White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (34 page)

LOST AND FOUND

he was recaptured. The single remaining year of his bondage was increased to five.

Annesley sank into a depression. He tells how his new master’s wife took pity on him and often brought him into the family home, whereupon her daughter Maria fell in love with the handsome young servant. By now, Annesley had built up his tale with enough qualities to make his story sell. But he was not yet done. He described how Maria had a rival, a young Iroquois slave girl, whose advances he rejected. The girl ran to the river and, like a tragic romantic heroine, threw herself in and drowned.

This appeared to be the most fortunate stroke of luck for Annesley, for when the story was told to Maria’s father he decided it was best if Annesley left his service. He announced he would give him his liberty but unfortunately reneged on his promise and sold Annesley to another planter.

Many more adventures followed, all no doubt designed to keep the readers of
The Gentleman’s Magazine
entertained. Annesley was tracked by the brothers of the Indian girl, who had sworn to avenge her fate, and narrowly escaped being murdered. After many further dramatic episodes, Annesley decided to make one final attempt to get home.

Astonishingly for one so dogged by ill-luck, he was successful.

He sailed on a trading ship to Jamaica, where he went on board a British warship and declared himself to be a kidnapped nobleman.

His brave claim came to the attention of the commanding officer of the flotilla, Admiral Vernon. The admiral decided the young man’s story was plausible and gave him passage to England, where he arrived in October 1741.

Uncle Richard was in a pickle: a man had turned up out of the blue claiming to be his nephew and clamouring for his inheritance.

It is said that the uncle attempted to have the pretender jailed for murder.7 If so, it did no good. James brought an action at the Dublin Court of Exchequer for his uncle’s ‘ejectment’.

Annesley’s claim gave rise to one of the longest and most famous legal struggles ever seen in Ireland. It was so protracted that it has been called the Irish equivalent of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, after the legal quarrel in
Bleak House
. Dickens’ description of a drawn-out 245

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dispute that never came to a conclusion could well describe the Annesley case, which has echoes in other works of fiction, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
and
Guy Mannering
by Walter Scott. All of Dublin society was hooked upon it and readers of
The Gentleman’s Magazine
savoured it in London.

The case began on 11 November 1743. Howell’s
State Trials
declared it: ‘the longest trial ever known, lasting fifteen days, and the jury (most of them) gentlemen of the greatest property in Ireland, and almost all members of parliament’. The jury unanimously found for Annesley.8 All Dublin was thrilled, believing a great injustice had been righted. The defending side lodged an appeal but the judgment was upheld. However, for the unluckiest man alive, this could not be the end of things. Following his great success, James petitioned the King for his seat in the House of Lords but delay after delay took place.

In the meantime, a former servant of the Annesleys was tried for perjury. In the initial hearing, Mary Heath had given evidence that Lady Altham had not given birth to a child in 1715. The jury did not believe her. At her subsequent trial, Mary Heath was found not guilty, a verdict that contradicted the earlier court’s decision.

If no son and heir had been born, Annesley was an imposter and his claim to the title was void. By now, Annesley had run out of the means to continue. He died aged forty-four, his claim to the title unresolved. Justice was just as expensive and elusive a prize to grasp in the eighteenth century as it can be today.

Not many years after Annesley and Williamson returned from their enforced migrations, kidnappings in British seaports began to subside. The quays in Aberdeen, Bristol and London where the spirits once prowled became busier with fleets bringing African slaves to the thriving colonies. By the Victorian age, European kidnapping would become, like the kidnappers themselves, the stuff of fable, replaced by the systematic mass abduction of Africans that has left such a stain on America’s plantations. But in the seventeenth century, the British government was about to give white servitude a major boost.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘HIS MAJESTY’S SEVEN-YEAR

PASSENGERS’

On 23 December 1769, the
Virginia Gazette
carried extracts of a letter from a gentleman in Boston to a friend in London. Heavy with irony, it made a point about slavery:

Through all the provinces the common cry is liberty and independence. Virginia and Maryland, with some reason form a pretension to independency. The bulk of the inhabitants or their progenitors forfeited their rights as subjects in England and were banished to America to expiate the crime they had committed in Europe. They suffered after their emigration . . . for seven, fourteen years or their life . . . But they should not forget that they came over as slaves; that there are many daily arriving in that capacity and that two thirds of the inhabitants, white or black are now actually slaves.

