geography of the plantation landscape—its “Great House,” sugar fields, provision grounds, and slave villages—the colonists residing in Bridgetown constructed markers and holding cells and enacted spatial punishments on enslaved bodies limiting enslaved movement, congregation, and other group activities. In addition, the enclosing space of Barbados as a small non-mountainous island limited possibilities for prolonged escape. There was generally no sustainable maroon community to run toward after the seventeenth century, nor an easily accessible neighboring colony that might offer slaves freedom for loyalty against a colonial enemy. This landscape was essentially finite.38 Yet, over time and precisely correlated to the influx of Africans into the colony, Bridgetown council members, assembly, and vestry men ordered and paid for structures like the Cage and the gallows to serve as a constant reminder to the enslaved laborers who traversed the town that their lives were bound to perpetual servitude violently enforced. One way to consider this historical experience of urban enslavement is to follow fugitive bodies moving through the space of Bridgetown as they encountered various spatial reminders of the looming violence of slavery.
Jane’s Flight: The Fugitive Body in Space
From her runaway advertisement it is unknown whether Jane spent her life in town or the countryside, but she shared with many enslaved women the desire to run toward Bridgetown to conceal themselves in a dense and more diverse population. Demographic statistics for the eighteenth century are sparse, but by 1774 the enslaved population of Saint Michael’s Parish numbered 12,268 to 5,105 white inhabitants.39 These numbers included both rural and urban parts of the parish in which Bridgetown was located.40 Wherever Jane originated on the island, she would have entered a town still rebuilding from “the worst hurricane in historic times,” which in 1780 wiped out half the houses, buildings, and wharves and the infrastructure that sustained this bustling Caribbean port town.41
Constructed around swamps and a landscape of mangroves, Bridgetown suffered from damp and humid conditions and the streets were strewn with animal and human waste. Richard Ligon, a seventeenth-century visitor, describes the town as being “ill scituate” and that it was built
upon so unwholesome a place for the spring Tides flow over [the banks], and there remains, making a great part of that flat, a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.42
Figure 3. A Plan of Bridge Town in the island of Barbadoes, by John Gibson (London: Gent. Mag., c.1766). Courtesy of Harvard University.
Just five months before John Wright placed the notice in the paper for Jane’s (re)capture, Mr. John Crawford, a Bridgetown surveyor, also complained of the inhospitable conditions of Bridgetown:
dung heaps had been accumulated to such a number and those so large as to render many of the Alleys & narrow Streets almost impassible which was a nuisance of so intolerable a nature as to render the Houses in the viscinity scarsely habitable from the stench, and from the Air being impregnated with such noxious particles as could scaresly fail to injure the health of the Inhabitants.43
The unhealthy conditions of town were manifold, and enslaved people, tasked with the most degraded jobs, cleaned and carried household and animal waste into the streets. One historian notes that, “[the enslaved] emptied chamber pots of their owners, sometimes going no further than the street gutter to do so, disposed of their garbage in vacant lots or threw it into the streets or the sea.”44 Indeed, Crawford recognized that the enslaved were responsible for waste disposal and recommended that the parish officer should “oblige the Negroes to deposit what they had taken from the Houses in [appointed] places only.”45 Other early modern European towns suffered from similarly polluted conditions and certainly the poor took the jobs of handling household waste. In the context of West Indian slave societies, however, the enslaved performed the most degrading and dangerous work. Many white visitors to Bridgetown remarked on the splendors of buildings and the opulent hospitality of the white residents. In the early eighteenth century visitor Pierre Baptiste Labat commented on the beauty and grandness of the town. Labat remarked on the well-set streets and the “English style” houses, that “have an air of propriety, politeness and opulence, that does not exist in other islands, and would be difficult to find elsewhere.”46 In contrast, enslaved women and men navigated an intimate proximity to the waste and excrement of urban slavery—the byproduct of capital accumulation—and their proximity to refuse exemplified their historical expendability.47 If enslaved lives were linked to waste and garbage, the authors of archival documents did not record the experiences of the enslaved as historical actors. They were often evoked in relation to filth.
Whether Jane arrived during the day or night there would have been people about—merchant and government men attending their affairs, meeting in government offices on the east end or the multiple taverns throughout the town. The streets would also be filled with “jobbing” slaves, poor white and black hucksters and free people of color going about their work, opening shops, and setting up stands to sell their goods. Walking from the eastside to the west, Jane would have passed Egginton’s Green, a piece of land close to an acre in area that made up the “front yard of [Jeremiah] Egginton’s grand mansion (‘the finest house in town’).48 In the late seventeenth century the Bridgetown courthouse and town hall were located in Egginton’s Green. For a period of time the Barbados House of Assembly met in these buildings. In addition, before the completion of James Fort in western Cheapside in 1701 many slaves were punished for various legal offenses at Egginton’s Green, which contained stocks and a whipping post.49
Jane might also have walked close to the careenage where small skiffs came in and out, returning with goods and people from the larger merchant ships anchored in the large natural harbor of Carlisle Bay just west of town. Dr. George Pinckard, a late eighteenth-century English visitor described the heavy maritime traffic:
Figure 4. Map of Bridgetown circa 1780s. This is a composite map using data from Denise Challenger, Luther Johnson, John Bannister, and Arlene Waterman, “The Streets of Bridgetown Circa 1765,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 45 (1999): 77–87, and Martyn Bowden, “The Three Centuries of Bridgetown: An Historical Geography,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical 49 (November 2003): 1–137. The locations on this map are an approximation based on the above data to provide a sense of the spatial layout of the town by the late eighteenth century. Courtesy of Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Carlisle Bay is become quite the busy Thames of the West Indies. English ships of war, merchantmen, and transports; slave ships from the coast of Africa; packets; prizes; American traders; island vessels, privateers, fishing smacks, and different kinds of boats, cutters, and luggers are among the almost hourly variety.50
This geography of Carlisle Bay as an accommodating and large harbor was likely one factor in making Bridgetown the economic capital of Barbados instead of Speightstown, Holetown, or Oistins. With calm waters, small boats easily navigated to and from the larger merchant ships carrying goods in both directions. The wharves on the careenage always teemed with enslaved men and women, the former who worked loading the small boats with casks of sugar or rum and the latter huckster women selling produce, meat and household wares to the passersby. In November 1757 the Barbados Council debated a bill “to Remedy the Mischief & Inconveniency arising to the Inhabitants of this Island from the Traffick of Huckster Slaves…. Committed in any of the Harbours, Bays, Rivers, or Creeks or upon the Coast of this Island.”51 Similar laws were proposed throughout the eighteenth century as colonial authorities attempted to regulate enslaved movement and commerce.
Walking
