Evans, selected Sarah to be one of his favourites, or ‘wives’.22 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’.24 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’.25
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’.26 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’.27
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. 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