The observations were distorted; but as America approached the parting of the ways with England, many exiled whites from Britain were indeed arriving daily and being thrust into slavery. They were

‘His Majesty’s Seven Year Passengers’: convicts sentenced to seven or fourteen years or sometimes life ‘transportation to His Majesty’s American plantations’. For much of the previous century, convicts 247

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had been shipped over spasmodically in relatively modest numbers and sold as servants. Now they poured into New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston to be marketed. In the final decade of British rule, at least 900 a year were arriving and possibly even more. The convict trade was big business. The merchant who transported most of them in the early 1770s claimed that it was twice as profitable as the black slave trade.

The year 1718 marked the start of the mass emptying of England’s gaols into America on the scale first envisaged more than a century earlier. The trigger was the ending of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. This unleashed thousands of unemployed soldiers on a country already suffering a crime wave, and prisons began to overflow. It might have been expected that convict transportation would be used immediately to ease the situation but there was increasing resistance in the colonies to the admission of convicts and merchants were reluctant to take them because few fetched a good enough price on the American servant market.1 As a result, the numbers of transported villains dwindled.

In the years immediately after the war ended, judges at London’s Old Bailey sentenced no one to transportation.

An Act of Parliament passed in 1717 transformed the situation. It was entitled ‘An Act for the further preventing Robbery, Burglary, and other Felonies, and for the more effectual Transportation of Felons, and unlawful Exporters of Wool; and for declaring the law upon some Points relating to Pirates’. Despite the references to pirates and wool this measure was all about convict transportation.

When it passed into law, the act’s preamble stated that it had two prime objectives: ‘to deter criminals and supply the colonies with servile labour’.

The act overrode colonial restrictions on the convict trade, empowered judges to make far greater use of transportation and turned the business of shipping convicts to America into a gold mine for the merchants contracted to do it. They were to be officially endowed with property rights in the men and women who were turned over to them from the gaols and to get a subsidy for every convict landed in America. The subsidy – up to £5 a head – meant that whatever price the convict fetched the merchant couldn’t lose.

248

‘HIS MAJESTY’S SEVEN-YEAR PASSENGERS’

A slave trader, Jonathan Foreward, secured the most lucrative contract, for convicts from London and the Home Counties. He was one of the merchants operating on the notorious triangular route

– taking English manufactures to West Africa, where he acquired shiploads of slaves, whom he then shipped to the New World, where he was paid for his human cargo in sugar or tobacco. On the last leg, he shipped these commodities home. Foreward offered to take convicts for a subsidy of £3 a head, which undercut the opposition substantially. That won him the contract but it was a loss leader.

Soon after the first shipments of English villainy, Foreward secured a huge increase in the subsidy to £5 per convict.

The sentencing formula had been devised in Ireland and had been in operation there for some fifteen years. Under an act passed by the Irish Parliament in 1703, courts were authorised to commute the death sentence for relatively minor offences to a sentence of transportation for seven or fourteen years or sometimes life. Those guilty of stealing one cow (but not two) qualified, as well as those guilty of stealing nine (but not ten) sheep and those who had stolen other property worth less than twenty shillings.

That act would be used to send countless thousands from Ireland to the New World.

In England, the value of any property stolen would similarly determine who was executed and who transported under the new act. Here, too, the sentences available were seven or fourteen years or life. On 23 April 1718, the first felons judged under the new act heard their fate pronounced in Justice Hall at the Old Bailey.

