White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (18 page)

Kidnapping developed to encompass several types of operative, each with a distinct role in the business. A key trade was that of

‘office keeper’. As with ‘spiriting’, this was a euphemism. The office keeper provided a base from which to run operations, maybe a tap-room to entertain potential clients and possibly a secure cellar or attic to hold those awaiting a ship. The office keeper also provided a plausible front to the world. As with the spirit, the office keeper 129

WHITE CARGO

used deception or any other art to get the unwary or gullible on board a ship. The only difference seems to have been that while the kidnapper might not necessarily have worried about papers of indenture, the office keeper would by any devious means obtain a signature or, as most people were illiterate, a mark. The sly and shifty nature of the business is very well caught in this description of spirits in London:

. . . three or four blades, well dressed but with hawks’

countenances . . . those fine fellows who look like footmen upon a holiday crept into cast suits of their masters . . . are kidnappers who walk the Change in order to seduce people who want services and young fools crossed in love and under an uneasiness of mind to go beyond seas, getting so much a head of masters and ships and merchants who go over for every wretch they trepan into this misery.7

This was no honest business – it was a pernicious racket, as the writer made clear in his description of the spirits’ victims: Half a dozen ragamuffinly fellows, shewing poverty in their rags and despair in their faces, mixed with a parcel of young wild striplings like runaway prentices . . . That house which they are entering is an Office where servants for the plantations bind themselves to be miserable as long as they live . . . Those young rakes and tatterdemalions you see so lovingly handled are drawn by their fair promises to sell themselves into slavery.8

The picture emerges of organised crime. Spirits targeted people across all sections of society. The unwary apprentice could just as easily fall prey to the kidnapper as the vagrant and unemployed.

But the kidnapper did prefer the young to the old. This was no surprise, for the labour markets in America and Barbados favoured the young and healthy. Those most at risk were children over the age of ten, particularly teenagers, and young men and women aged up to their mid-twenties.

130

SPIRITED AWAY

Spirits were active not only in London but all around the British Isles, in ports including Southampton, Aberdeen, Dublin and particularly Bristol. The illicit trade in Bristol was exposed by the unlikely figure of Judge Jeffreys, the drunken lawyer who was made Lord Chief Justice by Charles II. Today, Jeffreys is best remembered for conducting the Bloody Assizes of 1685, in which he sentenced around 330 of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebels to death and 800

more to transportation. During the assizes, Jeffreys learned that a young boy had been taken from prison and illegally transported.

It appears that the child was a victim of the sort of racket played out in many seaports. Petty thieves, rogues and vagabonds would be brought before the local justices and told the only way to save their necks was by agreeing to transportation. To this, most of the small-time villains, scared for their lives, would agree. The justices and their friends would then sell the rogues off to merchants or ships’ captains for the slave marts of the New World.

In the case of this young boy, Jeffreys discovered the culprits. They included the city’s Mayor, whom Jeffreys fined £1,000. The case of the child exposed the corruption of not only Bristol but of the age.

It was to Judge Jeffreys’ credit that he spotted this nasty little scheme and did his best to put a stop to it. Only three years later, when James II took flight, Jeffreys also tried to flee abroad but was recognised having a last drink in an inn and ended his days in the Tower of London, where he died of a stomach ulcer aggravated by alcohol.

Kidnapping was so prevalent that it became the subject of fiction, appearing in stories by writers including Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson. One spirit was supposed to have made St Paul’s Cathedral his headquarters. It is tempting to imagine the spirit practising his devious arts around and about the cathedral while the Dean, the poet John Donne, thundered from the pulpit about how deprived children might be given a second chance in a foreign land. The old St Paul’s was swept away in the great fire of 1666

and maybe the spirit with it. It is hard to think of the wardens of Christopher Wren’s neo-classical cathedral allowing such malign spirits to linger within.

