Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

in Jamaica Thomas Thistle would. So in Part one, I discussed the fact that Thomas thistle Would considered himself a bit of a naturalist, and that his documentations of all of the different crimes he committed were, in his own eyes, something he saw as a contribution to the scientific record. And he also considered like what he was specifically the sexual violence he employed as like a part of his

work as a farmer. You know, slaves aren't entirely treated the same as livestock in his mind, but they're treated more like livestock than people.

It's not out of humanitarianism or anything like that. They just it's it's that's pretty dark. Yeah, yeah, that's all this is to them. Yeah. One of the things that I find most interesting about the journals of Thomas Thistlewood is the degree to which things that are like these really horrible sex crimes are just like bracketed in between stuff like, oh, one of my lambs gave birth or I killed a snake, right, Like he literally like put

it in tween stuff like that. And in her study for Small Ax Journal, Heather Vermulion explains that by doing things like this, he's quote enclosing particular rape records within signifiers of his progress an increase in livestock and a decrease in the threatening of the undomesticated creaturely population, right, And so what he's seeing is like, what I'm doing is a part of this like taming of the natural world.

It's the same as getting rid of, you know, a snake that we have no use for because it will just eat our livestock. Or it's the same as one of my livestock giving birth right and Darwin's theory of evolution didn't exist yet, right, that's not published until the late eighteen fifties. But people who would wind up being Darwin's precursors are alive and publishing books of science in this period of time. And these are a lot of

the guys that Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of. Right, He's like, this is his We don't have like YouTube yet, but like this is very much the kind of content that he is he is ingesting, right, is these like early and some of them are bullshit? Right, yeah, Like this is his manusphere, right, is like this mix of works of science and works of like literature and satire and like literal like just like lies that are also

being passed off as science. Like all of this is like part of his intellectual diet, and one of the books that was most influence.

for their like views of the world around them. Like that that happens today with you know, shit like we can talk about South Park and the movie Starship Troopers, right, where a lot of people don't get the joke and wind up or take the joke in a specific way and wind up using it as part of like a worldview that justifies some pretty fucked up things and shit

like that is happening back then. And one of the things one of the ways it happens to Thomas thistle w is he he becomes a fan of this like satirical tract published in seventeen fifty two called the Man Plant, or a Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed. And this is this is like a you've heard of like Thomas Swift's a modest proposal, right yeah, where he's like he's talking about it we should, Oh, you know, there's all these poor people starving in Ireland. What if

we ate Irish babies? What if we like allowed them to be sold as food? And it's like it's a sad Like he's joking about how cruelly people talk about the poor, right and particularly poor Irish like that it's that's the joke, is like how awful his society is to this group of people, right, that they're treating their babies like a like chicken to be farmed for food, almost right, like like that's that's the point Swift was making, right, And some people get the joke and some people don't.

And Thistlewood comes across a book that's a similar thing to what Thomas Swift is doing, called The Man Plant, and it's written we don't know exactly who wrote it. The author's pseudonym was Vincent Miller. And it's really weird because it comes out in seventeen fifty two, so there's no theory of evolution. Our knowledge of heredity is very limited in the seventeen fifties, right, we're starting to get an understanding of it, but it is not what we'd

call developed. And this work, as a joke is an

early eugenics text. It's really fascinating. It's like a pre genetics understanding of eugenics, again written as a bit, because the gist of this book is that this guy Vincent Miller, is basically saying, hey, we need like there's a lot of problems like with the there's a problem of inequality between the sexes, right, because pregnancy is so dangerous and painful for women and part of what he's doing here is I think he's kind of making a comment on

the upper class in his society, in which it's very common for women who are of high society after they give birth to hand their baby off to like a nurse, right, who's going to like actually like feed and take care of effect we raise the kid. And so part of what part of the satires is he's saying, what if we take moms and dads entirely out of the equation and raise human beings like animals on a farm. Right, And one the way he suggests doing this is like,

we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's ges state embryos in an artificial womb, and that way we can keep we can we can remove human beings entirely from the business of like raising their children. Right, He's being like, this is a sad.