They consisted of fifteen women and thirteen men all guilty of minor property crime. Most seem to have been the small fry of the English underworld or to be in the dock because of one of those mad, bitterly regretted lapses that mark people criminal for ever.

They included a tavern skivvy condemned for taking home some plates of leftover food, a couple of young shoplifters, a man who had stolen a coach cushion, and a drunk who seems to have gone off with the tankard he had supped from. For these crimes, they were each to be sold in America. The heaviest villain amongst them was a lone burglar.2

The contract bound the merchant to ship to America everyone 249

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sentenced to transportation ‘without excepting or refusing any by reason of age, lameness or any other infirmities whatsoever . . .’

Once the felon was in America, it was left to the merchant to decide how to dispose of him or her. Rich felons could pay the merchant off and become free men or women as long as they didn’t return to England. The rest – the vast majority – were sold off as servants for whatever the merchant could get.

For the convicts, the journey began, as it ended, in chains. The merchant contractor would have paid for the first group of twenty-eight ‘transports’ to have been ‘ironed’ and lodged in Newgate, probably in a huge cell beneath ground level. When the contractor’s ship was ready, the transports faced a half-mile tramp to the river amid the jeers of Londoners who always collected at the sight of manacled men and women. Foreward used the
Eagle
, a vessel that he diverted from the African slave run. He described her as ‘most suitable’ for convicts. On board, the convicts were held between decks, chained together in ‘messes’ of six.

From the outset, convict ships were beset by mutinies.3 In 1718, thirty prisoners took over a ship bound for the plantations and got ashore in France. In 1735, forty Irish convicts ran their vessel aground off Nova Scotia, murdered the entire crew and vanished.

In 1751, transports from Liverpool shot the captain, took the vessel to South Carolina and fled. Foreward’s successor as chief convict contractor said that ‘an extraordinary number of seamen’

was always necessary ‘to prevent the felons rising upon them’.

Moreover, their wages were ‘always very great by reason of the nature of such a cargo’.4

The journey took two months or more. Merchants did not get a subsidy on dead convicts, so some instructed their captains to keep their reluctant passengers healthy by incorporating ventilators into the hull and ordering regular washing. But such considerate men were exceptional. There was money to be made by cutting supplies and squeezing more bodies into the ship, whatever the conditions.

In 1767, George Selwyn MP was shocked when he visited a convict ship preparing to sail to Maryland.

I went on board and all the horror I had an idea of is short 250

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of what I saw this poor man in chained to a board in a hole not above 16 feet long, more than fifty with him, a collar and padlock about his neck and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on.5

In the early part of the century, dysentery, smallpox, freezing temperatures and typhoid carried off as many as one in three incoming convicts. On the
Owner’s Goodwill
in 1721, fifty convicts embarked and only thirty-one disembarked. On the
Rappahannock
in 1726, there were only sixty survivors out of 108 who embarked.

On the
Foreward
in 1728, ninety-six embarked and twenty-seven of them perished.

Such appalling losses in human life were not confined to convict ships. The voyage of the
Seaflower
is among the most poignant of all the stories. On 31 July 1741, the
Seaflower
put out of Belfast bound for Philadelphia with 106 passengers. She encountered heavy weather, sprang her mast and was then becalmed for several weeks. Supplies of food ran out and crew and passengers began to die. By the time she made Boston on 31 October – thirteen weeks after starting out – sixty-four were dead, including the captain. Six of the dead had been eaten by the survivors.

Among the convict carriers some captains were notorious for their greed and sadism. One was Barnet Bond, the master of the
Justitia
. A merchant who employed Bond was so furious at the loss of human life – and his profits – that he sued Bond for murder. The captain was alleged to have cut convicts’ water rations and literally watched them die of thirst though there was plenty of water aboard. He then grabbed anything of value the dead had been carrying. A witness said Bond declared himself