization” as symbolized by the walled settlement on the other side of the river. Sitting close to the river’s edge, their view is not random. By the position of their heads, we can assume that both man and woman take in both the large British navy vessel and the walled settlement with Citadel Hill depicted in the middle ground just right of centre. The navy ensigns flying on the ship and over the hill further declared the safety of the settlement through their enunciation of British rule. The white gentlewoman’s potentially hazardous proximity to the passing Natives is therefore defused, not only by the presence of her white male companion, but by the implied presence of white British soldiers. Arguably then, the ideological work of this image was to indicate to potential white colonists and settlers the stability and security of Montreal as a desirable and “civilized” destination within the British Empire. But more so, in line with Kriz’s arguments about the process of British settlement of the Caribbean Ceded Islands, it is the calm presence of the white female subject, like the purposeful white mother in Sproule’s View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830) (Plate 5) that announces that the social “refinement” of Montreal has attained a level which rendered it suitable to accommodate the bodies of proper or upper-class white women.33 While the estimated population of Lower Canada was 250,000 in 1806, fewer than 10,000 people inhabited Montreal in 1800,34 that number rising to about 37,538 in 182235 and to over 44,000 in 1843.36 But in order for the white elite to maintain their grip on the expanding settlement, this population growth from less than 10,000 in the moment of Davies’ A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) necessitated a management and policing of race, ethnicity, religion, class, sex, gender, and sexuality. As Bradbury and Myers have argued, Montreal elites and reformers shaped the city by founding cultural institutions such as clubs, cemeteries, museums, and urban spaces like parks and neighbourhoods that reflected and perpetuated their class and ethnic identities. They were also in a

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position to build legal infrastructure and hire regulatory personnel to contain the threat that transgressive people posed to “their” city, establishing institutions that excluded or contained the working classes, immigrants, and those of other religions. Those with less economic and social power worked within and contested these elite visions of the city [italics mine].37 To this list of the excluded and contained categories should surely be added racial “others”, and to the list of transgressive people, blacks and Natives. Davies utilized a picturesque framing technique of tall trees, two at the far right and one almost dead centre in the immediate foreground, and a shorter one, closer to the water at the left. The Native subjects, two in a canoe, are seen in the process of actively paddling parallel to the shore of St Helen’s Island. As their canoe passes into view behind the centrally placed tree and moving into the centre foreground of the image, they will also pass directly into the visual pathway of the lounging white couple. The civilian clothes of the man and his lady companion indicate that the whites have no connection, like Davies, to the military purpose of the island. Their lounging postures and concentrated gazes indicate another more leisurely or touristic motivation for their strategic position close to the shore. In this regard, the timely appearance of the Native duo acts as another mirror, presenting the whites with a window into a nostalgic moment of “Indian” presence within a premodern landscape of pre-European conquest. By the time that Davies created this landscape, the colonial treatment of Natives as tourist objects and attractions had already been widely formalized in North American travel narratives and natural history books.38 European and even Euro-American tourists and travellers openly expressed their desire to recuperate an uncontaminated, so-called “Indian” presence from an earlier pre-contact moment. The so-called domicilated or domesticated Indians which nineteenth-century white travellers often encountered were utter disappointments compared with their pre-tour consumption of images and their imaginings about their “first Indian”.39 Due to their lack of authenticity (as defined by European standards), these indigenous peoples became fodder for the complaints that whites shared with friends and family to whom they sent correspondence and images about their Canadian tours. Consciously or not, Davies’ painting played upon European and Euro-American desire to glimpse the “Indian” in the “natural habitat”.The canoe, a Native vessel, would have added a further dimension of authenticity and charm to the image. But while the “wilderness” of the natural surroundings in the foreground would seem to collaborate with the colonial imaging of the Native body in the land, the obtrusive presence of the Europeanized fortified city, with the soaring Union Jack, Christian church spires, and several imposing, docked trading vessels, served to dismantle the very fantasy of an untouched pre-contact “Indian” past that Davies seemed, only half-heartedly, to offer. Indeed, Davies consciously or not, provided another stark juxtaposition – the small Native canoe, passing directly in front of the looming European vessel positioned almost in the dead centre of the image, which appears to be a British Navy ship, identifiable by the ensign flying from the stern. The fantasy is disrupted simultaneously for the painting’s internal viewers, the lounging white

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couple, as it is for us, the image as object’s viewers, for how can we sustain this fiction of Native authenticity with Rojo’s la flota, the very machine which violently dismantled the Native relationship to the land, visible in the distance? Unlike James Hakewill’s Jamaican landscape, Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (1825) (Figure 7.5), which also features a white upper-class couple, Davies does not position his white woman as the pupil of the white man. Although the closeness of the overlapping positions of their seated bodies clearly conveys that the two are together and well-known to each other –husband and wife, brother and sister, etc. – instead, selfcomposed with arms crossed demurely in her lap, the female subject sits and takes in the scene by herself and is not outwardly directed in its reading by her male companion. Her composure, which she maintains despite the approach of the potentially “wild” Native subjects, is due in part to the white male subject’s close proximity, the obtrusive Britishness of the settlement and the knowledge of the military installation in the very space of St Helen’s Island. Thus, the rugged and disorderly picturesque-ness of the shoreline belies the presence of the British military infrastructure which had already been carved out on St Helen’s Island and which Davies does not reveal. By editing out the settled areas of St Helen’s Island, largely populated with soldiers, Davies preserved the shoreline as a rustic landscape from which elite whites could participate in a specific vantage point, which allowed them to preserve a touristic vision of Montreal complete with non-threatening Natives. Davies’ A View of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) represented patterns of settlement and the colonial signs of European models of development and “civilization”, as contingent upon the assimilation and disciplining of Native subjects. As mentioned above, Davies’ later work Montreal (1812) (Figure 4.2) reversed the view from St Helen’s Island, providing instead a view from the “mountain” looking south-east towards the settlement. Although in the Montreal image we are positioned closer to the settlement, much like James Hakewill’s Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm, Davies positions us above the scripted British urban space, allowing us to look down upon it from an elevated and distant position. But unlike Hakewill, or his earlier landscape from St Helen’s Island, Davies does not provide us with human subjects to guide our narration of the landscape. Instead he again uses three towering trees in the foreground, which exceed the top of the image, to frame the painting and structure our view of the distant settlement. As Bradbury and Myers contend of the British mercantile elite of which James McGill was a part, “Although their offices were in the walled city cheek by jowl with those of the notaries and Canadien merchants, their mansions spread away from the river far beyond the city walls.”40 The large house visible beyond the tops of the trees right of centre and the vast lands around it would appear to be James McGill’s Burnside property which he purchased around 1797 to use as a summer house. As Frost has described, The McGill land was an attractive property of forty-six acres, situated on the gentle lower slopes of the southern side of the Montreal mountain. It was about a mile from the Place D’Armes to the property’s southern boundary which lay along the line of what was to become Dorchester Boulevard. The estate was bounded on the east to

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a farm belonging in 1829 to the Desrivières, but which later became part of the Phillips family holdings. The boundary ran down the middle of the present University Street. The western and northern boundaries were with the extensive McTavish properties, and the line ran fifty yards east of the road now named for McTavish and passed south of the present Dr. Penfield-Pine Avenue limits. A brook, or “burn” as James McGill would have called it, entered the property a little above where the Milton gate is located, and flowed south parallel to the eastern boundary, receiving reinforcements from a spring about where the Macdonald Engineering Building now stands.41 Positioned on the east side of what is today McGill College Boulevard (and the corner of De Maisonneuve Avenue), Frost contends that McGill’s home, built in a recognizable Quebec style, was used as a country residence, a summer home and not a working farmhouse.42 Although an owner of several thousand acres across various sites and regions, it is the Burnside property which has become synonymous with McGill’s legacy as a philanthropist since, as Cooper explains, he “left £10,000 and the Burnside estate of some 46 acres towards the endowment of a college or a university, specifying that the college or one of the colleges of the university should bear the name McGill”.43 As James McGill’s will attests, he accrued an extraordinary amount of wealth in his lifetime, which he bequeathed to his family, friends, and various institutions in Montreal and Scotland.44 But this bequest also highlights the normality of the practice of whites accruing such wealth from the aggressive capitalist exploitation of Africans and Natives in order to establish academic institutions across North America45 that were initially exclusively for the betterment, education, and further enrichment of an already middle- or upper-class white, male population.46 As Cooper relates, McGill had earlier secured “a fine stone house”47 within the walled settlement – the “highly desirable Bécancour house between Rue NotreDame and Rue Saint-Paul near the Château Ramezay” formerly owned by the merchant Thomas Walker48 – shortly after his marriage to Marie-Charlotte in 1776.49 Since McGill died in 1813 – shortly after Montreal (1812) was produced – it would appear that Davies’ representation of McGill’s property was not a commission. But McGill did express significant interest in the fine arts during his lifetime, taking advantage of and even encouraging the growing availability of European-trained portraitists in Quebec.50 These artists, mainly white men, were either Europeans emigrating to Quebec (like William von Moll Berczy) or Euro-Canadians returning from a period of study abroad (like François Malépart de Beaucourt, discussed above). Betcherman contends that Berczy’s (1744–1813) relocation fromYork to Montreal in 1804 was motivated, at least in part, by a written invitation from James McGill. His painted portrait miniature on ivory, which dates from between 1805 and 1811, evidences that, upon Berczy’s arrival, McGill took advantage of the German artist’s talents.51 McGill also sat for a portrait with the Frenchborn painter, Louis Dulongpré (1759–1843). As Jules Bazin contends, Dulongpré, who had initially engaged in the promotion of theatre in the city, likely encouraged by the success of Beaucourt, shifted gears to painting and travelled to the US, mainly Baltimore,

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to seek professional tutelage.52 He advertised his services as a professional artist upon his return to the city after less than a year of study.53 Both portraits by Berczy and Dulongpré depict McGill in an almost identical pose, with his right shoulder turned towards the viewer, his face directed across his body but slightly to his left, and his gaze directed out at the viewer. While the former miniature portrait by Berczy depicted McGill from the chest up, Dulongpré’s Portrait of James McGill (1744–1813) (1800–10) (Figure 4.4) is a rather large three-quarter-length portrait, which did more to

Figure 4.4 Louis Dulongpré, Portrait of James McGill (1744–1813) (1800–10), oil on canvas, 83.8 × 67.8 cm, M970X.106, McCord Museum, Montreal

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imply McGill’s wealth, rank, and cultural capital.54 These attributes are evoked by the luxurious dark fabric of McGill’s well-tailored jacket, made all the more dramatic by its juxtaposition with the decorative folds of white material at his neck. The jacket’s refinement is also evident in the exposed striped gold lining and the carefully rendered gold buttons.The six gold buttons cascade down McGill’s portly stomach, guiding the eye to his right hand in which he grasps a book. McGill’s index finger is represented inside of the book, as if holding his place. The implication is that we, the viewers, have interrupted his reading. As such, the portrait makes a point of his literacy and culture as related to his social status and standing, reflected in his well-groomed appearance. But whereas McGill clearly engaged with the art of portraits, his involvement with landscape artists is less clear. Since by 1812 both McGill and Davies held high ranks in the British military – Davies as a lieutenant general (by 1803) and McGill as a senior militia officer with the rank of colonel – it is certainly not inconceivable that they may have met.55 Burnside was just one property of many which McGill acquired starting in 1797. Indeed, the majority of McGill’s acreage was outside of the immediate vicinity of Montreal. As Cooper has demonstrated, The Detroit land deals, effected between 1797 and 1805, signalled McGill’s entry into systematic land speculation. Earlier acquisitions had been made haphazardly: a farm at L’Assomption, Lower Canada, a water lot at William Henry (Sorel), Montreal properties, a distillery, and probably Burnside, his summer home at the foot of Mount Royal. From 1801 land was secured methodically; that year he acquired 10,000 acres in Hunterstown Township and 32,400 acres in Stanbridge Township, and it was probably in this period that land was secured in Upper Canada near Kingston and York (Toronto).56 Peering between their curved trunks, from this elevated vantage point in Davies’ Montreal (1812) (Figure 4.2), cultivated pasture and farmlands, houses, and borders of densely clustered trees are visible outside of the walled settlement. Indeed, the space between the boulder-ridden and densely forested foreground and the walled settlement limit is largely agricultural. Just visible over a row of densely packed, dark green trees at centre and to the right, Davies used a paler yellow-green highlighted by broken brown lines to indicate cultivated land, “the productive gardens and orchards” that Frost argues enhanced McGill’s spacious, comfortably furnished house.57 These are the lands that McGill’s African and Native slaves were likely forced to tend and render productive. Indeed, after McGill’s sudden death in 181358 and prior to the founding of the college in his name in 1829,59 Frost has noted that “The house was ‘much out of order’, the garden ‘neglected’, and the meadows in ‘a state of exhaustion’”.60 Similar to Hakewill’s Jamaican landscapes, Davies used domesticated farm animals, dotting the landscape, to convey the scale and depth of the land. And again similarly to Hakewill’s tendencies, Davies does not introduce any labouring bodies into his agricultural landscape. As such the domestification is represented as complete and the agricultural

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work, absent any labouring bodies, is coded as effortless.The same fortified settlement seen in AView of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), with its church spires, Citadel Hill, and Union Jack and the tops of three-masted sailing ships on the far side of the south-facing wall, are visible below. As the tourist Thomas Johnston noted, such a view of the “glittering spires” from amidst the elevated vantage point of the densely treed mountain worked to reassure whites of the “certain knowledge that men, many of whom were reared in a civilized country, are the lords of the soil”.61 Almost in the centre of the image, one of several gates is visible, the guarded pathway into and out of the settlement. Davies’ rendering of plant life demonstrates more than a passing interest in nature. In both images, his attention to the colour variation of foliage, the shape and delineation of plant life – even down to the texture of tree bark – shows his interest in and study of the uniqueness of plant life in the colony. Re-imagining Montreal as a colonial trade and slave port Although not of military background, J. Henry Sandham’s Evening on the Wharf, or Montreal Harbour (1868) opens up some other possibilities for a postcolonial reading of marine landscapes. His choice to position us as a viewer on the dock with his figures and his sharp cropping pull us into close proximity with the bustle of activity on the dock and on the huge three-masted merchant ship which he placed at the centre of the canvas. Specifically, our eyes are directed to the main mast of this vessel, by the diagonal thrust of the bowsprit and beakhead of another vessel, the bow of which is only partially represented in the extreme right foreground. If we were to draw a line equal in angle and length, down from the point where the bowsprit would hypothetically intersect with the main mast of the central ship, it would graze the heads of the three-person grouping on the dock and a triangle would be formed, the lower plane of which would run beneath the feet of this grouping, cut through the scattered barrels and intersect once more with the first vessel, off the canvas to the right. Sandham’s dramatic sequences of fully and partially formed triangles direct our eyes back, deeper into the three-dimensional illusion of multiple layers of his hectic dockside scene where we see rows of equally large ships, positioned to move their cargoes. The technology of the three- and four-masted ship evolved in step with European imperialism, providing vessels that allowed for greater balance, manoeuvrability, and manipulation.62 Although developed dominantly for European war vessels, the technology was quickly adopted for commercial ends by merchant ships. If we examine the central ship we see that one man busies himself with the rigging of the main mast, whilst another alongside seems caught in the act of hoisting himself up to the main yard. Below, several figures positioned close to a long gangplank seem occupied with preparing to offload their cargo to the nearby dock, while two more on deck busy themselves with a long cloth between them – perhaps a damaged sail – and three more men attend to duties at the stern. The male figure with a hat on the dock in the right foreground seems to be tying off the vessel, a sign of its recent arrival. He is surrounded by several wooden

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barrels (hogsheads or puncheons) and further away Sandham includes a heap of white sacks; the ships’ cargo ready to be transported in horse-drawn carts like the ones waiting further down the dock on the left. Indeed, the dramatic angle of the slicing beakhead in the right foreground coupled with the cluster of ships work to block out nature and redirect our attention back to Montreal harbour as a thriving and bustling transoceanic commercial hub. Although the clear blue sky with slight traces of cloud is represented, the water is barely visible between docked ships. Sandham’s main focus is on the port as a functioning commercial enterprise and he reveals not only the patterns of labour inherent in colonial trade and commerce, but also something of the identities and activities of its participants. In the assembled trio to the left, all three subjects wear quite specific dress (hats and clothing) and they face each other as if in conversation. But whereas the two subjects to the left of the threesome appear to be of European origin, the seemingly bare feet or moccasins and long hair of the red-cloaked subject wearing a blanket coat more likely represents a Native subject.While their proximity to the central ship, still bustling with activity, may imply that they have recently disembarked, this question of who they are and what they are doing on the wharf is an important one in the distance between Davies’ lounging white subjects as staffage in his AView of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) and these decidedly more active subjects who are, by their very position on the other side of the river, implicated in the circuits of colonial trade and commerce that sustained the settler community. The work that Sandham’s painting also does is to reveal labour through signs of the transatlantic colonial commerce, which fuelled Montreal’s port during the serviceable months of May through to October.63 Indeed, the cargo, which Sandham represented, might well have been Caribbean rum and sugar since the standard measure for the former was a puncheon and the latter was generally packed in hogsheads. The strewn wharf is littered in the foreground with various barrels and sacks of transported goods, goods that were coming and going from other so-called New World Ports or European metropolises, goods that were often produced by slave labour. Most of these goods and commodities were destined for the local warehouses, shops, and auction rooms of the businessmen who advertised in the local papers, but some were reserved for country merchants and bound for further inland transportation.64 By the time Sandham created this painting, Montreal ocean shipping had experienced significant expansion, with increases not only to the number, but also to the size of the vessels being used.65 British trade to Montreal increased dramatically with inbound ships arriving each spring from Liverpool, Glasgow, and London with a “general cargo” for the city’s importers, consisting of woollen and cotton goods, manufactured hardware, pig iron, steel, fine clothing, and hats selected by British merchants or Montreal’s own during annual buying trips.66 In the other direction, men loaded flour, wheat, lumber, ashes, and staves – like the staves seen being hoisted onto the ship in Robert Sproule’s View of the Harbour, Montreal (1830) (Figure 4.5) – destined for those same British ports and others.67 But African and African-descended slaves, working under constant threat of violence in the American South where plantation slavery flourished, cultivated the cotton that was

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Figure 4.5 Robert Sproule, View of the Harbour, Montreal (1830), hand-coloured engraving, 22.6 × 34.8 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 33, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, Montreal

imported in the form of material or pre-fabricated clothing. This cotton, harvested in the semi-tropical or tropical plantations, was delivered in its raw form back to the seats of empire, where in cities like Manchester, England it was turned into fabric. The obscene profits that were yielded to the networks of white European and white Creole slave owners, landlords, shipbuilders, financiers, and merchants were a direct result of the colonial racial ideals which effectively produced blackness and sanctioned the horrific exploitation of Africans through their dichotomization with European whiteness. Although the Canadian enslavement of blacks in settlements like Montreal was largely about domestic labour requirements, many white Canadians grew wealthy through their direct or indirect commercial connections to plantation slavery elsewhere.While many wealthy merchant families based in Montreal had early connections to the fur trade, by the nineteenth century many (like James McGill discussed above) had diversified, gaining footholds in the shipment of general goods and commodities like clothing, glass, groceries, and hardware, or becoming specialized importers of more “exotic” products from other more southern colonies.68 Montreal’s colonial trade also encompassed ocean shipping to and from the West Indies, with vessels arriving yearly stocked with slave-produced sugar and molasses.69 For example,

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Jedidiah Hubbell Dorwin was known for trade with Nova Scotia, Labrador, and the West Indies; the firm of Tobin and Murison, owned by John Tobin, shipped cargoes of sugar and rum; and John Redpath (1796–1869) established the Canada Sugar Refining Company, known as Redpath Sugar, on the banks of the Lachine Canal in 1854.70 But Montreal merchants were also eager to trade in American plantation crops. John Young, originally of Scotland, who went on to a prominent position as the Chair of The Harbour Commission of Montreal, established himself in 1840s Montreal, when American slavery was still in force, as a merchant specializing in American rice and tobacco in partnership with Harrison Stephens.71 Jacob Joseph became wealthy from tobacco imports. The Montreal-based businessmen engaged in this colonial trade were keen to protect their profits through legislation and policy-making, which supported a direct trade. When American legislation allowed for goods to pass duty-free through the US into Canada by inland navigation, they fought to preserve the profits from their direct West Indian trade routes by lobbying government officials through organizations like the Montreal Board of Trade, which noted that such duties were necessary to preserve their “direct trade to Cuba and Porto Rico [sic]” and that their absence would “injure the carrying trade both by sea, and the canals in Canada”.72 Between 1842 and 1847, 11,324 pounds sterling’s worth of imports were shipped to Montreal directly from the West Indies and from 1841 to 1844, 26,083 pounds sterling’s worth of exports were sent in the other direction.73 Meanwhile, the number of ocean-going vessels coming upriver to Montreal increased from 65 in 1838 to 208 in 1841.74 Indeed, the streets, buildings, and institutions of present-day Montreal are still largely named for these white, anglophone, male, merchant moguls – Redpath, McGill, McTavish, Drummond – many of whom traded in plantation crops worked by slave labour. The nineteenth-century watercolour paintings that Robert Sproule turned into a set of “Views of Montreal” in collaboration with Bourne and Leney, also situate Montreal as a colonial, transoceanic geographic space. As a group, the six prints are replete with imperial signs, of colonial trade, labour, settlement, militarization, and Christianization. While five images provided close depictions of specific building, sites, and locales, only one of them, View of Montreal, from St. Helens Island, provided a sense of the settlement as a whole. But it is his View of the Harbour, Montreal (Figure 4.5), with its focus on colonial commerce, which Sandham’s later painting most closely approximated. Unlike Sandham’s work, the St Lawrence River takes centre stage and fills the entire picture plane in the lower half of Sproule’s work. With the labour of the busy wharf on the left, on the right Sproule provided access to the open horizon, a vista towards the east, the literal pathway to the Atlantic Ocean, which connected this particular setting of empire to others.With this view the British military presence sandwiches the St Lawrence River, with the Quebec Gate Barracks, Queen’s Barracks and overflow accommodations of Bonsecour Market on the north bank and St Helen’s Island Barracks on the south.75 It is only as the eye recedes into the image that the embankment wall of the harbour on the left cuts a diagonal line revealing the street facing the river and its chimney-topped buildings. Although two steamships are visible in the work, one with a partial name of

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“HENRY” in view, it is the larger merchant sailing ship upon which Sproule fixated. To the right of the street a large three-masted ship with its anchor prominently raised floats on the river, as it is readied for departure. The majority of the figures, all male, that populate the print perform tasks in direct relation to the departing vessel. Much like Sandham after him, Sproule represents the business of colonial trade. The central activity is the loading of cargo on a merchant ship for exportation. Clearly visible at the bow of the ship below the bowsprit, three men, perched precariously on floating boards, assist in the hoisting of staves, a commodity that the merchant James McGill began exporting in 1796.76 The precariousness and labour of the white men is contrasted with the security and idleness of the two Native males in the nearby canoe, one of whom seems to look towards the labouring men. A group of four men perch on an uncertain-looking group of floating wooden planks as they strain to hoist a stave. Meanwhile, a man in a dark blue jacket and black hat stands on a gangplank, propped between the ship and the street, extending his arm to direct a man in a red coat who bends over to lift a hogshead or puncheon. While this red-coated male seems ready to load his barrel onto the ship, the man behind him seated in the horse-drawn cart may have just offloaded the same barrel. But it is the three figures in the immediate left foreground that recall the vagrants of Sproule’s View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830) and the Natives of Davies’ A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762). Perched on the stone wall with one leg draped over it, the cheerfully idle Canadien with recognizable cap and red sash tilts his head and looks at the viewer. From the canoe just below him on the river, a Native looks up at him smiling, as he pushes his oar into the water seemingly in time with his Native companion who sits forward in the canoe in profile to the viewer. The specific ornamental detail of the Natives’ dress, like the necklace, plumed hat, and sash, point out their ethnic and racial specificity as well as their hybridity and creolization. Much like the Native duo in Davies’ St. Helens Island print, the Natives’ lack of labour positions them erroneously outside of the networks of transoceanic trade unfolding in the image – the essential work that made Montreal prosper within the broader context of the British Empire – while their general contentment serves to erase signs of their violent marginalization at the hands of the European settlers. Happy and docile, Native people for Davies and Sproule are seen as simultaneously inhabiting the territory of the British Empire and yet are excluded from and contribute nothing to the colonial economic “betterment” of Montreal, the trade and exchange that fuelled the so-called progress of the settlement. As such, the erasure of their essential labour and contributions to prosperous international markets, like fur, as I will discuss below, also ran parallel to James Hakewill’s deletion of the labour of enslaved Africans from Jamaican sugar cane plantations. Although it is a daytime scene, the sky is cloudy and not sunlit. As discussed above, the river-fronting street that Sproule depicted was notorious for taverns frequented by soldiers, sailors (like those in the print), and vagrant women who survived in part through prostitution and sexual favours. But this print does not disclose the seamy underbelly of Montreal. Women are altogether absent from the scene, as are the bodies of Montreal’s

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many garrisoned soldiers. But across the water, the visibility of St. Helen’s Island with a flag flying above its military buildings serves as a reminder of the British military presence. But most striking in comparison to Sandham’s later painting is the vista of the river that the image provides. The lower third of the image is filled with water, the representation of the St Lawrence River, which disappears when it meets the sky in the distance beyond St Helen’s Island at right.Throughout North America and the British Empire, the reputation of the St Lawrence had been secured in its connection to the harbour at Montreal, one of the most vital, active, and important Atlantic networked ports. As an American traveller observed, great was our surprise, on arriving within view of Montreal, at the magnitude and importance of the place, and the grandeur of the vast river, and the shipping five hundred miles from the ocean. It may well compare with our own Mississippi; and, though winter fast locks it in ice, summer, on the other hand, brings no yellow fever [italics mine].77 It is interesting that this traveller’s shock at the developed state of the settlement and colonial infrastructure of Montreal’s shipping trade ends with a knowledgeable reference to a well-known ill from which Montreal did not suffer, yellow fever. Indeed, as I will discuss in detail below, the disease, which was pervasive in tropical colonies like Jamaica, was one of the reasons why the island was early labelled the white man’s grave. Thus, the knowledgeable traveller deduced that although the drastic seasonal shifts of Montreal brought winter ice that forced a cessation of the port’s commercial activities, the cold weather was also a salvation, which prevented scourges like yellow fever from claiming the lives of the white settlers. While Sproule’s work centres the commercial labour and the large merchant sailing ships, which fuelled the colonial transatlantic trade for which Montreal had become renowned, a lithograph by James D. Duncan (1806–81) taken from a similar spot and vantage point featured a docked steamship, chimneys smoking, with the name “QUEEN” emblazoned on the side. An Irishman like Sproule, Duncan was born in Coleraine, Ireland and arrived in the region around 1825 with some level of artistic training already in hand.78 By 1827 he had already settled in Montreal where he received further artistic training and spent the remainder of his life.79 Besides the production of some portraits and miniatures, Duncan who taught at several schools,80 became most famous for his landscape views of Montreal, completing most of the drawing for Newton Bosworth’s Hochelaga Depicta: Or the History and Present State of the Island and City of Montreal (1839).81 As The New Guide to Montreal (1851) proclaimed, “The steam navigation connected with the City of Montreal has rapidly increased within the last few years . . . At present there are five steam vessels running to and from Quebec, enabling two and three of them to leave each city every alternate evening.”82 Duncan’s image entitled Steam Boat Wharf, 1843 (1843) (Figure 4.6) is literally anchored by Britishness, with a Union Jack visible at each side, a smaller one flying over a sturdy three-storey building at left and a very large one unfurling

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Figure 4.6 James D. Duncan, Steam Boat Wharf, 1843 (1843), lithograph with beige tint stone and watercolour on wove paper, 30.2 × 41 cm, 23150, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

into the image at right along the water’s edge.83 Interestingly, although there are no obvious British soldiers or sailors in the scene, the artist’s chosen vantage point cleverly provided a reminder of their presence. Just beyond the second giant circular wheel of the steamship Queen, the rise of St. Helen’s Island is clearly visible in the St Lawrence River, with a third flag flying above the British military installation. Although the focus is the same harbour-fronting thoroughfare as Sproule’s, the vantage point has shifted to the north-west and the street – now full of a diverse array of pedestrians – is the focus of the print. While middle- and upper-class men, women, and children are clearly identified by their dress and comportment, horse-drawn carts also line the busy street with their loads of hogsheads and puncheons destined for local shops or departing ships. Through the skilful depiction of perspective, the road which lines the left side of the image recedes into the distance along a slight curve, indicating that the social and commercial activities in the foreground are replicated again and again as far as the eye can see. Montreal here, then, is not just about the perpetual loading of departing ships, but about the culture and society that has been created by the constant ebb and flow of the dynamic port settlement.84 But the artist also indicates the profound social disparity between the wealthy and the poor. The spectre of vagrancy is represented by the group of men and women who sit idly on a pile of discarded sacks and hogsheads accumulated under a dark lamppost

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that slices the left foreground at a fork in the road. In this daytime scene the lamppost casts no light. Oddly and perhaps deliberately, Duncan rendered this group, although closest to the picture plane and hence the viewer, largely visually illegible. With their backs to the viewer, the artist provides no light source to illuminate them. The cross-sex nature of the group is only discernable by the outlines of the headwear and other dress of the figures like the bonnet on the female figure and the hats on several men. More drama is added to the image with the inclusion of a child on the woman’s lap, the small legs extending out over her skirt-covered knees, as the figure seems to clutch the child to her body. Thus, as Poutenan so ably argued, the endemic instability and vulnerability of vagrancy in Montreal impacted men and women, adults and children alike. The incongruity of this shadowy “family” of idlers is juxtaposed with the busyness of the properly dressed, parcel-carrying white woman who walks along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, the steamship Queen at her back. Much like the white, basket-carrying mother figure hurried across Sproule’s View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830) by the little white boy, this unchaperoned woman’s proper attire proclaimed that the settlement of Montreal was refined enough to accommodate “proper” white female citizens. St Helen’s Island Off the south-east shore of the island of Montreal in the centre of the St Lawrence River sits St Helen’s Island, re-named in 1611 by Samuel de Champlain in honour of his wife, Hélène de Champlain, née Boullé.85 Samuel Hazard described it thus in the 1830s: “The island is formed of limestone rock, overlaid with a dry, marly soil – it is shaded with lofty trees, and covered with a fine sward. A small portion is devoted to cultivation. The shore is dry and pebbly – no damp or marshy exhalations contaminate the purity of its atmosphere.”86 Under French colonization, in 1655, the island had come under the private control of the Le Moyne family of Longueuil who possessed a French Barony. However, through several strategic marriages with British men, the island became the property of the Grants up until 1818 when the British purchased it. In 1770, 15 years after the death of her husband Charles Le Moyne in 1755, Marie-AnneCatherine Fleury Deschambault, the widowed Baroness of Longueuil, re-married the Scottish merchant, seigneur, office holder, and politician William Grant. In 1781, Grant later arranged for his wife’s daughter, Marie-Charles-Joseph Le Moyne de Longueuil, heir to the Barony, to marry his nephew Captain David Alexander Grant, a soldier in the 84th Regiment.87 Much like the Scottish James McGill’s marriage to the French gentlewoman MarieCharlotte Trottier Desrivières née Guillimin in 1776 mentioned above (Chapter 2), the cross-cultural/ethnic marriages of the Le Moynes and the Grants demonstrated the extent to which the bonds and affiliations shared by upper-class whites often trumped any lingering animosities between the French and the British Empires. But control of the French Barony seemed the intent of the Grant men, since a mere two days after his wedding David Grant replaced his bride’s grandfather, Joseph Fleury Deschambault, as the trustee of her inheritance and the manager of the Barony. Born in 1782,

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their son Charles William Grant (baptized in an Anglican church) went on to inherit the estate and the title of Baron of Longueuil.88 Much like the Codringtons of Barbados in the case of the Caribbean island of Barbuda near Antigua mentioned below (Chapter 6), the Le Moynes and Grants used St Helen’s Island as their own private retreat, with Marie-CharlesJoseph using the family manor on the island as her summer home after her husband’s death in 1806.89 Indeed, St Helen’s Island was recognized as a site of local distinction and beauty. As Dr. Walter Henry pronounced, “There is great rivalry between Quebec and Montreal, the Queens of the St Lawrence. If Montreal boasts of her mountain and her beautiful St. Helens, Quebec is no less proud of her walls, her citadel, her noble position and her magnificent basin.”90 As discussed above, the desirability of St Helen’s Island for the British was directly connected to its military usefulness. The site became the second major military establishment in Montreal and, importantly, the location of the main ordnance depot. As Bosworth noted, “Fortifications and buildings for stores, where great quantities are kept, have been erected on the Island, and a military garrison is established there. It is itself a beautiful spot, and affords a fine view of the city, from which it is distant about a mile [italics mine].”91 Indeed, as Bosworth noted, next to a view from the mountain, St Helen’s Island became the most popular vantage point from which nineteenth-century artists represented Montreal. Unlike Jamaica, the immigrant population of Montreal had been early concentrated within the walled settlement, first constructed by the French and later taken over and re-fortified by the British. Furthermore, while artists like James Hakewill and Joseph Kidd documented the properties of wealthy plantation owners distributed across the entire island of Jamaica, in Montreal, the majority of the landscapes focused on a very small south-eastern portion of the island where the fortified urban space sat fronting the St Lawrence River. Besides the solder-artist Thomas Davies’ eighteenth-century watercolour painting discussed above, George Heriot, James Gray, Robert A. Sproule, and James Duncan all depicted Montreal from St Helen’s Island in the early nineteenth century. St Helen’s Island regularly appeared as a distant patch of land rising from the St Lawrence River in most landscapes of Montreal that were created from the vantage point of the mountain. However, oddly, most examples of images created from St Helen’s Island barely represented any of its terrain. Instead, St Helen’s was used as a strategic vantage point from which to make Montreal visible and became a tactical position from which to view the colony from across the river. Following Said, it was a way to re-imagine and reimage Montreal as a British site. As such, the inclusion of the words view of in the title of Sproule’s print View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (1830) (Figure 4.7) was instructive, indicating to the viewers that the image was more about the settlement of Montreal than the island from which that settlement was being seen. Interestingly, of these five versions, the landscapes of Gray, Sproule, and Duncan include soldiers, directly announcing the prized military significance of the island. In contrast (as discussed in detail above), Davies positioned his lounging upper-class white male and female couple quite close to the river’s edge, providing them with a view of the walled settlement, and the passing Native duo in the canoe.

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Figure 4.7 William Satchwell Leney after Robert Sproule, View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (1830), handcoloured engraving, 22.9 × 34.8 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 35, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal

George Heriot’s Montreal from St. Helen’s (c. 1797–1816) is one of 116 sketches dated from the period 1797 to 1816 and created within his English and Canadian sketchbook.92 The painting might date from 1810, as does another Montreal scene removed from the same sketchbook.93 Trained in topographical drawing at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich like Thomas Davies, the Scottish Heriot migrated to Quebec in 1792 eventually taking up the position of Deputy Postmaster General of British North America in 1800. As Finley explains, The training in topographical drawing which the gentlemen cadet received was an essential and eminently practical part of his preparation for a career as an army officer. It equipped him to document terrain, structures, and troop deployment, to facilitate the planning of manoevres, and to provide historical records [sic].94 Heriot’s Montreal from St. Helen’s is a delicate watercolour that explicitly reveals his acquaintance with the picturesque principles of Gilpinian landscape. Largely credited with defining the picturesque aesthetic, the Reverend William Gilpin was an amateur artist and writer

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who devised the theory in the later eighteenth century as an aesthetic means of creating and examining landscape art. As Finley explains, “A picturesque view required ruggedness, which could be reinforced by other qualities, such as irregularity, variety, and light and shade.”95 But furthermore, Gilpin devised ways for the artist to discipline the eye of the viewer while they observed the landscape representation, devices that included deliberate uses of certain tonalities and of objects in nature and that assumed the adoption (or fabrication) of certain strategic vantages points. As Finley has noted, “According to Gilpin, there should be a foreground of dark tonality, often silhouetted against a lighter middle ground and a still lighter distance of background” but also “foreground framing elements would prevent the eye from wandering, and the picture from being turned into a ‘map’”.96 While map-making was seen as too literal and devoid of aesthetic content, Gilpin saw topographical landscapes as a combination of geographical accuracy and aesthetic pleasure. This picturesque ideal is carried out almost to the letter in Heriot’s Montreal from St. Helen’s (c. 1797–1816). Much like Thomas Davies’ A View of Montreal in Canada,Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762), Heriot positions the viewer on St Helen’s Island close to the shoreline of the St Lawrence River and looking north across at the walled settlement. The representation of the wall surrounding the urban space of Montreal indicates that the work was surely painted prior to 1817 when the wall was dismantled.While a large church spire is traced in grey against a pale sky to the left, it is interesting that Heriot, the soldier, placed Citadel Hill at the centre of the middle ground. Unlike the other four artists Heriot inserted no figures (civilian or military) to narrate the viewers’ experience of the city vista. Indeed, the only signs of human presence are implied through the buildings that dot the landscape on the other side of the river and the two sailboats on the river in the centre of the lower half of the image. The river is tranquil, variation created where Heriot has allowed the ground of the sketchbook paper to escape full saturation of the blue paint. As Gilpin advised, Heriot’s foreground colours are the darkest tones in the work, the alternation between the dark and light brown providing the idea of ruggedness that was a defining feature of Gilpin’s picturesque. The colours of the landscape become lighter as the eye rises through the middle ground of the river and still lighter in the pale wash of the blue sky. The only interruption of Gilpin’s aesthetic is the dark grey slash of the mountain in an uneven horizontal line, which begins at the church spire on the left and continues across the entire page to the right side. Lastly, the eye is disciplined by the strategic framing of the image by two clusters of tall trees at either side of the image. The leaf-covered branches stretch and breach the top of the page on both sides and the innermost tree on the left side curves inwards, its delicate tracings of branches and leaves settling directly over Citadel Hill. Our eye is not only kept within the boundaries of the landscape, but also directed to important sites within it by Heriot’s strategic choice of vantage point and his manipulation of nature. Like Davies, Heriot’s erasure of the military significance of St. Helen’s Island is unusual given his status as a soldier and his employment as a clerk of cheque in ordnance in Quebec City in the 1790s.97 Surely with his British military background and experience of Montreal, Heriot was amply aware of the island’s specific military significance as the location

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of the main ordnance depot for the Montreal station. But instead of alluding, like Sproule, Gray, and Duncan, to the island’s permanent presence of soldiers, Heriot created a delicate, tranquil scene that represents British militarized Montreal and yet suppressed any overt symbols of imperial power, like the Union Jack or the bodies of soldiers. Neither is Montreal’s prominent status as a colonial trade port advertised. Instead, Montreal is peaceful and silent, a tranquil British settlement translated through the technology of the picturesque aesthetic and the viewers are allowed to imagine that they are civilians taking in the scene as if on a leisurely stroll. Little is known of the personal history or training of James Gray. Willett and Blandford of London, England published seven of his drawings as aquatints on 1 December 1828.98 Gray’s Montreal, from St. Helens Island (1828) (Figure 4.8) is simultaneously a distinct military pronouncement of British might and a bucolic landscape with grazing farm animals. The rural idyll of the island was no doubt owed in part to the former presence and agricultural cultivation of the Le Moyne and Grant families since, according to Leprohon, from the days of the early nineteenth century when Marie-Charles-Joseph had spent her summers on the island, it had boasted “very fine gardens”.99 While the scattered presence of soldiers and the flagpole with the Union Jack unfurled in the breeze convey the former message, a cluster

Figure 4.8 Joshua Gleadah after James Gray, Montreal, from St. Helens Island, published by Willett and Blandford Bouverie, Fleet Street, London, UK (1 December 1828), aquatint, 23.75 × 40.2 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 74, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, Montreal

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of white sheep in the right middle ground and the two cows and one calf in the right foreground deliver the latter. The viewer is positioned on a hill, which curves downward just beyond the flagpole, revealing the top of a building with two chimneys. From this vantage point, the river is visible, but the land, which it fronts, is not, giving the impression of a possibly perilous drop into the water. While Gray decorated the foreground with pretty white and pink blooming flowers, which emerge from a boulder-strewn soil, a tall leafy tree at right that transects the image frames the entire landscape. The tree limbs reach left, directing the eye into the image towards the centrally placed flagpole and then across the river to the walled settlement. While a daytime scene, the cloudy sky is tinged with pink but, as Kriz notes of Hakewill’s contemporaneous Jamaican landscapes, this is not a climatically correct image and the shadows that the clouds should cast on the river seem more cursory and decorative than a reflection of any actual atmospheric activity. Indeed, the river is mirror-like in its stillness and the activity of the renowned harbour is slight. While two steamships are depicted on the left side of the image, a cluster of sailing ships are gathered on the other side of the river at the left side of the image. And while no figures are visible on the other side of the water, Gray represented two clusters of figures on St Helen’s Island. Three male figures and a horse (or mule) face the water on the right side as if watching the passing steamers. Since they face the water the maleness can only be discerned by their dress, and the blue jackets (and purpose of St Helen’s Island) hint that they are most likely soldiers. But another three soldiers are more clearly identified and visible at the left side of the image. While one emerges up a hill towards the picture plane, only the upper part of his body visible, the other two stand facing each other wearing long blue jackets adorned with epaulettes and red trim. They face each other, the one with his back to the viewer, saluting the other, whose rifle rests at his left side. The juxtaposition between the armed, saluting soldiers and the grazing indifferent farm animals is striking. While the distant shore dotted with church spires and various multi-storeyed buildings seems to announce the modernity and industry of the British settlement, the viewer seems stranded in a paradoxical space simultaneously occupied by both a military and agricultural infrastructure. Yet another artwork that imaged Montreal from this perspective was Sproule’s View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (1830) (Figure 4.7). Davies’ earlier lounging couple seems particularly at odds with the starkly erect soldier, Sproule’s sentry at his post, reminding us that this view of Montreal was not merely one of leisure, but a necessity of British defined imperial growth and “progress”. The armed soldier’s alert pose on the south bank of the St Lawrence reminds the viewer that Britain’s control of the colony was something that needed to be defended with force – or at least the threat thereof. As discussed above, landscape prints often originated from drawings and watercolour sketches made “on the spot”. Sproule’s two versions of View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (1830) display certain small changes that occurred in the transition from watercolour to print that likely indicate the input of the printmaker Adolphus Bourne. As mentioned above, a soldier stands guard in the left foreground. Although in both works, the sole white male figure stands armed with a large bayonet held in an upright position that extends well beyond the top of his

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head, in the watercolour Sproule had outfitted him in a red jacket and white pants, and in an extant print the jacket is blue.100 While Sproule provided a detailed rendering of the soldier’s face in his original watercolour, the Bourne print relied on a more cursory depiction of his facial features. As with Sproule’s other prints from the six-print Bourne series, the atmospheric properties of cloud patterns over the mountain and the river do not seem to correspond in a rigorous way to the shadows that are cast on the landscape. Similarly, the dark shadow cast at a right angle on the right side from the soldier’s feet has no corresponding light source. Although obviously a daytime scene, the sun is not represented in the mainly blue sky, which takes up the entire upper half of the image. Since only a small fraction of St Helen’s Island is depicted in the mid- to left foreground, the St Lawrence River consumes most of the bottom half of the image. While a cluster of large merchant sailing ships are visible across the water docked in front of the settlement, four carefully rendered vessels are depicted by-passing St Helen’s Island on the river in the fore- and middle grounds of the landscape: two single-masted sailboats, a raft, and a steamship. But while the vessels sail parallel to the island in the print, Sproule’s original configuration was less precise. While the smallest craft with the same amount of men, five, is largely in the same position closest to St Helen’s Island in both images, the orientation of the boat is reversed with the boat heading westward in the original watercolour and eastward in the later print. The nature of the men’s dress in the watercolour, their red sashes and caps, seem to indicate that Sproule intended for some to be read as Canadiens. As such, their proximity to the shore placed their bodies in direct juxtaposition with the lone forward-facing British soldier, allowing for the foreign viewers to contemplate the cultural, ethnic, and religious differences within the colony’s population of white men. The other single-masted sailboat, slightly larger in size, was given a different orientation in the print. In the painting, although the sail is aloft, no figures are visible and the stern faces the viewer. But in the print, this sailboat, like the others, is parallel to the shore and miniscule figures are visible on the deck. Positioned almost dead centre in the landscape, the steamboat is reminiscent of Duncan’s docked boat Queen in his lithograph Steam Boat Wharf, 1843. In both of Sproule’s versions minuscule figures can be seen labouring on deck and a Union Jack flies over the bowsprit as the boat seems to head east towards the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was most likely one of the vessels of the Montreal Steam Tow Boat Company, launched in the 1820s by Scotsman John Torrance (1786–1870) or it could belong to the St Lawrence Steamboat Company, dating from 1822 and started by brewer, distiller, merchant, and banker William Molson (1793–1875); these two companies were fierce competitors until 1833.101 Consciously or not, Sproule’s depiction of the steamboat labourers evoked the regularity of the multi-racial crews since the steamboats that serviced the corridor between Montreal and Quebec City (as well as Lake Ontario) often employed black men.102 A watercolour sketch by the British military officer James Hope-Wallace documented his encounter with a black waiter on Torrance’s steamboat British America.103 Labelled at the bottom in cursive “Negro waiter on board the British America Steamer” (1838) (Figure 4.9) and dated 16 July 1838 in the upper right corner, the sketch is a full-body

Figure 4.9 James Hope-Wallace, Negro Waiter on Board the British America Steamer (16 July 1838), watercolour, pen and brown ink over pencil on wove paper, 16.5 × 24.6 cm, R9266–282, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

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portrait of the black man dressed in a uniform consisting of a striped jacket with a lightcoloured shirt and long apron, a tie, and dark pants and shoes. With his body facing the viewer and his head in profile turned to the right, his figure casts a cursory shadow on the floor. With a corked bottle tucked under his left arm, a light-coloured serviette in his left hand and a platter gripped between his thumb and index finger of his right arm, which is extended at a 90-degree angle across his body, Hope-Wallace appears to have rendered the man during a brief pause in a moment of service. The position of his head achieves two goals. Firstly, it conveys the idea that the waiter is pre-occupied in his work, his attention momentarily engaged with the activities taking place out of sight over his right shoulder. And secondly, it allowed Hope-Wallace to study the profile of the black man and apparently to partake in the racist, “scientific”, common sense of the racial inferiority of Africans as conveyed in the shape, size, and structure of the head. Specifically, the exaggerated lips and the prognathic position of the Negro waiter’s jaw were common features in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century human science print culture which argued for the intellectual inferiority of Africans, as based upon fundamental racial distinctions from Europeans in anatomy and physiognomy.104 Unsurprisingly, Montreal blacks were employed on local steamboats in the lowest order of jobs, which included cooks, waiters, and “boots”.105 The lure of the ships for black Montrealers was so profound that the all-white American Presbyterian Sunday School Society of Montreal blamed the demise of its short-lived No. 4 African School, founded in March 1827, on the spring thaw which sparked an exodus of their pupils for their principal employment on the steamboats.106 As Mackey has noted, “At least three black men worked on John Molson’s Accommodation, the first steamboat in British North America, launched at Montreal on 19 August 1809.”107 While Mackey suspects that Roger Ashley and the selfnamed Jean-Baptiste L’Africain (discussed above in Chapter 2) employed from July 1809 were recruited earlier for building work, the third black man, Richard Rogers, joined the crew the following year.108 As such, the steamboat companies represented a special economic pull for Montreal’s nineteenth-century black residents, not as passengers, but as workers. Finally, the raft that Sproule located directly west of the steamship in the watercolour was re-located further east and south, closer to the shore of St Helen’s Island, in the print. But in both works, the vessel still boasts ten men whose active poses indicate that they are in the midst of rowing the vessel eastward. But while the openness and precariousness of the raft indicate its use in local and short-haul transits, combined the four detailed vessels indicate the St Lawrence River as the embarkation point for both local and potentially Atlantic transits of short and longer durations, of both touristic and commercial motivations. Although a view of Montreal, Sproule’s watercolour and print are more about the vibrant economic and social life of the settlement, activated by its proximity to the river, than about the settlement itself. Rather, the walled space of Montreal acts as a backdrop for the vessels in transit. The ubiquity and detailed rendering of church spires in the distant landscapes is of great consequence and a part of what Harley calls the “geography of ecclesiastic power” which demonstrated the success of colonization by differentiating the before (the so-called savage territory of infidels) from the after (the so-called civilized settlement

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of the Christians).109 As our eyes move up the dark trunk and into the green leaves of the towering tree that slices the left foreground, they are guided into the branches, which extend out above the most prominent spires that dot the skyline, the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral.The landscape, then, is an act of reassurance proclaiming the correct function of the economic, social, religious, and military orders of the settlement. James Duncan’s View from St. Helen’s Island (1838) (Plate 9) is an interesting combination of various facets of the other four landscapes, highlighting the island’s military uses (like Sproule and Gray) and its bucolic and leisurely pleasures (like Davies and Heriot). But unlike the other four landscapes (watercolours and prints), Duncan’s, as the only oil painting, is the only “high” art piece of the five works. In terms of human subjects and activity, Duncan’s painting is an interesting assemblage of many of the attributes of the other four landscapes. The vantage point most closely approximates Gray’s, placing the viewer in a position set back from the shoreline to expose some of the grass, trees, and shrubbery of St Helen’s Island. Much like Heriot, the principles of the picturesque are employed in terms of tonality, the lightening gradations of colour from foreground to background as the eye ascends the page and recedes into the three-dimensional space towards Montreal and the mountain beyond. Furthermore, Duncan included the Gilpinian framing device of a cluster of tall trees on the right side of the image and the desire for ruggedness is expressed in the fallen tree, curved fence, and dense shrubbery in the immediate left foreground. Like Sproule, Duncan uses the St Lawrence River to provide insight into the daily life of the river-fronting settlement. The vessels that take up the middle of the image are a combination of small local craft, large multi-masted sailing ships, and two steamboats. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the work is the staffage. Duncan peoples the image with seven human subjects. Although most likely white and uniform in race, they are differentiated in other ways. Of the seven figures, five are obviously soldiers dressed in uniform. But the other two subjects are a young child and a genteel white woman.Whereas Gray’s print included grazing animals and Sproule’s the sentry on duty, Duncan represents three cannon in the left foreground, their muzzles directed at the river. While two soldiers stand to the right of the middle cannon, another two are set back from the water, one seated on a boulder and the other facing him in a standing pose. But it is the third grouping of the single standing soldier, in close proximity to the seated white female and standing child, which is the most intriguing combination. The military man and the upper-class white woman combine elements of Davies’ leisurely and Sproule and Gray’s military visions of the island.The connection between these three figures is not cursory.While the white male soldier has his back to the viewer and is therefore facing the woman and the river, the woman, seated on the ground, looks up into his face. The child’s position slightly in front of and to the right of the woman and to the left of the man, binds them in a tight triangle. Their connection is further indicated by the soldier’s outstretched left hand, which hovers above the child’s head. Although the gesture is ambiguous, it potentially indicates the man’s attempt to draw the child’s attention, or to engage the child in play. Unlike the small running white child accompanied by the white woman with the shopping basket who cross the parade ground in Sproule’s View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal

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(1830), this mother/child pairing is not engaged in economic activity. Rather, the woman’s position, seated on the ground, conveys a sense of her leisurely engagement with the soldier and the child for pleasure. Furthermore, the refinement of her proper dress with its long skirt that envelops her legs, in combination with the specificity of her headwear, secure an upper-class status which indelibly distinguishes her from the assorted vagrants that populated the murky foreground of Duncan’s Steam Boat Wharf, 1843. This white woman is a lady, most likely the mother of the erect child and possibly the wife of the standing soldier. The threesome, then, may represent the minority population of the soldiers who were able to have their wives accompany them on their missions, mainly officers. As discussed at length above (Chapter 2) only six per cent of soldiers were provided with the rations and lodgings to support families. But of course, many of the soldiers who did not have wives or that were unable to relocate them, sought sexual gratification and pleasure from local women. However, the class privilege conveyed by the white woman’s dress makes it unlikely that she is a mere mistress or lover of her soldier companion. More likely we are to read him as her husband or a legitimate suitor. As such, the painting conveys the message that, despite the presence of the cannon and the soldiers, St Helen’s Island is not only safe enough for proper white ladies and vulnerable white children, but also that they (considered by elite whites to be the most vulnerable and the most deserving of protection of Montreal’s civilian population) have nothing to fear from the British soldier. While the vantage point of St Helen’s Island was very popular with a variety of artists, only some of them included the soldiers in their images. But while the representation of the sentries at their posts and the soldiers on duty may have been meant to inspire fear and caution in French and other empires, the reality of excessive alcohol consumption within all ranks of the British military meant that men expected to be alert, disciplined, orderly, and prepared, were too often physically, intellectually, and morally debilitated by alcohol while on duty. In May 1758, Major-General James Wolfe observed in a letter to Lord George Sackville, “Too much rum necessarily affects the discipline of an army. We have glaring evidence of its ill consequences every moment. Sergeants drunk upon duty, two sentries upon their posts and the rest grovelling in the dirt [sic].”110 Duncan’s painting seemed the perfect antidote to the public fear and loathing that such unbecoming behaviour inspired. As such, more than the other four landscapes, his View from St. Helen’s Island (1838) seems designed to sell the soldier to the local citizenry, not just as disciplined military man and protector of the settlement, but as the loving and engaged father and husband and good citizen. Notes 1 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 39. 2 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 35. 3 According to a landscape frontispiece image, Cartier supposedly encountered a circular Native settlement fortified by wooden palisades and possessing one gate. Crediting Cartier with the “discovery” of the settlement, Sandham dates Cartier’s arrival in Quebec City as September 1535 and Montreal as the same year

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in October, during which he re-named the river the St Lawrence. Alfred Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications (Montreal: Daniel Rose, 210 St. James Street, 1874), frontispiece. The Tuscarora name for the St Lawrence was originally Kahnawá’kye. Blair A. Rudes, Tuscarora English Dictionary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 207. Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, p. 7. Sandham describes the exact location as a spot above a small stream later covered by Commissioner Street and St. Anns Market, which came to be known as Pointe à Callière. Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, pp. 7–8. Ville Marie was founded on 18 May 1642. In a report of 18 August 1717 from Montreal to France, Chaussegros De Leroy wrote of the large size of the settlement (three quarters of a league with 1819 toises or fathoms enclosed by fortifications), but warned of the ever-deteriorating state of the fortifications which he described as a poor enclosure of rotting stakes. He also noted that the enclosure had no door, leaving the population susceptible to attacks from Natives and the British. De Leroy’s description of the deteriorating wall, one that he described as being unable to withstand more than four or five more years, was a justification for his desire to build a fortification capable of resisting a British artillery attack. See Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, p. 12. In 1801, the Lower Canada House of Assembly passed an act appointing three commissioners to the task of removing the fortifications from around Montreal which had, according to Sandham, “o’leaped its former bounds” from 1797. The commissioners were the Hon. John Richardson, Jean Marie Mondelet Esq., and the Hon. James McGill, after whom the university, funded through his philanthropy, was named. A battle for the renaming of a newly renovated street resulted in all three commissioners writing their own names as the street’s new name. However, in the end McGill triumphed. See: Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, p. 21. Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, p. 22. Colin M. Coates, “The Colonial Landscapes of the Early Town”, Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal, eds. Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), p. 31. Gage received this promotion in September 1760, while Ralph Burton was appointed to the same position at Trois-Rivières and James Murray at Quebec. Sydney Francis Wise, “Gage, Thomas”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gage_thomas_4E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). Thomas Jefferys was cartographer to the king and the Prince of Wales. The collection included prints of the City of Quebec, the Fall of Montmorenci, Cape Rouge (the River St. Laurence), Gaspee Bay (Gulf of St. Laurence), Pierced Island (Gulf of St. Laurence), Montreal, Louisbourg, New York, Charles Town (South Carolina), Cohoes Falls, Bethlem (Penn-sylvania), and The Harbour of the Havanna (sic). The book is 18.3 × 28.8 cm and the prints are 15.4 × 26.8 cm. I am indebted to Barbara Tomlinson, Curator of Antiquities at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (UK), for her insights on these matters. Naval Flags and Ensigns: A Note by the Naval Staff Directorate, Version 1, at http://www.luxe-motor-kei. co.uk/documents/NavalFlagsandEnsigns.pdf (date of last access 9 August 2013). Naval Flags and Ensigns. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 69. The name of the river appears as St Laurence not St Lawrence on the map. Davies presumably learned landscape painting from G. Massiot who taught there at that time. See J. Russell Harper, Early Painters and Engravers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 84. Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal:An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), pp. 167–8. The sketchbook of W. Sidney Smith RN (1826–35) [PAF 0181-PAF 0221] is in the Schwerdt Collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Journal of Peter Simmonds of Voyage from Falmouth to Jamaica in HM Packet Mutine, Lieutenant Paule Commr, October 1831, 19 × 23 cm, JOD/35, Caird Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. The other human passengers were a Scottish man named Mr David McChlery (spelling uncertain) headed for Barbados, whom Simmonds described as having “all the appearance, and manners of a Barbadian”, and

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a Mr Gev Brownele who was going to Mexico on mining business. The captain’s nephew, Mr. Toole, and his son were also on board. Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, p. 84. Harper claims that after Montreal, Davies was promoted to Captain Lieutenant in 1762, commanding an artillery detachment in New York to c. 1766, then to Captain at Woolwich, England in 1771, thereafter serving in Halifax (1776), then Boston, then returning again to Halifax. He then participated in Howe’s attack on New York and the area c. 1779 after which he was stationed in Minorca and Woolwich. Davies was next an Artillery Commander at Gibraltar c. 1782 and promoted to Major in 1783. He returned to Canada as Lieutenant Colonel from 1786–90 after which he was promoted to Colonel in 1794, MajorGeneral in 1796 and Lieutenant General in 1803. Harper also stated that Davies spent time in China (1797) and Jamaica (1803). Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, p. 84 Another possibility is that Davies returned to Montreal long after his military obligations ceased. Coates, “The Colonial Landscapes of the Early Town”, p. 35. Coates, “The Colonial Landscapes of the Early Town”, p. 36. Coates notes that ordinances of 1706 and 1745 prohibited people from tossing garbage and excrement in the streets. Local officials educated the population on the dangers of cohabitating with pigs or allowing cattle to wander in the streets. Smallpox epidemics killed 8 and 10 per cent of the population in 1703 and 1733 respectively. Fire claimed large portions of the settlement in 1721, 1734, 1765, and 1768. Coates, “The Colonial Landscapes of the Early Town”, p. 29. Senior, British Regulars, p. 7. Senior, British Regulars, p. 7. Senior, British Regulars, p. 7. Senior, British Regulars, pp. 7, 8. As I will discuss further below, Kriz argues that the space of the Caribbean had to be “refined” (much like the sugar cane plant had to be transformed or refined into sugar, molasses, and rum) in order to accommodate population by upper-class white women. In part because of the majority presence of enslaved Africans, but also because of the prevalence of diseases like yellow fever, the sexual custom of white males taking black female concubines and the lack of sufficiently “safe” social spaces, white males and black men and women in many Caribbean contexts often outnumbered upper-class white females. Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the BritishWest Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008). Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 10. Colin M. Coates states that Montreal’s population was approximately 9,000 in 1800. Coates, “The Colonial Landscapes of the Early Town”, p. 35. Joseph Bouchette, The British Dominions in North America, or, A topographical and statistical description of the provinces of lower and upper Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the islands of Newfoundland, Prince Edward, and Cape Breton: including considerations on land granting and emigration; and a topographical dictionary of Lower Canada; to which are annexed, statistical tables and tables of distances (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831), vol. 2, p. 235; cited in “The 1800s (1806 to 1871)”, Statistics Canada, at http://www. statcan.gc.ca/pub/98–187-x/4064809-eng.htm (date of last access 30 November 2013). Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 10. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the population of white females in Montreal at this time since the eighteenth-century censuses did not indicate race, ethnicity or language, only sex. E-mail to author from Rénald Lessard Coordonnateur, Section de la Diffusion, Direction des services aux usagers et aux partenaires, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, 3 February 2014. Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, pp. 1–2. Unfortunately, Bradbury and Myers, like many scholars of Canadian Studies, fall short in their analysis, which focused mainly upon “gender, class, religion, age, or nation”, ignoring race although they ironically profess to examine how “Scots, English, Irish, and Jews” eventually became anglophones. As such, although published in the twenty-first century, their book missed the opportunity to address how populations like the Irish and the Jewish became “white” over time, as well as the chance to address black and Native populations of the city (p. 3). See: Karen Dubinsky, “Local Colour: The Spectacle of Race at Niagara Falls”, Racism Eh?: A Critical InterDisciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada, eds. Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson

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(Concord: Captus Press, 2004); and Ruth B. Phillips, “Nuns, Ladies and the ‘Queen of the Hurons’: Souvenir Art and the Negotiation of North American Identities”, Local/Global:Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Dubinsky, “Local Colour”, p. 226. Bradbury and Myers, “Introduction: Negotiating Identities”, p. 9. The term Canadien referred to French Canadian Catholics. Stanley Brice Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, vol. 1, 1801–1895 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s Press, 1980), p. 55. Frost states that a part of De Maisonneuve Avenue was first known as Burnside Place in honour of the house. Frost, McGill University, pp. 55, 57. John Irwin Cooper, “McGill, James”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/ bio/mcgill_james_5E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). James McGill Collection, MS 435, container 1, file 10 (1813), transcript of James McGill’s will by Alice Lighthall, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. James McGill died on 19 December 1813.The executors of James McGill’s will, dated 8 January 1811, were Isaac Todd, the Hon. John Richardson, William McGillivray, the Hon. Richard Cartwright, and McGill’s stepson François-Amable Desrivières (or any two of them). James McGill left his wife, Marie-Charlotte Trottier Desrivières, née Guillimin, buildings and property at the corner of New Market and Notre Dame Street (within the old settlement), an annuity of 600£ per year (current money of the Province of Lower Canada), and all possessions (goods, stores, furniture, pictures, china, etc.), horses, carriages, implements of husbandry, cattle, and live and dead stock from both homes.To his stepson François-Amable he gave tracts of land in Stanbridge, Montreal, three lots of land in the Quebec suburbs in the parish of Montreal, lot 13 on the ramparts of Montreal (purchased from the commissioners for removing the settlement walls), 1,600 acres (650 hectares) in the US and many more acres in Upper Canada. He gave Francis’ wife Margaret 500£ (current money). He likewise gave Madame Reynolds, the mother of his grandson and namesake James McGill Trottier Desrivières (son of his other stepson Thomas-Hippolyte) 500£. McGill also left money for many of his friends and their children. As a man with no biological children of his own, James McGill was also preoccupied with his legacy. To this end, he bequeathed a considerable amount of land in Upper Canada to the eldest son, James, “of my much respected friend the hon. Richard Cartwright” and to his heirs and assigns forever on the condition that he took the surname McGill after his own and used it in all deeds and writings and also “take and bear the family arms of McGill”, securing proper permission from the Crown or other authorizing body within two years. If James Cartwright failed to do so, the bequest was to become null and void and revert to his stepson François-Amable Desrivières. Amongst his institutional bequests were 200£ each to the Poor Protestants of Montreal, the Poor Roman Catholics of Montreal, the Hôtel Dieu, the Grey Sisters of Montreal, and in Scotland,The Infirmary of Glasgow and The Asylum of Glasgow. To his servants he left them each “a suit of mourning”, presumably to be able to be properly attired when mourning him. Given Frank Mackey’s contention that slavery had died out in Montreal early in the nineteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising that his will made no mention of any slaves. The probate for the will is dated 30 December 1813. Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery:The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), p. 6; James McGill Collection, MS 435, container 1, CH 155 S25, Probate of the Will of James McGill, dated Montreal 30 December 1813, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. See: Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013); Jennifer Schuessler, “Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers: ‘Ebony and Ivy’, About How Slavery Helped Universities Grow”, New York Times, Books, 18 October 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/books/ebony-and-ivy-about-how-slavery-helped-universitiesgrow.html?_r=0 (date of last access 25 October 2013); “Brown University’s Debt to Slavery”, New York Times, Opinion, 23 October 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/opinion/23mon3.html (date of last access 25 October 2013); NPR Staff, “How Slavery Shaped America’s Oldest and Most Elite Colleges”, NPR, 17 September 2013, at http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/09/17/ 223420533/how-slavery-shaped-americas-oldest-and-most-elite-colleges (date of last access 25 October 2013). Although faculty members had begun to make lectures available to women through the Montreal Ladies’ Educational Association from the 1870s, McGill University did not formally admit female students until 1884. At the time, women and men were instructed in sex-segregated classrooms. The impetus for the

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integration of women into the university came from a large donation from Donald A. Smith (later Lord Strathcona) who offered a provisional 120,000-dollar endowment “on condition that the standard of education for women should be the same as that for men for the ordinary degrees in Arts, that the degrees to be granted to women should be those of BA, MA, LLD, which should be so granted to them by McGill University on the same conditions as to men.” In honour of Smith’s generosity and principles of sex equity, for years McGill’s female students were known as Donaldas. “Blazing Trails: McGill’s Women”, McGill, n.d., at http://www.mcgill.ca/about/history/features/mcgill-women (date of last access 25 October 2013). Of course McGill University’s sex integration of white women preceded the racial integration of black students. It was not until 1956 that McGill’s Law Faculty graduated its first black student, Frederick Phillips. The first black graduates from the study of any discipline, female or male, have yet to be determined or to be formally acknowledged by the university. Anthony Morgan, “McGill’s First Black Law Grad – and Quebec’s First Black Lawyer”, Law – Focus Online, McGill Publications, Spring 2010, at http://publications.mcgill.ca/droit/2010/01/19/meet-mcgills-first-black-law-grad/ (date of last access 25 October 2013). Lewis H. Thomas, “Walker, Thomas”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/ bio/walker_thomas_1788_4E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). Thomas, “Walker, Thomas”. Cooper, “McGill, James”.The plan for a stately three-storey house in the James McGill Collection is likely this city dwelling near Château Ramezay and New Market. The first floor contained a kitchen (14 × 14 feet), dining room (21½ × 16 feet), parlour (18 × 14 feet), and library (17 × 12 feet). The second floor included three bedrooms (15 × 12, 17 × 12, 18 × 15 feet), a dressing room (9 × 8 feet), and a drawing room (25 × 18 feet). And the third floor comprised four bedrooms (15 × 13, 17 × 13, 16 × 15, 18 × 15 feet), two dressing rooms (7 × 9, 8 × 9 feet), and four closets (7 × 4, 5 × 3, 5 × 3 feet and dimension not indicated). James McGill Collection, MS 435, container 1, Folder 8, Plan and Elevation of House, 1816, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. (Note: 3 feet = 0.91 metres; 25 feet = 7.60 metres approximately.) Although unspecified, James McGill’s will bequeathed his “pictures” to his wife, Marie-Charlotte Trottier Desrivières, née Guillimin. James McGill Collection, MS 435, container 1, file 10 (1813), transcript of James McGill’s will by Alice Lighthall, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Betcherman derived her contention from Berczy’s papers at the National Archives of Canada. See LitaRose Betcherman, “Genesis of an Early Canadian Painter: William von Moll Berczy”, Ontario History, vol. 57, no. 2 (June 1965), pp. 60–61; cited in Angela Carr, “George Theodore Berthon (1806–92): Portraiture, Patronage, and Criticism in Nineteenth Century Toronto”, Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 11, nos. 1 and 2 (1988), pp. 25, 50 (note #11). Dulongpré was a co-founder of the Théâtre de Société in 1789, along with Jean-Guillaume De Lisle, Pierre-Amable De Bonne, Joseph Quesnel, Jacques-Clément Herse, Joseph-François Perrault, and François Rolland. After a successful first season that included six plays, the theatre was undermined when, Bazin notes, “on 22 November the curé of Notre-Dame in Montreal, François-Xavier Latour-Dézery, had denounced theatrical performances from the pulpit, adding that absolution would be refused those who attended.” Jules Bazin, “Dulongpré, Louis”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi. ca/en/bio/dulongpre_louis_7E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). Bazin surmises that the skill that Dulongpré exhibited and the speed with which he became proficient as a professional artist likely indicated an abundance of natural talent as well as some previous training from Beaucourt, who, as mentioned above, had himself returned to Quebec in 1792 from travels in France, St Domingue, and Philadelphia and who had immediately advertised his services as an instructor. After Beaucourt’s passing in 1794, Dulongpré had next to no professional competition in the region until Berczy’s arrival around 1804. Bazin, “Dulongpré, Louis”. Interestingly, Stagg states that Dulongpré became Berczy’s landlord when the latter moved to Montreal. Ronald J. Stagg, “Berczy, William”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/berczy_william_5E.html (date of last access 25 October 2013). Both portraits of James McGill are currently in the collection of the McCord Museum (Montreal). The Berczy measures 6.1 × 5.3 cm and the Dulongpré 83.8 × 67.8 cm. Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, p. 84; Cooper, “McGill, James”. Cooper, “McGill, James”.

192 Landscaping Montreal 57 Frost, McGill University, p. 57. 58 James McGill died suddenly on 19 December 1813 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery (Dufferin Square), but his body was reinterred on McGill University campus in 1875. Cooper, “McGill, James”. 59 McGill’s will stipulated that a college or university be erected on the Burnside site before the bequest took effect. The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning obtained a charter for the school in 1821. Cooper, “McGill, James”. 60 Frost, McGill University, p. 57. 61 Thomas Johnston, Travels through Lower Canada interspersed with Canadian Tales & Anecdotes, and Interesting Information to Intending Immigrants (Edinburgh: J. Glass: 1827), pp. 54–5. 62 Brian Lavery, Ship: 5000Years of Maritime Adventure (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004), pp. 69, 80. 63 McGregor noted, however, that, unlike Quebec City, Montreal trade did not come to a standstill in the winter months. Instead, he related, “Thousands of sledges may be seen coming in from all directions with agricultural produce and frozen carcasses of beef and pork, firewood, and other articles.” John McGregor, British America, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1832), vol. 2, pp. 513–4. 64 Gerald J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 68. 65 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 68. Tulchinsky dates the expansion to the decades of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. 66 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 68. Tulchinsky contends that such ships were unloaded in April and May. 67 A stave is defined as “One of the strips that compose the sides of a cask, tub, or bucket.” However, an undressed strip of wood sawn from a block was also referred to as a stave. Staves were machine-manufactured. Edward H. Knight, “Stave”, Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary: A Description of Tools, Instruments, Machines, Processes, and Engineering; History of Inventions; General TechnologicalVocabulary; and Digest of Mechanical Appliances in Science and the Arts, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1884), vol. 3, REA–ZYM, p. 2312. Included in the minutes of evidence given by James D. Hume Esq. (11 June 1835), number 98 explained that Canadian staves were brought as broken stowage to Britain, where they were reconfigured and exported containing “negro clothing and other articles for the West Indies” and “brought back filled with rum”, then “sent out filled with rum to New South Wales” after which they would be brought back filled with oil. Hume considered staves “a most important raw material” and was “deeply impressed” with their importance in transatlantic trade. As such, he recommended that the duty on staves should be low. Hume’s description of staves introduces yet another definition, which parallels puncheons or hogsheads or the wooden containers in which colonial goods were shipped. Selection of Reports and Papers of the House of Commons:Trade and Manufactures, Report from the Select Committee on Timber Duties;Together with the Minutes of Evidence, an Appendix, and Index (Ordered, by the House of Commons, to be printed: 14 August 1835), vol. 24, p. 16. 68 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 5. 69 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, pp. 68–9. 70 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, pp. 13, 19, 100. 71 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 85. 72 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 29. 73 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p.72. I have adapted these statistics from a table of imports/exports at Montreal, 1841–48. Although these figures seem to pale in comparison to the millions of pounds of goods coming from Britain, we must also consider that many of the manufactured goods that arrived in Montreal were fabricated from raw materials, like cotton, previously imported to Britain from the same West Indian ports. 74 Tulchinsky, The River Barons, p. 69. 75 Senior, British Regulars, p. 150. Senior has noted that some married quarters were provided in Bonsecour Market, giving an immediate military presence in the heart of the commercial zone. It is significant to note, though, that the British military presence permeated the city since, although soldiers were housed in barracks, officers lived throughout the city, including in private homes and hotels. See Senior, British Regulars, p. 8. 76 Cooper, “McGill, James”. 77 McGregor, British America, p. 514. 78 Harper contended that Duncan had completed some oil paintings in Ireland before immigrating to Quebec. Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, p. 97.

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79 Charles P. De Volpi and P.S. Winkworth, Montreal : A Pictorial Record: Historical Prints and Illustrations of the City of Montreal, Province of Quebec, Canada, 1535–1885, 2 vols (Montreal: Dev-sco Publications, 1963), vol. 2, p. 2. Harper argues that Duncan’s move to Montreal occurred in 1830. Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, p. 97. 80 For 1842–43 and 1843–44, Duncan is listed in a Montreal city directory under the category of “Artists” as follows “Duncan, James, Champ de Mars Street”. In the first instance he was listed with “Oliver, John, Place d’Armes, east side” and in the latter with “H. Morice, St. Urbain Street, under Mechanic’s Institute”. Duncan was listed as a portrait and miniature painter, and teacher of drawing. Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1842–3, containing an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, a classified business directory, and a supplementary directory of professional and business men in Chambly, Laprairie and St. Johns (Montreal: Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and Robert W.S. Mackay, 115 Notre Dame Street, undated), p. 143; Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1843–4, containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, second, a directory of the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, etc., in the city; and, third, a classified business directory, in which the names of the subscribers are arranged under their proper business trade. accompanied by a new map of the city (Montreal: Printed and Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and by RobertW.S. Mackay, undated), p. 239 both at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/ (date of last access 21 August 2015). 81 De Volpi and Winkworth, Montreal: A Pictorial Record, vol. 2, p. 2. The publisher William Greig dedicated the book as such: “To His Excellency Sir John Colborne, K.G.C. &c. &c. Governor-General of British North America, to whose wise, equitable, and prompt administration, in a season of peculiar danger, the province of Lower Canada is under great and lasting obligations, this volume is, with permission, most respectfully dedicated”. 82 De Volpi and Winkworth, Montreal: A Pictorial Record, vol. 1, p. 93. 83 Another copy of this work is: James Duncan (drawing), Steam BoatWharf (c. 1849), lithograph (Matthews, Montreal), 14 × 10⅜ inches (35.6 × 26.4 cm), Canadian Prints – Folio, #141, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal. 84 In a black and white version of the print more details are apparent. At the far side of the road at left, the artist carefully recorded the name of one of the businesses within the two- and three-storey building. The “OLD COUNTRYMAN” is depicted as occupying the first upper level of a three-storey building on the left side close to the picture plane. This version is owned by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library, McGill University, Montreal.There is no listing under boarding houses, brewers, chop and coffee houses, clubs and lodges, hotels and inns, or taverns and innkeepers in the 1842–43 or 1843–44 Montreal city directories for an establishment called Old Countryman. However, it is possible that the owner did not subscribe to Robert W.S. Mackay’s directory and simply was not listed. Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1842–3, containing an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, a classified business directory, and a supplementary directory of professional and business men in Chambly, Laprairie and St. Johns (Montreal: Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and Robert W.S. Mackay, 115 Notre Dame Street, undated); Robert W.S. Mackay, The Montreal Directory for 1843–4, containing, first, an alphabetical directory of the citizens generally, second, a directory of the assurance companies, banks, national, religious, and benevolent societies and institutions, and to all public offices, churches, etc., in the city; and, third, a classified business directory, in which the names of the subscribers are arranged under their proper business trade. accompanied by a new map of the city (Montreal: Printed and Published by Lovell and Gibson, St. Nicholas Street, and by Robert W.S. Mackay, undated), both at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/ (date of last access 21 August 2015). 85 Elisée Reclus, The Earth and its Inhabitants, North America, vol. 1, British North America, ed. A.H. Keane (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), p. 314. 86 Samuel Hazard, ed., Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania Devoted to the Preservation of Facts and Documents, and Every Kind of Useful Information Respecting the State of Pennsylvania, vol. 10, July 1832–January 1833 (Philadelphia, Printed by Wm. F. Geddes, n.d.), p. 166. 87 Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon, Antoinette de Mirecourt; or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing, a Canadian Tale (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press Canada, 1989), pp. xxviii–xxix. 88 Leprohon, Antoinette de Mirecourt, p. xxix. 89 Leprohon, Antoinette de Mirecourt, p. xxix. 90 Walter Henry, Trifles from my Port-folio, or Recollections of Scenes and Small Adventures during Twenty-NineYears’ Military Service in the Peninsula War and Invasion of France,The East Indies, Campaign in Nepal, St. Helena During

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91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

the Detention and Until the Death of Napoleon, and Upper and Lower Canada: In Two Volumes (Quebec: William Neilson, 1839), p. 85. Newton Bosworth, ed., Hochelaga Depicta:The Early History and Present State of the City and Island of Montreal (Montreal: William Greig, 1839), p. 176. “Montreal from St. Helen’s”, McCord Museum, at http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/collection/ artifacts/M928.92.1.21 (date of last access 5 January 2014). George Heriot’s unbound watercolour sketch Montreal is the exact dimension of Heriot’s sketchbook and corresponds with a missing page. It may have been dated later (since it is in a different hand and ink from the inscribed title). However, the date of 1810 is considered plausible given the sequence of views within which it most likely fits. “Montreal”, McCord Museum, at http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/ collection/artifacts/M973.152.1 (date of last access 17 January 2014). Gerald Finley, George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 4. Finley, George Heriot, p. 9. Finley, George Heriot, p. 10. Finley, George Heriot, n.p. De Volpi and Winkworth, Montreal: A Pictorial Record, vol. 2, p. 3. Leprohon, Antoinette de Mirecourt, p. xxix. Both the watercolour painting and a version of the print are owned by the McCord Museum, Montreal. The watercolour measures 23.2 × 35.6 cm and the print 37 × 52.3 cm. Frederick H. Armstrong, “Torrance, David”, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, at http://www.biographi. ca/en/bio/torrance_david_10E.html (date of last access 4 January 2014) . With services between Montreal and Quebec City and Montreal and La Prairie, Torrance’s fleet included both freight and passenger ships, including Hercules, St. George, British America, Voyageur, the Edmund Henry, the Britannia, and the 240foot Canada, the last being the largest and fastest boat in British North America at that time. Mackey has noted that the African woman, Margaret Sinclair, worked as a cook on the Molson steamer Quebec in 1819. Further, he speculated that others too might have answered the job advertisement placed by John Molson and Sons in 1817 for two elderly women to cook and wait upon ladies and passengers. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. Prognathism was widely taken to be an ape-like quality that supposedly reflected the “primitiveness” of underdeveloped races. See Chris Manias, Race, Science, and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany (New York: Routledge, 2013), n.p. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 165. “Boots” were footwear cleaners. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 164. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. Mackey, Done with Slavery, p. 167. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, pp. 69–70. Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London: W. Heinemann, 1909), p. 368; cited in Paul E. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army”, Journal of Military History, vol. 60, no. 3 (July 1996), p. 454.