of like that, like pregnancy is dangerous for women. And it's a little unclear to me if he's actually acknowledging that that's an inequality or if he's making fun of the people who see it as an inequality. Like I'm just not fully versed enough in like the satire of the seventeen fifties in England to tell you what he's trying to do more. But Vincent Miller, part of what he's doing is he's looking at this culture of upper

class child neglect and he's proposing a hyperbolic solution. Right, we create an artificial womb to ges state fertilized embryos outside of the human body, and we can raise human

beings like animals on a plantation. And part of one of the things that the eugenics thing that he kind of proposes here is he pretends that he's done this, He like writes claims about how I convinced this farm girl like to give me one of her after she had sex with his boy, that she liked to give me a fertilized embryo, and I took it out this way, and I grew it in a heat cow bladder. And the baby's twenty months old now, and it's much healthier

than a regular baby. And for this reason, I propose that this method of growing human beings will yield a heartier offspring will get which is proto eugenic. Right, that he's saying we will improve, and again as a joke, but he's still saying we will improve through this method the breeding quality of all of the British people that we start putting into the world.

of the satire. So obviously this guy does not is not seriously suggesting this, Nor did he literally just state a baby and a cow's uh black, Like that's you can't do that, right, Like that's like he's this is a bit. It's a little unclear to me how we know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood, because he writes, he quotes

extensively from this tract in his diary. He writes about it a bunch at the time that he reads it, and there's some some evidence some of the scholars who study his journals have suggested that this played like a role in his intellectual development and how he treated people. And it's kind of I kind of think I don't know if it's that he missed the satire entirely or that he just like a lot of these tech bros who read science fiction and there's like things in there

that you're not emulate. The Matrix, right, it's a torment nexus situation where like Vincent Miller is describing the torment nexus that is treating people like Livestock, and Thomas Thistle was like, what a cool idea. Why don't idea exactly right?

intervals of time. They may then become like those fertile fields that yield two or three crops in a season, and their fecundity will only be limited by such small reposes as the necessity of lying fallow will require for the reparation of the ground. They will continue longer able and apt for impregnation, so that, upon a moderate estimate, a well disposed, well constituted, and industrious woman may furnish her country with one hundred and thirty to one hundred

and forty or more children. So it's very much like again talking about women like a field and talking about human babies as crops. You know, you can see a GIF is supposed to like this. I think Miller is saying this is bad, right, that's why it's a satire. But this or what is just like what a cue?

is I mean, that's part of what's interesting. This is in seventeen fifty two, this comes out and it is kind of talking about like genetic engineering in a way, right,

and before we knew what those words meant. But it's a proto tract in that line of like science fiction, right, Like there's there's bits of Gatica in this, right, like that Gatica has bits of this in its DNA, if you'll forgive the term, right, the movie Gatica this idea of like we're well, by changing this, we make people that are heartier and stronger and we can ship them over sea. We're creating plantations of men, right, That's what

Miller writes in this book. And then we'll ship all these people that we've grown like crops over to populate the colonies. Quote. By this means we shall see infinite broods of subjects serve to in people and enrich as well as our island, as those vast tracts in North America which are so thinly inhabited, which are now obligated to be stocked with other foreign refugees. A naturalization bill

will thus be out of the question. We may also then more reasonably grasp the conquest of both the indies, our actual possessions and those which we shall infallibly by dint of superior numbers procure, will be abundantly supplied with swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as China itself. And part again, there's this knowledge that we're

only peopling the new world we need. It's mostly slaves in a lot of these colonies, right, slaves or local people that we're ruling, because British people can't survive that way well in all of these places, right. And part of the joke that Miller's like, He's like, no, no, no, what if we could get rid of all of these non white people by just outbreeding them with these human beings we grew on a field and again saying that to satirize a lot of the attitudes at his time.

