Part One: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

Robert walks his former colleague Titi Lee through the life and times of Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner and monster of the first order who kept a detailed diary of all his crimes against humanity.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Ah and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
that you're listening to today and maybe other days. Probably
other days. I'm Robert Evans here to tell you about
some of the worst people in all of history and
to talk with us about some of the worst people
in all of history. Is someone who's not one of
the worst people in all of history, but it's in

(00:26):
fact my friend T T.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Lee.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to the show. How are you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm good.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
I mean I still have time to become one of
the worst people.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
In history, so I wanted to Yeah, like, I believe
you could be a contender. No, no, it's like that.
It's like that movie where fucking Marky Mark becomes a
pro football player by trying out, Like I think you could.
You could become a dictator if you show up.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
If there was a competition show, yeah I need rules.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
If there's like a rubric, I mean actually there probably is.
I don't know if I would do well actually in
that competition.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
But see, that's this is what this is. And none
of these Network States Silicon Valley dictatorship people have any
sense of like fun because if you had like a
reality show where whoever one got to govern like three
million people's lives as like an iron fisted dictator. Like
the franchising potential for that show is incredible, especially if

(01:21):
any of them become nuclear armed. I mean, my god,
you could. You could keep people glued to the TV
like that's that's the new reality, Shoe.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, a competition for who gets the nuclear codes.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
I mean, we might actually end up in better situation
than we are now.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Just give it to someone else.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
See, I have an important question.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yeah, how's woo Shue? Oh my god, wooshoo. He's right
behind me. Wait is there a video on that you guys? Yeah? Yeah,
he's He.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
Doesn't like when he's not the underve attention as I
don't know if any I feel like old days when
we used to go into the that big building in
Hollywood to record.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, sure would run around and make a lot of noise.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
And then I had to stop bringing him because, Yeah,
but I discovered he doesn't like when he's not to
send her attention.

Speaker 5 (02:08):
I love back in the day Anderson who Sho used
to hang and that was nice, It was really nice.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah, he's an old dog, you know, he's about to
be nine.

Speaker 5 (02:18):
Anderson will be all of had Anderson ten years next year,
which is horrific and awesome but horrific.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
I would like her to age less.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, wouldn't we all like to age less?

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (02:29):
Fair enough?

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Would you if giving like the blood of a young
dog to Anderson would make Anderson younger? Would you do
the Peter Teal thing with Anderson?

Speaker 5 (02:37):
I would commit so many horrific crimes to extend the
lives of Anderson. If I could extend Anderson's life longer,
the amount of crimes I would commit to do this
I probably shouldn't say on it on Mike, but my goodness,
I would commit biohacker.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Who's the guy who like is always botoxing his penis?

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Ryan Jo? Are you talking about the guy who wants
to live forever?

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (03:00):
That vampire all but.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
They're all botoxing?

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Oh yeah, there's one. There's one guy on Twitter? Yeah,
probably him. Yeah. I feel like I wonder when, yeah,
when the next dog?

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Uh when the dog version of that?

Speaker 3 (03:12):
The dog version of that? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, because it does tend to like every after five
or ten years, it trickles down like people are now
doing like like cosmetic surgeries for their dogs and stuff.
It just takes a little while longer, uh for it
for for people to be like, well, maybe my dog
also needs to be ashamed that they're that there their
eyelids are drooping or something like that, even though they're
a bass a hound and that's how they're supposed to.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
I mean they have bb also droops for the labooboos.
Now that's like a whole what thing on TikTok. Yeah,
there's like they like wear little doctor clothes and have little.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Gloves and lies. Oh my, they're great. The videos are.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Great, and I will fuck well, I love the modern world.
But you know what the modern world is built on,
tet slavery obviously, right, we're all we're all aware of
that today.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Horrific transition.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Robert I went and I wasn't given a lot of
options weekend we started the started this, how we started this,
and that was the easiest way to get to slavery.
You're never more than like two steps away when you're
talking about like really any history, human history, to be honest,
But when we talk about like the Atlantic slave trade, right,
chattel slave trade in the America's uh a lot of

(04:30):
like our documentation about like what happened is documentation of
like people kind of nearer to the end of the
process who like escaped and were able to write about it.
That's not exclusively it, but you get a lot more
from that period of time just because you know, earlier
in the system there were it was a lot harder

(04:51):
for somebody to break out of that system and then
to be able to like talk about what had happened
to them. And so when it comes to like kind
of the height of this period of time, one of
our best sources in terms of like how actually brutal
the system was on a day to day basis is
the notes the extensive diaries of a single man of
a guy who was a plantation owner in Jamaica, and

(05:14):
one of the worst like documented mot like sex criminals
and murderers and history, just because of like the stuff
he wrote in his own diary. And this guy's name
is Thomas Thistlewood, and he's someone who's like studied by
historians of slavery today because like you get something with
him that you don't get a lot, which is like
one of the guys actually doing It's like some of
those like internal notes that the Nazis took when they

(05:37):
were doing their shit, where you've got this guy who's
a part of this system that is still like a
century away from a reckoning, you know, almost at the
time that he dies, who's just like writing about it.
Is like this has got up this morning and here's
what I did to these people that I own. Wow,
So that's what we're talking about today. This is like
a bleak story, but it's really important. Not because Thistlewood

(05:58):
himself is like the worst specific guy who ever owned people,
but more because he's a pretty normal guy who owned people,
who was like unusually detailed in his his note taking. Right,
That's why we know about it, like.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
A guy writing in his diary.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
That's exactly. Yes, I want to say.

Speaker 4 (06:16):
I had no idea what like, right before we started,
I was like, I don't know what we're talking about today,
and I asked you, I was like, is it gonna
be perfect yep?

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Or diamonds?

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Like this one's real bad? Here we go. I felt
the need to warn you about this.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, I had a feeling.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
I'm like, you know what, it's been a while since
I've done this podcast. It's it's it's gonna be a
brutal one. Yeah, but no, Well, yeah, well, I mean, obviously,
I'm sure there's horrific things in it. It's but while
that you were talking what you said about before people
realize as a reckoning, because that's something like I think
about a lot, like just like him, writing in a

(06:52):
diary feels like the most private, safe, like secretive thing. Right,
you just wrote in a piece of paper. There's no
such thing as xerox, there's no Internet. You just hide
it somewhere. But that's also like one of the most
lasting things because nowadays, and I could go away in
you know, one hundred years.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
And this is one of those things where this guy, yeah,
like like this, there's a decent chance that like very
few people's lives who were like live tweeting or streaming
everything they do today will be as known in a
hundred years as Thomas Thistlewood's because he wrote it all
down on paper and it got like when he died,
his effects wound up and I think in a university's
collection it was like a long decades after his death

(07:29):
that someone found these and was like, oh my god,
like there's a lot of there's a lot of detail
in here about how slavery worked. He's also like our
best detail on what the climate of Jamaica was like
for about a hundred years because he was just taking
like really detailed notes and it would be like woke
up and committed these horrible sex crimes. Here's what the
weather was like, right, Like these are the diary increase

(07:52):
that he's leaving behind. So's it's one of those things
where you'll find you'll find whole books by people that
are just like exing the stuff from his diary about
the weather because that's important for like climactic.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Sciences first and impression.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, and then there's this larger branch of scholarship that's
about his crimes against humanity. But it's it's kind of
like the Unobomber where he is also known for his
other work.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
You know.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
Interesting reminds me.

