Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
were burnt. The rents of the houses burnt, by the Church Books, amounted to £15, 442 Per Annum.”60 Accounts and statements from the governor’s council included the conflation of fire with the surreptitious activities of the urban enslaved. In 1757, a speech given by Governor Charles Pinfold clarified the continued objective of slave control and confinement. Imploring council members to convene committees to force residents to rebuild in brick and stone and not timber, Pinfold makes explicit reference to the increased regulations on urban slaves,
[Infesting] Your streets … their Lust for Revenge, the great Advantage they have Reaped from the two late fires, I am under the Greatest Apprehensions, that unless prevented by Your Care and prudence they may by such favourable Opportunitys for theft and plunder be tempted to renew your misfortunes.61
In 1771 Governor Spry, still responding to the devastation of property from the 1766 fires, wrote to the Board of Trade and Plantations concerning the most pertinent issues consuming council members in the legislature: “some Bills for the Improvement of our Internal Police: The Preservation of the Town from future Accidents by Fire—And the better Government of the Negros.”62 Despite the evidence presented to the Board of Trade that the 1766 fire in Bridgetown “was started by the Carelessness of an Apprentice Boy who fell asleep & left a lighted Candle too near some loose Flakes of Cotton,”63 the enslaved remained criminal suspects and subject to restrictive legislation curtailing their movements and regulating enslaved gatherings throughout the town.64 Colonial authorities in Barbados were responding to the history of attempts and conspiracies to revolt in the seventeenth century and the recent large-scale and deadly wars the British fought with the maroons in Jamaica in the early eighteenth century, including Tacky’s revolt in 1760, in which over a thousand slaves rose up against the British on that island for more than a year.65
As Jane made her way west she might have caught a glimpse of newly arrived Africans or “seasoned” creole slaves being sold in various storehouses throughout the merchant district and in the Molehead warehouses across the careenage from the mainland.66 On 2 August 1783, for example, the Barbados Mercury announced for sale, “At public Vendue at the store of James Beaumont Evans & Co. on the wharf Eighty Seasoned Negroes.”67 Lacking a central marketplace for the sale of slaves, slave merchants constructed makeshift spaces for the auction of African captives. These warehouses lined the waterfront and also housed bulk export items such as sugar, ginger, rum, and molasses for the wealthiest planters and merchants on the island.68 Constructed of wood or stone and close to the waterfront, they sweltered in the heat of the day. The threat and reality of pestilence from incoming ships, foul air and insects, and human bodies packed dangerously tight rendered the conditions inside the warehouses a constant peril and extended the mortal conditions of the Middle Passage onto shore. Merchant companies, townspeople, and planters all advertised sales of the enslaved. One such advertisement reads:
Dec 29th 1787
Just imported in the ship FANNY. Jenkins Evans, Co. from the Coast of Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers. A remarkable fine cargo, consisting of One Hundred and Eighty Five, prime young healthy SLAVES, which will be exposed to sale at the yard of Mr Thomas Griffith, on Monday the 7th of January early in the fore noon.
GRIFFITH and APPLEWHAITE69
The language of “exposure” and “fine cargo” describes the process of commodification and “black dispossession.”70 The African captives in this instance were removed from the ship’s hold to another pen in the warehouse district or the yards of merchant businesses, where they waited a week for their impending sale. Likely suffering from loss of shipmates during the journey, and other archivally invisible horrors, these men, women, and children faced new threats as they stood in Griffith’s yard where planters and townspeople, men and women, crowded around to inspect their potential investment. At the same time, the sight of newly arrived Africans being moved from the ship Fanny docked in Carlisle Bay reminded creole slaves of their denigrated position whether remembering their own moment of disembarkation and sale or the repeated terror of witnessing frightened captives led into a life of perpetual bondage and violence.71 In 1789, the year Jane became a fugitive, debates raged in the British Parliament about the cessation of the slave trade. It would not end in the British Empire for another eighteen years.72
The volume of Bridgetown’s slave trade and its convenient geographic location frequently lured purchasers from the French or Spanish colonies or even Europe. In late June 1773, a Spanish ship from Cadiz but bound for Havana entered Carlisle Bay. The captain, Don Ramon de la Hera, was ill with a fever and the crew asked local authorities for a few days berth. Another man from the ship, Don Heronimo Enrile, “Director for the Company of Asiento of Negroes,” purchased African captives with a “considerable sum of money … which sum was delivered to Messrs. Stevensen and … British Merchants Established here.”73 The Spaniard received slaves and provisions from the same. Stifling captivity, then, did not end in the dungeons of Cape Coast or in the holds of ships during the Middle Passage. From the layout of the town and the circumstances of slave trading, merchants and planters likely held many African captives for extended periods as they awaited sale in the warehouses lining the wharves.
To the north of the wharves and above the main thoroughfare of Broad Street, Jewish families, descendants of those who fled Dutch Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century, occupied Swan Street (formerly Jew Street), with shops of hardware and other goods.74 The former Quaker meeting house and the Milk Market dominated by enslaved and free hucksters and poor whites was not far from Swan Street to the west.75 Farther west Jane would meet the fish market and butchers’ shambles, where goats, cows, chickens, and pigs were slaughtered and fish was sold by the enslaved for dinner tables throughout the town.76 Jane may have known and made her way to the great market in Cheapside, to ask the huckster women for a place to hide, or a job where she might blend in with the twelve thousand or so enslaved people who worked in domestic capacities or on the docks. The great market, largely populated by enslaved women, was a place where runaways could gain information, hear news, and grasp a sense of the new dangers of town life. If Jane had run away on a Sunday, she would mingle with many enslaved people given day travel passes and wearing the required metal collar to sell goods in town.77 On 6 January 1708, an act passed, “to prohibit the Inhabitants of this Island from employing, their Negroes or other Slaves, in selling or bartering.” The authorities had difficulties enforcing this so added a provision, “That all such Negroes and other Slaves who are employed in selling Milk, Horse-meat, or Fire-wood shall have at all such times … a metaled Collar locked about his, her, or their Neck or Necks, Leg or Legs.”78 It is unclear to what extent owners complied with this provision, and although white residents attempted in various ways over the eighteenth century to curtail the commerce of huckstering slaves, they nonetheless persisted in their market activities.79
Across the water from Cheapside market and butcher’s shambles lay a swamp on the Molehead. This land was considered “unproductive” by the white townspeople and was often flooded by torrential rain or the tidewater brought in by hurricanes. If Jane was out at night she may have heard the sounds of song and mourning from a group of her fellow slaves interring a deceased friend or kin in this marginal land.80 She might have passed Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s infamous “Royal Navy Hotel” on Canary Street near the careenage, peopled by enslaved women who provided sexual services to the many sailors and military officers briefly in port.81 During the night there were also white watchmen patrolling the streets for suspect activity, black bodies out of place or engaged in illegal behavior.82 However, perceptions of enslaved women as public, mobile, and accessible provided some a useful disguise. On an October evening in 1742 an enslaved boy dressed as a woman walked across Bridgetown and was caught with a concealed sword at a home to which he was not bonded. Although he was following orders from his master, who was having an affair with the woman of the house, any efforts to explain himself were unrecognized by the law. Only white men decided the “guilt” or “innocence” of the enslaved. The law did not permit slave testimony.83
From a single runaway advertisement we cannot know Jane’s ultimate fate—whether she was harbored by friends,