5 Landscaping Jamaica

John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus: Jamaica in the early modern British imagination An early British example of the persuasive authority of cartography as imperial practice was John Seller’s (1630–97)1 Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas . . . (1675).2 As Hydrographer to the King,3 Seller’s full title (see notes) explicitly articulated the imperial drive to harness scientific geographical knowledge, of land and sea, for the maximum capitalist and commercial exploitation of the British Empire.4 Published “Cum Privilegio Regis”, the atlas’s narrative of imperial maritime might relied to an extraordinary degree upon a large number of highly finished, coloured topographical maps, many overflowing with various types of related illustrations. A visual iconography of maritime science and enterprise pervaded the text, the imperial sanction and possession of non-European geographies rehearsed through a canonical lineage of great white male explorers, as seen in the book’s frontispiece (Figure 5.1) where the busts of the sixteenth-century navigators Sir Francis Drake and Mr Thomas Cavendish were perched upon a decadently coloured, columned monument with a globe topped by a red jewel-encrusted British crown at its apex.5 As Harley has argued, “European atlases . . . while codifying a much wider range of geographical knowledge, also promoted a Eurocentric, imperialist vision, including as they did a bias towards domestic space which sharpened Europeans’ perception of their cultural superiority in the world system.”6 Although William Beckford’s book (which I will discuss in detail below) might stand as the most famous work on Jamaica, the significance of Jamaica as a supremely valuable British colony was imaged much earlier in John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas . . . (1675). Indicating his atlas’s desired market, Seller dedicated the work in the preface, “To all merchants, owners, commanders and masters of ships; and all other officers and gentlemen concerned in Maritime Affairs.” Seller continued by arguing that for these men, a knowledge of “sea-coasts through the use of maritime geography and hydrography” would prove “an accomplishment” that would benefit them; the implication being both in terms of safety and security and in terms of profit. The representations therein harnessed the visual technology of geography through the mapping of land and water, as a means for this assortment of business and military men to visualize their ships and to position them spatially in order to deduce “the commodiousness or danger of the Harbour or place where she is and what wind will carry her into

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Figure 5.1 John Seller (Hydrographer to the King), Frontispiece, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675) engraving, 31.5 × 45.5 cm, PBE9845, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

port, or bring her out; being at sea, to know what wind will sail her out or bring her home.”7 Although based upon an accumulation of shared geographical knowledge, Seller made claims of originality stating that his atlas was “the first Essay of this Nature that hath been completed in England”.8 Although Seller included two maps devoted to the West Indies (or West India), and a third map, which featured it, and provided summaries of four West Indian islands, the only island singled out for individual representation was Jamaica.9 Seller described Jamaica as follows: Jamaica, on the south of Cuba, from whence distant twenty leagues or thereabouts, and not much more from Hispaniola; formerly possessed by the Spaniard, not many years ago taken by the English, who therein have began a gallant Plantation; the wholesomeness of the Air, and fertility of the soyl, giving great hopes (if not assurance) of a continued encrease and improvement thereof, to the encouragement of such as are already there, or others that shall hereafter transport themselves thither. Merchandize of their own growth, are Tobacco, Sugar, Cotton, Ginger, Indigo, and several sorts of woods serviceable for dyers and others [sic] [italics mine].10

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Jill Casid has ably decoded the colonial definitions of “plantation”, noting the term as broadly interchangeable with the term “colony” within the British colonial context. But more profoundly still, she has demonstrated how plantations were far from natural, but rather material and ideological constructions which involved the deforestation and replantation of vast tracts of land, a process of “disindigenating, transplanting, and relandscaping” which, through a visible and literal erasure, allowed for a precise re-imagining which was, I argue here, largely a process of re-imaging.11 Even earlier than Seller, in 1598 Van Linschoten had described Jamaica favourably in a book on the East and West Indies. For Van Linschoten, Jamaica was “verie fruitfull both on the seaside, and within the land”, noting further that “There is likewise gold, and verie fine cotten wooll, and at this present it is ful of beasts brought thither by the Spaniards, and there have increased [sic]”.12 Thus, as with Seller, Van Linschoten’s assessment of Jamaica’s success as a colony rested not only on the current state of agricultural exploitation and resource extraction, but upon the future potential for increase. But it was not just the land and its plants and vegetation, which had to be managed and regulated into a state of naturalness, but the human populations as well. A parallel system of ideological, material, and aesthetic de-population and re-population was enacted through the sweeping genocides which exterminated vast populations of indigenous Caribbeans who were re-placed through systematic re-population by Europeans and enslaved Africans. The Eurocentric fantasies of other lands, peoples, and nature merge in the cartouche of A General Chart of the West India’s (1675) in which seven armed Natives rain arrows down upon imaginary and invisible foes from their perch atop an oddly monstrous elephant. The decorative design accompanying A Chart of the West Indies from Cape Cod to the River Oronoque (1675) which enclosed the title featured six nude and seminude male and female brown-skinned indigenous figures with headdresses, shield and bow and arrows, staffs, and other paraphernalia, three adults on either side of the text. The full frontal nudity of three male figures, two of whom also wear colourful circular decoration about the waist, would have appeared to the mainly European readers of Seller’s atlas, along with the largely unclothed, breast-feeding female at the far right, as confirmation of the indigenous populations’ supposed savagery in comparison to European norms of dress, weaponry, and behaviour. But it is the cartouche for the map of the Windward Pasage from Jamaica Betwene the East end of Cuba, and theWest end of Hispaniola (1675) (Figure 5.2) that brings together the three intersecting populations, embodied as men – white, black, and Native. While the standing white man at left is the picture of colonial knowledge, the allegory of an explorer with sword, the standing, topless, arrow-holding Native wearing a colourful skirt is opposite gesturing dutifully to the text. The image demarcates the colonial function or usefulness of each population of men as connected to their race. Tellingly, the black man is the only one labouring. The obedient black male slave crouches above the text, represented in the act of upending his basket of grain, a golden offering (for the white male subject as well as the assumed white male readers) symbolizing the seemingly unending promise of Jamaica’s (and other Caribbean islands’) agricultural fertility. Spilling across two full pages of the large atlas, Seller’s Novissima et Accuratissima Insulae Jamaicae descriptio (1675) (Plate 10) included a bird’s-eye view of the island, several large

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Figure 5.2 Detail: John Seller (Hydrographer to the King), The Windward Pasage from Jamaica, Betwene the East End of Cuba, and the West End of Hispaniola, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675), engraving, 43 × 54 cm, PBE6862(27), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

cartouches and detailed legends which included a list of past and present governors, the island’s precincts13 and a table of its agricultural products. Although four crops, “Cocoa, Indigo, Suger and Cotton [sic]” were picked out for special attention, an agricultural specialization in the form of mono-crop plantation systems was already apparent since, of the many estates listed, none was growing more than two of the four crops and many grew only one.14 It is important to note that the acceleration of Jamaica’s commercial value as plantation occurred only after British colonial rule commenced in 1655 after 160 years of Spanish control.15 That the island that Beckford would describe in 1790 as “one of the richest jewels in the crown of Great-Britain”16 was already shaping up to be such in the short twenty years between initial British occupation in 1655 and Seller’s poignant remarks of 1675, was a testament to how rapidly Jamaica’s agricultural possibilities were surmised and exploited as a source of potential ongoing enrichment of the British Empire; recall that a similar acceleration of the commercial exploitation of Montreal occurred only after British possession in 1760. And finally, The Insulae Insignia of the map of Jamaica similarly objectified Native bodies, here rendered as topless trophies who gesture meekly to a crocodile-topped coat of arms. They are a part of what Seller’s

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map claims to know and the British Empire claims to possess through their representation as a part of the branding of Jamaica as productive plantation. Sloane’s natural history Although a natural history, Sir Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica . . .,17 published as a lavishly illustrated two-volume folio in 1707 and 1725, is worthy of contemplation for how it represented, or perhaps refused to represent, Jamaica.18 Sloane, a physician, was dispatched to Jamaica from Plymouth to serve as the personal physician of the newly appointed Governor of the island, Christopher Monck, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle. Kriz has ably argued that Sloane’s book was a site of colonial power relations, which attempted to impose a “natural order” on the tropical colony.19 It is interesting to note that in Stephen Slaughter’s portrait of Sir Hans Sloane (1736), although 11 years after the publication of the last volume, the sitter’s reputation as a “liberally educated scholar-gentleman” is still explicitly connected to his authorship of Voyage, symbolically represented by the loose-leaf print of the leaves of the lacebark tree which Sloane strategically displayed in his hands.20 The oddity of the choice of illustration is its existence outside of the triangular traffic of which Sloane, as a colonial entrepreneur and marketer of chocolate, West-Indian landowner, and slaveholder, was an intimate part. But it is the absences and erasures of the text, mainly of black labouring subjects and the sugar cane plant, the two economic staples of the colony’s export-oriented mono-crop agricultural system, which call attention to European anxiety around transplanted tropical nature, slave resistance, and the well-being of their sugar-producing colonies. So what did Sloane represent? An image of a poisonous crab juxtaposed with a pottery shard in Michael van der Gucht’s Two views of a land crab and potsherd, accompanied a narrative which placed Natives firmly in the past, through Sloane’s discussion of indigenous human remains found in a cave with flesh-eating ants and pottery shards. At a moment of widespread maroonage, the danger of the fearsome crab and flesh-eating ants are called upon to stand in for the prolific human resistance of Natives and blacks, both of whom had populated the island before the British and who had persistently resisted European enslavement. In Sloane’s images, like Michael van der Gucht’s Spanish coins, fragments of a ship’s timber, and Portuguese man-of-war, nature was also a vehicle for the transformation of objects into artefacts; signs of the ultimate imperial victory of the British over the Spanish. Given the prior Spanish possession of Jamaica and despite the contemporaneous and dominant circulation of Spanish currency, it was more than a little suspicious that Spanish culture is represented as coralencrusted wood and Spanish coins pulled from a sunken Spanish galleon; a site that was literally submerged, illegible, and socially inactive.21 Whereas we will see with Hakewill in my discussion below, the disavowal of the slave experience is effected through the literal erasure of the bodies of the slaves. However, Sloane used a different strategy, instead representing slavery as so innocuous and humane that the enslaved, even after labour, still had an abundance of energy, sexual and other, with which to indulge in personal enjoyment and pleasure. This tactic was revealed in his

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surveillance and documentation of the musical traditions of the enslaved discussed above in Chapter 3. Of course such a narrative also implied the benevolence and indulgence of the ruling white planter class. Indeed, Sloane’s book seems a series of sublimations. While the sugar mill, which would have been a ubiquitous mark on the Jamaican landscape, is absent, an image of a cotton gin, which would have for his readers surely recalled slavery in the American South, is the largest fold-out plate in the entire two volumes.22 Meanwhile the single image of slave labour is that of Natives harvesting the cochineal beetle in Mexico under Spanish colonization, in Michael van der Gucht’s The manner of propagating, gathering and curing the Grana or Cochineel, done by an Indian in the Bishoprick of Guaxaca in the Kingdom of Mexico in America (1725). But if the realities of African enslavement were beyond the limits of representation for Sloane, so too were the realities of what these enslaved Africans were forcibly migrated to produce, mainly sugar. As Kriz has argued, Buried in the middle of volume two, with only its Latin descriptor to guide viewers, the plant, shown with delicate foliage, is virtually unrecognizable to all but those already familiar with it. Its most identifiable and economically important feature, the cane, has been eliminated by an amputation that was performed in the process of translating the specimen into a drawing, for the actual specimen still survives and boasts a stalk more than six inches long [italics mine].23 John Gabriel Stedman’s rendering of the sugar cane plant in his later eighteenth-century book was a vast departure from Sloane’s earlier decision to render the sugar cane plant illegible. Chapter 13 of Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) includes a plate representing the lucrative plant. Far surpassing Sloane’s earlier depiction in its specificity, Stedman’s The Sugar Cane, in its four different Stages was a composite image depicting the cane in its process of growth from new plant through to maturity.24 The four parts of the image were described as “A Being its first appearance above the Ground, B the Sugar Cane come to half Maturity, C the same with drooping leafs in full ripeness, and D a piece cut of[f] at one end and broke of[f] at the other [sic]”.25 Indeed, Stedman explained that the four-part image was designed “to give the Reader the best Idea of the Sugar Cane”.26 Furthermore, while Kriz decried Sloane’s amputation of the cane stalk – the part of the plant which was actually used to produce the lucrative by-products of sugar, rum and molasses – it is part D of Stedman’s image (the severed cane stalk pictured without leaves), which is represented from the closest proximity and with the greatest detail. The Beckfordesque landscape tradition William Beckford of Somerley stated his intention for his book, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1790), as a means to comment upon the appearance and the cultivation of land, especially sugar cane, “from its first plantation, and through all its stages, until its ashes shall return again to manure the soil in which it began at first to vegetate”.27 Yet,

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although a treatise on the cultivation of sugar cane, the state of slavery, and the possible outcomes of abolition, Beckford spent much of the time in enraptured and detailed descriptions of Jamaica’s landscapes which owed much in terminology and content to an aesthetic investment in the picturesque as a popular mode of European landscape representation. His work also included a telling apology: “. . . if any words shall have occurred, that may appear to be too inflated for a pastoral description, I can only say that the fault is mine, if I have, for the elevated, mistaken the bombast . . . [italics mine].”28 The pastoral was an ideologically fitting choice through which to render a slave colony from the perspective of the colonizer. Beckford inherited Jamaican property from his father Richard in 1765 and according to Richard B. Sheridan, by the following year, his three plantations – Roaring River, Fort William, and Williamsfield – had produced “450 hogsheads and one tierce of sugar and 219 puncheons of rum.”29 Jamaica’s importance for Britain was resource extraction through the agricultural economy based on African slave labour which produced tons of sugar, and other produce, each year. This slave system, as I will discuss in great detail below, was brutal in terms of the regularized practices of torture, abuse, and punishment that were entrenched to induce this labour. The strategic use of the pastoral by Beckford and other Jamaican planters enabled them to occlude the reality of slave terror through a deliberate erasure of the African body as labourer. As Quilley has argued, “As a genre, the pastoral proclaims a landscape apparently so rich that it dispenses with the need for cultivation”.30 In textually scripting the landscape as a series of visual images, Beckford also participated in the aesthetics of the picturesque. As David Marshall has argued, The picturesque represents a point of view that frames the world and turns nature into a series of living tableaux. It begins as an appreciation of natural beauty, but it ends by turning people into figures in a landscape or figures in a painting. Coinciding with a discovery of the natural world, anticipating an imaginative projection of self into the landscape through an act of transport or identification, it assumes an attitude that seems to depend on distance and separation.31 Therefore, the picturesque was as much about the active aestheticization of vision as it was about the ability of a viewer/artist to create a safe space and vantage point from which to see and produce a landscape; a space which, through its distance from the human subjects being viewed, could transform people into “figures in the landscape”.32 This point is worth expansion in terms of its specific relation to landscapes of tropical colonies, especially those that included slaves and/or plantations. Another way to describe the work of the picturesque in producing “figures in the landscape” is through the blunter idea of objectification. The distance achieved by the artists through the deliberate choice of certain vantage points served to render humans as mere objects; and of course slaves were considered to be precisely that, chattel in a literal, legal sense. The distance also refused the specificity and individuality of a figure as “real” and instead subjects take up the role of staffage; one of their main functions being to indicate the spatial order and dimension of the land they

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inhabit. Further, as Quilley has argued, staffage is “marginal, incidental figures, forming ‘a little business for the eye’, as Thomas Gainsborough put it, to re-direct the viewer to the principal subject of the picture, the beauty of the landscape itself ”.33 The picturesque required that one be close enough to see the land, but far enough away to separate oneself from it and to impose upon it an order, which came from the location and vision of the viewing subject. Planters also used the picturesque to produce distance between themselves and the reality of the oppression to which they subjected their slaves. For instance, writing in his Jamaican journal on 16 January 1816, the planter Matthew Lewis commented, I never witnessed on the stage a scene so picturesque as a negro village. I walked through my own to-day, and visited the houses of the drivers, and other principal persons; and if I were to decide according to my own taste, I should infinitely have preferred their habitations to my own.34 Seeing the Negro village as picturesque required a wilful blindness; the ability to anaesthetize oneself to the reality of things like poorly constructed and patchwork huts, the reconfiguration of old, discarded, and used objects into cherished possessions, and signs of abject poverty, malnutrition, sickness, desperation, and fear. There is obviously an added danger in the submission of already marginalized subjects to the aesthetic technology of the picturesque. As chattels under the law, enslaved Africans and their offspring were already brutally and systemically marginalized – socially, economically, and politically – in colonial Jamaica. Therefore, we can read the desire of white Creole and European authors and artists like Beckford and Hakewill to further visually emplace them (through text and/or images) in the picturesque economy of Eurocentric landscape aesthetics as a further means of cultural objectification. But even more alarming, these books and their landscape prints reveal the pleasure whites experienced in their ability to watch and orchestrate (often from afar) the activity of black bodies. Beckford wrote of the “picturesque and various attitudes” of black slaves engaged in clearing land, expanding that “as the different clumps of vegetation begin to fall around them, the light is gradually induced, and shines in playful reflections upon their naked bodies and clothes; and which oppositions of black and white make a very singular, and very far from an unpleasing appearance [italics mine]”.35 Let me be clear. Beckford’s seeming delight in the play of light on exposed brown skin, compelled into movement by his own command for the benefit of his economic bottom line, reveals not just a masochistic pleasure derived from pure physical mastery of others, but a sexual pleasure in his participation in a so-called miscegenating gaze. Furthermore, his use of the word “playful” to describe the way the light fell on the no doubt physically taxed, exhausted, malnourished, and dishevelled assemblage of black bodies reveals his ability to aestheticize human suffering and his inability as a white planter to empathize with the drudgery, misery, and pain of those under his control. As Tim Barringer has argued, “The picturesque was a genre of cultural amusements – an aesthetic category based on the idea of the landscape as a source of visual pleasure rather than a site of work.”36 Furthermore, white sexual desire

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for black people is of course what colonial discourse strained to suppress at every turn. If whites were indeed the supposed superior race, then how could they justify their sexual desire for blacks, which their “science” and “common sense” proclaimed to be a lower race or even a separate species, in need of a European “civilizing mission”? The institutionalization of the white male rape of black females within slavery of course ironically revealed that the pervasiveness of the delusion in their corporeal, racial superiority was not at all secure. Beckles’ typology of racialized female sexuality in Barbados reveals how whites – through rape, coercion, concubinage, and prostitution – expressed their deep desire for black female (and arguably male) sexuality. I deliberately say “whites” here and not “white males”, since white female sexuality and (in)action are also implicated in this complex cross-racial interaction.37 However, the cross-racial desire of the supposedly superior European for the supposedly inferior African had to be policed and thus was delegitimized in ways that disallowed state-sanctioned sexual and romantic unions. As Beckles has argued, a racialized sexual typology worked to legitimize white female sexuality by aligning it with the domestic sphere, while expelling black and mixed-race female sexuality as based in pleasure and sexual adventurism.38 Beckford’s description of Jamaica is sexualized in ways that implicate his desire for land and for bodies. Jamaican land becomes a feminized target of his sexual gaze as Beckford offered, “It may be possibly said, that I have viewed the natural beauties of Jamaica through a partial medium, and that I have described them with a licentious pen . . . [italics mine]”.39 Beckford’s pen is both the source of his intellectual authority and a medium for his sexual desire based on his visual experience of the land. This combination signalled Beckford’s material and symbolic privilege; material in his literacy which provided the ability to write and disseminate his thoughts and words, and symbolical, since the licentious pen within the patriarchal and colonial context of eighteenth-century Jamaica functioned as a phallic standin for his white male genitalia as a source of potential sexual pleasure and, fittingly since he wrote on nature, (pro)creation. Licentiousness does not describe a normal sexuality, but one that is compromised, debased, lustful, and immoral; in short all of the things that whites were accustomed to accusing Africans of being. But it is the aestheticization of the landscape and the unclothed bodies of his slaves that restrains Beckford’s licentious pen enough to render his text suitable for polite consumption.The act of writing is transformative and describes as much as enacts his power and mastery over his sexual targets (human and natural). The normality of white planters’ sexual exploitation of black females and agricultural exploitation of nature intersect in Beckford, for whom both result in pleasure and profit.Therefore, Beckford’s pleasure in an objectifying gaze, which rendered his black slaves picturesque, also held an erotic component which was all the more dangerous because it appeared in the guise of aesthetic contemplation. Beckford, slavery, and sugar cultivation The picturesque was also about a desire for the broken, the rugged, the rude, and the rough, and was therefore a type of predetermined engagement that led to selective vision. It was indeed a visual technology, both classed and racialized, which was arguably

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used to mediate the representation of white and black bodies in different ways. But it was also about the power to materially alter land to make it over in one’s own aesthetic image, and to control how others engaged with it.40 This difference between the picturesque as it had been carried out in Britain and as it was in Jamaica was in part a product of the shift from a temperate to a tropical climate, but also derived from the specific pro-slavery propaganda of American and British slave owners who strategically juxtaposed the plight of the white working poor with that of the enslaved black.41 Not satisfied with equivalence, those like the American Southerner and Governor of South Carolina James Henry Hammond argued for slavery as a “positive good” and reasoned that poor whites were worse off than enslaved blacks. Edward B. Rugemer has linked the shift in proslavery strategy in the Southern US context to the “rise of British abolitionism” culminating in the abolition of slavery in August 1833.42 He argues, “On the one hand, the brutality of Britain’s ‘manufacturing system’ revealed the hypocrisy of British reform, while on the other, the harshness of slavery in the British West Indies demonstrated that, by comparison, southern slavery was singularly humane.”43 This type of hypocritical fingerpointing between the two nations had earlier roots. When the British freed African-American slaves during the War of 1812, their explicit military rationale was largely invisibilized by their self-promotion as liberators (at America’s expense), despite the fact that slavery still flourished in their colonies.44 But white British and British Creole slaveholders and colonists in Jamaica also found themselves at odds with British abolitionists in Europe.45 Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica . . ., in the tradition of colonial knowledge as imperial gift, was dedicated “To His Grace The Duke of Dorset, Earl of Middlesex, &c.” from London on 3 February 1790. Although a primary concern of his book was what he described as his desire to shed light on the situation of the slaves as “objects of compassion”,46 he also at times contradicted this stance, slipping into a comfortable and socially acceptable rhetoric of white superiority. One example early on in the text is when he described slave abuse and punishment as a problem brought on by bad slaves whose capricious and provoking dispositions transformed the behaviours of the well-meaning white slave owners who responded rigorously to the “worthless and idle”.47 Although Beckford claimed his expertise stemmed from his insider knowledge of the island and its sugarmaking industry, he was equally quick to deny that he had benefitted financially from his role in sugar estates. There is some truth in this contention since, as Quilley has explained, Beckford wrote his book while incarcerated for debt in Fleet prison; a debt partially due to financial mismanagement, as well as losses suffered in the hurricane of 1780.48 As Williams explains, planters were often given credit by “mercantile correspondents” who sold their goods on consignment in overseas markets for a commission of 2.5–5 per cent. The same merchants offered their services to the planters to buy and ship international necessities back to the West Indies. However, problems occurred when the proceeds from a sale of the West Indian goods could not cover the costs of the shipping. With such shortfalls, wealthy merchants often covered the difference, extending credit to the planters based on expected earnings from future crop yields. But poor accounting, bad harvests, or natural disasters like hurricanes, droughts, and floods, could result in planters losing their

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holdings to merchants or ending up like Beckford in a debtors’ prison. A failed planter with 13 years of residence on the island,49 Beckford pitched his book as a rather selfless endeavour; a platform to impart his knowledge on sugar cane, seasons, and slave labour based upon direct experience “unprofitable to myself ” in an effort to use his errors and faults as lessons for other whites to “reap more certain and early profit than I have done”.50 Beckford’s text, which would be very influential on the later nineteenth-century British writers of similar travel, tourism or history literature on Jamaica and the British West Indies, is full of stunning visuals, but strikingly absent of any visual images. Facilitating the travels of the artist Mr George Robertson (1748–88) to Jamaica, Beckford had originally intended to include engravings like A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Roaring River Estate belonging to William Beckford Esqr. Near Savannah la Mar (1778), derived from paintings of views taken “on the spot” in his book.51 Taking pains to memorialize Robertson’s landscape paintings as the works of genius, Beckford described the artist as “the most correct admirer of Nature”. However, Beckford was forced to abandon his plan to illustrate his book due to financial and legal troubles as well as the artist’s premature death.52 Thus, unlike James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1825) or William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), 53 two image-rich publications, Beckford’s two-volume work did not reproduce any artistic images of the island, but relied instead upon his eloquent textual descriptions to evoke for his readership the sights, smells, and sounds of the island landscape where he had spent much of his life.54 It is revealing that Beckford repeatedly described his task as a visual one, an attempt at the creation of an objective and truthful gaze able to reveal the real Jamaica to his readers, as they would have seen it for themselves with “eyes unprejudiced”. His conviction of course assumed that he, a white British man, foreign (initially at least) to the land, which he described, had gained access to this objective vision, which he sought to impart to his readers. Beckford was not unlike other scholars and writers of his time in his belief that such access was a facet of his proximity to the object of his examination, his presence in the island itself. Specifically, Beckford felt that he had gained the right to contribute knowledgably to the scholarship and discussions on Jamaica and slavery through what he described as his residence amongst the Negroes. Indeed, Beckford claimed special knowledge of the island’s enslaved inhabitants, noting, “I shall then dwell upon the labours . . . and shall faithfully explain, from a long and painful experience, and in the hope that others may profit from my errors, how far they really are in a state of bodily suffering, or mental dependence.”55 It was this proximity that he proposed allowed him to shed light on issues of slavery from within, a contrast he made deliberately with what he saw as the ill-equipped people (abolitionists) who, despite their geographical distance and lack of intimate knowledge, spoke publicly on the subject in Britain.56 The picturesque and Beckford’s debt to European landscape (painting) Beckford’s mindfulness of his potentially inflated pastoral description points to his grounding in the discourses of the colonial pastoral as well as his expectations of the similar education

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of vision of his assumed readership, mainly the white British and Creole middle and upper classes. As Casteel has argued, On the one hand, colonial pastoral may refer to the pastoral or Edenic vision that European explorers imposed on the New World when they first encountered it, and to which Europeans often continued to adhere in spite of mounting evidence of the falseness of this vision . . . colonial pastoral also designates the practice common among settler colonial cultures of pastoralizing the new surroundings as a means of domesticating them for the purposes of settlement . . . Colonial pastoral may also indicate, however, the dissemination in the colonies of images of rural European landscapes and the impact of this transmission on this colonial subject.57 Beckford, although mindful of human-made (abuses within slavery) and natural suffering (like the hurricane of 1780) on the island, created an unbridled celebration of Jamaica as Edenic nature, a landscape unmatched in its natural diversity, variety, and abundance demonstrated in his elaborate descriptions of its vegetation, agricultural possibilities, natural formations, and climate in all its “exotic” detail.Yet, despite his elaboration of many plants and objects which would have been foreign to his typical reader – things like bamboo, plantain palms, and coconuts – Beckford’s text functions to render the foreign knowable, familiar, and indeed beautiful through a comprehensive aestheticization which rested upon his ability to engage his viewers at the level of vision and evoke a mainly visual experience of their imagined corporeal presence in Jamaica which was rooted in their assumed familiarity, not with a European landscape, but with European landscape painting. Beckford knew well that most of his readers had and would never visit the Caribbean isle. As such, he reached across the Atlantic Ocean to provide his readers with an ancient European landscape equivalent: Every passing cloud affords some pleasing variation; and the glowing vapours of the atmosphere, when the sun arises or declines, and when the picturesque and fantastic clouds are reflected in its polished bosom, give an enchanting hue, and such as is only particular to the warmer climates, and which so strongly mark the Campania of Rome, and the environs of Naples.58 But Beckford’s Italian equivalent not only transcended space, but also time since his description of Italy rested upon its ancient past. Remarking on the similarities between Jamaican landscapes and those of Frescati, Tivoli, and Albano, he stated: “. . . and the want of those picturesque and elegant ruins which so much ennoble the landscapes of Italy, are made some amends for, in the painter’s eye, by the appearance, the variety, and the number of buildings”.59 His use of the picturesque and his reference to the painter’s eye reveal the extent to which Beckford, as a wealthy white, was socialized and educated to see and consume Jamaica in aesthetic terms through the prevalent discourses of landscape art as they were connected to the Grand Tour which had Italy as its paradigmatic site. For the most part, Beckford’s readers, whom he encouraged to substitute windmills, distilleries, and

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Negro huts for ancient relics, were familiar with the ruin-dotted landscapes of Italian landscape painters, in some cases not just because they owned this art, but also because they had been to Italy and witnessed the campagna first-hand. However, Beckford left little room for doubt as to what he desired his readers to imagine as they read: . . . and the banks of the rivers are fringed with every growth that a painter would wish to introduce into this agreeable part of landscape: and those borders which Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, took apparently so much pleasure and pains to enrich, are there excelled by the hand of Nature alone: nor do I conceive it possible for any artist to invent, by a sedulous collection of the most choice and beautiful parts of her productions, more enchanting scenes than can be observed in the dells and vallies, and on the margins of the rivers, in that beautiful and romantic country [sic].60 In begging this comparison, Beckford’s book appealed to his readers in the language of a fellow grande touriste and art patron. He advised them that the Jamaican landscape surpassed even the most exalted landscape paintings of European origins as well as the European landscape itself. Commenting upon the after-effects of “periodical descents of the deluge”, he praised the clouds, solar rays, and rainbows, arguing that the striking nature of Jamaican scenery surpassed even the most sublime European comparisons. . . . the views of Flanders will not admit of that dignity, and those impressions of the sublime, which are characteristics of tropical climates: and not withstanding the scenery of Wales and Scotland, and the mountainous parts of France and Italy, and the tremendous elevations and gloomy vallies of Switzerland, may, in some respects, surpass them in the grand and terrible of Nature; yet the approach of a storm in Jamaica, with all its accompaniments of clouds, of rain, of thunder, and of lightning, excite ideas which, by comparison, are more romantic; and which, if seen and examined, would strongly justify the assertion I have made [sic].61 Interestingly, some years later, white visitors like the governor’s wife Maria Nugent were still employing Beckford’s advice to substitute windmills, distilleries, and Negro huts for ancient relics in their readings of the landscape. In a journal entry of 11 March 1802 she described a vista of Simon Taylor’s Golden Grove Plantation as follows: “In front you see a rich vale of sugar estates, the works of which look like so many villages, and the soft bright green of the canes, from this height, seems like velvet.”62 As such, Nugent’s aesthetic lens allowed what were no doubt the works buildings and Negro huts to be turned into a series of picturesque villages. The planter’s vantage point: The tropical picturesque But Beckford’s architectural substitutions were not innocent. The variety and number of buildings which Beckford cited were those of the plantation, the infrastructure built and

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worked by enslaved Africans. Arguably, in a book about the appearance and cultivation of sugar cane, he could not escape some descriptions of the means through which the island’s most lucrative crop was produced. However, his knowledge of the buildings from the perspective of a planter allowed him to casually cite them as innocuous decorations in a landscape, as opposed to scenes of daily backbreaking and perilous labour, torture, and abuse. The first appearance of Jamaica presents one of the most grand and lively scenes that the creating hand of Nature can possibly exhibit: mountains of an immense height seem to crush those that are below them; and these are adorned with a foliage as thick as vivid, and no less vivid than continual. The hills, from their summits to the very borders of the sea, are fringed with trees and shrubs of a beautiful shape, and undecaying verdure; and you perceive mills, works, and houses, peeping among their branches, or buried amidst their shades. The sea is, in general, extremely smooth and brilliant; and, before the breeze begins to ripple its glossy surface, is so remarkably transparent, that you can perceive (as if there were no intervening medium) the rocks and sands at a considerable depth; the weeds and coral that adorn the first, and the stars and other testaceous fishes that repose upon the last [sic] [italics mine].63 In Beckford’s unbroken narration of land and sea, he informed his readers that, in Jamaica, the bounty of Nature is matched by the industry of man. Indeed, Beckford’s imaging of Jamaica foregrounds its industrial development in the midst of and because of the bounty of its Nature.The two are positioned as symbiotic and natural as opposed to the by-products of a calculated, regimented agricultural exploitation and over-production. Eurocentric logic offers terra nullius as a pre-existing state of so-called New World “discovery”, but colonization itself necessitated the often violent and absolute clearing of vegetation and humans in order to fabricate this terra nullius through which empire was conceived. It is this transformation, wherein inhabited land was changed into terra nullius and then into colony or settlement through models of progress and development, which marks the creation of empire and/or the reproduction of the metropolis. Essential to this transformation was the sea as the medium of empire in a world where the ship was the only vehicle of long-distance travel and the means through which the lucrative slave-produced crops were circulated. It is unsurprising, then, that the perfect Jamaican scene for Beckford is a planter’s prospect at the water’s edge. He stated, “. . . the eye was arrested by hills that, from their distance, had only the appearance of incipient clouds; and on one side, the eye was delighted by a prospect of the sea, and lost itself upon a sail that just seemed a speck upon the horizon.”64 But returning to dry land, what terrain is Beckford narrating? His perception of mills, works, and houses takes his reader along with him on a tour of a plantation. These buildings were the plantation infrastructure necessary for sugar production, the literal apparatuses of planters’ wealth. But why are the buildings merely peeping through or buried amongst foliage? Why did Beckford offer this particular description? What other type of description was it possible to offer his readers and what would that have entailed? The answer is that the image of the plantation that Beckford created privileged a certain

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vantage point from which he allowed his readers to consume the terrain. This vantage point reappears later in the book. Beckford described a house on a rising surrounded by a smooth and beautiful green lawn, but “further removed from observation, there stood a negro village . . . which seemed to be illuminated by a softer tone, and to serve as a contrast to the glittering scenes around”.65 In Jamaica, as in most plantation economies, the house on the hill was the Big House or Great House, where the wealthy planter resided. What Beckford provided was a vantage point from which to appreciate the status and power of the plantocracy. With its gleaming green lawn it is the focal point. Elevated above the terrain, it is a place of surveillance and control of the enslaved below in the Negro village, which serves merely as a bit of decorative contrast. From this vantage point, these slaves are then, geographically, compositionally, and symbolically, set apart from the whites on the hill. With this description, Beckford writing from the debtors’ prison could have been recalling a moment when he had looked out the window of his own Jamaican plantation home or, just as easily, viewed a George Robertson painting of the land he had once owned.66 As a product of his white, male, upper-class identity, his vision, his eye had been trained to perform this biased division and racialization of the land. I return to David Marshall’s superb definition of the picturesque, cited above, as a “point of view that frames the world” transforming nature into “a series of living tableaux”.67 Equally as important is Marshall’s discussion of the type of people who could adopt the picturesque mode of vision, the conditions thereof and the outcomes. Marshall argued that the picturesque stemmed from the projection of the self and was dependant upon distance and separation from the very land being viewed. This visual discipline resulted in landscapes, but also in the objectification of humans in the land in relation to the nature being observed. Thus, I would argue that the self most capable of such projection, distance, and separation was, like Beckford, white, male, and upper-class. Although enslaved Africans carried out the majority of the backbreaking work on the plantation, it was white people of English (mainly as planters) and Scottish (mainly as overseers) origins that orchestrated the labour. While the forced labour of the Africans necessitated their physical presence on the land, the intellectual labour of the ruling elite could be carried out from afar, this distance encompassing the space between the cane fields and the Big/Great Houses or, as with absentee landlords, thousands of miles away, across the vast Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, returning to my previous questions on Beckford’s peeping and buried buildings and choice of view, Beckford has imaged the plantation in a very specific way, offering strategic vantage points to his white readers/viewers, ones that provided them with a privileged distance and separation from slavery, one that allowed them to walk in his planter’s shoes. If Beckford is able to perceive mountains of higher elevations crushing lower ones, he was viewing the scene from a distance and from an elevation that allowed for such a perception. Furthermore, his ability to deduce what was at the bottom of the “remarkably transparent sea”, the weeds, coral, etc., indicate that he is looking down into the water from on high. Beckford has provided his readers with an aerial view of slavery or at least an elevated and distant one, choosing a vantage point from which they can literally consume the land without getting their hands dirty, so to speak. Beckford’s

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description of these buildings peeping from or buried amidst thick and vivid foliage functioned also to transform the scene of inhumane abuse and forced labour of blacks, into a picturesque landscape for the pleasure of whites. But as I have argued above, for Beckford, the bodies of enslaved Africans, viewed in certain ways, were also a site of sexual or erotic pleasure essential to his production of a picturesque Jamaica. Beckford seemed to luxuriate in writing about the wealth of diversified views which delighted his eye, the surprise he found in “magnificent objects” and of “depths of shadow or bursts of light”. It was the diversity, splendour, and magnificence of the natural scenes, the land and its vegetation, but also the human and animal subjects which combined to form Beckford’s picturesque. For Beckford, the “observation of a group of dells or woody plains, of mountain-torrents, and of windy-streams; of groups of negroes, herds of cattle” all combined to create the unmatched landscape. But the discussion of groups of Negroes and herds of cattle in the same sentence betrays the racial objectification, which underpinned the tropical picturesque. Indeed, beyond objectification, in being lumped together with a herd of cattle, Beckford subjects the enslaved Africans to an animalization. As shall be discussed below (Chapter 7), Negro slaves were widely viewed as but one type of a variety of (live)stock on a given plantation. Arguably for Beckford, both were groups of animals, property purchased and controlled by white planters like him and necessary for the vital work of the plantation. Beckford engaged in the discourse of the colonial pastoral through his deployment of the familiar language of the picturesque, guiding his readers’ entry into the foreign and faraway by bridging their imagination of a tropicalized picturesque with the safety and constancy of the European pastoral. As Quilley has argued, “It hardly needs emphasizing that the commodification of the Jamaican landscape as picturesque is founded on a displacement of its material basis in plantocratic political economy.”68 Beckford’s textual descriptions performed this visual transformation of the Jamaican lands into landscape, preparing the ground for the later nineteenth-century examples of Jamaican and West Indian landscape art that was disseminated through this mode of travel, tourism, and natural history literature. But I am interested in the ways in which Hakewill’s book continued the tradition of a Beckfordesque colonial pastoral through the inclusion of visual images which settled the land into picturesque Jamaican landscapes, productive yet tranquil, tropical yet familiar, peopled with good British subjects and yet camouflaging slavery and its backbreaking labour and relentless punishment, torture, and abuse for a mainly foreign white readership. Both Beckford’s and Hakewill’s books must also be understood as political intervention, propaganda contrived and deployed at strategic historical moments – Beckford’s within the context of the “legislative discussions”69 of abolition and Hakewill’s between the aftermath of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade and full abolition in 1833 – to support pro-slavery discourse. The representational sanitization of slave labour is something that Kriz has also noted in the paintings of Agostino Brunias who was employed by Sir William Young, the Commissioner and Receiver for the sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago, to create images for the purpose of attracting suitable white immigrants to the

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territory.70 As Kriz has argued, “In a slave economy social refinement depends upon disavowing the violence and coercion involved in the laborious extraction and transformation of raw materials into finished products.”71 Instead, lively and complex market scenes with enslaved, dark-skinned African higglers/hucksters selling fruit, vegetables, and provisions replace the actual scenes of agricultural plantation labour through which such produce was cultivated. Kriz describes this focus on the market as opposed to the cane field as a part of the promotion of the enslaved body as exotic curiosity for the intended European viewers. Thus, a key distinction between Brunias’ work and the later prints of Hakewill is the former’s seeming absence of picturesque plantation scenes of Caribbean estates. Unlike Hakewill, Brunias focused on the multi-racial groupings of people in urban settings, particularly engaged in leisure or commercial activities. However, we should question whether or not Brunias’ genre studies, which constantly depicted the intimate, often inappropriate, daily interactions of indigenous, black, white, and mixed-race peoples – enslaved and free – across class hierarchies, also would have provoked some degree of titillation if not outright fear in white European viewers, many of whom had not previously ventured into tropical colonies, nor had first-hand contact with Natives or Africans.72 In the following chapter, I will explore James Hakewill’s Jamaican prints, employing his contemporary, William Clark’s starkly different Antiguan ones for comparison. Although I will only do so sparingly, Hakewill’s work can also be better understood if compared to the later work of the Scottish Joseph Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns, Public Buildings, Estates and Most Picturesque Scenery of the Island (1838–40) which included 50 lithographs.73 Compared with the books of Beckford and Hakewill, Clark’s prints contrastingly centred slavery and its black labourers as the primary focus of his images, the figures being so paramount and keenly represented that the works then occupy a space between genre and landscape art. As the full title of Clark’s book demonstrated, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes, in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery. from drawings made by William Clark during a Residence of three years in the West Indies, upon the Estates of Admiral Tallemach (1823), unlike Hakewill, he was invested in the representation of the economic backbone of the British West Indies, the sugar-making industry, and the people who drove it; not the wealthy whites who claimed ownership of the estates, but the enslaved black labour upon which every aspect of their colonial commercial ventures depended. Notes 1 John Seller, Hydrographer to the King Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas; being a Book of Maritime Charts. Describing the Sea-Coasts, capes, headlands, Sands and Shoals, Rocks and Dangers. The Bays, Roads, Harbors, Rivers and Ports, in most of the known parts of the World. Collected from the latest and best Discoveries that have been made by divers able and experienced Navigators of our English Nation. Accommodated with a Hydrographical Description of the Whole World; Shewing the Chief Cities, Towns, and Places of Trade and Commerce; with the Nature of the Commodities and Merchandizes of each Country; very useful for Merchants, and all other persons

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concerned in Maritime Affairs (London: Printed by John Darby, for the Author, and are to be sold at his shop at the Hermitage in Wapping, 1675). This version of Seller’s atlas can be found in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Caird Library, London, UK and measures 31.5 × 45.5 cm. Seller published a variety of navigation handbooks, but also almanacs, pocket books, and miniature seaatlases, and made a selection of mathematical and navigational instruments and tools. It is important to note that Seller’s full title specifies knowledge of both natural and human-made features in the land and water such as harbours, ports, roads, sands, and shoals. Roads were a measure of how easily slave-produced commodities could be moved from inland points of cultivation, like plantations which were not always readily accessible to waterways or the sea, to active commercial harbours to be transported by ship. Knowledge of shoals and dangers spoke of the navigability of harbours, which was immensely important in terms of the safety of ships and their valuable cargoes. These features become markers of a European defined development measured by the presence of the colonial apparatus (la flota) capable of resource extraction and settlement. Although the name on the frontispiece appears as “Candish”, it most likely referred to Thomas Cavendish. It is interesting however to note that, despite European geographical arrogance, it is not Europe that is positioned at the centre of the globe, but the Atlantic Ocean, a sign of Britain’s eminence as a maritime and largely trans Atlantic power. J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 68–9. This was derived from a lecture by James R. Akerman, “National Geographical Consciousness and the Structure of Early World Atlases”, Paper presented at the Eleventh International Conference on the History of Cartography, Ottawa, Canada, July 1985. Seller, Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas, n.p. Seller, Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas, n.p. The three maps which included the West Indies, besides the two-page map of Jamaica, were: West Indies (p. 22),West Indies from Cape Cod to the River Oronoque (p. 24), andWindward Passage from Jamaica between the east end of Cuba and the west end of Hispaniola (p. 27). Seller provided summaries for Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, and “port Rico” and identified the “Caribbe Islands” as: “Margerita, Trinidada, Granada, Granadilla, St Lucies, St Vincent, Barbadoes … next Martinica, Dominico, Mary-Gallant, Dissedea, Guardalupe, Antego, Barbada, Mount-Serat, St Christopher, Nevis, St Martins, St Bartholomew, Anguilla, Santa Cruz, and many others of less note [sic]”. Seller, Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas, p. 10. Seller, Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas, p. 10. Seller also mentioned places of note as: Sevilla, Melilla, Oristan, Punta Nigrilla, Port Royal, Port Moronto, and Anguia (sic), an assortment of mostly Spanish names many of which would soon be surpassed by British ones. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 7. Casid also argues for an understanding of the “tropical landscape” as an aesthetic and material invention brought about by the aggressive transplantation of foreign plants like bamboo, logwood, cashew, mango, banana, hibiscus, etc., which only retroactively came to be seen as indigenous and natural to Jamaica. John Huighen Van Linschoten, Discours of Voyages into East and West Indies Divided into Four Books (London: John Wolfe, Printer to the Honourable Cittie of London, 1598), p. 223. The book was dedicated to the “Right Worshipfull Julius Caesar Doctor of Lowes, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, Master of Requests to the Queenes Majesty, and Master of Saint Katherines [sic].” The section listing the precincts is entitled “A catalogue of the Severall Precincts, with the most Eminent Settlements therein, marked and numbered as followeth [sic]”. Precincts would later come to be known as parishes. For example, Seller lists: “Judge Molens, St Katherines, suger; Maj. Ayscough, St Johns, cocoa and suger; Cap. Keene, St Andrewes, Cocoa; Lieut. Coll. Freeman, St Davids, indigo and suger; M. Beckford, Clarendon, indigo; Cap. Cor, St Thomas, cocoa and suger; Mr. Squire, St Georges, suger [sic]”. William Beckford Esq., A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: with Remarks upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane, through the different Seasons of the Year, and Chiefly considered in a Picturesque Point of View; Also observations and Reflections upon what would probably be the Consequences of an Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and of the Emancipation of the Slaves, vol. 1 (London: Printed for T. and J. Egerton Whitehall, 1790), p. xiii. Beckford, in the language of discovery, credits Christopher Columbus with the find in 1493 of what the Spanish came to call Saint Jago.

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16 Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. xiii. 17 Sir Hans Sloane, Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles etc. of the last of those Islands (London: Printed for the Author, 1707–25). As Kriz argues, Sloane’s book was the first major publication to combine a travel narrative with a natural history of plants and animals identified by the pre-Linnaean Latin tags. See Kay Dian Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Voyage to … Jamaica”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 13. 18 According to Kriz, the volumes feature 274 plates and a separate 11 plates, which are numbered differently, four in volume 1 and seven in volume 2. These 11 plates appear before the 274 sequentially numbered ones and are also distinct in that those in volume 1 feature a combination of human artefacts with natural specimens. Kriz also argues that these plates are disjointed from the text, which they claim to visualize. See Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, pp. 15–16. 19 See Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, pp. 8–35. 20 See: Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, pp. 11–12. 21 Here then, the ongoing Spanish influence on the island was denied and instead replaced by encrusted, contained, “dead”, and inactive artefacts. 22 Kriz relates that the image of the cotton gin is the only plate, which acknowledged the labouring African slave body, although strangely dismembered since only the feet needed to turn the wheels of the machine were portrayed. See Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, p. 30. 23 Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies”, p. 30. 24 John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, eds. Richard Price and Sally Price (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2010), p. 256. 25 Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, p. 255. 26 Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, p. 255. 27 Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. 3–4. The full title illuminated the two key foci of the book for his readership. 28 Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. vi. 29 Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Kingston, Jamaica: Caribbean Universities Press, 2000), p. 228. 30 Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth-Century”, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830, eds. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 116. 31 David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, Aesthetics and the Disciplines (Spring 2002), p. 414. 32 Marshall discusses an exchange between the portraitist Joshua Reynolds and the landscape painter Wilson while observing a view at Richmond Terrace, in which Wilson, directing Reynolds’ attention to human beings, referred to them as figures. Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque”, pp. 413–4. 33 Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations”, p. 116. 34 Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 69. 35 Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. 254–55. 36 Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven:Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 41. 37 For instance, Beckles discusses white Creole females in Barbados inspecting the genitalia of enslaved African males at public markets. Without a doubt, their sexual access to these men was facilitated by their whiteness and the abject “black” sexuality and compromised masculinity of the male slaves. White women were also implicated in the sexual exchange of black women, in their dual role as owners and pimps, especially in Caribbean urban contexts. Beckles has revealed that many so-called respectable white women sustained their wealth through their active prostituting of their black female slaves, whom they frequently hired out to sailors and other white males for profit. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 660–1, 663. Another way that white females intervened in cross-racial interactions and sex between white men and black enslaved women was through the punishment of black female slaves

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38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

through the act of head shaving. White and White have demonstrated how female plantation mistresses used shaving or cropping “to the scalp” as punishment against black female slaves, particularly when their hair too closely approximated ideals of white female beauty and/or when the black female slave attracted the sexual attention of their white male husbands. See Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Southern History, vol.61, no. 1 (February 1995), pp. 49, 68. What is even more suppressed than white female “commercial” desire for black males is their romantic desire for them. Here Beckles has ably demonstrated how white English men in Barbados worked to disrupt Irish/African allegiances (formed when indentured Irish servants were initially made to labour side by side with blacks in sugar cane fields), and further to impede the more threatening white female/black male sexual and romantic alliances, by removing the white women from field labour. The major threat was, of course, that such unions would lead to more free “coloureds” (since the mixed-race children born to Irish women would, of course, not be slaves) who would contest the legitimacy of white domination. Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 230, 233. Beckles, “White Women”, p. 664. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. vii. The centrality of power and privilege to the discourse of the picturesque is revealed in the Englishman Thomas Duncombe’s precise re-scripting of his Yorkshire estate in order to provide a panoramic view of the thirteenth-century ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, a Cistercian monastery. Duncombe’s landscaping and the creation of a “half-mile long grassy terrace” provided his strolling visitors with carefully orchestrated, changing vistas of the ruins. See Stephanie Ross, “The Picturesque: An Eighteenth-Century Debate”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 46, no. 2 (Winter 1987), p. 271. Abolitionist authors and others who sought to reform (but not end) slavery pushed back against such ludicrous comparisons. For instance, the Rev. Bickell ingeniously argued that those who made equivalences between slaves and the white working-class poor should try going into any field in England with a driver’s whip to use upon even the humblest workers to “see if they will patiently allow him to lay it on their backs. I think after the first stroke, or even at the uplifted hand, a mattock or a spade, or any other implement, would be instantly raised in their own defence, to level the haughty and despotic Slavemonger with the dust. I will not insult the understanding of my readers, by entering into any further comparison on this odious subject. – Equal to poor and free English-men indeed! [sic].” Bickell’s strategy was to make the comparison seem so ludicrous and unsustainable that he would not entertain any further discussion of the issue, therefore positioning those who would argue or disagree with him as ignorant and cruel. Likewise, the Rev. Thomas Cooper argued that, in comparison to British labourers, slaves were compelled to work day and night for at least four months during crop time. To this he compared miners in Cornwall who worked only six hours and had 18 free. Cooper seemed intent upon offering a corrective to the misinformation circulated by a Rev. Mr. Bridge in a publication entitled Voice from Jamaica based on Manchester in which Bridge compared slaves favourably to the working poor in England. Bridge had argued that slaves return from labour to a good home and family well-fed, etc., implying that only the male slaves worked outside of the home. R. Bickell, The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), p. 61; Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824), pp. 30, 32–3. British abolition saw the American South as the last slave-holding society of the Anglo-Atlantic world. See Edward B. Rugemer, “The Southern Response to British Abolitionism:The Maturation of Proslavery Apologetics”, Journal of Southern History, vol. 70, no. 2 (May 2004), pp. 221–2. Rugemer, “The Southern Response”, p. 224. Matthew Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, The United States and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth-Century”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 59, no. 3, Slaveries in the AtlanticWorld (July 2002), p. 671. Unmoved by abolitionist arguments, Maria Skinner Nugent resided in Jamaica from 29 July 1801 until 28 June 1805. Obviously invested in the preservation of the racialized hierarchy of the island, Nugent wrote in her diary about the need for white males to disengage from their licentious contact with female slaves, and through such reform to encourage marriage and procreation amongst slaves (natural increase),

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after which the slave trade would become unnecessary. Lady Nugent was the wife of Major General Nugent, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, who had inherited a Jamaican estate valued at 200,000 pounds. Her father, Cortlandt Skinner, had been a lawyer and a loyalist during the American Revolution and her mother Elizabeth Kearney was the daughter of an equally wealthy New Jersey lawyer. Susan E. Klepp and Roderick A. McDonald, “Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentle Woman Encounter Jamaica’s Slave Society, 1801–1805”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 58, no. 3 (July 2001), pp. 640, 657. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 3. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. ix. Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations”, p. 108. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 44. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. vii–viii. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. x. Casid describes Robertson as Beckford’s protégé, explaining that the London-based landscape artist and engraver travelled to Jamaica (after the requisite tour of Italy) where he created paintings and drawings later displayed in London at exhibitions organized by the Society of Artists. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 9. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 36. Beckford described the artist as “the late Mr. Robertson” in the book. The full titles of these works are: James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall; E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825); Adolphe Duperly, Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica: A Collection of Views of the most Striking Scenery Public Buildings and other Interesting Objects, taken on the Spot with Daguerreotype and Lithographed under his Direction by the most eminent Artists in Paris (Kingston, Jamaica: Adolphe Duperly, printed by Thierry Brothers, Paris, 1840?); William Clark, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes, in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery. from drawings made byWilliam Clark during a Residence of three years in the West Indies, upon the Estates of Admiral Tallemach (London: Thomas Clay, LudgateHill, 1823). Beckford and his wife travelled to Jamaica in 1774 and lived at Hertford Pen for almost thirteen years. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 229. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 4. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 3. Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 25. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. 7–8. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. 8–9. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, pp. 11–12. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 76. Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Maria Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for the Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), p. 95. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 7. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 83. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1, p. 82. Beckford left Jamaica for debtors’ prison in 1777. Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 9. Ironically, his property stayed in the family since his principal creditor was his cousin Richard Beckford, a London sugar merchant. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 229. Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque”, p. 414. Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations”, p. 115. Krista A.Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics:Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 81. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 37. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 58. By inappropriate contact, I am referring to the hypocritical standards of social decorum established by middle- and upper-class white males in the islands. These standards, sometimes legally and at other times morally or socially, were rules about the types of contact (economic, sexual, and polite) within which

216 Landscaping Jamaica different groups of free and enslaved people could participate. The hypocrisy resided largely in white male policing of every other racial groups’ sexuality and, specifically, sexual access to female bodies. While for the most part so-called miscegenation between blacks and whites was seen as a social or even moral problem in terms of the assumed superiority of Europeans and the preservation of their supposed white racial purity, the rape, prostituting, and concubinage of black women was so commonplace that the mulatta woman, the offspring of such unions, became the central focus of Brunias’ paintings. For more on the use of social regulation and legislation to police black sexuality and to limit black male access to white women, see Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’”; and Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). 73 Kriz notes that Kidd had the first five lithographs published in Kingston and New York and the complete run of 10 parts in London. She argues that Kidd’s book, published after abolition, marks a shift away from the more topographical Caribbean landscapes tradition seen in the production of soldiers, and even Hakewill, to a more picturesque mode, characterized by Kidd’s attentiveness to the specificity of nature and climate in his renderings of things like clouds, storms, vapours, light, and shadow. Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the BritishWest Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008).

6

Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica Pro-slavery discourse and the reality of enslavement

William Clark’s Antigua The dedication in James Hakewill’s A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (1825) boldly announced his colonial allegiances, To the Noblemen and Gentlemen, proprietors of Estates in the West Indies; to the resident gentlemen, (from many of whom the Author received so much kindness); and to the merchants of the United Kingdom, connected with those valuable colonies; this picturesque tour of the island of Jamaica is respectfully dedicated, by their most obedient, and very humble servant, James Hakewill.1 Whereas earlier traditions of mapmaking and landscape, like Seller’s atlas discussed in detail above (Chapter 5), bore dedications to aristocracy in recognition of those who provided both funding and sanction, Hakewill’s book made a more intimate, territorially specific acknowledgement to those who facilitated his Jamaican sojourn and the book’s creation, and to the merchants back in Britain, the intended audience.2 Although he did not include a list of subscribers, B.W. Higman has noted that the fact that several of the plantations, which Hakewill depicted were owned by aristocratic families and Members of British Parliament, demonstrates Hakewill’s desire to ensure sales amongst both groups.3 The dedication hinged upon the connection of slavery with proprietorship, elevating its status as a noble enterprise, and the status of these men by virtue of their birth and relationship to the colonies; their ownership of plantations on which slave labour was seen as a necessary supplement. Hakewill’s Jamaican book was not his first endeavour with travel books. Indeed, the artist, draughtsman, and architect had previously published Views of the Neighbourhood of Windsor. . . (1813)4 and A Picturesque Tour of Italy, from drawings made in 1816–17 (1820).5 Hakewill’s Jamaican work was initially published as seven folios, each with three plates. The final folio which he published in 1825 also contained a title and dedication pages, an introduction, and a historical sketch of the island with a list of the author’s preferred order for the plates and a further list of the over 200 Jamaican views which he had created between 1820 and 1821.6 While the majority of the views which he created during his Jamaican sojourn are at present undiscovered or lost,7 Hakewill’s

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extant Italian sketchbooks – full of extensive notes and drawings – reveal the nature of his artistic process which entailed careful preparation in his close observation and rendering of sites prior to his selection of a certain focus or vantage point which ended up in the finished print.8 The Italian book, dedicated to the Right Honourable Lord Dunstanville, well prepared him for his Jamaican enterprise, since it included 63 plates also derived from on-the-spot drawings.9 But within the saturated realm of Italian tourist literature, his claim of distinction in the Italian context (his specialized focus on architecture) could not be extended to Jamaica since, in the European belief, the island still lacked a wide variety of comparably noteworthy buildings or ruins. Oddly then for the architect, only one of his Jamaican prints focused on the plantation Big/Great House, Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny.10 The majority of Hakewill’s landscapes represented some aspects of what Benítez-Rojo has called la flota or the fleet system, a part of the Caribbean machine.11 However, as stated above, Hakewill did not invent this colonial landscape tradition, but inherited one already commenced by men like Seller and Beckford. Although his contemporary William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823) occupied the same politically tenuous space as the Hakewill book – between the British abolition of the slave trade (1807) and full abolition (1833) – the focus of Clark’s images is explicitly upon the representation of the labouring bodies of enslaved blacks. Indeed, unlike Hakewill, Clark’s prints are decidedly genre studies and not landscapes. A part of this artistic distinction and how it manifested in the obfuscation (Hakewill) or focus (Clark) upon the labour of enslaved Africans surely had to do with the different paths that each man took in travelling to the British Caribbean, their motivations for creating these illustrated books, their class statuses, local affiliations, and labour. Clark, as an overseer on the sugar plantations of Admiral Tallemach (as his extended title proclaims), occupied a white middle class that still relied (at least in part) upon physical labour for economic survival. Hakewill, as a professional architect, may have also been considered middle class, but of another sort for which intellectual labour allowed greater access to upper-class white society. While Hakewill’s access to artistic education is obvious due to his architectural profession, we have yet to determine if Clark gained access to professional art education.12 Both men resided in their respective islands (Hakewill in Jamaica for two years and Clark in Antigua for three) for long enough to gain a clear understanding not only of the centrality of sugar cultivation for the economies of both islands, but of the intersection of entrenched racial and class hierarchies and the troubled and often violent nature of cross-racial interaction.13 Published in 1823 just two years before Hakewill’s book, Clark’s included 10 coloured aquatints14 compared to Hakewill’s 21, and, unlike Hakewill’s book which claimed to be focused on landscape aesthetics, as Clark’s full title declared, the earlier book functioned more as an illustrated “how-to” manual on Caribbean sugar cultivation.15 Known by its original Native inhabitants as Wadadli or Waladli,16 the island that would come to be known simply as Antigua was first encountered by Columbus during his second voyage in 1493 after which he renamed the island Santa Maria de la Antigua after a church in Seville.17 Today the islands of Antigua (Spanish for “ancient”), Barbuda (Spanish for

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“bearded”)18 and Redonda (Spanish for “round”) form one independent nation (since 1981), the capital of which, St. John’s, is located in Antigua.19 Antigua is comprised of 280 sq. km (108 sq. miles), Barbuda 161 sq. km (62 sq. miles), and Redonda 1.3 sq. km (0.5 sq. miles).20 Visited by the Spanish in 1520 and the site of a failed French attempt at settlement in 1629, consistent British interest began in the early seventeenth century. As Jerry Dupont has articulated, “In 1625 both islands were included with St. Christopher and Nevis in Letters Patent extending a formal British claim and protection to their territory. In 1628, a family of English planters on St. Christopher, the Littletons, obtained a Royal Grant of the entire island of Barbuda.”21 Considered a part of the Leeward Islands, the first permanent British settlement was established by Thomas Warner and a few British families on Antigua in 1632 and the British governor and commander of the region, although based at Antigua, also governed the neighbouring islands of Anguilla, the Virgin Islands, and Dominica.22 Sir Christopher Codrington23 is widely hailed as the first person to successfully embark upon sugar cultivation, an economic and agricultural practice that by Clark’s time had become the norm.24 In 1680, the Codrington family was granted the use of Barbuda as a private preserve.25 In 1821, during the precise moment when William Clark took up his position as overseer on the estates of Admiral Tallemach, the total population of Antigua was calculated at 37,226, comprised of 31,064 or 83.45 per cent enslaved peoples of African descent (14,531 females and 16, 533 males), and 6,162 or 16.55 per cent whites.26 Unsurprisingly, competing ideas about the nature of the slave system in Antigua often emerged along racial lines. For instance, in his narration of plate 2, Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes (1823) (Plate 11) Clark claimed that the slaves were “always allowed relaxation during the hottest hour, and on this occasion, an extra allowance of rum, with a plentiful supply of sugar and water”.27 In contrast to Clark’s claims of the civility of slave treatment, while visiting Date Hill with her owners, Mr and Mrs Wood, Mary Prince described the pitiable lives of the “field negroes”. Prince explained, They are worked very hard and fed but scantily. They are called out to work before daybreak, and come home after dark; and then each has to heave his bundle of grass for the cattle in the pen. Then, on Sunday morning, each slave has to go out and gather a large bundle of grass; and, when they bring it home, they have all to sit at the manager’s door and wait till he comes out: often have they to wait there till past eleven o’clock without any breakfast.28 In genre works like Planting Sugar-Cane (1823) and Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (1823) (Figure 6.1), Clark, who surely knew from his job the inner workings of sugar estates, took pains to render the corporeal specificity, and the distinctiveness of dress, manner, and activity of the Antiguan slave population and, as I will discuss further below, even Antigua’s free black population. Much like the English Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer on Jamaican plantations whom I shall discuss in great detail below in this chapter, Clark, who in his title stated that he had “a residence of three years in the West Indies, upon the estates of Admiral Tallemach”,29 would have been in an optimal position to

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Figure 6.1 William Clark, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–00037, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

interact in intimate ways on a daily basis with the enslaved under his authority.30 Indeed, overseers tended to have more direct and ongoing contact with the slave populations of the plantations, which they ran than the owners who were often absentee landlords and landladies. While Hakewill’s landscapes arguably constitute the British imperial connection between colony and metropole mainly through his written text’s celebration of the “noble gentlemen merchants”, Clark’s images like Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (1823) visually activated the material and geographical trajectories between internationally networked imperial sites. Indeed, Clark wrote that the hogsheads31 in the image were bound for England, “a voyage of uncertain duration, usually made in four weeks; but too often occupying two months, from the captain’s being compelled to cross the Atlantic under the disadvantages of varying winds”.32 As the last of ten plates, this image, which has widely come to be known simply as Shipping Sugar, played an important role in explicitly visualizing the process by which Antiguan slave-produced products reached the stores and kitchen tables of Clark’s European readers. The foreground of the image is dominated by enslaved black male labourers who are in the midst of loading hogsheads of sugar onto a waiting boat in Willoughby Bay. Clark used the five black men in the immediate foreground to illustrate the various aspects of

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preparation, which plantation goods underwent before shipment. In the left foreground and moving away from the picture plane, a black male is seen leading a team of three mules pulling a wain (cart) with a large hogshead in front of a storehouse, which, as Clark explained were built on the beaches for estates remote from the sea to hold sugar and rum.33 However, closer to the picture plane, Clark positioned a grouping of five men, four black and one white. The racialized class status of the men is discernable both through their dress and activities. While the suit-wearing white man furthest to the left bends to inspect or even read an inscription on a barrel, the four black men are in much more active poses, connoting their physical exertion in the process of loading the barrel.34 Clark cleverly posed the pair further to the left in diagonal stances leaning into and bracing against the hogshead, each with one leg bent at the knee and the other outstretched in a diagonal line to connote their exertion and forward movement in the process of rolling the barrel. The other two black men, equally active, stand shin- to knee-deep in the sea, tilting the small 20–30 ton craft known as a droger towards the shore to receive the impending cargo.35 The presence of these two men in the sea and the subsequent invisibility of their feet resulted in the erasure of their missing shoes, which Clark exposed in his rendering of the bare feet of the two barrel-pushing slaves on shore. As mentioned above, Clark exposed the race and class hierarchies of Antiguan slavery through both dress and activity. In comparison to the poorer-looking attire of the enslaved black men (hats, jackets, pants, kerchiefs, suspenders, and bare feet) the white male sports the more refined and surely more expensive ensemble of lightcoloured pants and hat, a white shirt and a blue coat with tails. But it is his actions also that set him apart from the surrounding black males and position him as their supervisor, if not owner. While the five black males in the foreground are all engaged in work that demanded a great deal of obvious physical exertion, the white man’s labour is intellectual and mental. The print then dramatizes the racial distance between the white man’s labour as intellectual and the black men’s as physical. Although Clark’s inclusion of a detailed blooming cactus in the extreme left foreground indicates his interest in tropical flora and fauna, this print is decidedly focused on human activity. As I mentioned above, the white male, stooped and absorbed amidst a cluster of three hogsheads, turns his attention, not yet to the sea, or even to the assembled black males, but to the inspection of the barrel, most likely examining markings, a label36 or the soundness of the container itself.37 As such, while the image posited the black men as useful only for their physical skill and dexterity, brute force or bodily exertion, it is the mental exertion of the white male which sets him not just apart from but above the black Antiguan majority.38 In the distance the foreground scene is repeated, this time with another hogshead-filled wain, more male slaves, and three smaller drogers each representing a different stage of the loading and transfer of the hogsheads from the smaller crafts to the two awaiting ships.39 As Rupert has noted in the context of Curaçao, the men who transited the hogsheads from the shore to the awaiting boats were known as lightermen.40 As if this endless cycle of the cultivation, processing, and shipping was not sufficiently communicated by the groups of busy black male slaves, Clark further drove home the point

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by depicting a billowing plume of grey smoke escaping from a works building (most likely a curing-house and stills) of a distant plantation on a hill overlooking the sea to the right of centre in the middle ground of the print.41 My deduction of the specific smoke-spouting works building is based upon the fact that furnaces were necessary to the process of the transformation of sugar cane juice into rum and molasses. Clark depicted the method in plate 8, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills (1823) (Figure 6.2), in which three fiery furnaces are clearly represented below two parallel chimneys spewing merging plumes of grey smoke. A shoeless black male slave feeds one of the furnaces, as another black man approaches with a large and heavy armful of fuel. The heaviness of his load is indicated by the way that Clark represented the backward angle of his upper body, which seems to strain under the weight. On the landing of the curing house to the right of the three black stills in which the rum was processed, several male slaves strain to push a hogshead towards a scale overseen by a white male with document in hand.42 The distant plantation in Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (1823) was Weatherhill Estate where Clark was employed as the overseer. In the inter-connection between these two plates, Clark achieved the anonymization of black slave labour and the individualization of free white labour, the latter largely through the inclusion of what appears to be two portraits in Exterior of Curing-House

Figure 6.2 William Clark, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0033, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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and Stills (1823). While brown skin, black hair and dark eyes in generalized faces characterize Clark’s black figures, two of his four white male subjects who face the viewer at a close distance have decidedly more detailed and specific facial features which recall portraiture more than genre. While the red-coated man with the golden top hat in the left foreground would appear to be the owner, I would hazard an educated guess that the male in the blue jacket on horseback in the right foreground, raising his black hat to wipe the sweat from his brow, is William Clark himself. While the “labour” of the standing white male at left is strictly verbal (as implied by his interaction with the white man in a blue coat and tails, black top hat and red-striped pants), Clark, distinguished by his mount on a horse (a more prized and expensive animal in the Caribbean than the mules that haul the wains), is more physically active due in part to his need to control his moving horse and oversee the plantation’s workforce. But Clark’s attention is decidedly not on the assembled slaves but directed outwards, towards the viewer/reader. Arguably, his elaborate gesture of fatigue, overheating, and even exhaustion is for these whites, and served to distinguish Clark’s labour not only as exceptional in the midst of the endless exertions of the black slaves, but to articulate Clark’s specific middle-class whiteness as distinct from that of the plantation owner’s upper-class racial position. The tropical picturesque as pro-slavery discourse If we are to believe his title, Hakewill arrived in Jamaica sometime in 1820. Assuming that he sailed directly from Britain, if his voyage aboard a ship was anything like the planter Matthew Lewis’ journey in 1815, it would have taken about seven and a half weeks.43 Similarly, Peter Simmonds’ unpublished, personal, illustrated travel journal in which he documented his 1831 trip from Falmouth, England to Jamaica indicates that his journey took just under eight weeks.44 Compared to Clark’s 10 genre scenes, Hakewill’s book included 21 prints, mainly topographical landscapes, that could have been arranged as a tour of the island from the urban centres in the south, proceeding to the east, then up and across the northern coast before culminating in the south.45 However, many other variations were possible due to Hakewill’s initial serial method of publication, which allowed the reader to combine all or some of the folios in the manner that they saw fit.46 As yet, due in large part to the absence of the recuperation of correspondence to or from Hakewill before, during or immediately after his Jamaican sojourn, his specific path to Jamaica is unknown. While it is completely plausible that Hakewill approached or was courted in Britain by absentee planters familiar with the success of his previous illustrated books, it is also possible that he set out on an adventure of his own design and became formally acquainted with the white Jamaican plantocracy only once he had arrived on the island. At any rate, as Barringer has noted, amongst the planter class and “their extensive network of families and allies in Britain, there was a substantial market for imagery (in the form of paintings, watercolors, and high-quality prints) depicting the plantation as tranquil and contented, prosperous and refined.”47 Middle-class Britons also comprised a substantial market for

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such topographical landscape prints, which allowed them to become armchair tourists.48 At a time of heightened abolitionist attack against the supposed deviance of white Creoles, Hakewill’s white Europeanness may have made him feel ethnically superior to his hosts and likely supremely confident in his abilities to attain the support of the local, white Creole Jamaican elite. Although Hakewill would have undoubtedly partaken of inland travel, he may also have made use of smaller ships known as cutters, to move more quickly between his desired locales.49 Derived from watercolours, most likely preliminary pencil sketches, and possibly even photographs taken with his camera lucida,50 Hakewill’s hand-coloured aquatints were produced by “laying on broad, flat areas of highly keyed, but evenly modulated tints”.51 As David Boxer has noted, they were etched in black ink, handcoloured with watercolours, and lightly varnished.52 Fortunately, Hakewill’s extant watercolour sketches provide insight into his artistic process and travels on the island. At least six “highly finished presentation watercolors” originally belonging to George Watson Taylor still exist. 53 While Lyssons Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (c. 1820–21), Haughton Court, Hanover, Jamaica (c. 1820), and Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica: The Property of G.W. Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21) reveal that Hakewill visited and depicted more regions and plantations than he ended up representing in his publication, the three extant watercolours of Holland Estate indicate that he likely made multiple sketches from various vantage points and parts of each plantation, developing an archive from which to select his final image for mass production.54 But it is Mill Yard Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) and Llanrumny Estate specifically which indicate that Hakewill absolutely witnessed various specialized aspects of plantation field labour. Together the two landscapes expose the ideological work of Hakewill’s much censored final selection of 21 plates. At the time of his visit, Jamaica was a British colony that had been divided into the three counties of “Middlesex, Cornwall and Surry”, each comprising several parishes.55 Not too long before, in 1801, Robertson had completed a survey measuring the island at 2,724,262 acres (11,024 sq. km).56 The names and topographies that the images represent indicate that Hakewill travelled the length and breadth of the island, including images from the political and economic centres of Kingston and St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) as well as a variety of rivers, a waterfall, a monument, a Great House, and several plantations. The images were meant to represent the actual lands, homes, and structures of the white men and women, the planter class with whom he resided. In other words, his focus was mainly on the representation of plantations. Writing on the symbolic relevance of the plantation landscape image, Casid has argued that, . . . the mythic image of the plantation landscape dominated by sugarcane as . . . a prodigious variety of introduced flora held in place by an ordering system of colourful segmentation spanned the century as a means to justify colonization and a discursive and material field in which to work out anxieties about mixture, particularly racial mixture.57

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Arguably, as will be discuss in further detail below (Chapter 8), Hakewill’s images sublimate the pervasive white anxiety about human racial mixtures (sexual and social) through his refusal to represent Jamaica’s pervasive racial hybridity as embodied in the mixed race populations. Hakewill’s presence on the island in the 1820s and his focus on the holdings of wealthy British planters could not help but result in the representation of sugar cane estates. Indeed as Higman has argued, “The long list of ‘views taken in Jamaica’ demonstrates a similar concentration on the sugar estates of the most wealthy planters. He had nothing to do with coffee planters and illustrated only the occasional pen.”58 In the British context, the tradition of topographical landscapes as a means of recording and commemorating one’s wealth dates back at least to the late seventeenth century. As Finley has argued, “Topographical landscapes were increasingly being commissioned by the aristocracy and substantial gentry, who wanted their vast estates and great houses to be recorded in this way, not only as a index of their belongings, but as tangible symbols of social and political power and evidence of personal achievement.”59 As Thompson has argued, by the time that Hakewill undertook his artistic project in Jamaica, the idea of the picturesque as tropical landscape had already become embedded within the plantation, in part through the initiative of planters like Beckford, discussed in the previous chapter.60 According to William James Gardner, in 1780s Jamaica, “Upwards of seven hundred sugar estates occupied on an average one thousand acres each”.61 Higman contends that the sugar estates operating around 1832 numbered around 670.62 It is crucial to understand just how much profit even a single acre of sugar-cultivated land could yield. According to Gilbert Mathison, a largely absentee planter, “An acre of land will in some places produce four tons of sugar, and two hundred and fifty or more gallons of rum; which may fairly be valued at one hundred and fifty pounds sterling – an immense return for a single acre of land!”63 The planter Matthew Lewis observed that his slaves were able to produce 33 hogsheads a week.64 Simply put, before and still during the time of Hakewill’s visit, such plantations were not only ubiquitous, but also extremely prosperous. However, more often than not, his landscapes worked at erasing the presence of black slaves, especially as labourers, and even erasing the very presence of the lucrative sugar cane crop. This erasure marks a tension between text and image since Hakewill often gave precise tallies of estate slave populations based upon the merchants’ legal data. But the absenting of the colonies’ most precious and lucrative crop also registered Hakewill’s and his patrons’ response to the increasing external pressure of British abolitionism. Given his two-year sojourn on the island, Hakewill likely developed quite intimate relationships with the white Creole Jamaican and British landowners whose properties he represented. Indeed, his relationships with Jamaican European and Creole elite may have begun in Britain since many owners of Jamaican plantations were absentee landlords, or made frequent visits back to Britain.65 Although the island had taverns, inns, and lodging houses where rooms could be let, early nineteenth-century Jamaica did not yet possess a proper tourist infrastructure. Thus, instead of hotels, Hakewill would have most likely lodged with the planters and their families on the sugar estates that he depicted.66 The upper classes of white Jamaican society were gracious to those of the same class and racial

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backgrounds. As the plantation owner Matthew Lewis noted on his first journey to the island, I had an opportunity of seeing many of the principal persons of the island during my residence here; and the civilities which I received from all of them were not only more than I expected, but such as I should be unreasonable if I had desired more, and very ungrateful if I could ever forget them.67 We need then to consider how Hakewill’s patronage from these wealthy sugar barons affected what he saw, wrote, and imaged and what in the end became his Picturesque Tour.68 The counterpart of his landscapes in the discourse of maps are cadastral or estate maps which were historically not only a means through which to demonstrate the boundaries of one’s property, but a way that “the state or individual landlords could more effectively control a tenant or peasant population”.69 The usefulness of such visual technology in a slave-holding territory, one in which the enslaved populations had demonstrated strong and ongoing resistance, would have been obvious to Jamaican planters.70 Interestingly, there are unmistakable distinctions between Hakewill’s imaging of Jamaican plantations and contemporaneous topographical plantation landscapes of the American South. Vlach has noted that in the American case, the majority of plantation paintings were not landscapes, but house portraits,71 and as such, “The connections that planters sensed between their personal identities and their home effectively transformed a painting of one’s house into something like a surrogate portrait”.72 Thus, while Vlach has demonstrated that the plantation landscapes of the antebellum American South were often focused upon the Big House as a sign of the white owner’s wealth and privilege, Hakewill’s images of Jamaican plantations took quite a different tactic. In the case of the Southern US, Vlach has argued convincingly that a distinct vantage point became normative, that of a view of the planter’s house from below, a strategy that resulted in the feeling of the viewer of being positioned below and having to gaze upwards at the house. Accordingly, Vlach has argued that Viewing a plantation house from that perspective, one experienced a sense of the presumed authority of its owner. Since members of the planter class were certainly among the wealthiest Americans, they naturally assumed that they would be accorded a certain amount of deference. Or, to put it another way, they expected to be looked up to as superior individuals.73 The images of their properties, centring on their homes from below, reinforced these elitist assumptions. In stark contrast, only one of Hakewill’s 21 plates focused in any significant way upon a plantation Great House, Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny. Rather, it would appear that in the inevitable conversations and negotiations over which of Hakewill’s 200plus sketches would be turned into prints, the Jamaican planter class seemed to privilege expansive vistas of their cultivated plantations, which included images of their extensive works as evidence of their wealth and prestige.

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Although Hakewill claimed that the book, which included landscape prints, detailed descriptions of social life and custom, an introduction, and an historical sketch of the island, was intended to be “professedly and exclusively picturesque”, his allegiance to the white Europeans and Creoles who facilitated his two-year sojourn was unequivocally political. Indeed, it is a possibility that Hakewill did not randomly make his way to Jamaica, but was invited there by the planter elite74 to help them further consolidate – during a time of obvious crisis – their identities as “creole gentleman planters”, authentic West Indians, in part by celebrating, through landscape representation, their planters’ prospects.75 As Casid has argued, “The prospect of a colonial landscaping was also always prospective. The colonial landscape of imperial print culture represented not merely what was supposed to have been done but what might or, from the perspective of those invested in the plantation system, should be.”76 At a moment when the British had already abolished the slave trade and abolitionist political activism was pushing towards full abolition, Hakewill’s picturesque landscapes were staked on the absence of the black slave labour whose bodies and toil constituted white British wealth and privilege. A further and ongoing problem for British colonial officials was the task of encouraging white immigration to the island; a tricky and difficult one due to the reputation of the Caribbean and Jamaica as a “torrid zone” of death and disease (especially for whites), brought on by the specific attributes of climate and geography.77 On the heels of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the looming demise of slavery made the prospect of increasing white migration even more far-fetched. As Kriz has argued, “In the islands these years were marked by a decline of the slave population, a decline in profits from sugar and rum, and white flight.”78 Cases like that of Mary Prince, exposed in great detail through her published narrative, rallied Caribbean slave owners who ferociously defended their own (like Prince’s infamously abusive owners Mr and Mrs Wood of Antigua) by audaciously claiming a victim status and charging the true victims and their abolitionist supporters with “disgusting conduct” in the circulation of “statements coming from a quarter so jaundiced” that it compromised “the character of a society, which numbers many eminent and worthy individuals among its members”.79 As this letter published in 1831 in the Bermuda Royal Gazette further proclaimed, “We shall select this case . . . as a specimen of the mode in which the public mind in England is poisoned against their brethren in the West Indies . . . [italics mine]”.80 In a slightly earlier example, Cynric Williams used his A Tour through the Island of Jamaica . . . in the year 1823 (1826) to argue that British people were ignorant of the general state of West Indian society, to contest the abolitionist ideas of the work and punishment practices of the Negro slaves held by “good Christians”, and to argue that the slaves’ lives were akin to the labouring folk of any country.81 Positioning the slave owners as noble Christians engaged in a legal enterprise sanctioned by Britain, Williams placed the abolitionists in opposition as ignorant outsiders who attacked the rightful wealth of the slave holders. Matthew Lewis’ pro-slavery strategy was more in line with the picturesque landscape tactics deployed by Beckford in the previous century. Writing in his journal on 10 January 1816 about his impressions of his plantation Cornwall in Westmoreland, Lewis recorded,

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On three sides of the landscape the prospect is bounded by lofty purple mountains; and the variety of occupations going on all around me, and at the same time, give an inconceivable air of life and animation to the whole scene, especially as all those occupations look clean, – even those which in England look dirty. All the tradespeople are dressed either in white jackets and trousers, or with stripes of red and sky-blue. One band of Negroes are carrying the ripe canes on their heads to the mill; another set are conveying away the trash, after the juice has been extracted; flocks of turkeys are sheltering from the heat under the trees; the river is filled with ducks and geese; the coopers and carpenters are employed upon the puncheons; carts drawn by six, others by eight, oxen, are bringing loads of Indian corn from the fields; the black children are employed in gathering it into the granary, and in quarrelling with pigs as black as themselves, who are equally busy in stealing the corn whenever the children are looking another way: in short, a plantation possesses all of the movement and interest of a farm, without its dung, and its stench, and its dirty accompaniments [sic].82 Lewis’ narrative works hard to transform the enslaved labourers into quaint peasants whose bodies and activities become the objects of humour and pleasure for an upperclass white viewer like himself. Instead of seeing the physical strain of the black slaves carrying heavy bundles on their heads, the danger of the process of mill-feeding which often resulted in amputated hands and limbs or the utter impropriety of the forced labour of enslaved children, the plantation labour becomes folly and amusement for his personal entertainment. The children’s strain to control the corn-stealing pigs becomes a hilarious romp, and their shared blackness with the animals is a noteworthy peculiarity, which further likens Africans to animals. Meanwhile, the very bodies of the slaves become ethnographic specimens, the observation of which provides picturesque contrast with the beautiful natural environment. Amazingly, even the colours and patterns of the substandard and no doubt tattered and heavily soiled clothing of the slaves is aesthetically pleasing to Lewis. Lewis’ revelry in the beauty of his estate and the picturesque vision of his slaves stands out next to the more measured observations of the contemporaneous observer, the Reverend Bickell, who commented that slave appearance was in general decent, though many were dirty and ragged.83 It is Lewis’ pleasure in his witnessing of his plantation scene that allowed him to erase the constant ardour and brutality of the forced labour and transform the black subjects into aesthetic objects in his landscape. But above all, for Lewis, the “cleanliness” of the scene is what elevates the Jamaican plantation above the British farm. However, this cleanliness in the midst of corn-stealing pigs, carthauling oxen, and the constant compelled labour of the plantations slaves in their no doubt smelly and unclean garments (due to the types of labour, common material deprivation and lack of access to self-care ), was a fiction and a testament to the ability of the white plantocracy to ignore the extreme suffering (which their insatiable capitalism initiated) all around them. Increasing in intensity at this tenuous political moment, the external abolitionist attack was multi-pronged, dealing with the overall inhumanity of slavery, the lie of its supposed

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civilizing mission, and the peculiarities of specific practices and habits of the planter class, like the sexual tendencies of white Creole males. According to Trevor Burnard, abolitionists attacked the licentiousness of white Jamaican men from a different angle, an angle, moreover, that attacked the beliefs of white Jamaicans at their very core. For abolitionists, firmly attached to the developing culture of sensibility and middle-class bourgeois propriety of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, white men’s sexual immorality was damning proof that a society based on slavery promoted godlessness.84 Hakewill’s refusal to represent the labour of enslaved Africans, a decision which explicitly removed blacks from the geographies in which he surely had daily viewed them, can be read in part as a response to such external abolitionist pressure, a pressure which resulted in the cleansing of the plantation which could provide an aestheticized if inaccurate view of Jamaican estates to white outsiders. But his choice was also a product of the logic of the picturesque itself and its colonial tradition in European literature and visual art. In a literary example of the sanitization of slave labour, Elizabeth A. Bohls has noted that within the diary of Janet Schaw, the eighteenth-century Scottish woman who travelled to Antigua and St. Kitts in 1774–75, slaves disappeared from her text for about 15 pages, only to reappear as prayerful visitors in a plantation church. This erasure occurred, tellingly, after Schaw described leaving the settlement of St John to visit several plantations.85 The question then becomes: which type of body could the tropical picturesque accommodate? Much like Sloane before him whose two-volume tome, Voyage . . ., included only one plate that directly acknowledged the labouring slave body, Hakewill’s book was also a work of selective vision.86 In Sloane’s book, numbered 190, perhaps the most questionable plate is Michael van der Gucht’s A Ginn Cotton (1725) in the “Natural History” section of volume 2. As Kriz has noted, the irony is that within a book focused on sugar-producing Jamaica, the largest fold-out plate was dedicated to cotton manufacture associated with the American South. Furthermore, the image itself did not visually represent a slave body. Rather, this direct reference was through Sloane’s text and a description of the process by which the machine was operated by seated Negroes who turned wheels with their feet, which activated mechanical rollers.87 The absence of the enslaved black labouring body had emerged as the norm in representations of the Caribbean. According to Kriz, “Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century illustrated books about the Caribbean tended to include African slaves as small-scale figures in topographical landscape views or as highly abstracted types in schematized scenes showing the cultivation and refinement of sugar cane.”88 However, the black body in the Caribbean landscape posed an inherent problem since, as Africans, they recalled another place and continent as well as the process of their violent extraction and forced relocation – the Middle Passage – and therefore, had to be indigenized in order to repress the memory of the inherent carnage that their diasporization recalled.