By the middle of the 1600s, fear of kidnapping became so great that hysteria swept over the land, especially among families living 131

WHITE CARGO

in or near ports, and even causing occasional mass panics among young women and other potential victims. False accusations were made by citizen against citizen. In 1645, Margaret Robinson was called before a court to answer the accusation that she assaulted one Mary Hodges, ‘saying she was a spirit’. William Gaunt and Thomas Faulkner were accused of attacking Margaret Emmerson and falsely claiming she was ‘a spirit or an enticer or inveigler of children . . . there being no charge or accusation laid against her’.

Some years later, Susan Jones was accused by Rebekah Allen of

‘raising a tumult against her and calling of her spirit’.9

Kidnapping was the subject of sensationalist popular journalism of a style we would all recognise today. One undated broadsheet gives a typically vivid account of large-scale spiriting of children in London. The report was published by James Read of Fleet Street, London, and is preserved in the British Library. It begins with sensational headlines:

The Grand KIDNAPPER at last taken

Or, a full and true

ACCOUNT

OF THE

Taking and Apprehending

OF

Cap Azariah Daniel

For conveying away the bodies

OF

Jonathan Butler
, and
Richard Blagrave
,
Also the confession he made before Justice
Richards

In
Spittle-fields
, with his commitment to
New-gate

With account of
Edward Harrison
, conveying away
The Children of
Thomas Vernon
Salesman, with the
Manner of his Confession how a Hundred and Fifty
Children more have been sent down the River in several
Ships; with his Commitment to
Newgate
.

The account contains so much detail of the scale of the spirit business that it is worth quoting further:

132

SPIRITED AWAY

The noise which the detection of the former Kidnapper had made in the Town; occasioned such strict enquiries to be made after other children which have been lost, by their afflicted parents, that pursuant to their great care, all Houses near the Water Side, and all outward bound Ships now in the river, have been severly searched, and many Children rescued by those means from the dangers that threatened them, but though the theft was regained, the Thieves for the generality made their escape, and we have had but Three, and those not the Principal who have been taken in those abominable Practices, till Wednesday the 7th. Of this Instant September: When one Captain Azariah Daniel, Commander of a Ship now in the River, coming by the Stocks-Market, was met by two Gentlemen who having lost their children, pursuant to the information they had of him, were in search after him.

The two distraught parents had their wits about them, for they had already obtained a warrant from a magistrate for the arrest of Captain Daniel. While one of them went for a constable, the other followed the captain to a public house. The captain was arrested and taken before the magistrate, Justice Richards. The justice asked the suspect where he lived. The captain gave his true address, which was unfortunate for him because the magistrate immediately ordered his lodgings to be searched: ‘And the rooms being searched, two Children were found in a garret.’

With the discovery of the children, both aged about twelve, Daniel was sent to Newgate to await trial. The same broadsheet contains a second case of a missing child:

Mr Vernon, a Salesman in the parish of Stepney, having but one Child and that some time since lost, was very Solicitous in enquiring after Him: And pursuant to his great care in looking after him, he received information that one Edward Harrison, a mariner who lived in the Neighbourhood, had been seen with a Boy about the Age of his son was described to be of, and who seemed very unwilling to go along with him.

133

WHITE CARGO

Accordingly Mr Vernon went to Sir Robert Geffery’s, and having gotten his Warrant, took a Constable with him and went to the House of Edward Harrison . . .

The prisoner seemed at first surprised at his unexpected apprehension, and seemed sensible of nothing of Guilt, protesting much for his innocency. But being brought before the Justice his courage failed him, and several convenient questions being put to Him by Sir Robert, he at last confessed he had conveyed the Child three weeks since aboard a Barbados Ship now in the River, and besides him there were above a hundred and fifty more aboard several other ships in the said River bound to his Majesty’s Plantations. Having made his ingenious Confession his Mittimus [Daniel] was made for New-gate, and he was accordingly sent Prisoner thither.

