Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
journey in danger. Left only with the newspaper trace of her scarred body, we lose her alongside “all the lives that are outside of history.”84 By subverting the discourse of the runaway ad and the gaze of her white male owner, we shift the epistemological weight of the archival document. Using maps and first-hand descriptions, we can reconstruct Bridgetown’s topography and visualize the historical experience of the enslaved in an urban context in a way that does not reinscribe the violence of the archive and erase the enslaved women who were a significant presence. Traveling through Bridgetown guided by Jane’s sensorial insight, we imagine the embodied experience of the enslaved, even if the record insists on reproducing the commodification and objectification in the descriptions of her scars and the reward offered for her return. Moreover, this method points to the tensions inherent in fugitivity between the rejection of the notion of being owned as property and the tenuous position of moving through public space. Violent punishment inevitably followed capture; well into the eighteenth century mutilation and death were commonly inflicted on runaways.85 Indeed, after a 1675 insurrection plot was discovered, the Barbados legislature revised existing laws in a 1676 act to include the death penalty for runaways.86 Yet, over the course of the eighteenth century, Bridgetown and other urban sites endured as a destination for runaways hoping for a permanent or temporary reprieve from their captivity. Whether enslaved in town or coming from the country to sell provisions, enslaved women and men became familiar with the urban landscape they traversed. Jane’s body, marked from the violence of enslaved captivity, would have also been a common corporeal topography to enslaved and free alike. Colonial power was mapped onto enslaved bodies through physical punishment and displays of public violence, and these modes of production developed early in step with the growing investment in a sugar economy. From its earliest development Bridgetown became a focal point for the production and exchange of commodities, colonial power and the precarious lives of the enslaved.
Emergent Bridgetown: The Material Body and Spatial Control
Fueled by the growing significance of sugar, late seventeenth-century Bridgetown’s development demanded a growing enslaved African population.87 The geography, economy, and coastal location of the town facilitated significant human and maritime traffic, exposing the urban population to threats of war from rival colonies, disease, and natural disasters. Conscious of their own vulnerability to an increasing majority African and island-born enslaved population, colonial authorities erected the Cage, gallows, and stocks within town to discourage rebellion and revolt.88 These factors, explored in detail below contributed to the hazards of urban enslaved life in unique ways.
Settled in 1627, Barbados became one of the first and most economically successful early modern British colonial projects in the Caribbean.89 This success developed slowly over time from dozens of Englishmen experimenting with tobacco, cotton, and livestock in the early years of settlement to the introduction of sugar by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century.90 Situated in a strategic geography that isolated the island from its neighbors, and as the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, Barbados grew in significance in the sugar and slave trades, both of which expanded exponentially. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the island boasted an elevated status in the British Empire as a lucrative sugar producer in addition to being a transportation hub of commodities, including captive Africans, shipped throughout the Americas.91 The first recorded settlement in the area of Bridgetown dates back to 1628 and was financed by James Hay, earl of Carlisle, who initiated the first group of settlers into the “Indian Bridge Town” named for an early Amerindian bridge that connected two parts of town over “Indian River.”92 Bridgetown developed haphazardly and slowly over the late seventeenth century.93 Located on the southwestern coast of the island, it boasted a natural harbor in Carlisle Bay that would become important to the shipping trade for the entire island colony. Large portions of St. Michael’s Parish remained rural in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries while Bridgetown had increased its urbanity and density consistently since the initial settlement. Speightstown on the northwest coast and Oistins on the south both developed distinct urban communities during this period, the former with a substantial free community of color into the nineteenth century.94 However, similar to Holetown, neither town became as important in terms of business, shipping, and colonial administration as Bridgetown. Indeed, Bridgetown was established as a rival town to Holetown, the first English settlement on the island.95 By the late seventeenth century, Bridgetown emerged as the island’s governmental and economic center, eclipsing Holetown in significance. The town arose around a substantial mangrove swamp where settlers claimed lands, built homes, and used natural bridges and harbors to establish their port. In the 1650s, directly related to the agricultural transition to sugar production, rudimentary cart roads gave way to trading infrastructures, warehouses, and wharves lining the waterways of the town and a usable port.96 Supplementing the creation of an infrastructure supporting sugar production, “the town also had a jail, stocks, pillory, whipping post, and dunking pool for thieves, fugitive slaves and servants, and the gangs of drunken seamen who frequently disturbed the peace of the town’s citizens.”97 Central to the project of a slave economy, the government of Barbados constructed these instruments of torture to subjugate disorderly black and white bodies publicly and persistently. Moreover, many of these technologies were specific to this urban context and increasingly reserved for the enslaved population.
By the 1680s, with its population of some 3,000 residents, Bridgetown was larger and more populated than all British American towns except Boston.98 During the sugar boom of the 1640s through 1660s, the Atlantic slave trade brought in tens of thousands of Africans, most of whom labored on the plantations strewn throughout the island colony. And by 1715, enslaved women outnumbered men. Similarly, from 1715 to the end of the century Bridgetown’s enslaved population grew substantially, from 13,000 to 17,000.99 Over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Bridgetown became the epicenter of British profit in the Caribbean. The growth of the sugar trade spurred the large-scale importation of Africans from west and central Africa. Combined, these economic factors made Barbados the most profitable colony in the region until the 1720s, when it was surpassed in exportation by Jamaica.100 Between 1707 and 1726, the board of trade and plantations listed 49,594 Africans brought into the colony.101 Destined for the fatal conditions associated with sugar cultivation, the majority were sold to planters across the island. Others were sold to neighboring colonies and a few remained to labor in town. Early Bridgetown was a central hub in this slave trade, and the Royal African Company of slave traders maintained an office on Tudor Street from 1671–1721.102 With no central market site for sales, a variety of urban spaces became flesh markets, further implicating this town in the violence of slavery. African captives were sold in several ways. A “vendue,” public auction, or “outcry” usually involved a financially distressed or liquidated estate. In the British Caribbean, captives also experienced sale through a “scramble,” wherein buyers raced around a holding yard or on a ship grabbing as many captives as they could afford within a designated timeframe marked with a bell.103 Other captives were sold individually within the ships by which they were transported.
From the late seventeenth century on, Bridgetown grew in density in people and buildings as well as in susceptibility to the elements, disease, and world affairs. Though disease, war, and natural disasters affected the entire population, slaves living in town acutely felt the brunt of incoming plagues, thinning provisions, and destruction of shelters. Since the late seventeenth century, Bridgetown had been known as “being by far the unhealthiest place on the island,” with a constant influx of diseased and transient sailors in addition to the African captives sickened by the Middle Passage.104 Epidemics killed hundreds of people in this society; in 1694 yellow fever killed 354 people in Bridgetown alone. Into the late eighteenth century governors wrote to England about the periodically high mortality of all the inhabitants.105 On 13 April 1776, for example, Governor Hay wrote the Lords of Trade and Plantations about “a Calamity … that has reigned in the Island for these three or four [Monthes], which is the Small Pox, attended with a putrid fever; Some Hundreds of People have been carried off by this disorder, particularly White Children and Negroes.”106 Living in a dense urban environment where the enslaved moved through town in ways not possible on plantations