Speaker 4 (08:20):
I don't know why I thought of Arcadia the play,
but that's too obscure a reference where all the notes
being taken are anyways, I.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
Probably wouldn't be brought up.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
But anyway, what is nobody.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
Because they go the Arcadi it is Tom Sopper play,
but in it they well, the reason I brought it
up is because people are taking notes and trying to
infer what happened, but then there's like slight misunderstandings of
like what actually happened. But I just find that interesting
if he mentions like a weird obscure bird or something,
and you're like, I just imagine some like you know,
bird hunter, like looking through his diary, like, yes, he's

(08:52):
a terrible slave owner, but there's a sign this extinct
bird exist.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
We've documented that this animal lived here at this time too.
That is like the thing with his diaries is that
they're both really useful to like naturalists and also to
students of one of the worst things people ever did
to each other. So his name was Thomas Thistlewood. He

(09:16):
was born on March sixteenth, seventeen twenty one in tupelm Lincolnshire.
His father was Robert Thistlewood, and he was who was
a moderately successful farmer. You know, so this is in
you know ingelande. His dad is like an okay farmer, yeah,
but not like super wealthy, right, Like his his family

(09:37):
aren't aristocracy, but they're like landed and they're doing okay.
There would be like upper middle class by the time
his dad dies. And his dad dies pretty young. When
Thomas is six in seventeen twenty seven. Now, this is
one of those things where, like the early seventeen hundreds
were kind of coming into modernity, but there's still a
lot that's almost very medieval. So, like the father dies

(09:58):
and he's got multiple sons, everything's going to the firstborn son, right,
That's just the way shit tends to work. And so
if you're the second born son, either like a wealthy
family or of like a family like this, that's just
pretty comfortable. You're not gonna inherit any of that land
or really much in the way of wealth. Right, So
you kind of you grow up knowing your older brother's

(10:21):
getting everything and you're gonna have to figure out something
new to do something probably not. This is what fuels colonialism, right,
is to a heavy extent. You've got all these second
and third sons who are like, not gonna get shit
unless they get it themselves. So they go over to
the New World somewhere, and they probably die of cholera
in a month, but whatever. You know, some of them

(10:42):
get rich.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
We could marry rich, but you know.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, yeah, that's your other option, is marrying rich. But
but you know some people tried to do both, and yeah,
this is kind of this is what's going to be
one of these guys who from the time he's like
five or six years old, knows, Okay, Dad's gone, I'm
I'm kind of all my own in terms of figuring out,
like what I'm going to do to make my fortune.
You know, Thomas would be one of these unhappy second sons.

(11:08):
His older brother John born in seventeen sixteen. And here
it's basically everything their dad does set aside some money
for Thomas, about two hundred pounds sterling. And you can
never kind of convert perfectly from that kind of money
to this kind of money because like most people back
then didn't have money, or at least didn't use it
most of the time. Like your average transaction is, like

(11:30):
your average working class person isn't handing over money for stuff.
You're often like bartering like well this time of year,
here's what I got and here's what I need. Right,
that's kind of a lot of a lot of the
use of currency or IOUs and stuff like that. So
but anyway you might translate his inheritance to like forty
or fifty thousand dollars, right, it's enough, it's going to

(11:52):
like pay for him to get through school basically, and
that's kind of it because for his whole childhood he
has to like pay people who are taking them in. Yeah,
exactly right, So this has to last the rest of
his chase. It sounds like a lot, I see, but
it's got to last him until or at least until
he's an adult, right, because he's he gets like moved
around almost as soon as his dad dies. And basically

(12:13):
these people who are teaching him, he's living with them,
or he's at a boarding school, and so wherever he is,
he's paying to be and he's paying people to take
care of him for the rest of his childhood because
that's kind of the only reliable social support there is.
Some of these people are his relatives, but he still
has to give them money because like that shit ain't free.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
So if you travel with your bag of money and
you're like, well's coin.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
For you, right, you get one coin a year for
taking care of me as like a seven year old.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, So I wonder how much that does impact him
as a kid, because that's a very transactional way to
think of your childhood. Like, all right, now you have
this much money left if for your childhood and you
have to pay this much a year to the people
caring you so they could feed you, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
That's a wild and you really have a sense of
like how much your value is in society. And someone's like,
I don't want to take care of you for this much,
and you're like.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
Here is it. I'm worth this much to be alive, Like.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, exactly, here's what I can pay to continue being alive, please,
And yeah, he's gonna be This is going to kind
of turn him into the perfect foot soldier of the
British Empire because he sees relationships is very transactional, and
he grows up knowing I'm gonna have to hustle constantly
for everything that I'm going to get, right, especially if
I want to be anywhere near as comfortable as like

(13:27):
my dad was and my older brother is going to be.
So in seventeen twenty nine and now eight year old
Thomas Thistle would have sent to a school in Lincolnshire.
This is a nice place, but it's not like the
kind of fancy boarding school that the wealthy sons of
the aristocracy are going to like send their kids to.
So he winds up boarding with a relative by marriage,

(13:48):
and he pays for his upkeep with his inheritance. And
he does this in various ways over the next six
years and three different schools. He studies Latin, he becomes
fluent in that, he learns Greek, and he studies reading, writing,
and a rhythm, and he's an intelligent kid. All signs
point to the fact that he did pretty well in school.
But it's also one of those things where once you're

(14:08):
like fourteen or fifteen, you're basically grown, and they're like,
it's time to apprentice in something and figure out what
you're actually gonna do for a living. So at age fifteen,
he moves into an uncle's house and he pays him
five pounds sterling a year to be an apprentice on
his farm. So he's like paying his uncle to teach
him how to run a farm, but he's because he's
not gonna he's gonna have to work on someone else's

(14:30):
he's not going to inherit any land of his own.
Sometime after this, a couple of years later, he.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
First paid internship. Unpaid internship.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's like an internship that you pay to attend at
your family, like you're paying your uncle to your like
to give you a paid internship, which is a shitty
gig really, like having done an unpaid internship, at least
you're not out anybody, right, Yeah, and it.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Sounds like he's working, he's given them free labor.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, it's really fucked up actually, and this guy's his uncle. Yeah,
but that just that tells you something about how mercenary
a lot of this culture is at the time, right,
Like you wonder why did the British Empire do the
things that the British Empire did? Well, this is how
people are living on the island when they're better off, right.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
Yeah, wow, that's like it's like these are the citizens
who and this is like their norm.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, how do you think they're going to treat people
in bengaal like, yeah, their own kill left to pay, Yeah, exactly.
So I don't know how long he spends in this
internship exactly, but he probably would have been somewhere around
eighteen when he sets off fully on his own to
make a living as a livestock dealer. Right. So he decides,
I don't have any land yet, but I've got some money.

(15:41):
I've saved up some left over from my inheritance. I'm
gonna start buying and selling livestock to try to make
a profit. And around this time, as he's starting his career,
he hooks up with a local girl for the first
time and she gets pregnant. Right, he gets this, this
young woman pregnant and they're not married. Now in this
period of time nearly seventeen hundreds, that there's this social level.

(16:04):
If you get someone pregnant, as the man, you have
two choices. Choice one is convinced this lady's parents to
let you marry their daughter, right, and that's very much
your job. She does not have a lot of choice
in the matter.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
That's going to vary from family to family, But this
is primarily you interfacing with this young woman's family, right.
And if they don't want you to marry their daughter,
if they don't see you as a suitable match, you
can get in a shitload of trouble. You can go
to prison for fathering a bastard. Right. So, yeah, he
gets in this situation and this lady's parents. I don't

(16:39):
know much about this person, but and I say, I
don't know if literally if she is a girl like
a child, or if she's like she could have been
anywhere from like fifteen to twenty, given the way things
worked at the time, right, And I have no idea
like why, but her parents are like, this guy is
not a suitable match for our daughter. Maybe it's just
that he's poor. Maybe they see something like the sketchiness

(17:02):
lurking inside this man's soul. I have no idea, but
they say no. And so he really is looking at
like if this girl has a kid, I'm going I
could go to prison. I'm at least going to have
to pay like a heavy fine for what I did.
But then the child doesn't come to term and he
gets off scott free. Right. But this kind of inspires
him to like get the fuck out right, Like this
was my message of like I got it almost got

(17:23):
in a lot of trouble here. I need to actually
like escape my hometown, maybe get out of England altogether. Right.
And so in seventeen forty six, he travels to London
and he signs a contract with the East India Company
to act as a purser on of super cargo on
a ship headed for the Far East. This means that, like,

(17:44):
you know, you've got this boat and it's taking a
bunch of goods over to like India and other parts
of Southeast Asia, and it's going to come back with
a bunch of goods from the different places it visits
on this like two year year and a half two
year long voyage right as the age of sail, that's
how long shit takes back then. And he's his job.
He's getting paid to like manage the money on board. Right.
They've got a bunch of petty cash. Some of their

