Beyond 1619 by Polgar Paul J.;Lerner Marc H.;Cromwell Jesse;

Author:Polgar, Paul J.;Lerner, Marc H.;Cromwell, Jesse;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 30373721
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

The Enslaved African

“If I would dismiss her another I must have which may prove tenne times worse than her; for untill a neger wench I have be brought to knowledge I cannot considering my present charge be without a white maid.”65 So ended John’s justification for keeping the Irish servant woman in his home, at least in the short term. He could not trust that a servant replacement would have a better reputation, and he needed his current charge to train his recently purchased enslaved woman in the appropriate tasks for running the Bridgetown household. This sentence contains the only reference to the enslaved woman in the correspondence between the brothers. How Thomas reacted on receiving John’s letter is lost to the archive. He may not have been surprised to hear that an enslaved woman was a necessary addition to a Bridgetown merchant’s estate, or an appropriate replacement for an Irish servant. After all, status was attached to one’s ability to staff a Caribbean house with enslaved Africans rather than indentured servants, and the numbers of available servant women were in decline.66 On Montserrat, the success of Henry’s plantation was dependent on the toil of enslaved women and men, and Thomas had reaped the benefits of their labor, even though the letters discussing the goods that the brothers traded in never acknowledged the people who produced these commodities.

It is difficult to know when John purchased the enslaved woman he so desired. That she was present in his household, but had yet to be “brought to knowledge,” suggests that she had recently arrived on the island. Thousands of enslaved women were forced to endure captivity, the middle passage, and the indignity of the auction block precisely because men like John demanded their labor. Living in the bustling port of Bridgetown, John would have had ample opportunity to observe sales of enslaved people and would have been familiar with different purchase prices for saltwater slaves, and those who had undergone a period of seasoning on the island.67 Because the “wench” he brought into his home had to be trained in the domestic arts, John most likely had chosen an enslaved woman who had come directly to Barbados from Africa.

In the year before John wrote his letter, the year he probably purchased his “wench,” at least ten slave ships, and over 2,000 enslaved people, left the west coast of Africa with Barbados as their primary destination.68 Three of these ships had loaded captives in the Bight of Biafra and had cargoes of between forty-five and sixty percent women, increasing the chances, statistically, that the woman John purchased came from that region of West Africa.69 Wherever she originated, the enslaved woman endured the horrors of the middle passage. If she felt alone as she stepped onto the slave ship that carried her across the ocean, or whether she embarked in the company of others that shared her language is unknown. She may have had someone to rely on, to talk to, on her voyage across the Atlantic, or she may have endured the journey bereft of any kind of companionship.

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