Belle (5 page)

Many of the abolitionists took up the rallying cry that the slave trade degraded both white and black, that the sailors were treated almost as badly as the slaves. Everyone was brutalised.

But there was another side to master/slave relations. William Butterworth, a sailor on the slave ship
Hudibras
, published an account of his travels in which he dwelt at length on his admiration for a slave called Sarah. ‘Ever lively! Ever gay!’, she was a superb dancer, and charmed everyone with her ‘sprightliness’ and ‘good nature’. She was ‘universally respected by the ship’s company’. Butterworth’s captain, Jenkins Evans, selected Sarah to be one of his favourites, or ‘wives’.
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This was not unusual. On the slaver
Charleston
, the captain and officers took three or four ‘wives’ each for the journey.
²³

Sarah was suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the ship. It was not unknown for slave women and children to be involved in rebel plots against the sailors. Because they were given greater freedom than the male slaves, they were able to take messages and surreptitiously pass weapons to them, allowing them to hack off their shackles and fight back. Despite Sarah’s involvement in the plot against Captain Evans, he spared her life.

Other female slaves who were quick to learn English and could help to maintain order were given positions of trust. Known as ‘guardians’ or ‘confidence slaves’, some of them became cooks or made clothes, and were given ‘wages’ of brandy or tobacco.

Sea surgeon Thomas Boulton was mesmerised by a black slave he called Dizia – ‘who did my piece of mind destroy’, as he wrote in a poem which alleged that she also wielded power over the captain: ‘Whose sooty charms he was so wrapt in,/He strait ordain’d her second captain’.
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The power exerted by the female slave over her master conformed to the sexual stereotyping of African women. Equally, many white masters raped and seduced female slaves as a way of emasculating, humiliating and punishing male ones: one master was so besotted with his slave lover that he ‘cut off the lips, upper lip almost close to her Nose, of his Mulatto sweetheart, in Jealousy, because he said no Negroe should ever kiss those lips he had’.
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However, the exceptionally close interaction between white and black, in both the slave ships and the plantation houses, created unusual psychological, moral and ethical situations. Can a relationship between a white captain and a slave woman within the British Empire in the eighteenth century ever be considered anything other than sexual exploitation? Could there ever be a consensual relationship between black and white, slave and captain? The short answer is yes.

When Mary Prince published her ‘slave narrative’ in 1831 she was advised not to mention her seven-year affair with a white man, Captain Abbot. Prince’s editors were keen to present her as an innocent victim, and it’s striking that they were uncomfortable with her revelation of this affair. Only later did Prince reveal the details of her liaison with Captain Abbot, which ended when she found her lover in bed with one of her friends. The jealousy she felt shows that she did have feelings for her captain – though there was also another factor, in that she had by this time converted to Christianity, and her ministers urged her to end the affair.

Thomas Thistlewood, a plantation overseer in Jamaica, lived openly with a female slave named Phibbah, and they were together for thirty-three years. In his will he requested that his executors should buy her and arrange for her to be ‘manumitted’ (formally freed). She eventually became a property-owner and a woman of means, providing for her extended family. Phibbah was clever and articulate, and managed to negotiate with adroitness the very delicate balance of being the black mistress of a white master. She was highly regarded within both the slave and the white communities. The careful details Thistlewood kept in his diary of their life together as ‘husband and wife’ suggest a deeply affectionate connection.

Both suffered when they were parted, sent one another presents, cared for each other in illness, cried together when their beloved son ‘Mulatto John’ died at the age of twenty, and engaged in furious jealous quarrels, although they always made up. Their sexual relationship seems to have been fully consensual: Thomas noted the times that she refused to sleep with him. Other slaves, with less status and power, had no such sway.

Nevertheless, Thistlewood’s relationship with his ‘wife’ Phibbah did not stop him from pursuing other women, who were powerless to prevent his sexual assaults. He abused and sexually exploited many of his female slaves (and indeed those from other plantations), keeping a careful record of his sexual conquests alongside his notes on sugar production.

Thomas Thistlewood’s journal conforms to the stereotyping of black women and their sexuality. In his imagination, black women were sexually insatiable, while white women were passive. Bizarrely, he claimed that African women who ate too much sugar cane became ‘loose and open, as tho’ they [had] just been concern’d with men’.
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His own sexual preference was always for black women – as was his nephew John’s. John Thistlewood went out to Jamaica to work for his uncle. When he was propositioned by a white prostitute he declined, because he ‘much preferred a Negro wench’.
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Though Thistlewood lived with Phibbah as his favoured concubine, he was dismissive of other white men’s ‘infatuated attachments’ to black women. His friend William Crookshanks was besotted with his slave lover Myrtilla, and cried when she miscarried his child. They later had a ‘mulatto’ daughter. The other planters were dismayed by the hold Myrtilla had over him, and it ‘weakened his standing within white society’.
²⁸

Lady Maria Nugent, the wife of Jamaica’s Governor General Sir George Nugent, kept a journal during her stay on the island from 1801 to 1807. She noted that white men of all descriptions, married or single, lived in ‘a state of licentiousness’ with their female slaves.
²⁹
Naturally, the white lady of the Great House resented her slave rival, particularly when children were born. Molly Cope was the very young wife of a sugar planter, John Cope. She knew that her husband kept a black mistress, Little Mimber, but was powerless to intervene, and so turned a blind eye. Other wives were less tolerant, and would punish their female slaves. Thistlewood recorded in his journal that Dr Allwood’s wife flogged to death a black slave, the third that she had killed in this way.