(18:05):
they're using to like buy goods to take back. Some
of it they're using to pay for like incidentals and
necessities on the voyage. And he's the guy, like man,
he's the ship's accountant almost right now. The ship, like
the one that he's signed onto, it's going to like
leave with goods loaded for you know, from the home
country for homesick colonizers in India, and then it's going

(18:26):
to come back with all sorts of shit. And you're
getting paid to do your job. But you also part
of like how you make good on being having a
job like this is along the way, you're buying stuff
at all of these different foreign ports that you're gonna
sell back at home. Right, that's understood to be like
a perk of the job, or.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Like flipping your own side hustle.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Right, you're going to like sell a bunch of tea
that you bought in India for like way more money
back in London or some shit like that. Right, So
the ship they're gone for almost two years, like it's
a long voyage, and they land back in black on
August twenty seventh, seventeen forty eight, Thomas disembarks. He's now
in his late twenties. He's a seasoned world traveler and

(19:07):
an entrepreneur. He gets his back wages for the journey,
which is like thirty pounds sterling something like eighty five
hundred bucks in modern money, which is not a lot
for like two years of hard labor on a boat.
Now he's got a bunch of shit with him that
he's going to try to make a fortune flipping and selling.
But he also spends most of his time like gambling

(19:27):
and playing cards and speculating on investments, and he's just
spending his money, and the money he's not spending on gambling,
he's spending on prostitutes. Right, Like we're talking London in
the seventeen hundreds, and he talks about this in a diary, right,
because this diary that this is like a thing that
he picks up at the school that he goes to
where you're they're like, so this diary.

Speaker 4 (19:47):
Are we already starting with the diary because I know
when he was eight, he wasn't writing in it yet. Okay,
so we're in diary first hand account mode.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah. He starts kind of in his early adulthood, right,
and he's this is like, this is not a diary
of his thoughts and feelings. We learn basically nothing about
what he how he feels. This is because he's just
like he's listing everything he buys and sells. So you
see part of the use of his diary, right, Yes,
classic man where it's just like this is what dinner

(20:16):
costs me in seventeen forty eight, right, Like this is
the cost of like buying tobacco. This is how much
I lost at cards last night. This is how much
I paid this prostitute. Right, And so it's both like
you get you do get this weirdly detached look at
the inside of this guy, but you also get like
you can see why it's useful to all sorts of
different scholars where they're like well, what did it cost

(20:38):
to get like drunk and gamble and go out with
a prostitute in London in seventeen forty eight? Well, this
we know. Actually this guy took notes on it, right,
or at least we have an idea.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
What did it cost?

Speaker 2 (20:49):
A great question? So when to anti time machines exist, No, exactly,
you need to know what to bring along. I have
a lot of foreign currency from the past that I
keep in emergency bags in case I get transported back
in time. You wind up in ancient Rome. You don't
want to not have any dinari. I like, what are
you going to do? You know, Oh, you got to

(21:09):
fight for it in a gladiatorial pit.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
You're not. Actually you would have like an old money collection,
like you.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Gotta be ready. Yeah, keep that and yeah, all right.
So whenever he was writing to know what it like
a night out with a prostitute cost in lead in
the seventeen forty eight whenever he wrote about stuff like this,
he would like box off the entry about the sex
stuff from the rest of his diary entries, and he
would preface it with the letters xxx, which is interesting.

(21:38):
I didn't know that went back that far. But apparently
it did, or at least that's what he chose, because like,
I don't think this was like a broader thing in society.
Yet it may just have been a coincidence. He chose
to do that to like kind of make a note
that he was about to start talking about sex, and
he would always write about it in Latin. And so
the very first entry that we have of him writing

(21:59):
about sex is of a night he's spent with a
prostitute in seventeen forty eight, and he writes in the
evening to in the evening to mouliere two shillings, right,
and a mouliere is a contemporary term for a prostitute, Right,
So he spends two shillings for a night with this lady, right,
And he writes a G above her title, which is
his way of letting her know G is the seventh letter.

(22:20):
It's his way of noting a F alphabetically, this is
the seventh woman that he's slept with. So presumably, while
he's traveling around the world at various ports, he's doing
you know, he's probably paying women, right, that's likely who
most of a through f FR. One of them's got
to be that lady that he got pregnant briefly, right,
assuming like, but this also tells you a lot about
him that he is. He's talking about the women that

(22:42):
he's been with. He's just like alphabetically that right, Like
that yeah, content the code.

Speaker 4 (22:47):
I feel like that's like yeah, because it's like you,
even though it is private, there's a part of him
that's like just in like yes, in case someone finds it,
he's writing it in like a secret code. That's what
I did want to tek a child in life, my
first pink diary, like right, you.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
Know, like pig Latin.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's great that you pick up on that.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Not quite Latin.

Speaker 4 (23:05):
I wasn't writing Yeah, I wasn't writing Latin back then,
but pig Latin.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Yeah, I wasn't hiring prostitutes there, so.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
Well yeah, I would hope not. But it is, like,
what you've picked up on is actually something scholars are
really interested in because there's a lot of debate as
to like why did he write about sex this way?
Why did he do it in Latin? Right? And that
is one of the theories, right as we'll talk about that. Basically,
this was his way of like if somebody comes across this,
I don't want anyone at least, I don't want anyone
uneducated knowing what I've been writing about, you know, And

(23:35):
from what we can tell, this is a guy who
I don't know if we'd call him like a nymphomaniac today,
but sex is a lot bigger part of his life
than people would have admitted to then, like a polite
man would have admitted to in this period of time. Right,
And he tries one last time after he gets back
from this overseas voyage to have a proper marriage with

(23:56):
someone in England and like start a life on the island.
He sits down with the parents of a girl that
he'd known as a younger man, and he asks them like, hey,
can I marry your daughter? And again he writes that
they entertained him with great civility, which one of his
biographers said was like that was him saying that they
said no, right, that they were like they politely said, absolutely,
you cannot marry our daughter. You're a creep, right, Like yeah, there's.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Stuff that he like non you know, like when you
meet someone.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Like something's wrong behind this fucker's eyes.

Speaker 4 (24:24):
You hear like, oh, what's wrong with them? And then
you're like, oh, I see. That's why, Like the vibes
are off, something's wrong.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
He looks like the kind of guy who lists women
alphabetically and his weird crime diary, Like, yeah, yeah, he.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Just spears correct in their assessment.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah, good call. Don't let this guy marry your daughter.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
Good call.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
So during this period of time, as at all other
points in his life, Thomas read voraciously, and he took
notes in his diary on what particularly interested him in
the books that he was reading. In January of seventeen
forty nine, this was abortions. He's really interested in. This again,
tells you a lot about what what's happening elsewhere in
this guy's life is he's just casually interested in how
to make a bort to fasciants, right, like drugs to

(25:07):
induce like abortion, wow or a miss like he often
frames his drugs to induce a miscarriage, right, And one
of his recipes. I just found this interesting because this
tells you, like, again, one of the things that, oh man,
the society believes at the time for an aborti fasciant
at the time is one pound of bitter apples. I
think that's what it means. It's it's like ld of bitter.
So it's an amount of bitter apples steeped in beer

(25:29):
and cooked at least twice. It says what it said
will cause abortions certainly, so bitter apples steeped in beer.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Yeah, I'm covering my unborn baby's ears right now.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah. Well, the good news is I don't think there's
a lot of bitter apples around anymore, although depending on
the state of reproductive healthcare in the near term, I
don't know. I don't Also, I kind of doubt this
worked very well, but maybe it did.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
He's like making drinks to like feed a little witch.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
He's making morning after pills. Yeah, he's interested, or at
least he's put part of like one of the things
that's theorizes that if he didn't need it, then he
was taking down notes while he was like near a
library on how to make basically morning after pills because
he foresaw because of what had happened to him in
his past, he was like, I might need to do
that in the future, right like, because the other thing

(26:19):
he's doing at the same time is he's writing down
recipes for cures for venereal diseases because This is a
guy who's probably by this point slept with prostitutes and
ports all around the world. He's picked up a lot
of VD right, Yeah, like this is not like there's
no antibiotics. They don't know anything about like how to
prevent disease. So he catches chlamydia, and he writes, this