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As Kriz has argued, “Transported Africans, after all, were not ‘indigenous’ people, so could not easily be deployed within an iconographic system predicated on the existence of clear distinctions between the native and the foreign.”89 To the extent that colonization was enacted through violence with material and physical consequences, Harley’s comments on the centrality of maps in warfare are instructive. Harley has linked the strategic “emptiness” of mapped territories to the ability of military powers to kill those who inhabit the seemingly uninhabited (at least on the map) spaces that they wish to occupy.90 It is in part the distance that the map provided, between viewer/colonizer and the land, and therefore a distance between viewer/colonizer and inhabitant/colonized, that allowed for the killing and destruction in a way that ameliorated any guilt or responsibility. I would like to consider Hakewill’s topographical landscapes of plantations in the same vein; as a cartographic representation that proclaims colonial victory not through force, but through its imaging of a peacefully attained domestification. As we shall see, what is domesticated is the land, now orderly and cultivated and capable of housing “civilized” European inhabitants. But arguably, just as the Native subjects in the Montreal landscapes of Thomas Davies and Robert Sproule discussed above, so too are the enslaved Africans domesticated, when Hakewill deigned to represent them at all. But what exactly does his persistent emptying of the Jamaican estates facilitate and accomplish in terms of this precise colonial moment of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, and for whom? What types of violence did this absenting and erasure enact upon the enslaved Africans whose blood, sweat, and tears were literally a part of the land and how the land became plantation/landscape? What does it mean when Hakewill not only repeatedly removed them from the land generally, but refused to represent them engaged in their most normative activity, toiling in the sugar cane fields? To what extent did this removal enact exactly what Harley argued, the ability of those in control of the map/landscape to conduct their violence in unseen and guiltless ways? And again, what does this have to do with 1820s Jamaica? As I will argue below, in part what is accomplished is the recitation of a peaceful landscape, which does not only imply a lack of violence, but the lack of a need for it. Hakewill could have easily named his book A Picturesque Tour of Jamaican Estates. Although active sugar plantations were his key focus, Hakewill’s Jamaica is a place where the economic might of the colony is represented as self-generating. Compared to Clark’s Antiguan images in which slaves are almost constantly pictured in acts of physical exertion, Hakewill’s Jamaica is a land where the labour of the slaves is always already complete. According to Mair, It was sugar that placed Jamaica at a strategic point in the emerging international capitalist system of the eighteenth century, establishing it as Britain’s most prized transatlantic colony. In 1805 it was the world’s largest individual exporter of sugar. Sugar commanded the island’s major resources of land, capital and labour. In 1832, sugar employed 49.5 per cent of the slave work force.91

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But the resplendent estates, which he took pains to title by owner, are shown as magically present and not as the product of backbreaking black toil. Instead, the black subjects are often at leisure, lounging in green fields and any labour is mainly represented as the seemingly less arduous transport of already manufactured goods in hogsheads and puncheons by donkey or mule and cart to ports for shipment as in The Bog Walk (Figure 6.3) and Montego Bay, from Reading Hill (Figure 6.4). Equally odd is the case of the labour represented in Bridge over the White River, St. Mary’s which depicts a group of four black slaves in the foreground, three adults and one child, with one naked adult standing in the river beating clothing while a basket of laundry sits on the shore nearby. The question of for whom they wash the clothing is left open by the nature of their task: is it for them or an absent white master or mistress? The absence of black field labourers can be characterized as problematic given that the majority of Hakewill’s landscapes represented views of various large sugar estates or plantations comprised of populations of hundreds of enslaved Africans. However, such

Figure 6.3 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, The Bog Walk, from part 4 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0060, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Figure 6.4 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Montego Bay, from Reading Hill, from part 2 of A Picturesque Tour . . .(1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0024, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

an erasure from the published prints can be upgraded to deeply troubling when we consider Hakewill’s extant watercolour Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica: The Property of G.W. Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21) (plate 3).92 Hakewill placed the plantation works below a distant ridge of blue-green mountains, overhung by a cloudy sky. While what was most likely the plantation Great House and other smaller buildings sit upon a hill in the right middle ground, the focal point of the image is a cane field in the process of being cleared of its undulating green crop. Dotted across the bare soil of a semi-circular patch of land, tens of slaves are seen actively cutting and bundling the cane for transport. With the aid of livestock, the cane is moved down a narrow path that bisects the field, running from the left foreground, through the centre of the image and disappearing below a slight incline in front of the works. It is this path that leads our eye into the central activity of the painting, where the green cane towers over the miniaturized slaves. The watercolour Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) (plate 2), also diverges sharply from the 21 published prints in Hakewill’s book, including of course the specific view, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (c. 1820), that

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Hakewill deemed publishable. The estate was the property of George Watson Taylor (1771–1841), the heir to the vast fortune of Simon Taylor (1740–1813). Simon Taylor (discussed in greater detail below in Chapter 7) was one of the richest and most powerful people in Jamaican history.93 In Hakewill’s painting, the enslaved population of Taylor’s plantation is no longer mere staffage. Rather, as the focus of the image set in close proximity to the plantation works, the painting is transformed from landscape to genre. With the boiling house clearly in view with chimneys spewing smoke, a group of five slaves, male and female, are depicted in the act of bundling cane for the mill, the process that would extract the cane juice and see it transformed into sugar, molasses, and rum. In the left middle ground, two slaves can be seen mounting the stairs that lead into a works building, one with a bundle of cane upon the head. The presence of two wains in the middle foreground drawn by oxen and donkeys or mules reminds the viewer that the cane must be hauled from the unseen fields. The active poses of three of the slave figures in the foreground just left of centre creates a stark comparison to the slave figures in the published Hakewill prints who were routinely invisibilized or idle. But Hakewill did not completely depart from the pattern of aestheticizing Jamaican plantation life. To the left and right of the hard working trio, two other slaves sit idly on the ground, the one at left on a pile of cane and the other at right, laid out on his belly chewing what is perhaps a piece of cane; what would have no doubt been seen as an act of terrible insolence. But although the slaves are labouring, Hakewill has removed the ever-present threat of violence from their midst with his refusal to render a driver or the overseer. As Barringer has noted, “Despite being brought into the foreground, the laboring figures lack the sense of extreme urgency that accompanied these processes (an urgency often enhanced by the use of the lash by drivers).”94 Urgency was a central facet of the manufacturing process since unless ripe cane was cut, crushed, and the juice boiled within 48 hours of harvesting, the crop was ruined.95 As I will discuss in greater detail below, Hakewill would have witnessed these types of scenes – and the threat of physical violence under which they were performed – on many occasions during his two-year sojourn in Jamaica. That these watercolours of Llanrumny and Holland Estates were not chosen to be transformed into the 21 plates in A Picturesque Tour . . . speaks to Hakewill’s desire to appease his patrons’ anxieties about exposing the ugly face of slavery to the foreign, British abolitionist gaze, by erasing the most pervasive and onerous details of the institution. As Cundall has explained, “A sugar estate was in those days as self-contained as a small village”.96 The “intimacy” created by the spatial control over such vast spaces meant that Hakewill would have been granted personal access to the inner workings of the Jamaican plantations, including the slave population. Hakewill’s own statistics placed the enslaved population at 317,138 and the free-coloureds and whites at only 25,000.97 As Klepp and McDonald recall, “By 1805, slaves made up nearly three quarters of the island’s nearly 400,000 inhabitants, but the brutal conditions of slavery caused population decline, requiring the constant importation of Africans to maintain and increase the enslaved workforce on which profits depended.”98 But this erasure is also problematic given the fact that it is not a product of the original configuration of

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the picturesque for the metropole. Hakewill’s erasure of black slave labour corresponds with and supports British pro-slavery propaganda, which equated the suffering of African slaves with that of the poor white working class. As Thompson has argued, “By representing the island’s slave population through Britain’s picturesque tradition, Hakewill reinforced the view that slaves differed only in location from Britain’s working classes.”99 Matthew Lewis’ views exceeded the supposed parity of the white British peasant and the enslaved Jamaican Negro. He iterated this falsehood explicitly in his entry for 13 January 1816: . . . as far as I can as yet judge, if I were now standing on the banks of Virgil’s Lethe, with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand, and asked whether I chose to enter life anew as an English labourer or a Jamaica negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter.100 Furthermore, Lewis was either too ignorant of his new context and circumstances or too wilfully blind to decipher the supposed perpetually jovial nature of the enslaved who were “always laughing and singing” and performing their work “with so much nonchalance” as forms of resistance (in other words, the determined practice of African spirituality and cultural expression as a means of solace in the midst of prolific surveillance and prohibitions, and the calculated performance of deference to the white master/ mistress as a means of survival).101 Crucially, those that suffered under the yoke of slavery were not ignorant of this ludicrous ploy. Noting the absence of slaves after her “escape” to London, Mary Prince related, “No slaves here – no whips – no stocks – no punishment, except for wicked people. They hire servants in England; and if they don’t like them, they send them away: they can’t lick them. Let them work ever so hard in England, they are far better off than slaves [italics mine].”102 At the same time that textual and visual representations offered healthy, happy, and festive slaves as evidence of the benevolence of white planters and slave owners, a brutalized, poor white British populous became a familiar pro-slavery tool that worked to belie the central role of race in the strategic colonial oppression of millions of enslaved Africans. As Kriz has argued, This kind of assertion was routinely offered in the context of a comparison between West Indian slaves and British workers in both pro- and anti-abolitionist speeches and publications from the 1780s onward, including James Tobin’s anti-abolitionist tract that advised readers to compare Brunias’s merry slaves with the working poor in Britain.103 Indeed, pro-slavery advocates like George Hibbert characterized abolitionist agitation as slanderous nonsense. George Hibbert (nephew of the planter Thomas Hibbert) a titan of the London factoring business – who interestingly had never set foot in Jamaica – lamented the difficulty in countering the “shoal of calumniating libels against the

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colonists, with which the tables of every public house and reading shop throughout the country are loaded”.104 Whereas what I have referred to as the visual technology of the picturesque was an objectifying tool for the poor, labouring body of the white in (rural) Britain, the objectification was amplified when applied to the enslaved, labouring body of the black in Jamaica. Hakewill’s images largely refuse a black presence, even as staffage; a glaring omission since he produced his drawings made on-the-spot while residing for two years with wealthy planters on their sugar cane estates worked by thousands of black slaves. As the questions posed earlier in this section suggest, Hakewill’s refusal to represent enslaved Africans engaged, under duress, in their most normative agricultural labour had much to do with the moment of his visit and the timing and patronage of his book. Resistance had been a mainstay of Jamaican slavery even before the British conquest in 1655. Under the Spanish, Maroon communities that included peoples of African and Arawak descent had been established in Jamaica’s mountainous terrain.105 Left behind by the Spanish, the ranks of these defiant, self-liberated people only grew under British colonization, as successive groups of slaves fled their mainly British owners. Such collective resistance persisted throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, largely instigated by enslaved populations in plantation settings. But resistance was also individual. Prior to and throughout Hakewill’s time on the island, Jamaican newspapers were constantly peppered with fugitive slave advertisements describing the runaways who risked punishment and death to claim their freedom. Meanwhile, runaways with the misfortune of being re-captured regularly appeared on workhouse lists. The increasing activism of abolitionists and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 arguably fuelled the resistance of the enslaved in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean. A few decades earlier, Jamaican planters had narrowly escaped a full-scale rebellion during the slave insurrection scare of 1776.106 This had been preceded by what Andrew O’Shaughnessy described as “one of the largest and bloodiest slave revolts in Jamaican history”, Takyi’s War (1760–61),107 and two Coramantee uprisings (1765 in St Mary’s and 1766 in Westmoreland).108 As Kenneth Morgan has noted, “In the last phase of slavery in the British Empire, three large revolts broke out in the British Caribbean. They were in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823), and Jamaica (1831/2).”109 The period of Hakewill’s sojourn, therefore, was rightfully characterized by white planter anxiety about the potential for catastrophic rebellion, catastrophic to the interests of the plantocracy. One antidote to such anxiety was to imagine one’s plantation as the seat of picturesque tranquillity; an image which required that all of the unpleasantness of slavery be vanquished, including the labouring bodies of the unruly and potentially insurrectionary slaves. Thomas Thistlewood and Vineyard Pen There can be no doubt that an upper-class white man like Hakewill (a guest of the planters, living on sugar cane estates during this extended period of two years) would have had every opportunity to witness (and experience) the inner workings of slavery

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in all of its brutality. This brutality was not only encoded in Jamaican law by the white planter elite, but also carried out through the vigilante justice, terror, and pre-emptive violence that whites visited upon blacks in Jamaica.110 As Burnard has astutely argued, “Slaveowners not only tormented their slaves physically but also subjected them to intolerable psychological stress. Jamaican slaves lived in a world of radical uncertainty, always vulnerable to the depredations of whites and fellow slaves [italics mine].”111 Hakewill’s witnessing would have been a multi-sensory experience since the practices of discipline, torture, and punishment, as well as those associated with malnutrition, illness, disease, and medicine, were experienced not only visually, but through smell, taste, touch, and sound.112 Indeed for a newcomer such as Hakewill, travel to the Caribbean must have felt like sensory overload. While vision, smell, taste, and touch may seem more obvious means through which Hakewill would have experienced Jamaica and Jamaican slavery, sound was equally important and potentially chilling. The lives of the enslaved were highly regimented. Personal time was largely a reliable possession only of free peoples, especially upper-class whites. In sharp contrast, the lives of slaves were not their own and they were perpetually regulated through the use of sound. For instance, one white observer, the Reverend Thomas Cooper, stated that some plantations had shell-blowgrounds,113 small patches of land near the dwellings in which slaves could work an hour in the middle of the day after the shell blows for them to leave work and go to dinner.114 The shell to which he referred was a large conch-shell that was generally sounded as a signal which informed the enslaved when it was time to go to or leave the fields. But the shell was also used as an alarm for various purposes.115 The planter Lewis recalled that “the drivers blew their shells to summon the negroes to their assistance”, when it was discovered that cattle had escaped into the canes.116 While the shell, when separated from its use as penal tool, is an aesthetic and melodic object, weapons were also used to produce disciplinary sounds. Reverend Bickell noted that slaves on Jamaican plantations were summoned from slumber by the crack of a whip, an obscene wake-up call, which must have elicited perpetual trauma since it symbolized impending torture.117 Indeed, he explained that if a slave was late for roll-call, the driver acted as “judge, juror and executioner” and inflicted the punishment of whipping.118 Such auditory signals could only work reliably because of the way that sounds travelled across vast acres of open fields. Other more disturbing sounds would also have travelled, like the screams of torture and rape victims. But the auditory horror of slavery was not limited to Jamaica. In his Notices of Brazil (1830) the Reverend R. Walsh related, “I never walked through the streets of Rio, that some house did not present to me the semblance of a bridewell, where the moans and cries of the sufferers, and the sounds of whips and scourges within, announced to me that corporal punishment was being inflicted.”119 Bickell confirms the reality of such sonic terror in Jamaica, noting that, although 39 lashes was the legal limit for whipping a slave in one day, he had personally seen a black driver deliver upwards of 40 at a time, “whilst his fellow-slave was crying out for mercy, so that he could be heard a quarter of a mile from the spot [italics mine]”.120 Cooper further described the

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ways in which the frequency of sounds of torture led to white indifference to black suffering: The sound of the whip is so common in the field, that one gets to hear it as a matter of course, and that without any particular observation or feeling. Hence many persons, after a residence of a few years in the colonies, fall into the idea, that the slaves are, on the whole, mildly treated, and that there is really no necessity for making any material alteration in their circumstances [italics mine].121 Therefore, Hakewill’s avoidance of the details of slave labour, abuse, violence, and hardship was done in the midst not only of their copious visibility, but their audibility too, since sounds like the whip, the screams of torture victims, and the conch would have surely gained his attention on the plantations upon which he resided.122 Although a pen, not a sugar estate, the detailed records kept by Thomas Thistlewood,123 a 29-year-old English overseer at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth during 1750 and 1751, indicate the commonality of material deprivation and corporal punishment of both male and female slaves.124 Tragically, multiple types of abuse and torture were so pervasive within Jamaican slavery that enslaved people did their utmost to adapt as best as possible to this “radical uncertainty” and, to the extent possible, found ways to adjust, to cope, and even to forgive their white tormenters.125 Jamaica, based on the size of the colony and the availability of land, was structured around a system of provision grounds, marginal lands provided to slaves, through which their own labours provided the bulk of their food. This was in comparison to smaller colonies like Barbados where slave owners provided a greater amount or the majority of their slaves’ food through rations. Regarding the scarcity of proper nutrition for slaves, newly arrived Africans likely suffered more than Creoles or more established African-born slaves who already had existing provision grounds. In his first month as overseer in July 1750, Thistlewood recounted providing one salted herring a day, one quart of flour weekly, and occasionally six ears of corn to individual slaves at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth.126 As Cooper recounted, protein was so absent from the slave diet that withholding it often served as a punishment.127 Thistlewood noted that the new slaves were frequently also given rotting, spoiled, and infested food. Unsurprisingly then, new arrivals were thought to have been involved in the two recorded food thefts (corn) on the estate in September 1750 and May 1751.128 Corporal punishment would also have figured largely on the estates that Hakewill visited. Within the period of one year Thistlewood whipped a slave every 11 days129 and “recorded whipping twenty-three or just over half of the slaves”, two thirds of the male and one half of the female slave population.130 Mainly punished for poor work, the beatings ranged at between 50 and 300 lashes.131 Such punishments were at the whim of the overseer. As Cooper explained, These punishments are inflicted by the overseer WHENEVER HE THINKS THEM TO HAVE BEEN DESERVED. He has no written rules to guide his conduct, nor are the occasions at all defined on which he may exercise the power of punishment. Its exercise is regulated wholly and solely by his own discretion.132

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Thistlewood’s journals, which he appears to have written for his own reflection and pleasure, are also a chilling source for the commonality of sexual violence, aggression, and coercion perpetuated against enslaved (and no doubt free) black females by various classes of white men, including planters, overseers, and of course their families, employees,133 and guests.134 By almost any measure of contemporary sexual behaviour, Thistlewood was wildly, perhaps even compulsively, and sadistically promiscuous.135 As Burnard contends, “He had some form of sexual contact with every woman on the estates that he had care of, save for the very young and the old and infirm.”136 The deep irony is that while Creole and European whites assiduously accused blacks of the grossest sexual promiscuity,137 something that they claimed was a part of African “nature”, the population most befitting this label was middle- and upper-class white males. White males in Jamaica enfranchised themselves with extreme sexual licence, which removed all penalties (social, legal, and moral) for their outrageous and dangerous sexual conduct. As the Reverend Cooper argued, a white man who lives in adultery, who keeps his black and brown mistress “in the very face of his wife and family, and of the community”, is shown the same respect and welcomed into society regardless of his breach of decency. 138 Thus, even a white man of Thistlewood’s sexual predilections, who between 1751 and 1764 recorded having intercourse 1,774 times with 109 black and two white women, would still be welcomed in “polite society”.139 For these reasons, Burnard has gone so far as to argue that “Indeed, white sexual access to black and colored women appears to have been a principal reason why white men moved to Jamaica [italics mine]”.140 Indeed, the nineteenth-century author Bickell commented that a man newly arrived from Great Britain was soon “deprived” of his moral and religious ideas and “is in a short time unblushingly amalgamated into the common mass of hardened and barefaced licentiousness [italics mine]”. 141 White Britons like Thistlewood came of age at a moment when British masculinity was dominated by the trope of the “rake”, and the white man’s virility, as expressed in his “whoring”, was considered a normal attribute of a healthy masculinity.142 Furthermore, as the normalized outcome of a sexuality conceived only for male heterosexual pleasure and gratification, the rape authorized in the metropole against lower-class white women was exported to colonies like Jamaica where anti-African sentiments allowed whites to imagine all black women deserving of such sexual terror. It was to the grave misfortune of black women that generations of white British males transplanted such ideals to the Caribbean. Such white male sexual, and even romantic, preferences for black women were not limited to Jamaica or even the Britishgoverned Caribbean.143 Of course any blame for white men’s sexual compulsions was usually placed squarely on the shoulders of black women, who were stereotyped as sexually lascivious seductresses. However, some whites did dissent. In the Barbadian context, although Elizabeth Fenwick’s correspondence (1814–22) with her friend Mary Hays documents her convictions that white men were trapped in a “perverse sexual culture, which corrupted their personal values and public morality”, she also deemed black female slaves to be the victims of sexual domination.144 In a world where white men were early initiated into sex through

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their socially sanctioned sexual access to enslaved black women, Fenwick worried for the character, and arguably the health, of her young son, Orlando.145 However, Fenwick was the exception to the rule and the insistence on seeing the victims of sexual violence as the source of sexual misconduct was not just a habit of white men, but also of white women. As the white Scottish woman Janet Schaw bemoaned during her trip to Antigua and St. Kitts, The young black wenches lay themselves out for white lovers, in which they are but too successful. This prevents their marrying with their natural mates, and hence a spurious and degenerate breed, neither so fit for the field, nor indeed any work, as the true bred Negro. Besides these wenches become licentious and insolent past all bearing, and as even a mulattoe child interrupts their pleasures and is troublesome, they have certain herbs and medicines, that free them from such an incumbrance, but which seldom fails to cut short their own lives, as well as that of their offspring. By this many of them perish every year [sic].146 There are several points worthy of dissection here. Firstly, although Schaw was correct that many slave women were knowledgeable about abortifacients, she nevertheless completely overlooked the arduousness of their labour itself and the ubiquity of corporal punishment as other clear reasons that enslaved females miscarried. The Reverend Thomas Cooper, writing about Jamaica, did not fail to discern this point. Cooper argued that “Among other things, it [the brutalizing and demoralizing system of government] causes the women to be extremely careless of themselves when breeding, so that miscarriages are very common; and it produces also the most miserable neglect of their children.”147 Secondly, that a word, “wench”, that originally referred to a bold or forward girl of loose character, evolved through slavery into a synonym for a black or coloured female servant or a Negress is telling.148 Without sympathy for the sexual exploitation of the black female slave population, Schaw’s ideals of white superiority could not abide the idea that white men were the predators, preying upon the black women that they literally owned. It could not possibly be white male desire for black women that motivated these unions, but the licentiousness of the black women who “lay themselves out” for the white males thereby disrupting the natural order of white male/white female relations, love, and marriage. The idea of white male culpability would have detrimentally undermined the Eurocentric logic through which white women were positioned as the romantic feminine ideal of beauty, sexuality, and morality. Instead, not even the clear evidence of ongoing and prolific black female resistance to rape and sexual coercion as indicated in Schaw’s acknowledgement of the use of abortifacients (the prolific application of which resulted in many of them perishing) could press her into a sympathetic recognition of the desperation of women choosing to induce dangerous herbal abortions rather than bear the children of rape. Although presumably neither wife nor mother, as a grown woman who undoubtedly experienced the pain, discomfort, and inconvenience of a monthly menstrual cycle, the fact that

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she was unable to imagine abortion, and the much more painful, traumatic, and potentially deadly physiological response that it would provoke as a corporeal and emotional trauma for enslaved women, demonstrates her inability to see black women as sentient beings. Instead, the use of the herbs was positioned as a careless strategy to escape motherhood and a woman’s assumedly natural role within the domestic realm, a tactic that further distanced these “wenches” from the paradigm of white womanhood. Never mind that domestic bliss was hardly the (happy) ending offered to most black victims of white male sexual coercion. Regardless, the mulatto children for Schaw were useless; unlike the essentialized Negro labourers, they were too feeble for the field and too uncivilized for the Great House. Viewing these circumstances through the lens of her white female privilege, Schaw was unable to acknowledge that it was the colonial configuration of the institution of slavery itself that corrupted the black family and exploded the potential for a black domestic life not contaminated by white intrusion and violence. White male sexual exploitation of black women White male sexual predilections for black women also had a profound impact on Jamaica’s white population. Specifically, while the constant rape and sexual coercion of enslaved black women resulted in the dynamic growth of the island’s coloured or mixed-race population, the refusal of men like Thistlewood to settle down with white women and the comparatively smaller size of the white female population (when compared to black females) simultaneously resulted in the lack of growth of the Creole white Jamaican population.149 As Burnard has argued, “Despite a slow and steady increase in white population from 7000 in 1703 to over 20,000 in 1774 (of whom 17,000 were ‘settled and resident white settlers’), Jamaica failed to keep pace with population growth in the plantation economies of the American mainland.”150 Burnard contends that Thistlewood’s diary is likely “the fullest surviving account of sexual activity between blacks and whites under a slave regime”.151 Thistlewood is what Burnard describes as a “sexual athlete” and what I describe as a practised and cunning sexual predator.152 His ability to bluntly detail his lustful exploits with a variety of black slave women – from the locations of the assaults, the times of day, and the sexual positions, down to the names and ethnicities of his victims – demonstrates the blasé nature of such crimes within the context of Jamaican slavery.153 Indeed his descriptions of his sexual escapades were primarily factual and not emotive and Thistlewood certainly failed to take interest in the sexual response (or lack thereof) or emotions of his targets.154 Put simply, the sexual violation of black women in Jamaica was rampant and “normal”.155 It must be understood also that these acts of sexual terror were not only directed at slave women, but at their black male counterparts who, within the context of white patriarchy, must have bitterly experienced their own helplessness through the constant lens of the rape and sexual torture of their female kin and loved ones. Indeed, one could easily argue that the social alienation from white patriarchy – the fact that the “benefits” of patriarchy were not accessible to all men – was a calculated and much-coveted attribute of elite white males.156 This is not to

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glamourize or applaud patriarchy in any way. However, if we are honest, we must admit that at a moment when women were widely subjected to social, political, and cultural marginalization, the practice of white patriarchy offered, especially upper- and middle-class white women, a unique set of protections that were strategically withheld from women of colour and sometimes lower-class white women.157 However, this scenario also meant that black males were unable to fully insulate, defend, protect, and advocate for black females, be they their mothers, wives, daughters, other kin or friends. As such, we cannot underestimate the extent to which the constant sexual interference of white males had extremely detrimental impacts on intrablack community and family dynamics.158 Although diasporized Africans initially arrived in the Americas with their own complex ideas and configurations of family structures, we must recognize that their creolization, experienced under duress, also resulted in their Westernization and produced in them a desire to participate within the social formations of whites and to attain the standards idealized by Eurocentric cultures. As such, Gwen Bergner has noted in her analysis of the fugitive slave turned newspaper editor and statesman Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845),159 “Since Douglass writes within and even aspires to the norms of the Euro-American social order from which psychoanalysis arose, his account usefully anticipates the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm of subjectivity”.160 But Douglass also critiqued the ways the whites used slavery to pervert the natural order of the family (black and white) by imposing a matrilineal order upon slaves, which incentivized rape and placed white men in the “double relation of master and father”.161 As Morgan has noted, “Thistlewood recorded fifty-nine acts of sex with thirteen partners, ten Africans and three creoles [italics mine].”162 Although I recognize that he wrote this article almost twenty years ago (when our attitudes towards sexual violence were less provictim than today), I disagree strenuously with Morgan’s use of the term “partners” and the way that it implies a level of choice, consent, and equal participation and even pleasure on the part of the enslaved black females. However, Morgan’s parlance is not merely an issue of the date of his publication, but of our own biases and blind spots as scholars who research, think, and write through the lens of our own identities. Indeed, the importance of identity to scholarship is evidenced in the fact that Ann duCille’s assertion that all crossracial sex within slavery “invariably occurred in a climate of sexual domination and despotic rule” was published five years prior to Morgan’s text.163 My point, then, is that, regardless of whether or not Thistlewood used physical violence to rape his victims, the nature of his utter control over the slave population (as a representative of the owner and as a product of his white male privilege) and the regularity of corporal punishment at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth (and subsequent estates where he worked) meant that no sexual contact between him and an enslaved person was ever truly consensual. That the bulk of his assaults were visited upon African women is demonstrative of the particularly calculating mind of a sexual predator. As related above, African women who arrived at Vineyard Pen were more likely than their Creole counterparts to be nutritionally deficient and dependent upon Thistlewood for food rations and the other basic necessities of life. That he targeted these most vulnerable females makes it clear that he was willing to exploit their dependence upon him and the plantation owner. Furthermore, African

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women, recently traumatized by the upheaval and violence of the Middle Passage and separation from loved ones, were far less likely to have created significant attachments with male slaves, and lacking “marriage” partners meant that they also lacked a man to intervene or appeal on their behalf regarding such abuse.164 Thistlewood, then, like many white men in their desire for black women in Jamaica, negotiated between the rejection or selective exploitation of white women, the domination of the black women, and the strategic emasculation of black men whose competition for women of all races could not be tolerated. As Beckles has argued, . . . it has been suggested that the shortage of white women in eighteenth-century Jamaica explains in part the rapid rise of the mulatto population, and accounts for the undeveloped state of the planter households, as well as the violence endemic to relations between white and black males, much of which resulted from competition for black females.165 Deviously, Thistlewood “rewarded” his victims with reduced labour, increased provisions or through other means.166 He also accepted sexual favours from female slaves in exchange for a reprieve from other forms of punishment.167 Indeed, Thistlewood seemed to revel in turning the enslaved females under his care into “prostitutes”, who understood that it was in their “best interests” to trade sex for money and gifts. Such was the case in 1760 with Egypt Susannah and Mazerine who each earned enough money from Thistlewood, then the overseer at John Cope’s Egypt Estate, to “buy either food to feed themselves for half a year or to purchase half a pig each”.168 Another case in point was Thistlewood’s sexual contact with a slave named Dianah with whom he documented having sex one time.169 Dianah was the wife of a gardener named Adam to whom Thistlewood reported giving “candles, flour, salt pork, and rum to distribute to his African wife, Dianah, when she gave birth to their daughter”.170 Having discovered Adam’s neglect (presumably he had kept the gifts for himself), Thistlewood documented visiting the new mother himself to supply her with food so that she would not starve.171 However, the overseer’s actions do not appear to have been wholly benevolent since Dianah’s gift of food may have come at a very heavy price, that of sex with Thistlewood.172 The only concession that the overseer seemed to make with regard to the feelings and attachments of the enslaved population, was that he never reported having sex with slave women in the slave quarters; certainly he did it everywhere else, but apparently never there.173 Of his 13 victims at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth, Thistlewood accosted most multiple times, but he had sex with 10 of them four times or less and with three of them, over 10 times each.174 Another chilling aspect of the nature of sexual abuse is the casual and often public nature of the locations of such assaults, many of which took place in the daytime. As Morgan has noted, On different days, Thistlewood had sex with Hago on the dresser in the wash-house at 3 P.M.; with Silvia, an Ibo, in the woods between the cornfield and the swamp

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at 11 A.M.; and Chrishe, a “Congo”, near a rock hole at 2 P.M. It is not hard to imagine a single slave woman, working or walking alone, being easily imposed upon by the manager.175 That he also took the time to document the occasions on which his sexual activities were performed in front of an audience clearly indicates his fascination not only with the sex act itself and a deep pleasure derived from sexual aggression, but a perverse interest in having what he likely considered his sexual prowess on display for others. Besides the trauma entailed of being physically accosted and penetrated or being forced to perform sexual acts like fellatio against your will, the public nature of Thistlewood’s sexual exploits indicate an utter lack of caution and consideration with regards to potential witnesses to his behaviour. Indeed, whites like Thistlewood were not only above the law, they were the law. For example, shortly after his arrival at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth, he noted that he had sex with a “Congo” female field slave named Marina while another Creole female field slave named Juba was present.176 This incident took place two weeks after the first time he had sex with Marina, who was to become his favourite.177 While the situation may have been orchestrated through the use of enticements and bribes like the “gifts” and “payment” that he bestowed upon his victims, it is equally possible that Juba was made to witness her fellow slave’s violation by force.178 Was this Thistlewood’s way of preparing Juba for a similar fate? It is quite possible, since after the public sex which she witnessed in August 1750, she was documented as working in the house, assisting the head house slave Phibbah in the fall of 1750, only to be put back in the fields by 26 November of the same year.179 Obviously, Juba’s work in the house meant greater and easier sexual access for the overseer and her return to the less desirable field status may have been a punishment for refusing the overseer ongoing sexual access. Certainly if Thistlewood was capable of punishing his “favourite”, Marina, he was quite up to the task of punishing other female slaves as well.180 As such, as much or perhaps more than the use of whippings, we must acknowledge the extent to which white men like Thistlewood used sexual violence as a public means of disciplining the female slave population in ways which combined physical violation with psychic abuse, public humiliation, and intimidation. Accordingly, Burnard has argued that “Power relations between blacks and whites were so unequal that to talk of the possibility of truly consensual sexual relations may be fanciful.”181 Of all of the slave women from whom Thistlewood extracted sex, he seems to have had the most trouble controlling the housemaid Phibbah, who would at times deny him, remove herself from his bed after sex or berate him about his infidelity. Thistlewood did not let Phibbah’s “married” status interfere with his desires.182 While Marina was his “favourite”, Phibbah, according to Burnard, was the person with whom he had the strongest emotional attachment, his “long-time mistress”; a term to which I object since it connotes choice on the part of the female in entering, remaining in, and leaving the relationship.183 As Bickell related, the type of relationship that Thistlewood formed with Phibbah was

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common in Jamaica. Bickell explained that most merchants, shopkeepers, deputy planters, and overseers in all parts of the country have what is called a housekeeper, who is their concubine or mistress, and is generally a free woman of colour; but the book-keepers, who are too poor and too dependent to have any kind of establishment, generally take some mulatto, or black female Slave, from the estate where they are employed, or live in a more general state of licentiousness [italics mine].184 This was Thistlewood’s “arrangement” with Phibbah. But a level of feeling seemed to develop on his part since a rare acknowledgement of slavery as “miserable” was based upon his concern for her in the midst of a brief separation brought on by his move to a new estate.185 It is this emotional attachment, as well as the longevity of the relationship, which likely allowed Phibbah to defy the overseer and which undoubtedly prompted Thistlewood to defend the house slave.186 Phibbah and Thistlewood lived together from 1754 to 1786, after which, upon his death, he left a will with instructions that she should be purchased and manumitted.187 Phibbah’s relationship with Thistlewood also demonstrates how enslaved women attempted to make the most of dire situations by extracting money, gifts, valuables or other economic resources from the white men who forced sex upon them. Indeed, Phibbah held property, livestock, household utensils, and money enough to loan some to Thistlewood by the 1760s.188 Clearly, Thistlewood’s attitudes and behaviours towards black females, as that of many white males in Jamaica, were informed by a stark dichotomy with idealized white women (which I will discuss in detail below in Chapter 7). Accordingly, Burnard has noted, that “By contrast, white women were not eroticized in his texts. Thistlewood had few dealings with white women and, for reasons he did not explain, sought neither to marry or have sex with any white women.”189 In fact, of the 111 women that he claimed to have had intercourse with in Jamaica between 1751 and 1764, only two were white.190 But although it is to be expected, given the attitudes towards white women in his day, that Thistlewood did not hyper-sexualize white women as he did black, what is to explain his deliberate avoidance of marriage? That Burnard described the state of white marriage in Jamaica as “fragile” and “battered by severe demographic constraints” was partly due to the behaviour and attitudes of white men like Thistlewood.191 Put bluntly, for a man prolifically invested in sexual pleasure and adventure, taking a white wife would have put a damper on Thistlewood’s extravagant sex life. Although, of course, a wife would have become an added sexual partner, a “proper” white woman from a middle- or upper-class family background would have frowned upon, if not tried to directly hinder, Thistlewood’s unchecked promiscuity. Furthermore, she most likely would not have tolerated Thistlewood’s specific sexual predilections within the marital bed. At the same time, taking a white wife meant the added expense of her appropriate upkeep (and that of any potential white offspring) which would accord with her station in proper white society;192 in other words, sharing your wealth – unless of course, the white woman was a heiress.193

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Thomas Thistlewood, Agostino Brunias, and cross-racial sexual relations in the Caribbean Agostino Brunias’ Linen Market, Dominica (1780) (Plate 12) staged the complex sexual dance between white men, white women, and black women that I here describe. In it, the centrally placed, ambiguously raced, light-skinned woman (is she mulatto or white?) is accompanied by a pink-parasol-carrying black maidservant as she engages with a seated black woman of medium complexion who proffers a bolt of white cloth. Kriz has argued that this whitish woman, at the centre of the scene, is under intense scrutiny, including from a nearby “white bewigged man, tensely gripping his cane, tucked into the background behind the table of linen goods”.194 While it is possible, if not probable, that as Kriz contends, “His position and manner suggest that he is the woman’s companion rather than a casual admirer”,195 I disagree that the white man’s “piercing gaze” is necessarily directed at his elaborately dressed, whitish companion, her potential commercial exchange or what Kriz calls the insubordination of her parasol-wielding maid.196 Rather, the direction of his gaze can just as easily be read as passing in front of his light-skinned female companion to land directly upon the upturned backside of a bent-over black female, one of a group of five figures in the right foreground of the image. In many ways this painting is about the fabricated colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender through which the Caribbean was governed, as well as the unreliable and often inscrutable nature of vision. Brunias literally embedded the class and racial hierarchy of the island into the compositional hierarchy of his painting by placing these five figures, arguably the darkest people in the image and the ones most likely to be considered Negroes, closest to the ground.197 As such, they were meant to be read as closer to the earth and to nature, and more animalistic and brutish, not only in terms of their colour and dress, but in terms of their actions at the market. Of all of the many women in the scene, it is telling that only the three light-skinned mulattas and the indeterminately white woman are actually shopping at the market; three for cloth (two at the left near the table laden with fabric), one in the centre at another table, and the mulatta buying an eggplant at the right side. Brunias’ European and white Creole viewers would have seen it as fitting that the darkskinned black figures were selling the cheapest and most natural goods in the market. Furthermore, despite the profusion of cloth in the cut of their skirts, the wide sleeves, the checked and striped scarves and the intricate headwraps of the gathered crowd, it is the darkest-skinned black subjects that are the most exposed. While a shirtless, barefooted black male kneels in the right foreground, the white blouse slips off of the right shoulder of the dark-skinned woman (likely a slave) in the centre of the image, almost exposing her right breast.198 That the upper-class white male – with a cane, hat, and blue jacket from which his ruffled shirt sleeves emerge – and the centrally placed white-looking woman, both standing, are amongst the tallest figures in the painting is not accidental.199 Their height, like their complexions and the distinctive headwear, serves to attract more attention. Moreover, the frivolous nature of the white man’s decorative sleeves and the too-long and impractically coloured white dress that the whitish female holds aloft with her left hand

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to guard it against the dirt, are, through their very lack of function, demonstrations of the wearers’ relative wealth, upper-class status, and leisure time. In comparison, the black female positioned to the left of this grouping sits on a very low stool with a parcel of corn at her left and basket of fruit and/or vegetables at her right. A kneeling black male watches as the bent-over black female handles a bunch of bananas, seemingly preoccupied with fetching him some. The black male’s low status, most likely a slave, is also visible in his bare chest and feet. Interestingly, the kneeling black male and the standing white one, although physically disconnected, are both absorbed in the same scene only from different perspectives. While Brunias positioned the kneeling black man as a legitimate client of the black female higgler/huckster, herself also likely a slave, it is the assumed proper upper-class white man whose devious behaviour is erotically charged; devious since if the whitest woman was indeed his companion, he would not have wanted her to catch him in the act of perusing another woman’s body in a sexual manner and certainly not a black woman. It is the tilt of the white man’s head to his right, away from the body of his lightskinned companion, that clears a visual path for him to peer in front of her body, gaining unimpeded access to the stooping black woman’s upturned backside.200 Here Brunias, unintentionally or perhaps not, complicated the assumed rightness of the racialized order of sexual desire by positioning a dark-skinned female slave higgler/huckster as the sexual target of the elite white male, and not the supposedly beautiful, decadently dressed, light-skinned “lady”.201 Ambiguity then, is not only a factor in the racial identity of the central female figure (as Kriz has ably noted), but in the glance of the white man (is it towards his “white” companion or the backside of the black female slave?), which not only connotes human interaction, but sexual desire. In allowing the form of a Negro slave woman to distract him from the supposedly irresistible charms of what Janet Schaw called his natural mate,202 – the presumed beautiful “white” woman – this white man in Dominica had much in common with Thistlewood in Jamaica. Since the domestic and sexual benefits that a white woman provided to a white male “bachelor” household could easily be extracted from an enslaved black woman (like Phibbah) for “free”, the cost or risk of taking a white wife surely outweighed the benefits for a man like Thistlewood. As Burnard has stated, “With continuing massive importation of slaves to work in both the plantation and the house, white men did not need white women’s labour nor, with abundant opportunity for socially accepted liaisons with black and mulatto women, did they necessarily depend on their wives for sexual gratification.”203 Furthermore, despite Thistlewood’s sexual antics, he was still, as a middle-class white man, allowed entrance into “polite” Jamaican society. A white wife was not necessary to his social access.204 But some white penkeepers and planters did take white wives, who in some cases provided a check, however small, to their wayward sexual practices. In one such case, Thistlewood documented that in 1756 after a bout of drinking with Mr McDonald, John Cope (his employer and the owner of Egypt Estate) sent for a female slave named Beck to service him sexually, after two other slaves, Egypt Susannah and Mazerine (from whom Thistlewood also regularly extracted sex) refused. When the latter two were

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whipped for their supposed insolence, Little Phibbah informed Mrs Cope who then examined the bedsheets, which were “amiss”.205 The totality of Thistlewood’s sexual energies were, unfortunately and to their great detriment, expended upon black females. Put bluntly, Thistlewood was extraordinarily promiscuous, often coercing or violently imposing sex on multiple females within very short periods of time.206 Indeed, Morgan estimates that he had some 170 sexual encounters in his year at Vineyard Pen alone.207 The price of excess: White male promiscuity and the spread of venereal disease The outrageousness of Thistlewood’s promiscuity opened him up (as well as the females upon whom he forced sex) to venereal disease and exposed the latter to unwanted pregnancies. The rampant sexual contact between white men and black women also contributed to the growth of the coloured population and the blurring of racial and class lines between enslaved and free. Indeed, unlike Thistlewood, many if not most white men in Jamaica ended up simultaneously producing both white and mixed-race offspring. Thistlewood himself had a son, a mulatto named John, who died in 1780.208 Meanwhile, his employee William Crookshank impregnated Myrtilla, a field slave from a neighbouring plantation who gave birth to a mulatto girl.209 In an age before penicillin and antibiotics, contracting sexual illnesses was a very real and devastating effect of sexual violence. Regardless of whether enslaved black women in Jamaica attempted to be faithful to their slave “husbands”, chances were that they would be raped at some, if not many, points during their lives by various white males who were themselves committed to sexual promiscuity and therefore most likely carriers of disease. As we might suspect of someone who was so licentious, Thistlewood’s journaling indicates that he was preoccupied with sexual disease. In one case he noted that Phibbah had cautioned him that women with sores should abstain from sex.210 In another, he noted that his employee William Crookshank, who started engaging in sex with various slave women shortly after his arrival in 1754, was afraid that he had contracted the “Clap”, a slang term for gonorrhoea.211 Meanwhile, on jury duty, Thistlewood learned that his fellow jurors – all white males of the slaveholding class – had each been afflicted on multiple occasions with the clap.212 Thistlewood’s employer, John Cope, the owner of Egypt Estate, also suffered from gonorrhoea and he likewise documented that a male slave named Lincoln had frequently suffered from the disease.213 But venereal disease also entered his journals with regard to his own health. Eighteen months after his arrival in Jamaica, Thistlewood was concerned enough by an abnormal redness in his groin on 30 September 1751 that he noted it in his journal.214 Regardless of his suspicions, which led to his notation, he brazenly had sex with an enslaved woman named Dido that same night. Only after yellow and green discharge, painful erections, an outbreak of red “kernels” and tormenting pain did he consult Dr Joseph Horlock who diagnosed and treated him for gonorrhoea beginning on 11 October.215 In reality,

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Thistlewood, who had just taken up a post at Egypt Plantation, was infected with both gonorrhoea and what Burnard and Follett call “the chlamydial infection, lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV)”, the cause of the penile “kernels”.216 Befitting of the sex and gender politics of a colonial society, once diagnosed, Thistlewood assumed a black female source of his infection and pathologized Dido by subjecting her to a gynaecological examine. But she was “clean”.217 Astoundingly, even in the midst of his excessive sexual activities, as a white man of middle- or upper-class background, Thistlewood was unable to imagine himself as the carrier of such a disease, who was, even by the measure of his own obsessive chronicling, putting the black women from whom he regularly coerced or physically extracted sex, at risk.218 Indeed, after a 44-day course of treatment that included “bleeding” and a medicinal paste (besides other things), even though doubtful that he had been cured, he resumed sex, taking Dido on 22 and 26 November and moving on to Jenny a week after.219 Although the clap was assumed to be treatable in the eighteenth century, Thistlewood clearly had evidence that he was a carrier, since, after several adventures with London prostitutes and affairs with British women of all classes, according to Burnard and Follett, he had suffered, “repeated bouts of gonorrhoea for most of his adult life”.220 But while venereal disease was treated as a commonplace nuisance in mid-eighteenthcentury anglophone societies,221 late in the century, shifting medical theories and changes in ideals of character, respectability, and civic responsibility were joined with abolitionist fervour which, as Burnard and Follett argue, “accordingly found the sexually wanton Caribbean sugar lords to be degenerate and divorced from new currents of British masculinity favoured by evangelical reformers”.222 While the obscene wealth produced by Britain’s cherished colony had previously induced the British in the metropole to resign themselves to overlook the sexual extravagances and immoral behaviours of the white Creole plantocracy, the late eighteenth century’s shifting concepts of national and individual identity, along with the British ideal of the white gentleman as good Christian husband and father, prepared the ground for a backlash, upon which the abolitionists seized. Sexual excess, and with black women no less, and rampant sexual disease certainly did not fit this increasingly reified image and, as such, was labelled un-British. As Burnard and Follett have argued, Abolitionists wove these essentialized ideas of race and identity into the politics of anti-slavery and into a new and more hostile attitude to what British men did outside the metropole. Planter behaviour, including their propensity to engage in non-procreative sex that resulted in disease, was no longer something that happened “out there” but was a sign of a society that had gone seriously astray.223 Although Hakewill’s wife Maria Catherine had accompanied him on his travels to the continent where they spent much of 1816–17 in Italy, it is unclear if she travelled with him to Jamaica for a part or all of the entire two-year sojourn.224 However, whether she accompanied him or not, Hakewill’s extended stay in Jamaica and his cultural and social

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access to plantations as an educated upper-class British man would have intimately acquainted him with the normality of the sexual exploitation of black women on the island. It must be noted that the moment of Hakewill’s stay in Jamaica can be expressed as two key moments: (1) the moment of heavy abolitionist (both external European and internal Jamaican) pressure for full abolition, and (2) the moment when Jamaican planters were literally “taking stock” (of their so-called Negroes) after the abolition of the slave trade and implementing new policies and practices for “improvement” in the face of their inability to import new slaves. This invariably was a moment of great anxiety and fear for the ruling class white plantocracy as the new state of affairs posed a threat to their way of life and the source of their economic stability, and social and racial privilege. The state of Jamaican slavery Both Jamaican and foreign authors of this period, whether slave owners, fence sitters or abolitionists, routinely agreed upon the brutality of Jamaican slavery.225 In his Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (1811) the white absentee planter Gilbert Mathison commented specifically upon the brutality of the “seasoning practices” of new slaves which, according to him, left many in a state “worse than death”.226 The seasoning of newly-imported Negroes (as it was called) was nothing less than the trial of their constitutions by hard labour, under the disadvantages, in some cases, of insufficient food and new habits of life, and, not unfrequently, of great dejection of mind. Many, of course, perished miserably; many were left in a state even worse than that of death, a prey to disease, decrepitude, and wretchedness; while none but persons of robust constitutions could entirely escape from the severity of this ordeal [sic].227 What is interesting about Mathison is that, as a planter, he did not oppose the abolition of the slave trade, rather he saw it as a means of getting rid of this type of abuse.228 Incredibly, although directly invested (economically and socially) in the continuation of slavery, he saw himself as an objective source labouring for the “common good”.229 But the Reverend Thomas Cooper was aware of the obvious conflict of interest when the fox guarded the hen house (so to speak). Cooper argued: There is something specious in the idea, that the master is the proper person to originate and perfect improvements . . . What, we repeat the question, has he accomplished? Not the education of the slaves; for they are now sunk in the grossest ignorance. Not their instruction in the doctrines and duties of the Christian religion; for his neglect in this respect is notorious and proverbial. Has he prepared them for the rights and privileges of citizens? . . . The slave ought to have been prepared for freedom years ago; and it is plainly the duty of the country to make up for past neglect by future diligence.230

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However, Mathison did recognize the abuse and mistreatment of the enslaved. He argued that the good achieved through the abolition of the slave trade, “in putting a stop to the atrocious methods of obtaining Negroes on the coast of Africa” was partially responsible for “new miseries” being visited upon a large group of the same population, “who may have long been established comfortably in our West India Islands [italics mine]”.231 The word “comfortably” used to describe a brutalized enslaved population should remind us that Mathison, although a moderate in many ways, was no champion of equality. Indeed, this is where he and Hakewill align through the idea of Said’s reflection on the power of images and imaginings. Like Hakewill’s images, Mathison was keen to imagine the slave population as content within slavery, an institution which contributed to Negroes’ lives and “comfort”. Thus, for him “the common combination of accumulation of debt and depreciation of property” led to “evil effects”, but slavery itself for Mathison was not evil, it was a way of life.232 Recounting his trip back to Jamaica after a lengthy absence, the British planter arrived after the abolition of the slave trade intent upon enlightening his fellow planters to “their own true interests” by rallying them to act, not in aid of the enslaved, but with regard to their own bottom lines.233 The timing of his trip post-abolition (of the slave trade) was deliberate and Mathison conceived that “some fatal error in the ordinary management of Negroes” could be rectified through the physical presence and attention of the master. 234 Basically Mathison’s argument sought to illustrate the urgency of implementing humane practices of work, health care, and nutrition since, with the impossibility of new slave imports, the planters’ practice of working or brutalizing slaves to death was now decidedly against their own financial interests. Instead, planters had to depend upon so-called natural increase, the forcible, coerced or incentivized “breeding” of their black female slaves and, as such, the health and welfare of their enslaved property, was, for the first time, of paramount significance to their ongoing economic goals. The Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis, who kept a “breeding list”235 for his plantations, documented his practice of rewarding the graundee (midwife) and the mothers a dollar each, “in addition to their usual allowance of clothes and provisions, for every infant which should be brought to the overseer alive and well on the fourteenth day”.236 Furthermore, Lewis gave each mother a scarlet girdle with a silver medal at the centre, which was to be worn on special occasions like feast and holidays as a sign of “peculiar respect and attention” to entitle these women to special considerations like being served first and getting larger portions of food. The girdle was also to be used to seek pardon for a first offence and to curry favour, since Lewis advised that the overseer was to indulge the wearers in order of the number of accumulated medals. As such, by attempting to manipulate the enslaved females with pay-offs, Lewis created a hierarchy of female slave value based upon fertility, with the top rank occupied by females who were the most successful “breeders”.237 Lewis provided some evidence that his breeding policy of social and psychological manipulation was working. On 13 March he recounted that on his arrival “every woman who had a child held it up to show me, exclaiming, – ‘See massa, see! Here nice new neger me bring for work for massa’”.238

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However, there are also indications that he and other planters missed the signs of clandestine resistance to breeding amongst enslaved women. On 3 February 1818, Lewis recorded overhearing the “negro-mothers” from Friendship and Greenwich Estates complaining to the attorney that the overseer was demanding that they wean their children too soon.239 Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman have debunked the idea that attitudes toward slave treatment and material provisions were the key determining factors in the disproportionate “natural increase” of slaves in the US when compared to Brazilian and West Indian slave societies.240 Instead, they argued that the lower average lengths of lactation in the US played a key role in the comparably higher fertility of black female slaves.241 While the American slaves generally breastfed for one year, their West Indian counterparts did so for two, effectively (deliberately or not) using lactation as a contraceptive.242 As such, the disgruntled women may have been consciously seeking to continue their breastfeeding practices as a way to disrupt the planters’ breeding policies. However, Jamaican planters did not only seek to manipulate the sexual relationships and fertility of their female slaves, but their male ones as well. Indeed, Lewis’ journal demonstrates his keenness to lay claim to the offspring of his male slaves. Specifically, he expressed his dissatisfaction with a man named John Fuller whom he suspected of deliberately choosing a wife owned by another person, “so that his children will not belong to me”.243 However, Cooper argued that the practice of forming sexual and romantic connections across the plantations of different owners was commonplace, although significantly detrimental to the enslaved. For one thing, he argued, the maintenance of such relationships required arduous evening commutes made after a full workday.244 But more alarmingly, a third party could too easily disrupt such “marriages” if slaves were moved between plantations in different parts of the island.245 But while the distance of loved ones meant less quality time spent together, the choice to maintain such long-distance relationships may well have been more than the form of resistance to breeding that Lewis suspected, but a means through which slaves spared themselves the agony of seeing their loved ones daily brutalized and humiliated. Cooper described such trauma vividly: The affectionate husband has there to witness the woman whom he loves urged on to her task by the cart-whip. She may be thrown down on the ground, her person exposed, and her flesh lacerated before his eyes, and he dares not even attempt to defend her . . . The work must be done, without any regard to this man being a husband, and that woman a wife.246 In this light, the choice of a male slave to put distance between himself and a beloved fellow slave seems obvious. Breeding was of paramount importance since, simply put, the white plantocracy of Jamaica required a healthy slave population to “keep up their stock”.247 Mathison confirms that the urgency of the question of slave numbers had made discussions of breeding, slave increase, and decrease common conversation.248 Referring to the Jamaican slave population of 1817 (which was given as 345,252), an anonymous nineteenth-century source argued,

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In 1820 the number was nearly the same as 1817, and from that time to the present, those who have the best means of information assert, that they are still more on the decrease, and that they have during the last three years decreased at the rate of two and a half percent; making the total amount of the decrease eighteen thousand.249 Slave fertility, sexuality and natural increase were open topics of “polite” debate amongst slave owners (and Jamaican society) and were written about in printed journals of the day.250 Surely in his extended sojourn over many months, Hakewill would have been privy to several dinner-table or parlour conversations, articles or “breeding lists” about just such vexing questions. Besides a racist loathing of Africanness, a part of the brutality of Jamaican slave practices had stemmed from negligence related to the fact that, prior to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, it was simply cheaper to buy new slaves than to care for your existing population. Similarly, Ghachem’s research has shed light on the extreme brutality of the Dominguan (Haitian) slave system. Referring to the demographic dominance of the slave population (estimated at 87–90 per cent), he noted: Striking as these figures are, however, they do not reveal the colony’s extremely high slave mortality rate relative to other New World slave societies. During their first three to five years of labor in Saint-Domingue, newly purchased Africans died on average at a rate of 50 percent. Never was slave mortality higher than during the 1780’s. During that decade, the importation of Africans to Saint-Domingue served not to augment the total number of slaves but rather to replace those who perished as a result of overwork, neglect, and abuse on the colony’s plantation fields.251 The failure of plantations to yield profits was for Mathison a problem, which resulted in poor outcomes for owners and slaves alike. Citing the regularity of mortgaged plantations, accumulation of debt, and depreciation of property, he noted how the threat of economic failure often resulted in inhumane practices designed for maximum labour extraction.252 However, the failure of a plantation was for Mathison not just the burden of the planter’s debt but also the separation of the enslaved families, since the slaves were inevitably sold off individually to pay out the planters’ debts.253 Although Mathison attempted to argue that slavery itself was not an evil, but an institution in need of “improvements”, the statistics that he cited tell a dire and different story of commonplace systemic brutality. According to numbers pulled from the poll taxes, Mathison estimated that the slave population had dropped from 323,714 in 1809 to 313,483 in 1810 (a deficit of 10,231), which he classified as “a most frightful instance in depopulation”.254 John Rock Grosett Esq. MP, owner of Spring Garden Estate, and other planters were also concerned with the planters’ ability to implement “improvements”. Hakewill noted that Grosett kept a surgeon in residence at the estate and lamented the inability (or unwillingness) of his peers to do the same, due to the “distressing circumstances of the times, and the continued low sale of their produce”, which was a hindrance to the planters. Interestingly, Hakewill included this reference to the effectiveness of

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abolitionist agitation after he had detailed the extensive holdings and wealth of Grosett, which included several estates, other lands, and wharves. Most of Jamaica’s hundreds of thousands of slaves (like the 600 Negroes at Grosett’s Spring Garden Estate), male and mainly female, were engaged in backbreaking field labour that was done by hand. Largely exposed in the acres of cane, they were a highly visible presence on every sugar plantation. After planting, the cane took about 11 or 12 months to mature.255 They laboured under armed drivers and overseers from sunup to sundown six days a week and, during crop time, five to six months a year, were also compelled to labour at night in rotating gangs256 to “feed” the mills that would turn the cane into molasses, rum, and sugar.257 As one author summarized, . . . during the crop season, which lasts for five or six months every year, all of the slaves on the estate, with the exception of a very few, have not only to labour from eleven to twelve hours in the day, but also either the whole of every alternate night, or the half of each night, which is called spell-work, in order to feed the mill with canes, and to keep up the process of manufacturing the sugar, which is going on constantly by day and by night during the crop season, until the whole is finished . . . all this labour is performed under the terror and influence of the punishment of the whip, which is put into the hand of the drivers, and ready to be applied in case they are slack in their labour.258 James Hakewill’s unpublished watercolour Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica: The Property of G.W. Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21) proves that he witnessed at least one crop season, but more likely two or more. But William Clark’s published fifth plate, The Mill-Yard (1823) (Figure 6.5), also represented this arduous process, arguably in a more rigorous and detailed manner than Hakewill’s earlier watercolour Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) (plate 2). In Clark’s print male and female slaves toil in the shadow of the looming windmill.259 Positioned in the left upper two thirds of the image, the towering blades and detailed stonework signal the solidity of the costly structure.260 Clark leads the viewer into the image and towards the mill with the clever placement of two similarly positioned, stooped female slaves in the left foreground. Facing in opposite directions but dressed in the same long blue skirt, a red-belted light-coloured shirt and red headwrap, they are surmounted by a small, standing, sexually ambiguous figure carrying a bundle of cane on the head. The three figures together form a diagonal line, which leads the viewer’s eye directly from the left foreground towards the male slave who feeds the mill. While this lone male slave stands at the top of the stairs in the curved opening of the mill undertaking the extremely perilous job of feeding bundles of cane into the rollers, a succession of other slaves (including these three figures) are busily bundling cane or carrying it on their heads to continue the process, all under the watchful eyes of the black driver and white overseer, also in the left foreground. The teams of livestock that haul more cane-filled wains over the deeply sloping hill on the lower right side of the image convey the endlessness of the task, as does the

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Figure 6.5 William Clark, The Mill-Yard, from TenViews in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0027, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

large pile of bundled cane in the left foreground. To the right of the mill, the large grey plume of smoke billowing over the sloping peaked roof of the boiling house alerts the viewer that yet more slaves labour within its wall, unseen. Clark’s seventh print, the nighttime Exterior of the Boiling-House (1823) (Plate 13), represented only the very top of the mill and a portion of three of its blades peaking over the left side of the sloped roof. The Mill-Yard reversed the perspective, taking up an earlier and interconnected stage of the process in a daylight scene, which represented the extraction of the cane juice for which the furnaces in Exterior of the Boiling-House needed to be fed, well into the night. Clark’s focused representation of the mill during crop time acts as a detailed elaboration of the quaint, long-distance vignette of the mill and works embellished by a plume of smoke in the middle distance, just right of centre in Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board. Just as the deeply angled stances and flexed arms of the male slaves loading hogsheads into drogers in Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board signalled the arduousness of the labour, in the left foreground of The Mill-Yard, the two female slaves bent low to bundle cane convey the drudgery of the operose task. When slaves were not labouring for the master or mistress, they had to work in their provision grounds since most Jamaican planters and overseers only provided small

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rations of herring as a sauce with which the slaves seasoned their food which they cultivated or purchased. As mentioned above, provision grounds were normally substandard plots of land located miles from the Negro quarters and equally far from the nearest market where slaves travelled on Sundays (their so-called day of rest) to sell and barter what they had grown. Although Sunday was not legally market day, it was by the nineteenth century a long-established tradition. A slave in Jamaica could easily walk 20 to 30 miles on a Sunday alone between harvesting from their provision grounds and travelling to and from the nearest market.261 While Mathison claimed the Sunday tradition as a facet of the “ignorance and irreligion”262 of the Negroes, the Reverend Thomas Cooper surmised that the absence of slaves from Christian worship was not a sign of a moral failure, but rather an outcome of their much circumscribed free time, since religious services were held on Sundays at “the very time which may be called high change at the Negro market”.263 Mathison nevertheless recounted that it was the industry of the Jamaican slave population that supplied town markets with all manner of goods and crops including meats, wood, fruit, and vegetables.264 As Cooper explained, with the planters gearing their products towards external markets, it was common knowledge that all of the sugar at market was stolen or smuggled.265 However, Cooper did not imagine the enslaved as inherently criminal, but rather he reasoned that the institution of slavery itself led to the degradation and vice of the Negroes. The culpability for slavery was not solely with the planters, but with consumers of slave-produced commodities. Cooper argued: The planters, however, are not the only persons with whom I would remonstrate upon this subject; for all who indulge in the consumption of West-India produce, or contribute in any way to the maintenance of the present order of things in our sugarislands, ought in common fairness to bear their share of the blame. With what propriety can a consumer of rum or sugar cast a stone at the cultivator of the sweet cane? The Negro is the injured individual; he is robbed of his liberty, and, with that, of every thing that can render a rational existence desirable [sic].266 But the toll of the Sunday market system was not merely moral, but physical. According to Mathison, enslaved peoples easily walked to the nearest market from a radius of 12 to 14 miles or “from distant parts of the country”. The latter group he identified, interestingly, from their extreme exhaustion; the fact that those slaves from farther afield would literally fall asleep in the midst of the noisy streets to recuperate from their exhaustion.267 The market was not a luxury but a necessity of their very survival, a means through which to sell or barter (through the process of higgling or huckstering)268 for the necessities that their owners would not provide or the staples that they could not grow in their assigned provision grounds.269 Slaves had no recourse to the law for their mistreatment since the same white men who owned the majority of the plantations were the magistrates who refused to enforce laws against slave mistreatment.270 Likewise, Thomas Cooper noted that in

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many cases when appealed to, the magistrates did not intervene on behalf of the slaves due to their own personal and political affiliations with the planters.271 The planters also comprised the members of the House of Assembly since the members were comprised of “Freeholders in the same parish where the election is to be made”.272 Not only did the white sugar planters dominate the politics of the island (to the detriment of penkeepers and others as shall be discussed below in Chapter 8), the timetable of their deliberations was literally governed by their custodial obligations, with the House sitting in Spanish Town generally between October and Christmas, as Cundall notes, “the time of year when planters could be absent from their estates with least inconvenience”.273 Various sources concur that slaves who attempted to appeal to magistrates for assistance in stopping their torture and abuse were regularly returned to their plantations only to be punished further for their supposed insolence by the same owners, overseers, and drivers.274 Therefore, the complexity of slave life was mindboggling, a constant negotiation for survival in the midst of various exploitative forces. The system itself was designed to pit slave against slave for scarce resources, to exploit the vulnerable, to break the strongwilled and self-possessed, and to position the weak at the mercy of the white ruling class. Morgan’s insights into the lives of the slaves at Vineyard Pen extend far beyond this St Elizabeth property: . . . slaves struggled daily to overcome their dehumanization. Their world consisted of sickness, near starvation, rape, and brutal punishment . . . slaves responded to these outrages by engaging in a remarkable drama of social exchange and cultural survival. They ran away, planted their grounds, cooked their own dishes, learned about native plants, made music, danced, played games, told stories, carved calabash bowls, lived in families, and named things. They maintained their humanity under severe conditions [italics mine].275 Dignity for slaves was something they strove for despite the constancy of both petty and grave insults and injustices. For enslaved females, the main targets of sexual violence, and for enslaved males, rendered impotent by their inability to intervene, they were denied the most basic right to determine the structure of their personal lives and intimate relations. Notes 1 James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall; E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825), n.p. The version of the original used is paginated in certain parts and not in others: page numbers are cited when appropriate. 2 B.W. Higman argued that Hakewill’s reference to the “noblemen and gentlemen” was directed at the absentee planters in Britain, while his term “resident gentlemen” was meant to acknowledge the men he had met in Jamaica. B.W. Higman, “James Hakewill: A Biographical Sketch”, in James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990), n.p. 3 Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p.

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4 This book is also known as The History of Windsor and its Neighbourhood and is described by Higman as “a large and handsome volume illustrated by 21 plates and 14 vignettes engraved by well-known engravers, such as J. Landseer”. Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p. 5 Hakewill commissioned Joseph Mallord William Turner to work up his sketches for the Italian publication. Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 250, note #30. 6 Boxer, “Foreword”, in James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990), n.p. 7 During their extensive research for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, Tim Barringer and Gillian Forrester did not discover any of Hakewill’s preliminary Jamaican drawings or watercolours other than the six in the collection at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. E-mail, Lisa Thornell-Gargiulo, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Department of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art, to author, 28 July 2014. 8 James Hakewill, Notes by James Hakewill on Travelling to Italy (1819), pen and ink on paper, 88 × 114 mm, Turner Bequest CLXXI, D13878, Tate, London, UK. 9 Hakewill’s images were re-drawn by J.M.W. Turner and engraved by a variety of artists. 10 While Hakewill spelled Trelawny with only one “e” in the tile of his print, Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny, he spelled it with two (Trelawney) in his list of sketches. James Hakewill, “Views of Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston: The Mill Press, Limited, 1990), n.p. 11 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Introduction: The Repeating Island”, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 8. 12 Alexander Lee and Tim Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 318. 13 In comparison, Joseph Kidd was most likely motivated to venture off to Jamaica by his brother’s personal narration of the island. Thomas, a resident of Trelawny, Jamaica in 1828, reportedly owned 20 slaves, 30 livestock, and a dry goods store. The store was advertised in the Falmouth Post (22 March 1836). Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 160, 249 (note #17). Kriz used as her source the Jamaica Almanack (1828). 14 Clark’s images included: (1) The Court-House, (2) Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, (3) Planting the Sugar-Cane, (4) Cutting the Sugar-Cane, (5) The Mill-Yard, (6) The Boiling-House, (7) Exterior of the BoilingHouse, (8) Exterior of Curing-House and Stills, (9) Interior of the Distillery, and (10) Carting and Putting SugarHogsheads on Board. 15 William Clark, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes, in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery. from drawings made by William Clark during a Residence of three years in the West Indies, upon the Estates of Admiral Tallemach (London: Thomas Clay, Ludgate-Hill,1823). 16 The name “Wadadli” became popularized in part by the calypso song “Wadadli Rock” by Sir McClean “Short Shirt” Emmanuel, which celebrated Antiguan independence. But a cruise company, a film company, sports clubs, and even a beer company have also adopted the name. Although “Wadadli” is widely recognized as the original Native name of the island, recent research conducted by archaeologist and local historian Dr. Reginald Murphy and confirmed by The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda substantiates that the aboriginal name of the island documented in 1635 was “Waladli”. Rory Butler, “Antigua’s native name ‘Wadadli’ under dispute”, Observer Media Group, Tuesday 22 January 2013, at http://www.antiguaobserver.com/antiguas-native-name-wadadli-under-dispute/ (date of last access 31 August 2013). 17 Rev. George Newenham Wright, A New and Comprehensive Gazetteer: Being a Delineation of the Present State of the World, from the Most Recent Authorities, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, and Constituting a Systematic Dictionary of Geography (London: Thomas Kelley, Paternoster Row, 1838), vol. 5, p. 36. Dupont gives the name of the church as Santa Maria la Antigua, not “de la”. Jerry Dupont, The Common Law Abroad: Constitutional and Legal Legacy of the British Empire (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman and Co., 2000), p. 184. 18 Columbus renamed what is today the island of Barbuda as “Dulchina”. Dupont, The Common Law Abroad, p. 184.

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19 St. John’s is the largest city and harbour in Antigua. 20 Dupont, The Common Law Abroad, p. 184. Interestingly, Newenham Wright’s 1838 publication did not contain a separate entry for Barbuda. 21 Dupont, The Common Law Abroad, p. 184. 22 See: Wright, A New and Comprehensive Gazetteer, pp. 36–7; Anonymous, Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and its Inhabitants from the Time of the Caribs to the Present Day, Interspersed with Anecdotes and Legends. Also, An Impartial View of Slavery and the Free Labour Systems; The Statistics of the Island, and Biographical Notices of the Principal Families (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street, 1844), vol. 1, n.p.; Dupont, The Common Law Abroad, p. 152. 23 Some confusion exists around the exploits of the male Codringtons since at least three successive generations bear the name Christopher. Christopher Codrington I apparently settled in Barbados around 1640 when his eldest son, Christopher Codrington II, was born. In 1663, Codrington II apparently purchased St. Lucia with other Barbadians from the Native chiefs. Christopher Codrington III was born at Barbados in 1668, studied in England and succeeded his father as the Governor of the Leeward Islands in 1698. Anonymous, Genealogies of Barbados Families: From Caribbean and the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2001), pp. 221–2. 24 Wright, A New and Comprehensive Gazetteer, p. 36. 25 Dupont, The Common Law Abroad, p. 184. 26 Wright, A New and Comprehensive Gazetteer, p. 37. Engerman gives the Antiguan population for 1830 as follows: whites 1,187 (3.27 per cent), slaves 29,600 (81.54 per cent), and free persons of colour 5,513 (15.19 per cent) for a total of 37,000. The total is of course 36,300 and my percentages are based on this more accurate total. Stanley L. Engerman, “A Population History of the Caribbean”, A Population History of North America, eds. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 496, Table 11.4, “Caribbean population, 1830”. 27 Clark, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, n.p. 28 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 82. Clearly certain noteworthy distinctions existed between the treatment of blacks in Antigua and other islands. In her introduction to Prince’s narrative, Ferguson notes that free black men were allowed to vote on the island (p. 12). 29 The views were created on Weatherill Estate, which was depicted in plate 2 (Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes), and plate 8 (Exterior of Curing-House and Stills). Bodkin’s Estate is shown in plate 3 (Planting the Sugar-Cane), Delop’s Estate in plate 4 (Cutting the Sugar-Cane), plate 6 (The Boiling-House), and plate 9 (Interior of the Distillery), and Gambles in plate 5 (The Mill-Yard). The first plate, The Court-House, was near the centre of town in St. John’s and the last one, plate 10 (Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board), is a scene from Willoughby Bay. 30 By intimate I mean not only the sharing or observation of social customs and cultural traits like cooking, language, child-rearing, the treatment of illness, and religious and spiritual beliefs, but the sexual intimacies created by the endemic white male exploitation of enslaved black females. 31 Hogsheads were a type of barrel commonly used to ship colonial merchandise, including plantationproduced goods. The failed sugar planter William Beckford noted that “The common size of a sugarhogshead is forty-two inches in height, and thirty-six across the head”, and would hold about “fifteen hundred weight” of sugar. However, according to Lee and Barringer, a hogshead weighed between 800 and 1,500 pounds. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: with Remarks upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane, through the different Seasons of the Year, and Chiefly considered in a Picturesque Point of View; Also observations and Reflections upon what would probably be the Consequences of an Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and of the Emancipation of the Slaves, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Printed for T. and J. Egerton Whitehall, 1790), vol. 2, pp. 80–81; Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 321. 32 This quote is taken from the section of Clark’s discussion of plate 10, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board. 33 Although the animals could be visually mistaken for horses, in his discussion of plate 8, Exterior of CuringHouse and Stills, Clark mentions that mules and cattle were used to haul sugar and rum to places of shipment. The lower and wider profiles of the animals in the distance in front of a second wain appear to represent cattle.

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34 After hogsheads of sugar had been cured, they were sealed and a plantation mark applied prior to shipment. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 321. 35 Strategically placed wooden beams known as spars or skids were attached to the gunwales or sides of the vessel and the droger tilted towards shore to assist with the loading of the hogshead, which was then rolled into the boat as the wave recoiled. Clark explained the specific processes and names in his text on plate 10, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board. 36 In his discussion of plate 8, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills, Clark noted that after the hogsheads were “headed up” or sealed by the coopers, the overseer marked them with the names of the estate and proprietor. 37 Clark earlier began this pattern of representing the binary of white male intellectual labour and black male physical labour in plate 8, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills. In it he represented several black male slaves on a landing, positioned in poses of exertion. They are rendered in diagonal stances, exerting pressure to create enough force to move heavy hogsheads onto an awaiting scale readied by more black male slaves. In the midst of their physical efforts, a white man in more refined dress examines a document. 38 Clark mentioned the skill and dexterity needed to load hogsheads in this manner in his discussion of plate 10, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board. 39 From centre to left, one droger is being loaded like the scene in the immediate foreground, further to the right another one has set out for the awaiting ships, and finally, at the far right, a hogshead is in the process of being loaded by pulleys onto a single-masted ship. 40 Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao, in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), p. 3. 41 Clark names the cluster of buildings as windmill, boiling-house, curing-house, and stills. 42 After crystallization, sugar was packed into hogsheads and stored in the curing house for five or six weeks. During this process, the molasses that accumulated at the bottom was collected and used to make rum. The rum was made by combining, fermenting, and distilling a mixture of molasses, brackish water, and the scum left over from the boiling process. After distillation, the rum was deposited in butts by slave coopers. If the manager determined that the alcohol level was too low (“low wines”), it was redistilled. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 321. 43 Lewis became a Jamaican sugar planter by inheritance since both his father and maternal grandfather had been born on the island. Raised in England, he became famous for his Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), published when he was only 20. Lewis kept a journal during his two trips to Jamaica, trips made in the wake of his father’s death upon which he inherited two plantations passed down from both sides of his family; Cornwall in the west and Hordley in the east. The precise dates of his visits were 1 January to 31 March 1816 and 23 January to 2 May 1818. He set sail for Jamaica in 1815 aboard the ship Sir Godfrey Webster captained by a man named Boyes. The ship sailed from Gravesend at six o’clock on 11 November 1815, spotting Antigua by sunset on 24 December and Montserrat and Nevis on the morning of 25 December, and passing Porto Rico (sic). The ship then passed St. Domingo on 28 December and its passengers finally sighted Jamaica on 30 December, disembarking at Black River on 1 January 1816. On the return voyage, Lewis departed on 1 April 1816, arriving in England on Saturday 1 June at nine in the morning. During his second voyage, Lewis departed on the same boat with the same captain on Wednesday 5 November 1817, arriving in Black River, Jamaica on Friday 23 January 1818. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 5, 6, 32, 33, 34, 36, 148, 195, 196, 202. 44 Journal of Peter Simmonds of Voyage from Falmouth to Jamaica in HM Packet Mutine, Lieutenant Paule Commr, October 1831, 19 × 23 cm, JOD/35, Caird Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Simmonds. provided detailed observations on the ship’s path and both expected and actual times between key sites. Leaving Falmouth on 12 October 1831, he commented on 30 October that it was about three weeks from Madeira to Barbados and a further week from Barbados to Jamaica. On 31 October we can deduce that the ship neared Madeira since he had “an excellent opportunity of sketching Madeira”. That the trip took longer than imagined was a point of consternation for Simmonds who documented a conversation of 7 November when the captain claimed to have previously made the voyage to Barbados in 28 days; although on this occasion Simmonds reported, “here we have been

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Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica very nearly that time and have come very little more than halfway”. On 10 November he reported that, due to the slowness of the ship’s progress, they began to ration water since they were not supposed to dock anywhere before reaching Barbados. The pace increased on 21 November when he wrote of “an excellent day” with the ship travelling at seven miles an hour most of the day. Barbados was spotted at 7:30 pm on 24 November and he went ashore with Mr. Olive to Mr. Cavans’ (spelling unclear) at 10:30 am two days later on 26 November. Noting that St. Vincent was 92 miles off, that evening they departed at 7:00 pm with a passenger bound for that island. Arriving at St. Vincent on 27 November, Simmonds noted that they were to pass a group of islands known as the Grenadines as they continued. On the 28th he observed that Jamaica was 820 miles away. Simmonds began to pack his belongings on 2 December, spotting the high land of St. Domingo. On 3 December he arrived at Port Royal, Jamaica and by the 4th was in the capital, Kingston. Simmonds also captured details of marine life, noting that a gunner caught a flying fish on 15 November and that he had spotted a group of porpoises under the bow on the morning of 22 November. My basis for this particular order of the plates is the bound copy at the British Library, London, UK. This layout is one of several since Hakewill’s prints were initially published in a set of seven folios of three plates each, most likely in an unbound format, which allowed the reader flexibility in their interaction with the work and the juxtaposition of image with text. As Kriz has noted in the much earlier case of Sloane’s Voyage to . . . Jamaica, the pages were secured with stubs and unstitched, allowing for the book to be laid flat, creating wide margins which could accommodate the reader’s notes. Boxer, “Foreword”; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 13–14. This method of publication has also led to various omissions and anomalies in existing volumes. For instance, David Boxer cites a rare “slave insert”, a sheet regarding the condition of the enslaved in Jamaica, that was inserted in some copies of Folio 2, but which is missing from most bound volumes. Boxer, “Foreword”. Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 41. Tim Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “ Picturesque Jamaica”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, p. 342. For instance, Lewis documented in his journal that he had sailed about 30 miles east on a cutter from Black River, St Elizabeth to Savannah la Mar, Westmoreland on 2 January 1816 in about five hours. The cutter departed Black River at four o’clock and arrived at Savannah la Mar just after nine o’clock. Lewis embarked upon this trip to inspect his property, the estate called Cornwall. Although the two settlements were both positioned on the south coast, inland travel by carriage would have been much more time-consuming, and arguably perilous, than on the cutter. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 41. B.W. Higman, “James Hakewill: A Biographical Note”, in James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990). Higman notes that Hakewill had previously used the camera lucida during his travels in Italy. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 161. Kriz notes that The Yale Center for the Study of British Art owns several Hakewill watercolours of the estates of Watson Tyler. Boxer, “Foreword”. Six of Hakewill’s watercolours of estates are now owned by the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, US. The watercolours are mounted on thick paper and bound into an album, making any possible inscriptions on verso inaccessible. The provenance of the album is unknown. E-mail, Lisa Thornell-Gargiulo, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Department of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art, to author, 28 July 2014. While St Thomas in the East and St Mary’s were depicted in Hakewill’s book, Lyssons Estate and Llanrumny Estate were not. Furthermore, no images from Hanover were included. Of his 21 prints, the largest group from one parish was four from St Mary’s, followed by three each from Kingston, St Catherine, and St James. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, p. 12. Middlesex was comprised of the parishes of St. Catherine, St. John, St. Dorothy, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, Clarendon, Vere, Manchester, St. Mary, and St. Ann. Surry was made up of Kingston, Port Royal, St. Andrew, St. David, St. Thomas-in-the-East, Portland, and

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St. George. And finally, Cornwall included St. Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, St. James, and Trelawny. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, p. 12. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 4. Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p. Hakewill’s unpublished images of coffee plantations included View Mount Zion Coffee Plantation, St. Andrew’s. His unpublished pens included Batchelor’s Hall, Penn and Admiral’s Penn the property of C. Arcedeckne in St Thomas in the East, two views from Shotover Penn created on the property of W. Bryan, Sir S.H. Clarke’s two pens Cacoon Castle Penn, Hanover and Mahogany Hall Penn, Shettlewood Penn, Hanover, from the property of C.R. Ellis, two views of Sir Alexander Grant’s Charlemont Penn, St. Thomas in the Vale, three views of Thomas Hibbert’s Agualta Vale Penn, Lord Holland’s Sweet River Penn, Westmoreland, William Shand’s Hopewell Penn, St Ann’s, two views of F.G. Smith’s Goshen Penn, St. Elizabeth’s, and John Tharps’ Top-Hill Penn and Windsor Penn. James Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston: The Mill Press Limited, 1990), n.p. Gerald Finley, George Heriot: Postmaster-Painter of the Canadas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 5. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 37. William James Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Present Time; Including an Account of its Trade and Agriculture; Sketches of the Manners, Habits, and Customs of all Classes of its Inhabitants; and a Narrative of the Progress of Religion and Education in the Island (London: Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, EC, 1873), p. 161. Gardner also claims that there were some 600 plantations growing provisions (that is, yam, potato, corn), another 600 pimento walks, 8 indigo farms (although soon abandoned), and 150 coffee plantations (p. 161). B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 1995), p. 14. Gilbert Mathison, Esq., Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1811). Mathison was an absentee planter who returned to Jamaica after an absence of 13 years, whereupon he published this book. The book was priced at “5s”. However, Lewis, who arrived in Jamaica on 1 January 1816, complained in his journal on 25 March that his slaves’ productivity slowed significantly upon his arrival, dwindling to 23 hogsheads after two weeks and to 13 “during the last week”. Labelling them “perverse beings”, he surmised that they rewarded his indulgences and protection with ingratitude, utterly failing to account for the overproduction, through force and abuse, which resulted in the “regular” output during his absence. Indeed, according to Cooper, slaves held on the plantations of absentee landlords suffered more due to the despotism of the overseer whom he described as an “absolute master”, a cruel combination of “lawgiver, accuser and judge”. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 141; Rev. Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824), p. 19. Kriz, citing the work of Higman, notes a steady growth in absenteeism amongst the planter class in Jamaica at this time, from 30 per cent in 1775 to 80 per cent at the time of emancipation. B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1988), p. 17; cited in Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 248, note #11. The first major hotel in Jamaica seems to have been that of the Scottish newspaper publisher James Gall. Built on Harbour Street in downtown Kingston in 1870, Gall erected the Myrtle Bank Hotel using the clear spring to construct a “sanitarium for invalids and tourists”. As a way to attract clientele, Gall also referred to his establishment as “The American Hotel”. See Krista A. Thompson, “Diving into the Racial Waters of Beach Space in Jamaica: Tropical Modernity and the Myrtle Bank Hotel’s Pool”, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 205–6. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 103. On the issue of patronage and map-making, Harley astutely noted how the cartographer’s lack of independence from his patron led inevitably to “deliberate distortions” for political purposes. If we replace map with landscape and patron with planter, we can begin to deduce the types of political pressure under which Hakewill must have laboured when conceptualizing and realizing his illustrated book.

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69 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 60. 70 According to Cundall, the fear of rebellions or outbreaks was ever present and a central reason why the many planters were wary of the colony’s 2nd West Indian Regiment of Negro troops raised in 1797. This regiment was considered to be “incompatible with our safety and pregnant with the most fatal calamities”. Governor Nugent had agreed to remove the regiment if the House of Assembly consented to support 5,000 instead of 3,000 British troops. However, his offer was voted down by a margin of 24 to 6 and the black troops remained. The military was systematically hierarchized according to race. As Cundall has noted, “The Kingston regiment of foot militia had two battalions of artillery and grenadiers, besides six companies to each battalion of light infantry – the 2nd company was composed of Jews, the 3rd of mulattoes, the 4th of quadroons, and the 5th and 6th of blacks – all officered by white men.” Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for The Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), pp. xxx, xxxii, xli. 71 John Michael Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 11. 72 Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect, p. 7. 73 Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect, p. 1. 74 Quilley has indicated that in the earlier period when Beckford published his book, the late eighteenth century, there was not only a scarcity of professional artists in the Caribbean, but a lack of suitable patronage due to the absenteeism of many British planters. Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth-Century”, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830, eds. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 107. 75 Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations”, p. 108. As Quilley argues, the conceptualization of the Creole gentleman planter as the “real” West Indian obviously worked to displace Jamaican indigenous populations, enslaved Africans, mixed-race people, and other populations from belonging. 76 Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 2. 77 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 157–9. 78 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 159. 79 “Appendix 9: Bermuda Royal Gazette (A Defence of Mary Prince’s slaveowners, Mr. & Mrs. John Wood), Hamilton, November 22, 1831, The Anti-Slavery Society, and the West India Colonists”, in Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 157. 80 “Appendix 9: Bermuda Royal Gazette”, pp. 152–3. 81 Cynric Williams, “Preface”, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826), n.p. 82 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 56–7. Lewis’ claim of cleanliness is outrageous. Given the practice of slave clothing or cloth rations in Jamaica, most slaves would have possessed very little clothing and laundering would have been reserved for weekends when a brief reprieve from field labour was possible. The arduousness of plantation labour tasks like planting, cutting, bundling, and hauling cane meant that clothing would have customarily been dirtied not only with sweat, but also with soil, plant matter, and other substances, especially the noted white clothing. 83 Rev. R. Bickell, The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts, with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), p. 54. 84 Trevor Burnard, “The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer”, Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 184. 85 Elizabeth A. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994), p. 375. See 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, eds. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). 86 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 30. 87 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, pp. 29–30. 88 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 121.

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89 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 121. 90 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 60. 91 Lucille Mathurin Mair, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 390. 92 The name Llanrumny (Llanrumney) comes from the Welsh Llanrhymni, a region east of Cardiff, Wales. Also known as Llanrumney Hall, it was the birthplace of Sir Henry Morgan in 1635. For the capture of Panama in 1671, Morgan became the deputy governor of Jamaica and was knighted by King Charles II. Taylor’s plantation, depicted by Hakewill, would appear to be the same St. Mary’s property that was bequeathed by Morgan to his wife. Keith Phillip Jones, “The Hidden History of Llanrumney”, The Guardian, 24 June 2010, at http://www.theguardian.com/cardiff/2010/jun/24/llanrumney-festival-andhistory (date of last access 12 August 2014). 93 Sir Simon Richard Brissett Taylor, the nephew of the senior Simon Taylor, was the first heir. With his premature death in 1815 at the age of 30, the fortune passed to George. The elder Simon Taylor is discussed extensively in Chapter 7. Courtney J. Martin, Gillian Forrester, and Tim Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, Catalogue Entry #72, Lyssons Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (c. 1820–21), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, p. 346. 94 Tim Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, Catalogue Entry #43, Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, p. 322. 95 Catherine Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire in the Era of Emancipation”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 16. 96 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xl. 97 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Engerman summarizes the Jamaican population as follows in 1830: whites 18,903 (5 per cent), slaves 319,074 (84 per cent), and free persons of colour 40,073 (11 per cent), for a total of 378,050. Engerman, “A Population History of the Caribbean”, p. 496, Table 11.4, “Caribbean population, 1830”. 98 Susan E. Klepp and Roderick A. McDonald, “Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentle Woman Encounter Jamaica’s Slave Society, 1801–1805”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 58, no. 3 (July 2001), p. 649. Klepp and McDonald give the population of whites in 1805 as 20,000, and of slaves as 308,755. The rest of the population consisted mainly of free blacks and coloureds. Tadman contends that some 750,000 Africans were forcibly migrated to Jamaica over the course of the Trans Atlantic slave trade, but that a much-reduced population of 300,000 existed at the time of abolition in 1838. He defines this downward rate as a natural decrease of 20 per cent per decade seen in Caribbean and Brazilian populations. See Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas”, American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 5 (December 2000), p. 1534. 99 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, p. 39. 100 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 65. Lewis went on to explain that the Jamaican Negroes were comparable to the English day labourers (p. 66). “The Lethe” refers to a river in the underworld to be crossed at death in Virgil’s Aeneid, book 6. Terry, “Introduction”, in Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 277. 101 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 65. 102 Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 94. 103 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 125. 104 A.E. Furness, “George Hibbert and the Defence of West Indian Slavery”, Jamaican Historical Review, vol. 5 (1965), p. 67; also cited in Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire”, p. 18. 105 Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaica Creole (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 13. 106 Richard Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution”, Origins of the Black Atlantic, eds. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2010). The insurrection was planned for July with the rebels plotting to take advantage of the departure of the military from Fort Lucea, Hanover (p. 30). The overseer Thomas Thistlewood noted this revolt in his journal. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 140.

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107 Andrew O’Shaughnessy, “Redcoats and Slaves in the British Caribbean”, The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, eds. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), p. 118. Takyi’s War (1760–61), also referred to as Takyi’s Rebellion or Revolt, is named for its leader, an enslaved Coromantee man who reputedly mobilized most of the Coromantees across Jamaica. It began on Easter Day (7 April) 1760 when a group of about 150 slaves seized gunpowder and muskets from Port Maria before gathering support as they moved south. At the time St Mary’s had the largest concentration of Coromantee slaves and the fewest whites. Although Takyi was quickly captured and executed, a guerrilla war involving thousands of slaves ensued for months. The rebellion was not quelled until October 1761 when 400 slave rebels had been killed in battle, 100 executed and about 500 deported to British Honduras (Belize). According to Peter Lindebaugh and Marcus Rediker, these deportees went on to participate in the other uprisings in their new residence (1765, 1768, 1773). Furthermore, the rebels reportedly killed about 60 whites and 60 more free blacks and people of colour. The rebellion prompted new legislation and prohibitions against Obeah, the practice of which had been central to the uprising. Diana Paton, “Tacky’s Rebellion (1760–1761)”, The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez, vol. 2, L–Z (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 623. Takyi is also referred to as Tacky by Shepherd, Lindebough and Rediker and as Tackey by Burnard. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, p. 140; Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd, Saving Souls: The Struggle to End the Transatlantic Trade in Africans (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2007), p. 35; Peter Lindebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The ManyHeaded Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 224. 108 The overseer Thomas Thistlewood noted both the 1765 (St Mary’s) and 1766 (Westmoreland) uprisings in his journal, stating that he participated in a slave rebel hunt during the latter. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, p. 140. 109 Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 144. Demerara was present-day Guyana. For more about these slave revolts, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 followed these rebellions, during the period of British slavery. On 11 October a group of blacks, led by Paul Bogle, entered Morant Bay. Protesting an unpopular court decision, their clash with the volunteer militia resulted in 18 deaths and 31 people being injured. Declaring martial law, Governor Edward John Eyre oversaw the execution of 439 people, including the “spokesman for formerly enslaved Jamaicans”, the coloured man George William Gordon. Eyre also ordered the flogging of more than 600 people. Many others lost their lives as the British military restored their dominance by torching houses and terrorizing the masses. Tim Barringer, “Emancipation and its Aftermath, 1838–65”, § “1865 and the Morant Bay Rebellion”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 536, 539. 110 With regard to vigilante justice and the terrorism directed at black populations by whites, the Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth overseer Thomas Thistlewood recounted seeing the body of a male slave from a neighbouring estate, decapitated and strung up in a tree for the crime of drawing a knife on a white man. Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 65. Abuse of the enslaved also took the form of pre-emptive violence and strategic terror that were casually inflicted by the planter class in the Caribbean. In the former case, reporting on Cuban slavery in 1840, David Turnbull surmised that it was a common practice amongst the “mistress of many a great family in Havana” to send some slaves monthly “to the whipping post” as “periodic advertisements” which aided in the management of a slave population considered prone to “vice and idleness”. And in the latter case, castration, dismemberment, and execution of black male slaves became normative in mid-eighteenth-century Barbados to deter enslaved black males from having sexual relations with white women. Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 666–7. 111 Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 165. 112 Matthew Lewis described the worst of the Negro diseases as “the cocoa-bay”, an illness deemed to be hereditary and contagious that lurked in the blood eventually resulting in “offensive sores, attended with extreme debility”. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 127.