And several Parents who have lost their children, have got the Lords of the Admiralty’s Warrant in order to Search all outward bound ships for the recovery of them.10

Laws were passed to control spiriting. But they did little good. In 1645, Parliament ordered all officers of the law to keep a watch for those ‘stealing, selling, buying, inveigling, purloining, conveying or receiving children . . .’ Port officials were instructed to search all vessels ‘in the river and at the Downs for such children’.11 A year later, a further law required customs officers in England to keep records of those leaving, and for colonial governors to send returns of those arriving in their territories.

In 1654, Bristol council ordered that a book should be kept detailing the names of indentured passengers on board ships heading for the colonies. Merchants and other worthies petitioned Parliament in 1661 and 1662 to introduce official sanctions against spirits but it failed to act. In 1664, a plan was put forward to have every emigrant bound for the colonies interviewed and asked whether or not they were going of their own free will. In 1670, Parliament made kidnapping – ‘any deceit or force to steal any person or persons with intent to sell or transport them into ports beyond the sea’ – an offence punishable by death. None of it 134

SPIRITED AWAY

made much difference. The kidnappers continued to thrive.

Justice was very inadequately administered in London. As the great chronicler of immigration, Peter Coldham, notes in
Emigrants in Chains
: ‘In the courts of the metropolis the theft of a horse merited much stiffer penalties than the theft of a person.’12

In 1680, a spirit named Ann Servant was tried before Middlesex Assizes for assaulting a young woman called Alice Flax and putting her on board a ship that took her to Virginia, where she was sold.

Ann Servant confessed to the crime and was fined thirteen shillings and sixpence. A horse thief would have been hanged.

In 1682, a government initiative to protect children from being spirited against their will laid out strict guidelines for indentures.

How little effect all the government attempts to clamp down actually had can be judged from yet another case in the Middlesex court. In 1684, a male and a female spirit who had kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl were fined the derisory sum of twelve pence.

Such fines reflected both how the courts viewed kidnapping in general and also that magistrates and judges often allowed the accused to pay a sum in compensation to their victim. From the Middlesex records, it is obvious that many cases reported to the court never proceeded to trial.

At the end of the seventeenth century, spiriting continued to play as important a role in supplying labour to the British colonies as it had near the beginning. Kidnapping was allowed to flourish because it was respectable business’s shady sibling. One authority has pointed out that ‘instead of being deplorable outlaws in the servant trade [spirits] were the faithful and indispensable adjuncts of its most respected merchants’.13 Newspapers continued to run stories about spirits, along with advertisements from those searching for lost relatives. In October 1700, the London
Post Boy
ran an advertisement from a father offering a reward for the return of his eleven-year-old son, who was feared kidnapped.

Spirits could continue to rely on authority turning a blind eye to their work and to their victims rarely living long enough to gain their freedom and return to confront them with their crimes. Yet, as we will see later on in Chapter Seventeen, in two celebrated instances kidnap victims did return to seek retribution and restitution.

135

WHITE CARGO

But perhaps the most important reasons why kidnapping grew and thrived in the seventeenth century were that spiriting was a convenient way for society to rid itself of the unwanted poor and homeless, and that very often the government simply decided it had more urgent matters to deal with, such as those that unfold in the following chapter.

136

CHAPTER NINE

FOREIGNERS IN THEIR

OWN LAND

In the Elizabethan period, young blades went to Ireland to prove themselves and get rich. As we saw in Chapter 1, Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert went to make war. The poet Edmund Spenser settled there to lead the life of a gentleman on a confiscated estate near that occupied by Raleigh. There were risks, of course. Ireland was where court favourite the Earl of Essex ended his career in bloodshed and failure despite the assistance of the ruthless Francis Drake. What happened in Ireland over several centuries had a direct bearing on how the first English settlements in America were approached and developed. Many great English adventurers and soldiers learned their craft in Ireland before searching for greater – and easier – pickings farther west.