(26:42):
is like the recipe he gives for a treatment for chlamydia.
Take every other day one dose of any purging pills,
and continue that course if your strength will allow it,
until the running change both its color and consistency and
appears the same as the semen. Right, that's like this
like discharge that happens when people get the clap. So
he's taking these like weird bamlmes, and we don't know
exactly what's in them, right, because there's these are both

(27:04):
cures for like the clap and for you know, gnarrhea
that guys are like buying on the streets. One of
them is called Ciderham's common purging. One of them is
called balm captive. And we don't know exactly what he
was taking. But I did find a dissertation by Elizabeth
Polcha for Northeastern University that discussed a similar quack remedy
that this exact guy used later for the same diseases

(27:26):
Wards Pill and Drop, which were these blue, red and
white pills that were filled with arsenic and other poisons.
So that's what we're taking for VD. It's like arsenic, yeah,
and like mercury and shit, that's what people put in
these because they like, Wow, it's the same logic that
a lot of like bullshit new age medicine stuff uses

(27:48):
today where they're like, look, it's drawing out the toxins.
Where they're like, if you give someone this like arsenic,
that they wind up like their body purges everything, like
they wind up vomiting and like right, and so they're
like it must be cleansing you.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
I mean, it's like, I think we covered this in Cracked,
but they used to do lysyl was originally invented as
like a vagina cleaner. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure
that men didn't have great health care before either. I mean,
they got there no little faster than we did.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
But right, yeah, twenties, Yeah, no one's doing great. And
I think the logic is the same as with lysol,
where it's like, well, this looks like it hurts, like hell,
so it must be working, right, It's like, now you've
just poisoned.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yourself, disinfect everything.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, yeah, you're all just taking arsenic. So by the
spring of nineteen forty nine, things are not going well
for Thomas. He has every venereal disease known to man.
Run out of his money seventeen forty nine. Yeah, wow,
we skipped. Yeah no, he's two hundred years.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
Old now, a real time traveler.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah no. So this guy, I mean, he's just sick
as hell all the time, and he's run out of money.
All the money he got doing his merchant marine. Shit,
he's loan through, he's got you know, he's got some
assets that he's still selling from his trip. But he's
doing badly enough that he's borrowing money from his landlady,
Which that's like a level of doing bad, right when

(29:12):
like you can't eat, you're not even paying your land lady,
you're like having to borrow money from her. Yeah, And
he's also borrowing from his brother and complaining in his
diary about how lonely he is all the time. So
he takes a little trip to the continent where he
tries to sell off some of his goods and he's
doing badly enough that by the end of seventeen forty
nine he finds himself back in London and he visits
this place called the Jamaica Coffee House, And as best

(29:35):
as I can tell, this is like a business in
it it's like a cafe basically, but it's also kind
of an advertisement for white people to go to Jamaica,
which at the time is like, I think it's the
wealthiest agricultural colony in the British Empire. They're making sugarcane, right,
that's what they're growing over there, Right, they're producing sugar basically.
And the Brits had had Jamaica not that long at

(29:59):
this point. They captured it from the Spaniards in sixteen
fifty five, right, so we're less than a century into
like English control of the island. And they've done in
this little period of time where they've dominated Jamaica. They've
done their best. They're trying to settle this island, but
they're having trouble because it seems to them that Jamaica,
like life on Jamaica, has evolved primarily to kill English people.

(30:23):
Like they'll send over a bunch of young white guys
to do the quote unquote skilled work on you know,
and a lot of that's over seer work managing these
slave plantations. And most of these guys die in the
first year, right, that's just known. You get a boat
with like two hundred white kids from the main island,
and like eighty of them are going to be or
like one hundred and eighty of them are going to

(30:43):
be dead within like a year, year and a half.

Speaker 4 (30:45):
Yeah, I wonder why you send a bunch of people
to go to already a land where people live, and.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
You're like, why do the people who live here keep
trying to kill us? We're just trying to colonize them.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
It's also just like the people who live there, because
this is all so you know that the slaves who
are brought there, the enslaved people, also die at an
elevated rate because like none of them have grown up
around the various like diseases and bugs that are there, right,
Like they're getting bit by mosquitoes and getting shit that Like.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
Oh, you mean they're just dying of natural car I
thought you meant like they're being fought off.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
That happens. That does happen. That's part of this because
there is there's a heavy maroon. They're called maroons, right,
which is like people they're former slaves and descendants of
former slaves who escaped Spanish plantations and formed independent communities.
And these like really forested off in like mountainous chunks
of the island, right. So it's areas that where it's
hard to control and you can't. Great Britain has troops

(31:42):
in Jamaica, but as soon as you send soldiers out
into these like these these heavily wooded parts of Jamaica,
they just start dying of diseases lest left and right.
You know, you can't keep a force out there for
any length of time because the natural world will kill
more of them than the enemy. But the enemy will
also kill them because these maroons by this point, these

(32:03):
are the people from the slave populations who survived their
first years in Jamaica, so they are hardened to the
different diseases and bugs and whatnot that exist on the island.
And they know these like forested, dense like rural areas,
so they're able to fight very effectively this guerrilla war.
So yes, it is both a mix of the natural

(32:25):
environment and these different maroon communities that are killing all
of the young white kids who come here, right, and
it goes badly enough for Great Britain that about a
decade before Thomas Thistlewood shows up in Jamaica, the Brits
give up and they offer terms to the Maroon communities.
And so they say to these like these independent chunks
of the island basically that are made up of former

(32:46):
slaves and their descendants, will recognize your independence and will
recognize your self rule over your territory. And in return,
you have to keep the roads open for us so
we can transport goods. And you have to not raid
these plantass and whenever future slaves escape from our plantations,
you have to help us bring them back. You have
to help us if there's an uprising by the enslaved population. Right,

(33:09):
there's like a treaty where these these marine communities agree
to all this in order to stop not have to
keep fighting these constant wars with the English colonizers. Right,
so this is like, you know, it's a pretty it's
an ugly thing, like it's it's a morally complicated thing,
but you understand the decision these like marine communities are making.
They're like, well, yeah, at least we get to keep
living on our own. You know, they're not quite.

Speaker 4 (33:30):
A sovereign nation, so there's no like big war to
be fought, but they're not quite acknowledging that, like England
owns the whole place, and England's like, right, we own this,
but we don't, but we do, but.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
We're we will will recognize your right to stay in
your area if you stop fucking with trade basically, right, Like,
that's kind of the agreement that these communities come to
with these agents of the empire. You know, who else
are agents of the British Empire? Maybe maybe a sponsors,
especially if it's like one of those big, big London

(34:03):
banks they might be advertising on this show. Who's to say?
And we're bad, how we're feeling.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
Sad?

Speaker 4 (34:19):
Well, you know, as you might expect, my mood has
gone down since before we started question.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
But in many ways, I'm also happy to see you,
so I can see you.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Too, happy to see you, happy to learn about how
shitty life was in the seventh mid seventeen hundreds, like
really just a bad time to be a person. So yeah,
into seventeen or start of seventeen fifty, Thomas Thistlewood books
Passage on a boat after saying goodbye to his friends
and family, and this is goodbye forever. He's never going

(34:51):
to see any of them again. He's like thirty, and
he's saying like goodbye for because I'm going to an
island almost almost certainly be dead in a year, right,
And in fact, it's one of the you get this
hint of how disposable these men being sent over are
that like within minutes of boarding, his luggage is broken
into and his liquor collection is stolen, right, And I
think it's just this like, look, steal whatever you can

(35:12):
from these guys. They're all going to be dead in
six months, Like fuck it.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
You know.

Speaker 4 (35:17):
It's like there's no law once you enter or don't
you step off of England, there's a law.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's very much like on the way to Jamaica. It's
certainly like that, Like this is still a period of time.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
Like have you ever taken a flight on the Spirit
Airlines Vegas? That's what that makes me think of.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
That's it's like a flight. It's like a Spirit flight
to Vegas, right, including some of the people on that
plane are being trafficked, right, Like some number of these
men on these boats with Thomas have been like knocked
out the night before at a bar and they're just
wake up working on a boat. Right, That's how that's
how you put them in on boats in this time, right. Yeah,

(35:55):
they actually get stopped by like the British Navy on
their way to Jamaica, and the Navy's trying to make
sure there's not like guys on there who got like
beaten up at a port and are being forced into
labor because it's like a it's a major problem. So
it is like it is the wild West. I mean
it's it's it's worse than that, but like it's there.
You are in between these settled areas. There's basically no rule.