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113 It is important to note also that the “choice” of the enslaved to put in more time in the shell-blow-grounds obviously cut into the time allotted for their dinner and much-needed rest. 114 Cooper, Facts, p. 5. 115 Lewis also noted that the conch shell was blown to signal people in the event of a fire. Known as the fireshell, the enslaved were expected to respond with assistance even if the fire was on a neighbouring plantation. Lewis, Journal of West India Proprietor, pp. 47, 276. 116 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 127. 117 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 47. 118 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 48. 119 Rev. R. Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1830), vol. 2, pp. 354–6; cited in Thomas Pringle, “Supplement to the History of Mary Prince: By the Original Editor, Thomas Pringle”, in Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 122. 120 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 13. 121 Cooper, Facts, p. 53. 122 Cooper, Facts, p. 5. 123 The Thistlewood diary consists of 37 volumes housed in Monson MSS, Lincoln County Records Office, England (Monson 31/1–37). Perhaps because of his uncle’s influence, Thomas’ nephew John Thistlewood, also kept a diary of his time in Jamaica which he spent working as a bookkeeper for 18 months under his uncle, from 1763 when he arrived, until 1765 when he died in a boating accident. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 170. 124 Thistlewood, from Lincolnshire, England, arrived in Jamaica on 24 April 1750. He spent the remainder of his life in the tropics, dying in 1786 at the age of 66 on a small agricultural property called Breadnut Island. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 163. Thistlewood began his post at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth in early July 1750. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67. Despite his lifestyle of dangerous (although socially normal) sexual promiscuity, Thistlewood’s death at 66 would have been considered old age since, as Burnard and Follett argue, the average number of years that white immigrants survived after migration to Jamaica was 13. Trevor Burnard and Richard Follett, “Caribbean Slavery, British Anti-Slavery, and The Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease”, Historical Journal, vol. 55, issue 2 (June 2012), p. 444. 125 It is of course extremely difficult to access and analyze the inner worlds of the enslaved in large part because, initially fluent in African languages and later barred from European ideals of literacy (reading and writing), Africans were unable to leave substantial personal traces of their lives. Furthermore, the nature and extent of their labour meant that they did not possess the leisure time to devote to things like journaling. However, cases that involved Thistlewood demonstrate the extent to which the enslaved may have been able to extend forgiveness towards a white oppressor. In one case, a mulatto driver at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth named Dick recounted to Thistlewood the occurrences of the pen a year after the overseer had left. This entry in Thistlewood’s diary was dated 28 July 1752. This exchange is remarkable since Thistlewood had ordered Dick whipped with 300 lashes shortly after his arrival in 1750. In another case, in March 1753, Guy, a slave penkeeper, called upon Thistlewood at his new residence some 20 miles away “to renew acquaintance”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 72 and footnote #50. 126 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 65. By August the rations were irregularly increased to two quarts of flour due to the “want” of the newly acquired slaves. Vineyard Pen slaves supplemented their mainly vegetable diet with protein sources like “fish, crabs, ducks, pork, the odd alligator, and grubs”. But Thistlewood had to extend rations to other slaves (six men and five women) due to the insufficiency of their provision grounds in August and September 1750 (p. 69). The herring did not provide a significant amount of protein but was instead used by slaves to “season” their provisions. Bickell noted that besides the yams, cocoas, and plantain that the slaves had to grow themselves in their provision grounds, they were usually also given poor-quality salt herring, and at Christmas on most estates and plantations, an extra allowance of salt cod which they boiled in an iron pot or roasted with vegetables. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 9. On Cornwall, Matthew Lewis’ plantation in Westmoreland, he noted that all of his slaves (even the domestic ones) maintained provision grounds and were expected to feed themselves, but that he provided “allowances of salt fish, salt pork, etc.”. Lewis wrote this entry in his journal on Sunday 7 January 1816, just six days after his arrival on 1 January. As such, it is possible that he was not well apprised of the protein rations of the enslaved people on his estate and perhaps

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Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica over-estimated the amount and type of meat and fish provided. This seems to be the case, since upon his second visit in 1818 he mentioned that the usual ration was herrings and also recorded that at Christmas, “it would go near to create a rebellion if they did not receive a certain portion of salt fish”. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 54, 209. Cooper explained that overseers often punished the entire gang of slaves by denying privileges like fish until someone took responsibility for a real or imagined offence. Cooper, Facts, p. 52. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 65. Some of the ailments of slaves would surely not have been only a matter of the lack of food, but the consumption of spoiled food. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 64. At the time of the publication of his article in 1995, Morgan contended that the only other known estimate of the frequency of whippings was Bennett Barrow’s nineteenth-century plantation in Louisiana, upon which a slave was whipped every five days. Firstly, as Morgan admits, the number of lashes and frequency of whippings at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth may be flawed since they are based solely on the overseer Thomas Thistlewood’s data. Secondly, I must contest Morgan’s idea that the ability of a slave to return to work was a significant measure of the “harshness” of the punishment. He argues that, since no slaves besides the mulatto driver Dick (who received 300 lashes and was laid up for nine days) “missed even a day’s work after a whipping”, the severity of the whippings is in question. In so doing he disregarded the other motivating factors for slaves to return to work, like the imminent threat of more violence, regulation, and discipline. If indeed Thistlewood punished most often for inefficient or shoddy work, being laid up, even if due to the overseer’s brutality, was a situation that slaves must have known might provoke further physical abuse. Furthermore, given that the working lives of slaves on pens were more independent, and given the ubiquity of slave resistance, it is more than conceivable that slaves would return to work in the strictest sense of the word, immediately after a whipping, but do so in a clandestine way which allowed them to rest and heal, while aided by fellow slaves and away from the watchful eyes (as much as possible) of the drivers and overseers. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 62. Specific slaves seem to have been targeted, with five slaves being whipped twice, and two, three times. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 62. Morgan notes that the majority of whippings were between 50 and 100 lashings. Cooper, Facts, p. 18. Cooper further noted that the “reasons” for punishing a slave were not only disobedience or neglect in the form of actions, but supposed insolence. A look or a word might provoke punishment as much as “desertion, theft or contumacy”. Significantly, a complaint lodged with an attorney often resulted in further punishment (p. 18). The white male employees on a plantation often included an overseer, bookkeepers, carpenters, coopers, and masons. As Cooper noted, each planter was obligated to employ a certain number of whites on the plantation according to the number of Negroes. Failure to keep up the numbers resulted in a monetary penalty. This practice was enforced to ensure the maintenance of the militia. Cooper, Facts, p. 23. Where guests are concerned, in one case Thistlewood documented that on 12 March 1755, while he was in the employ of John Cope (the owner of Egypt Estate), Cope returned with six men who gangraped a house slave named Eve. Although he did not intervene in the rape, when Eve ran away after the ordeal, Thistlewood did not punish her. I disagree with Burnard who argues that, in regard to Thistlewood’s ability to report or discipline Cope, “it was hardly possible for him to do so”. The “impossibility” lay only in Thistlewood’s willingness to align himself with the white male rapists at all costs in an effort to preserve his position upon the estate. He too, of course, was a repeat offender of sexual crimes, just one of a different sort. Late in May 1756 Thistlewood intervened on an occasion of a similar sexual attack involving “old Sarah” and the two men, Paul Stevens and Thomas Adams. The men also burnt Sarah and threatened to burn down her hut. Although his memory of the torture of Eve may have prompted him to act, Thistlewood was also concerned with the men’s audacity in attempting to destroy estate property. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 177. Thistlewood’s comments indicate that what may appear by our contemporary standards as wildly promiscuous sexual exploits were typical amongst the white men in Jamaica. I single out middle-class men like Thistlewood, and upper-class men like the sugar planter John Cope as the most heinous culprits of sexual exploitation and promiscuity, since it was they who had the fullest unimpeded access to the most vulnerable females (enslaved black women) who made ready victims due to their inability to access legal or social redress as targets of sexual violence. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 169.

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136 Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 172. Cooper disclosed that girls as young as 14 were used as “instruments of pleasure” within the context of Jamaican slavery. Cooper, Facts, p. 42. 137 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 76. 138 Cooper, Facts, p. 36. 139 Thistlewood’s case, which by his own account was not extraordinary, demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of ruling-class white men in Jamaica concerning the control and policing of female sexuality in the wake of their own licentiousness. Of the 111 women, he documented having sex with 71 only once. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 432. 140 Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 173. Another reason why white men moved to Jamaica was that it offered men like Thistlewood “dazzling opportunities” to make their fortunes. Thistlewood had arrived in Jamaica in 1750 with less than 15 pounds. But upon his death in 1786 at the age of 66, he was worth over 3,000 pounds sterling. By the end of his life, Thistlewood was no longer overseeing the estates of others, but had become a moderately wealthy planter in his own right, owning 34 slaves, in the sugarrich parish of Westmoreland. His political appointments included serving as a justice and lieutenant of the fort at Savannah la Mar. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 432. As regards a specific desire for cross-racial sexual adventurism and gratification, not much has changed in the way that white men (and women) imagine the sexual possibilities of the Caribbean. Denise Brennan argues that white sex tourists, mainly from Canada and Europe, flock to sexscapes in the developing world, which facilitate their racialized colonial fantasies. She argues that these fantasies arise from associations between nationality and race “rooted in colonial racist discourses, and, more recently, are fuelled by media depictions and Internet discussions and photos.” Denise Brennan, What’s Love got to do with it?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 33. 141 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 105. Importantly, “unblushingly” here indicates that this lifestyle did not prompt the sentiment of shame. According to John Waller, white male sexual preference for black and mixed-race women was attributable to co-habitation with coloured women “at a very early age” under their mothers’ directions. John Augustine Waller, A Voyage to the West Indies: Containing Various Observations Made during a Residence in Barbadoes, and Several of the Leeward Islands; with some Notices and Illustrations Relative to the City of Paramarabo, in Surinam (London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1820), p. 19; cited in Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. 142 Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, pp. 433–4. 143 When the English priest Thomas Gage travelled to Mexico in the seventeenth century, he noted that the combination of the light attire and enticing carriage of the “blackamoors and mulattoes” promoted Spaniards “even of a better sort” to “disdain their wives for them”. Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World (1648; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), pp. 68, 73; cited in Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’: Race, Clothing and Identity in The Americas (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)”, History Workshop Journal, no. 52 (August 2001), p. 178. 144 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 665. Beckles’ source was A. F. Fenwick, The Fate of the Fenwicks: Letters to Mary Hays, 1798–1828 (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 170. 145 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 665. Cooper shared similar concerns, claiming that he wrote in part to warn parents from sending their sons and wards “across the Atlantic to be plunged into this dreadful sink of vice and abomination. What fortune can be a sufficient compensation for the loss of health and character?” Cooper, Facts, p. 37. 146 Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, pp. 383–4. 147 Cooper, Facts, p. 9. 148 John Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological, ed. Charles Annandale (London: Blackie and Son, 1884), vol. 4, p. 619. 149 Bickell argued that Jamaica had a population of seven or eight thousand white men, nearly all of whom lived in this “wicked state”. But he took note of class distinctions. While he saw little excuse for the wealthy men who could easily provide for a white wife and family, he commiserated with the situation of overseers and bookkeepers who, he claimed, did not make enough money to support a white family and were supposedly often fired if they married, due to the objections of the planters. The rationale for discouraging overseers from marriage was that their domestic bliss would distract them from their work on the plantations and that their wives and children would lead to greater costs for the planters. This argument assumes that the mixed-race concubines and their children would demand and be offered less attention, time, and financial support than a white family. It is interesting that the Rev. Bickell’s

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Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica discussion of marriage implied that he was talking of that between white men and white women. As concerned as he was for the displacement of the coloured family, he did not suggest that white men marry their coloured concubines. Only the white wife would turn the “abode of profligacy and infidelity” into one of virtue, morality, and religion and the “degraded and shunned mistress” could give way to “the respectable, and acknowledged, and unobtrusive wife”. Therefore, the black women in this scenario are disposable. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 107, 108, 109, 223–4. Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica”, Journal of Social History, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), p. 64. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, pp. 163–4. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 163. The sexual positions he indicated (for instance, standing backwards) and locations in which the sex took place in particular mark the type of sex that white men were able to engage in with black females as socially inappropriate if not abhorrent when compared to the more traditional sexual practices deemed suitable for the white male/white female marital bed. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 169. The blasé nature of Thistlewood’s notation of his own sexual contact with female slaves starkly contrasts with his outrage at hearing of one Mrs Cocker, a white woman who reportedly “made free with one of Michigan’s Negro fellows!” (p. 175). Of course, Mrs Cocker would have been socially ostracized for her willing sexual contact with a black man. The normality of Thistlewood’s predatory sexual behaviour is also evidenced in the tone of the diary, which Burnard describes as lacking in “self-consciousness”. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 168. The strategic disenfranchisement of African, Irish, and mixed-race or coloured males in Barbados has been carefully examined in Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). Beckles has noted, for instance, that Irish indentured female servants were initially made to work sideby-side with enslaved Africans of both sexes when they were first introduced as labour in the colony of Barbados. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’”, p. 230. For instance, some black male slave “husbands” may have channelled their anguish at seeing their “wives” raped and sexually brutalized into anger, which they misdirected at their already victimized wives and children. The suffering for the children may have been worse if they were fathered outside of the relationship, especially by a white male rapist. This familial target was “safer” than directing their feelings outwards towards the real culprits, the white male predators who wielded the power of life and death over them and their families. Bergner is referring to Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself ([1845]; New York: Penguin, 1986). Gwen Bergner, “Myths of Masculinity: The Oedipus Complex and Douglass’s 1845 Narrative”, The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 247. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 49; cited in Bergner, “Myths of Masculinity”, p. 247. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 66. These were the incidents that purportedly took place at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth during 1750 and 1751. Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (July 1990), p. 120. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 66. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 662. For instance, according to Morgan, Thistlewood recorded on 4 May 1751 paying a Vineyard Pen slave named Dianah one bit for sex, presumably because she was the wife of another man, Adam the gardener. The currency, which Gardner spelled with a double “t” (bitt), was valued at fourpence-halfpenny sterling. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67. Gardner, A History of Jamaica, p. 167. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, pp. 176–7. In one case in February 1753, the enslaved female Clara who was absent all afternoon was punished with sex “by the Coffee tree” upon her return. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 181. For an enslaved person who had little access to high-quality protein, the prospect of a half a pig would have been a huge temptation. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67, see footnote #37. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 65.

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171 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 65. This exchange between Thistlewood, Adam, and Dianah took place on 20, 22, and 25 August 1750 (see footnote #33). Abuse and neglect from slave “husbands” also seemed rather commonplace, with Thistlewood documenting that slave men would beat their wives after the women drank too much bisange (perhaps a drink made from the kola nut or cane juice), after which they would appear as if they had just had sex (p. 71). However, since slave husbands suffered extreme forms of psychic abuse from witnessing the constant sexual and physical violation of their female kin by white men and women, we must consider what outlets they possessed for their anguish, sorrow, and rage. Since retaliation against the master class meant certain and swift punishment or even death, to the enslaved black man, one of the only viable outlets, however abhorrent, for his aggression would have been the further abuse and victimization of his black wife. By “viable” here, I mean a course of action that might not result in the slave man being punished. 172 Thistlewood recorded on 4 May 1751 paying Dianah one bit for sex. Although the exchange between Thistlewood, Dianah, and Adam occurred in August 1750, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he extracted sex from Dianah (or some other kind of payment for his “kindness”) on more than one occasion. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67. 173 Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 183. 174 Thistlewood documented having sex with a Creole named Hago (a house slave) 15 times, and two Africans named Marina and Chrishe (both field hands) 14 and 13 times respectively, all within the span of his oneyear employ at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth. How he chose his victims might be indicative of his ability to gauge their vulnerability and the likelihood that they would acquiesce. Within his careful documentation of 13 victims, the African females included details of ethnicities and African names, which likely indicated the recent nature of their arrivals. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 59, 60, 67 and see notes #25, 26, 37, and 39. 175 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 66. 176 That this incident supposedly took place on 19 August 1750, a Sunday (widely recognized in a devotedly Christian colony as the Sabbath), and only four months after his arrival, is evidence of the boldness of his sexual misdeeds and his personal lack of adherence to the pervasive Christian beliefs of the colony. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 169. Indeed, Morgan has noted that Thistlewood reserved Sundays for sex with women from neighbouring estates. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67. For details of Marina’s and Juba’s ethnicity and slave status see Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 60, 67, and footnote #26. 177 Thistlewood and Marina lived together from August 1750 until he left his post in September 1751. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 172. 178 Burnard has noted that Thistlewood frequently gave clothing and food to his regular victims and money to the others. Given these factors, Hago, Marina, and Chrishe likely derived the greatest material “benefit” from Thistlewood’s exploitation. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 169. Marina (also known as Waree), a “Congo”, was Thistlewood’s first sexual encounter at Vineyard Pen. The incident took place on 5 August 1750, one month after he assumed his post and was followed by 12 more encounters over the following month. She became his favourite as indicated by his bestowal of favours small (clothing, household items, food, etc.) and large, including a two-room house (18 × 7 feet/5.50 × 2.15 metres, half the size of his own), which he had built for her, paid for, outfitted, and even participated in setting up by hanging a book shelf and setting up a bed. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67 and footnote #39. Further evidence of his “affection” for Marina is indicated in his behaviour towards her on the eve of his departure as well as his parting gifts. In the former case, Thistlewood provided her with four bottles of rum, sugar, beef, fungee, and pepperpot for her housewarming on the Saturday before he left. It is telling that he joined in the festivities, or at least watched, commenting on the way that the slaves danced a congo, sang, and drummed, and one Charles even swallow fire and, perhaps displaying his superior masculinity, stab himself repeatedly “with the edge of a bill, very hard” without harm. In the later case, he gave Marina “thread, an old cap, two old handkerchiefs, a white shirt, two pairs of old trousers, a yard of cloth, a basket, a tin roaster, wild cinnamon, wax light, a form, a little stool, a cupboard that he had hung for her in her new house, a chest for her clothes, a barrel for her corn, a barrel of beef brine, a piece of beef, potatoes, three bottles of rum, sugar and butter.” On the Monday morning of his departure, he added another bottle of rum and a water pail to the gifts. All of this transpired between 6 and 8 July 1751. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 72–3 and footnote #51. Fungee, also known as pone, bitte, and moasher, was a Central

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Imaging slavery in Antigua and Jamaica African word for corn or cassava meal “boiled up thick to eat instead of bread” (p. 70). According to Gardner, pepperpot was “that strange compound, possible only to a native cook, of fresh fish, shrimps, plantains, ockro, and a variety of vegetables unknown in Europe, all strongly seasoned by the condiment which gives its name, but which can only be enjoyed by those who are well acclimatized.” Gardner, A History of Jamaica, p. 167. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 59–60 and footnote #25. Phibbah, with whom Thistlewood had an extended relationship, may also have had something to do with Juba’s removal to the field. Thistlewood documented punishing Marina on 12 January and 13 February 1751 when she was beaten for “bad behaviour”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67 and footnote #39. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 176. That Romulus, Phibbah’s “husband”, lived on a neighbouring estate, obviously facilitated Thistlewood’s access to Romulus’ “wife”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 59. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 170. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 104. The use of the word “take”, although probably not intended as such by the author, indicates the possibility of force on the part of the white male in securing the sexual and other services of his black female concubine. Bickell stated that these relationships were normal, not at all scandalous, and seen as a “matter of course” (pp. 104–5). Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 170. Morgan relates that Thistlewood documented on 4 March 1751 having two thieves whipped for stealing potatoes from Phibbah’s provision grounds. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 59 and footnote #24. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 172. It is interesting, however, that Thistlewood did not free Phibbah during his lifetime. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 181. Upon his death, Thistlewood still owed Phibbah a cow. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 175. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 432. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society”, p. 66. Whereas the duty to claim or to care for the many mixed-race children fathered by white males in Jamaica was up to their discretion and consciences, a middle- or upper-class white man would have been expected to provide for the proper housing, education, and upbringing of any children conceived with a white woman. Burnard notes that the rates of re-marriage for white female widows were much higher when the women had substantial inheritances. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society”, p. 75. Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 57. Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 57. Kriz, Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 57. Kriz refers to the maid’s actions as insubordinate because the pink parasol is not positioned as it should have been, entirely over the whitish woman, but rather, also provided shade for the maid. The other dark-skinned adult, a female, is also positioned very close to the ground. She sits, presumably on a low stool hidden by her voluminous white skirt, slightly left of centre in the middle of the composition, with a basket of produce (perhaps flowers or herbs) in front of her on the ground. The other darkskinned figure is in the extreme left foreground and is only partially visible in a brown hat, dirt-coloured shirt, and red lower garments. While the hat likely indicates that it is a male, the small stature could indicate that the person is a child or seated on an unseen stool. Another topless dark-skinned male, with his back and right side to the viewer, is visible in the left side of the painting in a group of four figures closest to the water. He bears a reddish-brown vessel on his head. Their only rival for height is the black, pink-parasol-holding maid. But her position closer to the picture plane indicates that if side-by-side with the white male (who is farther back in the image), he would be taller. Interestingly, the person who has the best view of the entire spectacle is not on the ground, but positioned in the central window of the wooden building at the right side of the painting. Although their complexion

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is indecipherable, the red headdress (not unlike that of the white or mulatto male soldier in the right middle ground) might indicate that the person is also a soldier. The race of the soldier, standing behind the mulatta woman who appears to be holding an eggplant, is indeed hard to read. Unlike the whitish woman in the centre whose complexion, we can imply, has been regularly protected by a parasol, the soldier’s brownish or ruddy tint may have been attained due to his outdoor work and lifestyle and sun exposure, and not an African ancestry. This colonial racial hierarchy of beauty and desirability still exists in what Denise Brennan calls the sexscapes of the developing world. In these tropical spaces where mainly white tourists travel to purchase not only sex but also the illusion of love, the race and complexion of the sex workers is a central factor in the determination of their value and desirability, as well as their overall treatment. Citing Kamala Kempadoo and Coco Fusco, Brennan argues that “brown-skinned girls” or “mulatas” have become a mainstay of Caribbean sex tourism. Brennan, What’s Love got to do with it?, pp. 34–5; Kamala Kempadoo, “Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights”, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, eds. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 131; Coco Fusco, “Hustling for Dollars: ‘Jineterismo’ in Cuba”, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, eds. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 152, 155. Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, p. 112–113; cited in Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 383. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society”, p. 74. Burnard contends that within this complex racial, class, and sex structure, white women increasingly came to be seen as decorative, taking on an “ornamental function”. Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society”, p. 74. We can only guess that the result of Little Phibbah’s discussion with Mrs Molly Cope was some sort of “punishment” for Mr Cope. However, he clearly, as the other white men in Jamaica, suffered no loss of public respectability for his behaviour since he became an assemblyman and the chief magistrate of the parish in the 1770s. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, pp. 177–8. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 67. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 67–8 and footnote #39. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 170. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 179. While Bickell explained that most white men of property lived with free coloured women whose children were therefore born free, he noted that overseers, tradesmen, and other white male plantation employees who took slaves for a mistress were anxious to liberate them and their kids. But he added that the bookkeepers and other poorer white workers were “too careless, and consequently there are many Mulatto male and female Slaves, and some Quadroons and Mustees: so that there are numerous instances of the descendants of white men, being in the state of Slavery, in or own Christian colonies.” Concern for the enslavement of mixed-race populations actualized around their paternity. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p.112. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 71. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 179. Syphilis was known by the slang term “the pox”. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 428. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 435. As Thistlewood noted in his journal on 31 December 1768, Mr John Panther, not yet 30 years old, had been afflicted 17 times with the clap, while a man named Billy Hartnole had been struck 14 times. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, pp. 435–6. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 428. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 428. Jamaican doctors regularly treated patients with mercury, leading to a host of ailments like organ damage, discolouration of the skin, and sensory impairment. While Thistlewood partook of these traditional Western medicines, he also experimented with herbal remedies like balsam capivi and lignum vitae, both sourced in Jamaica. However, Thistlewood noted that his first use of balsam capivi had been in England in 1749. Yet although the tropical herbal remedies had become transatlantic, he no doubt expanded his knowledge once in Jamaica through his interaction with enslaved Africans. In particular, Thistlewood mentioned seeking the help of a mulatto slave named Will who combined Western and herbal medicines, giving him both mercury pills and a paste made of rhubarb, balsam capivi, and jalap. Rhubarb was used for its astringent properties and jalap as a purgative. (pp. 437–8) Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 429.

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217 By eighteenth-century standards, to be clean meant that you did not have outward signs of the infection (like sores or discharge), it did not mean that you did not have the infection. 218 Thistlewood suffered ongoing occurrences of gonorrhoea and LGV with at least 20 separate outbreaks during his 15 years in Jamaica, or one episode every nine months. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 432. 219 Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 429. 220 Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 429. In fact, Thistlewood was so accustomed to being infected with gonorrhoea that, in February 1749 before leaving for Jamaica, he wrote a “cure-all” which included taking “purging pills” until the penile discharge or “gleet” changed back to the colour of semen, ingesting 20–30 doses of balsam capivi dropped on sugar loaf and, as a last resort, taking a course of laxatives to purge the infection from the body. 221 Venereal disease was so familiar at this point in Britain that medicines claiming to cure or treat these illnesses were widely advertised in newspapers and men’s magazines sold in coffee-houses and stocked by various shopkeepers. Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 434. 222 Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 430. 223 Burnard and Follett, “Caribbean Slavery”, p. 431. 224 Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p. Hakewill’s wife Maria Catherine died in 1842. They were married in 1807. 225 Some titles on the state of Jamaican slavery during the first quarter of the nineteenth century include: R.C. Dallas Esq., The History of the Maroons, from their origin to the establishment of their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone: Including the Expedition to Cuba, for the Purpose of Procuring Spanish Chasseurs; and the State of the Island of Jamaica for the last ten years: with a Succinct History of the Island previous to that period, 2 vols. (London: Printed by A. Strahan, Printers-Street, for T.N. Longman and O. Rees, Paternoster-Row, 1803); William Earle Jr, OBI; or, the History of ‘Threefingered Jack’. In a series of Letters from a resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England (Worcester: Printed by Isaiah Thomas, JUN. sold by him, and by Thomas & Whipple, Newburyport, 1804); Anonymous (By an Eye-Witness), An Essay on Slavery: Its Unjustifiableness proved from the Old and New Testament: The State of the Negro Slaves Investigated: An Equitable Plan for Their Gradual Emancipation Proposed. Together with Some Miscellaneous Observations on the Climate and Inhabitants of Jamaica (London: Printed for John and Henry L. Hunt, Tavistock-Street, Covent-Garden, 1824); Cooper, Facts; Bickell, The West Indies as they are. 226 Mathison, Notices, p. 11. 227 Mathison, Notices, p. 11. Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis also mentions the “seasoning” of Africans as a “dreadful period” of “unavoidable hardships”, which he prematurely proclaimed was “now at an end” due to the end of the slave trade. Lewis, The Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 65. 228 Mathison saw his book as a “remedy” for the defective modes of mismanagement that he thought were due largely to the absenteeism of owners. 229 Mathison, Notices, pp. v–vi. 230 Cooper, Facts, pp. 53–4. 231 Mathison, Notices, p. 16. 232 Mathison, Notices, p. 16. 233 Mathison arrived in Kingston on Sunday 28 August after an absence of 13 years. Mathison, Notices, pp. v–vi, 1. 234 Mathison, Notices, p. vi. 235 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 237. Lewis was distressed by the news that a “young, strong, healthy woman” had miscarried at eight months for the third time. He also lamented the fact that there were not more than eight women on the breeding list of the 150 enslaved females on Cornwall. This entry of 29 March 1818 appears to express his puzzlement that the slave women were not breeding more, given the fact that he described them as “well clothed, fed, contented of mind, even by their own account, over-worked at no time, and when upon the breeding list are exempted from labour of every kind”. Lewis’ description seems to point out his ignorance in two key respects. First, he seemed unaware of practices of contraception and abortion and what is today known as lactational amenorrhea or the strategic delay of ovulation through extended lactation as resistance to breeding. Indeed on this note, Lewis commented that his nursing slave women had been allowed the indulgence of suckling for two years, which he erroneously thought was “to the great detriment both of themselves and their children”. He instead

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imposed a policy through which slave children were to be sent to the “weaning-house” on the “first day of the fifteenth month” (p. 251). Second, since he had only recently inherited his two plantations, he was surely in no position to make definitive pronouncements about the amount and type of work from which pregnant slaves were uniformly exempt. “Ask Dr. Sears: Breastfeeding as Birth Control?”, Parenting, at http://www.parenting.com/article/ask-dr-sears-breastfeeding-as-birth-control (date of last access 20 January 2014). Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 79. Cooper noted that white men on estates used the slave midwife as a “procuress” or sexual intermediary to secure young slave girls for their pleasure. Cooper, Facts, p. 42. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 79–80. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 133. Lewis later contrived a play-day as a way to further manipulate female slaves to breed. On 24 February, Lewis wrote of a special dinner at the house of the whites for slave mothers with surviving children, piccaninny-mothers, held on a “play-day”. He recalled making the head driver announce to the Negroes that they were indebted to the slave mothers for their enjoyment of the special day (pp. 117–8). Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 209. Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 35, no. 2 (April 1978), p. 357. Klein and Engerman, “Fertility Differentials”, p. 358. Klein and Engerman argued that a key factor in the distinction in reproduction between slave women in the US and in the West Indies was the length of lactation. Treckel concurs with the idea of breastfeeding as contraception and has written that a nursing woman’s return to fecundity, signalled by the return of her menstrual cycle, is a matter of the type of breastfeeding that she practises. She points out that women who nurse partially are fecund within eight months, compared to those who nurse fully and are fecund after eleven. See Paula A. Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 20, no. 1 (Summer 1989), p. 39. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 89. For more on the under-researched topic of the sexual abuse and “breeding” of enslaved black males, see Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2011), pp. 445–64. Cooper, Facts, pp. 33–4. Cooper added that such commutes made slaves “sluggish” in the fields the next day and no doubt prone to punishment. Cooper, Facts, p. 13. Cooper, Facts, pp. 44–5. Mathison, Notices, p. 12. It is significant to note that the term “stock” was used to refer to both slaves and animals and furthermore, as I shall discuss in great detail below, that plantation owners needed highly skilled slaves to maintain their livestock. Mathison, Notices, p, 12. Anonymous, An Essay on Slavery, p. 12. The author provided a list of causes of slave decrease including: (1) insufficient food which leads to disease and mortality, (2) severe labour, beyond the relative strength of the individual, (3) promiscuous intercourse, (4) frequent abortions (produced naturally or artificially), (5) bad methods of child rearing, and (6) particular disease affecting a population and particularly infants and consequently their greater mortality. The author argued that all of these elements were present in the lives of the Negroes on sugar plantations in Jamaica (p. 13). Lewis recalled reading a piece on breeding in The Reporter of the African Institution. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 133. Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 36. Ghachem aptly notes that this extraordinary loss of life in Saint Domingue in the 1780s did not include the mortality rates of the Middle Passage, which he estimates for French ships at the rate of 13 per cent. At the moment, the transit time between Africa and the French Caribbean was an average of 70 days. Mathison, Notices, p. 16.

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253 Mathison, Notices, p. 15. Mathison’s stake in the preservation of black families is arguably ahead of its time since he expressed a rare capacity as a white man to feel sympathy for black suffering. This is remarkable since many whites believed that blacks were not only intellectually inferior to whites, but inferior too in their experience of sensation and emotion. Cooper also noted that slaves were seized and sold to pay off planters’ debts. Cooper, Facts, p. 13. 254 Mathison, Notices, p. 18. These numbers might have been even graver since, as Cundall noted, the statistics in this period were unreliable since the House of Assembly “flatly refused to facilitate the collection of information about births and deaths.” Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxxix. Cooper was also concerned about depopulation. Arguing that Negroes “do not keep up their numbers”, he cited as evidence the mere seven births in one year on Robert Hibbert’s Georgia Estate, in Hanover, Jamaica although the overall slave population was 400. Cooper, Facts, p. 10. 255 Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 319. 256 Slaves were divided into several gangs devoted to distinct tasks based upon their physical strength and ability. For instance, at crop time the first gang worked cutting the cane plants, while the second and third gangs of old and young slaves were employed at secondary tasks “such as bundling the cane and loading it onto wagons, and gathering up the ‘junk’ or ‘trash’” to use as fuel when boiling the extracted juice. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 319. 257 According to Bickell, slaves in Jamaica commonly worked from “sunrising to sunsetting”, or from 5 am to 7 pm for half of the year and from 6 am to 6 pm the other half. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 47; see also Anonymous, An Essay on Slavery, p. 13. 258 Anonymous, An Essay on Slavery, pp. 14–5. 259 While cattle often powered the mills in Jamaica, there were also a few water mills. In comparison, windmills (like the one depicted in William Clark’s print The Mill-Yard) dominated the Leeward Islands. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 321. 260 The expensive mechanical parts for the mill, gears and cogs, were generally imported from Britain. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § “Plantation Labor and the Enslaved”, p. 321. 261 Lewis wrote on Sunday, 7 January 1816 about his slaves requesting the following day, Monday, off after a festival held to celebrate his visit to Cornwall (his plantation in Westmoreland). They reasoned that the time was necessary in order for them to travel to the mountains for provisions. Noting that their provision grounds were “at a distance among the mountains” and in a distinct area from their cottages, he conceded on the understanding that they would have no more holidays until crop was completed. Lewis noted that the regular day upon which the enslaved at Cornwall cultivated their provision grounds was Saturday. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 54. 262 Mathison, Notices, p. 2. 263 Cooper, Facts, p. 10. Cooper recalled that there was a law that church services should be held in the afternoon after market to accommodate the Negroes, but that this was not adhered to in Hanover or in the adjoining parishes. He also explained that when appealing for permission to minister to slave populations, the curate at Hanover requested weekday access, since he felt that it was cruel to apply to preach to slaves on Sundays; a move that would inhibit their ability to participate in Sunday markets (pp. 10–1). 264 Mathison believed that, except for pork and corn, the towns were almost exclusively supplied by the “industry of the slaves”. Mathison, Notices, p. 1. 265 Cooper, Facts, p. 12. 266 Cooper, Facts, p. 13. 267 Mathison, Notices, p. 3. 268 For more on the practice of huckstering in Barbados, see Hilary McD. Beckles, “An Economic Life of Their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000). 269 Mathison named some of the products with which the slaves returned to the plantation as: salt pork and beef, codfish, butcher’s meat, rice, flour, bread, rum and clothes. Mathison, Notices, p. 1. It is interesting to note that the idea of salted codfish as a cheap staple for slaves was not at all that, at least not at this point in Jamaican history. Codfish was instead a sought-after protein, which was not a ration that planters regularly bestowed upon their slaves. Rather, the normal protein ration seems to have been herrings, which were given in very small portions and used as a “sauce” with which slaves seasoned their starchy provisions like plantain and yam. The Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis also mentioned that slaves received “a regular allowance of red herrings and salt meat, which serves to relish their vegetable diet”. However,

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in his zealousness to ensure the health and welfare of his slaves upon his first visit to his newly inherited plantations, Lewis may have overstated the provision of protein. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 68. In one such example, the newly arrived planter Matthew Lewis was approached on 28 January 1816 by a “large body of negroes, from a neighbouring estate”, with a complaint of hard treatment against their overseers and drivers. Although only on the island from 1 January and completely unfamiliar with his own holdings, as well as the culture of Jamaican slavery in general, Lewis surmised that the “charges were so strong, that I am certain that they must be fictitious”. In another case, on 31 January 1816 he wrote of being approached by Negroes who complained that their overseer had denied them the legal allowance of time for meals and to attend to their provision grounds. However, in this case Lewis wrote the magistrates requesting that they “summon the negroes in question before a council of protection”. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 90, 97. Cooper, Facts, p. 20. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxvi. The method for appointing members to the House of Assembly was established in 1681 and was still in force in 1801 under Governor Nugent when the House consisted of 43 members. Bickell reported that coloured men had applied for an extension of their limited privileges to the House of Assembly. However, although a few members had supported it, the bill was thrown out “with very little ceremony, by a great majority”. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 115. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxvi. A likely example of such political and legal injustice is John Cope, chief magistrate and owner of Egypt Estate, whom Thistlewood documented as facilitating gang-rape against a house slave named Eve and whipping two slaves, Egypt Susannah and Mazerine, for refusing him sexually. Burnard, “The Sexual Life”, p. 178. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 72.

7

James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour Representing life on nineteenth-century Jamaican sugar plantations

Sugar cane or slaves: Representing and sublimating labour A survey of all 21 prints in James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour . . . (1825) reveals some telling similarities or, put another way, some striking failures in terms of an accurate, picturesque representation of tropical nature. Firstly, given the character and intent of the publication, it is not surprising that all of the prints are of outdoor scenes. Obviously one of the purposes of the book was to depict for the foreign, white, upper-class gaze the nature of the specific tropical geography and landscape that one would encounter in Jamaica. Secondly, all of Hakewill’s scenes represent aspects of the island’s natural or human-landscaped and built environments in the daytime. Interestingly, the prints even exclude the representation of what foreigners would have deemed one of the most impressive picturesque spectacles of Jamaican nature, sunset over the ocean. I will go even further and state that his representations of shadows indicate that we are looking at landscapes generally conceived to represent the late morning or early afternoon. The prints generally lack long shadows – either around bodies, animals, buildings or vegetation like trees – that would indicate a rising or descending sun positioned at a deep angle in the sky. Therefore, unlike Clark’s seventh plate Exterior of the Boiling-House (plate 13), which represented the arduous plantation labour of enslaved black males at night, Hakewill’s imaging of Jamaica is a daylight project only. Thirdly, although definitively claiming a picturesque project, Hakewill’s landscapes are more indebted to the topographical mode of rendering, one which prioritized the supposedly objective rendering of natural and human-built environments over the representation of climatic or atmospheric specificity observable in weather patterns like clouds, rain, mist, vapours, the capturing of sunlight and the dramatic casting of shadows from human or natural formations. Discussing Hakewill’s Waterfall on the Windward Road, near Kingston, Kriz has argued, Hakewill’s view is bathed in the full light of the noonday sun; there are shadows – notably one that bisects the rock face in the center of the composition, but they are cursory and unmodulated. White clouds appear in the sky above the falls, but they do not seem to be the source of the shadows. Such a representation accords with the convention governing topographical drawing and painting, which dictates even lighting in order that the shape and position of landforms and architecture be clearly comprehensible.1

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The climatic specificity of Jamaica as a tropical island that emerges in the later prints of Joseph Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica . . . (1838–40) is absent from Hakewill’s work. Arguably then, Hakewill’s Jamaica imagines a landscape that is thoroughly tropical in vegetation, however, arguably adamantly not so – except for the all-encompassing nature of the ever-present sunshine – in the character of its climate and atmosphere. But as the ominously grey encroaching clouds in Kidd’s print Belle Vue Residence near Kingston (1838–40) revealed, the tropical sunlight in Jamaica could easily be swallowed up by equally tropical rains, rainstorms, deluges or even the occasional hurricane.2 But it is likely that Hakewill’s refusal to let the sun set on the island, in tandem with his negation of the dangerous side of tropical weather, was a fiction maintained to placate the inevitable fears of his potential foreign white readers/viewers for whom Jamaica was still a dunghill, a torrid zone or a white man’s grave.3 But Hakewill’s prints were also peculiar in terms of their representation of plantations. As seen in works like Hakewill’s Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s – The Property of I. R. Grosett Esquire M.P. (Figure 7.1), the demonstration of Jamaica’s adaptability to British imperial will was manifest not only in terms of a natural abundance, but a specifically agricultural one. As Higman has demonstrated,

Figure 7.1 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s – The Property of I. R. Grosett Esquire M.P., from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0042, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Sugar estates were strung along the entire length of the north coast; they were also concentrated in the Recent alluvial plains of coastal St. Thomas-in-the-East and the Plantain Garden River, on the plains of Westmoreland, Vere, St. Catherine and Liguanea, and in the interior basins of the upper Black and Rio Minho Rivers, at Lluidas Vale and St. Thomas-in-the-Vale.4 Hakewill’s rendering of sugar plantations in Jamaica correlate with Scotswoman Janet Schaw’s earlier literary impressions of plantation luxury in Antigua. In Schaw’s diary, luxury becomes an allegorical figure bestowing bounty on a deserving Creole white planter elite. In a striking elision of slave labour, Schaw reasoned that luxury could not be sinful if “nature holds out her lap”.5 The majority of Hakewill’s print representations of sugar cane plantations bypassed any detailed, up-close representation of actual sugar cane fields and represented the estates as self-generating (for where are the slaves and where is the sugar cane for that matter?). However, as I will discuss in greater detail below, a surviving watercolour painting of Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21) reveals that the elisions encompassed in the 21 prints which made it into the published book were a result of a calculated editing of the doubtlessly large accumulated visual archive of sketches and paintings from which Hakewill, after a twoyear sojourn on the island, would have had to choose. More specifically, Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s was one of only three landscapes to actually represent, in a detailed fashion, the lucrative agricultural crop and one of only two landscapes to represent a large group of slaves anywhere near a cane field; the other being Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s. The other two prints which represented the sugar cane plants were Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Property of G.W. Taylor Esq. MP, based upon the watercolour Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (1820) (Figure 7.2), and Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale (Figure 7.3). This tendency to sublimate the vital labour of the African population would persist after Hakewill in the post-emancipation lithographs of Joseph Kidd. As Kriz has noted, “The active labor of former slaves, upon which the economic vitality of the sugar colony depends, is not figured anywhere in Kidd’s Jamaican Scenery. Rather, the island’s well-being is registered by white bodies rapidly moving through the landscape.”6 In Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s Hakewill used the straight line of the estate road, slicing the right foreground, to lead the viewer’s eye into the image. This plate was the only one to combine the representation of a sizeable group of slaves with the sugar cane plant. While the road into the estate is lined with majestic royal palms, it is also peopled with several groups distinguishable by class and race. An elevated white male figure on horse back in hat and coat faces, as if in conversation, another well-dressed male figure whose race is obscured by his position, which places his back to the viewer. Nevertheless the standing man’s clothing and hat, similar to that of the man on horseback, proclaims an upper-class status, which separates the pair from the group of gathered black slaves positioned further down the road to the right. Hakewill’s rare slave grouping contains male and female figures distinguished by dress and role; one female figure carries a young infant on her back. The cane field seems to sway

Figure 7.2 James Hakewill, Holland Estate, St.Thomas in the East, Jamaica (1820), watercolour, 30.5 × 41.9 cm, B1977.14.1964, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Figure 7.3 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale, from part 5 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0072, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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in wavy, curvilinear patterns in the lower left quadrant of the image. However, in comparison to Clark’s fourth plate Cutting the Sugar-Cane (1823), in which the specificity of the sugar cane plant – gradations of colour, segmentation of the stalk, and distinctions between the texture of the stalk and leaves – is clearly articulated in the detailed rendering in the left foreground, Hakewill’s sugar cane plants were rendered with such vagueness as to be easily mistaken with various other species of grass. It is also telling that Hakewill did not choose to render the slaves in the field at work. Rather, armed with their agricultural tools, which they carry over their shoulders, they are represented decidedly outside of the sugar cane field, as if departing from it. Their march up the estate road will lead them beyond the mounted white male and his conversant and presumably towards the slave quarters, likely nestled out of sight in the dense growth at the foot of the hill upon which is perched the Big/Great House; its elevated position, literally above the land, sea, and slave labour, a material manifestation of the symbolic colonial hierarchy. Whereas Beckford had earlier advocated that his readers substitute windmills, distilleries, and even Negro huts in the tropical picturesque for the familiar ancient relics of the Italian campagna within the picturesque (see Chapter 5), although a central feature of the plantations he represented, Hakewill regularly erased Negro villages. As Thompson has ably noted, the effect was that he “artfully concealed many traces of where and how slaves lived behind a hilly slope or thatch of brush”.7 Yet although Hakewill erased slave labour throughout his Picturesque Tour . . ., the figure furthest to the right, the black woman with child slung on her back, inadvertently exposes the ugly underbelly of slavery. Although the black subjects are pictured outside of the cane field, the presence of their agricultural tools in their hands indicates that they have likely just finished or are about to commence their day’s work. The presence of the black mother amongst the other field labourers indicates the lack of gender division present in slave labour. According to Mair, in Jamaica, “In 1832, sugar employed 49.5 per cent of the slave work force. The majority of those workers were women, the ratio being 920 males to 1,000 females.”8 Indeed, male slaves could more easily escape the fields by being selected for training in the more skilled labour of craftsmen like coopers, carpenters, and blacksmiths or through becoming adjuncts to the corporal control of the slave populations in positions like drivers and watchmen.9 This sex-based division of labour was also influenced by complexion or more specifically from a social status derived from paternal racial heritage. The Reverend Thomas Cooper noted that although the number of brown slaves (children of white men) was considerable in Jamaica, they were not generally employed in the fields.10 Instead, they were usually domestics or the males were trained in the mechanic arts or as carpenters, coopers, masons, smiths, etc.11 Therefore, obviously the class division that aligned itself with complexion was cultivated by the whites who generally bestowed the opportunities for such education on their own (or other) lighter-skinned slave offspring. The exploitation of black women as the lowest rung of field labour actually sustained the gender differentiation ensconced within upper-class, white, polite society (where access to luxury and leisure were jealously guarded) and constructed a

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complex and dangerous environment wherein black maternity and child welfare were constantly imperilled by the physical hardships and material dangers of overwork, abuse, and malnutrition. The enslaved man Charles Ball recounted his observation of daily rituals of female slave labour: As we went out in the morning, I observed several women, who carried their young children in their arms to the field. These mothers laid their children at the side of the fence, or under the shade of the cotton plants, whilst they were at work; and when the rest of us went to get water, they would go to give suck to their children, requesting someone to bring them water in gourds, which they were careful to carry to the field with them. One young woman did not, like the others, leave her child at the end of the row, but had contrived a sort of rude knapsack, made of a piece of coarse linen cloth, in which she fastened her child, which was very young, upon her back; and in this way carried it all day, and performed her task at the hoe with the other people.12 Hakewill’s black female slave, like the one that Ball described, is pictured with the same “rude knapsack” in which the small child is placed upon her back.13 While the sugar cane is barely legible on the far right side, depicted behind a low-lying wall in Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, the print in which Hakewill gives sugar cane its most central place is Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale. This image is the third to represent the growing cane plants. The visual absence of sugar in the other prints is incongruous with Hakewill’s text, which overflows with specific details about sugar cane cultivation on the island. Indeed, the central preoccupation of Hakewill’s text is sugar. Unlike Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s and Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s, the slaves have completely disappeared in Williamsfield Estate and the focus is instead on the bountiful curvilinear crop and the plantation works. Whereas with Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s the viewer looks down onto the scene from an elevated position that seems to hover above the cane fields which emerge from the left corner of the print, in Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale Hakewill positioned his viewer on the large road leading into the estate that occupies and commands the central foreground. Spreading wider as it gets closer to the picture plane, the image beckons the viewer to enter the plantation. As Higman has noted, at the time of Hakewill’s visit, Williamsfield Estate was the property of the Lascelles family who had made their wealth in sugar in Barbados and through a West Indian trading house in London.14 Hakewill’s text informs his reader that the nearest “shipping-places” by wagon were Port Henderson and Passage Fort, 23 or 24 miles away, and that the road was the principal route across the island which connected Spanish Town to St Mary’s, which passed through the estate “on the bank of a pleasant rivulet, between works and dwelling house”.15 Both sides of the road are bordered by towering cane plants, dense and differentiated with varying shades of yellow, green, and brown. The attention to detail, which Hakewill dedicated to the sugar cane plants is noteworthy since the cane is more differentiated, in detail and colour, than Hakewill’s

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representation of enslaved Africans, which I will discuss below. The height and expanse of the cane gives the feeling of abundance and wealth that the viewer is literally, as they move forward on the road, descending into riches. But it is not a natural wealth as Hakewill’s references to soil manipulation attests. As Hakewill revealed, “The soil is in general light and poor, but with a judicious use of manure, which the situation of the cane land renders the application of, a hard task for the stock, gives fair returns.”16 According to Frank Cundall, in the early nineteenth century the Jamaica House of Assembly, mainly comprised of planters, had allocated 15,000 pounds17 a year “for the maintenance of such roads as might be necessary to encourage settlers to cultivate lands at a distance from the sea”.18 However, despite their efforts the roads remained unfinished and the planters requested more money to complete the job in the following session of assembly. The difficulty of travel on “frightful” roads was confirmed in the journals of Maria Nugent, the Governor’s wife, as well as in the memoir of Eliza Chadwick Roberts, a white woman from New Jersey, during her one-month sojourn in 1805.19 The bumpy state of the road in Hakewill’s print seems to indicate that passable roads were still a problem in Jamaica two decades later. Hakewill noted in his text that the plantation had only been settled 80 years prior by a Mr Needham. Although eight decades may seem today like a long period of time in which to perfect basic infrastructure like roads, the estate was vast (at 2,998 acres/12 sq. km) and included a “small estate”, Sandy Gut (that had been purchased in 1815).20 Of the almost 3,000 acres only 300 (1.2 sq. km) were “in canes”, with 500 (2 sq. km) in fallow and pasture and the remainder in what he described as excellent Negro provision grounds, woodlands, and ruinate.21 The feasibility of travel by road was no small matter since roads provided the internal economic lifeline, the infrastructure for the island’s constant transport of slave-produced goods from plantations to ports for shipping. Hakewill this time centres the lumpy unpaved road, which, curving slightly to the right, disappears behind dense foliage leading our eye to a group of buildings clustered in the right middle ground. The land descends from the foreground into a cleared field with large arrays of varied works and the river cuts from behind cane plants at left, through the central mid-portion of the landscape, disappearing into dense vegetation beyond some other works. Hakewill uses the river and the parallel road to guide the viewer’s eye. As Higman has noted, Hakewill’s view “was taken from a bend in the road immediately northwest of the bridge crossing the Rio d’Auro and joining works and houses, looking towards the eastern hills and the parish of St. Mary.”22 In the central middle ground, a bridge is visible, passing above a stream that runs parallel to the road. Hakewill again undertakes this dance between the visibility of the works and residential buildings of the whites and the invisibility of the intimate geographies of the enslaved. As Higman has argued, “Hakewill certainly provided a detailed picture of the great house, including its pigeon house, but managed to completely conceal behind luxuriant canes the extensive slave village which accommodated 330 people.”23 The works were to the north (left) of the bridge, including an imposing building with a towering chimney clearly visible flanking its left corner. The structure is more practical than palatial, indicating a distillery as the most likely contents. But the chimney spews no smoke,

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its idleness mimicking the barren fields that wait to be tended by the absent slaves. Since the brightness of the sunlit sky indicated a daytime scene, the absence of the slaves is even more peculiar. Given Mathison’s confirmation of the six-day working schedule of the slaves, the height of the cane crop, which indicates the closeness of harvest and the time of day, the most suitable explanation for the stillness of the plantation would be that Hakewill chose to render the estate on a Sunday. But given his two-year residency in Jamaica and the frequency with which he would have witnessed slave labour, such a choice seems a deliberate attempt at the falsification of the reality of Jamaican plantations. The tension between Hakewill’s text and images reveal that the landscapes of Jamaica were literally constructed through its commercial manipulation for colonial ends: (1) the manipulation of soil to produce the cane crops, and (2) the carving out of roads to connect regions and to provide access to “shipping-places”. But what he rendered as natural splendour is capitalist industrialized agriculture powered by slave labour. The path to riches (as dirt road) symbolized by towering canes and organized works is also another type of path, one hidden within the interiors of the estate buildings. It was a path of mind-numbing drudgery and back-breaking labour, of abuse, violation, injury, and early death, which Hakewill carefully hid from view. Whereas Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale was one of three prints to represent the agricultural reason for colonial Jamaica’s existence, sugar cane, besides Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s, Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s was the only other print to represent a large group of slaves which even hinted at the most prevalent type of work in which enslaved blacks were engaged in Jamaica, field labour. In fact Trinity depicted the largest group of slaves in the book; but the slaves, which Hakewill showed walking along the plantation road, paled in comparison to the 1,100 Negroes, whom he recorded as living on the 4,000–5,000-acre (16–20 sq. km) estate. Trinity was actually a group of three contiguous estates, Tryall, Brimmer-Hall, and Rosslyn, in Port Maria that were known together as Bayly’s Vale.24 Bayly had inherited the estate from his uncle Zachary Bayly Esq, who had died at the age of 48 on 18 December 1769. The plantation was extremely productive. As Hakewill argued, “The richness of the land, adapted for the most part to the cultivation of sugar, the easy approach to a shipping-place, the general healthiness of the spot, and the excellent provision grounds for the Negroes, render this one of the most desirable properties in the Island.”25 The plantation’s use of engineering ingenuity is noted in the presence of a long aqueduct that transects the middle ground of the page, connecting with the cluster of buildings. As Higman has noted, prior to the invention of steam-mills in the nineteenth century, water was the most sought-after and reliable source of power for plantations and planters accordingly made substantial investments in the construction of aqueducts and gutters.26 Hakewill’s text recounted that the aqueduct was built to supply water to the mill, “at once an object of utility and ornament, erected at a vast expense by the father of the present proprietor, and completed in 1797.”27 Compositionally, the landscape works much like Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s, using the diagonal line of a road, which starts off the page and slices through the land from

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right to left. The line of the road which slices into the right foreground at an angle parallels that of the aqueduct which begins in the centre of the page and sweeps backwards on an angle away from the picture plane and off of the left side of the page. As Higman argues, “The aqueduct at Trinity Estate in St. Mary was monumental in scale, stretching over a mile and composed of hundreds of masonry arches. When Hakewill sketched the scene, in the early 1820s, he was unable to contain the aqueduct in his frame even though it dominated his landscape.”28 But what was excised to accommodate Hakewill’s fascination with the aqueduct? In his view from the east, Higman has further noted that Hakewill “showed more buildings than appeared on Griffith’s later plan, but he still managed to squeeze out the slave village”. 29 As such, Hakewill’s rendering of Trinity Estate was at once extraordinarily precise – the cylindrical building in the right middle ground is a windmill without its sails – and deliberately misleading.30 Also carrying their agricultural tools over their shoulders as if returning from the field, much like the scene in Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s, tens of slaves are staggered along the winding path that crosses over a bridge and then curves back to the right, effectively guiding our eyes to a cluster of work buildings.31 Passing under the bridge is a narrow path of blue water, the Negro River, animals grazing on either side.32 But Bayly’s wealth is registered not only in the vastness of his lands, but in the presence of the livestock, the cows and sheep that rest and graze on either side of the stream. But placed within the configuration of cows at left are two lounging slaves, one seated and one outstretched. Their restful poses on the ground refute the viewer’s ability to read their actions as being directly connected to the immediate care of the animals. Rather, I would argue that Hakewill invites us to consume these black bodies as a part of the plantation’s holdings, just more livestock that Bayly owned.33 This reading is also supported by Hakewill’s own process of research for the book. His introduction indicates that he interviewed the administrative staff of the plantations that he visited, requesting tallies of the acreages and “heads of Negroes” that his planter hosts owned. William Clark’s labouring slaves In comparison with Hakewill’s dubious representation of slaves in Jamaica, nine of Clark’s ten prints (numbers 2–10) focus explicitly on the different aspects of the Antiguan slaves’ labours on sugar plantations. Even his plate 1, The Court-House (1823) (Plate 14), which he described as being set near the centre of town in St John’s (the capital), inadvertently referenced the agricultural work of the enslaved. He did so by placing a trio of barefooted black male slaves just left of centre in the foreground on a dirt road, with two pulling and one pushing a hogshead or puncheon in a straight line parallel with the picture plane. It is the contents of the hogshead, which connects these men to the Antiguan economy of sugar planting and the sugar plantations themselves, which Clark represented in his other nine prints. As Clark indicated, such containers were filled with rum, “and the casks are conveyed upon trucks, from one store to another, by Negroes”.34

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These casks of rum were used as payment for legal claims lodged in the courthouse, of which the front façade is pictured from the south.35 But it is the remaining nine prints, which truly demonstrate the extent to which Hakewill took great pains to avoid the representation of Jamaican plantation slave labour in his Picturesque Tour . . . (1825). It is particularly striking to note that not only are the slaves in Clark’s work represented as labouring, but that time and again he depicted them engaged in particularly dynamic activities with poses, postures, and even facial expressions that connote significant physical strain or exertion. In terms of postures, the diagonal lean of the males (discussed above) loading hogsheads into drogers on the beach in Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board, first appears in plate 1, The Court-House, in the figure of the black male slave (one of the trio) who pushes the cask of rum on a truck. His posture is even more hunched than the duo pushing the hogshead in Carting and Putting SugarHogsheads on Board, since his upper body is almost parallel to the ground. Indeed, the combination of this hunched-over upper body and diagonal, dynamic leg stance shows up two more times within the same scenario of shifting heavy hogsheads: in plate 8, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills, where three men are engaged in the task, and plate 9, Interior of the Distillery, with two men. As the sugar planter Matthew Lewis observed during his two visits to his Jamaican plantations in 1816 and 1818,36 these men, known as porters, moved “hogsheads of sugar weighing up to a ton and puncheons of rum and molasses containing up to 120 gallons from the boiling house to the curing house, or the distillery to the rum store”.37 The literalness of the back-breaking labour of planting, growing, harvesting, and refining sugar cane was also depicted through Clark’s reoccurring representation of perpetual motion through the portrayal of the various related postures of slaves working side by side at similar tasks. Indeed, Clark’s images make clear not only that the enslaved were constantly working, but also that plantation labour was not at all easy or gentle. His plates 2, 3, and 4 – Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes (Plate 11), Planting the Sugar-Cane, and Cutting the Sugar-Cane respectively – all utilize this visual technique to create the sense of continuity and perpetual motion within the static art form of the two-dimensional print. For instance, in Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, a line of enslaved labourers begins in the right foreground, and, as the figures recede and get smaller, extends in a slightly curved line back into the middle distance in the centre of the page. The neatly tilled land, sectioned in symmetrical squares below the boulders at the right declares their progress. While the dense row of slaves furthest to the right wield hoes, a row of three black males to their left employ a surveyor’s chain to lay the grid for their fellow slaves.38 According to Mathison, canes were planted in trenches, each two feet (60 cm) wide and the centre of each trench was four feet (1.20 m) from the centre of the adjoining trench.39 These trenches were made with a hoe, “and in places where the land is strong and hard, this work is the most laborious part of the Negroes’ duty”.40 The arduousness of the task is why this duty was often assigned to jobbing gangs.41 As Cooper explained, “A jobber is every body’s servant, and his slaves are in consequence exposed to new

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difficulties as often as they change places of work. They have so many to please, that their minds are kept in almost a perpetual state of irritation [sic].”42 As recent research has revealed, many of the slave owners who rented their slaves in this way were middle-class whites who possessed no land in the Caribbean.43 Even the pro-slavery apologist and plantation owner Matthew Lewis conceded that he had been apprised that the digging of the cane holes was “very laborious”.44 Although the composition implies that our vantage point has hidden some of the slaves from view, the row is comprised of almost 20 male and female, mainly adult, slaves who wield their hoes from sky to earth in an irregular pattern which, in conjunction with their various postures – from erect, to bent over to crouching – emphasizes the continuous activity and physical strain of their onerous task.45 But the threat of corporal punishment looms over everyone since the largest figure – a black male driver in a cream-coloured suit armed with a whip – stands alert to enforce obedience and to ensure the proper completion of the task at hand. Indeed, his posture is immediately threatening, as Clark represented him in the middle of chastising a kneeling male slave. The encounter evokes a decided power imbalance and Clark depicts the subjugation of the male slave who, down on one knee, is forced to look up into the face of the threatening driver who extends his right arm to point in the face of his male “inferior”. Black drivers were not necessarily a source of solace or a reprieve from violence for their fellow slaves. Actually they were often quite the opposite. As Schaw recalled from her time in Antigua, a driver was set to watch over every 10 Negroes.46 Yet the number of drivers varied from colony to colony and from estate to estate. As Cooper explained, in Jamaica, all size gangs of field labourers were present on various estates, “but in every instance attended by a driver with his whip in his hand. Some gangs are followed by two and three drivers: a gang of fifty would not have less than two.”47 Data from A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788) (Figure 7.4) indicates that of the 214 (106 men and 108 women) able-bodied, adult slaves on the Jamaican plantation, only four were drivers, Dary, Cudjoe, Simpy, and Jack, all aged 30 to 55.48 If we subtract the 21 males who laboured as carpenters, masons, coopers, blacksmiths, drivers, and a doctor, for the remaining 193 able-bodied, adult field slaves, there was one driver for every 48.25 slaves.49 Although the highest office to which a slave could aspire, Cooper noted that none with a conscience or “generous feeling” would seek to hold the post.50 Also referred to as “governors” or “chief governors” by Matthew Lewis,51 they were described by Bickell as “ignorant and revengeful” slaves.52 Such vengeance was not only reserved for other male slaves. Rather, as Bickell recounted, females regardless of size were not spared punishments but were “laid down by force” and flogged as any male slave with “many stripes” on the parts of their bodies “which shall be nameless for me, but which in women, for decency sake, ought never to be exposed”.53 Likewise, Cooper reported that drivers always carried the whip, which they used on men and women equally as if driving horses or cattle.54 Mary Prince admitted that it was “happiness” for a driver to “take down his wife, sister or child” and publicly strip and whip them.55 But referring to them as “rangers”, she also revealed

Figure 7.4 A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788), paper, 32.39 × 20.3 cm, ST West Indies Box 3(1), Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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the conundrum for these men who were themselves governed by cruel and often vengeful white overseers (like the mulatto driver Dick and the overseer Thistlewood discussed in Chapter 6). Of a ranger named Henry who, with his wife, invited her to a Methodist prayer meeting, Prince recalled, He confessed that he had treated the slaves very cruelly; but said that he was compelled to obey the orders of his master. He prayed them all to forgive him, and he prayed that God would forgive him. He said it was a horrid thing for a ranger to have sometimes to beat his own wife or sister; but he must do so if ordered by his master.56 Throughout these prints, Clark’s representation of a diverse slave population comprised of men and women, children, adults, and the elderly, makes it clear that nobody was spared the drudgery and physical strain of plantation labour. Indeed, four of Clark’s ten plates – Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, Cutting the Sugar-Cane, Exterior of Curing-House and Stills, and Interior of the Distillery – depict young children or adolescents. Although of Jamaica, Cooper contended that everyone over the age of seven was compelled to work in the fields, as A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788) attests, starting at age six, male and female children up to the age of 14 were employed in the fields in weeding gangs.57 In Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, to the left of this row of workers, two smaller figures – one in a red hat, white shirt, and blue pants and the other in a blue shirt and white pants – likely children, appear to work at less arduous tasks. To the left of these two figures, in front of a haystack and beside a penned-in group of cattle, an elderly female slave with a pail at her feet, back no doubt hunched with premature old age from a life of hard labour, delivers water to a red-shirted black male slave as a younger female slave looks on. But the looming aggression of the black driver indicates that even the much-needed necessity of rehydration was an act for which permission would have to be granted. Mathison, like most West Indian planters, felt that there were certain aspects of agricultural labour that simply could not be mechanized. He argued: On all sugar plantations, even where the plough and the horse-hoe might be used to advantage, there are certain parts of plantation-duty, which, as I conceive, can only be performed by hands; such as the business of cutting canes, of tying them up in bundles; of cutting cane-tops, of tying these up in bundles; of loading carts, and conveying the bundles of canes seriatim to the mill. No machinery can serve these purposes; they can only be accomplished by a multiplicity of persons working in detail, and with a considerable degree of bodily exertion.58 While in the hands of Hakewill’s Jamaican slaves the hoes are idle, in Clark’s Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes and Planting the Sugar- Cane they are ever active and in motion

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and in Cutting the Sugar-Cane Clark also represents the potentially threatening (for whites in Antigua) knife-wielding field slave.59 In contrast, arguably, the threat in Planting the Sugar-Cane is squarely directed at the enslaved who are trapped between the fortress on the hill, symbol of British military might, and the black whip-holding driver in the foreground, one of the appointed “soldiers” of the plantation complex designed to undermine black solidarity.60 While all three images share compositional similarities, the composition of Cutting the Sugar-Cane is almost the mirror opposite of Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes with the line of male and female slaves beginning in the left foreground and extending back across the centre of the print before disappearing down a hill into the distance on the right side of the landscape. Clark’s cane plants are not the fluffy, billowing, porous, light vegetation of Hakewill’s Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s. Instead they tower above the field slaves, their position creating a dense and impenetrable green wall of vegetation with which the enslaved labourers do battle. The density of the cane plants and the difficulty of the labour are indicated in the way that the workers wield the knives above their heads, hacking the green stalks from the tops of the cane. It is also made clear by the spread-leg, bent-knee stances of most of the workers. While the slaves cut the plants at left, the two slaves seen bundling the plant cuttings on the ground (one who seems to be female and the other male) and the third shown passing a bundle to a waiting slave in one of two wains, indicate the “progress” that is being made. Through the presence of the small child beside the female slave who ties the canes into bundles, Clark also informed his white readers of the ways in which the labours of female slaves disrupted European and white Creole ideals of a woman’s domestic role. Furthermore, the sugar mill depicted just below the middle of the page at the far right side telegraphs the eventual transformation of the plants into sugar, rum, and molasses, and recalls the economic imperative of the entire display embodied in the authority of the upper-class white male subject mounted on horseback in the right foreground of the image.61 The image that best illustrates my point about the way that the facial expressions of Clark’s slave subjects connote physical strain or exertion is Exterior of the Boiling-House (plate 13). In the seventh plate, Clark’s only night scene, a series of six chimneys rise against the dark sky and the blades of the windmill are visible above the slanted roof of the boiling house. The flames and smoke from the stacks served to emphasize Clark’s point that the boiling house was a place of constant activity during “good season”. As Clark explained, the scene depicted several male slaves tasked with the job of delivering fuel – the trash from the cane stalks from which the juice had already been extracted62 – to more specialized slaves known as firemen, whose task it was to ensure that the various coppers were heated to their optimal temperatures.63 Two fairly large and detailed black male figures straddle each side of the plate in the foreground. While the one on the left has his left side facing the viewer and the one on the right is facing forward, both men are in strikingly similar poses. With spread legs, bent knees, and hands clasping a length of rope, both men are depicted in the act of hauling fuel to the firemen.

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Clark’s careful study of the labour of Antiguan slaves is perhaps best conveyed in his accomplished depiction of the man on the left. Not perfectly flush with the picture plane, the man’s right arm and shoulder tilt upwards, causing the torso to twist and the left shoulder to drop lower, creating the feeling, not just of pulling, but twisting. At the same time, his elongated neck, protruding jaw, and upward gaze reflect not only deep concentration, but also extreme exertion. The man behind him at right appears equally strained, the force of pulling against the rope creating a deep angle along the plane of the left side of his body. Clark’s decision to let the rope disappear off the right side of the print is also provocative since the invisibility of the implied bundle of fuel, and the viewer’s inability to see its size and dimensions, allows for speculation which, when combined with the strained pose of the slave, adds a sense of trepidation to the image. He too has the outstretched neck and protruding jaw, signs of exertion, but his face is directed towards the white, red-coated manager whose outstretched hand indicates that he has chosen this inopportune moment to deliver directions. Finally, Clark’s decision to set this image against a night sky telegraphs to the viewer/reader that labour in the “good season” was continuous. Animalizing slaves, humanizing animals Returning to the issue of Hakewill’s desire to ascertain the head counts of slave holdings, Jamaican planters customarily kept precise ledgers of annual tallies of their property, which included Negro slaves that were counted amongst their “stock”. The nature of white assessment of enslaved blacks reveals the extent to which they viewed blacks as insentient animals. During his time in Jamaica, the Reverend Thomas Cooper came to the same conclusion, arguing that the use of the term “Negro stock” was telling since the slaves “have just about as much authority over their children as a cow has over her calf”, training them for the use of the estate upon which the highest honour is to become a driver.64 As Mary Prince lamented in her slave narrative, “Oh the Buckra people who keep slaves think that black people are like cattle, without natural affection [italics mine].”65 The yearly accounting of one’s property was a way to ascertain the economic success and value of one’s plantation by measuring variables like the mortality and birth rates of the labour force. With such data, planters could determine their need for the purchase of new slaves as opposed to the success of “natural increase” through the “breeding” of those they already possessed. As B.W. Higman has argued, When in the early nineteenth century the Jamaica planter sat down to count the cost and calculate his wealth or impending ruin he began by inventorying his changing capital stock. His mill and works were relatively durable. But the other kinds of power he manipulated, slaves and livestock, depreciated rapidly. They were vulnerable to debility, senility and mortality, the scourges of all living things, aggravated by the enervation of the torrid zone . . . First, he divided his slaves into males and females, and then for each one, by name, he noted age, colour, country

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of birth, condition or state of health and, if he were particular, their disposition towards their masters. Second he listed his livestock and for each (for they had ‘as fine or finer names than the negroes themselves’) he noted sex, breed, age, colour, condition, state of fatness and whether creole.66 Jamaican Hope Estate’s A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788), which listed 135 men, 41 boys (176 males), 133 women and 42 girls (175 females), indicates the bluntness with which enslaved Africans were conceptualized and legally documented as possessions.67 This fact is driven home by the existence of another very similar ledger from the same estate dated 20 December 1770 entitled A List of Working and Breeding Cattle on Hope Estate.68 As Rediker has noted, a key function of such ledgers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables was to render abstract the brutality of the utter oppression, power, violence, and control at the heart of the institution of slavery. Reducing humans to numbers, notations, and symbols on pieces of paper was a key method by which white slave owners, “managed in crucial respects to hide the reality and consequences of their actions from themselves and from posterity”.69 As Philip Morgan has argued, “humans and animals were the most valuable – and highly vulnerable – components of a plantation’s moveable equipment. For this reason, estate inventories consistently listed, first, the value of slaves and, second, that of livestock.”70 The former slave ledger was organized in columns that allowed for the name, occupation, and condition of the slave to be listed. Names here are only first names since the last names were stripped and the planter’s family name imposed. As the naming practices of Hope Estate attest, Africans were encumbered with a variety of names including typical anglophone and biblical names. But they were also named after geography (towns, regions, continents), physical qualities, personality traits, racial types, and holidays.71 In the categories of physical qualities and personality traits, some of the names on the ledger were Pleasant, Wackie, Short, Long, Swift, Strange, Smart, Constant, and Pretty. The naming of slaves was thus another form of white domination and ridicule, which daunted slaves throughout their entire lives. Lewis recorded his amusement at hearing the slaves’ names called aloud as he distributed clothing and materials at his plantation Cornwall: “We had Punch and Plato, Priam and Pam, Hemp and Hercules, and Minerva and Moll”. 72 Accordingly, the enslaved were even made to inhabit spaces designed more for animals than humans. As Mary Prince revealed of her time in Turks Island under the ownership of Mr D – , “We slept in a long shed, divided into narrow slips, like the stalls used for cattle. Boards fixed upon stakes driven into the ground, without mat or covering, were our only beds.”73 Andrea Levy’s thoroughly researched, emancipation era novel set in Jamaica, The Long Song (2010), reveals the combination of a blasé manner and haughtiness through which slave owners attempted to manipulate the identity of their slaves through the process of re-naming. Having named her child July at birth,74 the strong black female field slave, Kitty, is halted by her white master John Howarth in her travels with her nine-year-old daughter along a plantation road. Although explaining the reasons for her travel and

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producing a pass, Howarth snatches the “ragged piece of yellowing paper” from her and proceeds to interrogate her.75 Accompanied by his sister Caroline, newly arrived from England, the white woman becomes fixated upon the young black child, who, except for her skin “as dark as boot blacking”,76 reminded Caroline of her childhood dolls. Upon inquiring “what’s this one’s name?”, Kitty informs Caroline in a whisper that her daughter’s name is July.77 Amused at the opportunity to regale his sister with a story of his prowess as a planter, John explained how Kitty, now a towering “loathsome creature” with “sturdy ample shoulders”, had arrived at his plantation, Amity, years ago as a sickly child referred to as “Little Kitty”. The white pair’s objectification and invasive possession of Kitty and her child transcends naming, as John commands Kitty to raise her skirt to reveal the signs of her labouring body to his sister. When Kitty does not obey, the white planter yanks the “worn cloth of Kitty’s skirt” thereby “raising it almost to her waist” and commenced “rubbing his hand up and down Kitty’s leg saying, ‘Come and feel the muscles.’”78 As the master jokes with his sister that silk stockings would be unimaginable on such muscular legs, Kitty’s obvious humiliation and despair, embodied in her averted head, does not register with the pair.79 Levy makes it clear that the insentient beings in this exchange are actually the white couple – incapable of registering Kitty’s suffering – and not the enslaved black woman. Instead, she is further animalized in the interaction when John beckons his sister to mimic his actions in the stroking of Kitty’s legs, “‘Come on, Caroline, I have her, she won’t bite. Come and feel their strength.’”80 In the midst of Kitty’s terror, the unwitting black child dances at the white mistress’s feet, playing as she dropped flowers to the ground. Kitty urgently beckons her oblivious daughter as the white pair prepare to depart in their carriage. However, with John’s hastiness to depart and Caroline’s preoccupation with the “adorable” July, the planter commands his sister, “‘Well bring her then.’”81 As Caroline kidnaps July, with John’s approval, they provide tidy rationalizations for the destruction of this black family; Caroline reasoning that July will now be her companion and John that the kidnapping of July would incentivize Kitty to have more children.82 Levy paints a gutwrenching scene: Kitty stepped to snatch July from Caroline’s grasp. But Caroline slapped at Kitty’s hands shouting, “What’s she doing?” John Howarth raised his whip at Kitty, his face fiercely showing his intent, “Be on our way,” he said, “leave the child to your mistress.” Kitty, letting go of her child, just said, “But she go Unity Pen, massa. We have pass.” “Be quiet,” John Howarth shouted, “Your mistress here will take her now. She will be up at the big house. Now, go about your business.”83 Once ensconced in the Big House as the personal slave of this white mistress, July is renamed Marguerite by Caroline on a whim, “for she liked the way the name tripped upon her tongue like a trill”.84 Many years later when questioned by a new overseer, Robert Goodwin, saying “‘Tell me something, what is your name?’” July replies, “‘Miss July.’” When Goodwin continues, “‘Miss July? Then why does your mistress call you

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Marguerite?’” she responds bluntly, “‘Her t’ink that pretty name to call a slave, Now her can say no other.’”85 Although writing from his plantation on the Rappahannock River, the Virginia planter Robert “King” Carter (the richest planter in the state) related to his overseer a process of initiating Africans at the point of purchase, very similar to that of Jamaica’s Hope Estate and Levy’s “fictional” tale of Amity: “I name’d them here & by their names we can always know what sizes they are of & I am sure we repeated them so often to them that every one knew their name & would readily answer to them [sic].” As he further related, the process of re-naming continued when the Africans were forwarded to the plantation where the overseer repeated the process, “taking care that the negros both men & women I sent . . . always go by the names we gave them [sic].”86 As Berlin has noted regarding Carter, For the most part, he designated them by common English diminutives – Tom, Jamey, Moll, Nan – as if to consign them to a permanent childhood. But he tagged some with names more akin to barnyard animals – Jumper, for example – as if to represent their distance from humanity, and he gave a few the names of some ancient deity or great personage like Hercules or Cato as a kind of cosmic jest: the most insignificant with the greatest of names. None of his slaves received surnames, marks of lineage that Carter sought to obliterate and of adulthood that he would not admit.87 As Carter’s recollection conveys, the naming process itself was a scene of forced acculturation and intimidation through repetition (most likely administered under the whip); the slave’s ability or willingness to learn, know, and respond to their imposed name was a necessity that may have inevitably led to a reprieve from torture and abuse.88 But the renaming process was also a form of de-individualization. As Wood has argued, “Slavery, as legal and economic phenomenon, was premised upon the denial of personality, and of a personal history, to the slave.”89 But as Carter relates, it was also a means of dehumanizing the person and reducing blacks to memorable economic units, which benefitted the planter and the overseer in their ability to recall the corporeal specificity and therefore labour usefulness of a particular slave.90 This dehumanization of Africans coexisted with the humanization of animals on plantations as indicated by the names attributed to the cows in the “cattle” ledger of Hope Estate which mimicked the naming practices for slaves.91 As Morgan has argued, “In early modern England, as in Jamaica, cows were always given individual names, but . . . these names were not usually human ones. Perhaps in Jamaica, the close linkage of slaves and stock facilitated the jettisoning of old injunctions about never giving an animal a Christian name.”92 We must seriously contemplate not only the physical abuse of the enslaved being, as Mary Prince stated, worked “like a horse”, with “a halter round their neck and the whip upon their back”,93 but the psychic abuse entailed in an enslaved person existing in a highly circumscribed and overly regulated space in which they were forced to share their name with a farm animal.94

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The proximity of the grazing cattle (and sheep) to the lounging slaves in Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s drives home the similarity of their possession by Bayly whose wealth is implied by the unending rolling green hills (and the lack of obviously demarcated boundaries), which are dotted with even more buildings implying not only residences (Hakewill identified the overseer’s house on the hill at left), but works where sugar, molasses, and rum would have been produced. According to Hakewill, Bayly’s estates produced about 1,000 to 1,100 hogsheads of sugar yearly and 1,450 in 1815.95 The extraordinary animalization of the enslaved in Jamaica was further activated through the ubiquitous juxtaposition of advertisements, which similarly documented the sale or loss of slaves and animals. Examples of lost property advertisements from the June 1803 Jamaican Royal Gazette are indicative of this strategy: Spanish Town, April 18, 1803. Strayed into the Two-Mile-Wood Savanna, near this town, A Spanish mule, lately from the ship; is marked A, within a circle on the buttock. Whoever will deliver the said mule at Ebony-Park pen, or at the Printing-Office, in this town, shall Receive twenty shillings reward. St. Ann’s, Jan. 24, 1803. Escaped from St. Ann’s Workhouse, Plato, an Ebo, of a dark complection, 5 feet 6 inches high, belonging to the estate of Mr. Jones, of St. Ann’s. Whoever will lodge the said Negro with the subscriber shall receive a Pistole reward [sic]. Wm. Jones Taylor (sub.) And from 11 June 1803 Royal Gazette: Kingston, May 24, 1803. For Sale 302 Choice Young Eboe NEGROES Imported from Bonny in the ship Otway. Luke Mann, Master Bogle, Jopp, & Co. May 21, 1803. For Sale, at Haddon Pen, near the Moneague, 50 CREOLE STEERS Most of them fit for the Tongue. Apply on the premises.96 While the proprietary branding of the cattle recalls the same torture inflicted on the skin of enslaved Africans, the use of the term “choice” in the slave sale advertisement and “creole” in the cattle advertisement likewise drives home the inter-changeability of the naming and marketing practices of human and animal.97 But Prince’s narrative provided evidence that the animalization of slaves was not performed solely on a literary or symbolic level. Attempting to explain the vengefulness of white slave owners, Prince related,

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I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie up slaves like hogs – moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged;98 But interestingly, several other columns were featured in Hope Plantation’s List of Negroes; two in which the administrator could indicate whether the slave was born in Africa or Jamaica, and the last a large column where notes were inserted on the age, place of birth, and racial type of the slave. The relevance of the slaves’ Creoleness or Africanness may have been in part their need to be “seasoned” or “broken” into slave life as much as it was a way of tracking an estate’s expenditure on new labourers as opposed to those who were “bred”. But slave ethnicity was also taken as a predictor of resistance, as in Jamaica where Coramantee slaves were considered threatening.99 While Creole was used to indicate Jamaican-born slaves, the comments in the last and largest column indicated if slaves had been born on the estate, their approximate age, and their specific subset of blackness. This last was described with words like “mulatto”. But the ledger not only did the work of dividing the slave population by type, but by age and sex. The tracking of slave births was just as relevant to planters as the monitoring of elderly slaves. It is common knowledge now that the brutality of slave labour led to the premature death of countless slaves who were literally worked to death. It is safe to assume that the elderly slaves (elderly being forties and fifties) were tracked in part to ensure their replacements were bred or bought in time to supplement the labour losses brought on by their inevitable deaths. The sex composition of the slaves at Hope Estate validates Mair’s finding that it was black women who made up the bulk of the field labourers in Jamaica.100 While male slaves, listed as carpenters, coopers, masons, blacksmiths, and even doctors, would be put to work on other areas of the plantation and even granted the freedom to travel as needed beyond the plantation limits, female slaves were overwhelmingly trapped in the more menial and monotonous field labour tasks.101 While Hakewill’s Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s documents this likely mixed-sex group of field labourers, once again the disappearance of the cane field literally set them apart from the labours that consumed the majority of their six-day work week. James Hakewill’s white women While black men, women, and children are rendered throughout Hakewill’s prints, as well as white males of various classes, and by implication ethnicities, the missing person of Hakewill’s prints is the white woman. In comparison to Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica . . . (1838–40) in which 11 of the 50 lithographs represented white females, 102 in Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour . . . only two of the 21 aquatints depicted individual white

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women: Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Figure 7.5) and Rose Hall, St. James’ (Figure 7.6).103 The disjuncture between Hakewill’s near-avoidance of white female subjects and Kidd’s more judicious inclusion had everything to do with timing and politics. As Kriz has perceptively noted, “In the intervening years between Hakewill’s publication (1824–25), and Kidd’s (1838–40), the Emancipation Bill became law, sugar production declined by nearly 50 percent, and white flight accelerated.”104 The white female absence, though, only partially corresponds with the actual racial and sex demographics of the island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and must therefore be considered ideologically along the lines of Kriz’s arguments concerning the dominance of the mulatta in Agostino Brunias’ images of Dominica, St Vincent, and Tobago.105 In her readings of Brunias’ many genre scenes of bathing, markets, and other aspects of the lives of free coloureds, the enslaved, and indigenous Caribs, Kriz has astutely noted the centrality of the mulatta and the marked absence of white women from the images. According to Kriz,

Figure 7.5 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Kingston, and Port Royal, fromWindsor Farm from part 7 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0116, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Figure 7.6 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Rose Hall, St. James’, from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm,T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0045, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

One might expect to find in the West Indies a proliferation of similar representations of white West Indian families, featuring their women as the sign of a new, potentially prosperous and refined society. Although West Indian planters and their wives did occasionally have their portraits painted, in general white women in the Ceded Islands proved to be even more resistant to visual representation than their black slaves or domestic servants.106 Yet this absence of white female subjects was not wholesale, but specifically from the domain of “high” art representation. Indeed, as Kriz had noted, upper-class white Creole women had made a rather “inglorious debut” in mass-produced graphic satires of artists like Abraham James, William Elmes, and Richard Newton, in which they were often pictured as idle, lascivious, excessive, self-indulgent, and cruel.107 The absence of the white female subject from “high” art in the Caribbean context led Kriz to argue that Brunias’ images of mulattas worked to prepare the space for the upper-class white female subject by rendering the islands habitable through the “possibility of plenitude and refinement within newly acquired West Indian colonies”.108

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Therefore, the ideological aspect of white female absence lies in the Eurocentric and elitist idea that their bodies were too refined and “civilized” for the space of the West Indies and that their proximity to the supposedly culturally and racially inferior bodies of the enslaved Africans (and to a lesser extent the free coloureds and indigenous populations) would contaminate their innately superior sensibilities. In this way Hakewill’s under-representation of white women (as Brunias’ seemingly complete disappearance of them) can be read as a form of ideological protection, which through the absenting of their bodies resulted also in the refusal of their nativeness/Creoleness and therefore, racial, and moral corruption. Indeed, as Kriz concurs, “Well dressed and accompanied by equally genteel male companions, these women are placed in surroundings that confirm their virtue and elevated social status.”109 This sanitization of the social contexts of white female subjects through their near-complete removal from “high” art representation paralleled the ways in which white womanhood was defined within the contexts of “frontier civilization” within colonial and patriarchal discourse.110 Beckles contends that aristocratic and bourgeois values dictated that white women be insulated from “the aesthetically crudest aspects of slavery”, and disassociated from the, “reproduction of the slave status”.111 While any child born to an enslaved female was automatically a slave and the property of the female’s owner, white women were legally enfranchised by white men to “reproduce freedom” since their children were always born free regardless of the social status and race of the father. Accordingly, Beckles has argued that “white males valued black women’s fertility solely in terms of the reproduction of labour for the plantation enterprise, and placed a premium on white women’s maternity for its role in the reproduction of patriarchy.”112 However, the idea that white women could be uniformly insulated, by white men, from slavery’s rude face blatantly elides the frequency of their independent roles as the sole owners of slaves.113 Indeed, recent research indicates that at the time of British abolition in 1833, about 40 per cent of all slave owners in the British colonies were women.114 Therefore, in failing to fully represent white European and Creole women in the varied dimensions of their complex lives in Jamaica, and by specifically refusing to represent them in the company of black slaves, Hakewill also delivered the false impression that white women lacked direct association with (or ownership of ) enslaved Africans. Interestingly then, within his 21 prints, Hakewill represented only two white female subjects and both in the company, or more to the point, under the protection of, white men. This section (and the two that follow) explores Hakewill’s representation of white women in Jamaica in Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm and Rose Hall, St. James’, within the context of the actual racial demography of the island at that time. Furthermore, drawing largely from the experiences of Eliza Chadwick Roberts and Lady Maria Nugent, two foreign white women, I will argue that, similarly to white men like Hakewill, white women also participated in the aestheticization of sugar cane plantations for imperialist ends. I will also endeavour to examine the specificity of white female experience, as it was differentiated within the colonial context of Jamaican slavery, from that of black and coloured women. As Jane Haggis has argued convincingly, “Centring a singular female subjectivity fosters an inability to deal with the power relations of colonialism, privileging