But I don't think everyone gets is interprets it that way. We know Thistlewood owned a copy of this book after it was published, and he wrote about it in his diary several times. I don't know that he picked up the critique of aristocratic family dynamics, but the idea of peopling newly conquered territory and improving the quality of new generations was clearly on his mind, and that's how he

saw a lot of what he was doing. I found very little analysis of his impact of this the impactless book had on him, other than what Heather vver Mullin writes, Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers, and they

mostly ignore this kind of stuff. When a lot of them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all, right, like some of them like the most some of them will say is that like, Well, there's some debate as to whether or not you know, what he was doing was consensual, and it's like, well, there's really not like he owned these people. Yeah they couldn't read Latin, but yeah,

there's a lot of like this stuff gets mixed. Vermullin is one of the only female scholars that I've seen analyzed this Wood's writing, and she does center the man this book in her discussions of why he wrote about his sex crimes the way she did when discussing passages from Miller's book that he exerpted for his diary, she concludes Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his classification of enslaved women in rape records, which suggests that

his practice has preceded, or at least existed in reciprocal relationship to his engagement of pseudoscientific theory. In other words, he does start writing about what he's doing. It's like he would consider his sexual exploits before he reads this book, but the way he quotes from it suggests that he considers it to justify a provided justification to his behavior right, and that justification may have helped him continue to find ways to explain to himself why what he was doing was okay, right.

the old Negro house. Paid a bit, right, In other words, he slept with this woman, assaulted her on the ground, that's what supterum means it near the slave house, and he paid her the equivalent of like a dollar or two, right, And so that that's coming in immediately after he like exerts passages from this book. These things exist his like intellectual diet, and then the things that he is doing and justifying based on the stuff he's reading all exists

kind of in the same continuum together Vermilini's lanes. In other words, after noting that he returned to text that imagined plantations of men thistlewood records that he raped enslaved woman named Eve, and that he did so at the estate's current harvest site. Put differently, in an engineered Eden, the pseudoscientist Vincent Miller grew his ter Philius from an egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter, Thistle would mark the time of harvest by raping an enslaved

woman named Eve. Right, there's this weird degree to which what he's noting down and the things that he's partaking, he makes them almost fit the things that he's doing.

But you know, he's in a way. I think this is a product of the fact that he's isolated from the intellectual culture he's obsessed with. It's not a two way relationship. He's digesting these books and these articles, and he's talking with them about them with other white exiles, and he probably probably part of his ego is that he seems like a learned man among this population of exiles.

But he also knows he's not really fit to be part of the intellectual community that he admires, right, And some of that is shown in the fact that he doesn't really understand everything he's reading.

and it's a market. How unhappy Eve was that she escaped frequently, And this is some ofhow we get how Thomas would have punished the people that he was overseeing while he's working at this plantation. On March third, seventeen fifty five, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four people who escaped that day. The next day, he wrote, William Crookshanks, a white worker. Below Thistlewood brought Eve into the savannah to her mistress, missus Cope, but she soon

made her escape again. Below this, Thomas notes in small print he slept with her under the logwood. So what he is saying there is that this other white worker catches Eve after she gets out, and he brings her back to the big house, and she escapes again, and William catches her again and then he rapes her as like a punishment for escaping, or maybe just because it's what he wanted to do. Right. Part of what we're getting here is how this is not just Thomas engaging

in this behavior. This is all of the white people, all of the white men, particularly on these farms, are doing this habitually. Like it's incredible how casually. He notes this, Right, what Crookshanks does, This is not even like a significant

deal to him. It's just like, well, of course he recaptured this woman, and he did that as he was taking her back, right, And Vermulin goes on to note, quote the following week, after dinner for heartily drunk white male colonists, all Thistlewood's acquaintances hauled Eve separately into the water room. The bathroom, and we're concerned with which means raped her one of them, his good friend Harry Weach twice,

first and last. The following month, Eve ran away two more times and again, Like this is both how they're trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to themselves, like well, she escaped, so we have to do this, you know. It's and it's so casual, like none of them even think about it, Like this is the normal behavior for white men in the society, is to commit like rape at the drop of a hat against these people that they own, right, Like that is the normal behavior.

being the father if everyone's raping her. And so there's this like already, like you can tell the the arguments shakey to begin with, like clearly like what we understand, like this man's doing bad things and it's driven by you know, his bad motives, and then looking for different justifications, but they don't even they're not even.

we own is us civilizing the wild world. That's a lot how these guys are think that's and what's interesting is part of what you get from this is because Thistlewood doesn't write about what his colleagues are doing to these women the same way he does about himself. He doesn't put it in Latin, right, he uses these kind of body terms. They were concerned with her, right, which is commonly meant you know, had sex with kind of when people were writing about this sort of thing.

