authorities apprehended three of the musicians at Hyam’s home; the rest escaped. Several days later, three more of the deserters were caught, this time hiding out at the home of “an old white woman named Mary Ellis” who lived in a dark and seamy section of Kingston popularly known as “Damnation-alley.” Here those tracking the four who remained at large discovered that only a day or two before, “finding themselves warmly pursued,” the alert musicians “parted company, and took different routes.” Two of the remaining four were soon taken up shortly before they boarded a vessel at Savanna-la-Mar.80
By late March, then, only two of the original ten had managed to elude the authorities, George Theodorus Eskirkin (a native of Ireland known to friends simply as “Dorus”) and Quebec native John Sims. Both Eskirkin and Sims were accomplished musicians whose talents and interests included but ranged beyond mastery of the staple instruments issued to military musicians—the flute, hautboy, fife, and clarinet. Eskirkin, in the words of his commander, could “beat the drum,” and Sims enjoyed the “violin, violin-cello, harpsichord … basoon, and guitar.” Although the musical backgrounds of these two men differed in fundamental ways from those of the local musicians, their interests in the types of percussive and stringed instruments popular among black musicians in Jamaica may have enabled them to find kindred spirits in the underground who continued to help them evade the clutches of their pursuers. After leaving Jacob Hyam (now confined in the parish jail for having harbored the fugitives) and Mary Ellis, Sims and Eskirkin remained a step ahead of the law and moved to nearby Spanish Town, where they were often seen in the company of another notorious musician, “a black man named Jack Nailor,” like Sims “a Fiddler” who made his home somewhere “in the Jew market.” Either under Nailor’s tutelage or on their own, the two deserters began taking up disguises in order to lose themselves amid the comings and goings of the capital. Sometimes they appeared as British seamen, dressed in long black stockings and tarred baggy trousers; at other times they became Spanish, effecting accents and walking about with “coloured handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and striped linen jackets and trousers.” By mid-summer, exasperated authorities had all but given up on trying to apprehend Eskirkin and Sims, whom they now described as literally indistinguishable from their darker-skinned companions in Kingston and Spanish Town. Said to be “fishing and shooting” along the southern coast, the two musicians had come to “look as brown as some people of colour.” There is no record of either having been taken up and returned to military duty.
For Dorus and John, music proved to be the thread of common experience linking their adventure to the struggles of masterless men and women in Kingston’s urban underground attempting to fashion a life outside the scrutiny of Caribbean officialdom. Their success reflects the difficulties these officials faced in disentangling the networks which permitted people of all types and descriptions to resist authority and assert a mobile existence. Such popular resistance and mobility would become key factors allowing for the transmission of the excitement of social revolution in the Caribbean. It is essential to recognize, however, that these networks were not confined discretely to single islands or areas but stretched to encompass entire regions. It is to this vital inter-island mobility—the world of ships and sailors—that we now turn our attention.
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