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the white woman as benevolent victim of the imperialist white man. The colonised are relegated to an ungendered background against which the white genders act out their historical roles.”115 Years before Roberts and Nugent arrived in Jamaica, writers like Edward Long had lamented, in The History of Jamaica . . . (1774),116 the cultural and social degeneration of European women who, through their contact with their black slaves, came to adopt African manners of speech, comportment, dress, habit, and attitude.117 According to Long, We may see, in some of these places, a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant, lolling almost the whole day upon beds or settees, her head muffled up with two or three handkerchiefs, her dress loose, and without stays . . . In the afternoon, she takes her siesto as usual . . . When she rouzes from slumber, her speech is whining, languid, and childish [sic].118 Here Long demonstrated the belief that the frequency of contact with the Negroes led to the adoption of their bad and “primitive” habits and customs, and progressively to the degeneration of the white female, both in body and mind. Similarly, the American Eliza Chadwick Roberts also expressed dismay at the “indolence” of white Jamaican women observing an evening ritual wherein “the Ladyes has there mattrasses fixd with Springs Like a Swing Cradle and are Swang in this untill sleep [sic]”.119 However, unlike Long, Roberts placed the blame for this social and moral corruption in the laps of the whites whom she accused of relying too much on their servants.120 I would argue, though, that the way that Hakewill represented white women in Jamaica helped to secure their position as supposedly superior to black and mixed-race females by insulating them in terms of how, where, and in what contexts they became visible. The presence of white women in only two of Hakewill’s prints, Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm and Rose Hall, St. James’, must also be considered in relation to the actual race and sex demographics of the island. According to Beckles, “In Jamaica, white women constituted no more than 40 per cent of the white community up to 1780.”121 This “shortage” of white women would have resulted in less viable marriage candidates for the white male planter class who only rarely sought legal or religious sanction to legitimize their frequent sexual and domestic relationships with black and coloured women. However, it also assuredly meant an increase in the sexual exploitation of these aforementioned groups of women of African descent who, as sexual surrogates for the absent and/or insulated white women, were expected, through force or coercion, to provide the sexual and domestic services of a wife, without the benefit of the social status or legal protection of marriage. As Kriz has argued regarding the Jamaican context, “Married men left their wives at home in Britain and single men tended to remain unmarried during their stay in the West Indies. In either case, once in the islands many of these men took black or mulatto women as their mistresses and produced racially mixed offspring.”122 Indeed, the case of Hakewill himself should lead us to speculate on just how many little mixed-race Hakewills may have been left behind in Jamaica after his two-year residency on the island had ended. In 1807, Hakewill married the portrait painter Maria Catherine

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Browne, a frequent exhibitor at The Royal Academy and The Society of Arts.123 Hakewill and Maria had four sons: Arthur William (1808–56) who became an architect, Henry James (1813–34) who became a sculptor, Frederick Charles who followed in his mother’s footsteps and became a portrait, and Richard Whitworth.124 However, it is unclear if his white wife, an established portraitist, accompanied him to Jamaica during his long sojourn since the colony was not considered particularly suitable – culturally, medically or socially – for upper-class white women, who were the greatest minority on the island.125 Regardless of his wife’s presence or absence, Hakewill’s potential sexual access to black and mixed-race women would have been easily brokered by this white male planter associates upon whose estates he lodged during his extended stay. Although Maria Nugent, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Jamaica, George Nugent (1801–06), lamented weighing in on the indelicate subject, she commented that white Jamaican men regularly set a poor example for the black population by living “in a state of licentiousness with their female slaves”.126 Given the customary and widespread nature of the sexual exploitation of black women in nineteenth-century Jamaica (discussed in great detail above in Chapter 6), Hakewill would obviously have been provided the opportunity to indulge in the common practice of cross-racial sexual relations. Indeed, as Cooper bluntly revealed, “Persons on a visit at a friend’s house, think it no disgrace to send out for a girl when bed-time arrives, or, which is about the same thing, secure one of the female servants for the night.”127 Due to the length of Hakewill’s stay, his presence on sugar cane estates and his intimate dealings with Jamaican planters and their social circles, he would have quickly become apprised of the specific dimensions of the inner lives of the white Creole elite as well as the patriarchal stratification of women on the basis of race upon which the plantation system depended. Although frequently accusing their African slaves of inherent debauchery and licentiousness, all evidence indicates that the white male plantation elite regularly overindulged in what was considered at the time to be socially immoral sexual practices and excessive alcohol consumption.128 White Jamaican men regularly partook of ritualized bonding through frequent late-night bouts of drinking. Their intemperance usually involved rum punch, a by-product of the lucrative sugar cane plant, which ironically led to their physical and mental deterioration.129 After two years on the island, Hakewill would surely have been aware of (and invited to participate in) such homo-social gatherings and his desire to publish and sell his book would have made it expedient for him to bond with the males of the planter class in this fashion. As such, he would also have been privy to the planters’ sexual predilections and no doubt would have been offered sexual access to their female slaves. Drawing from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources, Beckles has noted that “white males possessed a sexual typology in which white women were valued for domestic formality and respectability, ‘coloured’ women for exciting socio-sexual companionship, and black women for irresponsible, covert sexual adventurism”.130 Hakewill’s representation of white women is a demonstration of this typology, liberating them from the day-to-day grind of the plantation, as a site of brutal forced labour and

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economic exploitation and disassociating them from their roles as what Beckles has called “economic actors” and “ideological enforcers”.131 The fact that the terms “actors” and “enforcers” are words that imply action were key for Beckles since they confirmed white women as people who participated within the institution of slavery in ways which point out their often independent investments, confirmed their racial privilege, and reinforced the status quo.132 Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss concurs, arguing in her examination of nineteenth-century white Martinican women that they undermined the ideals of elite white womanhood laid out by white male planters, “through their participation as more than mere consumers in the local and transatlantic economy”.133 In Rose Hall, St. James’, an image of a sugar plantation, Hakewill positions the white woman literally outside of the gates of the estate. For the English architect whose earlier book on Italy had focused extensively on architecture, the choice to depict the landscape so that the viewer is looking down a very long dirt road towards the much-diminished Great House, is an odd one.134 This vantage point is even more peculiar given that the Rose Hall Great House was considered one of the “grandest” in the colony (Plate 15).135 Indeed, only one of Hakewill’s 21 images depicts a planter’s home in a large-scale, detailed and significant manner, Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny.136 Furthermore, although Hakewill rendered the Great House in Rose Hall, St. James’ visually insignificant, he paradoxically described it as “justly considered as the best in Jamaica” and devoted his textual description to detailing the opulence and accomplishment of the structure and interior.137 Hakewill described the house, which was “at a delightful elevation” and commanding “a very extensive sea view”, as positioned on the seaside between Montego Bay and Falmouth.138 As Geoffrey S. Yates has observed, “The residence of John Rose Palmer Esq., the home which resembled an Italian villa was built fifty years before Hakewill visit by the Hon. John Palmer, Custos of St. James for the cost of 30,000 pounds sterling.”139 Even from what little can be deduced from Hakewill’s rendering, Rose Hall’s multi-level estate house, positioned in the distance at the centre of the image at the end of the long plantation road, was certainly huge and stately. Surely, it surpassed the Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis’ house. As Lewis described, The houses here are generally built and arranged according to the same model. My own is of wood, partly raised upon pillars; it consists of a single floor: a long gallery, called a piazza, terminated at each end by a square room, runs the whole length of the house. On each side of the piazza is a range of bed-rooms, and the porticoes of the two fronts form two more rooms, with balustrades, and flight of steps descending to the lawn. The whole house is virandoed with shifting Venetian blinds to admit air . . . There is nothing underneath except a few store-rooms and a kind of waiting-hall [sic].140 Lewis’ observation about the similarity of the planters’ homes provides a likely reason why Hakewill did not choose to replicate the house portrait genre which Vlach describes as a staple of landscape representation of the plantations in the American South. As an architect

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who had travelled to Italy and seen some of the most revered European edifices, the architecture of Jamaica likely seemed provincial and unworthy of documentation. However, although Rose Hall, as his text indicates, was worthy of note, he declined to represent it as anything more than a distant and unspecified monument. While the size and solidity of the stone gates that frame the plantation entrance symbolized the wealth, stability, and prestige of the family who owned the land, the Palmers’ money concerns began with Rose Hall’s first owner. According to Yates, Like many other rich planters of the period, The Hon. John Palmer lived on credit, which was fine as long as the sugar boom lasted. His wealth was more apparent than real, and the more he spent on building and furnishing Rose Hall, the deeper he floundered into debt.141 John Rose, the great-nephew of the more senior John Palmer, reputedly travelled to Jamaica in 1818 to reclaim his family’s estates which had fallen into the hands of creditors.142 However, although he briefly reclaimed control of the properties, his lack of resources also forced him to mortgage them to Henry Martin Ancrum of London.143 John maintained himself by serving as a JP in Montego Bay and, from 1824, as administrator of the neighbouring estate, Running Gut, while the owner, George Whithorne Lawrence, was absent in Scotland.144 It would appear that John Rose’s fortunes were shifting for the worse, precisely around the time when Hakewill was reported to have visited in 1821–22. Hakewill centred the print around the Rose Hall Great House, placing us on the central drive, which widens in the foreground spilling off either side of the page (Figure 7.6). The drive and the house are framed by the stone gate and the towering royal palms that tilt slightly towards the centre of the page directing the viewer’s eyes again to the road and the distant house. This framing device is used more conspicuously by Hakewill in his print of Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny in which a set of five royal palms are visible behind the right side of the house. The road to Rose Hall, marked on both sides with the parallel tracks of a carriage or wain, seems to dip and rise again into another elevated flat upon which the house sits.145 Behind the house a densely forested area is visible that rises into hills and eventually mountains in the distance. Palmer was the owner of another adjoining estate called Palmyra, and had inherited it and Rose Hall from his great uncle. In the image, the only access that Hakewill provides to the two hundred acres of cane fields is through the metal and stone gates of the estate’s main entrance.146 Again, the absenting of (labouring) slave bodies is maintained since Hakewill represents only one of the 252 Negroes, which Palmer reputedly owned.147 The single slave stands erect and statue-like, reminiscent of black marble, on the right beside the opened gate as the two white riders approach. Although the black subject is not very far from the picture plane and the body is directly facing the viewer and the approaching riders, the subject is literally faceless. The blackness of the skin, shoulders, chest, feet, and face create a flat field against the blue and white clothing. The inaction of the sexually

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ambiguous slave is odd and difficult to deduce. Has he/she just opened the gate for the white couple? The stance of the feet do not connote movement and due to the position of the body so close to the right gate, the figure cannot obviously be read as present to attend to the approaching white couple. The image shows the white leisured class of Jamaican plantocracy. The vastness of their land that sweeps in a horizontal band across the page is a sign of their wealth, as is the opulent house in the distance. Unlike Hakewill’s Montpelier Estate, St. James’s – the Property of C.R. Ellis Esq. MP, the works of Rose Hall and Palmyra are nowhere visible. Instead the Great House announces the presence of white owners and their importation of European culture in the form of an Italian villa filled with paintings, gildings, a mahogany staircase, etc. The woman in the image is most likely Annie Mary Paterson who had married John Rose in Mount Pleasant, St. James on 28 March 1820.148 John Rose died at Rose Hall in November 1827 at the age of 42, just two short years after Hakewill’s book was published.149 The impression of opulence and wealth that Hakewill’s text and landscape evoke were largely false, since Annie, when widowed inherited her husband’s 6,000-pound debt and only £1,137 15s 10½d of assets.150 In 1829, Annie owned a mere four slaves. She died in 1846.151 It would appear, then, that any hospitality that the couple extended to Hakewill may have been a part of a façade to retain the appearance of a social visibility and public status that was fast dwindling. Although her dress, comportment, and accompaniment by an upper-class white male (as shown in his attire) indicate that she is most likely the plantation mistress (or family member or guest thereof), her positioning outside of the physical space of the estate serves to symbolically remove her from the brutality of slavery and the systematic exploitation of slaves upon which such estates relied. However, both the memoir of Eliza Chadwick Roberts and the journals of Lady Maria Nugent indicate that even foreign white women were quickly made familiar with some of the more gruesome aspects of plantation slavery. Furthermore, Beckles’ research also demonstrates that white women in Barbados were direct participants within the extremely oppressive socio-sexual aspects of slavery, not only in terms of their interaction with black women but also with black men.152 Both Roberts and Nugent, for instance, recount being schooled on the frequency and necessity of the amputations of hands and limbs performed by overseers with hatchets when slaves got fingers drawn into working mills.153 And the Scottish Janet Schaw, during her sojourn in Antigua, witnessed the use of drivers, the frequency of whippings, and the scars that such punishment inflicted.154 If Schaw, Roberts, and Nugent received such educations, how much more would a white (Creole) Jamaican woman have been familiar with, witness to or implicated in such commonplace horrors? Roberts was given a first-hand glimpse of the inner workings of a plantation when she and her husband visited Newry Estate, southwest of Annotto Bay, as the guest of the manager or overseer, Mr Hazard.155 But tellingly, Roberts did not extend much sympathy to the slaves who worked around the clock minding the boilers in the plantation distilleries. Instead, she likened their toil to keeping watch at sea, or to her own long days as a milliner, a drastic over-simplification which completely ignored the perils of excessive heat (both

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from climate and ovens), and the brutality of vengeful drivers and overseers.156 Of course, sewing hats or sitting on the deck of a ship in the fresh sea air for many hours could never have compared to the hard labour of planting or harvesting fields of towering cane that enveloped slaves in oven-like heat or to tending boilers in the confined space of the steaming distilleries for hours on end. Critiquing late twentieth-century Caribbean historiographies’ inability to contend with white women as pro-slavery agents, Beckles argued that scholarly approaches were needed to adequately address white women as economic actors, managers of slave-based households, and conduits in the process of socio-ideological transmission. As a result, the traditional conception of the slave owner as male remains unchallenged, and the socio-economic limit of patriarchy not identified . . . Yet there is no shortage of documentary evidence to show white women as accumulators of property and profits through involvement on their own account in commercial and service activities, and as ideological enforcers within the social organization of slave society.157 As such, I would like to suggest that a part of the ideological work that Hakewill’s representation of white women accomplishes is an erasure of what Beckles describes as their direct and often independent roles in the economic and social dimensions of slavery in the West Indies; investments which went against their characterization as “refined”, “civilized”, and “dignified” purveyors of European culture and “polite” domestic values. But furthermore, Hakewill’s decision to remove these white women from contact with black people in his images also served to contest the histories that implicate white women in the endemic violence of slavery. As Beckles has argued, Acts of extreme cruelty to black women by white women are documented in much of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. European travellers seemed rather surprised and disturbed that white women should display attitudes of human suffering and impose punishments that held them indistinguishable from their male counterparts [italics mine].158 After four years in the Caribbean, F.W. Bayley found white female slave owners to be crueller than their male counterparts, more vengeful, and to employ more “refined” methods of punishment, especially towards their female slaves.159 The Reverend Thomas Cooper argued that “White women, who are owners of slaves, will, in general, without any scruple, order their slaves to be flogged, and some of them will even stand by to see them stripped bare, and punished in the usual disgusting manner.”160 Similarly, J.A. Rogers argued that, largely in response to their sexual and romantic usurpation by black females, “married [white] ladies frequently excelled their husbands in the use of the whip . . . delicate young ladies had Negroes, male and female, stripped and beaten before them”.161

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White and White have argued that head shaving was not an uncommon form of slave punishment in the US, and, although initially applied both to male and female slaves, it increasingly became a punitive act meted out against enslaved black females by white female slave mistresses.162 In one case, James Brittian recalled that the beauty of his African-born grandmother, who had hair “fine as silk and hung down below her waist”, inspired the jealous rage of the white slave mistress who had her whipped, cut her hair off, and ordered that his grandmother henceforth wear it shaved to the scalp.163 In a similar case on a Texas plantation, the white wife of Judge Maddox waited for him to leave before cropping the hair of his newly purchased slave, a “pretty mulatto girl” with “long black straight hair”.164 In a telling example the nineteenth-century observer of Jamaican slavery, the Reverend R. Bickell, recounted the abuse of a black female slave at the hands of her white mistress in Port Royal. Although the white woman’s husband was engaged in a coercive sexual relationship with the slave and according to Bickell the slave could not resist his “entreaties and presents,” the jealous white wife was in the habit of punishing her severely “with her own hand”, until the master allowed the slave the reprieve to “go out as a servant” to a gentleman in Kingston.165 But the mistress was also upset by the slave’s new circumstances and ordered her back to the residence where the floggings resumed.166 This case exposes a particularly sinister element of slave abuse; the punitive nature of the white mistress who retaliated, not against her white male husband for his sexual promiscuity and indiscretions, but against the black female victims of sexual aggression and violence. In the case that Bickell related, the goal was not to get the black woman away from her husband (which had been accomplished when the slave was dismissed to Kingston) but to punish her for being more desirable than her (white) self in the eyes of her husband, something which the black woman of course could not control. To what extent, then, were the heinous torture practices of white women against black women a product of their mis-directed rage against their white husbands, which could not be directly expressed against the male head of household within the patriarchal logic of the upper-class white Creole marriage? Accordingly, Bickell surmised that white women as well as men in Jamaica were abusive owners who punished overzealously: Why gentle reader, I have heard of a lady, (viz. a white woman of good property,) of the parish of Westmoreland, who was accustomed to send her female Slaves to a large pond, a cattle-pond, to wash themselves, whilst she herself would be mounted on a charger, and would point out to a driver, or some flogging assistant, such and such females as were to be flogged in their naked state!!!167 Indeed, in nineteenth-century Jamaica the indiscriminate torture of slaves and the public evidence of such torture in their exposed and marked flesh were so rampant as to be seen as normal.168 Returning to Kriz’s point about the absence of the white wives of the male planters from the Caribbean context, the cases of Eliza Chadwick Roberts and the more famous Lady Maria Skinner Nugent provide tantalizing exceptions to the rule; tantalizing since

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both women wrote of their time in Jamaica and their texts have survived to provide us with white female perspectives of Jamaica in the early nineteenth century.169 These American women, both born in New Jersey, wrote about their sojourns, which were directly related to the work and travel obligations of their husbands. Although raised in the slave-holding state of New Jersey, both were, prior to their Jamaican sojourns, unfamiliar with the nature of slavery in colonies where black slaves constituted the majority of the population.170 Indeed, due to the racist “common sense” about the inferiority of so-called Negroes, their exposure to the sheer number of black inhabitants in Jamaica would have been shocking for the women. In March 1802 when arriving at Golden Grove, one of the estates of the wealthy planter Simon Taylor, Nugent commented, “Never in my life did I see such a number of black faces together”.171 For Nugent then, sightings of white women became more remarkable than that of blacks.172 While Lady Nugent journaled while residing in Jamaica with her husband (Major General George Nugent, Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the island) from 29 July 1801 until 28 June 1805, Roberts, who apparently kept a diary (which she later transformed into a memoir) during her stay from 10 June until 14 July 1805, was prompted to visit the island due to the travels of her husband, Captain William Roberts.173 Although both white American women, Eliza was of a decidedly lower class than Maria174 and, while her stay on the island was significantly shorter, Eliza Roberts’ memoir provides interesting insights into the perceptions and engagements of middle- to lower-class white females in Jamaican slave society of the time.175 As Klepp and McDonald have argued, “Both left friends, kin, and their accustomed activities to be with their husbands and to visit an exotic environment that at once enticed and repelled them. There they were in a society where the vast majority of the population was enslaved and where white skin conferred privilege.”176 Lamenting the scarcity of women’s perspectives on historical Caribbean society, Klepp and McDonald have argued that the deficit is troubling, since “Anglo-American married women’s experiences as femmes covert might have produced more sympathetic responses to the plight of slaves and sharper critiques of slave-owning society than accounts authored by men.”177 However, their argument is based upon a problematic logic that places the sex/gender difference of white females above their racial sameness, imperial affiliations, and economic investments with white men; the assumption being that the femaleness of white women somehow dissuaded them from fully participating in or benefitting from the colonial racial dynamics of slave societies. Indeed, this is the exact same “victim approach” that Beckles decried in his pioneering scholarship on white women in the Caribbean.178 Arguing against this retroactive sanitization, Beckles has concluded that “The evidence can be interpreted to suggest that many black women probably suffered their greatest degree of social exploitation at the hands of white women, since the direct sale of women’s sexuality for accumulation purposes represents a crucial distinction between the general experience of plantation and urban slaves [italics mine].”179 White women clearly participated in and benefitted from empire. Beckles’ earlier research (which Klepp and McDonald oddly cite) on the directness of white female sexual

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exploitation of black females in Barbados, as well as the reported viciousness and the deliberate nature of their sex-specific, slave-owning, and punishment practices, renders the assumptions of Klepp and McDonald problematic.180 The issue of class affiliation is surely also at stake in how these white women related to and documented the black people that they encountered. Although Nugent was assuredly upper-class, Roberts, although accustomed to paid labour, could in good times afford to hire a servant.181 The combination of the women’s racial and class affiliations, along with the patriarchal protections afforded them through their legitimized access to marriage with white men, would have placed them, both socially and culturally, significantly above the enslaved and free black populations of Jamaica.182 Although marriage is often recounted largely as a prison of regulation, policing, abuse, and containment for white women within the nineteenth century and earlier, a critical analysis of the intersection of sex/gender and race/colour within the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery, quickly reveals the protections and indeed privileges which white women were afforded through the racialized application of patriarchy. But Roberts and Nugent diverge in considerable ways from the Creole white women they would have encountered on the island, many of whom, if married, would have had Creole white Jamaican men as husbands; a class of men who posed a distinct set of problems for their white wives. As Burnard has argued, “Not the least of these problems was the tacit social acceptance of the growing tendency for men openly to take concubines rather than enter into marriage.”183 Although taboo for the ways that it conflicted with the colonial “common sense” and Eurocentric scientific and aesthetic logic about the supposed racial superiority of whites, many white men in the Caribbean, either European or Creole, expressed a clear sexual (and romantic) preference for the company of black or mixed-race women over white. While much of this “expression” was inconspicuous, white men like Bayley wrote openly about their desire for complexions that were “tinged, if not too darkly, with the richness of olive”.184 Further, Bayley confessed, “I know no prettier scene than a group of young and handsome coloured girls taking their evening walk”.185 White male desire for black women undoubtedly produced anger and jealousy in white women who were reared with an expectation that their supposedly superior beauty and culture positioned them above females of all other races in the competition for heterosexual attractiveness. Beckles contends that white female jealousy of black women’s ability to compete “effectively for the attention, favours and resources owned and controlled by white men” was the root not only of white female pro-slavery ideology, but the (misdirected) anger that they vented without prohibition against women of colour.186 And yet, as the wives of white men, white women were socially and legally protected from or had recourse against certain forms of abuse, violence, and humiliation. It is not insignificant that at a moment when the majority of enslaved black women in Jamaica were field labourers on sugar cane plantations (at a ratio of 920 males to 1,000 females),187 both Roberts and Nugent were empowered, although to varying degrees, through their access to tourism, literacy, and leisure time, to participate in the “cult of domesticity” and to

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contemplate and embrace the “ideal of the companionate, egalitarian, and loving marriage”.188 Indeed, Roberts consciously conceptualized her writing as aspirational, a way to protect her personal time and to counteract the labours and drudgery of her normal existence. She argued, “I would not be deprived of the enjoyment of Solitude and reflection tho they are stolen from the hurry and bastle of life [sic].”189 At the same time, the enslaved black women that both Maria and Eliza observed were trapped within an exploitative capitalist system, which Mair has noted “concentrated black enslaved women in the fields in the most menial and least versatile areas of cultivation in excess of men, and in excess of all persons, male and female, who were not black”.190 But political and religious ties as well as education and upbringing reveal the distance between these two white women. While Maria was a wealthy Anglican born into a loyalist family, Eliza was middle- to lower-class, self-educated, Methodist, and born to a father who had fought in the Revolution on the side of the Americans.191 While Maria grew accustomed to a Jamaican household dependant on the labour of slaves and servants and a life burdened by political obligations,192 Eliza became the head of her household, raising small children, grieving lost loved ones, and staving off financial ruin with the support of extended family and friends.193 Interestingly, both women lamented the frequent absences of their husbands whom they loved, and both expressed reluctance about visiting Jamaica;194 Maria, upon news of her husband’s posting, lamented the obligation of having to play “the Governor’s lady to the blackies”.195 In comparison, Eliza, who ably recounted details of the Haitian Revolution, expressed sympathy for the St Dominguan slaves.196 However, it is also fair to say that both were bound not only by their commitment to self-expression and observation through writing, but also by their expectation of an audience; initially for Maria her children and for Eliza an unnamed friend.197 At the time when Eliza and Maria were in Jamaica, slaves accounted for more than three quarters of the 400,000 population and, as Klepp and McDonald note, “The white society in which Nugent and Roberts found themselves was numerically small and predominantly male – this population of 20,000 had at least 50 percent more men than women”.198 This calculation placed the white female population at 6,667 (or less) of the 400,000 inhabitants on the island. A part of the necessary background of Hakewill’s representation of white women is an understanding of the extent to which they were constructed as the only women in Jamaica at this time. In a compelling passage in her novel The Long Song (2010), Andrea Levy describes how the racialization of gender and sex allowed white Jamaican men to differentiate and discriminate between white and black women. Set on the eve of emancipation in Jamaica as slave rebellions brewed across the island, Levy placed the English planter John Howarth and his Scottish overseer Tam Dewar within the midst of a journey home from Kingston after helping squash slave rebellions: At the bend in the road, where it narrows to barely a path, they heard a woman screaming. A white woman. Most white men upon this island believe the sound to be quite different from that of a negress; the cry softer, higher, and has a more melodious cadence, even when pitched with the same terror. Now the holler of a

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negress could go unmarked, but a white woman screaming must be investigated by the militia [italics mine].199 “I am the only woman”: Politeness and the erasure of black and coloured women The disjuncture between black and white women, especially between enslaved and free, and the intersection of class and racial oppression upon which plantation and other forms of slavery were based, served to elevate, insulate, and protect upper- and middle-class white women in Jamaica. This protection, of course, was not just physical, social, and material but also sexual. In the case of physical harm, Levy represented a gruesome “fictitious” vision of a slave woman, stripped, beaten bloody, and left to be tormented by carnivorous birds, which recalls to mind John Gabriel Stedman’s earlier eighteenthcentury infamous description and image of a Flagellation of a Female, Samboe Slave (1790) in Suriname.200 Expanding upon the travel of two key white male characters, the planter Howarth and his overseer Dewar, Levy wrote, Half-way between the town and Shepperton Pen, they had come upon a naked slave woman, tied to a coconut tree by her arms. As her feet could not reach the floor, she was slowly spinning in the sun’s heat. Dangling juicy as roasting meat upon a spit, crows kept pecking at her to test her as food. As she spat and kicked to shoo them, she would start to spin faster. She had been beaten before being tied up – with a stick or a short riding whip – for her skin, dusty and black, was in places torn off, creating a speckled pattern that appeared like dappled sunlight upon her.201 Levy’s planter saw the dying black woman not as a suffering human being worthy of rescue, but as a bizarre and gruesome aesthetic object of disinterested contemplation. The objectification of a torture victim recalls Beckford’s earlier aestheticization of his slaves’ labouring bodies (discussed in Chapter 5). Howarth’s response to the horrific scene was to frown, ponder the black woman’s assumed crime, and ride on; for a black female body abused and tortured as such, warranted neither his nor his overseer’s pity or intervention. As Beckles has argued, “white men especially were located at the convergence where the racial, sexual, and class domination of slave women provided a totality of terror and tyranny.”202 It was the white woman, then, who alone held the top position in the hierarchy of females and, accordingly, who alone could be classified as woman. This idealized status also provided protection in the forms of the social, legal, and economic infrastructures of white patriarchy. During her travels along the north coast of the island from Annatto Bay, Nugent’s comments demonstrated her willing performance of her white female privilege and the extent to which white women were complicit in the sex/gender marginalization of black females. She commented, “It is wonderful the attention that is paid to me, and the

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care that is taken of me; all I say and do is perfection, for I am the only woman! [italics mine].”203 But of course, in a colony with 400,000 people, she was not the only woman. That she was often the only (upper-class) white woman present at gatherings (especially during travels of this nature with her husband) is unquestionable. However, the fact that Maria Nugent was unable to see and to acknowledge black females as women was a product of her extreme privilege and insulation as the upper guard of a colonial administrative regime, sustained by the complete legal, social, and material exploitation of enslaved Africans. Just as with any racial identification, neither European nor Creole whiteness was secure. Rather, the gendered, class, and racial boundaries between supposedly distinct groups had to be constantly re-enforced. As Schloss has noted in the Martinican context, the fiction of white homogeneity served a useful purpose in structuring the limits of black and coloured social access and mobility, particularly in times of social upheaval or rebellion.204 Therefore, the fiction of Maria Nugent’s exceptionalness as a woman had to be maintained, for her own sense of self and because her privilege as a white woman, which included the production of her idealized sexuality and her insulation from certain kinds of sexual abuse and physical suffering, was constituted through a careful maintenance of white dominance based upon the white population’s ability to ensnare people of African descent in specific relations of power. As such, much as in the case of Janet Schaw in Antigua and St Kitts, as Bohls has argued, “Genteel femininity, the white ‘lady,’ symbolically aligned with the plantation’s aestheticized Nature, becomes crucial to upholding the structure of racial domination.”205 But Nugent’s position was premised on an active denial of the demographic dominance of enslaved black women in Jamaica. Arguably her ability to disavow the womanhood of this vast population was the effect of a psychological self-deception, even delusion, which allowed her to overlook or dismiss situations, which she found uncomfortable by disengaging through her identity as a Euro-American foreigner of a supposedly superior class and culture. Returning to the issue of white female jealousy at their sexual and even domestic usurpation by the supposedly less beautiful, less refined, and less prized women of African descent, Nugent was squarely confronted by the reality of Jamaican concubinage during a visit with Simon Taylor at his Golden Grove plantation during her husband’s gubernatorial tour.206 The super-rich Taylor owned four sugar estates and managed several others, accruing an estimated worth, upon his death in 1813, of one million pounds.207 Nugent described him as “the richest man in the island”.208 Needless to say, with the extent of his fortune, finding a suitable white female to marry was not an issue for Taylor. Indeed, even if Taylor felt that the pickings in the Jamaican white plantocratic marriage pool were slim, he could easily have secured a suitable match directly from Britain or elsewhere in Europe. That he did not, and consciously at that, clearly indicates his contentment with another type of domestic arrangement with black women.209 Petley reports that from the age of 30, in conversations and correspondence with family and friends, Taylor was already mapping out his life as a “bachelor”.210 Instead

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of a legal and religious domestic commitment with a white woman through marriage, Taylor chose to have two long-term relationships with free coloured women, Grace Donne and Sarah Hunter.211 Often called “housekeepers”, this euphemism was a polite way to disguise the sexual and domestic labour and social benefits that these women provided.212 So pronounced was this practice that after only five weeks in Jamaica, Matthew Lewis felt confident in proclaiming, “This kind of establishment is the highest object of the brown females of Jamaica; they seldom marry men of their own colour, but lay themselves out to captivate some white person, who takes them for mistresses, under the appellation of housekeepers.”213 Likewise, Cooper observed that, due to ignorance and the immorality and what I call the defeminization caused by slavery, black and brown women perceived the station of concubine of white men as an honour.214 However, unlike Cooper, Lewis’ observation was devoid of empathy and understanding of the plight of these brown females who, on the basis of the supposed inferiority of their African heritage, had been early socialized to accept a compromised sexual/gender identity which facilitated demeaning, socially-compartmentalized relationships with white men. If, as the dominant colonial ideology professed, the African’s racial difference and supposed inferiority rendered them essentially well suited to the status of slave – a chattel whose job it was to use their labour to accrue wealth for their owners, not for themselves – blackness (as complexion, phenotype, and anatomy) as a sign of Africanness also came to stand for a marginalized class status. As Bickell surmised, coloureds in Jamaica were shut out from all trusts and offices; and the females, however fair and chaste they may be, (for many of them are as fair and chaste as white women, and particularly as to the latter, those who have been educated in Britain), they are not allowed to marry the lowest white man.215 Indeed, even white men suffered social ostracization for daring to “lower” themselves by marrying women of African ancestry. As Bickell explained, if a white man were to do so, he would be shunned and persecuted like a monstrous or diseased entity.216 But it is crucial to note that the greatest pressure to maintain the racialized sexual hierarchy, which positioned black and coloured women as sexually exploitable, came from upperclass white men who policed their own ranks. Determined to shore up their privilege and to ensure the continuing marginalization of black men and women at every turn, white men who themselves had coloured “housekeepers” and children and who kept company with white men of similar domestic circumstances, not only refused to socialize with, but openly shunned, those who dared to marry their coloured “housekeepers”. The problem of marrying a coloured woman was that it bestowed upon her (and her mixed-race children) social and legal legitimacy. Lewis further noted that the dominance of white male/coloured female relationships functioned to limit the romantic and sexual choice of coloured men who had “no other resource than black women”.217 Similarly, Bickell claimed that most coloured women

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preferred to be kept as a mistress of a white man than to be the wife of a man of colour, arguing that the grip of racism was such that they took pride in seeing their offspring advance towards whiteness (socially and biologically no doubt) and attain a more privileged colour and caste. Of course the word “preferred” does not acknowledge the problem of racism and social conditioning and cannot account for the brutal social pressures and controls under which all people, never mind marginalized subjects, were operating. But such white male bonds with coloured women were often disrupted or severed by white women. Bickell claimed that most white men provided for their coloured mistresses and children, but that in cases where men eventually married a white woman, the coloured family was often deserted with the approval, authorization or even at the insistence of the white wife.218 Regardless, it is clear that some mixed-race females leveraged their desirability to improve their class status and make economic and social gains for themselves and their children, gains achieved through their deliberate separation from the enslaved population. Writing about the coloured population in Jamaica, Cooper explained, “They are objects of great respect to the slaves, but are kept at a distance by the free Browns, who consider themselves as rising in rank as they approach to the colour of Whites.”219 During the visit to Taylor’s property Nugent came face to face with the ubiquitous outcome of cross-racial sexual relationships, embodied in the person of Taylor’s mixedrace daughter. Taylor expressed concern, even embarrassment, about exposing upper-class white women to the nature of his intimate relationships with women of African descent. In one example, his correspondence indicates that he worked to undo his niece’s proposed Jamaican visit of 1798 due to his unease at having the white female privy to the nature of his relationship with his coloured “housekeeper”, Grace Donne.220 Regardless of Taylor’s attempts to insulate white women from the reality of his domestic situation, Nugent was confronted by the nature of Taylor’s lifestyle choices during her visit. As Nugent related, A little mulatto girl was sent into the drawing-room to amuse me. She was a sickly delicate child, with straight light-brown hair, and very black eyes. Mr. T appeared very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the evening, the housekeeper told me she was his own daughter, and that he had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates.221 Taylor’s anxiety is curious alongside Bickell’s assertion that Creole white ladies accepted the ubiquitous practice of white men taking coloured housekeepers and having mixed-race children since they often paid visits to the coloured mistress of a relative and “fondle and caress the little ones”.222 However, the key distinction may be in the identifier “Creole”. Arguably, Taylor’s concern for decorum manifested more concretely around Nugent whose origins in New Jersey, a white majority slave-holding state, had made her less familiar with so-called amalgamation. Furthermore, Nugent was arguably the most publicly esteemed white woman on the island, thus demanding a greater degree of caution and politeness. Nugent was clearly informed that Taylor’s pattern of sexual engagement with black women extended across his various properties. Despite being confronted with the reality of Taylor’s active sexual and domestic life with black women, Nugent’s narration

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of her visit and her impressions of Taylor still insisted upon eliding the centrality of black women in his life and refusing black females the status of women. For instance, in her diary entry for 10 March 1802, she wrote, “ I cannot here avoid mentioning, that Mr. Taylor is an old bachelor, and detests the society of women, but I have worked to reform, for he never leaves me an instant, and attends to all my wants and wishes [italics mine].”223 Nugent’s narration accomplished two tasks: it worked to erase Taylor’s long-term, cross-racial relationships, the very same ones which produced children like the “little mulatto girl” that she met, and it refused the plethora of coloured females at Golden Grove (nevermind the black female field slaves) the status of women. Indeed, quite contrary to her claim of being the only woman, Nugent’s diary tells quite another story. On 5 March 1802, upon leaving her white gentlemen companions to take tea in her room, she was “surrounded by the black, brown and yellow ladies of the house, and heard a great deal of its private history”.224 Later, on 10 March 1802 she reported that after putting on her dressing gown and attempting to rest she was, “every instant interrupted by mulatto ladies, with one curiosity or another”.225 But only certain types of social interaction between a white woman of Nugent’s social status and mulatto females (or coloured people in general) were deemed appropriate. As Wright has explained, It is doubtful whether a coloured person ever sat down to dinner with Mrs. Nugent. When staying at planter’s houses, she receives the coloured ladies apart from the rest of the company, usually in her bedroom. According to the missionary Gardner, it was not until some thirty years after her time, when Lord Mulgrave was Governor (and . . . when the free coloured had achieved full citizenship), that coloured guests were invited to functions at King’s House.226 These mulatto ladies were of course the product of cross-racial sex – often violent or coercive as evidenced in the activities of Thomas Thistlewood recounted above (Chapter 6) – that was so ubiquitous that, as Joseph Phillips noted, “such connexions are so common, I might almost say universal, in our slave colonies, that except by the missionaries and a few serious persons, they are considered, if faults at all, so very venial as scarcely to deserve the name immorality [sic]”.227 Therefore, contrary to Nugent’s own journal entries, she was not the only woman, she was the only woman who was deemed suitable, due to her whiteness and upper-class status, to share the “polite”, cross-sex company of comparably upper-class white men. Or rather, her status as an upper-class white woman, a group that was deemed as needing to be insulated from the reality of the prolific cross-racial sexual desires and relationships of white men in Jamaica, made it necessary for the black and mixed-race women to be banished from cross-sex gatherings in her presence; for surely, without Nugent, the white men gathered at Taylor’s home could have been entertained in the presence of the “mulatto ladies”.228 Accordingly Petley has argued, Therefore, even though concubinage was common practice in Jamaica, white men did not treat their mistresses as de-facto wives. Taylor’s attitudes towards his

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housekeepers also suggest different levels of discretion around this aspect of his life. He did not discuss his housekeeper with his niece or with Nugent, but he was willing to enter into guarded discussion of them with his brother and cousin.229 Hakewill’s two images of white women are of similarly upper-class backgrounds as Nugent, the smallest portion of the Jamaican population at that time. There are some interesting observations to be made about this group of women. Perhaps most significantly, and bizarrely, Hakewill does not rely on skin colour to convey the race of his white women. Their bodies are excessively draped with full-length dresses and elaborately plumed headwear. The ability of viewers to read them as white is facilitated largely by their dress and their decorum, but also by the fact that both are chaperoned by equally well-dressed white men. Indeed, Janet Schaw praised the gallantry of the white Creole men that she met in Antigua, commenting that “No lady ever goes without a gentleman to attend her”.230 Of course, her use of the word “lady” presumed whiteness. The relation of the white men to the women also indicates their race and class. In Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Figure 7.5) the pair is seen standing together on elevated land, looking down over the city of Kingston, the harbour, and the arm of Port Royal stretching out into the sea. Beckford’s description of Kingston and its environs, published some three decades earlier in his A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1790), captured the topographical details of Hakewill’s print. Every situation that commands the harbour of Kingston, takes in a prospect which can hardly be surpassed in any quarter of the world . . . The majestic sweep, and beautiful curve of the Bay of Port-Royal, the numerous sails that catch the wind in every direction, the romantic projection of the town that gives it name, the dotted houses that mark in the situation of Kingston, and the numerous masts of vessels that rise above their summits, present a scene of business and variety.231 The male figure is a surrogate for the Jamaican planter, the artist himself, and for the white male viewer/reader, his active gesture, the outstretched arm raised parallel to the earth and extending out towards the water. This act is a means of directing the gaze of his female companion (and the white female readers) and we can imagine him narrating the details of the landscape below, pointing out species of plants, the boundary lines of properties, the economic activity on the streets of Kingston, and the impending trajectories of the many merchant ships. The gesture, then, deceptively assumes the female’s removal from and ignorance of the landscape of which she was most likely a part and instead instils the authority of narration and the certainty of local expertise in the body of the upper-class white man. Furthermore, Hakewill’s rendering explicitly contests the vision of white women whose eyes are literally missing, concealed by their conspicuous headwear. Both of Hakewill’s white female subjects are pictured from the side, their obtrusive headwear also shielding their faces. While the lower part of the side of the face and the hands of the white woman in Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Figure 7.5) are visible, Hakewill’s use of dress completely obliterates the skin, face, and body of the white woman in Rose Hall, St. James’ (Figure 7.6). The prominent nature of their enveloping clothing also

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signals the supposed preciousness of the unseen “delicate” white skin, always assumed beautiful and in urgent need of protection from Jamaica’s harsh sun. Hiding from the sun was considered a necessity for an upper-class white woman, the “proper West Indian lady” whom Bohls terms “stationary, protected and pale”.232 As the Scottish Schaw related of her travels in St Kitts, “From childhood they never suffer the sun to have a peep at them, and to prevent him are covered with masks and bonnets, that absolutely make them look as if they were stewed.”233 The large-brimmed hats or bonnets that Hakewill’s white women sport are standins for the more conspicuous parasol. The parasol was a form of dress, a decorative type of sun protection which became the staple of upper-class white female fashion in hot weather throughout the British Empire, as indicated by Robert Sproule’s chaperoned, upper-class white woman who carries a blue parasol in View of the Place d’Armes, Quebec, 1832.234 Brunias’ Dominican women also carry parasols in his busy Sunday market scene in the port settlement of Roseau, but their use further complicates the identification of race since the users often defy easy racial classification as white. In Brunias’ Linen Market, Dominica (1780), two parasols are evident, a blue one held by a standing black female above a seated perhaps lighter-coloured black woman and a pink one being held by a standing black woman above a standing light-coloured woman of ambiguous race.235 Interestingly, it is the two women whom the parasols are intended to shade that have entered into an economic exchange that takes centre stage in Brunias’ genre scene as the seated female market vendor extends a bolt of cloth for the standing “whitish” woman to inspect. While all four of these women wear headwraps, their social status and place within the island’s racial hierarchy is differentiated by the types of cloth and the intricacy of the wrap styles as well as by their other clothing and actions. It is not accidental that the lightest woman, also distinguished by her elegantly ruffled white dress and elaborately wrapped and high “turban”, is attended by a darker maid who shields her mistress’s “delicate” complexion from the sun. A part of what Brunias represented was not just the typical customs of the Dominican colony in terms of the distinct tropical climate, but the symbolic significance attached to complexion which was accentuated, not only by the use of fashionable parasols, but by the act of being able to appoint a slave or servant purely for the purpose of your own sun protection. Whether or not the centrally placed white-looking woman was actually beautiful, her employment of the darker-skinned maid with the parasol acted as a foil against which the viewer could appreciate her decidedly lighter skin colour and at the same time mark her out as exceptional through her need to protect her complexion. The painting itself then functioned to persuade the viewer that, regardless of actual appearance, the whitest woman was the most worthy of attention and the most beautiful. In Jamaica then, as in other parts of the West Indies, the cultivated lifestyle and fashion of upper-class white females further exaggerated their racial difference from the enslaved Africans all around them, at the level of skin colour.236 Although the feet of the white woman in Rose Hall are engulfed by her dress, both white women (of course) wear shoes. In Jamaica where the absence of shoes was a sign of slave status, the sight of a slave woman with shoes was, much like seeing one with her own parasol, an event through which whites ridiculed the distance between black and white female gender identity; usually through the denial of black females from Eurocentric ideals

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of femininity altogether. Of course this was a distance that whites had deliberately engineered. As Earle has argued, Bare feet in particular occasioned much negative comment, in sharp contrast with the bare-footed beauties depicted in eighteenth-century casta paintings . . . Nineteenthcentury travellers regularly remarked that poor women, “in endeavouring to imitate their richer neighbours, make a grotesque appearance, being dressed in a gay gown, without the accompaniment of shoes or stockings”.237 Earle has noted that nineteenth-century white travellers to the Caribbean remarked disparagingly upon the incongruity of the luxurious attire of black female slaves with their muscled bodies and bare feet.238 Specifically, commentators of the period wrote about black female appropriation of upper-class, white female fashion staples like the parasol and gloves.239 Notably these acts appeared all the more ridiculous to upper-class whites when the perpetrators were field slaves, “ladies who toil under burning sun six days of the week,”240 women described as “big hulking negresses” with “woolly locks” and hoof-like feet.241 However, the word “appropriation” should arguably be replaced with “transculturation” or “creolization” since although enslaved Africans were forced to submit to European and Euro-American culture and slave women often intimately participated in the manufacture, cleaning or care of their white owners’ clothing, they also resisted, insisting upon maintaining African cultural traditions like dress.242 At the same time, blacks, whether enslaved or free, were clearly aware of the class mobility, however tenuous or contentious, that clothing could provide.243 If these “clothing acts”,244 as Earle names them – the strong and muscled, suntanned, black women adorning their bodies in gloves, slippers, stocking, ribbons, etc. – held “subversive and disruptive potential” they may not merely have been read as mimicry, but also as menace.245 Riding side-saddle: White femininity, modernity, and privilege As with the image of the white woman overlooking Kingston, the woman in the Rose Hall image is pictured from the left side of her body as she approaches the gates on horseback with a white male rider appropriately positioned to her right, or off side (Figure 7.6).246 But her head is completely swallowed by the yellow bonnet with red plumes, rendering her face invisible to the viewer. Whereas the memoirs of Eliza Chadwick Roberts recount the arduousness of long-distance travel by horseback, the excessive length of the white woman’s dress in Hakewill’s print, although seemingly contradictory to the rigours of proper horsewomanship, indicate the local white Creole embrace of European riding fashions.247 Alison Matthews David’s comments about the later Victorian riding habit seem to ring true for this earlier moment. She explains, The Victorian sidesaddle riding habit was a paradoxical garment. It was a fashionable, anti-fashion statement, masculine and feminine, practical yet alluring. While on

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horseback, the fair equestrian shunned the lace, frills, and furbelows worn by her pedestrian sisters . . . the essence of the horsewoman’s garb was a lean, understated and almost masculine simplicity.248 In the early nineteenth century, Nugent’s own experiences of wearing similar dress in Jamaica illuminate the gender contradictions, which the clothing produced. During a visit in March 1802 with Jamaica’s wealthiest planter, Simon Taylor, she recounted setting off “on horseback, in my night-cap, dressing gown, and pokey bonnet”, after which she explained of Taylor, “I believe he takes me for a boy, as I constantly wear a habit, and have a short cropped head”.249 Hakewill’s positioning of the horses’ hooves indicate that the two horses are in midstride. However, interestingly, the elevated positions of the two front hooves of the woman’s horse indicate an unsettling prospect. Peril is implied in the image since the woman’s horse appears to rear up, threatening to unseat her as she sits elegantly in a side-saddle position befitting an upper-class white woman. Nevertheless the woman’s hands are securely on the reins and, unlike Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (1825), the male makes no outward gesture to rescue or direct her.250 Joseph Kidd adopted this same pose in an almost identical fashion several years later in his representation of the horse ridden by a white female and her male companion in his Scene at Up Park Camp (1838–40).251 The setting is not inconsequential. Originally known as Up Park Pen, according to Buckley, the 156 contiguous acres (0.6 sq. km) were purchased for 350 pounds in 1784 and transformed into a military installation.252 With commanding views of Kingston, the generally flat land provided space for troops to drill and practise their “evolutions” as well as accommodation for 1,000 men.253 The buildings in the distance are no doubt the barracks, officers’ mess rooms, kitchens, “necessary houses”, and barracks that Buckley notes as being on the property. Kidd’s choice of setting may indicate that the men further up the dirt path who are shepherding additional horses may be soldiers. But the white male accompanying the white female appears by his clothing to be a civilian. Seated side-saddle, and also seen from her left side like the white woman in Hakewill’s Rose Hall (1825), the front legs of the horse are raised from the ground, and the animal, perched on its hind legs, threatens to unseat its elegant rider who is bedecked in a dark blue riding dress and a billowing light blue veil. While the dress and the veil (a form of protection for inclement weather, insects, and the sun) both function to indicate the class, sex, and racial identity of the rider, the dangerous action of the horse in Kidd’s case is triggered by the presence of a small dog clearly visible at the horse’s feet, that presumably barks at the female rider and her mount.254 But whereas in the similar scenario in Hakewill’s Rose Hall (1825), the white male rider seems oblivious to his female companion’s potential need for assistance, in Kidd’s work, not one but two white men appear to rally to her aid; the first the brown-suited civilian male at her side who turns his horse toward the female’s mount and the second another white male (possibly soldier) slightly further up the diagonal stretch of road who has broken stride with the pack of riders advanced down the dirt path to turn back toward the couple behind him. Indeed Kidd’s Scene at Up Park Camp (1838–40) has a striking

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resemblance to one of Nugent’s journal entries of 15 March 1802, on the occasion of her husband’s review of the battalion of the 60th Regiment at Port Antonio. Nugent wrote, “I had my saddle changed, and put on a beautiful grey horse, belonging to an officer of the 60th regiment; and, after the review, I rode it back to Mr. Bryan’s, to which we were attended by an immense number of gentlemen on horseback”.255 At a basic level, these similar prints seem to send a message that the state of genteel, cross-sex decorum between whites had advanced in Jamaica within the 13 years between Hakewill’s and Kidd’s works, so that white males were more attentive and alert to the needs of their white female companions. But if indeed the second male up along the road is a soldier, Kidd’s print also functioned as propaganda to improve the external (and local) perception of the West Indian soldiers whose reputations for debauchery and uncivil behaviour was, by this date, notorious, as I have already discussed in the context of Montreal above and will discuss in further detail in the Jamaican context in the following chapter. Furthermore, whereas the Kidd image provides a rationale for the horse’s perilous behaviour (the yapping dog), the Hakewill print, absent such rationale, may have led viewers to speculate about the soundness of the white female’s horse-riding abilities. Yet, given the prominence of horseback riding in the colonies as a necessity amongst the elite and lower classes, many upper- and middle-class white females in Jamaica were likely quite expert riders. Either the horse on its own or with a carriage was a mainstay of upper-class travel in Jamaica.256 In the early nineteenth century, the cost for a horse of good quality was easily in the hundreds of pounds. In December 1801, after being advised by her husband’s aides-de-camp that her husband had paid 200 pounds each for five “fine new horses”, Nugent surmised that “Good animals of the sort are of course very dear in this country”.257 Indeed, as Kriz has noted in regards to Kidd’s lithographs like The Parade and Upper Part of Kingston from the Church (1838–40), the white Jamaican population’s possession of horses connoted not only their wealth through their ability to purchase such expensive animals but, given the animals’ accelerated mobility, it also symbolized their modernity and vigour.258 As such, for Kidd, the temporality and modernity of Kingston was evoked through the heightened movement and vitality of whites at the same time that the essential labour of former slaves within the moment of apprenticeship was elided, just as Hakewill had erased the labour of the enslaved blacks during slavery. Similarly, Hakewill’s earlier watercolour Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, View from the Change of Air House (c. 1820–21) celebrates the wealth and modernity of the owner George Watson Taylor through the inclusion of two thoroughbred horses, one white and one dark, being led into the left foreground by a barefoot male slave.259 But white Jamaicans also had other uses for horses. As Higman has noted, “Horse-racing was a popular sport in Jamaica during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and several properties had their own race courses.”260 After arriving in Kingston on 4 December 1831, Peter Simmonds rose at 6 am on 10 December to walk the one and a half miles to the racecourse to see the horses training for the Kingston Races, which he attended two days later on 12 December.261 Whereas few free black or coloured Jamaicans like Benjamin Scott-Moncrieffe (1782–1849), and even fewer enslaved ones, like the

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Creole house slave Phibbah at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth, were able to accrue the wealth to own a horse, owning and riding was commonplace, if not a necessity for upper-class white men and women.262 Furthermore, within a colony where the vast majority of the population was enslaved and could not afford shoes, much less the luxury of a horse, the speed and mobility of the animal came to signify the wealth, privilege, mobility, and modernity of the white owners. Speaking of the abundance of horseback-riding white subjects in Joseph Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica (1838–40), Kriz has noted, “These white colonists possess the means to buy horses, and thus to project such movement and vigor, in comparison to the most clearly defined group of black people, who are stationary.”263 According to Johnson, the horses that inhabited nineteenth-century Jamaica were the descendants of the animals brought by Spain, first to Española and then to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba many centuries earlier.264 Returning to Spain after encountering the inhabited island known by the Natives as Hayti, Columbus’s report of the fitness of the island for colonization gained royal sanction. That the royal order (cedula) issued on 23 May 1493 and sent to the secretary Fernando de Zafra specifically included orders for him to locate 20 willing horsemen in Granada and five spare mounts (mares), indicates the centrality of the horse in the colonial vision of the Spanish Empire.265 Although the presence of mares indicates the intention to breed the horses in the Caribbean, Columbus did not leave things to chance, indicating in the Torres Letter, which he dispatched to the king on 30 January 1494, that more horses should be sent with every ship.266 While it is unclear if this request was precisely fulfilled, it appears that, at least, the king sent horses with every new fleet beginning in 1494, and by 1501 the island had between 20 and 30 horses.267 Providing an official infrastructure for the breeding of horses and other livestock in Española and other islands, established in 1499, the success of the Royal Farms or haciendas was evidenced in Governor Ovando’s 1505 correspondence, which indicated that the importation of mares was no longer necessary.268 Indeed, not long after, livestock was plentiful enough to be used as “bait” to attract permanent settlers who were promised “livestock, supplies, and implements” to migrate to the West Indies.269 The increase in horses also aided the Spanish in their genocidal extermination of Natives who were outmatched on flat terrain when they engaged armed Spaniards on horseback.270 Originally envisioned as a supply station for other settlements, horses initially arrived in Jamaica in 1509 with Juan de Esquivel and the infrastructure of Royal Farms was soon replicated.271 The success of these farms was evident at least by 1521, if not earlier, when Jamaican haciendas were lucratively exporting horses to other colonies.272 As will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, when the British besieged the island and ousted the Spanish in 1655, they rounded up the abandoned Spanish livestock, including the horses, and established what would come to be known as pens, a specific type of livestock plantation. With the rise of sugar and the burgeoning wealth and establishment of a minority white Creole plantocracy, the expense of owning a horse became another way to embed class and racial hierarchies. As Sandra Swart has argued, “The early modern colonial state that had come into being by the nineteenth century – against resistance from the metropole – was based, at least in part, on the power of the

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horse in the realm of agriculture, the military and communications.”273 By the nineteenth century, in a colony where the vast majority of the brutally over-worked, enslaved African population had as their primary mode of transportation bare feet, the horse was a highly visible symbol not only of the extraordinary wealth but the mobility, leisure, and cultural difference of the ruling white class, both men and women. Moreover, the cultivated delicateness and frailty of upper-class white women – as demonstrated in dress like parasols and veils – made a horse, or better yet a horse and carriage, an essential possession of a wealthy white Jamaican household. As David has argued, “Colonial expansion changed women’s relation to physical exertion. Part of this shift was economical. Since horses, space and servants were less expensive in the colonies than in England, a greater range of people could afford to ride in Bombay than in London.”274 Reputedly introduced to England by Queen Anne of Bohemia and Luxembourg after her marriage to Richard II in 1382, according to David, side-saddle became “the privilege of queens, who led the hunt seated sidesaddle while their ladies-in-waiting followed astride”.275 In the eighteenth century, many men viewed women’s English-style riding costumes as transgressive gender fusions of masculine (on the top) and feminine (on the bottom) attire.276 By the Victorian era horseback-riding was for upper-class white women a delicate balancing act between decorum and freedom, femininity and athleticism. With the emergence of a specific fashion, dubbed costume amazone by the French, these increasingly mobile women had a distinctive and easily recognizable look achieved by “tightly cinching her waist with whalebone corsets, coiling and pinning her long hair, and taking up a twisted position on horseback, spine straight, legs dangling down to the left of her mount’s belly”.277 Although in the earlier period of Hakewill’s book it appears that Jamaican female riding fashion had not become a uniform, the riding skirt of the white woman in Rose Hall seems to prophesy the coming standardizations of Victorian riding fashion. As David has argued, “A good riding skirt was a masterwork of tailoring. It had to sit smoothly over a rider’s bent knees when a woman was mounted, yet lie flat when she walked on the ground.”278 This optimal skirt was also longer than normal attire, as indicated in the image and, as such, placed ideals of elegance and decency above physical safety.279 But in a colony like nineteenth-century Jamaica, a horse was also a practical mode of transportation. Since a horse had to be broken to be safely ridden side-saddle, women at times rode astride as necessary.280 As such, the side-saddle riding female in Hakewill’s print connotes “refined” elegance through the implication of her well-trained horse. Such elegance and poise was in distinction to Henderson’s advice in The Barb and Bridal (1874) in which he warned upper-middle-class British daughters destined, through marriage, for lives in the colonies, that they should physically prepare themselves “like a cavalry recruit” several months prior to departure.281 Since, as David has noted, activities like riding, shooting, and sailing became a staple of the landed gentry, I would argue that in Hakewill’s Rose Hall the act of horseback-riding itself (and riding in this lady-like manner) was – as much as the actual rendering of the expansive lands, imposing gate, waiting slave, and multi-level Great House – a sign of the white woman’s social and economic status.282

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Returning to the issue of facelessness, the lack of faces and vision of Hakewill’s white females cannot be explained merely as a product of his artistic (in)ability to render the human face. White men appear throughout Hakewill’s illustrations and they are commonly represented in active poses with faces and vision. Furthermore, Hakewill also regularly represented the faces of his black slave subjects, many of them from the front. However, where the treatment of these subjects parallels that of the white females, is in the absence of black vision. Notes 1 Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 161. 2 For a detailed discussion of this print see Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 169–70. 3 Edward Ward coined the term “Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuse of the whole creation” in 1698. “The Torrid Zone” was the name of a print created by the soldier Abraham James who served in the 67th Regiment of Foot in Jamaica, which lampooned the laziness and excesses of white Creole Jamaicans. And the notion of the white man’s grave was spawned due to the growing literature on yellow fever and other diseases which were linked to tropical locations like Jamaica and the Caribbean. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 157, 158, 167. See Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica: With a True Character of the People and the Island, 3rd ed. (London: 1698), 7th ed (J. How, in the Ram-Head-Inn-Yard, in FanchurchStreet, 1700). 4 B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 18. 5 Elizabeth A. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994), p. 375. 6 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 174. 7 Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 39. 8 Lucille Mathurin Mair, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 390. 9 Evidence of male slave labour outside of the fields is provided in the annual documentation of the Negro slaves of Hope Estate, Jamaica for 1788. Of the 135 men, 41 boys (176 males), 133 women, and 42 girls (175 females) listed, 21 males were employed in specialized positions: 6 carpenters, 4 masons, 5 coopers, 1 blacksmith, 1 doctor, and 4 drivers. Only 2 of these 21 specialized positions were held by Africans: Tom, a carpenter (#1), and Wilkes, a cooper (#12), were listed as African. This indicates a white preference for Creole slaves who were considered to be “seasoned” or less resistant. In sharp contrast to male access to specialized labour, all of the plantation’s able-bodied females of working age (six and above) were listed as field labourers. See A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews (1788), West Indies #3, Jamaica Estate Accounts (Eighteenth century), Huntington Library, San Marino, US. 10 Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824), p. 26. Indeed, Cooper claimed to have encountered only one case during his time in Jamaica where brown slaves were labouring in the fields – Roundhill in Hanover. 11 Cooper, Facts, p. 26. 12 Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Lewistown, PA: J.W. Shugert, 1836), pp. 150–1. 13 The arduous field labour of the average plantation slave, male and female, meant that slave children received dramatically different care and attention than white children. Even before birth, the health and welfare of the pregnant slave was often at odds with the slave owner’s desire for maximum exploitation

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of their labourers. Shortly after giving birth, female slaves were commanded back to the fields to the obvious detriment of their new-born children. Field slaves sometimes took small slave children to the fields with them, carrying them on their backs or leaving them nearby while they laboured. Philip D. Morgan, “The Significance of Kin”, The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 338. Due to the consistent absence of the slave mother and as a consequence the black baby’s only or main source of nourishment, I have argued elsewhere that slave children were socialized into deprivation at a very early stage. See Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art”, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 43. B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1988), p. 111. The proximity of plantations to harbours was of paramount importance since the crops and products were, for the most part, shipped outside of the island. Lewis noted that his estate Cornwall in Westmoreland was well positioned in terms of its distance to the sea. After taking a cutter (a small ship) from Black River to Savannah la Mar, his inland journey, by curricle and gig, was only about five miles. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 41. As Terry has noted, both the curricle and gig were light vehicles with two wheels, the first drawn by two horses and the latter by one. Young men supposedly desired the curricle due to its speed and design. Terry, “Explanatory Notes”, in Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 275. James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall; E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825), n.p. Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for The Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), p. xxvi. The pounds were Jamaican currency of which one was valued at 12 shillings sterling. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxvi. Cundall claimed that the money was paid in amounts of between 50 and 400 pounds to groups of landowners who took responsibility for specific roads. Susan E. Klepp and Roderick A. McDonald, “Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentlewoman Encounter Jamaica’s Slave Society, 1801–1805”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 58, no. 3 (July 2001), p. 650. According to Higman, in 1790 the property spanned 2,426 acres (9.8 sq. km) with the purchase of Sandy Gut to the west, bringing the acreage to 2,998 (12.1 sq. km) in 1815. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 111. “Ruinate” was a Jamaican term meaning re-grown secondary scrubland. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 451. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 111. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 114. Hakewill also created views of Rosslyn, Brimmer-Hall, and Tryall Estates. James Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston: he Mill Press Limited, 1990), n.p. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 116. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, pp. 116–7. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 117. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 117. I share Higman’s contention that the slave subjects appear to be returning from labour. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 117. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 118. Higman explains that the Negro River had its confluence with the Port Maria River in the Trinity work yard (p. 118). Also similar to Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s – The Property of I. R. Grosett Esquire M.P., the ultimate slave in the procession is a female pictured with a small child strapped to her back. Marcus Wood has pointed out that the conflation of the enslaved and livestock was also actualized in a “precise legal equation” through the juxtaposition of advertisements for fugitive slaves and livestock in newspapers. See Marcus Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway: The Iconography of Slave Escape in England

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and America”, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), p. 171. William Clark, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes, in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery. from drawings made by William Clark during a Residence of three years in the West Indies, upon the Estates of Admiral Tallemach (London: Thomas Clay, Ludgate-Hill, 1823), n.p. Clark also stated that Negroes received proper audiences in the court, lodging complaints on their own behalf for which the offending parties were summoned and brought to justice. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. xxi. Lewis visited Jamaica twice in 1816 and 1818 for a total of between six and seven months or about 27 weeks. It was through an inheritance that he became the owner of two estates, Cornwall and Hordley. The estates’ “stock” holdings at the time of his inheritance were: (1) Cornwall, 307 slaves and 287 livestock, and (2) Hordley, 283 slaves and 130 livestock. Although supportive of abolition from his days in Britain, Lewis sailed for Jamaica intent upon alleviating the suffering of his slaves, much like Gilbert Mathison, by means of “improvement”, and not through manumission. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. ix–x, xiv. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. xxiv. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, p. 318. Gilbert Mathison, Esq., Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1811), p. 85. Mathison, Notices, p. 85. Although this seems not to have been the custom, Mathison advocated for planters to adopt the use of the plough in the fields to lessen the labour of the slaves. However, remarkably he nevertheless conceived of this still arduous labour as suitable for “pregnant women and weakly people”, further adding that it “is at the same time a valuable sort of education for the children” (p. 96). Cooper, Facts, p. 58. Cooper also noted that the slaves in jobbing gangs suffered other hardships. For instance, while sometimes employed at home (a preferable situation) many were sent six, seven or more miles away, which resulted in many privations. In particular, deprived of the slim comforts of home, Cooper claimed that their lodgings were “unwholesome”. Most jobbing slaves commonly constructed a hut comprised of one long room where all slept together (men, women, and children). Others travelled back to their own homes, only intensifying their fatigue. Cooper argued that the children of slaves on jobbing gangs were worse off than others in part because they were at great risk of being sold to accommodate their master’s circumstances. Cooper, Facts, pp. 61, 62. Cooper, Facts, p. 63. It is noteworthy that Cooper tried to shed light on the inner world or the emotional or psychological lives of the enslaved and the psychic toll that this life inflicted. David Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership has been Buried: Now its Scale can be Revealed,” The Guardian, 12 July 2015 at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-historyslavery-buried-scale-revealed (date of last access 14 August 2015). Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 65. This compositional trick is achieved through Clark’s positioning of the first slave in this gang. This male, indicated by his pants and shirt, is only partially in the image and only his left leg and a part of his back and buttocks are visible. The slave’s partial visibility gives the impression that others must be working to his right. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 376. Cooper, Facts, p. 48. Cooper revealed that on some estates he had seen as many as eight drivers whom he described as “terrific officers”, meaning that they inspired terror. A List of Negroes. The records for Hope Estate, Jamaica indicates that there were 135 men, 41 boys, 133 women, and 42 girls, totalling 351 slaves on the plantation in 1788. Of the adult males, 29 were listed as old or infirm (#s 107–135) of whom there were 8 Creoles, all of who served as watchmen (#s 107– 114) and 21 Africans (#s 115–135). A notation beside these 21 Africans stated, “some of these have been upon the estate upwards of 50 years”. Regardless, it is noteworthy that despite their long presence on the estate, none of the old or infirm African males was assigned the role of watchmen. This likely indicates that the whites felt more comfortable in bestowing important roles on Creoles, slaves who were thought of as “broken” or “seasoned”. Of the adult females, 25 were listed as “superannuated or disabled”, 16 Creoles who had been born on the estate (#s 285–300) and 9 Africans (#s 301–309). It is also of significance that all of the boys and girls on the estate – 83 in total – were Creoles and none was listed as infirm.

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This may indicate that this estate avoided purchasing African children. But the ledger does not reveal infant or child mortality since deaths of child (and adult) slaves were not documented. A List of Negroes. The ledger is structured with male slaves first, men then boys, followed by females, women then girls. The first 21 slaves listed were the non-field labour, specialized adult males. Cooper, Facts, pp. 15, 46. Terry, “Introduction”, in Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. xxii. R. Bickell, The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), p. 13. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 49. Bickell is referring to the public exposure of the female slave’s buttocks and the chest. Cooper also noted that black drivers had significant power, often ordering a slave to be held prostrate by the hands and feet on the ground and whipped on their “bare posteriors”. While the overseer, under the Slave Act of 1816, punished more serious offences, drivers were legally allowed to deliver 10 lashes without the overseer being present. Slaves who came late to the field in the morning or after dinner were customarily punished in this way. Cooper had heard of as many as 60 slaves being flogged in one morning. Cooper, Facts, p. 17. Cooper, Facts, p. 16. However, Cooper also documented a discussion with the carpenter who claimed that drivers commonly would strike the ground with their whip instead of the slave if the overseer or another white person were not present (p. 58). Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 93. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 82–3. A List of Negroes. Cooper explained that a female known as a driveress commonly supervised child slaves. He argued that thus, from an early age, slave children were “degraded from the rank of rational beings, to the condition of cattle in a team”. Cooper, Facts, p. 49. Mathison, Notices, pp. 19–20. Mathison argued that “The most laborious and distressing duties on a sugar-plantation, are digging caneholes and keeping spell during crop.” “Keeping spell” referred to night work. Mathison, Notices, p. 38; Richard B. Sheridan, “From Chattel to Wage Slavery in Jamaica, 1740–1860”, The Wages of Slavery: From Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery in Africa, the Caribbean and England, ed. Michael Twaddle (London: Frank Cass, 1993), p. 28. Of a total of 351 slaves, 176 were listed as male in Hope Estate’s A List of Negroes. Four of them were listed as drivers, including Davy, Cudjoe, Simpy, and Jack. The name “Cudjoe” may have been bestowed by this man’s parents or relatives, and not a slave owner or overseer, since it was made famous by a Maroon leader, who would have been recognized amongst Jamaican slaves as a self-liberated black who had resisted British domination. This white man’s authority is also visualized in his discussion with the standing black male slave who, cap in hand, is forced to look up into the face of the mounted white male. Stored in a trash house, the highly flammable trash from the cane plants became a target for arson attacks. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § Plantation Labor and the Enslaved, p. 321. Clark explained that three fires were required for each copper, one for simmering, the second for clarifying, and the last for the first tache. Cooper, Facts, p. 46. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 71. Higman, Slave Population and Economy, p. 1. A List of Negroes. A List of Working and Breeding Cattle on Hope Estate, West Indies #3, Jamaica Estate Accounts (Eighteenth century), Huntington Library, San Marino, US. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 12. Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 47. While many slaves had typical anglophone names like Dick, George, Will, and Bob for males, or for females, Barbara, Betty, Cynthia, Fanny, Daphnie, or biblical names like Hagar and Esther, others were named after regions (Berkshire), months (March, June), ancient mythological heroes (Ajax, Mercury), colonies or continents (Cuba, Jamaica, America), meteorological phenomenon (Rainbow), directions

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(East, West, North, South), physical characteristics (Blind Phillis, Long, Pretty, Short, Smart, Stout, Strange, Swift), personal characteristics (Pleasant Betty), or holidays (Christmas). Some slaves shared names that were distinguished only by an adjective (Barbara, Little Barbara, Cretia, Short Cretia, Juno, Little Juno, Lucy, Little Lucy, Nanny, Little Nanny, Sikey, Little Sikey, Venus, Little Venus). Other names were simply descriptions of race or complexion (Black, Brown, Sambo) or names paired with a racial description (Black Jenny, Mulatto Dolly, Sambo Franky). Still others were made to live with some odd combination of names (Angola Sampson, Dicks Juba, Eboe Nancy, Mountain Chloe, Mountain Quasheba, Old Merryman), which could often indicate in which part of Africa a slave had originated. Gender norms applied to the naming of whites were often transgressed with slave naming. For instance, Hope Estate had a Creole male mason named Pleasant (#10), a typical female name. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 80. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 72. Andrea Levy, The Long Song (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2010), pp. 19, 113. Levy, The Long Song, p. 34. Levy, The Long Song, p. 34. Levy, The Long Song, p. 34. Levy, The Long Song, p. 36. Levy, The Long Song, p. 37. John’s touch upon Kitty’s body grows more vulgar as he slaps her thighs and recalls the Scottish overseer Dewar’s description of the Negro women bent over in the fields as six-legged beasts due to their drooping and dangling breasts (p. 36). Levy, The Long Song, p. 36. The phrase “I have her”, of course, recalls the kind of phrase one would have used in restraining a dog or wild animal for petting. Levy, The Long Song, p. 37. Levy, The Long Song, p. 37. Levy, The Long Song, pp. 37–8. Levy, The Long Song, p. 45. Levy, The Long Song, p. 182. Interestingly, it is Goodwin, seen as the “good, Christian” overseer who becomes the first white person to address July by her real name since she was abducted from her mother at the age of nine. Robert “King” Carter to Robert Jones, 10 October 1727 [misdated 1717], 24 October 1729; cited in Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 251. Berlin, “From Creole to African”, pp. 251–2. Berlin has noted that Africans deliberately retained and used their real names as a form of resistance, citing runaway slave advertisements from Georgia where an owner conceded that the escaped slaves he had renamed Abel and Bennett went by the names Golaga and Abbrom respectively. See Berlin, “From Creole to African”, p. 252, endnote #4. Morgan also discusses slaves with both African and Anglo-Jamaican names at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth where Thomas Thistlewood was the overseer (1750–51). See Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 52. However, it is important to note that the preservation of African names may not have shown up in official plantation ledgers and documents. Such seems to be the case at Hope Estate, discussed above, where evidence of African origins instead exists in the plantation officials’ inscription of “A” for African (as opposed to “C” for Creole) and in the ethnic labels added to names (Angola Sampson, Eboe Nancy). See A List of Negroes. Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway”, p. 87. In his examination of Vineyard Pen’s records, Morgan argues that to refrain from bestowing an animal name upon a slave may have been a means of “conferring prestige” upon slaves with important positions like drivers, penkeepers, and gardeners. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 53. A List of Working and Breeding Cattle. Some of the names given to cattle were Samboe, Merryman, Dingoe, Shorten, Lump, Rose, Dolly, and Lucy. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 75. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 88. Prince’s reference to the horse was in regard to her 13-year period of ownership by Mr and Mrs Wood of Antigua (p. 88). She also articulated how the enslaved were abandoned and neglected by their masters and mistresses after a lifetime of labour, stating: “when we are quite done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse?” (p. 94). Her comment about the halter and

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whip were from her time in London in response to her vexation at hearing British people state that slaves “do not need better usage, and do not want to be free” (p. 93). For a detailed discussion of the ways that slaves and animals were named upon Florentius Vassall’s Vineyard Pen in St Elizabeth during the time that Thomas Thistlewood was the overseer (1750–51), see Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 52–4. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, pp. xxxix–xl. Published in 1825 during the time of James Hakewill’s Jamaican sojourn, Bickell’s book claimed that the practice of branding had diminished on the island since the abolition of the slave trade. However, he also noted that it was not uncommon for a slave to be branded multiple times in different parts of the body like the shoulders, breasts or even the cheeks. For instance the Workhouse Sales St Andrews’s at Halfway Tree Tavern on Tuesday 11 November listed “Margaret, a Creole, 4ft. 11in. marked RS on shoulders, to Mr. Richard Stedman, Ludlow, Manchester; she was delivered of a male child on the 3d inst.” On branding Bickell commented, “It is a horrid practice, for it must be attended with very acute and lasting pain, besides the disgraceful and disgusting appearance of seeing a human being marked like, or worse than a horse.” Although noting the animalization of blacks, his language betrayed his own socialization through which he viewed the enslaved as stock, when he explained that locally born or Creole slaves are less likely to be branded unless they are “inclined to wander”. The use of the term “wander” recalls the assumed mindlessness of a mule or dog straying from their owner. Branding was also practised in other parts of the Americas and by other empires. Daniel Schavelzon has noted that in Argentina, the enslaved newly arrived from their ocean voyages were branded at the place of sale in the markets of Buenos Aires as a safeguard against escape and a mode of identification. He further noted that branding on the face was commonplace until the eighteenth century. See Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 37, 44; Daniel Schavelzon, “On Slaves and Beer: The First Images of the South Sea Company Slave Market in Buenos Aires”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 127. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, pp. 93–4. Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Mair, “Women Field Workers”, p. 390. Male slaves also escaped the fields later in life when they were employed as watchmen, as was the case with eight men listed as old and infirm in the Hope Plantation records: Quace, Cuffee, Bruff, George, Smart, Old Merryman, Mercury, and Quamina. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 169, 251 (note #44). There is a figure holding a parasol, a staple of upper-class white female fashion in tropical locations, in Hakewill’s Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny. But the figure appears to be a black woman, making the use of the parasol quite strange. Clark’s contemporaneous illustrated book on Antigua, which had 10 aquatint prints, had no white female subjects. However, the absence of white women is fitting given Clark’s focus on the ins and outs of plantation labour and manufacturing through images that represented the cultivation of sugar cane plants and the stages of processing the plant into rum, sugar and molasses. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 169. Kriz notes, following Thomas Holt, that Jamaica produced approximately 20 per cent of the world’s cane sugar in 1820, 11 per cent in 1830, and 3 per cent in 1840. Holt also notes that Jamaica’s white population was at its height at 34,152 in 1824, but declined by 56 per cent over the next decade (p. 251, note #43); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 87. Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 37. Invited to the islands by Sir William Young, the commissioner and receiver for sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St Vincent, and Tobago, Brunias became one of the first professional Western artists to visit and live in the Caribbean. Kriz argues convincingly that Young solicited his assistance to attract white settlers to the islands through the production of images, which could “civilize” the space. Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 52. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 166. Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 40. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 168.

328 James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour 110 Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 661. 111 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 661. 112 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 661. 113 In the context of Barbados in 1817, Beckles has demonstrated that white women owned fewer than five of the properties with 50 or more slaves, but 40 per cent of the properties with fewer than 10 slaves and 50 per cent of the properties with fewer than 10 slaves in the capital of Bridgetown. Overall, 58 per cent of the slave owners in the capital were female, most of them white, although some were coloured and black. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 661. 114 Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership has been Buried”. 115 Jane Haggis, “White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-Recuperative History”, Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2011), p. 241. 116 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island: with Reflections on its Situation, Settlement, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, in Fleet-Street, 1774). 117 For interpretations of Long’s comments on Creole white women see Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 54; and Beckles “White Women and Slavery, pp. 667–8. 118 Long, The History of Jamaica, vol. 2, pp. 412–3. Also cited in Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 54; and cited from the same and other passages in Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 668. 119 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 658. 120 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 658. 121 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 662. Beckles posits that, in comparison to Jamaica, “as early as 1715 white women outnumbered white men in Barbados by one percent, and by seven per cent in 1748 – levelling off at about two per cent for the remainder of the slavery period” (p. 662). 122 Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses”, p. 52. 123 “Hakewill, James (1778–1843)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at http://www.oxforddnb.com. proxy1.library.mcgill.ca/view/article/11888?docPos=2 (date of last access 17 December 2013). Hakewill’s wife was the daughter of W. Browne of Green Street, Grosvenor Square, London, UK. Maria died in 1842 and James the following year in 1843. 124 See Sir Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 24, Hailes–Harriott (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 15 Waterloo Place, 1890), p. 9. Although I have been unable to determine the birth and death dates of Hakewill’s two younger sons, the last-born, Richard Whitworth, was still young enough when his father’s will was drawn up that James stipulated that the executors provide “as far as possible for the completion of the education of my said youngest son”, whom he named simply as Richard. The second-born, Henry James, was already deceased. Will of James Hakewill Adam Bryanstone Square, Middlesex, 8 August 1843, PROB 11/1984, Records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Volume no. 12, Quire nos. 551–600, Public Records Office, National Archives, London, UK. 125 If Maria Catherine did travel to Jamaica with her husband James, she likely gained a plethora of portrait commissions since very few professionally trained artists had lived in or visited Jamaica at this time. 126 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 657. 127 Cooper, Facts, p. 42. 128 Cooper noted the common practice of supposedly good whites speaking openly about having been drunk and or getting drunk without embarrassment. Cooper, Facts, p. 37. 129 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 28–9. In one case Kriz recalls a captain whose excessive ingestion of brandy and sugar led to his inability to imbibe solid food. Instead the man suckled at the breast of a slave for sustenance. What Kriz does not mention is the extent to which this nursing obviously constituted the sexual violation and abuse of the black woman. This nursing must also be regarded as a theft of the woman’s biological property. The fact that she was lactating indicates that she may have been the mother of a young child and the white man’s theft of her milk would obviously have had a detrimental effect on her child/children.

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130 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. Beckles used as sources F.W. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies, During the Years 1826–1829 (London: William Kidd, H., Cliandos Street, West Strand, 1833); and John Augustine Waller, A Voyage in the West Indies, Containing various observations made during a Residence in Barbadoes, and several of the Leeward Islands; with some Notices and Illustrations relative to the City of Paramarabo, in Surinam (London: printed for Sir Richard Phillips and Co., Bride Court, Bridge Street, 1820). 131 Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 660. 132 Beckles acknowledged but critiqued the typologies produced by other Caribbeanist scholars for their failure to represent white female action within slavery, instead describing white women as social parasites. For instance Beckles argued that although Barbara Bush had acknowledged the racial privilege of white women, she had also believed in the existence of a common ground in which all women were the sexual targets of “white male patriarchal authority”. Beckles further argued that Lucille Mair’s slave typology that “the black woman produced, the brown woman served, and the white woman consumed” served to erase “the diverse productive roles played by white women in the development and maintenance of the slave mode of production”. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 660. 133 Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising in Martinique and the Policing of White Identity”, French Historical Studies, vol. 30, no. 2 (Spring 2007), p. 227. Schloss reveals that in part the ideal of elite white womanhood was formalized through the founding of a royal boarding school for girls in Saint-Pierre in 1815, which was tasked with educating the daughters of the island’s wealthy planters. Conformity to gender norms with an end goal of marriage and motherhood was taught through instruction on proper manners, the arts, French language study, and embroidery. 134 Hakewill’s list of views taken in Jamaica indicate that he made two views of Rose Hall. James Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990), n.p. 135 David Buisseret, Historic Architecture of the Caribbean (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 11. 136 Hakewill’s list of views taken in Jamaica indicate that he made three views of Bryan Castle. But he also created other images of Jamaican houses which did not make it into his publication, including Thomas Hibbert’s house in two views, Hibbert’s House, Kingston and Duke Street (Hibbert’s House), Haughton Hall and Green Island (belonging to James Haughton), J. Simpson’s Bounty Hall, Trelawney [sic] and Lascelles Wynn’s Marly Castle, St. James. Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, n.p. 137 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 138 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill described a double flight of stone steps leading to an open portico giving access to the entrance hall. He was so taken by the home that he even described the types and positions of rooms and interior furnishings. 139 Geoffrey S. Yates (Assistant Archivist Jamaica Archives c. 1965), “Rose Hall – Death of a Legend”, Jamaica Family Search Genealogy Research Library, at http://jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples2/mpalmer.htm (date of last access 2 March 2013). 140 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 55–6. 141 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 142 The creditors foreclosed in 1792 and, forced to mortgage both Rose Hall and Palmyra estates, the Hon John Palmer moved to a smaller residence at Brandon Hill where he later died. Yates, “Rose Hall”. 143 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 144 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 145 I am grateful to Victoria Bonwell for bringing this to my attention. 146 Hakewill also wrote of 200 acres of grass and 250 of ruinate at Rose Hall, with a further 1,250 acres comprising Palmyra. 147 Palmer also owned 276 cattle. 148 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 149 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 150 Yates, “Rose Hall”. 151 Annie Mary would have been about 44 years old when she died. She was buried at Montego Bay. Yates, “Rose Hall”. 152 Beckles has determined that it was white females who were the central actors in the lucrative sex trade of Bridgetown, Barbados through which enslaved black females were prostituted to locals and transients

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(soldiers, sailors, etc.) for economic gain, often through the practice of letting or renting. See Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”. In terms of white female sexual exploitation of black men, Beckles has found evidence of white female slave owners inspecting and assessing the genitalia of black male slaves within the context of slave auctions. While such inspections on the surface functioned as the straightforward economic assessment of the “breeding” potential of male slaves, surely too, they provided a sexual outlet of titillation and fantasy for upper-class white females who were largely seen as the (sexual) possessions of their white male husbands and who would have had little control of their “legitimate” sexual lives within the confines of marriage. Furthermore, a significant population of these white female slave owners was unmarried and therefore bereft of any “legitimate” sexual outlet. Significantly, while there has been an explosion of literature on the sexual exploitation of enslaved black females at the hands of white male slaver owners, scholars have yet to tackle the more clandestine histories of white female (and male) sexual exploitation of enslaved black males. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 693. Beckles’ source was a letter from Colonel Hilton to Reverend John Snow, 16 August 1816, Codrington MSS, Barbados Accounts, 1721 to 1838, Lambeth Palace Library, London; Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2011), pp. 445–64. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 650. As Clark explained in the narrative of plate 5, The Mill-Yard, female slaves transport “junks” of cane on their heads to the slave men that “feed” the mill, which, during high winds, necessitated two or three feeders. The mill was composed of three cylinders and corresponding cogs that pressed the cane, draining the juice into a reservoir where it was then strained when it was deposited in the boiling-house. Although Schaw observed that there were 10 Negroes for every driver, “who walks behind them, holding in his hand a short whip and a long one”, disturbingly, she downplayed the emotional and mental aspects of the abuse and terror on the enslaved by casting them as anti-intellectual beings, “brutes” who were incapable of mental suffering and whose minds could not even retain anguish (shame or pain) “beyond the present moment”. Furthermore, she implied that if blacks were merely brutes, such whippings were incapable of inflicting much suffering. Even when presented with the evidence of the scars on the backs of the enslaved victims, she was unable to see them as completely human, like herself. Much like John Stedman during his expedition to Surinam, Schaw painted the true victims as the whites, the “humane Europeans” who suffered at the knowledge of the abuse. But she simultaneously comes to the defence of the Creole whites, stating that the whippings could not be avoided. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, pp. 376, 379. See John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam: Transcribed for the First Time from the Original 1790 Manuscript, eds. Richard Price and Sally Price (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2010). Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, pp. 649–50. The circumstance of access to Jamaican plantations for Hakewill and the Robertses are parallel, yet distinct. Whereas Hakewill leveraged his status as an educated and successful British architect to access the hospitality of the Jamaican planter class for two years, the Robertses, less wealthy and less educated, could only access the plantation through the lower stations of the overseers and managers, often Scottish men who were themselves situated in the middle classes. However, Hakewill’s list of “Views Taken in Jamaica” indicate that he did spend time representing the world of the overseer, as in his Overseer’s House and Orange Valley, St. Ann’s, Works from the Overseer’s House created on John Blagrove’s Estate and View of the Overseer’s House, Pepper Penn, created on the property of Dickinson and Harman. Overseers generally could not leave substantial inheritances to their offspring as did the planter class and similarly, they were less likely than the plantocracy to leave detailed traces of their personal lives and experiences. Of course, the obvious reason for this is their relative lack of leisure time created by their need to work, as opposed to the planters and their wives who often bestowed all or a part of the responsibility for the day-to-day running of their holdings to managers, overseers, and attorneys. A rare exception of an overseer who left a considerable record of his life and experiences in journals is Thomas Thistlewood (extensively discussed in Chapter 6) who ran Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth in 1750–51. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 50; James Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston: The Mill Press Limited, 1990), n.p. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 650.