her escaping, sometimes he does it after she escapes. But he does it constantly, and he writes about him doing it fundamentally differently than he writes about his friends doing it, which is does say something, right, It talks about the incoherence in his worldview, as you pointed out, and it just also I think it shows this kind of narcissism that he does think that he's special and that what he's doing is different than them. Right. So the night after this I mentioned in episode one, he's in a

long term what he would call a relationship. We're not calling at that, but it's important to talk about how he describes it with this enslaved woman Fiba, right, phibbah is how he spells it, and so she he has. Ostensibly there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her, like because he talks to her like she she like's he comes back to her

pretty regularly, and it clearly at least matters. When she's pissed at him and the way he describes it, she gets angry because she thinks of this as like them, him cheating on her, right, and I this is kind of again, this isn't a relations This is like a parody of an actual relationship, like a sick like it's it's a perversion of everything that that's supposed to be.

But he does write about it like that, right, He describes the fact that after he goes over to her after assaulting Eve again, Phibi seems much out of humor about Eve yesterday, and he's angry and he doesn't know who can have told her? Right, Like, who the hell let her know what I did to this woman? Right?

we don't get he's not interested in asking her. He doesn't talk to her, like we only get pieces of her from the outside, like we do of all of these people that he owns and is abusing, So to talk about Eve again. She escapes in the early fall, and she manages to stay free almost the entire month of October. When she was caught, Thomas quote whipped and chained her. She subsequently escaped once more and was brought

home on December twenty third and chained again. The next day, she escaped and was brought back the day after that, whereupon Thomas chained her in the cookroom. This pattern continued for years. When she ran away and was caught in the spring of seventeen fifty seven, Thistlewood reported her punishment thusly tied her to the oven post and gave her

a little correction. Now that phrasing could mean a lot, And so that's as good as segue for any as me to discuss the corporal punishment on the plantation as it existed in the time in which Thomas was doing his job and ed kinds of violence that he and his peers meeted out on the people that they owned. But first bad time for an ad break. Huhugh, yep, sorry, wof and we're back.

And part of it's because we'll talk about this in a little bit, but even some historians are really uncomfortable talking about the details of the sadism of the punishments that white people engaged in in places like Jamaica. And it is really upsetting to talk about Thomas arrived in Jamaica as a practiced farmer and an amateur naturalist, and there's no evidence that prior to arriving here he was a violent man or had ever so much as struck

another person. Maybe he had, maybe he'd been in a lot of fights, but he didn't write about it, right, We don't know if he had not been violent prior to coming to Jamaica. This changed rapidly upon starting work at a plantation. On his first day working as assistant overseer on his first plantation on the island, his boss ordered him to give three hundred lashes to his driver, who was one of the oldest enslaved people on the property.

Thistlewood delivered the punishment, which was likely ordered as much to toughen him up as to punish the enslave man in question. Right, there's this new white guy on the farm. We got to have him beat the absolute hell out of the most like, sympathetic and liked person on the enslaved persons. Yes, are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah? And he proves cruel enough for the job. Now, as I noted, Jamaica was reputed for being a really the

egalitarian place for white men. Right, even poor white men would be treated well by the rich white men. And part of why is because there's this there's this understanding that everyone will bind together when it's time to do violence against the much larger enslave majority. James Robertson writes that quote the generous hospitality of a planter's household rested on uninhibited violence in the fields. This will would absorb this lesson and continue to order floggings for the rest

of his life in Jamaica. And yeah, that is. It's one of these things. He exists in Jamaica during the high point of slavery and slave plantations on the island, both because the weather is unusually good during like thirty seven years that he's there and so harvests are really good. It's just a good time climactically to be growing sugar in Jamaica. And also there's no limits whatsoever on slavery right while he is there, and that's going to start

to change after he dies. In seventeen eighty nine, not long after he passes, anti slavery advocates are going to testify, it part in Westminster, about the abuse of enslaved people in Jamaica. Robertson writes about this quote. These included. The testimony included cruel beatings occurring not just out on lonely estates, but in gardens in Savannah Lamar, the parish's principal port or. Only a hedge separated passers by from the victim's screams.