(36:17):
But part of the appeal of Jamaica who guy like
Thomas is it's known at the time, the like marketing
nickname for Jamaica when they're trying to get these young
white guys to move over there, is that it's the
best poor man's country, right, And what that means is
that if you don't have any money, you can and
you don't have any standing in society back in Scotland

(36:38):
or Ireland or you know, England, you can go to
Jamaica and you will be number one, you can get
rich there, and number two, you'll get respected because all
white men are equally respected. That's the idea, right. It's
not exactly true, but one of the things that's said
about planter culture is that any white man who shows
up at any plantation in Jamaica will get like he'll

(37:01):
get put up for the night and get fed a
good meal. It doesn't matter how poor you are or
where you come from. There's this level of egalitarianism for
white men in Jamaica. Right. And as we'll talk about,
this is not entirely what it sounds like, but this
is how it's being marketed, right, This is how guys
like Thomas are convinced to go there. And I want
to quote now from a two thousand and six article

(37:23):
in Caribbean Quarterly by James robertson the glowing promises which
encourage successive European migrants to sail to Jamaica, often shattered
against the brutal island society these Johnny Newcombs encountered, an
early nineteenth century bookkeeper, wrote home, regretting his choice. Instead
of being a gentleman's life, it is more like a
slave continuing I'll die before I'll be a planter. Though
it is the best forgetting money. A person that is

(37:44):
hard enough to manage the business make it to be
an overseer and have three or four hundred pounds a year,
but no one has wages equal to their hazards. Nineteen
out of twenty die without getting anything, and I fear
I shall be one of the unhappy number. These were
daunting odds, and while the brutalizing work contrasted with the
splendid prospects that had persuaded him to migrate, even if
global farm boys continue to swallow recruiters golden tails, the

(38:05):
supply was never sufficient for all the vacancies. So this
is one of those.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
They're being recruited.

Speaker 4 (38:12):
Oh sorry, Well, just to clarify, when you say he's
kiss he's like, I'll never be a planter. But they're
still like being paid as not well to be a planter.
And so they're kind of being told they could be
a boss and they're being Is that right or are
they already immediately going into slavery the white people.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
I mean, they're not owning slaves, but they're managing slaves
for slave owners. That's the start of the ladder once
you get over here. And what that guy is saying,
with that bookkeeper saying is that the only way to
really get rich is to make enough money to buy
a plantation of your own and be a planter. But
almost no one gets there. Nineteen out of twenty people
will die before making any money at all.

Speaker 4 (38:47):
Right, that's what you said, Well he's not, actually, so
there's not having the white people like actually do the
labor still.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
The white people. The labor the white people are doing
is making the black enslaved people. That's the labor for
white Now, there are some there are some experts who
are like making metal things or what not. Those there
are jobs, and like that guy we heard from as
a bookkeeper, so that's not the only job for these
young white men. But what this guy is saying is
that as soon as he got over on the island,
he realizes it's a scam because there's almost no way

(39:18):
to get make enough money to leave Jamaica again. And
you're definitely going to die there, right, Like something on
the island will kill you. So you've cut your life
short and it's just this miserable situation. So that's that's
the where Thomas stumbles into on May fourth, seventeen fiftieth,
the day he gets to Jamaica, and he starts like

(39:38):
that other guy, working as a bookkeeper and eventually an
assistant overseer on a plantation. The idea is that soon
he'll get promoted to overseer, but this doesn't materialize. Now
Lucky for Thomas, there's not nearly enough healthy white guys, right,
So when this first place that hires him, when he
finds out they're not going to promote him where he
wants to, he's able to get another job really easily.

(40:00):
He survives his first six months and then his first year,
and after that point options start to open up for
somebody like you, because you've proven that you're not going
to die right away in Jamaica, so you're valuable to hire, right.
And so all of these plantations that none of them
have enough white men, right, even if they have enough

(40:21):
and slave people, they don't have enough like guys to
run them for them, because the slave the enslaved population
vastly outnumbers the white population, right. And this is part
of why Jamaica in this period is the most productive
slave plantation in the British Empire. About half of the
forty five thousand tons of sugar that were imported into
Britain each year came from Jamaica. And while white overseers

(40:42):
and technical employees like Thomas were a part of the workforce,
most of it isn't slaved Africans or their descendants. There's
only rough numbers here, but by the time Thomas lands
on the island, there's about eighteen thousand white people and
about another seven thousand free black or like mixed race
people on the island. Right, So like eighteen thousand white
people know that there's another seven thousand free non white people.

(41:05):
The enslaved population is one hundred and seventy thousand. And
so when we talk about why there's this reputation that
any white man will be treated well in Jamaica, it's
because there's not as much room for the rich people,
the rich white people, to exclude the poor white people
because they're so outnumbered. Right, you kind of need these

(41:26):
poor white guys at your back in case there's a
slave uprising, which there will be periodically, right, And so
that's the reason for this quote unquote egalitarianism. Is the
wealthy plantation owners know that they need to keep these
poor white guys on their side, like it makes.

Speaker 4 (41:43):
Probably feel well to respond to that. I think it's
interesting you bring up the point about like the egalitarian
and maybe they're not having room to exclude.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
The other white people.

Speaker 4 (41:52):
But I also think part of it is them being
I mean it is like, you know, the white supremacy,
but being surrounded by so many enslaved people and they
see them as like background, They don't see them as people,
so subconsciously they're gonna feel like, you know, when they
see another white person, like you're on my side, as
opposed to a society where everyone's white, those like aristocratic

(42:15):
you know, one percenters look for someone else to put down. Yeah,
they kind of have that space filled, and so they're
gonna just be nicer. And yeah, I think that kind
of leads to that like superiority complex because you just
get so used to feeling like a whole nother race
is the background to your supremacy.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
So yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, and that also helps
explain why these poorer white guys who don't own enslaved
people themselves will defend the system so much. Is that
they still because of the system, they have a much
higher place in society than they otherwise would. Right, Like
the fact that the majority of the people are this
kind of like background noise to the white population means

(42:55):
that as a poor white you matter more like you
feel like it, and that will make you more inclin
line to defend the system, right Like, that's also got
to be part of what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, and if their whole value quote unquote is managing
uprisings or you know, of people, but they're going to
have to convince them.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Managing just this system of human slavery.

Speaker 5 (43:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:15):
Yeah, they convince themselves that those people aren't people because
that they're required to be there to maintain order, you.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Know, quote unquote.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah. Now, and I should make it clear here that
at the time when he arrives, Jamaica is kind of changing,
But at the time he lands there, it's still the
case that like, of that seven thousand or so person
population of like free non white people in Jamaica, a
good number of those people also own enslaved human beings
and operate plantations. Right now, one of the things that

(43:45):
will change during the time Thomas is there is that
this number will get like cut down because the only
people who are able to be part of the island
legislature are white property owners, and they start voting to
like restrict both political rights and reduce the amount of
land that non white people can own during the time
that they're here. So even the ones, even the non

(44:06):
white people who are like part of the system of
slavery are going to be like edged out of it
over the time that Thomas is on the island by
like these white slave owners who actually get to like
manage things politically. Now, Thomas, like I said, he's going
to live. He's going to survive his first year and
then some and as a result, he's going to get treated.

(44:27):
He's going to be very valuable, right, He's going to
take some pretty significant leaps very quickly and social standing
and an income. He proves to be such a competent
overseer that he's soon fielding offers for jobs from half
of the plantations in his area, which means he's getting
steady raises. His boss has to pay him more every
year to keep him on because he always has places
he can go. This allows him to accrue a tidy

(44:49):
pile of ready cash, and he starts buying human beings
of his own and he will rint them. He doesn't
own land yet, so he's buying people and then he's
renting them out to his bosses as laborers, right, and
he's pocketing the money for their labor. And that's how
he basically sets up passive income for himself that is
going to like allow him eventually to buy a plantation

(45:09):
of his own, as he starts by like buying people
and renting them back to his boss, and his boss
is always going to pay above average rates for the
slave labor that Thomas rints him because his boss wants
to keep Tomas happy, right, because Thomas can go in
where he fucking wants. So does that kind of make
sense in terms of like why this would be appealing
to someone like Thomas? You can survive that first year

(45:30):
of plague, right, Like he's doing better now than he'd
ever have been able to do in England because he's
buying and selling human beings.

