Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Chapter 9. Collecting and Accounting: Representing Slaves as Commodities in Jamaica, 1674–1784

chapter 9 k Collecting and Accounting: Representing Slaves as Commodities in Jamaica, 1674–1784 Trevor Burnard When Thomas Thistlewood died in late November 1786, he was eulogized in an obituary in the Cornwall Gazette on December 16, 1786 as follows: In Westmoreland, on Thursday the 30th of November, in the 65th year of his age, Thomas Thistlewood, Esq., a gentleman whose social qualities, during a residence of upwards of thirty years in that parish, had greatly endeared him to a whole circle of his neighbours and acquaintances and whose attainments, in many branches of natural knowledge, in which he was peculiarly communicative, rendered him a most desirable companion to men of science.1 Thistlewood was a gentleman collector, with a wide-ranging interest in ‘‘many branches of natural knowledge,’’ a follower of Linneaus and his classificatory systems and an obsessive recorder of all types of information. These included the books he read, the letters he wrote and received, the plants he introduced into Jamaica and tended in his showpiece garden, the women he had sex with, and the weather that he experienced. But, despite his eulogist, he was hardly a ‘‘gentleman,’’ in either origins or behavior, though he was certainly a collector. What he is notorious for was his willingness to record in his private diaries multiple interactions with slaves. Because he was a list maker and a collector and thus attuned to the enumerating and classifying undercurrents of the Enlightenment, he preserved his diaries of 178 trevor burnard his life in Jamaica, diaries that, along with thirty-seven years of very precise weather measurements and some other accompanying material, have been fortuitously saved for posterity. These diaries have been mined by historians of slavery to examine white mastery in the tropics. They show Thistlewood to have been a harsh master, a sadist, and a more than occasional rapist.2 His obituary, however, which depicts him as a socially gregarious man of parts and a parish-level intellectual, does not mention Thistlewood’s extensive involvement with slavery. It is a silence characteristic of eighteenth-century engagement with this institution. Eighteenth-century people in plantation societies were hardly indifferent to slavery. Nevertheless, when they thought about slaves and slavery, they did so in the abstract, treating slavery as an intellectual or political problem, rather than as a negotiated relationship between two sets of mutually antagonistic people.3 The idea of collecting material about slavery was incomprehensible, although, as James Delbourgo notes, more collecting of slave-related material was done than we might think.4 In general, however, slaves were invisible in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Europe, especially as people whose ideas, material creations, and material constraints were worth collecting and displaying.5 The number of individual slave lives in the Americas we can reconstruct even partially is so small as to raise real questions of representation. Slaves were always present, always crucial to white selfde finition in societies where slaves were present, but that presence was seldom thought worthy of including in intellectual discourse. Even less was the material life of slaves worth saving or preserving.6 To take one example of the dissonance between what Thistlewood thought about slaves and his interest in intellectual achievement, we can compare his reaction to the executions of slave rebels and the death of his closest intellectual friend, Dr. Anthony Robinson, in 1768. Thistlewood thought Robinson ‘‘a good natural philosopher and the greatest botanist that ever was in Jamaica, his genius perfectly adapted to examining plants’’ and mourned his death intensely ‘‘walking out alone and weeping bitterly.’’ He recalled fondly the spring of 1761 when he and Robinson had amused themselves by ‘‘drawing Birds, Plants etc.,’’ some of which drawings Thistlewood carefully copied into his commonplace book. At that very time, however, whites in western Jamaica were wreaking terrible revenge on slaves captured during Tacky’s revolt of 1760, the largest and most dangerous eighteenth-century slave revolt in British America. A few weeks before Thistlewood met Robinson, Apongo, or Wager, a remarkable man whom Thistlewood considered ‘‘the King of the Rebels’’ was condemned to ‘‘hang in Chains 3 days then be took down and burnt.’’ A few weeks after Thistlewood met Robinson, he noted in his diaries, rather casually, that he had allowed one of his slaves to give ‘‘witness against Allen’s Quamina: he is to be hang’d at the estate, his head Cutt off, and...