More frightening. Still, while the witnesses stated the cries were heard with universal detestation, the perpetrator was not brought to legal punishment. Historians of slavery have made little use of these remarkable depositions, despite their early date. The arguments for disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement found these witnesses, so their evidence can hardly be objective.

This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists, and then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slaveholding societies could be. Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion that such horrors could not exist in a British colony. So there's even this problem with a lot of histories where they're like, we can't take these accounts by anti slavery activists of how brutal the system was as literal because they're by is.

but like I got shipped to do. You know. It's the It's the same thing in every society to an extent, when you talk about the stuff that's horrible but widely accepted, is there's a large number of people who always knows something's wrong, but like, bro, I gotta make rent, you know,

like yeah, good stuff. So, as we saw in the case when we were talking about Eve, people who often escaped numerous times and would be whipped numerous times when they were taken back by slave catchers, and when this didn't stop them from trying to escape, slave owners and overseers developed more elaborate methods of punishment. One that acted

as a sort of garnish to flogging was pickling. Right, So if you if they need want to flog you, but you've already been flogged, they will, or if you do something particularly bad, they'll pickle you after they flog you. And that's a literal term. You take pickle spices and salt and lime juice and peppers and you rub them in the open wounds that you whipped into their body. Oh us, correct, that's a normal punishment. It's like a normal thing that this guy Tom. That's his part of

his day job. He does it, like yeah, like like what I think about, like something you have to do like once or twice at least like a couple of times a week at your day job. And it's like that for him, right, Like that's that's his gig, you know. On a website called Same Passage, I found a detailed account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings.

These include, in seventeen fifty six, runaway enslaved people named Punch and Quackou were quote well flogged and then washed and rubbed in salt, pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper as noted with eve chains were also used as a punishment. In seventeen seventy one, a runaway named Cuba was flogged, chained, and then had a brand marked into her forehead. So she was had a brand like burned into her head. Right, there's some evidence.

enslaved person named Egypt shit in his mouth. Months later, when Derby was caught eating sugarcane again, he was flogged and pickled, and then Thomas made Hector shit in his mouth. This was a normal punishment in Jamaica. It's not the only place where it was done, but this was something that was extensively done by slave owners and overseers on the island. They would force enslaved people to defecate in

each other's mouths as a punishment. Depending on the severity of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth gagged and covered while that was the shit was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment. Right, this is a thing that there's a version of this called Derby's dose. That's a really common extreme punishment on the island, and it's done. It's not

just done for slaves who like escape. Sometimes like someone steals some sugar or some food and you just do this insane thing to them, and it's like there's a degree to which it's almost a method of entertainment for some of these white guys is coming up with these increasingly sadistic and fucked up and elaborate ways to hurt

the people that they own. But if you need to know anything about the moral quality of the white men on Jamaica at the time, Like a lot of the common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds. That was a normal thing they would do, right, Yeah.

they stopped doing it. We don't really know. But this is something that exists and is normal for a while while he's early in his career, and it's it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the period of time that he's there. But it's a pretty common like Derby's dose is a thing that other people are doing in Jamaica to the people that they owned. Thomas spins is first seventeen years on the island working for other planters,

primarily in Egypt. In seventeen sixty he made a note of his active preparations to purchase land of his own, and seventeen sixty seven he'd saved up enough to buy one hundred and sixty acre farm, which he named bread Nut Island. He'd been purchasing people this whole time, and he'd made extra money that led him buy the land by renting them out to his boss. And though so by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like thirty people, and he moves them onto this plantation that

he owns right. In an article for the social historian Barbara Starman's Writes of his human acquisitions, he wrote of purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid one hundred and twelve pounds for two men and two hundred pounds for one boy and three girls. The two men were named Will and Dick. Will was about twenty five years old and stood five foot three and a half three and two tenths of an inch, and Dick was about twenty two years old and taller at five feet seven tenths

of an inch. The boys and girls were Kuba, aged about fifteen. Suki aged about fourteen, Maria aged about fifteen, and Pompey, aged about sixteen. All were branded with Thistlewood's mark a double TT on their right shoulders. Because he's scarring all of these people that he owns in order to prove it, well, does t T Yeah?

doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does this because he doesn't want them to die of smallpox, because they're valuable assets. Right now, that said he could you know this is he is a guy. I think he wanted to see himself as a nice master. He makes an note of every like nice thing that he does for the people that he owns, like around Christmas, but he gave them each eighteen herrings and a bottle of rum. Some of them he made share bottles of rum. Right,

not everyone got their own bottle of rum. But he like he writes about this stuff, is like, see, I could be a nice guy. I'm not always a huge dick to Everybody's definitely.

he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes about them a lot, and he develops a preference for this specific plant, Bromeliad penguin, which he uses as like a natural fence for parts of the farms he works on. And then when he gets his own plantation, he moves these plants, which people call prickly penguins, to keep pests

away from his personal gardens. And he doesn't know this about them, but they're an herbal aborde fascian, right, And there's evidence that a lot of the women who live on these plantations, both when he's an overseer and then when he owns one, know how this plant can be used and don't tell him and use it to stop

him themselves from carrying his kids to term. Right, Like, there's evidence again, when you talk about this, there's always resistance happening, even if it's not well documented, Even if the historic record doesn't give it to us directly, you can tell he writes about like, wow, there's a lot of what he calls miscarriages among these women that he

thought were going to carry kids to term. And we know from other things that some of these women were using this plant as an herbal Abortifacio, and he didn't know.

of the story is like the agency. These people who had very little options for exercising agency were able to like fight for right and and they had to like do it underground, they had to hide it, but they did do it right anyway. I feel like I've detailed enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the gravity of his to you. But there is one area I want more. Well, there's one thing we should say that I'm not going to go into detail on, but I will tell you he talks a lot about pedophilia.

That is another aspect of this, right, that's something he's doing. He will buy girls when they were eleven or twelve, and he will not long after assault them.

and pickling people and whatnot. Just like, that's all of these guys wearing these fancy coats who got painted in their plantation houses. They're all the same kind of guy as Thomas Thistlewood. Right, those are the people who are the same. Right, All of these people who own human beings and make their living off of it are all doing shit like this. None of them are particularly better than the others.

This kind of stuff happens all the time, but it's like weird pains contemplate. Yeah, he's paying for a white person right to have who owns Phiba? Right, he does buy her freedom when he dies kind of, but like, yeah, it's it's a very like that is the situation here, and he he buys her a little girl to be basically her personal slave. Right, And for the first couple of years that this girl best is there. She's an assistant to Fiba, and she's he also uses her as

a runner. Right, He'll send this this little girl, this eleven year old girl running across the island on foot, and he'll to bring exchange books with his friends on other plantations. She's his postal service in a way. Right. Like there's one point where like he sends a letter to a doctor friend of his and she runs back to him with a copy of the works of Francis Bacon that he that this guy he sent a letter to sends back with her right. So this is kind

of this is how like social like. This is how these guys are all staying in touch in Jamaica. It's how they share letters and books and their thoughts on the scientific discoveries of the day. In seventeen seventy eight, this girl Best runs back to the plantation with a copy of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity. That's

how modern this is. Right, he finds out about the shit ben Franklin is working on because this girl he buys at eleven runs back to his house with a copy of the book that some other white dude gave her right to give to her. Master. At the same time as this knowledge is being transmitted, abuse is being transmitted. Thomas is going to sexually abuse this girl. We assume

people he's sending her to do this too. And an excellent dissertation for the English Department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth Polka writes, one can't help what wonder if Best spent any time looking through Franklin and Bacon's printed works on her journeys between the homes of these men, particularly Franklin's Observations and Experiments which was illustrated with engraved plates depicting Leyden jars spread in currents of Electricity One especially, he

wonders about Bess's interactions with a text when considering that an August of seventeen sixty six, shortly after Thistle would acquire his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistle would flog a then twelve year old Best for meddling with my watch and telescope in the Great House piazza. Three years later, after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescope, Thistle would

first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the location east of the Pond was fifteen and part of Again, these stories you don't get directly, but there's this girl who is in this terrible situation and is very intellectually curious. He describes her as messing with the telescope. She's trying to understand this. She's trying to look out at the stars,

probably right, like it's not. It's very reasonable that Polka wonders if she would have, during this what little time she had alone, taken a glimpse at some of these books, because this is clearly a curious child, right and she's just completely locked away from exploring any of that by the system of heinous abuse that she is never able to escape, right. And this is it's important to note when I talk about this not being that abnormal within

