Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
she would have entered a town still rebuilding from “the worst hurricane in historic times,” which in 1780 wiped out half the houses, buildings, and wharves and the infrastructure that sustained this bustling Caribbean port town.41
Constructed around swamps and a landscape of mangroves, Bridgetown suffered from damp and humid conditions and the streets were strewn with animal and human waste. Richard Ligon, a seventeenth-century visitor, describes the town as being “ill scituate” and that it was built
upon so unwholesome a place for the spring Tides flow over [the banks], and there remains, making a great part of that flat, a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.42
Figure 3. A Plan of Bridge Town in the island of Barbadoes, by John Gibson (London: Gent. Mag., c.1766). Courtesy of Harvard University.
Just five months before John Wright placed the notice in the paper for Jane’s (re)capture, Mr. John Crawford, a Bridgetown surveyor, also complained of the inhospitable conditions of Bridgetown:
dung heaps had been accumulated to such a number and those so large as to render many of the Alleys & narrow Streets almost impassible which was a nuisance of so intolerable a nature as to render the Houses in the viscinity scarsely habitable from the stench, and from the Air being impregnated with such noxious particles as could scaresly fail to injure the health of the Inhabitants.43
The unhealthy conditions of town were manifold, and enslaved people, tasked with the most degraded jobs, cleaned and carried household and animal waste into the streets. One historian notes that, “[the enslaved] emptied chamber pots of their owners, sometimes going no further than the street gutter to do so, disposed of their garbage in vacant lots or threw it into the streets or the sea.”44 Indeed, Crawford recognized that the enslaved were responsible for waste disposal and recommended that the parish officer should “oblige the Negroes to deposit what they had taken from the Houses in [appointed] places only.”45 Other early modern European towns suffered from similarly polluted conditions and certainly the poor took the jobs of handling household waste. In the context of West Indian slave societies, however, the enslaved performed the most degrading and dangerous work. Many white visitors to Bridgetown remarked on the splendors of buildings and the opulent hospitality of the white residents. In the early eighteenth century visitor Pierre Baptiste Labat commented on the beauty and grandness of the town. Labat remarked on the well-set streets and the “English style” houses, that “have an air of propriety, politeness and opulence, that does not exist in other islands, and would be difficult to find elsewhere.”46 In contrast, enslaved women and men navigated an intimate proximity to the waste and excrement of urban slavery—the byproduct of capital accumulation—and their proximity to refuse exemplified their historical expendability.47 If enslaved lives were linked to waste and garbage, the authors of archival documents did not record the experiences of the enslaved as historical actors. They were often evoked in relation to filth.
Whether Jane arrived during the day or night there would have been people about—merchant and government men attending their affairs, meeting in government offices on the east end or the multiple taverns throughout the town. The streets would also be filled with “jobbing” slaves, poor white and black hucksters and free people of color going about their work, opening shops, and setting up stands to sell their goods. Walking from the eastside to the west, Jane would have passed Egginton’s Green, a piece of land close to an acre in area that made up the “front yard of [Jeremiah] Egginton’s grand mansion (‘the finest house in town’).48 In the late seventeenth century the Bridgetown courthouse and town hall were located in Egginton’s Green. For a period of time the Barbados House of Assembly met in these buildings. In addition, before the completion of James Fort in western Cheapside in 1701 many slaves were punished for various legal offenses at Egginton’s Green, which contained stocks and a whipping post.49
Jane might also have walked close to the careenage where small skiffs came in and out, returning with goods and people from the larger merchant ships anchored in the large natural harbor of Carlisle Bay just west of town. Dr. George Pinckard, a late eighteenth-century English visitor described the heavy maritime traffic:
Figure 4. Map of Bridgetown circa 1780s. This is a composite map using data from Denise Challenger, Luther Johnson, John Bannister, and Arlene Waterman, “The Streets of Bridgetown Circa 1765,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 45 (1999): 77–87, and Martyn Bowden, “The Three Centuries of Bridgetown: An Historical Geography,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical 49 (November 2003): 1–137. The locations on this map are an approximation based on the above data to provide a sense of the spatial layout of the town by the late eighteenth century. Courtesy of Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Carlisle Bay is become quite the busy Thames of the West Indies. English ships of war, merchantmen, and transports; slave ships from the coast of Africa; packets; prizes; American traders; island vessels, privateers, fishing smacks, and different kinds of boats, cutters, and luggers are among the almost hourly variety.50
This geography of Carlisle Bay as an accommodating and large harbor was likely one factor in making Bridgetown the economic capital of Barbados instead of Speightstown, Holetown, or Oistins. With calm waters, small boats easily navigated to and from the larger merchant ships carrying goods in both directions. The wharves on the careenage always teemed with enslaved men and women, the former who worked loading the small boats with casks of sugar or rum and the latter huckster women selling produce, meat and household wares to the passersby. In November 1757 the Barbados Council debated a bill “to Remedy the Mischief & Inconveniency arising to the Inhabitants of this Island from the Traffick of Huckster Slaves…. Committed in any of the Harbours, Bays, Rivers, or Creeks or upon the Coast of this Island.”51 Similar laws were proposed throughout the eighteenth century as colonial authorities attempted to regulate enslaved movement and commerce.
Walking along the careenage, Jane would smell the seawater, mixed with the sour and dank smells of too many people in too small an area, and if she passed by the Cage, which held captured runaways, she would have seen the sweat and sensed the fear of the occupants inside. Enslaved people were no longer executed for running away by the time Jane made her escape, but the return to an angry owner offered no solace to the captured fugitive, as whipping or some form of bodily mutilation followed capture.52 James Fort, both a structure of official government business (completed in 1701) and by the mid-eighteenth century a common site, as Governor James Spry stated, “where Slaves have frequently Suffered Death,”53 sat on an out-cropping on the south west of the Bridgetown waterfront.54 Execution sites in Barbados towns were centrally located, and slaves were often hanged, gibbeted, or burned to death in front of large audiences. For example, in 1768 an enslaved woman named Molly was executed in Speightstown for allegedly poisoning John Denny Esqr., while a crowd of slaves gathered to bear witness to colonial violence.55 Similarly, Jane might have heard the beating of drums announcing new acts passed for the “governing of negroes” or overheard conversations about a recent burning alive of enslaved men who were falsely accused of murdering a white doctor just three years before her escape.56 One of the accused, an elderly black man, likely named Nick, raised the stake to which he was tied with his bound body, in an effort to escape the terror of being burned alive. The authorities instantly struck the stake farther into the ground and increased the wood to intensify the flames that eventually ended his life.57
If Jane continued west she would see balconied two and three story houses, only a few of which were still made of wood after the fires of 1757 and 1766.58 The fires of May and December 1766 destroyed 70 percent of the houses, storefronts, and warehouses throughout the town.59 The minutes of council records for the period describe the destruction: “The fire broke out May 14th, at 11 O’ Clock at night, at a house in High Street.