Speaker 4 (45:37):
And I mean, yeah, I know it's fucked up, but
it's also interesting that, I mean, like prostitution was such
a big part of his earlier life because that is
like already, like you said, it's so transactional. There's already
this idea of like like buying you know, like a
night with someone, and then kind of escalating that to
being like, well, and now he thinks I'm buying this

(45:58):
person's labor. Yeah, And I mean that's completely inhumane, but
I could see, like in how you're describing it, like
how this man's kind of thinking will jump to that extreme.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, because it is obviously paying your uncle to take
care of you when you're like ten is different from
owning humans. Paying for sex is different from chattel slavery.
But he has his whole life had this variant, transactional
understanding of what human be other people are right, that is,
that has been with him, like since he was a
little kid. That has to have some sort of impact

(46:33):
on like why you are this way?

Speaker 3 (46:36):
So.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
James Robertson, in his article on Jamaica during this period
of time, describes this like initial mass death of new
arrivals from Europe as seasoning, and one of the reasons
he theorizes Thistlewood survived his period of seasoning is that
he's not getting drunk every night. He's like a nerd.
He's spending all of his free time writing in his
diary and journaling about the weather and like reading books

(46:58):
and so he's not just like all the constantly while sick. Right,
someone stole his liquor. That may have saved his life.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
Yeah. And also all the arsenic you drank probably.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, all that made it so that nothing else could
survive it. But that's right, everybody, try drinking arsenic yourself.
See if it makes you stronger. Who knows? You know
our if? I think, but we could get RFK to
endorse arsenic drinking arsenic? Oh God, like that's that's that's
medicinal now, So Tom.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
You should do it.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
You should do your second ad Oh should I? Okay? Yeah,
well here's another AD break and we're back. There's not
a good way to segue into this next part. But
the uh this is the first time, in December of
seventeen fifty, about five months after landing on the island,

(47:51):
is the first time that Thomas writes about committing sexual
assault on an enslaved person who works on the ranch
where he's working. And he writes this in his like
Latin shorthand, and basically the translation is that he he's
slept with this enslaved woman named Sylvia, who's a black
woman from the Ebo Forest region of modern day Cameroon.

(48:12):
In silv right, he writes that he like he lay
with Sylvia in silv and silv is like a that's
a shortened version of the Latin word for forest. Right,
So he's kind of writing, he's kind of writing about
this sex crime he's committed, almost as like a like
a Latin couplet, right, Like he's he's he's not just

(48:34):
writing about this thing that he's done, but he's clearly
he's clearly drawn to this woman named Sylvia because her
name is similar to the name of like this Roman goddess. Uh,
this Roman term for like the wild part of the world,
and this Roman term for like a goddess. Right, Like
it's this he's making these weird references in his diary,

(48:55):
like these aren't just exploitation logs. But he's he's almost
like showing off his noge of like classical education while
he's doing this too. And it's kind of unclear to
me why he does this. I've read a couple of
different theories as to why he feels drawn to do
this while he's writing about these things. In her paper,

(49:16):
Redacting Desire, Elizabeth Polka theorizes quote. Thistlewood structured his sexual
exploitation Logs as an entry embedded within an entry, a
private subspace into which he placed the record of his
sexual activity. If Thistlewood's ten thousand pages of diaries were
visualized as an architectural space, such as a domestic home,
the sexual Exploitation Logs would be a locked drawer in

(49:37):
Thistlewood's bedroom dresser, where his Latin coding functions as a
locking mechanism. Within this private space, Thistlewood placed walls around
sexual encounters, employing documentation to codify and order the sex
act within a system of concealment, which is similar to
kind of what you were saying earlier, right, Like he's
locking this away for anyone. That's part of why he's

(49:57):
making these obscure references to like Roman gods in this
entry log about a sex crime, is so that the
only other people who will understand what I've done, truly
are other educated white men of a scientific bent, and
they'll understand that what I was doing wasn't a sex crime,
it was an act of science, because that's how he

(50:18):
writes about this. Yeah, well, I.

Speaker 4 (50:20):
Wonder if it's like, like you said, it's more like
in self defense, Like it's I don't know if he
really believes it, because if he's already putting it into
that box, like literally right you say he boxes it off,
there's that feeling already like describes it. Yeah, he needs
to separate it. And then on top of that, it's
like you're kind of what you said he's writing and
couple it makes me think of like, you know, you

(50:40):
kind of code switch when you're if you're writing, like
people analyze it you're lying or not. Like maybe there's
a piece where he switches into like he thinks he's
intellectualizing it, but really it's because he feels some sort
of guilt and then it's trying to connect it or
dissociate or you know, be like actually, I'm you know,
kind of going into this intellectual place when I'm doing this,

(51:04):
But really it's it's a reaction to his own feelings.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
I mean, it's zydiary effical. He's not needing to defend
himself to anyone.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Right and the fact that because it can be both
right where he wants to hide this from anyone other
than the people he thinks might understand why he's doing
what he's done. But that implies that he understands there's
something unacceptable to regular people about what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
Well, could he be trying to defend himself to himself
like almost.

Speaker 4 (51:29):
Like possibly, yeah, you know, logging his Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Like what I'm doing is because he's he is a naturalist, right,
and that is that those are kind of the early
scientists in this period of time, is like people who
are going on in the natural world and they're taking
this is Eventually guys like more rigorous and better versions
of this are going to you know, produce people like
Charles Darwin. Right, But this this basic idea that like

(51:54):
you go out and you're taking notes. That's why he's
taking notes on the climate every day too, on the
wather he's experiencing. Is there's this early scientific understanding that like, well,
part of science is just documenting what you see, right,
and so he is part of what he's doing is
walling off these sexual experiences and documenting them as if
he's doing scientific research. And I think you're right that

(52:16):
it's part of it maybe a defense mechanism where he's
trying to make this unacceptable thing acceptable, and there's maybe
this level of knowledge that that will not work for
a lot of people, so he has to kind of
code it for the people that he sees is like him,
these other scientists. One of the reasons he uses Latin
probably is to connect his because that's the scientific language, right,

(52:39):
And this also connects the work he's doing to the
documentation of a scientist he greatly admired, Carl Linnaeus, who
is a Swedish biologist and the person who created like
the modern taxonomy system how we name species is because
of Linnaeus, right, and during his time in Jamaica. Part
of why and part of why this is relevant to
Linaeus is Thomas is not only committing these sex crimes

(53:03):
on enslaved people out of like some sense of desire
or even a personal need for power. There's a financial
motivation here, because if you get a person you own pregnant,
the baby is your property. You can sell them when
they're an adult. And he will repeatedly over his life.
And part of what he's doing here is keeping notes

(53:24):
as to who he's sleeping with, so he can document
the parentage of different people that he's going to own
and sell, right. And he sees this scientifically in the
same way as people who are like breeding livestock. Right,
that's what this is to him. Right, that's horrible, but
that is how Thomas thinks about this, Right.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
That's why, like that totally changes like what I was
saying before, because yeah, it definitely makes it feel more
like he's just logging his property.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
I think there's a few things. This isn't a simple thing. Really,
it's a lot in here, right, But that's part of
what he's doing here.