In the absence of documentary evidence about the relationship between Captain John Lindsay and Maria, what we can reconstruct of her life comes down to probability. She probably endured the full horrors of capture in Africa and a transatlantic voyage. She may well have been sexually assaulted – possibly more than once – before Lindsay took her from the Spanish. Their relationship, by contrast, was probably – though by no means certainly – loving and consensual. Lindsay would have been the victim of gossip and disapproval for taking a black ‘wife’, especially once she became pregnant. But the stories of figures as diverse as Thomas Thistlewood and Mary Prince show that the relationship that gave birth to Dido was by no means unique in the annals of the slave era.

4

The White Stuff

Still life with meat, kettle, cup, sugar loaf and sugar lumps

All slaves want to be free – to be free is very sweet

Mary Prince

It is pure, bright, dazzling white, a solid conical shape with a rounded top. It is wrapped in blue paper to emphasise its refined whiteness. Weighing anything from five to thirty-five pounds, this substance can be found in all but the very poorest kitchens in Georgian England, where it is locked away in a box by the lady of the house. Because sugar is expensive, and Georgian England has a very sweet tooth.

A sugarloaf. It is a shop-bought luxury item, purchased with other imported consumables such as tea, coffee and drinking chocolate. The semi-hard sugar cone requires its own hardware: a sugar axe or hammer to break it into chunks, and sugar nips – plier-like tools with sharp blades – to break off small pieces, which can be transferred into sugar boxes, and then used to sweeten those exotic hot drinks that Britain is consuming with such insatiable thirst.

Sugar had once been the luxury of nobles. Portraits of Tudor aristocrats show their subjects holding precious boxes of sugar as they would white gold. By the mid-eighteenth century, though, the substance was to be found in most middle-class, and many labouring-class, homes.
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Coffee houses and tea gardens were all the rage, places where polite society gathered to sip hot drinks and gossip.

But sugared hot drinks were most often consumed in the comfort of the home. Tea, in particular, was the soft drug of the English, taken behind the closed doors of townhouses and country cottages. A commentator observed in 1744 that the opening of ‘trade with the East Indies brought the price of tea so low, that the meanest labouring man could compass the purchase of it, when sugar, the inseparable companion of tea, came to be in the Possession of the very poorest Housewife, where formerly it had been a great Rarity’.
²
White, refined sugar was seen as a status symbol, a way for the middling classes to be associated with the privileged upper classes. Dark-brown sugar was consumed by the lower classes. Breakfast china sets, teacups, saucers and sugar bowls were bought with matching trays. The famous workshop of Josiah Wedgwood supplied an ever-expanding market with pottery and porcelain as tea and coffee became affordable by a wider range of people. Wedgwood grew rich on sugar.

In one humble Hampshire cottage, an unmarried daughter was in charge of sugar and tea supplies (locked in a box, of course, to prevent pilfering). In 1808 her mother had purchased a ‘silver tea-ladle and six whole teaspoons which make our sideboard border on the Magnificent’, and she was given a Wedgwood breakfast set as a present in 1811 – we learn this from the tea-loving daughter, whose name was Miss Jane Austen.
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It was Jane’s job to make breakfast, and every morning she could be found presiding with domestic pride over the large copper teakettle in the dining room. The taking of tea is frequently mentioned in her novels. Miss Bates, the gossip in
Emma
, is one of the female characters who loves her cup of tea: ‘No coffee, I thank you for me – never take coffee – a little tea if you please.’
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Sugar was also used in cakes, puddings and preserves. British people loved sugary desserts: trifles, fools, syllabubs, apple pies, milk puddings, ice cream. Thanks to drinks and puddings, Britain consumed four times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710.
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Yet few people, sipping their hot, comforting cup of tea in the mid-eighteenth century, stopped to consider where the white stuff came from, or how it was produced. Nor would many of the sugar addicts have known of the personal cost to the people who produced it: the violence, the exploitation, the horror. Any qualms they might have had were well disguised under the veil of patriotism. Drinking sugared tea supported British colonies, and the moral efficacy of sugared drinks was celebrated: ‘the cup that cheers but does not inebriate’.
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If one did pause to consider the cost, then how would Britain deal with its sugar addiction? Perhaps it was better not to think at all.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

Especially sugar, so needful we see?

What? Give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!

In this poem of 1788, entitled ‘Pity for Poor Africans’, William Cowper, the most popular and admired poet of the day, raises the uncomfortable truths behind the production of what was at the time the most powerful commodity on earth. The consumption of sugar was rendered possible through the exploitation of Africans captured and sold as slaves to work the plantations in the West Indies. Cowper begins with this stanza:

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,

And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans

Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.