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Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 660. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 665. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence, pp. 417–418; also cited in Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 665. Cooper, Facts, pp. 27–8. J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation on the Two Americas (New York: J.A Rogers, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 130; cited in Ferguson, ed., “Introduction”, in Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 43, note #32. Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Southern History, vol. 61, no. 1 (February 1995), p. 68. White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture”, p. 68. White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture”, p. 68. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 27. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 27. Bickell stated that he had a reputable source that had provided him with the details of this domestic drama. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 27. The orchestrated scene of unclothed women being terrorized as they bathed encapsulates Marcus Wood’s claim that the origins of Western (sadomasochistic) pornography stem from slave torture. Here we have the spectacle of naked black women washing, their private acts now forced to be public, not only for the invasive gaze of the white mistress but for the inevitably male, normally white overseer. And it is his hand and gaze, manipulated through her commands, that were activated as a weapon of sexual humiliation and shame for the black women. But this is not merely a degrading display but a site of potential homoerotic pleasure and spectacle for the white mistress. The homoerotic impulses, desires, and acts of white masters and mistresses within the context of slavery are harder to detect because they were even more sublimated than the heterosexual. But it is crucial that we look for and acknowledge the ways that same-sex objectification and (sexual) violence would have also been inflicted upon enslaved Africans. See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Cooper noted an incident when he was about to leave the island from the port town of Hanover parish. While in the company of the captain of his vessel, they witnessed an old male slave standing in the street with his “posteriors exposed and bleeding” from what was apparently a recent flogging and “yet he seemed to excite no attention whatever” from anyone but himself and the captain. Cooper, Facts, p. 27. While Eliza produced a significant 5,000-word account of her month-long stay in Jamaica, Nugent’s much longer four-year sojourn resulted in a more detailed 100,000-word journal. Klepp and McDonald have also ably noted that the immediacy of Nugent’s journal surpasses Robert’s text since the former was written as daily entries and Eliza’s composed not prior to 1814, nine years after her trip to Jamaica, and a year after her husband’s death. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 643. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 652. Slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1804. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 92. For instance, on 13 March 1802 while travelling near Port Antonio, Nugent wrote about receiving a Mr and Mrs Cosens, the woman being “the first white woman, except my maid, that I have seen since we began our journey”. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 97. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, pp. 638–9, 643.While Maria Nugent’s journal has been published several times, including 1838, 1907, 1934, 1939, and 1966, the manuscript of Eliza Roberts’ autobiography is archived at Monmouth County Historical Association, Freehold, New Jersey, along with a 115-page handwritten transcription. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, pp. 637–8. Maria was the daughter of Cortlandt Skinner, a lawyer and loyalist during the American Revolution and Elizabeth Kearney the daughter of a well-to-do New Jersey lawyer. Maria’s marriage absolutely raised her class status, moving her from “affluent commoner” to “genteel British society” since her husband was heir to an estate valued at 200,000 pounds and property in England and Ireland. Not only did she become the governor’s wife in Jamaica, but soon after, Lady Nugent. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 640. Eliza was the daughter of Elizabeth and Thomas Woolley Chadwick. Her father fought in the battle of Monmouth, on the side of the Americans, during which his farm was destroyed by fire by the British. He had been employed in an assortment of jobs including petty tradesman, farmer, boatman, and innkeeper. Taken in by an uncle after her father’s murder by a gang of thieves, she later moved to New York City where her mother had remarried a grocer. At the age of 14 she married the 23-year-old William, then a

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mate on a merchant ship. During her husband’s significant absences, Roberts worked in the grocery store of her mother and stepfather, assisted with boarders, and earned money as a milliner. See Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, pp. 639–40. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 639. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 637. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 661. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. Klepp and McDonald cite Beckles’ “White Women and Slavery”, in Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 652, footnote #47. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 640. As discussed above in the “sexual typology” elucidated by Beckles and as shall be further explored below in the case of Thomas Hibbert and his mulatto “housekeeper” Charity Harry, white men worked to exclude black and coloured women from social legitimacy through social and legal prohibitions placed upon their access to marriage. Although forcibly Christianized, white owners policed their slaves’ access to the sacraments of the church. “Marriage” between black slaves was more often a mutual decision of commitment unsanctioned by church or law. Furthermore, cross-racial marriages between women of African descent and white men were socially stigmatized and often prohibited through legislation or policy. For a white man to marry a slave whom he did not own, he would first have to gain the consent of her owner and arrange for her freedom, usually through purchase. In such cases, the ability of the woman to be manumitted was at the whim of her owner. Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica”, Journal of Social History, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), p. 76. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence, pp. 493–4; cited in Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence, pp. 493–4; cited in Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 664. A recent vivid representation of the relationship between enslaved black women and white female slave owners is Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning depiction in 12 Years a Slave (2014) of the white slave mistress, Epps, played by Sarah Paulson, who subjects her husband’s “favourite”, Patsey (played by Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o), to vicious and spontaneous physical attacks on several occasions in front of many witnesses and encourages her husband to whip Patsey until her back is raw and torn up. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) (for which the director won an Oscar for best original screenplay) also did an admirable job at undoing the fallacy of the always-kind white plantation mistress. In a striking scene, the white slave mistress Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (sister of Leonard DiCaprio’s character Calvin Candie), played by Laura Cayouette, actually delivers the female slave Broomhilda von Shaft (played by Kerry Washington) to the bedroom of Dr King Schultz (played by Oscar-winner Christopher Waltz), consciously leading her to what she assumes will be the scene of her rape. Mair, “Women Field Workers”, p. 390. Morgan concurs with Mair that slave “men monopolized specialized posts, and women were relegated to field labor”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in EighteenthCentury Jamaica”, p. 60. As regards a specific breakdown of the ratio of female to male field slaves, Morgan has noted that the majority of the field hands at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth were African females. Of a total of 42 slaves in July 1750, 24 were male and 18 female. Morgan contends that 19 females worked in the fields, and that 16 were African (p. 50). If his numbers are correct, the female population must have increased from the initial count of 18, since a female named Phibbah was a house slave who was commonly assisted by one or two other women. If we account for Phibbah and two female slaves, they would bring the available female field slave count down to 15 from Morgan’s stated total of 18 (p. 59). Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 643. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 645. Mair, “Women Field Workers”, pp. 390–1. I have deliberately used the word “observed” rather than “encountered” or “interacted with” since the writings of Maria and Eliza demonstrate the extent to which the worlds of black and white women in Jamaica did not converge on equal terms. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 641. Nugent made reference to her “black domestics”. It is obvious that the governor’s mansion had a large staff of slaves, since on one occasion Nugent arranged for the baptism of 25. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 654.

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193 Eliza was no stranger to hardship. She recounted one of her husband’s departures while she was pregnant and her mother was ill. She also documented that the death of one daughter to croup was quickly followed by the death of another in infancy. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 645. 194 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 646. 195 Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801–1805 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), pp. 1, 2; also cited in Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 647. Maria used the term “blackies” frequently throughout her diary to describe the island’s Africandescended inhabitants. 196 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 648. St Domingue was the name commonly used for the western third of the island referred to as Hispaniola, known as “the pearl of the Antilles” due to its status as France’s richest colony. See Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World”, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), p. 587. Klepp and McDonald speculate that Eliza’s knowledge of the revolution likely came from a mixture of her interactions with the “seafaring community” and her consumption of “publick prints” (sic). 197 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 643. 198 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 649. Klepp and McDonald draw their data from Higman, Slave Population and Economy, pp. 142–4, 255. Higman estimated that 308,755 slaves and approximately 40,000 free black and coloured people were living in Jamaica in 1805. 199 Levy, The Long Song, p. 113. Notable is the description of the black woman’s cry as a “holler”, a much more base and common sound than the supposedly delicate, musical tone of the white woman’s cry. Levy does an exceptional job at illuminating the cultivated racial discrepancies between white and black women in Jamaican slave culture. Interestingly, her novel, which is obviously based upon detailed historical research, is set within the same period as Hakewill’s journey and book. 200 John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, eds. Richard Price and Sally Price (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2010), p. 265. Stedman described coming upon the scene, which attracted his compassion while visiting a neighbouring estate. He found the 18-year-old Samboe girl, whom he described as beautiful, tied by both arms to a tree and “as naked as she came to the World”. Stedman also recounted that the shocking lacerations (200 in all) that she had received from the whips of two Negro drivers had left her “died over with blood”. Interestingly, while Stedman’s tale recounts the naked state of the slave on public display, his print represented her with her genitalia covered by a tattered loincloth. This misrepresentation was likely for the sake of decorum for his white female readership in a scene, which also included four male figures clearly in the distance (see pp. 264–5). 201 Levy, The Long Song, p. 115. In distinction to this scene, during the same journey, Howarth and Dewar also come across the tortured and bound body of a white Baptist missionary, Mr Bushell. Interestingly, they are attracted by the screams of his wife which, of course, they could distinguish as those of a white woman and thereby worthy of investigation. Although desiring to intervene, Howarth is stopped in part by the warnings of his overseer and in part by the fact that other whites, planters, had committed the crime against this white man. The men, known to Howarth, had dressed in drag to facilitate their attack in which they had tarred and feathered the missionary in front of his wife and their two small sons. What crime was so grave that a white man could be subjected to such public ridicule and torment? He had aided slaves in the rebellion against white planters (p. 114). Wood also relates the threat of carnivorous birds, described as “carrion birds”, in his discussion of a print in the American Anti Slavery Almanac which depicted a runaway black male slave wearing a collar with bells, hanging from a tree, and surrounded by several attacking birds. The slave was the unfortunate victim of suicide after a failed attempt at escape. Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway”, pp. 97–8. 202 Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure”, p. 693. 203 Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 650. 204 Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising”, p. 235. 205 Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 381. 206 Nugent arrived at Golden Grove on 10 March 1802. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 92. 207 Christer Petley, “ ‘Home’ and ‘This Country’: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder”, Atlantic Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (April 2009), p. 46. Taylor’s annual income was estimated at 47,000 pounds. For context, Petley offers that between 1809 and 1839 in the British Isles, only 905 people died leaving personal wealth of over 100,000 pounds.

334 James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour 208 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 88. Nugent further stated that Taylor “piques himself” about the inheritance that he was set to bestow upon his nephew (upon his death), Sir Simon Taylor, that would make him the “richest Commoner in England”. 209 Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 49. 210 Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 49. 211 Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 49. Although the majority of his money was left to his white heirs in Britain, Taylor made provisions in his will for his “housekeepers” Grace Donne and Sarah Hunter, as well as Sarah Taylor (most likely his daughter with the latter) and Sarah Hunter Taylor Cathcart (most likely his granddaughter with the latter). 212 Although of a different order, the most famous mulatto or mixed-race Jamaican woman within this realm is surely Mary Seacole, the heroine of the Crimean War described as a “yellow doctress”. Patricia Mohammed, “ ‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired”, Reconstructing Femininities: Colonial Intersections of Gender, Race, Religion and Class, Feminist Review, no. 65 (Summer 2000), p. 33. 213 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 105. Lewis arrived in Jamaica on 1 January 1816 and made this journal entry on 8 February. Lewis also documented inquiring of his overseer about Nancy, “a cleverlooking brown woman, who seemed to have great authority in the house”. After much prompting, the overseer sheepishly revealed that the woman was not Lewis’ slave, but a free woman and his housekeeper (p. 105). 214 Cooper, Facts, p. 40. I have used “defeminization” in much the same way as “emasculinization”, to indicate the enslaved black female’s distance from European and white Creole ideals of womanhood. 215 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 113–4. 216 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p.114. Bickell provided some examples of the ostracization of white men who had married women of African ancestry. The first was of a white planter in the parish of Clarendon who took his brown wife to an assembly only to be insulted and ordered to leave. Bickell’s claimed that within a short time both died of broken hearts. In another case, a white man from the parish of St Thomas in the East – a respectable man who was a collecting constable – married a woman of colour as privately as possible (by licence) only to be discovered and shunned by his former friends, fired from this job and nearly ruined (p. 225). 217 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 106. Bickell also provided information, which substantiated the occurrence of marriage between coloured men and black women. While curate in Port Royal he recalled two instances of free men of colour marrying black women. He also wrote that during the two years and three months of his service, he had married 12 or 14 couples consisting of a free person of colour and a slave, with several more about to be married when he left the parish in April 1823. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 92, 112–3. On the sexual limits and prospects of mixed-race men in Jamaica, see also Mohammed, “ ‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’”, pp. 37–8, 41. 218 Bickell described a white man who rose from overseer to planting attorney only to abandon his woman of colour concubine and children to a small house so that he could marry a rather poor white woman from Tweed. Instead of providing for his ex-“wife” and children, at the new wife’s urgings, the man eventually sent her bills for food and forced her to sell the small property to sustain herself. Bickell claimed that white women were social climbers, motivated by money and titles and stated that they were no more concerned for the fate of the “poor mistress and the coloured brats, (as they are contemptuously called,) than if they were so many dumb animals”. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 106, 221–3. 219 Cooper, Facts, p. 25. 220 Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 50. 221 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 93; partially cited in Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 50. The housekeeper in question here was not Grace Donne or Sarah Hunter, but Nelly Nugent, the daughter of an Irish man named Nugent who had been on the estate in prior years. 222 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 105. The Rev. Thomas Cooper contradicted Bickell’s assertion of the normalcy of white upper-class Jamaicans allowing their coloured children to socialize with other whites. Rather, he argued that the rarity with which whites “introduce even their own [coloured] children into company” was proof of the degrading light in which they held persons of colour. He further commented on a rare incident when he saw a white father riding in a gig with his own coloured daughter.

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However, Cooper seems to distinguish between mixed-race women and children entertaining white women alone as a commonplace occurrence as opposed to in the mixed company of white men. As an example of the latter, Cooper provided a detailed account of the profound segregation of whites and coloureds at a baptism of a coloured child. At the invitation of the coloured father (who himself had a white father), Cooper noted that the many whites and blacks in attendance at the church were seated separately, the whites above and the coloureds below. Critically he explained that although many of the coloureds were “far above most of us in fortune, and some had been educated, in a very respectable manner, in Great Britain”, they were clearly deemed to be unworthy of equitable social engagement with the white guests. Rather, following the baptism, the coloureds stood apart and seemed “gratified and flattered” by white attention, which they however, did not solicit. Furthermore, only after the whites had been treated to an elegant and plentiful feast with wines and spirits known as a “second breakfast”, throughout which the father of the baptized child served like a footman (and the other coloureds kept a respectful distance), did the coloureds have their own feast which lasted for two or three days. Cooper, Facts, pp. 24–5, 35–7. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 92. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 88. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 92. Nugent specified that the curiosities were in the “eating way”, different types of animals, which were consumed as food, such as a conch, a turtle, and several “curious fish” (pp. 92–3). Philip Wright, Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica (London: Society of Genealogists, 1966), p. xxix; cited in Mohammed, “‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’”, p. 33. Pringle, “Supplement to the History of Mary Prince”, in Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 111. Mr Joseph Phillips of Antigua provided this explanation in a letter written from London on 18 January 1831, as evidence offered to Thomas Pringle (the original editor of Prince’s narrative) in defence of the narrative which was subsequently attacked by Prince’s last owners, Mr and Mrs Wood. Prince had enlisted the aid of the Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury where Pringle requested the assistance of the solicitor, George Stephen, to see if Prince’s “freedom could be legally established on her return to Antigua” (p. 95). Prince, who had accompanied her owners Mr and Mrs Wood to London, had escaped their tyrannical grasp but, although desiring to return to her husband Daniel James in Antigua, feared that she would be re-enslaved upon arrival. Interestingly, Bickell stated that he had known some white married ladies to pay visits to the kept mistresses (no doubt women of African ancestry) of rich (by implication white) men who were not their relatives, though the same women “would not look upon a more respectable woman of the same colour, who might be married to a brown man”. White women declined to socialize with coloured women who had legally sanctioned relationships with coloured or black men, but had relationships with the same group of women if they were the “housekeeper” of a white man. Thus, the “legitimacy” of the relationship was about the maintenance of white male privilege and power. White male sexual and relationship choices, however illegitimate in the eyes of the law and the church, were legitimized within a white patriarchal order, not just by white men but by white women, in ways which further disenfranchised white women and black or coloured men. Indeed, the only “winners” in such relationships and social interactions were the white men. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 105. Petley, “‘Home’ and ‘This Country’”, p. 50. 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 and Charles McLean Andrews, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 87; cited in Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 385. Ironically, in a world where white men had institutionalized the rape of black females, they staged, along with the help of white women, the elaborate protection of white women from the stereotypical black male rapist. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica: with Remarks upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane, through the different Seasons of the Year, and Chiefly considered in a Picturesque Point of View; Also observations and Reflections upon what would probably be the Consequences of an Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and of the Emancipation of the Slaves, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Printed for T. and J. Egerton Whitehall, 1790), vol. 1, pp. 20–21. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 389.

336 James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour 233 Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, p. 114; cited in Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 386. Oddly, Schaw thought that the Creole white ladies of St Kitts went too far in protecting their complexions, and that the end result was that they appeared less healthy and beautiful due to a lack of sun, proper air, and exercise. Unlike her teenaged relative Fanny who adopted the local practice, Schaw herself admitted to setting her face “to the weather”, describing herself defiantly as a “brown beauty”. Of course, however, her brownness as a facet of the sun, and not an inherent sign of supposed racial inferiority (as that inflicted upon the degenerate breed of mulattoes that she derided), could be read as enchanting and even rebellious. 234 Janet Schaw mentions a parasol being held for white ladies by her brother Alexander’s “Indian” servant during her trip to Antigua and St Kitts in 1774–75. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 384. 235 In the first case I hedged on “perhaps lighter” since the shade provided by the parasol-holding woman may be the cause of the darker-looking complexion. 236 Unlike several locations of Spanish colonization in the Americas, Jamaican society did not seem to develop a slave culture in which the body of the slave acted as a material symbol of the owner. In contrast, in Brazil lavishly dressed female slaves were commonplace since they were taken as extensions of their mistresses’ bodies. Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’: Race, Clothing and Identity in The Americas (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries), History Workshop Journal, no. 52 (August 2001), p. 183. 237 Cochrane Journal, vol. 2, pp. 88–9; cited in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 184. Ghidoli argues that bare feet were likewise a sign of slave status in Argentina. Maria de Lourdes Ghidoli, “Journeys of Candombe Federal by Martin Boneo: Their Contribution to the Social Imaginary on Afro-Argentines”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, vol. 7, no. 2 (2014), p. 160. 238 Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 184. 239 Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837, ed. Philip Wright ([1838] London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1968), p. 52; cited in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 184. 240 Sturge and Harvey, The West Indies in 1837, p. 52; cited in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 184. 241 Jay E.A. Hastings, A Glimpse of the Tropics; or, Four Months Cruising in the West Indies (London: S. Low Marston and Company Limited, 1900); John Colthurst, The Colthurst Journal; Journal of a Special Magistrate in the Islands of Barbados and St. Vincent July 1835–September 1838, ed. Woodville Marshall (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977), pp. 121–2; cited in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, pp. 179, 184. While the remark about “hulking negresses” with “woolly locks” was attributed to British travellers in the 1850s, the comment which likened feet to hoofs was directed at a young black woman named Dutchess in the island of St Vincent, by the Anglo-Irish magistrate Colthurst. Dutchess was accused of stealing money, which she allegedly used to purchase elegant clothing, including two pairs of pink satin shoes. After Dutchess was ordered to appear in court and forced to try on the slippers in front of the assembled crowd, Colthurst’s disdainful comment was triggered by what he deemed to be the incongruous sight of her feet in the refined slippers. 242 Beckles has also noted that such transculturation or creolization happened in both directions. In the case of eighteenth-century Barbados, lower-class Irish women who worked as hucksters were seen carrying baskets on their heads and strapping children to their hips in a manner, which Beckles described as “typically African”. Hilary McD. Beckles, “An Economic Life of Their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 737. 243 Earle notes that in parts of Ibero-America and the Caribbean, race was not just determined by corporeal traits like skin colour and hair texture, but by wealth, cultural identification, and social status as reflected in practices like dress. Thus, within the realm of law, individuals sought to establish their racial classification by demonstrating that they wore certain dress appropriate to their claimed social status. Specifically, throughout the Spanish Empire, the legal processes known as gracias al sacar and autos sobre declaratoria de mestizo (available throughout the eighteenth century) provided pathways for the official alteration of racial identity, opening previously restricted access to careers and activities reserved for “legitimately-born individuals of ‘clean’ blood”. In one such case, in 1686 a man named Blas de Horta denied his Indian heritage by producing a witness who confirmed his “Spanish dress”. But at the same time that Spanish law created pathways for “upward” racial mobility, sumptuary laws imposed roadblocks. For instance, Earle notes that in sixteenth-century Mexico, black women were prohibited from wearing gold, pearls, silk or

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other luxurious goods unless married to a Spaniard. Such a law seemed intent on preserving wives as social trophies, but only for white husbands through a rationale that they should not be impeded from dressing their wives as they saw fit, showering them with jewels and enjoying their appearance, simply because they were black. Clearly, within the British Empire, no such pathways, legal or social, existed which allowed people of African descent (or indigenous Americans) to lay claim to what was considered by whites to be a higher racial identity on the basis of cultural practices like dress. Instead, the British colonial ideal of race was inextricably bound to the body and the idea that race was biologically determined and could be visually discerned through markers like skin colour, hair texture, and nose width. Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 187. For more on Blas de Horta see Martin Minchom, The People of Quito: 1690–1810: Change and Unrest in the Underclass (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 158. For more on the Spanish legal codes gracias al sacar and autos sobre declaratoria de mestizo, see Minchom, The People of Quito, pp. 158–70; and Anna Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honour, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!’”, p. 177. Kriz, following Franz Fanon and Homi K. Bhabha, theorizes the distinctions between mimicry, mockery, and menace. The first must produce its slippage to be effective, the second indicates deliberate parody, and the third refers to an excessive difference provoked by the unrecognizable and uncontrollable nature of the “other”. I would argue that while mimicry allows the white colonizer to laugh at the black colonized, mockery turns the tables, allowing the colonized to re-read white culture against itself as the site of ridicule. Mockery and menace challenge white fantasies of total control over the “other”. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 120. Alison Matthews David, “Elegant Amazons: Victorian Riding Habits and the Fashionable Horsewoman”, Victoria Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1 (2002), p. 194. A male rider customarily rode at the right side of the female rider, the side, which reputedly revealed any flaws in riding technique. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, p. 650. Eliza journeyed on horseback throughout the north coast of Jamaica, visiting the parishes of St Mary’s, St Ann’s, and Trelawny with her husband Captain William Roberts in 1805. David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 179. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, pp. 91–2. Roberts recounted a perilous incident on horseback when she attempted to cross the Wag Water River after it had been swollen by rain. As her husband and Mr Hazard, an employee at Newry Estate, watched from the shore, the current overcame Eliza’s horse. Only her resolve to remain calm and firm in the saddle allowed her to extract herself from danger. Tellingly, due to her higher-class status and social position, Maria Nugent’s similar experience of a dangerous crossing of the River Magno, where she and her infant became stranded, was not on horseback, but in a carriage. In both cases, the women (and the baby) were rescued and aided by “negroes”. Klepp and McDonald, “Inscribing Experience”, pp. 651, 652. Hakewill’s list of “Views Taken in Jamaica” includes an image of Up Park Camp. James Hakewill, “Views Taken in Jamaica”, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston: The Mill Press, Limited, 1990), n.p. R.N. Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida; and Barbados: University Press of the West Indies, 1998), p. 78. Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies, pp. 78–9. While on a visit to Jamaica, Cynric Williams recalled encountering a veiled free woman riding a pony on her way to Black River. Buckridge concludes that the woman was likely black since Williams did not describe her as a “brown girl” as he generally did with mixed-race women. Attended by a “negro boy”, Williams noted that the woman was wearing a veil that at first glance appeared to be made of lace, but instead was constructed from the bark of a tree. Buckridge has argued that the item was most likely fabricated from the laghetto or lace bark tree and further concluded that the veil may have been worn to camouflage unsightly scars or disfigurement. Buckridge further notes that this dress item may have been an adaptation of the Spanish mantilla or a form of Islamic dress preserved by enslaved Muslims. Regardless, the veil signified an elevated social status, which coincided with the woman’s pony riding and her ownership, despite her likely blackness, of a slave. It is also noteworthy that the woman stated her reason for travel as her desire to lodge a complaint against a white man who had threatened her verbally and with physical intimidation. She also expressed the opinion that King George should compensate slave owners

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255 256

257

258 259 260 261

262 263 264

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266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276

for the loss of slaves. Her ability to travel by pony, her ownership of a slave, and her willingness to speak against the king likely indicate that the woman had attained a higher-class status than most people of African descent. Cynric Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica from the Western to the Eastern End in the year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clark, 1826), p. 83; Steve O. Buckridge, “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress”, Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (September, 2003), pp. 68–70. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 98. In the nineteenth century, carriages of various types and names were available in Jamaica. Matthew Lewis recorded departing at six in the morning on 1 February 1816 from his estate Cornwall in Westmoreland to travel to Spanish Town accompanied by a young naval officer in a kittereen with a canopy, “a kind of one-horse chaise with an umbrella or raised awning over the seat”. On the occasion of his second visit to Jamaica, Lewis landed at Black River and took a cutter to Savannah la Mar where he was greeted by Mr T. Hill who drove him in a phaeton to his estate, Cornwall in Westmoreland. A cutter is a “clinker-built ship’s boat, rowed with eight to fourteen oars and rigged with two masts.” A phaeton is an “open carriage, with one or two seats facing forward, originally with two, later four, wheels, usually drawn by a pair of horses.” Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, pp. 98, 202, 280, 285. Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 59. On another occasion, 15 March 1802, when she accompanied her husband to review the battalion of the 60th Regiment at Port Antonio, Nugent recounted that “I liked my little horse so well, that General N. paid a hundred pounds” to buy the “beautiful grey horse” from an officer (p. 98). I thank Alexandra Turnbull for bringing these entries on the cost of horses in Jamaica to my attention. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 174. Hakewill also included horses prominently in other prints including King’s Square, St. Jago de la Vega and Montpelier Estate, St. James’s – The Property of C. R. Ellis Esq. M.P. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 211. Journal of Peter Simmonds of Voyage from Falmouth to Jamaica in HM Packet Mutine, Lieutenant Paule Commr, October 1831, 19 × 23 cm, JOD/35, Caird Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK.Simmonds’ personal journal concludes on 12 December 1831 with his entry on the first day of the Kingston Races. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 68 and footnote #41. Bickell commented that Jamaican slaves were generally “not allowed to own even a single horse, mule or cow”. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 62–3. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 174. John T. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse into the Western Hemisphere”, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 23, no. 4 (November 1943), p. 587. Española (Hispaniola) was the name given by the Spanish to the Caribbean island now shared by the two nations of Haiti (in the western part) and the Dominican Republic (in the eastern part). Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 589. The request for mares indicates a desire to breed the horses. Johnson notes that these horses were considered the finest in Europe due to seven centuries of cross-breeding between horses used by North Africans (“Moors”) and the horses originally held by the Spanish. These horses first arrived in the Caribbean 28 November 1493 (p. 590). Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 592. Johnson notes that the letter obtained its name from Antonio de Torres, the man tasked with the job of delivering it to the king on the returning vessels dispatched to Spain while Columbus remained behind. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, pp. 593–4. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 596. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 598. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 599. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 604. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse”, p. 605. Sandra Swart, “Riding High – Horses, Power and Settler Society, c. 1654–1840”, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Environmental Histories, no. 29 (November 2003), p. 47. David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 200. David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 180. David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 180.

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277 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 180. The normal dress also included a silk top hat, or the less formal billycock or bowler hat, a dark veil to protect against pollution or sun, gloves, a crop, coat, and boots (p. 187). Although this description of side-saddle may seem unbearably uncomfortable and contortionist to us, British women did not reject the practice en masse until the 1890s when the advent of dress reform, an increase in female sports participation, and the rise of the bicycle rendered the riding habit obsolete (p. 200). 278 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 184. 279 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 185. David has explained that the dangling fabric of the skirts posed the threat that it would become entangled in the horse’s galloping feet or caught on the saddle causing the rider to be dismounted, dragged, and even trampled. The riding fashion also made it difficult for women to mount and dismount the horse without assistance. Therefore, paradoxically, while purportedly being an outfit for female activity and athleticism, it actually increased the dependency and helplessness of women (p. 194). 280 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 201. 281 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 201. David cites from Robert Henderson, The Barb and the Bridle: A Handbook of Equitation for Ladies (London: The “Queen” Office, 1874), p. 3. 282 David, “Elegant Amazons”, p. 181.

Charmaine A. Nelson, Rose Hall Plantation, Montego Bay, Jamaica (August 2014), photograph

8

Beyond sugar James Hakewill’s vision of Jamaican settlements, livestock pens, and the spaces between

Caretaking animals: Identity and penkeeping There is much that differentiates Hakewill’s representation of whites – men and women – from his depiction of the enslaved black population of Jamaica in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. To be certain, of his 21 mainly landscape images, it is his black slaves that comprise the bulk of the human subjects. These black subjects are comprised of males and females, adults and children, and they are also distinguished by what they are doing. As I have already discussed at length in the previous chapter, the activity (or lack thereof) of these enslaved people of African descent did not correspond with the reality of their daily lives, the centrepiece of which was sugar plantation field labour for the demographic minority of the Creole white Jamaican elite. In this section I would like to examine what these black subjects were doing in Hakewill’s prints and to consider the logic and motivation of these choices for Hakewill, as a white foreign artist. One of the activities in which the enslaved are repeatedly imaged is tending to animals, be it mules, horses, goats, cows or dogs.1 To understand these images it is important to contemplate the dominant British ideals of man’s relationship to nature, specifically animals, and the Eurocentric location of Africans within that “natural” order. To the British, man occupied the top of the hierarchy of nature and was given dominion over animals. Africans, considered “brutish”, supposedly lacked humanity and, according to Morgan, “In their animal-like condition, they could be branded, bought and sold, chained, whipped, even castrated – just like stock”.2 Jamaican slaves were likened to domesticated animals, which, in the popular parlance of the day, needed to be subjected to a “civilizing mission”.3 But as domesticated animals did not necessarily do well in the hands of nineteenth-century white Jamaicans, neither did the enslaved. As Bickell noted, “there are many white savages in the West Indies, who have no more feeling for a Negro than for a dog, and who take every advantage to gratify their worse than Turkish disposition by cruelly flogging them for small offences, and even causing their death, without fear of punishment.”4 That the language of “breeding” was applied equally to livestock and to enslaved blacks was not accidental.5 Hakewill’s prints accurately represented a central relationship – that between human and animal – of the plantation economy since slaves were largely responsible for the care of Jamaican livestock. As Morgan has argued, “In Jamaica, slaves worked with livestock in three distinct settings – sugar plantations; small ranches or farms (termed ‘pens’ or,

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more specifically, ‘grass-pens,’ in eighteenth-century parlance); and, most important of all, specialized pens (or ‘cattle-pens’) that were often satellites of larger sugar complexes.”6 Hakewill represented blacks caretaking or directing animals in a total of 10 of the 21 prints including: (1) Waterfall on the Windward Road, near Kingston, (2) Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, The Property of G.W. Taylor Esq. MP, (3) Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at Agualta Vale, St. Mary’s, (Figure 8.1), (4) Port Maria, St. Mary’s, (5) Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s, (6) Cardiff Hall, St. Ann’s, (7) The Bog Walk, (8) Bryan Castle, Great House, Trelawny, (9) Montego Bay, from Reading Hill, and (10) Whitney Estate, Clarendon – The Property of Viscount Dudley and Ward.7 Throughout the British West Indies, slaves and livestock, inextricably linked, were the lifeblood of a plantation. As “stock”, human and animal, they were the constant focus of regulation, monitoring, and appraisal. As Morgan has noted, Because of their signal importance, these two forms of capital were usually grouped in precise gradations according to their productive capacity: from the strongest to weakest, from first gang to children, from working stock to calves. As units of power they were subject to constant evaluations of their effectiveness, persistent weightings of their worth.8

Figure 8.1 D.T. Egerton after James Hakewill, Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at Agualta Vale, St. Mary’s, from part 3 of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0039, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Indeed, the livestock holdings of Jamaican plantations rivalled the slave holdings, making various types of animals a regular feature of the different estates that Hakewill would have visited. According to Verene A. Shepherd, large estates like Golden Grove (St Thomasin-the-East) required one hundred “steers” (oxen) yearly, in addition to other animals like mules and spayed heifers.9 Although various classes of people kept livestock in nineteenthcentury Jamaica including, according to Shepherd, “slaves, free people of colour, free blacks, the large sugar planters, coffee farmers and other small-scale white entrepreneurs”, the animals in these prints were not meant to be read as the possessions of the slave subjects.10 Therefore, there is a distinction to be made between the “slave ‘penkeepers’”,11 whose labour entailed the caretaking of their owners’ livestock, and the penkeepers who were themselves owners of land, livestock, and slaves.12 Some of the slave penkeepers that Hakewill represented were shepherds or goatherds, identifiable by the staffs that they hold or that appear in the images near their bodies.13 This is the case in Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Property of G.W. Taylor Esq. MP, Port Maria, St. Mary’s, and Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s, The Property of C.N. Bayly, Esq. In Hakewill’s watercolour and print of Holland Estate a black male slave, seated beside a stream, watches over two cows, with staff in hand. With his back to the viewer, we do not see his face or eyes, but we can infer that our view of the expansive estate is also his own. Port Maria, St. Mary’s shows a pair of slaves, likely men, in the left foreground, the standing black male goatherd braced against his staff as he looks towards a group of goats. And finally, Hakewill included another duo of shepherds in his image of Trinity Estate, again in the left foreground. Like the lone slave penkeeper depicted in Holland Estate, the pair is pictured by a stream. But while the slave on the left is seated with the shepherd’s staff laid out to the right, the one on the right is laid out on the ground, the pose conveying even more fully a sense of leisured relaxation or idleness. The animals in these images may have been the product of the sugar plantations themselves, since, as Shepherd also points out, some sugar estate owners had large enough holdings, capital, and land to have their own “satellite pens”.14 If a planter could afford it, such internal investments in livestock were considered shrewd, given the ongoing need for animal power for their mills, overland transportation, manure, leather, milk, and meat.15 In 1815, “84 sugar planters owned 96 satellite pens serving 122 estates”, representing about one third of all pens.16 This of course created economic competition as well as social tension between the white planters who kept pens and the mainly white dedicated penkeepers.17 The friction was also political since, up until 1845, no penkeepers numbered amongst the men in the Jamaican Assembly or Legislative Council.18 Yet more tension was created since many times the lawyers and overseers of the larger sugar plantations were the penkeepers who owned the smaller, less desirable, and more marginally located plots of land.19 To make matters worse, penkeepers’ dependence on a sugar plantation clientele, combined with the planters’ monopoly on most of the best pasture land, and foreign competition, restricted their potential for growth, resulting in a lack of access to social mobility.20 This arguably deliberate class division and hierarchization within whiteness, achieved in part through the unjust (mis)application of import duties and taxes, is rarely depicted within Hakewill’s book – which in terms of whiteness, focused most of the attention on the

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English elite – except for his Harbour Street, Kingston (Plate 16) which I will discuss in detail below.21 Plantation economies were often characterized by monocrop agriculture, which, although productive of outputs for exportation, often decreased the internal possibilities for capital accumulation and internal economic markets, while creating a reliance on imports, often from the “mother country”.22 But contrary to the limited internal economic markets of other islands, Shepherd has noted that the variation of Jamaican geography, along with its economic and entrepreneurial diversity, led to the “evolution of an important group of non-sugar producers”.23 While planters growing crops other than sugar cane, like coffee, often geared their smaller yields to external markets, some created businesses, which were directed at an internal market.24 Those in the business of raising animals, known as penkeepers, fit this latter model.25 According to Shepherd, in Jamaica “Among those producing primarily for the local market were the penkeepers or livestock farmers who participated only minimally in the direct export trade, accumulating their capital locally.”26 These businesses dominated the Jamaican livestock trade by catering mainly to sugar estates, which required continuous supplies of livestock.27 However, the penkeepers’ economic orientation towards sugar planter clients made them especially vulnerable to price fluctuations.28 Unsurprisingly, the penkeepers or livestock farmers, dominantly but not all men, were comprised at times of free coloureds but more often of a “lower strata of white society” than the more wealthy class of landowners who owned the sugar cane plantations.29 Another characteristic of penkeepers was that they tended to be Creoles and residents, as opposed to the absenteeism and foreignness of many of the sugar planters.30 First devised under the Spanish whose hatos “dotted the southern savannah lands”,31 Jamaica was used as an “open-range ranching colony” with cattle, horses, and hogs running freely.32 During the seventeenth century the Spanish livestock industry was geared largely towards export, supplying meat, hide, lard, and tallow to the Spanish metropolitan market.33 It was upon British conquest that the wild animals were rounded up and the beginning of the Jamaican penkeeping industry was born.34 Some of the first British livestock farmers were the “soldier-settlers of the Cromwellian expeditionary force”, who initially settled on the south coast before being pushed onto more marginal regions in the interior.35 It was only after the British conquest of the island and the rise of the sugar industry that livestock farmers oriented themselves towards an internal market, supplying animals for “draught purposes and millwork”,36 eventually becoming dependant on the owners of sugar cane plantations who became their largest client base.37 By the 1780s, Gardner estimated that there were four hundred “breeding pens” in Jamaica.38 Therefore, by the time that Hakewill arrived in the 1820s, the penkeeping trade was firmly established and had expanded to encompass attorneys and overseers.39 Higman estimates that some 405 holdings were referred to as “pens” around 1832.40 While livestock pens functioned as distinct enterprises in Jamaica, in Antigua, pens were sometimes a part of the same property as the sugar plantations as seen at the left side of Clark’s Digging, or

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Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes (1823). Although Shepherd has cautioned that it is perhaps problematic to refer to penkeepers as a group due to their heterogeneity, at the same time they used collective action and organizing, although not to its full capacity, to advance their political and economic goals in the face of planter dominance.41 The division provoked by internal race and sex differences disrupted the potential cohesion of penkeepers as a group with political power. Shepherd noted that although white male and female and coloured male penkeepers resorted to collective action by petitioning the Assembly, “free coloured women were excluded by their male counterparts from the civil rights movement”.42 To make matters worse for coloured penkeepers, coloured male penkeepers like Robert Hilton Anguin and Benjamin Scott-Moncrieffe petitioned the Assembly as individuals for personal gain which did not extend to other coloured penkeepers.43 However, in stark contrast to the economic and political ostracization of black women, white women like Catherine Buckridge at times instigated protests, which included male penkeepers. In 1843 she petitioned the Assembly (although unsuccessfully) regarding the planned diversion of the Rio Cobre to make way for railway lines between Spanish Town and Kingston, a diversion which encroached on the lands of several St Catherine penkeepers (including her own) and diverted much-needed water which was used to nourish grass which they sold at market.44 As mentioned above, by the eighteenth century some free coloureds had been able to accrue sufficient wealth to become penkeepers. The planter Matthew Lewis recorded his disparaging opinions about these property-owning people of colour during his second visit to the island in 1818: “Some of the free people of colour possess slaves, cattle, and other property left them by their fathers, and are in good circumstances; but few of them are industrious enough to increase their possessions by any honest exertions of their own.”45 Regardless of this coloured penkeeping population, several factors that transpired subsequently make it unlikely that the livestock in Hakewill’s images were the possessions of their black caretakers. As Shepherd relates, a prohibitive law passed in 1761 strategically sought to interfere with the amount of wealth that free coloureds could accumulate.46 The Jamaica Assembly, “the traditional bastion of ‘sugar power’”,47 instituted a law prohibiting free blacks from inheriting significant wealth.48 Passed on 19 December 1761 and subsequently ratified in London, UK, the act sought to block the acquisition of wealth by the mixed-race offspring of white men and black female slaves. Known as the Devises Act, its purpose was to “prevent the inconveniences arising from exorbitant grants and devises, made by white persons to negroes, and the issue of negroes; and to restrain and limit such grants and devises.”49 The act was a reaction to the regularity with which various types of wealth (estates, money, slaves, livestock, etc.) were being left to the “mulattoes, and the other offspring of mulattoes”, the children of white men, “not being in their own issue born in lawful wedlock”.50 Specifically, in an effort to restrict what black and mixed-race women could inherit as the beneficiaries of white men, the act declared null and void any bequest over 2,000 pounds.51 It is likely that a mulatto like Rolph, described in the 30 April 1818

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entry in Matthew Lewis’ journal as the owner of six or seven slaves inherited from his father, a white ploughman, was the target of just such legislation.52 The acquisition of wealth by blacks and coloureds was seen as a direct threat to the continuing social, political, and economic dominance of the white planter class and a pattern that would damage the white community. As such the act declared that . . . no lands, negro, mulatto, or other slaves, cattle, stock, money, or other real or personal estate in this island whatsoever, shall be given, granted to, or declared to be in trust for, or to the use of, or devised by any white person to, any negro whatever, or to any mulatto, or other person not being in their own issue born in lawful wedlock, and being the issue of a negro, and deemed a mulatto . . . or to or for the use of them, or any of them, by any deed, last will and testament, instrument in writing or by parole, or by any other way or device whatsoever, other than in manner hereinafter excepted [italics mine].53 The act dramatically exposed the imposed racial limits of kinship in eighteenth-century Jamaica. The expansiveness of the law indicates that white Jamaican politicians were intent upon blocking all conceivable manner of inheritance from being bequeathed to black and coloured Jamaicans, regardless of whether or not those Jamaicans were actually their own mixed-race kin.54 The law also obviously demonstrated the economic order of white wealth and black marginalization since no such act was necessary to prohibit the flow of wealth from blacks to whites. It is interesting that the proviso of wedlock was left as a type of loophole through which white men could conceivably leave inheritances for their mixed-race children (and “housekeepers”). In regard to white Creole slave owners, although Beckles has noted that “In general, they considered it no evidence of degenerate taste to retain black or coloured female slaves as sexual partners”,55 in comparison, the rate of marriage between black women and white men in the British Caribbean was pitifully low, and certainly taboo, if not an act of outright social and political suicide, for white men.56 In the rare cases where the mixed-race child was the product of a legitimate marriage, article seven of the act also set a limit upon the inheritance, which could “exceed not the sum of two thousand pounds in the whole, to any one person”.57 The Jamaican Assembly approved the act with only three dissenting votes cast by members Norwood Witter, Edward Clarke, and William Wynter.58 The dissent was formulated on the basis that the act restrained the “Power of his Majesty’s faithful and Freeborn Subjects in disposing of their Estates at their own pleasure”, that it facilitated the “Encouragement of Frauds and Perjurys”, and that it would result in petty lawsuits from people contesting the value of the inheritances of blacks (sic). Yet the Messrs (that is, the three named above) went even farther with arguments numbers five and six (of a total of eight), which advocated for the economic rights of free Negroes and mulattoes. In the fifth argument they noted that free blacks and coloureds were prohibited from lending money on equal terms with others or providing mortgages to whites, a fact that they argued caused

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harm to the industry of whites and provoke an exodus of capital and people. The sixth argument contended that the act interfered with the “natural Affections of the mind”, effectively prohibiting whites from bequeathing wealth to their offspring and loved ones at will. But tellingly, the argument of the error in the majority’s logic was made by pointing out the whiteness of many of the “black” or “coloured” children of white men by claiming that they would be unjustly prohibited from inheriting from their fathers, even tho’ they should be removed 3° from the Negro Ancestor, and Consequently are seven eighths White, and not distinguishable from White Persons, and altho’ the Ancestors of such Offspring on the mother’s side may have been free for many Generations, And even altho’ such Offspring may have been educated in Great Britain in the most Liberal manner and brought up in the Christian Religion according to the Church of England.59 Indeed, this argument had to do with the child’s right of inheritance being validated only because of their perceived proximity to whiteness and distance from blackness. It is significant to note that this law was passed without the input of the lower classes of white men, since, as mentioned above, none ranked amongst the members of the Jamaican Assembly until after 1845. Hakewill’s Cardiff Hall, St. Ann’s depicted a pen. The residence of the white Creole John Blagrove Esq., who was deceased by the time of Hakewill’s visit, the estate focused on cattle breeding, breeding and racing horses, and importing horses from Britain.60 Unlike other pens, the excellence of the house, variety of the grounds, and the estate’s location, contiguous with the sea, made it one of Jamaica’s most desirable residences.61 The preservation of white property through inheritance was evident in the lineage of the estate, handed down to Blagrove from the days of Cromwell. In an effort to anglicize the Creole “gentleman” and to no doubt remove some of the bias of potential British readers, Hakewill noted that although born in Jamaica, Blagrove, an English property owner, had been sent to Britain at an early age and educated at Eton and Oxford.62 The view of the estate is from behind a range of trees. Hakewill positions the viewer as if peering down upon rolling green hills with small clusters of humans and livestock. The detailed representation of the work buildings in the middle ground demonstrates the wealth and success of the functioning estate. And yet, the distance of the buildings actually hides the labour from view. Similarly, the people tending the animals are too far away to discern their race, much more their specific actions. Therefore the scene becomes a pleasing vista that extends across the hills to the sea filled with boats in the distance. Hakewill also chose a vantage point, which would highlight the diversity of the goods produced on the estates. By representing the large flat white rectangle beside the works, he informed his readers/viewers about the process of harvesting pimento. Known as a barbeque or plaister, the floor was used to spread out and dry pimento.63 Despite Hakewill’s customary focus on the picturesque qualities of the landscape, his text focused on the encroachment of abolitionism, conflicting with the scenic image that

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he offered his readers. Coming to the deceased Mr Blagrove’s defence, Hakewill argued, “At this period, when the whole system of colonial slavery is so grossly misrepresented, it will only be an act of justice to state, that Mr. Blagrove was always considered by his slaves as a most kind and humane master.”64 Hakewill continued that Blagrove’s 1,500 slaves were “a fine people, and unquestionable specimens of the happiness and comfort to which a slave population may attain, however melancholy it may be to contemplate the risks to which the late discussions are daily exposing them [italics mine].”65 The “late discussions” which Hakewill openly lamented were those of the mainly foreign abolitionists. Cunningly, by attempting to position abolitionism and the liberty of enslaved populations as a risk and a source of instability and “melancholy” for the slave population, Hakewill represented slavery as a protection for Negroes, a system that would provide food, clothes, and shelter, but above all, direction, purpose, and “civilization” from benevolent whites. That Hakewill took pains even to quote from Blagrove’s will demonstrates the extent of his research and his desire to attain a comprehensive knowledge of Jamaican slavery as well as his commitment to projecting the best possible image of the white Creole planter class. From the will, he quotes Blagrove’s words: And lastly, to my loving people, denominated and recognized by law as, and being in fact my slaves in Jamaica, but more estimated and considered by me and my family as tenants for life attached to the soil, I bequeath a dollar for every man, woman, and child, as a small token of my regard for their faithful and affectionate service and willing labours to myself and my family, being reciprocally bound in one general tie of master and servant in the prosperity of the land, from which we draw our mutual comforts and subsistence in our several relations (a tie and interest not practised on by the hired labourer of the day in the United Kingdom), the contrary of which doctrine is held only by visionists of the puritanical order against the common feeling of mankind [sic].66 Indeed, even as he contemplated his own death in the drafting of his will, Blagrove waged a war against abolitionism, otherwise known as the “visionists of the puritanical order”. In a stunning turnabout, slavery is here fashioned as the common good, as beneficial to slave as master. The strategic image of the slave as attached to the soil conjured the quaint image of a rustic farmer, not a person toiling under a driver’s whip and an overseer’s direction. Furthermore, by positioning the slaves as a group offering their “willing labour” and attached to the land, they are indigenized and their violent, forced migration out of Africa erased. The idea of a willing family of tenant labourers also disavowed the consistency of slave resistance and revolt, fabricating in its place an imaginary history of a harmonious, blended, cross-racial family in which slaves devote themselves willingly to their benevolent white masters and mistresses, in deference to their racial superiority. Through the inheritance of one dollar each (a pitiful sum in comparison to Blagrove’s actual wealth), Blagrove created a fiction of reciprocity, built upon the false idea that the 1,500 enslaved people could actually share equitably in the profits that he derived from

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their labour. But in reality, only the whites, through labour, which they violently extracted from blacks, reaped the “prosperity of the land”. It was a form of psychological manipulation, the strategic maintenance of hegemony that the white oppressor decided to bestow a miniscule fraction of his slave-produced wealth upon the enslaved. Obviously then, the idea of mutual comfort was deeply ironic and imbalanced. And finally, adding insult to injury, in noting that the free labourers of the UK did not form the “ties and interest” of the slave societies like Jamaica, Blagrove attempted to pit the “puritanical order” of abolitionists against the “common feeling of mankind” or the establishment of cross-racial familial bonds within supposedly equitable and prosperous relations. Returning to the issue of Hakewill’s representation of black caretakers of plantation livestock, the existence of the Devises Act and the widespread resistance of whites to black acquisition of wealth make it improbable that the animals that they are seen tending were their own. Rather, for the white planters themselves, who were also some, if not the core, of Hakewill’s assumed future readers/viewers, his landscapes invited a reading of the slaves and the livestock as simply two types of their plantation holdings, amidst a third type, the land itself. Indeed, the overarching culture of Jamaican slave life, be it on pens or plantations, meant that slaves who tended livestock were just as susceptible, if not more so, to abuse and exploitation as any others. As Morgan has noted, “The degradation was not just physical but also mental, for the commingling of slaves and livestock encouraged the manager to think of his human and animal charges in similar ways and treat them as such.”67 Given the estimated costs of each animal (18 pounds in the eighteenth century, and between 20 and 30 pounds in the early nineteenth), and since a large part of a planter’s wealth was expended on animals, Hakewill’s consistent representation of slave holdings side-by-side with animal holdings was a way to emphasize the planters’ tremendous wealth,68 and is demonstrative of the extent to which “slaves and animals were joined in the minds of Anglo-Jamaicans”.69 The limits of mobility and the pervasiveness of surveillance: Exploring wainage Shepherd has noted that the pens made the bulk of their profit from the sale of working animals to the estates, as opposed to money earned from “jobbing, wainage, pasturage and the sale of food and miscellaneous items”.70 Jobbing referred to the process of a slave owner renting out the labour of their slaves to others (often plantations),71 wainage to the process of transporting things in a wain or cart, and pasturage to the task of feeding cattle.72 Accordingly, Hakewill’s prints likely represent all three tasks. Likely, since in the case of jobbing, it is difficult to judge if the slaves that he represented were from the plantations, which he depicted or rented from other estates or owners.73 However, pasturage is certainly implied in many of the 10 prints listed above, especially Cardiff Hall, St. Ann’s, where a small human figure is positioned at the left side amidst two small clusters of animals. Furthermore, the use of slave labour in wainage is arguably the centrepiece of activity in The Bog Walk, Montego Bay, from Reading Hill, and Whitney Estate, Clarendon – the Property of Viscount Dudley and Ward.

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However poor, the inland system of roads was a necessary series of arteries, which connected plantations to ports. As Hakewill illustrated in the three aforementioned prints, the hauling of goods, wares, and produce in carts or wains between plantations or between plantations and ports was a primary responsibility of the enslaved. The Bog Walk, also known as “the Walks”, represented a high road, which extended along the north side of the island connecting Spanish Town to the parish of St Thomas-in-the-Vale, St Ann’s, St Mary’s, and so forth. After the preceding images of Jamaica’s political and urban centres (The King’s Square, St. Jago de la Vega, Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm, and Harbour Street, Kingston) and plantations, The Bog Walk can be read as a transitional image, or representative of the connective tissue between Jamaica’s urban centres and estates. While the road takes up most of the right side of the image, the Rio Cobre winds through the left, its power held in check by a retaining wall or “stone parapet”. As such, the image is demonstrative of the types of technological intervention and encroachment that were necessary to facilitate the colonial capitalist project, which was based upon the exportation of plantation monocrop agriculture. The vantage point is slightly elevated, allowing us to look down upon the river, the stone wall, the road, and the human subjects scattered along it. While in the far distance four people are visible, in the middle distance, a large wain hauled by a team of six oxen is ushered forward by two whip-wielding black figures, most likely slave penkeepers. The contents of the wain which is directed towards the viewer are hogsheads or puncheons, the barrels customarily used to store rum and sugar. Therefore the print demonstrates the transportation of the crops and manufactured goods from plantation to harbour. We can also see the seated black male wearing a hat perched on the stone wall. The closest figures to us, a black female with two small children, one in her arms and one at her side, seems to walk towards the oncoming “traffic”. While Hakewill’s textual commentary focused upon the “luxuriant foliage of every variety of form and grandeur and every variety of tint”, his image unwittingly revealed the arduousness of an ongoing aspect of slave labour – the continual internal transit of goods between estates and internal markets or places of shipping. Indeed, the work of slave life was also entailed in the daily grind of moving one’s body (and the master or mistresses’ goods) from point A to point B, unassisted, unlike the white middle or upper classes, who had the aid of a horse and/or a carriage. Travel for the enslaved was no small matter for several key reasons. First of all, slaves were customarily shoeless since Jamaican slave owners did not provide shoes in their clothing rations. Bickell substantiates this point noting that no stockings or shoes were allowed, “nor are they much wanted”.74 However, while the lack of shoes obviously resulted in various injuries, cuts, sores, and excessive hardening or growth of calluses on the feet, that slaves also became known for an ailment called chigga foot or chigga toe makes Bickell’s claim that the slaves did not desire shoes seem suspect.75 Upon his arrival in Jamaica, the planter Matthew Lewis quickly deduced that the common ailment of lameness was “chiefly occasioned by the chiga, a diminutive fly which works itself into the feet to lay its eggs, and, if it be not carefully extracted in time, the flesh around it corrupts, and a sore ensues not easily to be cured.”76

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Second, the seemingly free and unsupervised movement of the enslaved in The Bog Walk image would have been facilitated by the procurement of passes from their owners or estate management.77 As such, the mobility of blacks and coloureds on the island was constantly regulated and under surveillance by whites. Third, slaves could easily walk ten miles or more between the fields, their Negro quarters, and their provision grounds on any given day. On Sunday, market day, that number could easily double or triple as they also moved from provision grounds on the estates to the urban centres to sell and exchange their goods. And finally, as the image revealed, unlike the products moved in the wains, the slaves often accompanied the goods and directed the animals, but on foot. As such, in addition to the other regular tasks of a plantation, wainage necessitated that slaves walk long distances, over difficult terrain. In this light the seated black male on the stone wall in The Bog Walk takes on new meanings, since as discussed above, Mathison noted that fatigue and over-exhaustion was a common occurrence, resulting in the enslaved (particularly those travelling great distances) literally falling asleep even in the midst of noisy urban streets to sleep off their exhaustion.78 Originally known as “Carver” and described in Edward Long’s work, Hakewill perhaps erroneously described Whitney Estate, Clarendon as the property of the Viscount Dudley and Ward (John, sixth Baron Ward of Birmingham [1700–74]). However, by the time that he arrived, the second Viscount had already died (1788) and his illegitimate daughter, Anna Maria Ward, had become his sole heir.79 It is unclear if the estate was in the hands of Anna or her uncle William (the half-brother of the second Viscount) at the time of Hakewill’s arrival since William, product of John’s marriage to the Jamaican heiress, had received all of the “settled estates”.80 Hakewill focused his image on what he described as the “great interior road connecting St. Elizabeth and St. Dorothy”, upon which the estate was situated, its 3,243 acres (13 sq. km) almost completely encircling the Whitney River.81 But again, the central activity of the image is wainage, and the focus is so deliberate that it arguably transforms the landscape into a genre scene. According to Higman,Whitney Estate was a large plantation with an unusually long slope on the western edge of the Mocho Mountains north of Porus.82 As in Trinity Estate, the industrial technology of the aqueduct takes centre stage, cutting across the right middle ground and then snaking a “sinuous path around the hillside” at the right of the page.83 Hakewill explained that the vantage point was from the south and positioned the viewer at a bend in the important dirt road. In the immediate foreground, two blacks, most likely male slaves, approach the picture plane, one on foot in a white robe and red hat and the other in the cart with a whip in hand, directed at the sky. They were two of the 270 slaves whose houses – unseen in the print – were spread across 20 acres of land beside the works.84 Their teamwork was typical of certain assignments, including the transport of goods or livestock between estates or to market. As Morgan has noted regarding Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth, under Thistlewood’s orders, “In mid-February 1751, Julius, Scipio, and Simon shepherded twelve sheep to Westmoreland, returning four days later with flour, cloth, and twelve bills”.85 As such, the apparently empty wain (or at least empty of hogsheads or puncheons) seems to indicate that the men are at the end, not the beginning of their journey. Meanwhile, the steep upward slopes of the land at either side of the road gives the viewer

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the feeling of being firmly positioned, if not trapped, on the road and by implication positioned for imminent contact and interaction with the approaching slaves. Of all of the prints then, this was the first and the only of Hakewill’s works that gave the impression to his assumed white readers/viewers of an impending and unavoidable encounter with slave subjects. Arguably then, such a vantage point was titillating to the mainly foreign British readership who had never set foot on the island and who would have had little to no contact with people of African descent. Besides the two male slaves with the wain, there are five other human figures clearly visible on the road into the estate. Although they are too far removed from the picture plane to deduce their race visually, the fact that they are walking and not on horseback or in carriages and the bundle clearly visible on the head of the figure closest to the far side of the transecting aqueduct wall, would indicate that they were also slaves. These enslaved people were a mere seven of the total of 271 Negroes who belonged to the estate.86 But the number of slaves may have seemed, for the times, small considering the vastness of the estate. As Hakewill noted, Whitney Estate, situated on a great interior road, boasted 3,243 acres (13.12 sq. km), with 160 (0.65 sq. km) in canes, 2,902 (11.74 sq. km) in provisions and “wood land”, 151 (0.61 sq. km) in pasturage, and 22 (0.09 sq. km) in corn.87 While the white wall of the aqueduct sliced the foreground, framing the central action, Hakewill represented the rest of the structure as it wound deeper into the estate, along the right side of the image, disappearing around a hill and then re-emerging to peak between a hill and some works in the right middle ground. Besides highlighting the agricultural technology of the aqueduct, Whitney Estate’s works also literally take a central position in the picture frame, offset against the backdrop of the verdant hills and mountains in the distance. The two primary slaves occupied in wainage were likely those regularly employed in the hauling of the reported 250 hogsheads, which according to Hakewill, was the average crop from the estate.88 But their apparently empty wain would indicate that they were at the end or beginning of a journey. While wainage was necessary to all plantations, it was particularly essential to those like Whitney Estate that did not have sea frontage. Thus while estates with ocean frontage like Spring Garden, St. George’s may have been considered prime real estate due to their ability to construct independent docks, not all planters owned waterfront property and therefore only some had the ability to build their own independent docks. Known as Great Spring Garden, the property was owned by John Rock Grosett Esq MP and had been passed down to him from his great-grandfather whom Hakewill described as “the original settler”.89 Grosett’s plantation was vast, comprising 3,000 acres (12.1 sq. km) , thirty of which were dedicated to the “Negro village” of the estate’s 600 slaves. That the village was positioned at the base of the hill upon which sat the estate’s Great House indicates the extent to which plantation surveillance and discipline were not merely a facet of constant human regulation by overseers and drivers but literally built into the architecture and landscaped environment of the plantation.90 Due to the position of the Great House, the slaves at Spring Garden, whether being watched by the owners or not, were made to feel as though they were under constant surveillance.

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But Hakewill’s vantage point for the print cloaked the Negro village in foliage. In that way, Spring Garden Estate, St. George’s not only sanitized black labour (by representing the slaves departing from the fields) but erased black life, by removing the slave quarters from view. While the Negro village was clearly outside of the picturesque ideal to which Hakewill aspired, his choice of vantage point deliberately showed off the placement of the estate, particularly its vital water frontage. As Hakewill wrote, “This plantation is contiguous to the sea-shore, and adjoins the left bank of the Spanish River.”91 Optimally positioned on Buff Bay, with a backdrop of the Blue Mountains, Grosett, Hakewill tells us, took advantage of his sea frontage with a private wharf and large stores.92 The fact that Grosett was a wharf owner was no small matter. Wharves were an essential part of la flota that ensured the timely shipment of plantation goods first on coasting vessels to Kingston or Montego Bay, and subsequently on large cargo ships for Trans Atlantic voyages.93 Furthermore, Grossett’s wharf likely allowed him to bypass the use of coastal warehouses, which other planters who lacked wharves had to construct or rent to store produce prior to shipment.94 As such, Hakewill noted that the draggers (smaller craft, also known as drogers) were easily able to move Spring Garden’s goods to the larger vessels for export. Indeed, Grosett accumulated wealth not just through the produce raised on his estates, but by benefitting from the export of other planters’ produce through the principal wharf at Morant Bay, which he also owned.95 Owning a wharf was another sure way to make a living within the sugar-dependent trade economy of Jamaica. Unlike Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm, the vantage point that Hakewill chose placed the settlement of Montego Bay (Figure 6.4) at a good distance from the viewer, almost exactly in the middle of the page. Hakewill was clearly enchanted with the settlement, claiming that Montego Bay and its neighbourhood was “a very desirable place of residence”.96 As he related, at the time, Montego Bay was the third largest city on the island and had two churches, a courthouse, a gaol, a fort, a marine hospital, and barracks for two companies of infantry.97 As Lewis described during his visit just a few years earlier in January 1816, I was much pleased with the scenery of Montego Bay, and with the neatness and cleanliness of the town; indeed, what with the sea washing it, and the picturesque aspect of the piazzas and verandas, it is impossible for a West Indian town so situated, and in such a climate, not to present an agreeable appearance.98 Much closer to the viewer’s imaginary position, yet still far below the elevated viewpoint, a large wharf is clearly visible in Hakewill’s print. He educated his readers that it belonged to Mr Scott but was rented by Mr Home. This wharf carried on the tradition of the site as an official port of entry, first established in 1758, ten years after the first ship and house had been constructed.99 The importance of Montego Bay as a port was emphasized in Hakewill’s text, which gave examples of the ways in which wealthy stakeholders came together to create infrastructures to facilitate the expansion of their wealth and the protection of their economic interests. According to Hakewill, incorporated by an act of legislation in 1759, the Close Harbour Company, the first company to be formed in the West

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Indies for an execution of a public undertaking, had built a breakwater to protect the ships, which had previously been grounded.100 And yet, regardless of the representation of the wharf and all of the text devoted to shipping and harbour improvements, the focal point of activity in the print is wainage. On the right-hand side of the image, extending from the picture plane one third of the way into the distance, King’s Road dominates. The route, as Hakewill explained, ran from Montego Bay to Westmoreland. Sandwiched between a steeply graded hill and a stone wall, the dirt road is occupied by two wains apparently moving in opposite directions. The wain farther from the picture plane is positioned with its back end to the viewer and its load, likely several hogsheads or puncheons, is clearly visible. The other wain – at a bend in the road very close to the picture plane – is pulled by a draught animal (likely a mule) towards the viewer while a hatted figure, likely a male slave, stands to its left. Indeed, the image represents three distinct figures, the two on the road likely slaves. With the whip at his right side pointing up into the air, the male beside the wain ignores his docile animal and faces a seated figure on a stonewall, most likely a female by the nature of her dress. However, like the seated man on the stone wall in The Bog Walk, this seated figure and the interaction with the standing figure would probably have connoted to Hakewill’s white readers the unhurried, pleasant interaction of “comfortable” slaves. While Hakewill’s text praised as heroic the “labour” of white males to construct a breakwater and improve the vital harbour, the daily herculean efforts of the enslaved were masked by the ways in which Hakewill chose to script views that deliberately transformed the arduousness of wainage into a series of quaint interactions between unhurried, independent and seemingly unhindered slaves. Unlike the vantage point in Whitney Estate, Clarendon, Hakewill did not position the viewer on the dirt road, but decidedly above it. As such, the feeling is one of looking down upon the road (and the two slaves) from a much higher perspective, most likely another part of the grassy slope that framed the King’s Road, only further along the unseen curve. As such, the viewer’s mirror is the third figure; the almost imperceptible blue and white speck visible at the base of the trees at the far right side of the print. Although race is hardly a certainty due to the miniscule size of the figure, the head appears to be white. Is the figure a poor white worker from the wharf below, the wealthy child of a neighbouring plantation owner or a stand-in for the artist himself? The position on the hill overlooking the stretch of road, the wharf and the sea beyond, provides this figure with the most masterful view. Although not similarly posed or the obvious conduit through which the narrative of the landscape unfolds, this person’s vantage point mimics that of the white couple in Hakewill’s Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Figure 7.5). Above land, sea, and road, the perspective does not just command the landscape below, but perfectly positions the person for surveillance over the Negro couple paused on the road. As such, instead of displaying the “comfortable life” of the enslaved, Hakewill’s Montego Bay, from Reading Hill revealed, most likely unwittingly, the extent to which slave life in Jamaica was the site of constant scrutiny and regulation. Furthermore, in mirroring the viewer’s assumed position on a hill

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overlooking the road, Hakewill offered his white viewers the same opportunity for masterful surveillance. “Other” whites: Representing British soldiers in the Caribbean Hakewill’s 21 images were made up of both rural and urban scenes. In Harbour Street, Kingston Hakewill also provided a close-up view of the very lanes and streets of the urban space of Kingston upon which his white couple in Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm gaze down. The scene takes place at the intersection of the roads King and Harbour, a fact that Hakewill indicates with the presence of signage on the building at the left side of the image. After seizing the island from the Spanish in 1655, the British initially retained the location of the original Spanish capital, changing the name from of St Jago de la Vega to Spanish Town. Kingston emerged as a major urban centre only after the earthquake of 1692, which forced many of the surviving inhabitants of Port Royal to seek out new residences.101 As Catherine Hall has noted, Most of the white residents lived at a distance from the town center, in which creoles, French residents (many of them refugees from San Domingue), Spanish settlers, and a significant number of Jews lived alongside poor whites, free men and women of color, tavern and brothel keepers, sailors, street sellers, prostitutes, apprentices and the enslaved.102 Lewis did not think much of Kingston during his first visit in 1816. On 5 February 1816 he commented in his journal, There is not that air of melancholy about Kingston which pervades Spanish Town; but it has no pretensions to beauty; and if any person will imagine a large town entirely composed of booths at a race-course, and the streets merely roads, without any sort of paving, he will have a perfect idea of Kingston.103 The settlement was laid out on a formal north–south, east–west grid system in the dominant shape of a rectangle. The two major arteries of Kingston were King Street, the major north–south Street, and Queen Street, the east–west one.104 A central square was placed at the intersection of the two streets. Originally intended for a governor’s house, which never materialized, a parish church occupied its south side.105 But by the eighteenth century, the square was eventually taken over by the army. Renamed Place d’Arme, with the addition of barracks and magazines, the open area became a place for troops to drill and the square became commonly known as Parade.106 The position of the properties around the square increased its symbolic and economic value and the most powerful members of white Jamaican society purchased the land.107 In contrast to the centrally located Queen Street, as indicated on a Plan of Kingston (1750) (Figure 8.2) created by Michael Hay and dedicated to the governor Edward Trelawny,

Figure 8.2 Michael Hay, Plan of Kingston, to his Excellency Edward Trelawny Esquire . . .This Plan of Kingston is Humbly Dedicated . . ., engraving, 33 × 40 cm, DUC245:11/5, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

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Harbour Street was located farther south and was the second closest east–west artery to the sea, the first being Port Royall Street (sic). While the intersection of Queen and King became symbolic of military and planter dominance, the intersection of Harbour and King was the commercial hub of Kingston. According to Crain, Despite the importance of the square to early Kingston, the nerve center of the city was Harbour Street, where the major wharves and shipping facilities of the island were located. At that time, the shoreline was defined by the south edge of Harbour Street, until filling moved the shoreline south and Port Royal Street was created.108 Thus in representing King and Harbour Streets (Plate 16), Hakewill was knowledgeably depicting the economic hub of Jamaica’s transatlantic enterprise; the businesses through which the agricultural produce from the plantations he also represented were dispatched from the island. However, although an urban scene, the romping goats in the left foreground (one reared up on its hind legs bucking its neighbour) points up the extent to which the life of the “city” was also still encroached upon and supported by the rural life of the country. To this point, similar goats, this time a trio, are represented in the left foreground of Golden Vale, Portland and eight in the same position in Port Maria, St. Mary’s.109 It is significant that Hakewill chose to provide a street-level view. Such a vantage point may have proven titillating for his European readers/viewers since it gave the impression that they were pedestrians walking up the road behind the black female higgler/huckster, a person who sold goods at the local markets.110 In sharp contrast, the later lithographs of Kidd focused more intensely on the colony’s capital with a total of five views of Kingston. While one represented Place d’Arme or the Parade, the other four were panoramic views of the colony’s economic capital taken from the vantage point of the roof of the “Commercial Rooms”; as Kriz notes, a place, “where information about ships coming into harbor and other commercial news were circulated”.111 Located at the intersection of Harbour and Temple Streets, the vantage point that Kidd chose provided partial aerial access to Hakewill’s site in Harbour Street, Kingston.112 Temple Street ran north/south, parallel to and east of King Street and west of the similarly oriented Church Street. Judging from the vista that Kidd structured in his View of Kingston from the Commercial Rooms, Looking toward the West (1838–40), the lookout protruding from the triangulated roof in the centre foreground of the image is the same one which Hakewill represented on the right side, mid-way down the street. Almost the exact same point on Harbour Street was then offered by both artists, only from different vantage points, the earlier work by Hakewill from the ground looking eastward and the later by Kidd from above looking westward. Indeed, by looking west down Harbour Street, consciously or not, Kidd mimicked Hakewill’s earlier vista precisely. Kidd’s return to the exact site indicates the continuing importance not only of Hakewill’s earlier print, but of this part of the city and this precise intersection in the economic and social life of the settlement. The wooden-frame, colonnaded architecture of the busy thoroughfare seemed to have changed little in the 13 years between Hakewill’s and Kidd’s publications. But although

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seen from a distance, Kidd’s image represented greater human activity and mobility, the latter captured in the numerous horses tethered outside of businesses, pulling carriages or being ridden. Although Kidd’s image implies a mix of racial subjects, the distance compelled the viewer to make such determinations not on the basis of complexion or phenotype but by reading the activities, dress, and possessions of the human subjects. For instance, while the horseback and carriage riders could quite safely have been assumed white, the walking figures that seem to carry loads on their heads were surely meant to represent the newly “liberated” slave population. But while Kidd provided the outlines, the sense of physical distance meant that the details were lost. As Kriz has pointed out, Certainly Kidd is required to minimize the street life that enlivens Kingston city center much more than Hakewill does in his ground level view of Harbour Street . . . Crucially, by simulating the kind of embodied view associated with large-scale painted panoramas, Kidd marks Kingston as a subject fit for this most modern mode of urban representation. Rooftop panoramas were generally reserved for the largest and most important urban centers in the Old and New Worlds.113 Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston also represented the complex racial and class makeup of the Jamaican population. Dramatically however, white women are absent from his urban street scene, which is filled with enslaved black males and females and white men of various classes. My reading of the black subjects as slaves is in part derived from their simple clothing, dark complexions, bare feet, and actions and inactions. Two black women sit on either side of the road tending to small naked children, the one at left on what appears to be some kind of sack, with legs crossed and the other at right on a low stool. The unclothed state of the black children, especially the fully exposed child on the right side of the image, was not the fabrication of quaint local custom through exaggeration on Hakewill’s part. Reverend Bickell noted that black children were allowed to go about quite naked, “and I have seen boys and girls, seven or eight years of age, in a state of nature, even running about some houses, who for the sake of common decency ought to be clothed”.114 Another black female figure in a checked coat stands at the right and appears to be drawing water from a well. On the ground at her feet, positioned between her and the woman seated on a stool, a container of produce is visible (perhaps melons?). Meanwhile, to the left and right of the standing woman a series of containers, likely used to hold the water, are perched on the ledge of the waist-high structure (perhaps the well), which draws her attention. Another woman sporting a similarly patterned checked skirt, white shirt, and yellow scarf over her shoulders walks up the left side of the road, deeper into the image, with a basket over her left arm and a load balanced upon her head. Like the woman at the well, this latter woman may be read as black despite the invisibility of her face and skin and also as a higgler or huckster. Unlike Hakewill’s upper-class and leisured white female subjects, all of these black females are labouring in some capacity, either tending children,

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preparing containers of water or hawking produce and wares. However, once again, Hakewill did not show them in what would have been their actual principal labour, field hands on Jamaican sugar plantations. Kriz has noted the same tendency in Agostino Brunias’ earlier work, arguing that To make visible such forced physical labor of women, even “lowly” African women, would reflect poorly on the colonizing British; it is not surprising, therefore, that when Brunias depicts African women at work they are shown not as field slaves, but most often as “free” agents in a market economy, selling fresh produce grown in their provision grounds after their day’s work for the master was done.115 For the most part, like the white woman in Rose Hall, St. James’, Hakewill does not show the faces nor barely any skin of two of the black female subjects in Harbour Street, Kingston, the one at the well and the one walking up Harbour Street. Besides the glimpse of the skin of their arms, their race and sex can only be deduced by their actions and clothing and by their unchaperoned presence in the urban space. As in the plantation landscape of Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale, Hakewill uses a centrally placed road in Harbour Street, Kingston to guide us into the image. A row of buildings appears along both sides of the street and groups of white men in hats, coats, and tails engage in conversation under the covered walkways that the buildings provide. As Crain explains, “Mid-nineteenth-century Kingston had a downtown area where colonnaded business places stood at street level, with wood-frame residential units above. The streets were unpaved.”116 These white men are no doubt the merchants, traders, entrepreneurs, and planters who engaged in the urgent business of the colony. But another lower class of men is also represented. Shepherd has argued that white penkeepers (discussed above) “were clearly socially differentiated from the top echelons of white society, and typically represented a contrary location within the classs configuration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaican slave society [sic].”117 This argument also extends to the white soldiers of the island. Through the bodies of uniformed soldiers, Hakewill also makes clear that the business of the colony is only ensured and facilitated by the constant presence of the British troops. Driving home this point, Hakewill represented a massive naval ensign flying over the buildings at right mid-way down the street. There are also two black men clearly visible in the image; one in the street behind the black woman at the well and another under the arcade of the buildings at the right, near the two upper-class white men. However, neither seems to be engaged with other subjects. While the black male seen deeper within the image is positioned quite close to a pair of white men, their body positions are aligned with the viewer and it is the black male who is turned towards them with the right side of his body facing the picture plane. It is not a small consideration that Hakewill’s choice of poses and positions point out the social isolation of the black men from Kingston’s realm of business and capital. The close positioning of the white men, not merely side by side but overlapping, and their similar poses and clothing convey their engagement with each other.