Speaker 4 (53:58):
And he doesn't see them as is I mean, I
guess it's probably true for most people of this time,
but just hearing us, like, so he doesn't see them
as his children, no, right.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
I mean he does a person. He knows they literally
are biologically his children, but he does not see them
as human beings. Fully. I think that's probably accurate. Like
all people living in these situations, there's a lot of
weird relationships here that are all deeply unequal and fucked

(54:30):
up and also like difficult to categorize and understand. We
will talk about that some. But yeah, part of what
he's doing here is like writing about what he's like
these what's happening, as if he's like breeding livestock, that's
an aspect of like what he's doing here, and you know,
beyond that, he's also he's his era's equivalent of like
a nerd, right, he's into science is like a cool

(54:53):
thing for a chunk of like the educated aristocracy. It's
a thing you do as like a hobby, right, And
so's he has this sense of like, I'm not quite
as good as a lot of other people because he
doesn't grow up super rich, and he doesn't he's not
fit for high society where he comes from. And so
this is kind of how he tries to fit himself

(55:14):
in right, is by framing himself and presenting himself to
others as a man of science. There's a really good
article on this called Thomas Thistlewood's Libidinal Linnaean Project for
Small Acts Journal by Heather Vermulian, and she proposes a
likely symbolic explanation for why Thomas wrote about this very

(55:35):
first sex crime on the island the way that he did.
Thistlewood may have attend intended more than a play on
words with his description of the rape of Sylvia in
the silv His choice to attack this woman in particular
may have carried symbolic weight, as Robert Pogue Harrison writes
the traditional legends of Rome's foundation tell us that the
city was born of the forests, but they also suggest
that Rome had had to turn against its matrix in

(55:57):
order to fulfill its destiny. According to Livy, Harrison explains, Romulus,
the founder of Rome, belonged to the Sylvian family line,
as is the case in many foundation myths, the Rape
of the Sabines, the Rape of Lucretia. It is sexual
violence that sets the story in motion. Romulus and his
twin brother Remus were born when Mars, the Roman god
of war, raped the vestal virgin Raya Silvia. Viewed in

(56:17):
this light, this Wilwood perpetuated his initial act of terrestrial
rape against an enslaved woman whose name evokes a spirit
or goddess of the wood, targeted for Roman conquest, as
well as Reya Silvia, targeted for divine rape. His act
also conjures the very manner in which Romulus populated Rome,
by capturing women from nearby cities and forcing them into
relation with Rome's founding men. Thisilwood's rape of Sylvia may

(56:39):
well participate in this classic genealogy of mystified sexual violence.
Ambiguous parentage, colonization and captivity, and the imperial domesticating of
unruly forested land as a sign of progress. Right, So
this is he sees this as part of this very
scientific and high minded colonial pride. England is colonizing and

(57:01):
civilizing the wilderness and making it better. And these sex
crimes I'm committing are a part of this scientific effort
to improve via not just like you know, by developing
the land, but by inserting my DNA into these populations.
That's how he's thinking about this, right, I mean, because that's.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
Like what I mean.

Speaker 4 (57:21):
I can see like, I mean that very well written interpretation.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
But is he is he really like that? Like I
don't want to say com smart, but is he really
like thinking that deep?

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Or this would have been all of these ancient Roman
myths and all of this knowledge of Latin. This was
part of a normal education for a man of his
stature at this time, you got an intensely detailed classical education,
right because in part the British Empire is portraying itself
as in this line of civilizing imperial western forces, right

(57:58):
these and in this line of like because the Greeks
and the Romans are very much admired for their understanding
of the natural world right and for the their their
power and command over it in an area in which
that was seen as having been less common elsewhere, and
part of why Latin is still the knowledge the language
of science at the day. And it's also Thistlewood doesn't
he doesn't want to see himself as just a guy

(58:18):
trying to get rich and committing horrible crimes against other
human beings. He wants to see himself as part of
this noble global endeavor to civilize the world.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
And that's mythological.

Speaker 4 (58:30):
It's very yeah, that there is a parallel to what
I see, I mean what I see happening now with
a lot of white supremacy because they talk a lot
about classical literature and referring to classical like and you know,
biblical memes or imagery. I know, like Hillsdale College.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Is one that you know, very.

Speaker 4 (58:51):
Conservative and they really focus on teaching classical, classical stories
to children, and very much in the same way you're
talking about sort of like upholding these images that are yes,
you know, eurocentric.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
Myths, and it's it's this, this is a this is
a massive part. This is not just a part of fascism.
But this is a part of selling any fucked up
thing to young men, as you convince them they're doing
something great. Right. This thing that we could just say
is you giving into your base impulses is also heroic
and it puts you in line with divinity and you're

(59:24):
part of this great civilizing mission. Right. We've been telling
young men that in every society that's ever existed to
get him to do fucked up shit, right, And that
doesn't by the way, that's not to say, oh, Thistlewood's
just a victim, no, no, no, no, no. He is choosing
to find a justification for the cruel, violent, vicious things
that he wants to do and that he increasingly finds appealing,

(59:47):
because he becomes a worse and worse person the more
he gives into this, and that means you need to
come up with increasingly like lofty intellectual justifications for the
horrors you're committing. Right.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (59:58):
Well, to be clear, I know there's there been times
where I'm like, yeah, oh, that's interesting he said that.
I understand that for the listeners who don't know me, like,
I'm very much like, oh yeah, there's no justifation from
the beginning to the end, like this leg owner, I'm
already like, yeah, not trying to be like justify it.
But it is so interesting to me to dive into
like the details, because it is like why are we

(01:00:19):
still here in some ways, like years later, why are
we still seeing people like this? I mean not in
the exact way, but how does it happen?

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
I think this is an important half not even half,
but this is an important part of the story. Is
not how they lived with themselves, but how they felt
good about themselves for doing this, and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
How they justify it in their own world that they're heroes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
And yeah he is, but he is. He is literally
raping civilization into these people. That's how he thought about
it in a very literal way in a lot of
like I mean, he wouldn't have called it rape, but
like that's what he's doing, you know. And and he
also writes repeatedly about a lot of these people not
wanting it right. He will write basically they did, they

(01:01:04):
weren't into it, or they weren't like he will add
that he takes notes on that sort of thing too.
That's part of the documentation.

Speaker 4 (01:01:12):
Does he describe the like sexy had with not in
detention women he dated, like, no, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Not what.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Did he describe the sexy had with women that.

Speaker 4 (01:01:22):
Were like dating differently than the woman he raped, or
they're kind of all seen as like objects.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
We don't get any of that.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
We don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
We know because of things that little bits side bits
of his life that we get. We know that he
got a woman who was roughly at his social level,
pregnant when he was younger, and that the relationship didn't
work out. Right. We know that he never writes about
anything that could be termed an equivalent relationship between two

(01:01:52):
people choosing to be like, right, he writes about paying
for sex and you know, I don't know about the
ethics of where you want to put the ethics of
sex work in seventeen hundreds London, but it's different than
what he's doing in Jamaica. And he writes about sex
crimes that he commits in Jamaica. Right, he does. Right,
there is an enslaved woman with whom he has a
long relationship that is obviously not a consensual relationship, but

(01:02:13):
he writes about it as if it is because that's
his interpretation. That's how he feels about it. We get
a little of that, and it's still pretty brutal because
he's still like I mean, yeah, we'll talk unfortunately about
too much of that. But in January of seventeen fifty three,
this Thistlewood yeah sorry, takes on his most prestigious job
yet he gets made overseer of the large and profitable

(01:02:35):
Egypt Plantation. This is still in Jamaica, it's just called Egypt.
He's paid the princely sum of sixty pounds sterling a
year for his labor. Immediately after he moves to the plantation,
he commits another sex crime on another young enslaved woman
named Flora, replicating his Sylvia silver word play by mentioning
her within several lines of a passage discussing the plantation's

(01:02:56):
Flora right, and he writes that he paid her four
bits after doing this. And this is something you get periodically,
some of these fortune to No, it's a type of currency.
It's two t's. Unfortunately, well, I don't know, probably yeah,
I don't know where to take that. But it's a bit.

(01:03:19):
You may have heard of like this used especially like
pirate literature, Like a bit is a if you've heard
of a piece of eight, like Spanish pieces of eight,
Like that's a Spanish reel, is a piece of eight,
or is like it's eight pieces of eight and you
would like break off the little piece. That's like pirate money.
It was a Spanish reality, and a bit was equivalent
to like one eighth of a Spanish reel, right, which

(01:03:41):
is again the money in pirate movies. As a general rule,
So four bits that he gives this woman is half
of a piece of eight, and depending on the source,
that's equivalent from like fifty cents to like one thousand
dollars in modern money, because it's really not easy to
actually draw an equivalent based on the context. I think
this is the equivalent of him giving her like five
or ten dollars.

