Abstract
On 11 November 1814, a tiny boat arrived at Trinidad’s Port of Spain. On board the vessel was a small, bedraggled group of free coloured women and their children. It may have been like any other arrival that month — Port of Spain was, after all, a very busy harbour — but for the fact that those on board had come from Venezuela and that, for the last two months at least, this traffic had been increasing alarmingly. Only days before, the harbour authorities had begun to collect the names and details of those who stepped ashore in an effort to provide some much-needed regulation and to try and control what was fast becoming an exodus.
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Notes
There are many books that cover the colonial history of Venezuela and Spanish South America more generally. See Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 7th edn (Oxford University Press, 2010);
Salvador de Madariaga, The Fall of the Spanish American Empire (Hollis and Carter, London, 1947);
and Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vols 1–3 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
In particular, see John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1973), Chapter 6, ‘Venezuela: The Violent Revolution’, pp. 188–226, especially for his description of Boves and his ‘Legion of Hell’ which operated just across the water from Trinidad. By 1813, even Bolivar was matching violence tit-for-tat with the royalists. For Spaniards, as well as other Europeans in the region, this period of the revolution became known as ‘The War to the Death’. In his famous declaration of June 1813 at Trujillo, he made it clear that ‘Spaniards and Canarios, depend upon it, you will die, even if you are simply neutral, unless you actively espouse the liberation of America’ (p. 202).
Two particular sets of archives contain details of this patronage and family relationship: Gloucestershire County Record Office 421/X13/19–29, Woodford to Charles Bathurst (private) and Devon Record Office 152M/OC 2–24, 1813–19, Woodford to John Hiley, Henry and John Henry Addington (private); see also Sir Henry Bourguignon, William Scott, Lord Stowell: fudge of the High Court of the Admiralty, 1798–1828 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
The intractability for the Colonial Office of some assemblies and governors is well known. See Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester University Press, 2005), in particular Chapter 4, ‘The Isolation of Governors’, p. 61.
D.M. Lavaysse, A Statistical, Commercial and Political Description of Venezuela, Trinidad, Margarita and Tobago (Negro Universities Press, Westport, 1969, original edn Paris, 1820), p. 332.
These findings complement and offer a supporting perspective to that of Foucault’s rendering of state and empire in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison (Pantheon Books, New York, 1977). The development of ‘technologies of security’ over discipline is made more profound here by the confusion of social markers that were to become so prevalent later, a division recently elucidated for the peripheral colonial context by Ann Laura Staler. Stoler’s study seeks to define these ideas further by identifying the beginnings of this process. The increase in the emphasis on ‘governing the self in order to protect the security of Europeans in the colonial context would see a steady erosion of this type of independence. This study also seeks to identify the complications therefore inherent between colonizer and colonized and, in keeping with Stoler’s own appreciation, to assist in the dismantling of ‘empire as a unified bourgeois project’ to one where these neat divisions are something inherent in the development of imperial societies. As many of these women were creole Europeans, the erosion of this type of liberty for women becomes intrinsic to the growth of the division between colonizer and colonized. See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves’, in Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire (Routledge, New York, 2000), pp. 88–90.
See, for example, Felix V. Matos-Rodriguez, ‘Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop Owners and Domestics: Some Aspects of Women’s Economic Roles in 19th Century San Juan Puerto Rico’ and Paulette Kerr, ‘Victims or Strategists? Female Lodging House Keepers in Jamaica’, in Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (eds), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (James Curry, London, 1995).
This analysis revises the Winthrop Jordan thesis that sees a steady codification of behaviour across North American colonies as increasing throughout the eighteenth century by adding the complexities of the Caribbean colonial space. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (UNC Press, Chapel Hill, 1966), p. 176.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 135.
For example, see R.V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton University Press, 1975).
The time slaves spent in transit is something argued by James Walvin. See Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edn (Blackwell, London, 2001). There are many original sources for the trade in Africa — as opposed to those for the middle passage (although many, like Oloudah Equiano, cover both). One is John Matthews, ‘A Voyage to Sierra Leone’ (originally published by B. White and Sons, London, 1788), Letter VII, Sierra Leone, 15 February 1787 in Robin Law (ed.), The British Atlantic Slave Trade, Vol. 1, The Operation of the Slave Trade in Africa (Pickering & Chatto, London, 2003), pp. 179–90.
See also Vincent Carretta, Equiano The African: A Biography of a Self Made Man (Georgia University Press, London, 2005);
Moira Ferguson (ed.), Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (University of Michigan Press, London, 1987);
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking, New York, 2007).
By far the best book on the subject of ex-slave soldiers is Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Redcoats: The British West Indian Regiments, 1795–1815 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979).
For migrations more widely, see also Kit Candlin, ‘The Expansion of the Idea of the Refugee in the Early Nineteenth Century Atlantic World’, Slavery and Abolition, 30(4) (2009), pp. 521–44;
Emma Christopher, Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus, Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007);
K.O. Laurence, ‘The Settlement of Free Negroes in Trinidad before Emancipation’, Caribbean Quarterly, 9 (1963), pp. 26–52;
John Weiss, Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815–16 (McNish and Weiss, London, 1995);
Roseanne Marion Adderley, ‘New Negroes From Africa’: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth Century Caribbean (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2006);
David Eltis, ‘The Traffic in Slaves Between the British West Indian Colonies’, Economic History Review, 25(1) (1972), pp. 141–61;
see also Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Freedom (Beacon Press, Boston, 2006).
Mixed-race children benefiting from white fathers to provide them with mobility is part of the discussion found in Christer Petley, ‘Legitimacy and Social Boundaries: Free People of Colour and the Social Order in Jamaican Slave Society’, Social History, 30(4) (2005), pp. 481–98. It has to be said, though, that Petley’s general argument is specifically for Jamaica and is not representative of the fluid frontier to the south. I disagree with his argument that ‘Jamiaca had many of the features of a frontier zone: men outnumbered women in white society and many of the customs of metropolitan society were suspended’ (p. 484). While his observations about things such as sexual disparity are true, Jamaica and Barbados were settled parts of the Caribbean with an established practice, more exceptional for this practice than anything else. Originally they were frontier colonies, but this was hardly the case from 1720 onwards.
N.A. CO 385–1, Trinidad Arrivals, ‘Julie Crenzy’, p. 56. This article concurs with many of the conclusions drawn by Alison Games in David Armitage and Michael Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002), ‘Part two, Migration’, p. 43, in which she refers to, among other ideas, the prevalence of repeat migratory journeys made by migrants after they arrived in the Americas, an idea which this evidence supports conclusively.
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© 2012 Kit Candlin
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Candlin, K. (2012). The Importunate Revolution on the Main. In: The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_8
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