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Meanwhile, the black man’s positioning, towards the oblivious white pair, records and emphasizes his invisibility within their world. The addition of a clock extending out from the second-floor banister on the right further drives home the necessity of efficiency, discipline, and organization within the realm of business. But the signs of poverty that riddle the black bodies – their shoelessness, poor dress or lack of dress, and activities – mark them as the pathway to wealth production for the surrounding white men, but not equals with access to that pathway for their own gain. Although the tending of child slaves as the raising of white property was a central aspect of the economic reproduction of slavery and the selling of goods or higgling/huckstering was an essential part of the internal economy, the black subjects in this print are utterly disengaged from independent access to the external economic life of the colony. This world of colonial commerce is further highlighted by Hakewill’s effort to record the names of specific businesses, which line both sides of the street, both through his image and his text. According to Hakewill, At the corner to the left is the store of Mr. Netlam Tory, and on the right that of Mr. John Mais, M.A. Further on, on the same side of the way, is Harty’s Tavern, the flag indicating a public entertainment. Beyond is the Custom-House, marked by its high roof. The great tree stands in front of Wood’s Tavern. The Street is terminated, at the distance of about half a mile, by the residence of Edward Codd, Esq.118 Furthermore, although Hakewill failed to mention it by name, the signage at left, less than halfway down the street, announces a shop by the name of Goldsmith Abrams Jewellers.119 This sign, then, recorded the presence of a Jewish community in the colony, another population that was perceived as being above the enslaved and free blacks and coloureds and yet, much like the Irish, below and separate from elite whites.120 While taverns were almost unheard of in the country due to what Gardner called the planters’ “duties of hospitality”, they were a more normal fixture in the Jamaican towns. Hence, while the jeweller indicates the presence of a white upper-class clientele in Kingston, the presence of the tavern locates a more diverse population including lower- and middle-class white men, arguably to a large extent soldiers, sailors, poorer white Creoles, upper-class whites, some coloured men, and foreign white travellers.121 In Jamaica, as in other parts of the West Indies, taverns were not merely places where one could eat and drink, but also sleep and procure sexual favours, mainly from black women.122 The terms “tavern”, “lodging house”, and “inn” were almost interchangeable, the difference being that taverns sometimes did not offer lodgings, and inns tended to be larger establishments.123 By 1820–21, the time of Hakewill’s sojourn in Jamaica, these types of businesses were established across the island at different levels of cleanliness, aesthetic appeal, and cost for different clientele. Amongst the types of people who frequented such businesses, Kerr has listed foreign tourists, historians, magistrates, humanitarians, plantation managers, overseers, clerks, attorneys, planters, merchants, government officials, no less than Lady Maria Nugent the Governor’s wife herself, and

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of course, sailors, soldiers and seamen.124 While white men originally dominated the hospitality trade in the seventeenth century, with the shift towards lodgings as opposed to just the provision of alcoholic drinks, by the beginning of the nineteenth, free women of colour had infiltrated the profession in significant numbers.125 The Jamaican census of 1844 supports this contention with 88 female compared to only 26 male lodging house keepers listed of the total of 157 on the island.126 Matthew Lewis, the owner of two Jamaican plantations, recorded a Miss Edwards, the mistress of a hotel in Black River in which he stayed upon his initial arrival in Jamaica in 1816.127 Although forewarned against staying in Jamaican lodging houses,128 Lewis wrote glowingly about a Montego Bay lodging house and its coloured keeper, . . . but the lodging-house was such a cool clean lodging-house, and the landlady was such an obliging smiling landlady, with the whitest of all possible teeth, and the blackest of all possible eyes, that no harm could happen to me from occupying an apartment which had been prepared by her. She was called out of her bed to make my room ready for me; yet she did every thing with so much good-will and cordiality; no quick answers, no mutterings: inns would be bowers of Paradise, if they were all rented by mulatto landladies, like Judy James.129 Although on the lower end of the income spectrum,130 coloured women like Judy James131 gained a foothold in the sector from which they diversified and made considerable profits, often across several businesses.132 Since liquor licences were granted by the magistrates or members of the vestry who were inevitably upper-class white men, coloured women’s ability to take over this industry was due largely to their capacity to exploit white male sexual desire and to turn white male political clout to their own ends.133 While Beckles has already documented that the lodging houses of Bridgetown, Barbados were havens for prostitution, often controlled by white women who acted as pimps and rented out their black female slaves, Jamaican slave owners also participated in this practice.134 Indeed, planters frequently participated in letting out their female slaves for carnal labour.135 However, the prostitution related to such transient residences in Jamaica seems to have been less conspicuous. As Kerr has noted, “A number of lodging house keepers could swell their coffers by providing a multitude of services in addition to those of food, drink, accommodation, laundering and probably prostitution, whether overtly or disguised. These additional services included being nurse or ‘doctress’.”136 It is significant that Hakewill not only represented several soldiers on Harbour Street, but that he specifically mentioned the presence of the tavern since these establishments were a mainstay of soldiers’ lives. Tellingly, taverns are listed as one of the facets of the imperial infrastructure of la flota that Benítez-Rojo describes.137 Given that barracks life, for soldiers stationed in Britain or abroad, was the exception and not the rule, soldiers were often allowed to build their own huts or cabins, or were billeted in private homes or taverns.138 Furthermore, as Buckley conveys regarding Jamaican military installations like Up Park Camp, the living conditions of soldiers in the Jamaican barracks were dismal, not only inadequate in term of hygiene and comfort, but perfect conditions for the proliferation of

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disease. Of the soldier’s lot in Up Park Camp Barracks, an Inspection Report from 1806 deduced, His situation here is peculiarly distressing, far different from any thing he experiences in other Countries; The Soldier is here debar’d of the common indulgence met with in other Barracks; he is left exposed to the necessity of sleeping on damp fixed platforms, or more generally damp floors, which must almost constantly be the case in the rainy season (when fevers are most prevalent) without a bed to lie upon, consequently must have encreased that dreadful mortality so lately experienced in this island . . . [sic].139 Thus, as Kerr contends, due in part to the atrocious conditions detailed in this report, besides the other people who frequented lodging houses and taverns, “There must have been also hundreds (possibly thousands) of sailors, military and naval officers who stopped for lodgings, food and drink and even medical care, and ‘who left little evidence of their presence in the records [sic].’”140 Soldiers and sailors made a ready market for the white slave owners who prostituted enslaved and poor black women through businesses like taverns and lodging houses. Beckles has noted a British naval officer, who in 1806 Barbados reported a “respectable Creole white lady” who rented her female slaves for sexual services under the guise of washerwoman, expecting them to return pregnant, therefore allowing her to reap the added financial benefit of new slaves.141 In a different case in 1808, John Waller reported of another “respectable” white lady in Barbados who had rented out a young female slave to an officer in the garrison for the cost of 12 dollars per month. Waller was disturbed that the female owner, who lamented to the assembled company that the slave’s imminent return would lose her the rental fee, deemed such information suitable “polite” dinner conversation.142 Womanizing and heavy drinking were staples of military life and, as discussed in detail in the Montreal context above (Chapter 2), specialized markets and services rose up to meet the needs of these transient, mainly lower-class white men. Although making his claim with regard to the eighteenth century, what Kopperman noted for that period also surely applied to Jamaica in the nineteenth century: “Drunkenness was epidemic in the British Army . . . Alcohol abuse was regularly blamed for poor performance by the soldiery, for undermining morals and discipline, and for shortening lives”.143 While ale and beer were popularly sold at taverns, rum was also widely available and, as Kopperman has noted, notoriously cheap on the island riddled with sugar estates.144 Indeed, the popularity of rum and its ubiquity in the British Empire is evident in the fact that rum was regularly provisioned to British soldiers in America by the summer of 1776, at the amount of about a gill per day or one gallon per month.145 According to Kopperman, “It may indeed be that in the West Indies and in Canada the troops received more rum from the army, whether in standard rations or in special allowances, for it was widely believed that liquor protected the body against heat and cold alike.”146 The British navy’s rations were less, averaging at a pint of wine or a half pint of brandy or rum that was served as grog, per day.147 Furthermore, the tight quarters of the ship made it easier for officers to observe and regulate the

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drinking habits of their crews. However, sailors were not always on ships and, as Kerr has noted, “Most of the lodging houses in major seaport towns like Falmouth, Montego Bay and especially Kingston, were frequented by numerous sailors in transit”.148 In contrast to the absentee sailors, once ashore for months, even years at a time, and often stationed near towns, soldiers quickly gained local knowledge about the types and costs of alcoholic drink, and the establishments that served them. The surgeon William Dent stationed in St Vincent commented in 1819 that “Rum is as cheap as Ale in England and the Soldiers consequently always drunk, which is the cause of all the Sickness in the West Indies.”149 Soldiers were apparently so keen to drink that they often bartered their provisions or other accoutrements for alcohol. In the West Indies where the rations were old rum (considered mellower and less harmful), the soldiers were known to exchange it with local shopkeepers for a larger quantity of new rum.150 From most accounts, a soldier’s life was full of monotonous routine and many unfilled hours, the perfect situation to encourage unhealthy diversions like excessive alcohol consumption and extraordinary promiscuity. According to Bell, “Occasionally mounting guard, attending parade morning and evening, with the injurious and often unnecessary fatigue of a field-day, constitute the whole duty of a soldier in a West Indian island, even in time of war.”151 Besides being blamed for illness in the ranks of the army and the navy, cases of sexual assault and rape obviously grew in proportion to the drunkenness of the male population (whether solider or civilian), resulting in what was commonly called debauchery.152 Thomas Thistlewood, the overseer at Egypt Estate, documented on 12 March 1755 that he had witnessed the gang-rape of a house slave named Eve, after his employer John Cope had spent a night in intense drinking with six male guests.153 Officers, then, had to strike a balance between providing the sanctioned liquor rations and preventing excessive drinking, which was blamed for immorality, illness, and a general lack of discipline. But deterring soldiers’ drinking, either through punishments like floggings or by watering down their rum, was difficult to maintain, due to what Kopperman calls the “alcoholic culture” of the British Army.154 Within this context, Hakewill’s visual depiction and textual mention of the tavern along with his representation of what would appear to be six soldiers on the same street (three in the foreground and three in the background) was not innocuous. While the positioning of the approaching black woman who walks up Harbour Street blocks our view of a forward-facing soldier left of centre, his comrade to her right can be seen squarely from behind. Meanwhile, the third soldier in the foreground can be seen at right facing a man, most likely white, dressed with a top hat and blue suit jacket who is seated in a horse-drawn carriage. Their proximity connotes a verbal exchange. But while the face of the white male in the carriage is not visible, this soldier, although more distant from the picture plane, faces the viewer, his uniform clearly visible. These men are identifiable as British soldiers through their uniforms, which echo the visual representation of the black soldier in Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith’s aquatint Private, 5th West India Regiment (1814),155 particularly the bright red of their jackets decorated with epaulettes fringed in white, the thick white bands that bisect their chests on a diagonal, and their tall, cylindrical, short-brimmed black hats.156 They are members of the West

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Indian Regiment, the first two battalions of which were raised in 1795.157 R. Money Barnes has explained further that The plain lapels, without buttons or lace, were a regimental peculiarity (British other ranks wore no lapels after 1796), but the cotton trousers, of rather Jodhpurish style, were worn by British regiments serving in tropical stations. The slippers, of course, were a privilege of the West Indians, who had never been used to boots, and probably could not have marched in them.158 For at least a portion of Hakewill’s intended audience, middle- and upper-class British men and women, the presence of the soldiers was most likely taken as a comforting sign of the proper defence of their prized colony from the outward threat of other European empires. Writing in Antigua in the late 1700s Janet Schaw recorded her encounter with both a fort and a large barracks capable of housing 1,000 men. However, rather than being terrified by the implications of being one of the very few white women in a colony within which the presence of an installation capable of holding a barracks of such magnitude was deemed necessary, the Scottish gentlewoman used the appearance of the soldiers as an aesthetic tool to harmonize a landscape and culture with which she was unfamiliar. She wrote, “We saw a number of the officers walking among the Orange-trees and myrtles, and . . . I thought the prospect was mended by their appearance.”159 But to an alternative viewer, like a coloured clerk working on an estate, an enslaved black woman working in a plantation Great House or one of the higglers/hucksters depicted in the image, the sight of the uniformed soldiers in the image Harbour Street, Kingston (as in their daily lives) may have been a disturbing reminder of the official British sanctioning of internal racial violence against rebellious slave populations and free blacks alike.160 Significantly, based upon their own experiences, for a black female viewer the proximity of the white soldiers to the four surrounding black female subjects in Harbour Street, Kingston may have seemed outright threatening. Arguably, even the local white Creole elite, far too knowledgeable of the drunken misdeeds of the British military, would have responded to this particular plate differently than foreign whites. According to Kopperman, “That alcohol abuse was rampant in eighteenthcentury England is generally accepted. Indeed, the evidence appears to be overwhelming.”161 As such, the soldiers stationed in Jamaica, like those in the rest of the empire, were recruited from an already alcoholic society and inserted into the even more heightened alcoholic culture of the military. It is no coincidence then that many soldiers were recruited in taverns.162 Therefore, as Kopperman contends, “Thus, alcohol abuse was the rule, sobriety the exception, and generally non-drinkers were looked on with puzzlement, even contempt.”163 And this was true for both the officers and the troops. To withhold alcohol from military men was acknowledged as a danger that could result in mutiny or desertion.164 Given these histories, the massive ensign (flying almost the width of the entire street), which Hakewill mentioned and represented only as a marker for a local tavern, is far more potent than he conveyed. Indeed, during his two-year stay on the island and especially

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within the confines of the urban setting of Kingston, Hakewill was likely himself an overnight guest at just such an establishment. The blue British military ensign likely indicated that it catered to servicemen or that it had been established or vetted by the British military. As discussed above in reference to Montreal landscapes, the Royal Navy often flew ensigns from ships or over land to announce their presence and to designate the rank of the commanding officials. The Union Jack in a field of blue comprised the flag known as a blue ensign. As mentioned above, according to British maritime law and custom, an ensign is a flag generally used to designate a warship, a government vessel or a civilian one.165 A part of the Royal Navy’s squadronal system implemented in 1627, the three colours (red, blue and white) existed within a strict organizational hierarchy allowing the differentiation of British vessels. While the original configuration had been from red (as the most senior) to white (the most junior),166 given the change between 1653 and 1864, by the time of Hakewill’s print, the order had changed to red, white and then blue, the colour visible in the ensign on Harbour Street. While the Union Jack would be placed within a field of one of these three colours, the choice of red, white or blue represented the rank of the admiral in command.167 As Michael Pawson and David Buisseret contend, some kind of naval force had been based at Port Royal, Jamaica from 1668 onward, which was, between 1692 and 1815, the most important British naval base in the Caribbean.168 Besides being tasked with keeping the peace internally within the colony, the sailors were expected to police pirates and to keep the militaries of the French and other empires at bay. But Britain’s hold on the island was also guaranteed through the presence of troops on the ground. As Bohls has argued of the British West Indies, By the 1780s their total population, including Jamaica and Barbados as well as several smaller islands, was estimated at about 520,000, including 65,300 whites, 20,000 of mixed race, and 455,000 blacks. Thus overwhelmingly outnumbered, faced with the ever-present danger of slave revolt, the colonial society was necessarily militarized.169 Between 1801 and 1806 when Nugent served as Commander-in-Chief and Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, the island militia, comprised of whites and free men of colour, totalled over 10,000.170 Nugent had to work with the Jamaican Assembly to determine a budget for the military. However, Cundall has argued that It constantly protested, as it had done in Balcarres’s time, against the cost of the subsistence of the white troops, but it objected especially to the presence of the 2nd West India Regiment of negro troops, raised in 1797, whom it considered “incompatible with our safety and pregnant with the most fatal calamities”.171 The military forces were comprised of detachments of the Royal Artillery, the Royal Dutch Artillery, the 20th (or Jamaican) Light Dragoons, the 1st, 4th, and 6th battalions of

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the 60th Foot, the 69th Foot, the 83rd Foot, and the 2nd West India Regiment, in addition to the island militia and artillery.172 The stark racial hierarchy exercised on Jamaica plantations was also evident in the racially segregated military, which included amongst its ranks not just men of African ancestry but slaves.173 According to Cundall, “The Kingston regiment of foot militia had two battalions of artillery and grenadiers, besides six companies to each battalion of light infantry – the 2nd company was composed of Jews, the 3rd of mulattoes, the 4th of quadroons, and the 5th and 6th of blacks – all officered by white men.”174 Thus while the extensive militarization of Jamaica as the most important holding in the British West Indies was meant to secure its place within the empire and to ensure its continuing success as a sugar colony, the very culture of the military tasked with keeping the peace and enforcing British rule threatened to derail the “progress” and proper management of the colony. But alcoholism was not the only threat to military stability. Early modern ideas of climate theory, connecting climate to human development and culture, were deeply racist, conceiving of tropical islands like Jamaica as sites of certain death (by tropical disease) for whites. Abraham James’ The Torrid Zone or, Blessings of Jamaica (1800–03) made precisely this point.175 The amateur artist’s exposure to the lifestyle and customs of the Jamaican plantocracy came through his service in the 67th Regiment of Foot. James represented six white figures, two women and four men, against a light-coloured curved band that swept from one side of the page to the other. Although the dress of the figures connotes a mainly upper-class status, it is their poses and their lack of decorum that betray their distance from a European standard of culture and etiquette.176 For instance, one woman lounges on a striped settee with her hose-enveloped legs splayed open and her dress drawn up to expose her legs to the knees. The other white woman is paired with a white male. Both in profile and seated on chairs facing each other they prop their feet up in the air parallel to the floor, bringing the soles of the feet together, causing the white man’s chair to teeter backwards.This motion similarly exposes the white woman’s legs (also encased in hosiery) to the knees and by implication exposes much more to the white man who is seated in front of her, unlike the viewer who sees her from the side. While the seated man opposite her (perhaps her husband) is smoking, other signs of leisure are apparent amongst the figures. At the far right side, a seated white male with a broad-brimmed hat and blue jacket cocks one leg over a chair rail as he reads a newspaper. The smoking, reading, and the parasol carried by another excessively overweight male subject whose stomach protrudes over his pants all position this group as the upper classes of white Jamaican society. Their undignified enjoyment of life’s pleasures is sharply contrasted with their precarious position, literally on the edge of a scythe, held by a monstrous, black, skeletal, fire-breathing allegory of yellow fever that has the words stamped on its stomach; they are quite literally living on the edge. Unsurprisingly, the figure of yellow fever dwells below the earthly realm of the six white people in a darkened space inhabited by scorpion-like creatures, snakes, corpses, and a head that looks suspiciously like an African mask.177 What Kriz calls a “hellscape” is counterbalanced by the upper third of the image, which through the blue sky, bright sunshine, and winged angel, represented heaven.178 But James’ heaven seems almost as undesirable

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a destination as his hell since, with mouth gaping open and eyes tightly shut, the topless white male angel brandishes opium as he thrusts one naked and dirty foot over the dividing wall between heaven and earth, seemingly about to descend into the space of the oblivious white couple. But the sun seems to burn too hot and, as Kriz has noted, James’ inclusion of a crab on one side of it and a lion on the other symbolized the two hottest months of the year (July and August) but also disease (Cancer) and the British Empire (Leo).179 The susceptibility of whites to yellow fever not only impacted the general population but, of course, also the military ranks. During a voyage from Cork Harbour to the West Indies, which began in March 1814, Captain Lord William Stuart succumbed to the disease on 28 July 1814.180 Upon his second voyage to Jamaica, in 1818, the planter Matthew Lewis noted that yellow fever was “committing terrible ravages, particularly among the wives of the soldiers” at the barracks near his estate, Cornwall in Westmoreland.181 As Kriz has noted, Accounts of the devastation wrought by yellow fever on whites in the West Indies increased significantly in the 1790s, when the disease struck down thousands of British troops sent to the Caribbean in the wake of the revolutions in France and SaintDomingue. The statistics from this period tell a grim tale: the mortality rate for soldiers stationed in Jamaica was eight times higher than that for Britain or the northern United States.182 Within the context of the pervasive alcoholism of the military, the red-coated soldiers on Harbour Street no longer simply signify the order and regulation of Jamaica’s most important urban setting, but the ever-present threat of disorder and chaos spurred on by neglected duties, disease, desertion, mutiny, and debauchery all triggered by the institutionalized rationing of Jamaican rum and the too-easy access to alcohol in local taverns like the one Hakewill depicted. White anxiety: Cross-racial mixing and coloured populations The extraordinary segregation of the Jamaican troops, a practice which in terms of the African-descended men would have been performed largely on the basis of visual cues and presumably with a local knowledge of family lineage, brings me back to the multifaceted issue of complexion as a marker of racial identity in Jamaica and its representation (or lack thereof) in Hakewill’s art. While it is arguably not surprising that Hakewill’s white subjects seems to have fairly undifferentiated complexions (in part because the idea of whiteness was fundamentally falsified through an exclusion of the reality of racial mixing), in an island where a detailed nomenclature of degrees of blackness existed, where “miscegenating” sex was both rampant and frowned upon, and where distinct racialized populations like the coloured female lodging house keepers (whom he would most likely have encountered during his stays in Kingston and Montego Bay) held peculiar social ranks, it is quite markedly surprising, if not outright suspicious, that Hakewill’s

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“black” subjects are completely uniform in complexion. Furthermore, by the mid-1820s, the coloured population outnumbered the whites two to one.183 The contemporaneous observations of other foreign travellers confirm the ubiquity of mixed-race populations as worthy of notice and documentation. For instance, on 26 November 1831 Peter Simmonds on board HM Packet Mutine wrote of seeing “Plenty of Brum boats along side to day with ladies of colour” during the departure from Barbados for St Vincent (sic).184 Similarly, on 5 January 1816, a mere four days after his ship had docked at Black River, a first-time visitor to Jamaica – the planter Matthew Lewis – observed with great concentration and detail the specific nature of the complexion of his slave Mary Wiggins with whom he was newly acquainted. Encountering her while returning to his plantation Cornwall in Westmoreland after a journey to Montego Bay, he wrote, I really think that her form and features were the most statue-like that I ever met with: her complexion had no yellow in it, and yet was not brown enough to be dark – it was more of an ash-dove colour than any thing else; her teeth were admirable, both of colour and shape; her eyes equally mild and bright; and her face merely broad enough to give it all possible softness and grandness of contour: her hair and countenance would have suited Yarico [sic].185 In fact, Lewis did not only study Wiggins’ complexion down to its undertone (noted as ash-dove as opposed to yellow), but every detail of her face and head (eyes, teeth, hair), her facial and bodily structure, her countenance and expressiveness.186 Although not yet within Lewis’ grasp,187 an intricate racial taxonomy of what the planter Mathison referred to as the “black, brown and yellow” people of the island was deeply entrenched and widely known in Jamaica by the time that Hakewill visited.188 Indeed, of an even earlier period in the eighteenth century, Quilley and Kriz have argued that “hysterically – complex codifications and categorizations of skin colour were being articulated for the benefit of the economy of the slave trade”, ironically at the same time that Atlantic cultural difference was increasingly polarized in racial terms as either “black” or “white”.189 The white absentee planter Mathison not only picked upon on distinctions in complexion, but on ones of class and labour within blackness. Observing a Sunday market scene he commented: Great bustle and activity prevail in this market. The groups are full of spirit, but by no means pleasing. Loud laughter and noisy bargains assail the ears at every corner of the market. Quarrels, productive of violent gestures and great apparent agitation of mind, but rarely leading to bloodshed, give an alarming and false appearance of the prevalence of the most angry passions in the Negro character. In the midst of this busy and tumultuous concourse of people, are seen well-dressed beaux and belles, black, brown, and yellow, walking about with the greatest possible indifference and composure, having apparently no object but to display their persons and their tawdry dresses, and feeling no apprehension whatever of surrounding mischief.190

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This quote is enlightening in several ways. It reveals that Mathison was able to read racial and complexion difference amongst blacks since he named the degrees of blackness (and therefore the generations of miscegenation) visible in the bodies of people of African descent (that is, black, brown and yellow). It also tells us that visible or legible distinctions also existed between enslaved or lower-class labouring blacks and more middle-class and perhaps free blacks; in part the latter are distinguishable by their lack of labour in the midst of labour, their indifference within the context of the market, signalling their lack of need to accrue wealth or subsistence through the process of higgling/huckstering as the enslaved blacks were actively doing. It is fascinating, then, that the “well-dressed beaux and belles” chose to make this provocatively conspicuous display in the midst of this explicitly economic arena where they must have known that their bodies would be juxtaposed with and differentiated from the enslaved.191 Such performances can be read as a process and practice of “passing”, both out of slavery and arguably out of blackness and into citizenship, a process, then, of both racial and class passing. But we must note also that the “well-dressed beaux and belles” were seen by whites, according to Mathison, to have failed in their attempts to pass into the highest echelons of Jamaican white society, since their dress – however great compared to slaves – was still to his eyes “tawdry”. If Mathison could discern such distinctions amongst black subjects after being absent from the island for 13 years, such insights were certainly also available to Hakewill who sojourned on the island for two years. Blaming the abundant diversity within the black population on the lack of marriage (and procreation) between whites, Thomas Cooper described this mixed-race group, the “people of colour”, as follows: The nearest to a Negro is a Sambo, the next a Mulatto, next a Quadroon, next a Mustee, and next a Mustiphino; after which the shade is lost, for the children of a Mustiphino, by a white man, are accounted white by law, and have higher privileges than the others.192 As Colin Grant has explained, “Jamaica, and the British West Indies at large, had evolved a system of ascending miscegenation, that is, blacks rose through ‘genetic association’ with whites.”193 Interestingly, more so even than his white women, Hakewill seemed to completely avoid representing Jamaica’s coloured population, at least in his published prints.194 But of course, many if not most of Hakewill’s “black” subjects were not entirely so and were not fully African. The institutionalization of rape and sexual coercion within slavery (discussed in great detail above in Chapter 6) meant that the offspring of Africans in the diaspora became progressively whiter as their biological lineage became more and more mixed with Europeans and white Creoles. Known widely as “coloured”, it certainly would not have taken long for Hakewill to ascertain the reality of this marginalized group. Indeed, residing with the plantation owners in their estate homes for two years, Hakewill would have been daily confronted by the presence of mixed-race or “miscegenated” house slaves and “housekeepers” who would have served him and the white families and who were, in many cases, directly

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related to or intimately involved with their owners. Furthermore, time spent by Hakewill in urban centres like Montego Bay, Spanish Town, and Kingston, would most likely have brought him into direct contact with several coloured women like the Montego-Bay-based lodging house keeper Judy James mentioned by the English planter Matthew Lewis. Indeed, within mere days – two to be exact – of arriving in Jamaica in 1816, the planter Matthew Lewis came face to face (on one of his own plantations, Cornwall) with the normal outcomes of “miscegenating” sex in Jamaica, mixed-race slaves. After meeting a “remarkably handsome” Creole slave named Psyche, Lewis noted the next day that a “little brown girl” who “proved to be an emanation of the aforesaid Psyche”, attended him at breakfast.195 Deliberately or unintentionally mis-reading the ubiquity of sexual exploitation, Lewis wrote coyly and romantically that Psyche had already “visited the palace of Cupid”.196 Besides insinuating that Psyche’s motherhood indicated her sexual initiation, Lewis’ comment about the brownness of the daughter also signalled his knowledge of cross-racial sex.197 On another occasion, Lewis quickly ascertained the racial politics of black intra-group segregation. As he recorded on 6 January 1816, just five days after his arrival, when he asked his page Cubino why he had not married a specific slave woman named Mary Wiggins, Cubino had responded with surprise, “Oh, massa, me black, Mary Wiggins sambo; that not allowed [sic]”.198 Also at the same moment as Hakewill, Cynric R. Williams’ illustrated book, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the year 1823 (1826), documented his observations of the commonality of cross-racial sexual contact between white Jamaican men and enslaved black females which resulted in a variety of complexions amongst the enslaved population.199 Another pro-slavery sympathizer,200 Williams’ third plate, Diana (1826), represented a young woman whom the author described as a “pretty brown maid” of quadroon complexion, slightly darker than Europeans.201 His attraction to the young woman was evidenced in his text, which struggled to disengage her from her blackness and assumed aesthetic inferiority. Describing the “contour” of her hair, Williams took pains to let his readers know that although it reminded him of her African origins, that it was not “woolly”.202 Recalling his meeting with Diana as when Cesar first met Cleopatra,203 his blatant sexual desire was further betrayed in a passage in which he discussed the woman’s “charming symmetry”, revealed to him by the blowing of her garments against her body. He recounted that as he watched, he found it impossible to withdraw “my eyes” from her “elegant person”.204 As was the norm in the Caribbean, Diana’s European ancestry had come from a white father – a wealthy planter – and her African ancestry from an enslaved mother. Williams made excuses for the all-toocommon cross-racial sex, positioning the endemic exploitation of black women as a custom and explaining the conditions under which the “gentleman” in question became Diana’s father: Diana is the daughter of a wealthy planter, who resides now near Port Antonio, in this island, to which place he emigrated from the more civilized plains of Westmoreland, at the invitation of Fortune, who was obliging enough to offer him a wife with an estate

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at her back. This gentleman, not deviating from the practice of his ancestry, became the father of Diana when he was a poor bachelor at – . Her mother was a slave, and the child of course the property of that slave’s master . . . [italics mine].205 The normalcy of mixed-race slaves and free coloureds, despite the taboo of miscegenation, became a preoccupation of Agostino Brunias’ images of the Ceded Islands. Genre paintings like Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (1780) (Figure 8.3) revealed the results of the institutionalized sexual exploitation of African women in the attention to variations of complexion in the adult and child subjects. The image centred, literally, around the display of elaborately dressed mulatta beauties of various shades. A standing central figure with a low-cut dress and elaborate headwrap inclines her head coquettishly towards a well-dressed light-skinned male (likely mulatto) figure whose inappropriately close position behind her is facilitated by the expectation of her compromised “black” sexuality. But just as significant, two children can be seen at the far left, the seated boy with a lighter complexion and the standing girl with a medium brown skin tone. Like Brunias, Clark’s prints in Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823) also convey the distinctive complexions of various black Antiguan subjects. Specifically, the labouring

Figure 8.3 Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (1780), oil on canvas, 35.6 × 46.4 cm, B1981.25.77, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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black male and female slaves in plate 6, The Boiling-House (Figure 8.4), have different complexions. Clark’s composition conveys the vastness of the building where hundreds of gallons of cane juice were processed into rum, sugar, and molasses in a complicated and time-consuming process that involved boiling the cane juice, removing impurities through a process of its transfer between the coppers, clarifier, and several taches.206 The danger of the environment is also made abundantly clear, especially due to the extreme heat evoked by the tall plumes of steam, which escape through the open slats of the roof. But the male slave standing at the rim of an open copper stirring the steaming liquid is in a particularly precarious position. As the Jamaican planter Lewis documented in 11 January 1816, a coachman named Charles had been hospitalized the previous night, “having missed a step in the boiling-house, and plunged his foot into the siphon”.207 This task was extraordinarily perilous. As Terry has described, “Boiling the juice sometimes entailed a heat so extreme that water had to be sprayed on the roof of the boiling house to prevent the shingles catching fire; the repetitiveness of some jobs over many hours entailed considerable risk.”208 Along the length of the left side a bricked trough filled with the transforming cane juice is visible. In front of it a line of male slaves tend to the liquid with long ladles with handles almost as long as their bodies are tall. While a woman who walks up a central

Figure 8.4 William Clark, The Boiling-House, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . .(1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0029, Paul Mellon Collection,Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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tiled aisle holding a tray on her hip has a dark complexion like that of the black man to her right, the forward-facing man wearing an apron with a cream-coloured hat is a decidedly lighter shade. But it is Clark’s first plate, The Court-House, which engages most fully with the complex race, complexion, and class hierarchies of Antigua, which Hakewill largely reduces to the stark polarities of blackness and whiteness in the Jamaican context. Arguably, one of the themes of this print is the ways that this imposed stratification played out in and on the bodies (the corporeality and dress) of the island’s inhabitants as well as how identity demarcated the limits of social action and interaction. While Hakewill and Clark both represent white men frequently, and black men and black women in abundance, it is Clark’s representation of mulatto women and the distinctiveness of their dress, habits, and complexions that sets him apart from Hakewill, demonstrating at once the complex possibilities of “blackness” and the nuanced potential of colour in early nineteenth-century print technology, which Hakewill’s images avoided. Although the street scene is lively with 20 human subjects, the actions, dress, and complexions of the mulattas serve to segregate them, clearly distinguishing the free from the enslaved. In all but one case, these people are only engaged in conversation or interaction with people, not only of the same race, but also complexion and social status, and they are only seen doing activities supposedly befitting their rightful social stations. For instance, the supreme social status of Clark’s eight upper-class white men is demonstrated by their positions in the image and by their dress and possessions. In most cases, Clark positioned the white male subjects (sideways or with their backs to the viewer) to make it clear that they are dressed in jackets with tails and fashionable brimmed hats. While five of them stand in the doorway or walkway of the courthouse – a sign of their judicial access – the other three are seen riding or commanding horses; two at the left on their mounts are seen in conversation, and one at the right in his cabriolet is in the act of whipping the brown blinkered horse that pulls his green and black carriage as it is harassed by a yapping white dog who runs alongside the horse’s hind legs.209 As already discussed above (Chapter 7), the device of the annoying dog is one employed by Joseph Kidd, though with different effect, in his later lithograph Scene at Up Park Camp (1838–40). The next most plentiful racial group is black males.There are six and they are almost certainly slaves as their bare feet attest. While three of these men push and haul a cask of rum on a truck at the left side of the image, two others are seen jostling with each other from their position on the sidewalk on the right side of the image. Their lower status is not only reflected in their bare feet, but also in their more ragged-looking clothing. But it is also registered in their position outside of the brick and metal fencing of the courthouse, a location emphasizing their symbolic exclusion from the European world of the law, which the white men readily access. Ironically then, although the labour of the black male slaves facilitated the production and transportation of a cask of rum that served as payment in the various legal cases argued within the walls of the courthouse, they were themselves summarily excluded from the Eurocentric realm of law symbolized by the building. In the immediate right foreground, the only black female is pictured in conversation with a black male. Again their shoelessness marks them as slaves, but their loads also

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potentially position them as higglers/hucksters. While the woman balances a basket of produce on her head with her left hand, and her right holds a pink bundle, the black male holds several dead fowl in his left hand. The entrepreneurship of these industrious people is clearly on display since, as Clark noted, Negroes stocked the nearby market. Mary Prince ingeniously highlighted the entrepreneurship of the slave population in Antigua while simultaneously condemning whites for their utter control of the slaves’ time, which limited market activities to Sundays. Prince explained, those that have yams or potatoes, or fire-wood to sell, hasten to market to buy a dog’s worth of salt fish, or pork, which is a great treat for them. Some of them buy a little pickle out of the shad barrels, which they call sauce, to season their yams and Indian corn. It is very wrong, I know, to work on Sunday or go to market; but will not God call the Buckra men to answer for this on the great day of judgment – since they will give the slaves no other day?210 Similarly, after residing nearly five years in Jamaica, the Reverend Bickell lamented preaching two or three sermons every Sunday “but to very little purpose” since Sunday markets were the “bait of Satan, to draw away the ignorant Negro”.211 Although subtle, after examining the entire book and its many plantation labour plates, a careful reader of Clark’s work may have realized the weighty significance of the black higglers/hucksters in this, the first plate. The labour that allowed them to stock the market, vary their diets, become economic consumers, and accrue some sense of autonomy, was on top of the enormous labours they already did for their white owners. The final two groups of subjects, which Clark represented in The Court-House were mulattas and lower-class white men. Three mulatta women are represented in the scene, two walk together at the left side in front of the court house fence and ahead of a lone black male with a bundle whose lower body and likely shoeless feet are hidden by the passing cask of rum. The third and final mulatta stands in the street, right of centre, in conversation with a white male soldier, just beyond and to the left of the upper-class white male and his horse-drawn carriage. My deduction of these women’s status as mulattas or mixed-race women is based upon their complexions, which are darker than those of Clark’s pinkcheeked white men but lighter than those of the barefooted slaves. As such, the eighteenthcentury British cult of sensibility for white females needs to be extended to white men. As Rosenthal has explained, This came to be represented in aesthetic discourses by means of an emphasis on the transparency and paleness of female skin, a skin that had – so to speak – split off its darker, uncivil, erotic drive. No longer was white femininity construed, dialectically, through juxtaposition to an Other – the page or the shadow; rather feminine virtue was directly registered, and understood to be registered, in the skin itself.212 The blush of Clark’s white male subjects then acted to highlight the transparency of the “fair”-skinned men and staged what Rosenthal has called a “dialogue” between the skin’s

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surface and the fleshy, blood-infused “underneath” which calls attention to its transparency.213 This transparency was seen as a vehicle, which allowed one’s emotions to be telegraphed in the shifting colouration of the cheeks, therefore acting as “the precondition of emotional legibility”, and a means of seeing into the soul.214 Subjects with darker complexions were, in comparison, seen not only as aesthetically inferior but deceptive, dishonest, and comparatively emotionally illegible. Rosenthal has noted that the heightened theorization of racial difference through skin colour and its properties coincided with the growth of abolitionism and the destabilization of the “primacy of self-sufficient white subject”.215 The dramatically blushed cheeks of Clark’s white men thus act as a means of racial distinctiveness from the gathered blacks and mixed-race women. But they also act as a means of class distinction since the cheeks of the lower-class white male soldier are by comparison less blushed. But while Rosenthal argues that “the blush as the visual sign of whiteness emerges as a response to the probing ‘colonizing’ gaze of the white heterosexual man”, Clark’s blushing white men do not produce this visible physiological shift within the context of intra-racial dynamics.216 According to nineteenth-century scientific treatises, the supposed inability of black people to blush (or to register colour difference on the skin) was deemed to be a sign of an inferior spiritual and moral state.217 While Rosenthal argues “that the blush as the sign of whiteness is being ‘looked at’ women”, in the absence of white women but surrounded by Negroes and mulattas, the blush in Clark’s The Court-House which distinguishes the upper-class white male bodies from their supposed colonial inferiors is a “response” deployed for the external gaze of the assumed white viewer and not the product of “heterosexual intersubectivity” within the print.218 But the strolling women are also read as mulattas because of the fact that none of them is chaperoned by a white man, as would have been the case for “proper” white ladies, like those in Hakewill’s Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (1825) (Figure 7.5), and Rose Hall, St. James’ (1825) (Figure 7.6), and Kidd’s Scene at Up Park Camp (1838–40). Although in conversation with the white soldier, the mulatta at right does not appear to be with him, but instead to have encountered him in the street. They are facing each other but appear to be headed in opposite directions. The mulattas are also distinguished by their clothing. All three of them wear hats or headwraps and fashionable long dresses and, while it is implied that they all three wear shoes, the one at right (closest to the picture plane) is clearly wearing both stockings and yellow shoes as well as elbow-length yellow gloves. To top it off, their preoccupation with preserving their light-skinned complexions is indicated by their use of parasols. While the two at left share a light-coloured parasol, which seems to match with one of their dresses, the mulatta at right also shades her body with the “essential” fashion item. Interestingly, Clark installs two sets of witnesses in the image who are similarly positioned outside of the courthouse fence, the two mulattas and the jostling black men. While both mulattas turn to look at the street scene, the one closest to the fence even leaning to her left to peer around the body of her companion for a better view, it is unclear if they look at the black slave men hauling the cask or if their eyes are drawn to the elegant white men on horseback who converse in the street. Due to their more

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privileged birth generally derived from white paternity, mixed-race or coloured people were better dressed, better educated, better fed, less likely to be enslaved and thus also less likely to undertake hard labour than their so-called Negro counterparts. As such, mulattas were also less likely than their so-called Negro female counterparts to choose black males of darker complexions, even if said males were free, for sexual or romantic partners. In a world in which social status and mobility were intimately wedded to complexion, ideologies of white superiority, although not always successfully, socialized mixed-race women to aspire to similar or lighter-skinned romantic matches in order to lighten or whiten their offspring. Indeed, as discussed at length throughout this book, mixed-race women became the sexual “favourites” of upper- and middleclass white males, even at times replacing white women in the Caribbean domestic realm. As such, the gaze of these mulattas is complex in its ambivalence. If towards the Negro males, it may have been a reflection of disdain or dismissal, and possibly (though less likely) of affiliation. But if toward the white men, their gaze could have been in recognition of familial ties, as much as the glance of sexual victim towards a known aggressor. The second set of witnesses is the black male duo that looks towards the picture plane. The man on the right in the burgundy jacket seems to grip and yank on the left arm of his associate as the two stare into the street. As with the mulatta women, Clark renders the target of their gaze ambiguous. Is it the mulatta woman with the white soldier or the horsedrawn carriage guided by the white man? The latter scene was made compelling by the inclusion of the pesky dog, which seems to bark at the brown horse that the white man seeks to control with his outstretched whip. But the dog is on the far side of the duo and from their vantage point the comedy of the scene was most likely lost. It is therefore more likely that the black men stare at the mulatta woman and the white soldier. Given the debauchery and sexual licentiousness for which British soldiers in various colonies became notorious – largely due to the institutionalization of alcoholism through the rationing of Caribbean rum discussed above – the soldier in this scene, as the ones in Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston, does not necessarily connote discipline, order and justice, but chaos, misconduct, abuse of power, and promiscuity. Hakewill’s choice of dark brown to represent all people of African descent produced a flat field, which swallowed any physiognomical details and obscured corporeal specificity and individuality. Quite literally, Hakewill’s black subjects do not possess eyes or, commonly, any facial features. This is abundantly clear in Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at Agualta Vale, St. Mary’s (Figure 8.1) and St. Thomas in the Vale from Mount Diablo. In both prints, black subjects are positioned close to the picture plane, their bodies and faces clearly visible. Regarding the rise of the picturesque and its impact on human subjects, Bohls has argued: “This way of looking at land, as it puts into practice the separation of aesthetic from practical, obscures the links between the topography of a place and the material needs of those who live there. When we see people in a picturesque scene, they are faceless, merely ornamental.”219 However, the disjuncture between Hakewill’s representations of black and white subjects, most evident in

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Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. at Agualta Vale, St. Mary’s, allows me to go further than Bohls and question, if for Hakewill, this facelessness is only a facet of blackness. In the image, Hakewill positioned a well-dressed white male in close proximity to a barefoot plainly dressed male slave. As in Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Figure 7.5), the extended arm of the white male subject imbues him with intellect and narrative authority as he is seen in the midst of explaining the significance of the monument to the slave who looks on as he tends the white man’s horse. Strikingly, the white man’s face, framed by the black top hat and the collar of the blue jacket, clearly indicate his facial features. In comparison, much like the seated black female slave on the left side of the road in Harbour Street, Kingston, the black man’s hair and skin are represented as one mass of dark brown and the texture of his hair can only be detected as a silhouette against the verdant green of the distant hills. His undifferentiated physiognomy mirrors Hakewill’s treatment of the seated black female subject on the left side of the road in Harbour Street, Kingston. The exposed black flesh of the woman’s face and neck create an unbroken mass with her similarly coloured hair and her bare right arm, bent at the elbow, seems to merge with the like blackness of the baby whose body is depicted as two spherical blobs. The monument, which Hakewill represented is also significant. It marked the spot where Thomas Hibbert had been interred on a hill overlooking Anatto Bay.220 Hibbert was one of Jamaica’s wealthiest merchants, politicians, and planters. His family was key to the factoring business in London and his nephew George Hibbert was central in the construction of West India Dock, becoming the company’s first chairman.221 Born into a Manchester cotton family that supplied slave ships, Hibbert arrived in Jamaica in 1734. Accruing immense wealth, he built what was recognized as the “finest house in Kingston” and in 1755 was elected as the Speaker of the House of Assembly, which frequently sat at his own residence instead of Spanish Town.222 As Kirk Savage has noted, public monuments are material structures, which purport to express “the people’s heart”, through an act of commemoration, which is a search for historical closure, a condensation of meanings in sculptural form.223 But clearly within the context of pre-emancipation Jamaica “the people” did not include enslaved Africans. The Hibberts were prolific slavers, owning three properties on Jamaica’s north coast, totalling about 3,000 acres (12 sq. km) and being serviced by some 900 slaves. The irony, then, of the print is that the white male subject, who may well have been a direct descendant of the Hibbert family, is captured explaining the life, legacy, and most assuredly the “greatness” of a white man who was most likely the reason for the pictured black man’s enslavement. The print, then, not only speaks to the sanitization of colonization through its public memorialization (a process through which whites responsible for the economic, social, and psychic exploitation and disenfranchisements of Africans could represent themselves as heroes and heroines) but to the attempts of white slave owners to psychologically indoctrinate Africans into the lowly status of the slave through cultural “education”.224 The print acts as a double commemoration, representing the gravesite as a monument, which acted to celebrate and heroize a man who had made his fortune through the exploitation of hundreds, if not thousands, of Africans.225

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Even with a shortage of upper-class white women in Jamaica, a man of Hibbert’s wealth and status would not have had difficulty in attracting a white wife. However, he, like Simon Taylor (discussed in Chapter 7), remained unmarried, instead choosing to cohabitate with a mulatto woman named Charity Harry.226 Manumitted from slavery in 1775, Harry ran his household and together they had three daughters whom they educated in England.227 Regardless of the fact that mixed-race women had more opportunities than so-called fullblooded Negroes, the fact that Hibbert never legally sanctioned his long-term relationship with Harry speaks to the ongoing displacement of coloured women by white women, who alone were deemed suitable official partners in the proper bourgeois domestic sphere. As Beckles contends, Social custom dictated that prominent white men should neither marry coloured women, nor allow them in any way to transcend white women in social respectability. In this way, coloured women’s social ambitions could be kept in check without alienating their sexual usefulness. In spite of their intimacy and loyalty to eminent white males, coloured women could not be accepted as equal members of official elite society.228 As discussed above, the mulatto woman, however finely dressed, was, due to her African ancestry, perceived by white males (Creoles and Europeans) as always already sexually compromised and thus accessible. Unlike the white man in Brunias’ Linen Market, Dominica (1780) or the mulatto man in his Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (1780), in The Court-House Clark’s white soldier does not inappropriately touch or look at the mixed-race woman’s body. However, their familiarity conveyed by the close proximity of their stances and his very presence with her in the street – an unchaperoned female – speaks to her compromised sexual position. The jostling black male duo, then, may be read as potentially commenting upon the cross-racial couple’s acquaintance, lamenting their own lack of sexual and romantic access to this higher class of black women, or equally disparaging either party for their respective groups’ flawed reputations. Brunias’ ability to convey the specificity of varying African and mixed-race complexions not only in painting, but in prints like A Negro Dance in the Island of Dominica (1779), and Clark’s ability to represent the specificity of the complexion of the white men, mulattas, and black slaves in The Court-House, indicates that the absence of the same level of racial variation in Hakewill’s prints was not a matter of technical impossibility or artistic inability, but of aesthetic choice and ideological disposition.229 Furthermore, in comparison to Hakewill, Kidd likely represented at least two coloured women in his later illustrated book.230 I would like to suggest, then, that James Hakewill’s lack of representation of the coloured classes of Jamaica emerged from an anxiety (no doubt transmitted at least in part from his planter hosts) which resulted in a sublimation of miscegenation and therefore concomitantly the institutionalized sexual exploitation of enslaved black women in Jamaica; a custom in which he may have taken part whether or not his white wife accompanied him to Jamaica. White concern for the outcomes of miscegenation was not limited to the British Caribbean. In Martinique, Schloss has noted that the white Creole elite was threatened by what

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they perceived as the growing demand for rights and recognition from the gens de couleur (free coloured).231 Specifically they feared that any social advances would manifest in their intrusion into the protected white upper class domestic realm, posing a threat to white women. As one white Creole man from Saint-Pierre put it, “They want . . . to marry our daughters without obstacles, to sit at our tables, and to enter our foyers, as if laws or violent conquest could give them these objects of inviolable reserve!”232 Through the metaphor of the cross-racial breeching of the liminal threshold of the home – “entering our foyers” – the anonymous author positioned the white domestic realm as a sanctified, feminine space that needed to be protected from the violent penetration of men of colour. As such, measures were taken to regulate both the gens de couleur and white women, since, to the extent that white women might have a desire for sexual intimacy with enslaved black men or free men of colour, the regulation of white female sexuality was the regulation of black sexuality. This “threat” was real for white men since, as Schloss contends, “scattered references in civil registers throughout the island suggest that white women did have sexual relationships with enslaved and free men of color”.233 Such relations were, for white men, the cause of much apprehension (if not outright panic) since they could result in the birth of free people of colour. Ironically, the supposed sexual threat of the cross-racial rape of white women was fabricated in the midst of the ongoing, systematized, ubiquitous, rape and sexual violation of black women within the institution of slavery. To conclude, Hakewill’s black subjects are overwhelmingly uniform in colour and subsequently in class and represented only as so-called full-blooded Negroes. Furthermore, their dark undifferentiated colouring does not realistically approximate the colour of skin. His visual misrepresentation of Jamaica’s black subjects, a significant population of whom were mixed-race, after two years in Jamaica could not merely have been based upon a lack of observation. Indeed, Hakewill did not keep his distance from the enslaved people of Jamaica, revealing on one occasion that he gathered information about Williamsfield Estate “from the old Negroes”.234 Furthermore, Hakewill’s text indicates his understanding of distinctions of complexion and the practices of racial naming on the island. It is within his discussion of this estate that he uses the term “people of colour” for the first time, stating that 304 of them as well as Negroes were present on the estate. Therefore, as Schloss contends for the contemporaneous case of Martinique, it is likely that Hakewill’s sublimation of mixed-race populations marked an anxiety that stemmed from their social mobility and their engagement with and contestation of the white social order; the very same that had sustained his two-year sojourn. Notes 1 According to Morgan, the horses were most likely from Britain or North America, cattle from Spanish America, and sheep (known for hair rather than wool) from West Africa. Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 71. 2 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 74. The early nineteenth century saw some planters, like Gilbert Mathison, begin to resist the tradition of debasing enslaved Africans as stock.

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5 6 7

8 9

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Referring to the Jamaican planter, Mathison argued, “he can no longer act upon a large unfeeling scheme, regardless of the lives of men as the lives of cattle; he must consider his slaves as a valuable part of his family, and enter into numberless little details and circumstances by which their health and prosperity may be affected; he must encourage them to acquire wealth and property as the most certain means of attaching them to his plantation, as a security for good behaviour, as a resource in time of need, as a motive to a wish to raise a family of children, he must establish a fair, steady, liberal mode of management, confiding in the efficacy of this principle, as a rule of practice, that the prosperity of his Negroes is now identified with the prosperity of himself; he must treat them, as he would his friends, with tenderness and liberality, subduing them by a thousand little kindnesses, which endear a patron to his dependant, and serve to soften the asperities and some of the miseries belonging to a state of servitude.” Gilbert Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1811, pp. 100–1. In comparison to enslaved blacks as domesticated “animals”, Thistlewood referred to Maroons as “the Wild Negroes”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 74. R. Bickell, The West Indies as they are: or a Real Picture of Slavery: but more particularly as it exists in the Island of Jamaica, in three parts with notes (London: Printed for J. Hatchard and Son, 187 Piccadilly: and Lupton Relfe, Cornhill, 1825), pp. 23–4. While acknowledging the barbarity of whites in Jamaica, Bickell relied upon stereotypes of the cruelty of “others” (here the racial and religious difference of the Turkish) to explain the cruelty of whites. But were the inhumanity, cruelty, and greed of whites in the British Empire over the course of centuries not enough to describe itself? Bickell also used the Turkish as a racist slur against a merciless overseer who managed a large estate in Clarendon and was accused of excessive cruelty (p. 32). Although, in many respects a reformer, Bickell’s hands were not clean and he was not an abolitionist but instead, like Mathison, argued for slavery’s “improvement”. He admitted to sending a “stout servant boy, or hired Slave of my own” to the workhouse for punishment, ordering two dozen lashes for a theft. Bickell then reported that, “Though he richly deserved the flogging”, the young man returned and “crept and rolled about the yard for some time, crying aloud, and was so much marked, that he could scarcely sit or walk for several days” (p. 26). Bickell nevertheless was incapable of imagining British cruelty as homegrown or innate, instead summoning a comparison with the Turkish as essentially cruel. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 74. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 48. Morgan estimated, based on educated guesswork, that some 25,000 slaves (13 per cent of the total enslaved population) worked predominantly with livestock in 1770. With regards to Cardiff Hall, St. Ann’s and Bryan Castle, Great House, Trelawny, the race of the human subjects must be largely inferred from their location and activities. In the former, a standing person can be seen on the left side in the open pasture amidst a grouping of low-lying animals (perhaps cattle). In the latter image, a seated figure is seen on the left-hand side, a short distance from the castle, amidst a scattered group of white goats and a small dark-coloured dog. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 47. Verene A. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers and Marginality in Jamaica’s Sugar-Plantation Society: A Tentative Analysis”, Social and Economic Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (June 1992), p. 189. Shepherd further contends that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the island-wide demand for working animals was estimated at between 56,000 and 71,000 (italics mine) (p. 189). Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 186. According to Morgan, the lives of slaves on pens were generally considered to be less arduous than those of slaves employed on sugar plantations and the “seasoning” process was considered to be less traumatic. Their labour, characterized by “variety and flexibility”, was also more independent (allowing for individual or small group tasks), more diversified, and therefore less monotonous. According to Morgan, “slaves rarely spent a whole week on any single task.” Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 62. Regarding Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth at the time of Thistlewood’s management, although all of the slaves worked with animals in some capacity, there were five enslaved men who specialized in handling animals, especially cattle, and some were given the specific title of penkeeper. Penkeepers had greater freedoms than other enslaved people since they often moved livestock between pens or from pens to plantations. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 51, 54. Since this type of freedom of movement would have been excellent for passing messages, sharing news, and ascertaining

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the political climate of the colony, it is interesting to consider the role that slave penkeepers may have played in Jamaican slave insurrections. For the mention of the participation of penkeepers in the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1776, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 152; and Richard Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution”, Origins of the Black Atlantic, eds. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 39. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 186. Although surely rare, Phibbah is evidence that some slaves were able to become landowners. As Thomas Thistlewood’s housemaid with whom he had more than a sexual relationship for many years, Phibbah was able to earn money through selling cloth, mending clothes, and selling eggs. Morgan’s mention of potatoes stolen from her provision grounds may also indicate that she participated in huckstering. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 59. According to John Ogilvie, a shepherd was defined as “a man employed in tending, feeding and guarding sheep in the pasture.” John Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological, ed. Charles Annandale (London: Blackie and Son, 1884), vol. 4, p. 60. However, his sex-biased definition was not wholly accurate. Although the majority were men, some shepherds were women, like the two at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth in 1750–51. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 61. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 187. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 48. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 190. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, pp. 190, 198. See also Jamaica Almanack (1815), pp. 221–83. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 192. Shepherd notes that penkeepers were more likely to attain lower political positions like waywardens and jurors (p. 193). A waywarden is a surveyor of a road. See Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary, p. 609. Although considered less desirably located and of poorer quality, Morgan has demonstrated that pen lands were certainly still vast and well suited to their purpose. For instance, the terrain of St Elizabeth, which dominated Jamaican penkeeping in the late 1700s, “contained a large area of open, rolling, hilly country, together with large stretches of infertile, swampy lowlands, both of which were unsuitable for sugar production” (p. 49). Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 193. These circumstances often drove penkeepers to diversify their businesses with investments in other crops like coffee, pimento, and logwood, or to make more money by taking employment as overseers on sugar plantations (p. 193). Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, pp. 194–7. The majority of penkeepers’ petitions were in regard to the import of livestock from Spanish America and the low level of import duties, as well as issues of taxation (on their own locally reared livestock). While the government argued that such taxes were applied to social services like roads, the penkeepers complained that it was a devious means to appropriate funds for other uses (p. 196). For example, penkeepers petitioned the government in 1790 (St Ann Vestry), 1816 (Manchester and St Elizabeth), 1840 (St Mary’s), and 1843 (St Mary’s and other parishes) arguing that the situation caused unfair competition, which adversely impacted the local penkeepers (pp. 194–6). In their defence, the planters argued that the presence of foreign livestock regulated the prices and that they preferred the Spanish method of payment (one year credit with six per cent interest) to that of the local penkeepers (cash on delivery). However, in the 1843 petition, penkeepers claimed that they were more heavily taxed than any other proprietors in the island (pp. 196–7). Arguably, this taxation and duty model, along with their lack of representation in government offices, was conceived in part to ensure that penkeepers could not acquire the wealth to aspire to a higher-class status. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, pp. 183–4. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 184. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 184. According to Morgan, between 1756 and 1776, the median Jamaican pen held 43 slaves. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 49. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 184. For instance, Morgan gives the example of Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth, which, upon Thomas Thistlewood’s arrival as the new overseer, had “251 cattle, 16 horses, 86 sheep, 80 goats, 108 chickens, 23 turkeys, 21 ducks, and a few pigs”. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 52.

382 Beyond sugar 28 Shepherd gives the example of a penkeeper named George Forbes of Thatchfield Pen in St Elizabeth whose savings were destroyed by the mid-nineteenth-century decline of sugar plantations, which concomitantly had an adverse effect on livestock prices. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 190. 29 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, pp. 185–6. Shepherd has noted that free blacks and coloureds, and white women also owned pens, the former two categories being the more numerous. Freed women owned pens in St Catherine (including the wealthiest free coloured woman Anna Woodart who owned Dirty Pit and Hoghole Pens), Westmoreland, St Elizabeth, St Thomas-in-the East, and St David. However, their lands were the smallest and occupied marginal locations. The white female pen owners, as in the case of Catherine Buckeridge from Sonning, Berkshire, in England, owner of “a rather substantial pen – Salt Pond Hut – in St. Catherine”, were normally widows (p. 188). According to John Seller’s map Novissima et Accuratissima Insulae Jamaicae descriptio (1675), St David was a precinct (later parish) on the south coast of the colony situated between St Andrewes to the west, St Thomas to the east, and St Georges to the north (sic). St David was absorbed by the larger parish of St Thomas-in-the-East (St Thomas) with the reconfiguration of the island’s political boundaries in the 1860s. James A. Delle, The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in the Plantation System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 118. 30 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 189. The wealthy, elite, mainly English plantation owners, often foreign-born and-educated, were often absentee landlords who regularly looked down upon Creole, resident penkeepers who literally could not afford to absent themselves from their holdings through the hiring of managers. 31 Shepherd notes that the Spanish were still invested in Jamaican livestock farming even after the British takeover of Jamaica since the Jamaican sugar planters continued to import their working animals from Spanish America, despite a well-formed local market. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, pp. 189–190. 32 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 47. 33 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 187. Tallow is a form of animal fat. According to Whitney and Smith, it is “The harder and less fusible fats melted and separated from the fibrous or membranous matter which is naturally mixed with them . . . the most common being derived from sheep and oxen.” Solid at room temperature, it was used in food such as shortening, in household items like candles and soap, and in industry for things like dressing leather and mechanical lubrication. William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E. Smith, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of English (New York: Century Co., 1889), part 21, p. 6171. 34 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 47. Interestingly, Morgan notes that the term “driver” initially referred to a person who caught and sold wild horses. Originally the term “Maroon” similarly connoted labour with animals, referring to a person who hunted wild cattle and not fugitive slaves who formed their own communities in the mountains (p. 47). The term “driver” was later used to denote a labourer on an estate (sometimes a black male slave, like Dick the mulatto at Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth) who disciplined (violently if necessary) and regulated the slaves (including catching runaways) (p. 57). But the savagery that drivers sometimes visited upon other slaves, was also visited upon them by the white planters and overseers. Such was Dick’s case when he received 300 lashes, shortly after Thomas Thistlewood took over as overseer of Vineyard Pen in 1750. Morgan speculates that the devastating whipping that laid Dick up for nine days may have been ordered by the owner, Florentius Vassall, to reinforce the racial hierarchy of the pen. Vassall had “arrived at Vineyard a few days before the dramatic show of force and left the following day” (p. 58). Although laws existed to limit the number of lashes that could be inflicted, Cooper argued that they were not adhered to, since “No White person employed in the sugar-planting business, will inform against another White person who may go beyond the bounds of the law in his conduct to the Negroes.” Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica: with Notes and Appendix (London: Sold by J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly, and Lupton Relfe, 13 Cornhill; G. Smallfield, Printer, Hackney, 1824), p. 58. 35 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 187. 36 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 187. The term “draught” denotes animals used for pulling heavy loads. 37 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 189. 38 William James Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Present Time; including an Account of its Trade and Agriculture; Sketches of the Manners, Habits, and Customs of all Classes of its

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Inhabitants; and a Narrative of the Progress of Religion and Education in the Island (London: Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, E.C., 1873), p. 161. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 188. B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 1995), p. 14. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 186. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 194. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 194. Benjamin Scott-Moncrieffe (1782–1849) was a free coloured who acted as an attorney for several neighbouring plantations and pens and served as the treasurer of the St Ann’s Colonial Church Union. Benjamin attained a privileged status, even prior to abolition, due to his “education, wealth and identity with the whites”. In the 1820s and 1830s his holdings included hundreds of livestock and slaves since he owned several properties, which specialized in livestock (including horses and cows) and the marginal crop of pimento. He also pursued horse racing as a sport and as a potential money-making venture. Although he lived at Union Pen, he employed an overseer at the rate of 100 pounds per year. Peter Moncrieffe, likely his son, became a barrister and sat in the Assembly in the 1840s. See B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1988), p. 211; and “Scott-Moncrieffe, Benjamin, planter, attorney and horse owner, 1828–1840” (Journal of), Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 194 Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 218. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 188. See also Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1981), p. 13. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 197. Trevor Burnard, “‘The Grand Mart of the Island’: The Economic Function of Kingston, Jamaica in the Mid-Eighteenth Century”, Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, eds. Kathleen E.A. Monteith and Glen Richards (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), p. 229. “Act of the Jamaican Assembly December 1761”, Transcribed (25 November 2011) by Anne Powers from The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, St Jago de la Vega (1802); A Parcel of Ribbons: Eighteenth Century Jamaica Viewed through Family Stories and Documents, at http://aparcelofribbons.co.uk/apr/items/show/48 (date of last access 30 July 2013). “Act of the Jamaican Assembly December 1761”, n.p. Patricia Mohammed, “‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired”, Reconstructing Femininities: Colonial Intersections of Gender, Race, Religion and Class, Feminist Review, no. 65 (Summer 2000), p. 39. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 247. According to Lewis, Rolph, who was renowned for his cruelty to his slaves, had recently struck and killed a male slave with a stick in front of several witnesses. However, since the witnesses were all slaves, or as Lewis described “negroes”, they were not permitted to give evidence and Lewis doubted if Rolph would even stand trial. In an entry of 1 May 1818, Lewis argued that mulattoes or coloureds were particularly vengeful slave owners and recounted the case of a mulatto mistress who whipped an enslaved child with a cattle whip 30 times as punishment for exposing the mistress’s theft of some ducks. On this Lewis pronounced, “Indeed, I have every reason to believe, that nothing can be uniformly more wretched, than the life of the slaves of free people of colour in Jamaica” (pp. 248–9). “Act of the Jamaican Assembly December 1761”, n.p. Referring to them as “brown”, Bickell documented the further economic, legal, and social disenfranchisement of free coloured populations who he claimed had only recently been allowed to give evidence in courts of justice and to become property owners, to a limited extent. However, he also noted that brown men were not allowed to serve on juries, to be overseers or bookkeepers, or to fill the lowest offices of constable or beadle. Furthermore, even the land-owning brown population could not vote for Assembly or fill low offices (like carpenters, smiths or bookkeepers) on white men’s plantations, but only on another brown man’s property. However, these same men were obliged to serve in militias and to “clothe and accoutre” themselves at their own expense, which Bickell argued was more than some of them could bear. Although he did not think it would be “politic”, while slavery still existed, to grant them the same privileges as whites and he likewise thought it best to ban them

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from the Assembly or magistracy, Bickell nevertheless felt that those who had freehold property of a certain value should be allowed to vote for returning members to the House of Assembly. He also argued that the “respectable ones” should be allowed to sit as jurors or be admitted into low offices such as bookkeepers. Bickell’s arguments were not completely altruistic. Rather, noting that the parity between the sizes of the white and brown populations would soon be disrupted by the rapid growth of the latter, Bickell argued that should the brown population ally themselves with slaves and arm them, then “woe be to the white inhabitants of Jamaica! One month’s civil war would moisten the soil with their blood, and exterminate them, root and branch, from the face of the earth”. Cooper also noted that free blacks and people of colour were not employed on plantations because of white bias since whites viewed them with suspicion and as a threat to insurrection. Further, he remarked that whites were very jealous of free blacks and people of colour, especially when they had been educated in Britain and treated like men. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 114–6; Cooper, Facts, p. 23. Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), p. 694. A case wherein the boundaries of public social acceptance of the all-too-common practice of white men taking black females as concubines or sexual and household partners was challenged occurred when the new Governor, George Ricketts, arriving from Tobago to Barbados in 1794, did so in the company of his mulatto mistress, causing “a tremendous uproar among the councilors and assemblymen”. The deep hypocrisy was, of course, that many of the dissenters had “similar social relations”, only appropriately veiled from “polite” public view. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure”, p. 698. “Act of the Jamaican Assembly December 1761”, n.p. A copy of the dissent is held at the East Sussex Record Office among the papers of the Fuller family – ESRO SAS/RF 20/66. “Act of the Jamaican Assembly December 1761”, n.p. James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall; E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825), n.p. Hakewill mentioned that Blagrove was buried at Titchfield in the parish churchyard where a monument had been erected. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill mentioned that Blagrove owned Ankawyke Mansion and Estate with a manor called Wyrardisbury (Wraysbury) in Buckinghamshire, as well as a property called Great Abshot near Titchfield. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. From the pimenta dioica plant, the pimento is a berry that is indigenous to the Caribbean, southern Mexico, and Central America. The dried, unripe berries are ground to produce allspice. Allspice has a strong flavour described as a mixture of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and black pepper. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 50. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 189. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 50. Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 189. According to Cooper, jobbing slaves suffered a great deal since their mistreatment was rarely redressed and they were commonly given the most demanding tasks on the plantation, as well as made to fix roads. This no doubt also derived from their removal from the properties or plantations of their owners. Jobbers in one gang could belong to several different people but were governed by one superintendent who was generally the person to whom the greatest number belonged. The superintendent controlled the labour of the gang or received a commission on their labour for his supervision. Such jobbing gangs were also supervised by drivers and visited once or twice a day by the superintendent. Cooper related that an “industrious jobber” could expect to make a small fortune, sell the entire gang and retire to “this country” (that is, Britain). Sugar planters usually bought such gangs to increase slave numbers. However, as Cooper noted, the slaves in such gangs were worn out from abuse and overwork. But the group of slaves which Cooper thought was “peculiarly unfortunate” were the slaves of slaves. While some slaves were granted

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permission to own slaves, as Cooper entreated, if “wealthy, humane, and liberal” masters barely provided for their slaves, what condition must the slaves of slaves be living in? Cooper, Facts, pp. 54–5, 58, 62. For jobbing, see James A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), p. 88. For wainage and pasturage, see Lewis Chambaud and J.Th.H. des Carrieres, A New Dictionary English and French and French and English, containing the signification of words, with their different uses, the construction, forms of speech, idioms, and proverbs used in both languages; the terms of arts, sciences, and trades (London: Printed for Cadell and Davies, etc., 1815), vol. 2, part 2, n.p. Cooper noted that small proprietors often practised jobbing. Employed on other estates, the work required slaves to regularly sleep away from their homes. Slaves were expected to bring their own provisions and were made to sleep on the ground, under tents or sometimes in the sugar works or in the homes of the local Negroes on the estate. Cooper, Facts, p. 27. Bickell, The West Indies as they are, p. 54. Bickell’s assertion that slaves did not desire stockings and shoes is, of course, deeply suspect due to afflictions like chigga (discussed below), which tormented the enslaved. Furthermore, since shoelessness became the universal symbol of slave status, the enslaved developed a particular desire for shoes as an aspirational sign of a higher-class status, which was associated with freedom. While chigga-foot is sometimes regarded as fungus-infected feet, the chigga is actually a flea-like insect, which bores into the flesh and, if left undisturbed, will create a nest and lay eggs. Known as a serious problem in the sugar colonies for animals (especially pigs) and humans, the exposed feet and legs of slaves left them prone to the assault of such insects and the resulting ailments of such an infestation. See: Dennis Jabari Reynolds, Jabari: Authentic Jamaican Dictionary of the Jamic Language: featuring Jamaican Patwa and Rasta Lyaric, Pronunciations and Definitions (Waterbury, CT: Around the Way Books, 2006), p. 27; Charles Hallock, The Sportsman’s Gazetteer and General Guide: the Game Animals, Bird and Fishes of North America; their habits and various methods of capture. Copious instructions in shooting, fishing, taxidermy, woodcraft etc. Together with a directory to the principal game resorts of the country; illustrated with maps (New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1877), p. 695; Anonymous, “The Chigga, Pulex Penetrans”, The Saturday Magazine, vol. 7, no. 198 (1 August 1835), p. 44. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 132. Lewis further noted that people of all walks of life were obliged to submit to regular foot inspections to avoid a chigga infestation. The slaves were also provided with knives to extract them (p. 132). Thomas Thistlewood, the overseer at Vineyard Pen (1750–51), wrote about giving Phibbah the house slave (with whom he also shared a sexual and emotional relationship) a pass so that she could be absent from the pen in order to sell cloth to people in the neighbourhood. Morgan noted that she sold cloth for 30 days in a period of seven months and was away from the pen for a total of 18 days. Morgan also noted several male slave penkeepers (Julius, Simon, Scipio, Guy, and Charles) who spent between 11 and 145 days away from the estate in one year. In comparison, Dick the mulatto driver spent 35 days off the estate. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, pp. 54–5, 59, and footnote #14. Mathison, Notices, p. 3. Whitney Estate was inherited from the eldest son of John, sixth Baron Ward of Birmingham (1700–74), who was created Viscount Dudley and Ward in 1763. After the death of his first wife Anna Maria Bourchier (c. 1700–25), daughter of Charles Bourchier of Clontarf, Co. Dublin, with whom he had a son (also John), the first Viscount married a Jamaican heiress (likely named Carver) and produced another son (William). The elder John’s possession of Whitney Estate was presumably through his second wife. John the second Viscount died in 1788, decades prior to Hakewill’s arrival on the island. However, he had also produced an heir with the young widow, Mary Baker, an illegitimate daughter, Anna Maria Ward. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, From the Earliest Times to the year 2000, vol. 57, Walliers–Welles (Oxford: Oxford University Press in Association with the British Academy, 2004), pp. 315–6. Regarding the name of the Jamaican heiress see Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 57, pp. 315–16. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 118. The estate had 2,902 acres (11.7 sq. km) of woodlands and provision grounds, 151 (0.61 sq. km) of pasture, and 22 (0.089 sq. km) of corn (pp. 119–20). According to Higman, the “Plan of Whitney Estate, Clarendon” (1807) created by John B. Pechon stated the size erroneously as 3,421 acres, due to the fact that Pechon seemed to have double-counted the cane acreage (p. 119).

386 Beyond sugar 82 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 118. 83 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 119. 84 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 120. According to Higman, Whitney Estate’s 270 enslaved people produced 262 hogsheads of sugar and 111 puncheons of rum in 1806 and 242 hogsheads and 63 puncheons respectively in 1807. Each 1.4 (0.0057 sq. km) acres of cane produced about one ton of sugar, a ratio, which helped to offset the price of building the aqueduct and the transportation of the goods to the wharf at Milk River, 15 miles away (p. 120). 85 Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”, p. 54. 86 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 87 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 88 Hakewill noted that the produce from Whitney Estate was shipped at Milk River about 15 miles away. 89 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Grosett had significant holdings, including Petersfield Estate in St Thomas in-the-East, various premises in Morant Bay, Chepston Coffee Plantation and Pen, and two or three other “minor” properties. 90 The Great House also overlooked the works, which Hakewill described as extensive, including a mill well-supplied by water, a boiling house with a double and single set of coppers, a house for the overseer, offices, a hospital, and buildings for Negro children. 91 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 92 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 93 Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § Plantation Labor and the Enslaved, p. 321. 94 Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § Plantation Labor and the Enslaved, p. 321. William Clark represents such a warehouse in Willoughby Bay, Antigua in the left foreground of his plate 10, Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (1823). 95 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill noted that a railway had been laid for convenience connecting inland routes to the wharf at Morant Bay. It is interesting to consider if Grosett used his political clout to influence the building of the railway in ways that would benefit his holdings and increase his wealth. 96 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 97 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. Hakewill also noted that there were no less than 14 religious establishments for the instruction of the black population. 98 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 44. Lewis’ estate called Cornwall in Westmoreland was about 30 miles from Montego Bay (p. 45). 99 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 100 Hakewill explained that the danger to the ships was posed by a swell caused by the movement of northwest winds on the Gulf Stream on “the coast of America”, which was thrown back, causing a reaction in the sea in the Bay of Mexico and inevitably the islands. The harbour could hold 30 ships, and had even accommodated a vessel of 800 tons. Hakewill explained that the owners received a return of six to ten per cent on their original shares, the result of a tax placed upon shipping, approved at the time of incorporation. 101 Edward E. Crain, Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 13. 102 Catherine Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire in the Era of Emancipation”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 20. 103 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 101. 104 Crain, Historic Architecture, p. 13. 105 Crain, Historic Architecture, p. 13. 106 Crain, Historic Architecture, pp. 13–14. 107 Crain, Historic Architecture, p. 13. 108 Crain, Historic Architecture, p. 15. 109 Higman notes that Golden Vale was located five miles up the Rio Grande in the hills behind Port Antonio. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, p. 114. 110 For more on higgling/huckstering in the Caribbean, see Hilary McD. Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000).

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111 Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 174. 112 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 252 (note #52). 113 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 175, 178. 114 Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 54–5. Bickell noted that the practice of nakedness amongst slave children extended well beyond the early years of childhood and that it was “very common to see black boys and girls, twelve or thirteen years of age, almost men and women, in nothing but a long shirt or shift, waiting at table; so little are the decencies of life observed towards them” (pp. 54–5). In an institutional context where “breeding” was normalized, the commonplace public display of the sexually maturing adolescent bodies of slave girls must have further encouraged their sexual exploitation. Indeed, Bickell’s argued that such breaches of moral law inevitably come back twofold upon the offender, begetting “impure ideas and obscene actions in the favoured superior” and causing “shameful scenes of debauchery, and too general but lamentable profligacy, which reign uncontroled throughout the Slave-holding islands [sic]” (p. 55). 115 Kay Dian Kriz, “Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes”, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 52. 116 Crain, Historic Architecture, p. 15. 117 Shepherd, “Livestock Farmers”, p. 191. 118 Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour, n.p. 119 There is a second word on the jeweller’s sign, between Goldsmith and Abrams, that is difficult to make out. 120 Holly Snyder, “Customs of an Unruly Race: The Political Context of Jamaican Jewry, 1670–1831”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 151. An example of the codification of Jewishness as a race and its expulsion from whiteness comes from Maria Nugent. In an entry for 25 February 1803, Nugent recalled attending Mr Cussan’s exhibition in Spanish Town, at which “The audience were of all colours and descriptions; blacks, browns, Jews, and whites”. Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago (London: Published for The Institute of Jamaica by Adam and Charles Black, 1907), pp. 193–4. For more on the nineteenth-century Jewish population of Jamaica, see Jackie Ranston, Belisario Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 2008). 121 The most excluded population (as clients) from taverns comprised, of course, free black men and, without question, slaves. Kerr notes that slaves travelling long distances, as well as working-class free blacks, had to seek alternative shelter, for example “negro yards” or the homes of friends of similar class backgrounds. Paulette Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?: Female Lodging House Keepers in Jamaica”, Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2011), p. 473. For more on “negro yards”, see Erna Brodber, A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1975), p. 7. 122 Gardner noted the bill from a “respectable place” in Kingston in 1716 included “Dinner, five bitts; small beer, one bitt; bottle of ale, four bitts; a jorum of rum punch (one quart), four bitts; bed, eight bitts; coffee in the morning, one bitt.” A bitt was valued at 4½d sterling. Gardner, A History of Jamaica, p. 167. 123 Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 468. Kerr notes, however, that while the term “lodging house keeper” was a recognized occupation during the nineteenth century, the term “innkeeper” was not. 124 Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 473. 125 Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, pp. 469–70. Kerr, drawing from Pawson and Buisseret, notes that in seventeenth-century Port Royal, of the 44 tavern keepers and “victuallers”, only two were women. See Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), appendix 12. A victualler was a person who furnished victuals or provisions or that kept a house of entertainment or was a tavern keeper. Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary, vol. 4, p. 564. 126 Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 468. 127 Arriving in Black River on New Year’s Day 1816, Lewis was flung into the midst of the enslaved population’s holiday celebration and he recorded the sounds of drums and the banjee (an early form of banjo) as well as a procession including John-Canoe (whom he described as a “Merry-Andrew dressed in a striped

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doublet and bearing upon his head a kind of pasteboard house-boat, filled with puppets, representing, some sailors, other soldiers, others again slaves at work on a plantation”) and ranks of Red and Blue girls (rival factions perhaps based upon rivalries between colours of the admiralty or army vs. navy). Lewis explained that the hotel mistress, Miss Edwards, was “rank Blue to the very tips of her fingers”. Lewis provided a very detailed and animated account of the carnival (which he seemed to enjoy) including unusual characters like the John-Crayfish. Lewis was so enamoured by the carnival that he invited “Mr John-Canoe” to his plantation, Cornwall, on 6 January 1816, for a festival day given to his slaves to celebrate his arrival. For that occasion he recorded slaughtering a couple of heifers and allowing “as much rum, and sugar, and noise, and dancing as they chose”. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, pp. 37, 39, 49. Kenneth Bilby uses the spelling “Jankunu” to refer specifically to “the elaborately decorated model of a house made to be carried on the head of a dancer” which was fashioned anew and “destroyed at the end of the holiday season”. Kenneth Bilby, “More than Met the Eye: African-Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 121. The two other things about which Lewis had been forewarned were not to take exercise after ten o’clock in the day, or to be exposed “to the dews” after sundown. The latter referred to the sudden drop in air temperature after sundown, which was thought to cause disease. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, pp. 44, 275. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 44. On route to Spanish Town from his estate Cornwall in Westmoreland, Lewis also mentioned stopping at a “solitary tavern, called Blue-fields”, where he encountered a young Spanish Creole woman that he described as a fugitive (with her mother) from Old Providence, an island in the possession of Colombia since 1822. The girl, whom he described as George Colman’s Yarico, had been welcomed to the tavern by the owner, a relative of her mother. The reference to Yarico refers to the popular story of Inkle, the shipwrecked Englishman, who was nursed back to health by the Native girl Yarico. The pair then fell in love but, once rescued, Inkle sold Yarico into slavery. Colman’s musical play Inkle and Yarico was produced in 1787 (pp. 46, 98, 280). On the same journey, Lewis also mentioned “the Gutturs”, situated at the base of the May-day Mountains as an excellent house with “good beds, eatables, and, in short, every thing that travellers could wish [sic]” (p. 98). Later, on 8 February, Lewis mentioned an inn located in the small town of Rio Bueno with a pretty brown landlady named Eliza Thompson. The mixed-race Eliza was the “wife” of an English merchant and had a father “from home” (p. 105). According to Kerr, in Jamaica in 1847 tavern keepers could expect to earn an annual income of 300 pounds sterling and lodging housekeepers 150. In comparison, a schoolmaster made 70, a banker 500, a surveyor 300, a storekeeper 300, a master tradesman 150, and miners 70. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 472, Table 29.2, “Annual Incomes Attached to Various Occupations in Jamaica, 1847”. Other women who rose to prominence through their entrepreneurship as lodging house keepers were Miss Polly Vidal of Falmouth, Miss Bessy McClean of Black River, and Eliza Thompson of Rio Bueno. Lucille Mathurin, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica from 1655 to 1844 (PhD Dissertation, History Department, University of the West Indies, 1974), p. 415; also cited in Mohammed, “‘But most of All mi Love me Browning’”, p. 41. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 472. For instance Kerr notes the wealth of several lodging house keepers at the times of their deaths including (in pounds sterling): Elizabeth Sutton (2,821 in 1803 and 14 slaves worth 1,200 each, a fully furnished five-bedroom house), Susanah French of Kingston (3,219 and a fully furnished five-bedroom house, a three-bedroom house in Hannah Town and 34 slaves), and Ann Fraser of Laughlands Tavern in St Ann (5,838, furniture and goods worth 2,213 and 37 slaves including four carpenters, one mason, ten field hands, cooks, and a house washer). The wealth of these coloured women and their ownership and exploitation of black and coloured slaves points up the extent to which their ability to accrue wealth and security was based upon their collusion with white men in a colonial racial structure which exploited people like them. Although Kerr does not mention it, many of these upwardly mobile coloured lodging house keepers had likely themselves been born into slavery and only gained their own freedom through the process of negotiating their sexual exploitation by white men. If not slaves in their lifetimes, they were certainly not far removed from their own slave ancestry. As such, their willingness to hold others in bondage speaks both to the normalization of enslavement in Jamaica and also to the extent to which these coloured women felt themselves, because of favour, supposed beauty

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(largely attained through complexion), and wealth, separate from and above the order of Jamaican slaves. See: Jamaica Archives, 1B 113, vol. 100, Inventory of Elizabeth Sutton; Jamaica Archives, 1B 113, vol. 132, Inventory of Susanah French; Jamaica Archives, 1B 113, vol. 127, Inventory of Ann Fraser. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 470. Kerr argues that it is the relationship between white men and black and coloured women and the tradition of “gifts” for sexual favours that allowed coloured women (as opposed to coloured men) to fill the vacuum left by white male lodging house keepers. Kerr notes the innovation of coloured women who were not necessarily gifted already functioning inns, taverns, and lodging houses, but who took the gifts of dwellings and, through their own innovation, turned them into shops, hospitals, and lodging houses. She also notes that these women strategically selected popular land routes near important seaport towns like Montego Bay, Port Antonio, Falmouth, and Black River. Hilary McD. Beckles “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean”, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Ian McCalman, ed., The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn (New York: Marcus Weiner, 1991), p. 46. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 471. Of course the most famous Caribbean lodging house keeper and “doctress” was Mary Seacole. See Sandra Gunning, “Traveling with her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in ‘Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands’”, Signs, vol. 26, no. 4, Globalization and Gender (Summer 2001), pp. 949–81. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Introduction: The Repeating Island”, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 8. Paul E. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army”, Journal of Military History, vol. 60, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 450–1. R.N. Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida; and Barbados: University Press of the West Indies, 1998), p. 329.The report also noted that the new barracks had not been built high enough off the ground and the author(s) expressed regret that the barracks had not been placed on arches at least six feet (2 metres) from the ground which, it was noted, would have allowed for better air circulation and “a comfortable shade during the heat of the day”. Furthermore, the board noted that the barracks were not sufficiently large to accommodate the number of men for which they had been built. Each barrack was to contain 10 rooms and each room 50 men. However, once hammocks were hung only 36 men (or 32 men in rooms with two doors) could be contained. See W.O. 1/95, Barrack Inspection Report, 6 March 1806, enclosed in Coote Gordon, 22 March 1806. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 473. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 663. Beckles’ source was Major Wyvill, “Memoires of an Old Officer”,1815, p. 386, MSS, Division, Library of Congress. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery”, p. 663. Beckles’ source was John Augustine Waller, A Voyage in the West Indies: Containing Various Observations Made During a Residence in Barbadoes, and Several of the Leeward Islands; With some Notices and Illustrations Relative to the City of Paramarabo, in Surinam (London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1820), pp. 20–21. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 445. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 448. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 448. Kopperman added that in America, these rations cost the British Army 7–11 shillings per month per man (p. 454). A gill is the equivalent of five fluid ounces or one-fourth of a pint in the British system or four fluid ounces or half a cup in the US system. “Gill”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, at http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233688/gill (date of last access 13 March 2014). Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 447. While Breverton contends that grog is alcohol, usually Jamaican rum, Partridge clarifies that it more precisely meant rum diluted with water. Breverton argues that receiving “six water grog”, rum diluted with six parts water instead of three, was a form of punishment in the British Navy up until the early twentieth century. Terry Breverton, The Pirate Dictionary (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2004), p. 69. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Paul Beale (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), n.p. Kerr, “Victims or Strategists?”, p. 474.

390 Beyond sugar 149 Letter, William Dent to his cousin, 12 August 1819, MS #7088–11, letter #43, National Army Museum, London. Cited in Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 449. 150 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 450. Another health issue caused by drinking was illness due to contamination, sometimes through deliberate alteration of alcoholic beverages. For instance, Kopperman (drawing from Bell) noted that new rum was supposedly often contaminated with lead (p. 453). See John Bell, An Inquiry into the Causes which Produce, and the Means of Preventing Diseases among British Officers, Soldiers, and Others in the West Indies (London: J. Murray, 1791), pp. 16, 20. 151 Bell, An Inquiry, pp. 34, 91–2, 94–7; cited in Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 451. 152 “Debauchery” refers to the excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures of any kind, including gluttony, intemperance, sexual immorality, and the unlawful indulgence of lust. Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 674. 153 Trevor Burnard, “The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer”, Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 177. Although he did not intervene in the rape, when Eve ran away after the ordeal Thistlewood did not punish her. 154 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, pp. 457, 458, 459. 155 This aquatint was reproduced in Charles Hamilton Smith, Costumes of the Army of the British Empire, according to the last regulations 1812 (London: Colnaghi and Company, 1812–15). 156 A gold-coloured medallion rested where the two bisecting bands of white material met at the top of the torso and a braided tassel curved beneath a gold-coloured plate, which decorated the front of the hat. A white antennae-like piece of material also protruded upward from the helmet, extending above the height of the hat. See image in R. Money Barnes (Major), Military Uniforms of Britain and the Empire: 1742 to the Present Time (London: Seeley Service and Co. Limited, 1960), p. 97. 157 Barnes, Military Uniforms of Britain, p. 96. By 1800 there were 12 regiments serving the West Indies, which were reduced to eight between 1800 and 1815. 158 Barnes, Military Uniforms of Britain, p. 96. British naval uniforms did not become standardized until 1748. See Amy Miller, Dressed to Kill: British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions 1748–1857 (London: National Maritime Museum, 2007), p. 7. 159 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 and Charles McLean Andrews, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 75; cited in Elizabeth A. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994), p. 371. 160 Although such alternative viewings and readings of Hakewill’s and other books must have occurred, it is very difficult to ascertain the occurrences and reactions since people like my imagined clerk, house slave and higgler/huckster were of course not the intended audience for Hakewill’s book and may have had to read it in clandestine ways. Furthermore, lower classes had less leisure time and were more likely to be illiterate and therefore, unable to leave written traces of their thoughts and impressions. 161 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 459. 162 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 460. 163 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 460. 164 Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’”, p. 467. 165 Naval Flags and Ensigns: A Note by the Naval Staff Directorate, Version 1, at http://www.luxe-motor-kei. co.uk/documents/NavalFlagsandEnsigns.pdf (date of last access 9 August 2013). 166 Naval Flags and Ensigns. 167 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 69. 168 Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica, p. 173. 169 Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 371. 170 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxx. 171 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxx. Nugent apparently agreed to disband the Negro regiment if the Assembly approved the funds to support 5,000, rather than 3,000 British troops. The Assembly voted against his proposal by 24 to 6. Cundall was referring to Alexander, 6th Earl of Balcarres (1752–1825), who served as the Governor of Jamaica from 1794 to 1801. “James Lindsay, 7th Earl of Balcarres”, Legacies of British Slave-ownership, at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/21571 (date of last access 6 November 2014).

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172 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxxii. The 1st and 4th battalions were German Protestants who were commanded by British officers. 173 After the massive loss of life due to tropical diseases like yellow fever and the failed British involvement in the Revolution in St Domingue, the British army needed to rethink its recruitment strategy. Between 1795 and 1807 it is estimated that 13,400 Creole and newly arrived African slaves were purchased to act as soldiers within the West India Regiments. This reliance on slave conscripts was a factor in the prolongation of the slave trade to 1807. “A Private of the 5th West India Regiment, 1812”, National Army Museum, at http://www.nam.ac.uk/online-collection/detail. php?acc=1950–11–33–42 (date of last access 6 September 2013). 174 Cundall, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. xxxii. 175 The print in the collection of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (New Haven, CT) is dated 1803 while the one at the National Library Jamaica (Kingston) is dated 1800. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 251, note #40. 176 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 167. 177 Interestingly, this mask may be the head of the coiled snake positioned at the right side of the yellow fever allegory. It is hard to determine this for certain because of the way that the bent elbow of yellow fever’s left hand overlaps with the snake. 178 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 167. 179 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 167. 180 Journal of a Voyage from Cork Harbour to the West Indies in His Majesty’s ship Conquistador, RUSI B 123, 19 × 12 cm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Stuart’s journal begins on Wednesday 9 March 1814 at Cork Harbour and ends abruptly with an entry on Tuesday 26 April 1814 at Barbados after going ashore (at the insistence of an Admiral Durham) to wait upon the Governor, Sir George Beckworth. Ordered to sail from Cork at the first fair wind after 10 March, Stuart’s vessel was joined by 106 others at Liverpool. They then sailed in sight of Madeira with instructions for a ship to be dispatched to collect items for trade in the West Indies. He also dispatched several ships to “the Brazils”, and the Mutine and 12 other trading vessels to the former Dutch colonies on the coast of “Guyana, Surinam and Berbica”. The remainder of the convoy arrived at Carlisle Bay Island off Barbados at six o’clock in the evening on Monday, 25 April 1814. Stuart apparently succumbed to yellow fever onboard the Conquistador somewhere between Havana and England. He was 36. 181 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 209. 182 Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, p. 158. According to Terry, the losses from 1730 onward amongst companies of regular soldiers in the British West Indies were appalling. Of the 19,676 men sent there in 1796, 17,173 died within five years and two-thirds of a regiment was destroyed by it in 1819. See also Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. xiv. 183 Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire”, p. 20. 184 Journal of Peter Simmonds of Voyage from Falmouth to Jamaica in HM Packet Mutine, Lieutenant Paule Commr, October 1831, 19 × 23 cm, JOD/35, Caird Archive and Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. 185 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 46. Yarico was the name of a Native character in a European literary work, produced in various genres and languages and made famous in the eighteenth century. The story was one of tragedy and betrayal. Yarico saves the shipwrecked Englishman Inkle and the two fall in love. However, once rescued, Inkle sells Yarico into slavery (p. 276). 186 Lewis’s mention of the beauty of her teeth is interesting in terms of the dental hygiene practices of blacks in diaspora. Whites in different locations in the Americas frequently noted the cleanliness and whiteness of the teeth of Africans. Such remarks often appeared in runaway slave advertisements where the fugitive was described as possessing extraordinarily white teeth. For example, an advertisement placed in 1792 for Digby, Nova Scotia notified the public about two runaway Negroes, one described as “a likely young Fellow with remarkable white Teeth”. The enslaved often used chew sticks derived from the wood or bark of certain trees as well as the raw sugar cane itself to clean their teeth. In comparison, European and Euro-American dental hygiene, although increasingly medicalized, was not as successful in its results. See Daniel Odel and Phillip Earl, “Runaway”, The Royal Gazette and Nova-Scotia Advertiser, no. 172, Tuesday 3 July 1792. 187 I would guess that Lewis was not yet well versed in the local racial nomenclature in part because he had newly inherited his two estates and this was his first occasion to travel to Jamaica. And secondly, his

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description of Wiggins as Yarico, a Native or indigenous woman, demonstrates a conflation of African and indigenous racial attributes and most likely his inability to fully read or to accurately name (by Jamaica standards) the racial mixture that Wiggins’ complexion and physiognomy indicated. Since Jamaica’s indigenous population, the Arawaks, had been violently exterminated by the Spanish prior to British conquest (unlike other Caribbean islands where the indigenous population had survived), African-descended people in Jamaica for the most part were not mixed with Arawak. The exception may have been Spanish-descended Maroons who purportedly had intermixed with the Arawak in the seventeenth century. But their subsequent mixing with British-era Maroons would have made the visual identification of any definitive Arawak racial traits extremely tenuous. Mathison, Notices, pp. 2–3. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 9. Mathison, Notices, pp. 2–3. The seemingly deliberate juxtaposition of their bodies with those of the “lower” enslaved blacks would appear to be a conscious strategy of differentiation employed by the coloured Jamaicans, designed to play up their higher-class status. The hierarchical structure of colonial racial ideals encouraged free coloureds, in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, to buy into the idea of their racial superiority to the enslaved population and further, in many cases, to participate in their abuse, humiliation, and marginalization despite their shared racial origins and affiliations. In one example, Mary Prince, the enslaved female from Bermuda, recounted how her suffering while in the possession of the vicious white Antiguan couple (Mr and Mrs Wood) only increased when they employed a mulatto woman who delighted in monitoring and informing upon Prince. During a period of Mary’s sickness, Mrs Wood hired a mulatto woman named Martha Wilcox to nurse her child. As Mary recalled, “but she was such a fine lady she wanted to be mistress over me. I thought it very hard for a coloured woman to have rule over me because I was a slave and she was free.” Describing her experience with this newly hired servant, Prince recounted that “The mulatto woman was rejoiced to have power to keep me down”. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 79–80. Cooper, Facts, p. 111. Cooper further offered that if a woman three degrees removed from African ancestry had a child by a white man, the child was free and had the privileges of whites (p. 23). It is important to note that so entrenched was the impossibility of white female/black male (of any complexion) sexual and romantic relations that Cooper’s racial genealogy lessons assumes that the Mustiphino will of course be a female and that the white will of course be a male, and not the other way around. It is unclear, then, if a Mustiphino male and white female would also have had the privilege of “white” children with all of the social and cultural benefits that this implied. Matthew Lewis provided the same list of racial terms, but with the spelling musteefino. However, he also dispelled Edward Long’s myth that two mulattoes were incapable of producing offspring together. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 68. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 301. If the bulk of Hakewill’s missing or destroyed watercolours remain unrecovered, we may never know for certain if he initially represented the diversity of Jamaica’s coloured population within his preliminary sketches. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 43. Lewis also recorded distinctions between the dress and habits of his blacks and mulattoes and quickly perceived that the mulattoes were exempted from field labour; the males instead were trained and employed as tradesmen and the females “brought up as domestics about the house” (p. 50). Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 43. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 43. Lewis documented his encounter with Psyche as occurring on 2 January 1816 and with her daughter on 3 January 1816, on the first and second days after his arrival. The daughter’s job at the breakfast table was to shoo away flies from Lewis with an orange bough (p. 43). Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 53. The category of sambo was the offspring of a black and a mulatto. Lewis’ interest in Mary Wiggins was not random. Indeed, his detailed description of her was an expression of his sexual desire. After meeting her he wrote in his journal that she was “a thousand times more beautiful” than the famous Italian contralto, Josephina Grassini (1773–1850) in Gaetano Andreozzi’s

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201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217

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opera La Vergine del Sole. He also went on to insist that she visit him at his plantation, Cornwall, and instructed her to tell her husband that he “admired his taste very much for having chosen her”. That Lewis dared to compare a black woman favourably with a renowned white European female beauty would have seemed scandalous to many whites at the time (pp. 46, 276). Cynric R. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica from the Western to the Eastern End in the year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clark, 1826), pp. 3, 52–3. Specifically, Williams recounted the political position of a Jamaican planter (Mr Mathews) on the role of abolitionism in stamping out slave traffic from Britain, while the traffic from other empires continued. Mathews blamed the horrors of slavery on the unequal application of abolition. While Williams advocated for the amelioration of the condition of the slaves, he similarly (no doubt influenced by such acquaintances) focused upon the slave traffic as evil and not slave holding. His solution then was the full abolition of the slave trade. See Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, pp. 68–9. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, pp. 52–3. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, p. 54. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, p. 54. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, p. 55. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, pp. 128–9. Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, § Plantation Labor and the Enslaved, p. 321. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. 58. As Lewis reported, Charles was scalded but spared great injury because the fire had not yet been fully kindled. Terry, “Introduction”, in Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, p. xxiv. A cabriolet was a “fast one-horse carriage.” Lee and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, p. 318. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 82. A dog is “the 72nd part of a dollar” and “Buckra” is a term for white people (p. 82). Bickell, The West Indies as they are, pp. 67–8. Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture”, Art History, vol. 27, issue 4 (2004), p. 572. Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 574. Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 574. Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 579. Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 582. Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 582. For example, Rosenthal cites Thomas Henry Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing; Illustrative of the Influence of Mental Emotion on the Capillary Circulation; with a General View of the Sympathies, and the Organic Relations of those Structures with which they seem to be Connected (London: John Churchill, 1839). Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture”, p. 582. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism”, p. 368. George Hibbert.com at http://www.georgehibbert.com/hibbertsjam.html (date of last access 27 February 2013). Hall, “Britain, Jamaica, and Empire”, p. 16. George Hibbert was a key advocate for slave owner compensation once slavery was abolished. George Hibbert.com Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 4, 6. Savage eloquently explores the perilous terrain of commemoration in the post-Civil War period of American monument building. The emergence of the newly enfranchised population of ex-slaves resulted in deep-seated political divisions over the role and status of blacks as American citizens and their role in the public memorialization of a new, slavery-free democracy. Sir Simon Richard Brissett Taylor also erected a memorial at Lysson (the site of one of his family’s estates) near Morant Bay in memory of his father Sir John Taylor and this slave-owning uncle and namesake, Simon Taylor, whom he described as “a loyal subject, firm friend, and an honest man [who had led] an active life, during which he ably and faithfully fulfilled the highest offices of civil and military duty in the island”. Martin, Forrester, and Barringer, “Life and Labor in Jamaica, 1807–34”, Catalogue Entry #72, Lyssons Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (c. 1820–21), p. 346.