the mainstream white high society at the time. There's a really good passage in Polka's dissertation that talks about like does a good job of putting Thomas's habits and his documentation of what the violence he was doing into like

a global context. Quote Meriwether Lewis and William cla Ark, Following the advice of Thomas, Jefferson, kept extensive diaries of their North American settler colonial mission into Native territory, in which they would occasionally record details of the sexual encounters between the men on their surveying expedition and the Native women,

as well as the spread of venereal disease. These recordings were later printed in either French or Latin by editors as means of coding the explicit details, just like Thistlewood did. Eighteenth century Virginia planter William Bird also kept a coded log of his sexual activity as a means of control. More specifically, Richard Godbeer explains that he was anxious to

control himself as he was to control others. Further, Godbeer concludes that Bird experienced chronic tension within the Chesapeake's white population during the seventeenth century and fostered an obsession with control in colonial Southern society. While the elite's emulation of English gentry culture necessitated an intense self consciousness and careful scrutiny of one's personal behavior. Like Thistlewood, Bird coded his

diary in shorthand. However, unlike Thistlewood, Bird's entire diary was coded not only the segments related to sexual exploitation, and he kept a diary in a locked library, and Kenneth Lockridge speculates that birds shorthand may have been intended above all to hide Bird's further encoded self from his wife. In an even more well known instance of sexual documentation, diaris Samuel Peppies, who also recorded his sex acts, occasionally coded his sexual activity in Latin as well as in

French and Spanish. What emerges in this cross comparison of eighteenth century diarists is a gendered coding of sexual documentation, where Enlightenment era men use quotidian writing in order to document conceal and control their exploitation of women. That's what I mean when I say, like, this guy is not that weird for his social level, you know well, and.

the Bible and talk about it in Latin. And that cuts down the number of people who might be because you know, the part of the thing the Catholic Church wanted to stop was anyone who had a different opinion about Christianity going into business for themselves, which is where we are right now, right like that's the way. That's what Protestant is is like anyone can go into business for themselves as like interpreting the word of God basically, So there is something to what you say, right and that.

The vast majority of these women were enslaved. The vast majority of these acts would have been sexual assault, and his analysis of the diary, which you'd done, estimated yeah, three and fifty two with a you know, somewhere around one hundred and thirty victims would be the way of looking at it. One of the people who analyzed the diaries, Richard Dunn, estimated that prior to coming to Jamaica, Thomas would have averaged at most around ten sexual encounters per year.

On the island, this increased to about two hundred sometimes more so. Part of when you're looking at what motivated him to become a slave owner and a planter. Sexual opportunity is not zero percent of that story, right. He finds ways to justify it that are heavier. But this does come down to that, you know, That's part of what this comes down to. Cool stuff or so did he ever ever have kids or raise a family? He has about fourteen kids, all who are born en slaves, yep, yep,

and he does. He writes about he has a child with Thiba, and he writes about punishing like having this kid whipped, you know, for in disobedience. This this child dies in seventeen eighty, you know, which is about six years before Thomas passes on. So his children, I mean, they're living these difficult lives. They're working on plantations, right, so they don't benefit from easy lives, right, And yeah, I mean it's a there's a lot that's complicated here.

And like what's going on with him in Fhiba in how he sees these relationships with the people that he brings into the world this way, But it's all based on kinds of exploitation, right, Like that's what's happening here. Fundamentally, it's all exploitation. That's the only kind of relationship that he has with any of these people is one based on ownership?

of stuff becomes seen as much as his coverage. As we've talked about, it's never fully reckoned with you know, when when the Great Britain banned slavery and in their colonies they never really look that deeply into what guys like Thistle what are doing. Right, there's kind of this acknowledgment that like, well, that was bad, that was a bad system people. It was bad that things were doing that, and it's good that we stopped it. Let's focus on the fact that we stopped it, and how nice that is.

We were faster to stopping it than the Americans. Right, and they did definitely in slavery, faster than the United

States did. But there's also this level to which there was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated, and how many British fortunes were based on them, on selling and buying people, on these plantations, on the profits from these plantations, on selling stuff to these people, on running the boats, like that's that's never reckoned with Yeah, right, we one so.