Speaker 4 (01:04:01):
Right, he's giving that's that And that wasn't something he normal.
I mean, it's not a standard practice he.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
Did sometimes he wasn't different time and it Yeah, and
I don't think I don't think like I think some
of it is that maybe it makes him feel better,
like this is more like what he was doing with
the sex workers in England than what it is, which
is a sex crime. And I think some of it
is that this just makes it easier for him.

Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Right, Like it was there a world where there are
where there were also people doing like sex work on
the side.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Yes, like that, that's that's a that's a thing too,
is that like if your flora, maybe this is how
you make money because there's not a lot of options
open to you to do that. We like, we really
don't know how this conversation starts. Like we know that
this is a sex crime just because of the slave
and not free relationship, right, but we don't know if
she would have seen herself as like, well, this is

(01:04:59):
the way for me to make money, right, there's not
a lot more or if he just assaulted her and
then threw some money on the ground, like both of
the either of those could be the case. There's never
any way to know. Yeah, and all of them are bad.
It's just that we don't really know what was happening here.
That said, it is worth it. He starts after floor,

(01:05:19):
he picks out another African born and slave field worker,
and he starts what he described as a relationship with her, right,
and he describes Ginny as consenting to the liaison. Obviously
she didn't have choice here, but it's worth exploring what
she would have seen as the benefits of a relationship
like this, because that does paint a bleaker story. And
we get some hint as to that in Robertson's article,

(01:05:41):
because he writes that the tour together for nearly a year,
but quote, she increasingly alienated his affections by heavy handed
attempts to intervene when he assigned punishments, bringing a knife
to bed proof the final straw. So what I take
from this she did, che did and Jenny any quote Again,

(01:06:01):
I use the word choice loosely here, but one of
the few choices available to her was if I get
in this guy's good graces and pretend that I like him,
the next time he tries to beat one of my friends,
I can convince him to stop, right, And that's.

Speaker 4 (01:06:16):
Eventually yeah, yeah, yes, he's already interested in her. If
she refuses, it's gonna be worse.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
So like kind of puts up.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Maybe I can use this position to help some people.
And Thistlewood gets annoyed at her right because she's yelling
at him when he beats people. Uh, And eventually she
decides I might need to kill this guy, and maybe
I can't convince him to not be so much of it,
and so she brings a knife to bed and he
catches her, right, and this is the end of whatever

(01:06:46):
you want to call this, like very very bleak thing, right,
But that does it tells us a lot about how
someone in Ginny's position may have thought about what was
happening as like, well, maybe this is an opportunity to
gain some control over my life and my friends' lives.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
Right, And what does he do when he finds the
knife and he.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
Kicks her out? Basically, I mean she gets punished for this.
She was almost certainly would have been would have been
like whipped for this, and there were to talk about
worst but.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
She killed them. She should have just killed him.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
I don't think she got the chance. I know, Yeah, yeah,
it does seem like what she wanted.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
To because it's like, yeah, even if she could, she
would get in trouble after that, So it's it would
have been kind of game.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Yeah, there's there's no good options for someone, and it's
like she's taking trying to take the best option, which
is at least gaining some level of control, trying to
write and it doesn't work out, and almost as soon
as things end, he with Ginny As a result of this,
he picks a new victim slash partner, an enslaved woman
named Fibba. She had been the last overseers mistress and

(01:07:53):
she was his cook. When he starts at Egypt Plantation
in December of seventeen fifty three, they are physically together
for the first time. Again, this is a sex crime,
but she is It is framed in his life, and
she is at least acceding to this image of it
to him as a romantic relationship, and they will be

(01:08:13):
together the rest of his life in this kind of
grotesque parody of marriage. And again I want to reiterate
here at the end of this that nothing we're talking about.
We have all this detail about Thomas, and it's hideous
the things he did, and we barely scratch the surface.
It's really important that I lay out here something that's
going to need to carry us through the rest of

(01:08:33):
the episode, which is that there's no evidence Thomas Thistlewood
was particularly bad for a slave owner or an overseer
and Jamaica in this period of time, or would have
been considered bad in the Confederacy in North America right
or in what became the Confederate states. There's no evidence
that he was particularly violent. There's no evidence that he

(01:08:54):
was a committed rape on a wider scale than his peers.
They were all like this. He just kept a diary, right,
And so when we tell.

Speaker 3 (01:09:02):
Me like he was sort of an average of what
people may have been acting, like.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
Yeah, yes, because part of the thing is no one
notices shit about this guy's diary until like the I
think it's the early twentieth century when this rule. It
might have been after the US Civil War when people
started first started looking into it, but people who owned
slaves at the time in Jamaica didn't think anything of
what he was writing. This was not extreme, This was

(01:09:26):
not horrifying. This was an upsetting. This was a guy
chronicling daily life in a normal way. Like what he
wrote about doing to these people was no different than
him taking notes about the weather. That's very much still.

Speaker 4 (01:09:36):
Sort of an outcasting type of Well, so that's interesting
because it kind of I feel like it draws like
the people who end up going into being sleeve owners
probably all have that like already those fucked up yet flags.
But it sounded like, yeah, early in his life, like
people saw red flags and then all those people congregated.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
And became right. Yeah, it is still like.

Speaker 4 (01:09:58):
Just like it's not like this is like these are
the good I mean, I don't know just by bristle
to that, because it's still like there is evidence that
these people were seen as like not like I don't
want my daughter to marry someone like this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
Well, that's what I'm saying within the context of people
who were running plantations. He was not abnormal, right.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
While there politics were like they're all kind of fucked up.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
And yeah, those people are certainly all going to be
more fucked in the head than some random dude who
like lives in London and works like at a like
at a counting house, or is like lives a little
further north and is working in like the first coal
mines that open. Those guys are part of a slave state,
but they're not thinking about what's They would probably be
upset if you were to explain to them what Thomas
Thistle what's putting it his diary, because it's it's more upsetting.

(01:10:41):
Which isn't to say that they'd feel about the way
we do. But like this is these are all of
these slave societies are really brutal, right, and It's why
whenever you get abolition movements a big thing. These abolition
movements are doing both the first one that sets up
that gets slavery outlawed in the British Empire and the
one in the United States. A big part of what

(01:11:02):
abolitionists are doing is just taking, when they can, very
normal accounts of daily life in these places where chattel
slavery is the norm, right, and talking about them to people,
because to people who live outside of that, it's fucked
up and horrifying, right, Like, even if those people are
not what we would call it have a modern attitude

(01:11:23):
on race or anything like that, they're still horrified by
a lot of what they're hearing about because it's really bad,
you know. But yeah, within that community, Thomas is a
normal guy within the community of assholes. He's a normal asshole.
I think it's the way I would come down.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
On him, right, Not an exceptional asshole.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
No, No, he just kind of is more of a
nerd about being an asshole than most people. And that's
part one. Teresa, how are you feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
Well?

Speaker 4 (01:11:51):
I mean, however you expect. I feel like I'm not
being very like lighthearted or funny, which lighthearted about Yeah,
I don't know if I'm doing hey in my my role,
but I'm learning a lot and definitely feeling uh sad
for humanity. But yeah, I don't know should I be
like commenting more? I feel like there's I never know
you find a balance without being.

Speaker 3 (01:12:12):
Too uh to like joke a lot of fucked up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
This is a real bad, real bleak one. Like there's
not a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
I'm like, I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 (01:12:23):
I'm just gonna listen and be like, oh that's bad. Yeah,
I don't want to like, yeah, I hope, I hope
I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (01:12:31):
Okay, but yeah, you're You're fine. It's just bad stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
Uh yeah, yeah, do you have anything you want to plug?
T T.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
You know, truly not much going on right now because
I'm about to have a baby, but you know, my
my friends Zach Persard just came out with the book,
and so I'll plug his book. It's it's a it's
like kind of like a parody of like those like
speaky stories, but it's a Christmas one. It's called Stories
to Make You Scared of Christmas. Zach bar You've get

(01:13:03):
a free book online or you can buy it on Amazon,
So check it out.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
It's a very funny comedian.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Hell yeah, check that out everybody. Uh and yeah we
will be back.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
E T.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Thank you so much for being on the show. Well
we'll talk to you again for a really depressing part too, Keawait.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 5 (01:13:40):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
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