394 Beyond sugar 225 It would seem that such elaborate monuments were fairly customary amongst the wealthy white planters of Jamaica. Matthew Lewis was particularly impressed by his family mausoleum, which “looks for all the world like the theatrical representation of the ‘tomb of the Capulets’”. The mausoleum prompted him to declare Jamaica “the only agreeable place for me to die in”. Lewis, Journal of West India Proprietor, p. 66. 226 George Hibbert.com 227 One of the daughters, Jane, became a painter, studying under Sir Joshua Reynolds. She won a Gold Medal for Painting. She later married a Quaker surgeon from Worcester but died from complications in childbirth. 228 Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure”, p. 698. 229 Agostino Brunias, A Negro Dance in the Island of Dominica (1779), hand-coloured engraving, London, The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, RI, US. 230 Kriz contends that in Kidd’s book, the woman dressed in pink crossing the road on horseback in The Windward Falls, near Kingston (1838–40) and one of the women standing under the balcony in View of Kingston from the Commercial Rooms, Looking toward the East (1838–40) are mixed-race. Kriz, “Torrid Zones”, pp. 162 (fig. 90), 175 (fig. 101), 253, note #66. 231 Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising in Martinique and the Policing of White Identity”, French Historical Studies, vol. 30, no. 2 (Spring 2007), p. 226. Schloss argues that tensions surrounding definitions of whiteness in terms of class, affiliations, and origin (Creole vs. France) and the limits of cross-racial interaction were heightened in the wake of the 1831 slave rebellion in which 11 plantations near the commercial centre of Saint-Pierre were attacked by some 300 slaves aided by gens de couleur and petits blancs (whites who were not a part of the plantocracy or upper classes), including Bernard Xavier Bosc and Théodore Le Chevalier (pp. 203–4). 232 “A Monsieur le Rédacteur du Journal du Havre”, Journal du Havre, 23 November 1831; cited in Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising”, p. 226. 233 Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising”, p. 230. 234 Hakewill apparently sought to interview this population of slaves in the absence of written records. He learned from them that a Mr Harvey from Barbados, a Kingston merchant, and later Daniel Lascelles Esq (brother of the 1st Baron of Harewood) had bought the plantation three or four years after the initial purchase.

Conclusion Deception in the life and art of the white Jamaican creole planter class

The link which, bound the islands of Montreal to Jamaica (and Antigua), regardless of the climate, the nature of trade, and the specificity of the practices of enslavement, was their adaptability to British imperial ends. This adaptability was also made present in the orderliness and discipline of the urban landscape, the representation of its carefully planned settlements and the establishment of necessary British legal, penal, religious, and military institutions represented in the images by churches, courthouses, gaols, ordnance yards, barracks, and ports filled with various merchant ships – la flota. This combination of places, buildings, institutions, objects, and themes created the idea of the success of the “civilizing mission” of slavery, evidenced in the textual and visual representations of content and obedient slaves, like those in Hakewill’s St. Thomas in the Vale from Mount Diablo, who lounged and rested far more than they ever worked. Indeed, the represented idleness of the slaves was key to the desired function of the landscapes. As Quilley has argued, “Here the casting of slaves as pastoral figures accentuates the bifurcated meanings of idleness, interconnecting and contrasting the leisured idleness supposedly proper to the condition of the aristocrat or planter with the improper, transgressive and punishable idleness of the slave.”1 In Hakewill’s landscapes of British Jamaica, the slaves’ insubordinate idleness is what rendered the white “civilizing mission” of slavery necessary. Similarly, in British Montreal the legal codification of idleness as unproductive if not criminal behaviour culminating to the charge of vagrancy, led to the further vilification and surveillance of already disenfranchised populations including lower-class whites like Irish and Canadiens, as well as blacks and Natives who, in works like Thomas Davies’ A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 (1762) and Robert Sproule’s View of the Harbour, Montreal (1830), were imagined as existing outside of the modern world of imperial commercial enterprise and capital accumulation. As I have argued throughout, the two British island colonies were prized in part due to their locations within or close to the Atlantic. As the ocean through which countless ships travelling under competing European flags aided in the construction of empire, proximity to the Atlantic reassured colonialists of the promise of obscene wealth. More specifically, both Montreal and Jamaica became sites of la flota, their geographies facilitating the elaborate construction of imperial infrastructures, which included garrisons for the permanent relocation of thousands of soldiers over the course of decades or centuries.

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These British soldiers forged yet another link between the two islands. Posted to the colonies of the “motherland”, their duties included the maintenance of order and peace, the expulsion of enemy empires, the internal suppression of transgressive populations, and the violent contestation of ongoing resistance to the lucrative institution of slavery. But their dependence upon rations of Jamaican rum, whether in the cold of Montreal or the heat of Jamaica, rendered the soldiers public nuisances at best and sources of lewd, immoral, and debauched behaviour at worst. As my reading of Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston (1825) and Cornelius Krieghoff’s Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal (1845) reveals, whether posted in Britain’s northern or southern colonies, the bodies of white British soldiers often came to represent the exact opposite of what their military duty was supposed to entail. The combination of the institutionalized access to slave-produced rum and the absence of provisions for soldiers’ wives within the context of societies which strategically vilified black female sexuality as lascivious, facilitated the prolific sexual exploitation of enslaved and free black females. Where soldiers and sailors travelled, brothels, taverns, and inns – another essential aspect of the imperial infrastructure – materialized to service their social and sexual needs. The evidence of the ownership of slave women amongst the military ranks in Montreal and Jamaica indicate that a racialized sex trade emerged in both colonies to service the sexual desires of this dangerous transient population; dangerous both in terms of the well-documented tendencies for drunkenness and sexual misconduct, as well as for the ubiquity of venereal disease. The essential training of these British soldiers in cartography and geography allowed them to produce topographical landscapes of the sites to which they were deployed. As I have argued, these images did not merely document local geographies, but rather helped to remake the colonies in the image of Britain, imposing a racialized order, which fitted with the colonial vision of the usefulness of the territories. But the fissures in this vision point up the speculative nature of geographical imaging, not as objective renderings of place as real but, as Said has argued, imaginings which coincided with the use of physical violence for occupation and conquest. I have endeavoured to demonstrate the ways in which such topographical landscapes, as forms of what Harley calls spatial discipline, were a central part of how empires were ideologically conceived and materially constructed, in the ways in which depictions of nature, animals, humans, and land were rendered in relations always favourable to the colonizer. As imperial intruders, the white colonizer’s process of imaging was always already invested in the erasure or containment of Natives and the indigenization and sanitization of African presence. As Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour . . . demonstrates, the colonial drive to contain African resistance was also interwoven with the project of discrediting abolitionist opposition to slavery. Indeed, as Vlach has noted in the American context, these landscape images carried a heavy burden, that of signifying a peaceful and abundant tropical colony, which for Hakewill was a Jamaica like that created in Williamsfield Estate, St. Thomas’ in the Vale, where the inherent violence and the oppressive physical and mechanical instruments of slavery were nowhere visible; a land where the noise of animals grazing and winds in the transplanted palms hid the brutality of forced sexual exploitation and the refined technologies of torture and abuse. Both Europeans and white Creoles were deeply devoted to this

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colonial project. As Barringer has argued, “Considerable amounts of capital, both financial and ideological, were invested in these images, in the production of which artists and their patrons colluded in an attempt to naturalize the moral injustice enshrined in laws that made some men and women the property of others.”2 This was a Jamaica where, to paraphrase Hakewill, the happy Negroes were willing servants with good lives, nice homes, and bountiful provision grounds and their benevolent white masters, the white planters, were the true victims of the nosy, know-nothing abolitionists back in Britain. Through his contemporaneous illustrated book, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the year 1823 (1826), Cynric R. Williams used his publication to comment disparagingly upon the fitness of the slave population. According to Williams, even a “careless observer” in residence for a short period would concede that many slaves are totally unfit to have the entire disposal of their own time; they must be kept in a state of pupilage, under constant, though humane restraint; the majority of them have not even a correct notion of emancipation; the better informed have no wish for it; it is only the unruly, idle, and profligate, and the puritanical hypocrites, that make any clamour about it [sic].3 Williams here presumed a kind of scientific anthropological exercise of his stay through which he supposes to have accessed fully the personal, political, and social beliefs and aspirations of the varied slave populations, despite his own racial, cultural, and political differences and removal which would have made him, for many blacks, an object of great suspicion and loathing. But I would like to return to the question I posed at the beginning of the book. What type of body could the tropical picturesque accommodate? The answer had much to do with race, not to mention sex, gender, and class. In the shift from temperate rural Britain to tropical rural Jamaica, what was lost in the picturesque was not the desire to reimagine the latter as rugged, rough, rude, etc., but to do so while including the labouring black body. The black body held at least a double threat; first it pointed up the process of indigenization as not only the migration and transplantation of vegetation, but of human populations. But this twin process also required the disindigenization of humans and plants through the violence of colonial settlement. To the extent that black slave labour is what is largely erased from Hakewill’s picturesque, I would argue that this sanitization was necessary to how white Jamaican, pro-slavery Creoles wished to visualize Jamaica; as natural and largely self-perpetuating plantations which camouflaged the brutality of slavery of which European-based abolitionists were all too aware and all too keen to expose. The second aspect of the double threat of representing the black body was that it destabilized this deliberate naturalization, which disguised the fact of the plantation as a constructed foreign and labour-intensive colonial amalgamation, a trophy of imperial commerce and brutality. As Bohls has argued, “the visible, superficial signs of beauty and the aesthetic discourse they invoke cooperate with the visible, superficial sign of race and discourses of racial inferiority to legitimate – and even render

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seductively appealing – the relations of power, violence, and brutality that characterized this colonial system.”4 In contrast, the black body as staffage is missing from Montreal landscapes of the period. But this absence was in alignment with the minority status of the enslaved African population who, in a non-plantation context with a temperate climate, laboured largely indoors in domestic settings usually out of sight and dangerously hidden from the intervention of people who were not their owners. But as Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Haitian Woman (1786) and Heriot’s Minuets of the Canadians (1807) indicate, in Montreal both French and British artists saw enslaved Africans as worthy of artistic attention. In contrast to the demographic minority of enslaved blacks in Montreal, as I have discussed above, Hakewill’s sojourn in Jamaica regularly placed him in the midst of sugar plantations on thousands of acres of land worked by hundreds of slaves. Hakewill arrived in Jamaica in the aftermath of the crisis sparked by the British abolition of slave trading. Whereas the slave trade had made it easy for planters to ignore how the brutality of their labour and torture practices led to the premature death of the enslaved, the ban on slave importation triggered a population crisis resulting in a clear connection between plantation practices and the depopulation of slaves, what was termed “natural decrease”. However, the decrease was not natural at all but clearly, as authors like Mathison, Bickell, Cooper, and others documented, a matter of the overwork, extreme physical exertion, abuse, torture, and sickness of the enslaved. Put bluntly, when the flow of slaves from African stopped, it served to highlight just how normative the practice was amongst Jamaican planters and slave owners of working their slaves to death. Faced with the depopulation of their work force, authors like Mathison (himself a slave owner) began to advocate for “improvements” of slave practices as opposed to full abolition. His motivation was not the humanity or care of slaves, but rather knowledge that the care of the slave population in a time of a ban on importation was a necessity for planters to ensure the continuation of their enterprises and profits. Hakewill then arrived in Jamaica at this moment of crisis amongst the planters. It was a moment when white Jamaicans were decidedly on the defensive and actively deploying propaganda about the wholesomeness and necessity of their role in the British imperial economy. In this volatile period after the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and leading up to full abolition (1833), the demographic dominance of the black population must have felt even more threatening to the ruling-class whites and their sympathizers. But as a European outsider, this undeniable demographic dominance – the extent to which the enslaved outnumbered their white counterparts – would have been an immediate and shocking realization for most white visitors to the island. It was also a time when white Jamaicans were preoccupied with external politics, mainly from Britain, as regarded the prospect of full abolition and their futures in such a new economic and social order. Therefore, the erasure of the black subjects, their most normal labour, and their homes from Hakewill’s prints then marked a tension between his text and images and his experiences in Jamaica (the reality of slavery) and his art, since Hakewill often gave precise tallies of estate slave populations based upon the merchants’ own legal data.

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Hakewill’s sanitized picturesque images, then, are the visual arm of the planters’ political argument. The landscapes not only show Jamaican land as fertile, tranquil, and diverse, but the slaves, if shown at all, are relaxed, idle, and at rest. The centre of their lives – sugar cane cultivation – as the property of another, was decidedly, and deliberately, not represented. We must consider and weigh the ideological and aesthetic work that it took to erase the slaves from the plantations upon which Hakewill resided for two years, plantations, which held hundreds and at times even thousands of slaves in bondage. Not only did Hakewill not show the slaves, or their labours, he did not show their torture and abuse or the ominous presence of the drivers and overseers. Hakewill’s text and images are paradoxical and contradictory, since his text clearly illuminated his deep interest in the daily workings of the plantation and the labour force, the Negroes, but the images refused their presence repeatedly in spite of the production – the hogsheads and puncheons of sugar, rum, and molasses – that he insisted on tallying. Furthermore, it must also be noted that Hakewill resided within Great Houses, which were maintained largely by the mixed-race, enslaved offspring of the white male planters, houses that were also strategically positioned to materially survey the Negro villages where the majority of the enslaved lived. So both within the houses where he ate, slept, studied, and read and outside in the land which he sketched and painted, Hakewill had constant daily evidence of the lie of his images and the lie of the pro-slavery discourse which characterized slavery as benevolent. Everything that Mathison, Bickell, and Cooper described about the daily hell of slaves’ lives – the up at dawn and work to night, the work on your own provision grounds in your “spare” time, the work night and day during crop time, the walk miles to your provision grounds, the walk to market on Sunday, the no shoes, no doctors’ care lives, the breeding, the beatings, the torture – James Hakewill would have seen all of it up close, in great detail, daily over the course of many months. His landscapes then reveal a choice to neutralize the slaves, taking them out of the picture, so that the estates and their wealth in hogsheads and puncheons of sugar, rum, and molasses (which he tallied again and again) were seemingly self-producing. And the country, the “plantation” of Jamaica that was at the time overwhelmingly demographically black, became, through his racially selective gaze, a white man’s country. The question must be posed then, if at this historical juncture in the British Empire, within the context of Jamaica and on the heels of the abolition of the slave trade, did the black slave body, in and of itself, signify slavery as an untenable institution? I believe that it did. This type of deliberate artistic erasure was cleverly taken up by Levy in The Long Song (2010) in a scene, which encapsulated the deceptions of landscape representation. On Jamaica’s Amity Plantation once owned by John Howarth and now inherited by his sister Caroline,5 an artist, the renowned painter Mr Francis Bear of Falmouth was hired primarily to create an elaborate portrait of the mistress and her new husband and plantation master, the former overseer Robert Goodwin. As Levy related, the portrait Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin, although created over the course of several weeks in the long room at Amity, depicted the newlyweds in front of an open landscape of the plantation.6 Thus, besides

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capturing the two sitters, the artist in preparation for the portrait also engaged in the creation of landscapes in various settings around the property. On just such an occasion, “the old distiller-man” Dublin Hilton, who quickly deduced the deception central to such landscapes, approached Bear. Levy wrote: “Now Dublin Hilton stood only a few feet behind the artist and yet this white man, gazing out with frowning absorption upon the view before him, time after time painted another bush where Dublin could clearly see the higgledy-piggledy of the negro village.”7 In the spoken exchange that ensued, Dublin, emboldened by his recent emancipation, pressed the white male artist for an explanation regarding his erasure of the “negro dwellings”. Exasperated by his conversation with the “nigger”, the artist finally barked that “no one wished to find squalid negroes within a rendering of a tropical idyll”.8 Levy’s Francis Bear invokes James Hakewill, who clearly concurred with this aesthetic assessment, camouflaging the “Negro village” which he nevertheless described in his text about Spring Garden Estate.9 But the Bear paintings held several deceptions, the first in the landscape, the suppression of the “higgledy-piggledy of the negro village” which aided in the transformation of the landscape into a “tropical idyll”, and the second in the portrait, the affair between the white husband and new planter Robert Goodwin and his wife’s black house slave July. Indeed, as Levy related, so eager was the virgin Goodwin to have sex with the black female house slave that he did not consummate his marriage on his wedding night and instead spent the evening making love to July and not his new wife, Caroline. Writes Levy, However, it was not Caroline that plucked him. For while Robert Goodwin’s new bride lay reclining upon her bed – the ribbons at the neck of her new nightgown untied and the garment teased down low to reveal the ample mounds of her primped and scented breasts, as she eagerly waited for her new husband to finish his business within the negro village – he was in the room under the house, frenziedly dropping the clothes from off our July’s back.10 For Caroline, the painting was a triumph; material evidence of her status as a planter’s wife, her cultural capital as a patron of the arts, and, most importantly, her (non-existent) relationship with her emotionally and sexually absent husband, Robert Goodwin. It was a lesser matter to her that her marriage was initially completely lacking in intimacy. The portrait of the couple could be used to refute this fact and to create the semblance of a happy marriage, an acceptable image for the outside world. Hung in a place of honour in the long room, replacing the portrait of her long-deceased sister-in-law Agnes, Caroline rewarded the artist with “two bottles of Amity’s finest rum” and, hoping to inspire envy in her neighbours, gathered her wealthy peers to view the finished painting.11 Within the portrait, a standing Robert leaned against the chair upon which Caroline sat, artfully arranged at the best angle to show off “the slope of her shoulders”, as well as her intricate coiffure and elaborate wedding gown.12 As Levy’s narrator relates, “Indeed, so attentive was the artist to render truthfully the detail of the gown, that the pink silk of the garment shimmers as if the actual cloth were pasted upon it.”13 As such, the painting, itself a display of cultural capital, was also a literal representation of the

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Goodwins’ economic capital. And just as for Hakewill’s white Creole Jamaican planter patrons, the act of representing their plantations was a public declaration of their wealth, white privilege, and the social status which they derived from both. The Goodwin’s fictitious portrait set in front of the “tropical idyll” of Amity Plantation, was, like the plantations of Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), meant to inspire envy in its viewers. Indeed, Hakewill’s illustrated volume demonstrates how elite Jamaican whites used art to reproduce, consolidate, and memorialize their wealth, power, and privilege. As Levy’s narrator related, commenting on the function of the portrait, “The intention was that Caroline Goodwin would gaze from out this canvas upon the viewer with so attractive a smile, that all who saw it would contemplate with envy this perfect scene [italics mine].”14 But as I insinuated above during my discussion of Hakewill’s Harbour Street, Kingston (Chapter 8), both black and coloured folk (although not the intended audience), much like Levy’s fictitious newly emancipated slave Dublin, would have gained access to Hakewill’s watercolours, plates, and book and would undoubtedly have arrived at far different conclusions about the images that Hakewill produced. Although it is extremely difficult to recuperate their opinions it does not mean that we should not attempt to do so, and also to contemplate their inevitable difference. The final deceptions of Bear’s painting were ones which Caroline could not hide from her neighbours’ probing eyes. Bear transformed the overly plump Caroline into a “notquite-as-fat-as-she-should-be missus” with “unduly slim” feet.15 This ruse of making Caroline appear more attractive and “more slender than perhaps any who knew her would recall” was voluntarily taken up by the artist who did so to avoid offending his female patron.16 But alas, this was not to be, since far more alarming and potentially embarrassing for Caroline was the artist’s representation and configuration of the three sitters, Robert, Caroline, and July. Besides including the standing Robert Goodwin and the seated Caroline Goodwin, the portrait also represented July, extending a tray of sweetmeats to her mistress. But whereas the angle of Robert’s gaze was supposed to have fallen upon the tray of sweetmeats, it was not lost upon the gathered visitors that it fell instead upon July. Levy makes it clear that the portraitist did not capture a lie since “Robert Goodwin was indeed gazing upon July through the whole of the portrait’s execution. For July was carrying his child and he wished to stare nowhere else.”17 But for Caroline, her neighbour’s unrelenting truthfulness was crushing since, as Kriz has argued, “ignorance, like knowledge, can be a form of power”.18 As a planter’s wife and one of the few upper-class white women on the island at this juncture, Caroline Goodwin should have commanded not only respect, but envy. From the beginning of her loveless marriage, she had consoled herself in part by fervently pretending that her husband did not prefer the company of her black house slave. Caroline’s fury at the memorialization of her husband’s infidelity on canvas, and with a slave no less, resulted in her insistence that Bear rework the portrait. However, “although Francis Bear retouched the likeness for several more weeks, still his daubings could not raise Robert Goodwin’s eyes from off our July [sic].”19 What Levy’s artfully told and historically accurate novel reveals is the extent to which the lives of the white Creole Jamaican plantocracy were governed by elaborate artifice.

402 Conclusion

The gender, sex, race, and class performances of the plantation stage were detailed, complex, and intricately woven plays, which relied upon absences, erasures, secrets, and outright lies. Hakewill would have witnessed this for himself, up close. The planters with whom Hakewill lived during his two-year stay in Jamaica were certainly not unlike Caroline and Robert Goodwin; whites who were known amongst their peers as good, upstanding, Christian, and moral people, and yet also capable of committing the most heinous, racist violence, and exploitation in the most blasé manner. Centuries-removed from the initial Spanish colonization of the island, they did not regard Jamaica as indigenous land, nor did they consider it the property of those who did the majority of the work upon it, the so-called Negroes. Rather, their claims to the land were by virtue of their supposedly superior racial identity and all that this implied, and their engagement with their land and their Negroes within the framework of a Christian “civilizing mission” allowed them to commit and condone racist violence as a necessary, everyday aspect of Jamaican life. Hakewill’s strategic erasure of blacks also supported and was informed by the white ruling-class insistence that only they had the requisite “local” knowledge to rule over the colony and its enslaved black inhabitants.20 Having previously published several illustrated books, Hakewill would have been keenly aware that without a suitable paying audience, his book would not succeed. And the fact of the matter was that within this moment of intensifying abolitionist pressure, the same planters (and their peers) with whom he resided and whose lands he depicted were his best hope of gaining a readership, at least initially. Therefore, Hakewill was more than most artists (even than the fictitious Francis Bear) beholden to the desires of his white Jamaican slaveholding clientele. Although unfortunately Hakewill’s letters have remained lost or have been destroyed, one letter dated 11 July 1825 written by Hakewill and addressed simply to “Gentlemen” seems to support this assertion. In it he requests information about the sale of his books and provided instructions for the return of remaining volumes: Gentlemen Grant thy good info and deliver to the Paddington Carrier, the unsold numbers of Part I of the Jamaican – . yours humbly J Hakewill 14 – New Roads 11 July 1825 [sic]21 Since New Road does not seem to be a Jamaican address from this period, Hakewill appears to have been writing from Britain to inquire about the progress of sales, after his departure from the tropical island.22 As such, given the July 1825 date on the letter, the book about which he inquires had obviously already been published prior to the date of the letter. The salutation “Gentlemen” indicates that Hakewill is addressing more than one man. As such, at the very least, we know that he had kept in touch with at least two of the men (and likely more) that he had met during his stay. But what the letter also indicates is that there were “unsold numbers” of his book. I would argue that the seeming failure of

Conclusion

403

Hakewill’s book, as seen in his request for the return of unsold volumes from Jamaica, was a manifestation of the political climate of vigorous external abolitionist pressure which made such a romanticized and sanitized vision of plantation slavery seem, in the midst of slavery’s last stand, an objectionable idea. As Kriz has argued, “It was probably only when the end of slavery seemed assured that the island could be marketed as a picturesque and exotic locale.”23 Furthermore, Hakewill’s book prophesied the next phase in Jamaican and West Indian colonial, and eventually national formation, the struggle to define the role and place of the free person of African descent in society. As Kriz has argued, what was to follow in the 1830s was a white Jamaican elite “faced with the problem of redefinition that hinged on how to incorporate a newly freed African-Jamaican majority into the body politic”.24 What produced grave anxiety was the idea that this transition might be “out of the hands of a white minority”.25 As for the success of his Jamaican venture, Higman has argued “It is not known whether Hakewill made a profit from his Picturesque Tour of Jamaica, but the fact that only seven of the projected twelve parts were published suggests that it was not an overwhelming financial success.”26 Although this, Hakewill’s last tourist book, did not seem to bring him additional wealth and accolades, as a fairly successful architect and author, he had already achieved a modicum of stability and could leave his sons a small legacy.27 In his last will and testament drawn up on 10 May 1843, signed on the 16th and declared by executor John Harrison, Hakewill (whose residence was listed as Adam Street Bryanstone Square) left to his two eldest, surviving sons, Arthur William and Frederick Charles, the legacy of 19 guineas each.28 To his business partner, Charles Willson, Hakewill left a gold watch.29 After he was buried and his debts settled, Hakewill instructed his executor to provide for the education of his youngest son Richard Hakewill and indicated that any remaining sum over 200 pounds was to be split between all three sons.30 Hakewill’s bid for success as an architect and author arguably resulted in only modest achievement. The Jamaican planters and their families who had welcomed him to the island during this tumultuous time and with whom he socialized for two years would remain, through their greater wealth, in a higher class. But paradoxically, the book that was to represent the veracity of Jamaican landscape through topography arguably rendered this tropical world of sugar estates more elusive, sublimating the sugar cane cultivation for which Jamaica was most famous by erasing the considerable African slave holdings and the back-breaking labour that made it all possible. Notes 1 Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth-Century”, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830, eds. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 122. 2 Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved”, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, eds. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 41. 3 Cynric R. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clark, 1826), p. 69.

404 Conclusion 4 Elizabeth A. Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994), p. 390. 5 Caroline Howarth’s inheritance came by way of the tragedy of her brother John Howarth’s suicide, which she craftily conspired (with the Scottish overseer Tam Dewar) to blame on a free black man, Nimrod Freeman. Levy, The Long Song, pp. 118–122. After returning with his Scottish overseer, Tam Dewar, from helping to quell a slave insurrection, John Howarth, traumatized by the events, took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In particular, the incident that drove Howarth over the edge was his witnessing of the torture of a white “man of God”, the tarring and feathering of Mr Bushell, the Baptist missionary of the parish. For Howarth, the depravity of the situation was worsened by the nature of the attack, perpetuated by nine cross-dressed white Jamaican planters, “ugly-beauties atop horses” in “diabolic disguise” who “sullied the good name of Jamaican planters”. Levy, The Long Song, pp. 114–6. 6 Levy, The Long Song, pp. 217–9. 7 Levy, The Long Song, p. 233. 8 Levy, The Long Song, p. 234. 9 James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall; E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825), n.p. Hakewill described the Negro village, where the 600 slaves resided, as comprising 30 acres and being at the foot of the knoll below the Great House. 10 Levy, The Long Song, p. 218. Although Caroline did not initially know it to be the cause, the intensity of the relationship between Goodwin and July kept the new planter from engaging in sexual relations with her, his white wife. Indeed, as Caroline noted, Robert only visited her bed twice in the span of the first year of their marriage (p. 222). However, the affair between the white overseer-cum-planter Goodwin and the black, or really mulatta, house slave July (the product of the repeated rape of the field slave Kitty by the Scottish overseer Tam Dewar) does not end well. After a long and intense “marital” relationship (they referred to each other as “husband” and “wife” and maintained a “home” in the basement of the plantation Great House) which produced a daughter, a “fair-skinned, grey-eyed girl who was named Emily”, Goodwin turned upon July at the close of slavery when his frustration mounted at his inability to control and manipulate the now freed black labourers on Amity. When the Negroes abandoned the plantation after being terrorized by Goodwin’s hired band of white thugs, July and Caroline find him in a cane field disoriented and dishevelled, “ragged, filthy, black”, hacking mindlessly at cane pieces with a machete. Although it is July who tries to console him, his despondency at the flight of his Negroes soon turns into a rage against all blacks for which July becomes the easiest and closest target. As July moved to still his frenzied and purposeless labour, Goodwin accosts her crying “Get away from me, nigger, get away”, finally seizing her by the throat and raising the machete above her head to strike her. In the end, it is Caroline’s intervention that spares July from the deadly assault of her white “husband”. Levy, The Long Song, pp. 227, 229, 261, 262. 11 Levy, The Long Song, p. 229. 12 Levy, The Long Song, p. 221. 13 Levy, The Long Song, p. 221. 14 Levy, The Long Song, p. 221. 15 Levy, The Long Song, p. 229. 16 Levy, The Long Song, p. 221. 17 Levy, The Long Song, p. 229. 18 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 24. Kriz made her comments in regards to Hans Sloane’s presumably clandestine spying on a Negro festival in Jamaica with a Mr Baptiste. She points out the ways in which Sloane’s access to and representation of the festival were mediated by his cultivated ignorance of his subjects’ resistance and by his preconceptions of African social life and moral character. 19 Levy, The Long Song, p. 230. While Francis Bear had unintentionally depicted Robert’s sexual indiscretions for all to see, Caroline, humiliated and enraged, reacted by misdirecting her venom towards the artist by re-hanging the painting in an unused room and demanding the return of the gift of rum. 20 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 136. 21 Letter from J. Hakewill, 11 July 1825, Manuscript Number MS 734, National Library of Jamaica, Kingston. The translation provided is my own. The National Library of Jamaica has no official translation of the letter and the handwriting is very difficult to decipher. The library could not provide any details of the letter’s

Conclusion

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

405

origins, except to say that it is kept in an envelope addressed in 1914 to Frank Cundall, a former Head Librarian at the Institute of Jamaica. It would be very useful to determine to whom specifically Hakewill had addressed the letter and from whom Cundall received it. I am grateful to Mrs Genevieve Jones-Edman (Coordinator, Research and Information Department, National Library of Jamaica) for providing me with this information based upon her consultation of a placenames directory. Kay Dian Kriz, “Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840”, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 160. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 143. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 143. B.W. Higman, “James Hakewill: A Biographical Sketch”, in James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Mill Press, 1990), n.p. Hakewill later published a tract entitled An Attempt to determine the exact character of Elizabethan Architecture (1835). Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p. The Hakewills’ second-born son, Henry James (b. 1813) who had become a sculptor, had died earlier in 1834. Their eldest son, Arthur William (1808–1856), became an architect. The third son, Frederick Charles became a portrait painter like his mother. Higman, “James Hakewill”, n.p. Will of James Hakewill Adam Street Bryanstone Square, Middlesex, 8 August 1843. A guinea is £1 1s in British currency: 19 guineas in 1843 was equivalent to $2083.14 US currency. Historical Currency Conversions at http://futureboy.us/ fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=19¤cy=guineas&fromYear=1843 (date of last access 9 February 2014). There is another item which Hakewill left to his business partner. However, the writing (at least for me) is illegible. The will also states that Willson owed him the sum of 500 pounds. But it would appear that the Hakewill sons were at odds (with their father and perhaps their younger brother) since the will also stipulated that, should the elder sons contest their father’s wishes, their legacies were to be revoked. This statement, along with the fact that Hakewill felt that he had to legally stipulate that the two elder brothers aid in the completion of the youngest son’s education, seems to indicate that a rift existed between the two surviving elder sons and the youngest, Richard Whitworth. If so, could it be that the youngest son was a mixed-race child conceived in Jamaica with a woman of African ancestry? Hakewill would not have been the first British man to bring his mixed-race child back to Britain. Of course, this is pure speculation on my part, which may only be resolved with the discovery of primary sources like correspondence and journals.

Index

abolition: slavery 86, 100n129, 103n164, 201, 204, 299; slave trade (1807) 27, 79, 107n219, 210, 218, 227, 235, 252, 398 abolitionists: agitation, characterization 234–5; attacks 229; puritanical order, commentary 349; race/identity ideas 248 academic over-saturation, destabilization (Slavery Studies) 2, 3, 6, 13, 53 amalgamation, cross-racial sex 156n180; labour-intensive colonial amalgamation 397 Antigua: black subjects, complexions 371–2; BoilingHouse (Clark), aquatint 372; Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogshead on Board (Clark), aquatint 220; Clark, William (perspective) 217–23; Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-holes (Clark), aquatint 219, 257n14, 258n29, 286, 289, 290; Exterior of Curing-House and Stills (Clark), aquatint 222; labour, study (Clark) 291; Mill-Yard (Clark), aquatint 254; Planting SugarCane (Clark), aquatint 219; race/class hierarchies, exposure 221; racial demographics 128, 130; sexual misconduct, source (Schaw description) 239; slavery: imaging 217 aqueduct, construction (Jamaica) 284–5 Arthur William (son of Hakewill) 301, 403, 405n28 Barbuda (Antigua) 178, 218; private preserve usage 219; Royal Grant, obtaining 219 Barringer, Tim 2, 9, 30, 202, 223, 233, 397 Bayly, Zachary Esq. (Jamaican planter) 284 Bear, Francis (Andrea Levy character) 399, 400, 401, 402, 404n19 Beckford, William (Jamaican planter) 23, 195, 200; debtor’s prison 205, 209, 215n66 Beckles Hilary McD. 3, 17, 35n41, 111–12, 152n116, 242, 213n37, 299, 305, 307–8, 328n113, 329n152, 332n186, 336n242, 346, 361, 378; sexual typology 203, 301–2, 304, 329n132, 332n182 Belisario, Isaac 46, 142–3; Sketches of Character 56n24, 154n160, 156n188, 387n120 Belize 10, 264n107; bushy (epithet) 10; mahogany industry 10, 35n39, 84 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio (la flota) 13

Beothuk (indigenous): genocide 35n43; observation of Buchan’s party 12; Shawnadithit 12, 22, 35n43 Berlin, Ira 17, 34n25, 294 Bhabha, Homi K. (mimicry) 142 Bickell, Rev. R. (observer Jamaican slavery) The West Indies as they are 26, 89, 306, 312, 341, 374 black Canadians: music, African Diaspora (connection) 143–4; perception 6 Black Diaspora 1, 5, 9, 13, 48, 52, 85, 139 black women/females: abortifacients (use of) 239; breast, exposure 125–6; cruelty 305; concubinage, commonness 216, 315–16; cultural performance, white male demands 136; enslaved females, breeder function 133; exploitation 281–2, 308, 370–1; female sitter, hypersexuality 126; male desire 308–9; politeness/erasure 310–7; positioning 246; rude knapsack, representation and use of 282; sexual exploitation 68, 74, 240–4; sexual coercion/violence, concubinage 145n16, 203; sexual coercion/ violence, Eve (gang rape, Jamaica) 266n134, 275n274, 363; sexual coercion/violence, illusion to (Mary Prince) 74, 91; sexuality, vilification 396; sexual predilections 240; slaves: fertility 251; Thistlewood attitudes/behaviours 244; white males: desire 242; white planter sexual exploitation, normality 203 BogWalk,The (Hakewill) 231, 350; enslaved, presence 351 Bourne, Adolphus (printmaker) 46, 69 branding 93n17, 295, 327n97 Brazil 15, 35n47, 103n173, 236, 336n236 Bridge over theWhite River (Hakewill) 231 Brittian, James 306 Brooks, Tom (slave), description 81–3 Broome, John (of Barbados, living in Montreal) 80 brown (racial type) 30, 326n71, 329n132 Browne, Maria Catherine (wife of Hakewill) 300–1 Brunias, Agostino: cross-racial sexual relations 245–7; Linen Market (painting), Dominica 245; Market Day (painting), Roseau, Dominica 371, 378; mulatta images 297; paintings 210–11;Young,William Sir 210

408 Index Buckridge, Steeve O. (slave dress) 82, 101n150, 104n178, 104n180, 155n168, 337n254 Burnard, Trevor 79, 229, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 246, 248, 308; radical uncertainty (of slaves’ world) 236, 237 Burnside property (James McGill, Montreal) 85, 166; attractiveness 166–7 Canada 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 18, 20, 31, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 59, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76, 79, 82, 85, 122, 126, 132, 133, 137, 143, 162, 164, 169, 173, 362; great white north 10, 103n177 Cap François, importance 118, 120 Caribbean Slavery in the AtlanticWorld (Beckles and Shepherd) 3 carriage 303, 319, 321, 350, 358 Cartier, Jacques 17, 157 Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (Clark) 219–20, 222, 254 Cartwright, J. (printmaker) 46 Casid, Jill (plantation) 19, 20, 38n93, 58n59, 118, 158, 197 Casteel, Sarah Phillips 9, 53, 206 castration (black men and slave men) 264n110 Ceded Island (Dominica, St Vincent, Tobago) 298; British settlement 164; genre studies 27–9; images 371 Champ de Mars (Montreal) 163; description 69–70 Charles (Matthew Lewis coachman, Jamaica) 372–3 Charles Willson (Hakewill’s business partner) 403 Charlotte (McGill, Marie-Charles, Sarah) slave 87, 90, 92 chief governors (driver), term (usage) 287, 289 chigga: foot/toe 350; infestation 385n76 Christian civilizing mission 402; curate 106n215; Sunday worship slaves 255, 274n263 Christmas: Christmas and New Year celebrations, slaves (John-Canoe, John-Crayfish) 387n127; keeping, observation of Mary Prince 135; Mary Prince and Daniel James marriage 91; slave festivities Jamaica 141, 142 Citadel Hill (Montreal): British flag, prominence 163; ensigns, visibility 159; razing 157 Clap (gonorrhoea) contraction 247 Clark, William 23, 24, 27, 29, 46, 85, 205, 211, 218, 223, 253, 285; Admiral Tallemach 218, 219; Antigua 29, 218; The Boiling-House, aquatint 372; Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogshead on Board, aquatint 220; The Court-House, aquatint 257n14, 258n29, 285, 286, 373; Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-holes, aquatint 219, 257n14, 258n29, 286, 289; Exterior of Curing-House and Stills, aquatint 222; Interior of the Distillery, aquatint 257n14, 258n29, 286, 289; Mill-Yard, aquatint 254; physical exertion 221, 230, 321, 398; Planting Sugar-Cane, aquatint 257n14, 258n29, 286; slaves (complexions) 29, 128, 245, 308, 358, 372; white labour (intellectual) 222

Clarke, Edward (dissenting vote, Devises Act, Jamaican House of Assembly) 346 climate, tropical (disease and fear of) 51 Close Harbour Company (Jamaica) 353–4 cloth: lace-bark (laghetto) 82, 155; Linen Market, Dominica (Brunias) 245, 316, 378; osnaburg/ oznaburgh 82, 104, 155; rations (Jamaica) 262n82, 396; sale of (Ceded Islands) 27 Codrington, Christopher (Antigua) 219 coffee: Pennsylvania import 123; planters, interactions 225; St Domingue (Haiti) 118, 123 coloured (racial type) 30, 49, 119, 141, 240, 247, 297, 376; children 11, 117, 347; females (housekeepers) 312, 313; people, abuse 23, 300; population 29, 127–8, 130, 233, 368; socializing limits (with whites) 310–14, 344–5, 360, 378 Columbus, Christopher 14, 130, 218, 320; Torres Letter 320 conch (shell) 236, 237, 265n115 Cooper, Rev. Thomas (observer Jamaican slavery) 26, 89, 236, 239, 267n136; Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves 39, 100, 214, 261, 322, 382 corporal punishment, impact 237–8; whipping 93n20, 107n227, 236, 237–8 Coudrin, Marie-Félicité 92 Cramahé, Hectore-Théophile 62 Creole 7, 10, 17, 30–1 Crookshank, William (plantation employee of Thomas Thistlewood, Jamaica) 247 Cuba 14, 122, 161, 173, 196, 320 cultivation cycle (sugar) 221–2 Curaçao Creole 89 Cutting the Sugar-Cane (Clark) 281, 290 Dance at the Chateau (alternative image title for Minuets of the Canadians, Heriot) 137 de Beaucourt, François Malépart 8, 111–2, 119, 167; death 128 de Brisay, Jacques-Réné (Marquis de Denonville), 60 de Champlain, Hélène (née Boullé) 177 de Champlain, Samuel 157, 177 Demerara 235, 264n109 demographic dominance, denial (enslaved black women, Jamaica) 311 de Montigny, Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont 117, 146n25 de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau 117–18 Desriveres, Marie-Charlotte Trottier Desrivières, (née Guillimin) 177 Dessaline, Jean-Jacques (general, Haiti) 120, 122 Devises Act (Jamaica) 345, 349 Dianah (African slave wife, Jamaica) 242, 268, 269 Dick (mulatto driver, Vineyard Pen, Jamaica) 265n125, 266n129, 289 Dick (slave, music commentary) 135 Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes (Clark) 219, 344–5

Index documents of denial (John Michael Vlach) 22 Dominica: Agostinto Brunias 297, 316; Linen Market, Dominica (Brunias), painting 316; Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (Brunias), painting 371; William Young, Sir 140, 210 Dominican Republic 130 Donne, Grace (mixed race housekeeper of Simon Taylor, Jamaica) 312, 313 Douglass, Frederick 88, 241; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 268n159, 268n161 dress 66, 70, 82, 83, 115, 118, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 163, 164, 171, 174, 176, 177, 182, 183, 187, 197, 219, 221, 245, 279, 300, 304, 315, 316, 317, 318, 321, 354, 358, 360, 366, 369, 371, 373; gloves 63, 317, 375; headwrap 253, 371; parasol 130, 245, 316, 317, 366, 375; slippers (Duchess slave) 317, 364; veil 318 driver (chief governor) 84, 233, 236, 253 droger (boat) 221, 254, 353 Dulongpré, Louis 167–8 Duncan, James D. 24, 65, 175; Steam BoatWharf 65, 175, 176, 183, 187, 193n83;View from St Helen’s Island 186 Dunlop, Ann (information wanted notice) 68 Dunn, William (incarceration) 64 Earle, Rebecca 317, 336n243; clothing acts 317 Egerton, D.E. (printmaker) 46 Elmes, William (graphic satire) 298 English diminutives (use of in slave naming) 294 ensign 158, 161, 165, 359, 364 enslaved Africans: activities, imaging 341; cargo 7, 52; ethnic differentiation/bias 78; individuality 139; musical traditions, surveillance/ documentation 200; representation 111 ethnic differentiation/bias, existence (slave populations) 78 Exterior of Curing-House and Stills (Clark) 222–23 Fenwick, Elizabeth (white female, Barbados) 238–9; correspondence (Mary Hays) 37n66, 238, 267n144; Orlando (son) 239 field negroes, lives 219; female to male ratio of 281, 308, 332n187 flight, politics (St Domingue) 119–24 foreground framing elements (topographical landscapes) 180 Frederick Charles (son of Hakewill) 301 French Barony (Longueuil), control 177–8 Friendship Estate (Jamaica) 251 Gaétant, Benoite (widow of de Beaucourt and slave owner, Montreal) 87 General Advertiser (Philadelphia newspaper), advertisements 122–3 General Chart of theWest India (cartouche, Seller) 197 gens de couleur (Martinique) 379 geography 3, 9, 10, 15, 20, 24, 41, 42, 43, 49, 51, 52, 54, 117, 119, 157, 185, 195, 227, 277, 292,

409

344, 396; authority (eye/I) 8, 42; cartography 25, 42, 49, 55, 157, 195, 395; centre-periphery model 8, 9; deforestation/re-plantation 197; hydrography 195; knowledge 13, 46, 55, 195, 196; “on the spot” (representation) 8, 10, 43, 182, 205, 218, 235; prospect 21, 67, 76, 81, 162, 208, 227, 228, 315, 318, 364, 398; rural vs. urban model 9, 10, 355; terra nullius 19, 208 Gibson, Robert (ensign in the 36th Regiment) 161–2 Gilroy, Paul (Black Atlantic) 52, 88 Girard, Philip 77 Girard, Philippe 118 Golden Grove Plantation (Simon Taylor, Jamaica) 207; coloured females, women status (refusal) 314 Golden Vale Estate (Jamaica) 20 Goodwin (née Howarth), Caroline (Andrea Levy character) 400–1 Goodwin, Robert (Andrea Levy character) 293–4, 399–401 Gray, James 181; Montreal, from St Helens Island 181 Greenwich Estate (Jamaica) 251 Guillet, Catherine (slave) 119, 129; marriage 129–30 Guthrie, Robert M. (slave owner Montreal) 81 Haiti 31, 88, 112, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 161; affranchis 128; Haitian Revolution 25, 31, 59, 88, 120, 121, 128, 132, 309; racial demographics 128, 130; slave mortality 127, 252 Hakewill, James 20, 24; black subjects, colour (uniformity) 379; The BogWalk (aquatint) 231; book dedication 217; Bridge over theWhite River, St. Mary’s (aquatint) 231; Bryan Castle Great House, Trelawny (aquatint) 218, 226, 257n10, 302, 303, 327n103, 342; Cardiff Hall, St. Ann’s (aquatint) 342, 347, 349, 380n7; colonial allegiances 217; dark brown, selection 376–7; daytime (nature of landscape representations) 174, 177, 182, 183, 277, 284; domestification 169, 230; Harbour Street, Kingston (aquatint) 344, 350, 364, 377; Haughton Court, Hanover (watercolour) 224; Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (aquatint) 280; Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East,View from the Change of Air House (watercolour) 319; house, description 302; images, examination 22; Jamaican landscape 164; The King’s Square, St. Jago de laVega (aquatint) 338n259, 350; Kingston, and Port Royal (aquatint) 166, 297; length and nature of sojourn (Jamaica) 217; Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s (watercolour) 224, 232, 253; Lyssons Estate, St.Thomas in the East (watercolour) 224; MillYard, Holland Estate (watercolour) 21, 43; mixed-race children (possibility of) 300–1; Montego Bay from Reading Hill (aquatint)232; Montpelier Estate, St. James’s (aquatint) 304, 338n259; Monument of the late Thomas Hibbert Esquire AgualtaVale, St. Mary’s (aquatint) 342; picturesque images, sanitization 399; Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica 21, 23, 217, 277; Port Maria, St. Mary’s (aquatint) 342, 343, 357; prints 70–1; print, topographical details

410 Index 315; publication 46; Rose Hall (aquatint) 298; St Thomas in the East (Hakewill) 280; St.Thomas in the Vale from Mount Diablo (aquatint) 376, 395; slaves (representation of) complexion 29, 89, 118, 128, 316; Spring Garden Estate (aquatint) 278; tours 277; Trinity Estate, St Mary’s (aquatint)164; upper-class/ leisured white female subjects 358–9; Waterfall on theWindward Road (aquatint) 277–8; white female subjects, representation 315–6; white women 296–310; Whitney Estate, Clarendon (aquatint) 342, 354; wife, Maria Catherine 300; will 328n124, 405n28; Williamsfield Estate (aquatint) 280 Hamble Town (Bermuda), public slave auction 91 Hammond, James Henry (governor of South Carolina) 204 Harbour Street, Kingston (Hakewill) 357–9 Harley, J. B. 8, 19, 42, 44, 54, 55, 157, 185, 195, 230, 396 Haughton Court, Hanover (Hakewill) 224 Hays, Mary (correspondence with Elizabeth Fenwick Barbados) 238–9 Henry James (son of Hakewill) 301 Henry, Walter (Montreal) 178 Heriot, George 111; Caribbean travels 137; foreground colours, usage 180; La Danse Ronde; 134, 143; Minuets of the Canadians 134, 143; Negro Dance,West Indies 138; Quebec scene 136, 141; Travels through the Canadas 133;White River, St Mary’s, Jamaica 137 Hetty (pregnant slave of French origin, Bermuda) 108 Hibbert, George (factoring, London) 234–5 Hibbert, Thomas 234; internment 377; monument 377; relationship, sanction (absence) 378 higgler/huckster 246, 357 Higman, B. W. 20, 21, 217, 225, 278, 282, 283, 284, 285, 291, 319, 344, 351 Hispaniola 120, 130, 196 hogshead 6, 31, 34, 39, 174, 221, 222, 285, 286 Hope Estate/Plantation (Jamaica) 292; cattle ledger 294; Negro list 288 Hope-Wallace, James 183–4; NegroWaiter on board the British America Steamer 183, 184 horses: behavior, Kidd image 319; and carriage 321, 363, 374, 376; colonization use 320–21; cost Jamaica 319; Hakewill positioning 318; importation by Columbus 320; modernity 317, 319, 320; side saddle 317, 318, 321 House of Assembly (Jamaica) 256, 283, 377; Devises Act 345, 349 House of Assembly (Quebec) 65 Howarth, John (Andrea Levy character) 293 Howe, Bridget (alcohol consumption) 65–6 Huguet-Latour, Louis (notary) 129 Hunter, Sarah (mixed race housekeeper of Simon Taylor, Jamaica) 312 hurricane 204, 206, 278 Hyers, Martha (black female, Montreal) 68

imperial intrusion (concept) 12, 15 indentured servants 35n41, 152n116, 214n37; Sutton, Richard (fugitive servant) 81 indigenous (Native) 30; Arawak 14; Carib 60; first Indian, white tourist sight of/imaginings 165; Hayiti (Haiti) 144n3; Hochelaga (Montreal) 14, 157; panis(e) 11, 81, 86; Stadacona (Quebec City) 36n54; Taino-speaking 14; Wadadli/Waladli (Antigua) 218; Xaymaca (Jamaica) 14 Ingham, Leticia (information wanted notice) 68 Insulae Insignia (Seller) 198–9 Italian sketchbooks (Hakewill) 218 James, Abraham (white soldier Jamaica) 298, 322n3, 366; The Torrid Zone or, Blessings of Jamaica 366 Jamaica: abolitionist attacks 229; abusive owners 306; Beckford description, sexualization 203; Beckford enrapture 201; Blue Mountains 353; Bog Walk (Hakewill), aquatint 231; British conquest 76; British imagination 195; Christmas festivities 141; colonized landscape 17–24; coloured people, abuse 312; common good/conflict of interest 249; concubine/housekeeper 244; death/disease, torrid zone 227; housekeeper, description 244; imperial connections 48–52; Kingston 16, 46, 65, 224, 309, 315, 319, 345, 353, 355, 357–60, 363, 365, 367, 370; Kriz examination 182; landscapes 11; landscaping 195; Lewis journey, description 226; livestock pens 341; lodging house 66, 225, 360, 361, 362, 363, 367, 370; military 13, 47, 66, 121, 161; mills, feeding 253; Mocho Mountains 351; modernity 317–22; Montego Bay (Hakewill), aquatint 232; Montreal, comparison 13–15; plantations, inner workings 233–4; planters: Cooper remonstration 255; poll-tax 252; population size (by race) 101n145; privilege 317–22; property, Beckford inheritance 201; residence, observation 397; Rio Cobre 345, 350; Royal Gazette strategy 295; scenery, European comparisons 207; Seller description 196; settlements, vision (Hakewill) 341; slave life, torture 22–3; slave population, arguments 251–2; slavery: imaging 217; knowledge 348; Spanish (Jamaica) 76, 78, 81, 161, 198, 199, 344, 345; stock, regulation/ monitoring/appraisal 342; strategic point, sugar (importance) 230; sugar cultivation (per acre of land) 225; sugar plantations, life (representation) 277; Sunday market scene, observation 368; wealth, cost/calculation 291; white British peasant, enslaved Jamaican Negro (parity) 234; white femininity 317–22; white Jamaica creole planter class, life/art (deception) 395; white males, enfranchisement 238; white men (licentiousness) 229; white women, population (low level) 242; Windward Passage (Seller), engraving 198

Index Jamaica Assembly, sugar power 283, 345 James, Abraham (graphic satire) 298, 366 James, Daniel (husband of Mary Prince, Antigua) 91, 92 Jean-Baptiste-François/ Jean Beaucour dit l’Africain (slave Montreal) 87, 130 Joseph- François (journeyman) 92 Juba (slave, Jamaica) 243 Kidd, Joseph 22, 24, 178, 279, 318, 319, 357, 358, 373, 378; BelleVue Residence near Kingston (lithograph) 278; Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series ofViews (lithograph) 23, 211; The Parade and Upper Part of Kingston (lithograph) 319; Scene at Up Park Camp (lithograph) 373; View of Kingston from the Commercial Rooms (lithograph) 357; white female representation 315, 316 Kriz, Kay Dian 1, 2, 142 landscapes: boundary (Lewis) 228; decorations 208; figures, presence 201–2; function/treatment 53; geographical terms 42; image, symbolic relevance 224; imagination, participation 12; painting 54–5; pastoral 10, 210; picturesque 23, 44, 179, 180, 186, 201, 202, 210, 211, 225, 227; prints, appeal 43–4; racialization 8–13; representation 41; spatial discipline, perception 8; staffage 44, 85, 398; Theobalds (Lord Burghley’s house) display 45; topographical landscapes 54–5; tropical picturesque 207, 210, 223 L’Assomption, Lower Canada 169 Légaré, Jacques 18 Leney, William Satchwell (engraver) 69 Levy, Andrea 292–3, 310; Dublin Hilton (distiller-man character) 400; July (slave character) 293; Kitty (slave character) 292, 293; The Long Song (novel) 292, 309, 399; Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin (portrait) 399 Lewis, Matthew (white plantation owner Jamaica) 78, 136, 202, 353; breeding list 250–2; Cornwall Estate (Westmoreland) 108n229; graundee (midwife) 250; Hordley Estate 259n43, 324n36; house, description 302; Jamaica journey, description 226; Journal of aWest India Proprietor landscape, boundary 228; miscegenating, impact 370; slave observations 225; views, impact 234 A List of Negroes on Hope Plantation in St. Andrews 78, 287, 289, 292 List of Working and Breeding Cattle on Hope Estate, 292 livestock: haciendas (Royal Farms Spanish Jamaica) 320; pens, usage 341; usage 253–4 Llanrumny Estate, St Mary’s (Hakewill) 21, 224, 232, 253 Logan, James (visitor Montreal) 80 Luffman, John (Antigua) 140 Lyssons Estates, St Thomas in the East (Hakewill) 224 McCord Museum (Montreal) 25, 114, 132, 133

411

McGill (Charlotte, Marie-Charles, Sarah) [slave] 87, 90, 92 McGill, James 79, 85–92; Burnside property 166; attractiveness 166–7; death 167; exporting efforts 174; heritage 86; house New Market 191n49; importation, rum 16; marriage 177–8; portrait 268; slaves, terms (usage) 90; warehouses, description 86; will 190n44 McNae, David (survey, Golden Vale Estate in Portland, Jamaica) 20 Madame Eustache Trottier Desrivières Beaubien, née Marguerite Malhiot (portrait) 115; absence of flesh 115 magistrates (Jamaica) 255, 256 Mair, Lucille 230, 281, 309 maison de débauche (appearance) 65 Manesty, Joseph (merchant, African trade) 50 Marie-Charles-Joseph Le Moyne de Longueuil (heir to Barony) 181–2 Marie-Thérèse-Zémire (slave) 119–24, 130, 131, 133 Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (Brunias) 371, 378 maroons 81, 235 marriage, slave 91–2 Martin, William (captain) 162 Martinique 378, 379; gens de couleur 379 Mathison, Gilbert (white plantation owner Jamaica) 26, 27, 225, 249, 250–2, 255, 286, 289, 351, 368, 369, 398, 399; Notices Respecting Jamaica 39, 249, 261, 324, 380 Meighen, Frank Stephen (brigadier-general) 64 Middle Passage 7, 8, 23, 127, 134, 229, 242; second Middle Passage (Nelson concept) 7, 85, 127 Minuets of the Canadians (Heriot) 111, 133–40; musicians, presence 134; print, inclusion 134; representation of black male subjects 134, 398 mixed-race children 312; inheritances 29, 346; labour 214n37; treatment 152n116, 214n37, 270n192 mixed-race people 211; names, racial terminology 141 mixed-race relatives (lesser), domestic help 119 mixed-race women/females 27–8, 301, 308; desirability, leverage 313; gathering restrictions with white women, ban 314; housekeepers 67, 244; interaction, white women 91; sexuality, basis 203; superiority 300 Mocho Mountains (Jamaica) 351 Moco Country 89 molasses (sugar cane by-product) 52, 86, 123, 172, 200, 222, 233, 253, 290, 372 Molson, William (banker, brewer, distiller, merchant) 183 Monck, Christopher (2nd Duke of Abermarle, governor of Jamaica) 135 Montego Bay from Reading Hill (Hakewill) 231, 354–5 Montreal: African enslavement, conditions 126–8; Articles of Capitulation 77; Beckwith, John

412 Index (alcohol perspective) 73; black minority, situating 79–85; British capture 162; British military stronghold 157–70; British seizure 157; brothels, presence 66; capitulation (1760) 75–6; city, shaping 164–5; colonial beginnings 157; colonial landscape 162; colonial slave port, re-imagining 170–7; colonial society, dress (significance) 82; colonial trade, re-imagining 170–7; colonized landscape 17–24; colonizers, impact 72; comments 18; conquest, impact 76; Constitutional Act 75; drunken soldiers, problem 62–75; enslaved African, representation 111; enslaved population, oppression 77; fortifications: description 157–8; French regime, impact 76–7; grog/rum mixture 72–3; harbour, engraving 172; Hyers, Martha 68; imperial connections 48–52; Jamaica, comparison 13–15; landmass, representation 54; landscapes 11; landscaping 157; loose women, problem 62–75; McGill, James 86–92; merchants, arrival 86; Museum of Fine Arts, Portrait of a HaitianWoman installation 125–6; plan, map 159; population, existence/ location 80; portraiture, slavery (relationship) 111–16; post-slavery 130; prostitutes, presence 66; Royal Military Academy, drawing/mapmaking 160; Saint Helens Island perspective, engraving 179, 181; St Lawrence River (importance of) 18, 19, 26, 47, 49, 52, 133, 163, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 185; slave, portrait 128–33; slavery: British adaptation 75–9; France/Britain, impact 59; slaves: Christian status 83; slaves: escape 77; slaves: ownership, description 86–92; slaves: purchase 61; slaves: smuggling, impact 89; soldiers 16; steam boat wharf, lithograph 176; Sulpicians, impact 76; tippling houses, presence 64; town, plan (illustration) 159; troops, show 69–70; vagrancy, problem 62–75; watercolour, examples 160, 161; warehouses, description 86 Montreal Gazette 72, 81, 124, 128 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 114, 120, 125, 132 Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. Saint Mary’s (Hakewill) 342, 377 Moore, Henry (free black, Montreal) 80, 129 Morant Bay (Jamaica) 353 Moravian Church attendance (Antigua) 141, 335n222 mulatta/mulatto 245, 297, 371, 374, 375, 376; Agostina Brunias 28, 29, 210, 211, 245, 246, 297, 298, 316, 359, 371, 378; Ceded Islands 27, 29, 164, 298, 371 Mustee (racial type) 369 Mustiphino/Musteefino (racial type) 369 Myners, Charles (slave owner, Bermuda) 91 naked bodies (slaves), playful reflections (Beckford description) 202 Napier, Peter (captain, British Navy, slave owner Isabella) 67

Negro Dance in the Island of Dominica (Brunias) 378 Negro River (Jamaica), representation 285 Negroes: Christmas festivities 141; fugitive status, identification 77–8; heads of, counting (Hakewill) 30, 285 Negro villages 352; food, growth 87; Hakewill images 400, 402; picturesque scene: Lewis description 202; requirements 202; slaves, presence 15; suppression of, Francis Bear painting 404n19 Nevis, black man (prohibitions on travel) 88 New France: British seizure/renaming 76; Negro slaves, presence 60; panis(e) 11, 15, 30, 75, 81; slavery, misperception of humane/familial traits 60 New Road (Jamaica) 402–3 Newry Estate (Jamaica), visit of Eliza Chadwick Roberts 304–5 Newton, Richard (graphic satire) 298 “New World”: Edenic vision 206; emptiness 20; sites 20, 47 Nugent, George (governor, Jamaica) 122, 300, 307 Nugent, Maria (white female Jamaica) 299, 360–1; coloured females 304; cross-racial sex, commentary 301; horses 318; marriage 215n45; visit, Simon Taylor 307 object de luxe (Quebec, black female slaves as) 75 octoroon (racial type) 11, 30 other whites (lower class) 355–67 Ovando (governor, Spanish Jamaica), correspondence 320 overseer: house 295; Mr Hazard, Newry Estate (Jamaica) 304; punishments 237–8; Thomas Thistlewood (Jamaica) 27, 69, 219, 237, 314, 363; William Clark (Antigua) 219 owners (slave): abusive owners (Jamaica) 306; Captain Darrell (Bermuda) 100n124; Charles Myner (Bermuda) 91; James McGill (Montreal) 16, 25, 26, 85–7, 92, 167; John Cope (Egypt Estate, Jamaica) 242, 246, 247, 363; Maria Nugent (Jamaica) 304, 311; Mary Prince, Betsy Williams (Bermuda) 91; Mr and Mrs I (Bermuda) 108; Mr and Mrs Wood (Antigua) 74, 219, 227; Mr D (Turk’s Island) 74, 108, 292; presumed authority 226; white slave owners, vengefulness 295–6 Palmer: Annie Mary (née Paterson) 304; debt 303; Hakewill visit 302; John Rose 302, 303; marriage 304; Rose Hall Estate 329n142; Rose Hall Great House 303; Rose Hall Plantation, Montego Bay, Jamaica (Nelson) xii; Rose Hall, St James (Hakewill) 302; slaves 303 panis(e) [indigenous slaves Quebec]11, 75; death 90; description 81; distinctions 75

Index Pavilion, Claire and Marc Bourgie (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) 125 penile kernels (chlamydial infection, lymphogranuloma venereum), cause 248 penkeeper 84, 380n11, 382n28; Anguin 345; Benjamin Scott-Moncrieffe 319, 345; petition 60, 65; slave 265n125, 343 Phibbah (slave, Jamaica) 320; economic status 244; freedom of movement 244; horse 320; sexual advice 247; Thistlewood arrangement 244, 247 Philadelphia: coffee imports 123; François Malépart de Beaucourt 124; St Domingue trade relationship 131 picturesque: Beckford picturesque 205–7; definition 209; ideal 180; images, sanitization 399; representation 201; tropical picturesque 207–11; visual technology 235 Picturesque Tour of Italy (Hakewill) 217–18 Plan of Kingston (Michael Hay) 355, 357 Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal (Universal Magazine) 159 planter: absentee landlords 209, 220, 225; Admiral Tallemach (Antigua) 218–9; John Cope (Jamaica) 242, 246, 247, 363; Matthew Lewis (Jamaica) 78, 80, 135, 136, 202, 223, 225; Mrs Cope 247; Robert “King” Carter (Virginia) 294; Simon Taylor (Jamaica) 233, 307, 318; white Creole 348 plantation: approach 51; aqueduct 284, 285, 351; division of labour 281; economies, characterization 344; fields, abuse 127; field slave, labour 228; field slave, portrait 118; Great House (Big House) 80, 302; house, perspective 226; landscape image, symbolic relevance 224; livestock 320; male/female division 281, 308, 332n187; Negro quarters/village 255, 351; profit yield, failure 252; provision grounds 22, 87, 237, 254, 255, 283, 351, 359, 397; ruinate 283; shell-blow grounds 265n113; size Jamaica 237, 303 (see chapter 6); size of 15; slave holdings 28–9; works 51 Planting the Sugar-Cane (Clark) 219–20 Plauvier, Margaret (Montreal) 80, 129 population: demographic impact (of planation economy) 130; racialization 117 Port Antonio (Jamaica) 319 Port Maria, St Mary’s (Hakewill) 357 Portrait of a HaitianWoman (title change) (de Beaucourt) 114, 125, 398; analysis 131; display 132; foreign setting, necessity 117; geographical alienation 116–19; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts installation 8, 125–6; renaming 115, 132 Portrait of James McGill (Dulongpré), 168 portraiture: black servant, presence 112–13; July (Francis Bear in Andrea Levy Long Song) 393; Marie-Thérèse-Zémire 119; slavery: power dynamics, understanding 111–12; relationship 111–16

413

Port Royal (Jamaica): inhabitants, survival 355; naval force, usage 365 pregnancy: breeding list 250; female slaves 74, 93n20; graundee (midwife) 250; lactational amenorrhea 272n235; white female opinions 93n20 Prince, Mary 91, 135, 219, 227, 294; abuse 93n20; Antigua 74; auction Hamble Town 121n99; Bermuda, early life 91; London 234; marriage to Daniel James 91, 92; mother 99n121; Moravian Church 100n122; Turks Island 292, 294 Pringle, Thomas (secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury, UK) 16, 135 Private, 5thWest India Regiment (Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith) 363–4 privilege (white female) 317–22 prostitution: Barbados 66; Montreal 70, 162, 174; soldiers 66; white female facilitation Bridgetown, Barbados 361 provisions: Jamaica 211; provision grounds Barbados 237; Thistlewood (Jamaica) 237, 242, 363 Psyche (Creole slave Jamaica) 370 puncheon 7, 31, 171, 174, 285 quadroon (racial type) 11, 30, 366, 369–70 Quebec: British economic investment/growth, impact 78–9; City, ordnance 181–2; productive work 114; slavery, myth of mildness 16; Raigan, Catherine (widow, Montreal prostitution) 64 rations (slave): Antigua (Mary Prince), 374; cloth/ clothing (Jamaica) 350; food 237, 255; Jamaica 262n82, 265n126; rum, British soldiers 362–3 Raudot, Jacques (intendant, New France) 61 rebel-controlled nation (St Domingue), trade (increase) 131 Rediker, Marcus 3, 21, 50, 292 Redonda (Antigua) 219 re-implacement (Edward Casey), idea (geography) 41–2 Richard (son of Hakewill) 403 Rio Cobre (Jamaica) 350 rituals (lodges): importance 121; solidarity-promoting practice 121 rival geographies 12 Roberts, Eliza Chadwick (white female Jamaica) 283, 299–300; Haitian Rebellion, perception 309; husband, captain William Roberts 307–9; Jamaican visit 307; marriage 331n175; memoirs 317; Newry Estate visit 304; slave labour perception (Jamaica) 307 Robertson, George (artist protégé Beckford) 205; AView in the Island of Jamaica 205 Rodgers, Jane (prostitution Montreal) 64 Roseau (Dominica), port settlement 316 Royal Gazette (Bermuda) 33n21, 227

414 Index Royal Gazette (Jamaica) 295 Royal Gazette and Nova-Scotia Advertiser 391n186 rum (sugar cane by-product) 7, 16, 25, 31, 52, 71, 72–3, 86, 123, 126, 171, 173, 187 Running Gut Estate (Jamaica) 303 Said, Edward 1, 17, 48, 54, 178, 396 Saint Domingue: African enslavement, conditions 126–8; coffee exports 118, 123; colonial name 120; conflict, eruption 123; Dessaline, general 120, 122; François Malépart de Beaucourt 112; indigo/cotton supplier 123; international relations, Cuba 173; international relations, Jamaica 122; international relations, USA 367; Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, presence 119–24; Masons, presence 121; Philadelphian ships, return 123; population 127–8; racial demographics 130; services, advertisement 132; transition 131; vessels, arrival 124 St Elistan, Jean/John François (free black from Saint Domingue in Montreal) 80 Saint Eustatius (Caribbean) 138 Saint Helen’s Island (Montreal) 162, 177–87; Barracks 173; British military infrastructure, presence 166; images: James D. Duncan 175; James Gray 181; Le Moyne family possession 177–8; Robert Sproule 173, 178; Thomas Davies 162, 164, 165, 166 St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town, Jamaica) 355 St Kitts: black man (prohibitions on travel) 88; Janet Schaw, travel 229, 239, 311; sexual misconduct, source (Schaw description) 239; white female customs, sun protection 316 St Lawrence River: activities, depictions 47; Natives, passage 164; representation 175, 183; visitor approach 163 Saint Mary’s (Jamaica), Monument of the late Thos. Hibbert Esqr. (Hakewill) 342 St.Thomas in theVale from Mount Diablo (Hakewill) 395 St Vincent 140; Agostino Brunias 297; Peter Simmonds (topographical sketch) 161–2; William Young, Sir 140 samboe/Sambo (racial type) 30, 89, 369–70 Sarah Hunter (slave housekeeper Jamaica) 312 Scene at Up Park Camp (Kidd) 318, 375 Schaw, Janet (white female Antigua, St Kitts) 239, 279, 364; diary 229, 279; perception of cross-racial sex 29, 314, 370 Scott-Moncrieffe, Benjamin (free mixed-race man, attorney, horse owner, planter, Jamaica) 319, 345 Seller, John (hydrographer to the King) 23; Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea-Atlas 26, 195; crops (Jamaica) 198, 199; Frontispiece 195; Novissima et Accuratissima Insulae Jamaicae description 197; Windward Pasage from Jamaica 197 sexually transmitted diseases: chlamydial infection 248; Clap, the 247; exposure, avoidance 67;

gonorrhoea 247; penile kernels (chlamydial infection, lymphogranuloma venereum), cause 248; recurrence 69; Thistlewood, discussion (Jamaica) 69; Thistlewood infection (England) 248; treatment balsam capivi 271n215, 217n220; treatment lignum vitae 271n215; treatment mercury 271n215 Shawnadithit (Beothuk) 12, 22, 35n43 Shepperton Pen (Andrea Levy, Long Song) 310 Shipping Sugar (alternative name for Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board, Clark) 220 ships: slave construction 32n14; technology (improvement) 170–1 shoelessness (as sign of slave status) 360, 373; chigga: foot/toe 350; infestation 385n75 side-saddle: class perception 321; clothing 317; riding 317–22 Simcoe, John Graves (lieutenant-governor Upper Canada) 79 Simmonds, Peter (tourist, sketchbook author) 161, 223 Sisters of Providence (Montreal), preoccupation 67 sitters (portraits) 112; payment 126 slavery: aesthetically crudest aspects 299; Beckford picturesque 203–5; branding 93n17, 295, 327n97; breaking/seasoning 249; breeding 17, 51, 84, 116, 239, 250, 251, 291, 341; breeding list 146, 250, 252, 272; British adaptation 75–9; cross-racial sex 29, 35n41, 314, 370; culpability 255; dynamics, understanding 111–12; excision 44; food 68, 255; foreign setting, necessity 117; harshness 204; imaging (Antigua/Jamaica) 217; inner workings, brutality 235–6; legal regulation 61; malnutrition 92, 202, 236, 282; portraiture, relationship 111–16; pro-slavery discourse, tropical picturesque (usage) 223–35; protection 59; recognition (British North America) 77; status (Jamaica) 249–56; studies: absences 2–4; art history, disconnect 2–3; terminology 29–31; tropical plantation slavery, increase 66 slaves: abuse, sinister element 306; African slaves, arrival (Caribbean) 120; animalization 291–6; Canadian standards 87; cargo 50; children 11, 29, 62, 117, 228; Christian status (Montreal) 83; cruel treatment 289; Cynric R. Williams commentary 397; degradation 349; disease, cocoa-bay 264n112; dress 82; elegance 370; escape 84; escape (Montreal) 77; ethnicity: Angola 21; Congo 89; Coromantee 89; Eboe 89; Moco 89; Mundingo 89; familial bonds, alienation 62; female slave labour, rituals (Ball description) 282; fertility 252; hair: style 82, 143, 163; texture 83, 128, 377; washing 139; holders, black majority (relationship) 21–2; idleness 70–1, 174, 284, 395; intervention, magistrate avoidance 256; labour: crop time 253, 254, 399; good season 290, 291; importation/breeding

Index 51–2; representation/sublimation 277–85; sugar cultivation 120, 218, 219; labour (types): artisan class (blacksmith, carpenter, cooper etc.), 287; field 11, 75, 84, 117, 224, 234, 253, 281, 284, 287, 296, 308, 341; firemen 290; lightermen 221; labouring slaves, Clark description 285–91; leisure time 115, 143, 246, 308; marriage 108n231; motherhood 74, 240, 370; naming practices 30, 78, 292, 294; Nugent (Maria) perspective 122; numbers, question (urgency) 251–2; ownership: description 86–92; internal practices 16; physical torture 91; population: demographic dominance 127, 252; population, division 296; psychological terror 91; rebellions, squashing 309–10; runaways 30, 60, 78, 235; runaway slave advertisement 81; sale (Montreal) 61; seasoning practices 249; sexuality 252; sexual torture 240–1; slave-based households, managers 305; slave-based products, cargoes 50; slaveowners, number 16; slave-produced cargoes 24; slave-produced rum, access 396; societies, slave societies and societies-with-slaves (contrast) 15–17; summoning, whip (usage) 139; time, control 374; torture 17, 22–3, 62, 89, 131, 208, 210, 236–7, 256; torture, reprieve 294; trauma, Cooper description 251; whipping 236; white slave owners, venereal disease 247; white slave owners, vengefulness 295–6; women, abuse 310; working schedule, confirmation (Mathison) 284 Sloane, Hans (slave owner Jamaica, merchant, physician) 199; cotton gin 200; lacebark tree (laghetto) 199; The manner of propagating, gathering and curing the Grana or Cochineel (Michael van der Gucht) 200; Monck, Christopher the 2nd Duke of Abermarle (governor of Jamaica) 135, 199; portrait (Stephen Slaughter) 199; Spanish coins, fragments of a Ship’s timber, and Portuguese man-of-war (Michael van der Gucht) 199; Two views of a land crab and potsherd (Michael van der Gucht) 199; Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica 26, 33n18, 135, 153n143, 213n17, 199 Smith, Charles Hamilton (colonel) 363–4 Smith, W. Sidney (RN) 161 socio-ideological transmission (of slavery), process 305 soldiers: alcoholism 366, 367; Dolly’s Tavern, St James Street, Montreal (Krieghoff) 63, 396; garrison, Montreal 16, 178; Harbour Street, Kingston (Hakewill) 29, 364, 376, 396; Montreal, from St Helens Island (Gray) 181; Scene at Up Park Camp (Kidd) 318, 373, 375; venereal disease 396; View from St Helen’s Island (Duncan) 186, 187; View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island (Sproule) 182; View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (Sproule) 69, 73 Sparke, Matthew 12 Sproule, Robert Auchmuty 24, 45, 69, 73, 175; prints, examination 183; View of the Harbour,

415

Montreal 171, 395; View of Montreal. From Saint Helens Island 178, 179, 182;View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal 69, 73, 164, 174, 177, 186 stave: hogsheads 39n114, 170, 171; loading 171, 174 steamships, harbour presence (Montreal) 173–4 Stedman, John Gabriel 200, 310; Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave 310; Narrative of a FiveYears Expedition 200 stone parapet (Bog Walk, Jamaica) 350 Stuart, William (Captain Lord) 367 sugar 3, 7, 11, 31, 45, 48, 49, 52, 79, 84, 85, 113, 118, 120, 123, 126, 127, 130, 138, 171, 172, 173, 196, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208, 211, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233, 237, 248, 253, 255, 256, 279, 281, 282, 284, 286, 289, 290, 295, 297, 303, 311, 320, 342, 343, 344, 345, 350, 353, 362, 366, 372, 399, 403; cane 16, 21, 22, 27, 28, 51, 174, 199, 200, 201, 205, 208, 222, 225, 229, 230, 235, 279, 282, 284, 286, 299, 301, 308, 344, 399, 403; cultivation 120, 200, 203–5, 208, 218, 219, 229, 282, 399, 403 Sulpicians, impact Montreal 76 Sutton, Richard (runaway indentured servant, Montreal) 81 Takyi’s/Tacky’s War (Takyi’s Rebellion/Revolt), Jamaica 235 Talon, Jean (intendant) 60 tambourine 140–3; black tambourine player 138; Minuets of the Canadians (Heriot) 134, 138; player, prowess 141 Taylor, George Watson (Jamaican planter) 233; Hakewill presentation watercolours (owner) 224 Taylor, Simon (Jamaican planter) 207, 307, 318; bachelor (status) 311; British identity (ideas of) 248; family correspondence 313; fortune 233, 311; housekeepers 312; mixed race children 313; niece’s proposed visit 314–15; plantations 207, 307; property, Nugent visit 313 terminology (used in book) 29–31 Thistlewood, Thomas: activities 314; arrangement 244, 247; Dianah (slave) 242; Dido (slave) 247, 248; Dr Joseph Horlock (venereal disease treatment) 247–8; Egypt Susannah (slave) 242, 246; employee, William Crookshank 247; employer, John Cope (Egypt Estate Jamaica) 246, 247, 363; food rations (slaves) 241; journal 247; Little Phibbah (slave) 247; Marina 243; Mazerine (slave) 242, 246; negotiations 242; orders 351–2; Phibbah (slave) 320; punishment, capability 243; punishment, Dick (mulatto driver) 265n125; records, detail 237; sexual promiscuity 69, 247; sexually transmitted disease 247; son, John (mulatto) 247;Vineyard Pen, St Elizabeth (Jamaica) 27, 69, 235, 237, 241, 242, 243, 247,

416 Index 256, 320, 351; white women (opinions of) 238, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245 Tobago 140; Agostino Brunias 210, 297; William Young, Sir 210 Tobin and Murison (Montreal merchants) 173 Tom Brooks (mulatto slave Montreal) 81 Torrance, John (Montreal Steam Tow Boat Co.) 183 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 130; biological vs. social blackness (Dominican Republic) 130 torrid zone (concept) 227, 278 Trans Atlantic Slavery: Canadian participation 5; context 308; erasure 15–16; expelling from Canadian history) 113; impact 1; landscape representations 23; sexual exploitation 74; sustaining 88 Trans Atlantic World: dominance 140; empire-building 65; enslavement, importance 112; global significance 1–2; slavery, presence 59 transoceanic (concept) 52 Trim, John (former slave, free black man Montreal): employment 129; house 80; property 129; second marriage 130; servant, Catherin Guillet 129; wife, first 129, 130 Twelve RemarkableViews (Jefferys) 158 unreadable blankness (masks worn in Belisario’s Sketches of Character) 143 vagrancy 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 162, 176, 177, 395 View of Kingston from the Commercial Rooms (Kidd) 357 View of the Champ de Mars (Sproule) 69, 73, 174, 186; Canadien 194; Native figures 174; soldiers 69, 164; white mother/child pairing 186–7; white mother figure, presence 177 Views of the Neighbourhood of Windsor (Hakewill) 217 View of the Place d’Armes, Quebec (Sproule) 316 Vlach, John Michael (documents of denial) 22 wain 28, 221, 223, 233, 253, 290, 303, 349–54; wainage 28, 349, 351, 352, 354 Walker, Thomas (justice of the peace, Quebec) 73 Walks, the (Bog Walk, Jamaica) 350 Walsh, R. Rev. (Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829) 236–7 Warner, Thomas (British settler, Antigua) 219 Wentworth, John (governor, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia) 18, 83–4 whiteness 2, 11, 15, 21, 30, 59, 68, 71, 81, 130, 142, 172, 223, 311, 313, 314, 315, 343, 347, 367, 373, 375; degrees of whiteness 10, 76 white Creoles: Dominguan viewers 119; Jamaican, British landowners (intimate relationships) 225–26; males, promiscuity 27, 67, 69, 238, 244, 247, 306, 363, 376; marriage, whites 379; polite society 238, 281; population 10; viewers 245–6; sexual tendencies 229

white females: Martinique 378, 379; Montreal: vagrancy 177; sensibility 374; slave owners, Bridgetown, Barbados 328n113; subjects, social contexts (sanitization) 299; torture (refined) use of 396 white male, sexuality 15, 240, 241, 244; rake 238 white Jamaican women: cultural and social degeneration (Edward Long) 300; Eliza Chadwick Roberts (commentary) 283, 299, 300, 304, 306, 317; indolence 300; James, Abraham (graphic satire) 298, 366; Kingston, and Port Royal, from Windsor Farm (Hakewill) 166, 297, 299, 300, 315, 318, 350, 353, 354, 355, 375; Rose Hall, St. James (Hakewill) 297, 299, 300, 302, 315, 359, 375; sightings Jamaica (Maria Nugent) 304 Whitney Estate, Clarendon, vantage point (Hakewill) 354–5 Whitney Estate (Jamaica) 351–2 Whitworth, Richard (son of Hakewill) 301 Williams, Cynric R. 23, 227, 370, 397; Diana 370; A Tour through the Island of Jamaica 23, 227, 370, 397 Williamsfield Estate (Jamaica) 282–3 Wilson, Jane (of Bermuda, living in Montreal) 80 windmill 253, 285, 290 Witter, Norwood (dissenting vote, Devises Act, Jamaican House of Assembly) 346 Wolfe, James (Major-General) 187 Wood, John (slave owner, Antigua) 74; abuse 74; lawsuit 154n147; London 99n122; Mary Prince 74 Wood, Marcus 2 workhouse (Jamaica): fugitive slaves 89, 235, 295; punishment 89; slave ethnicity 296 works (plantation): barbeque/plaister (pimento harvest) 347; boiling house 290, 372; distillery 283, 286; Exterior of Curing-House and Stills (Clark) 222, 289; Exterior of the Boiling-House (Clark) 254, 277, 290; Interior of the Distillery (Clark) 286, 289; mill 289; MillYard, Holland Estate (Hakewill) 21, 43, 253, 279; The BoilingHouse (Clark) 372; The Mill-Yard (Clark) 253, 254 Wright, Marie Charlotte (free black daughter of Catherine Guillet and William Wright, Montreal) 129 Wright, William (free black, Montreal) 129 Wynter, William (dissenting vote, Devises Act, Jamaican House of Assembly) 346 yellow (racial description) 314 yellow fever 29, 51, 175, 366, 367 Young, William Sir (Commissioner and Receiver for sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St Vincent, and Tobago) 140, 210; Agostino Brunias 210; Carib, policy 60; recollections 141

Plate 1 François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a Haitian Woman (formerly Portrait of a Negro Slave until 2011) (1786), oil on canvas, 72.7 × 58.5 cm, M12067, McCord Museum, Montreal

Plate 2 James Hakewill, Mill Yard, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East (c. 1820–21), watercolour, 31.1 × 42.2 cm, B1977.14.1963, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 3 James Hakewill, Llanrumny Estate, St. Mary’s, Jamaica: The Property of G.W. Taylor Esqr. MP (c. 1820–21), watercolour, 31.1 × 41.9 cm, B1977.14.1960, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 4 Cornelius Krieghoff, Dolly’s Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal (1845), oil on canvas, 20.32 × 25.4 cm, The Schulich Family Collection. Photo credit: Michael Cullen, TPG Digital Art Services

Plate 5 William Satchwell Leney after Robert Sproule, View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal (1830), hand-coloured engraving, 22.8 × 34.8 cm, Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 34, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal

Plate 6 J.C. Stadler after George Heriot, Minuets of the Canadians, from Travels through the Canadas . . . (1807), engraving, 23 × 36.7 cm., M19871, McCord Museum, Montreal

Plate 7 After Thomas Patten, An East View of Montreal, in Canada, published for Carington Bowles at his map and print warehouse, No. 69 in St. Paul’s Church Yard, London (after 1760), hand-coloured engraving, 15.2 × 26.1 cm. Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, Lande 101, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal

Plate 8 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Trinity Estate, St. Mary’s from part IV of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0056, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 9 James D. Duncan, View from St. Helen’s Island (1838), oil on canvas, 73 × 110 cm., 1998.1900, Château Ramezay – Historic Site and Museum of Montreal

Plate 10 John Seller, Novissima et Accuratissima Insulae Jamaicae descriptio, from Atlas Maritimus, or a Sea-Atlas . . . (1675) engraving, 42.5 × 54 cm, PBE6862(26), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Plate 11 William Clark, Digging, or Rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), hand-coloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0001, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 12 Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica (1780), oil on canvas, 49.8 × 68.6 cm, B1981.25.76, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 13 William Clark, Exterior of the Boiling-House, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), handcoloured aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0031, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 14 William Clark, The Court-House, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua . . . (1823), aquatint, 31.5 × 45 cm, Folio A 2010 10, 4515711–0002, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Plate 15 Charmaine A. Nelson, Rose Hall Plantation, Montego Bay, Jamaica (August 2014), photograph

Plate 16 Thomas Sutherland after James Hakewill, Harbour Street, Kingston, from part I of A Picturesque Tour . . . (1825), hand-coloured aquatint, fol. 32 cm, T683 (Folio A), 1266998–0010, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven