Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

Robert talks about legitimately some of the worst stuff we'll ever discuss on this show. Oh my god, you guys

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Uh huh, I do it's now that we
used to script to the zoom Lady going recording in progress.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I know, I know. Whatever happened to the zoom Lady
another job taken by automation. I think it was an
automated job to begin with. I think that was a
who complains when the when the robots get taken their
jobs taken by other robots, you know, we need solidarity
with some of the robots against the other robots.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
I think I think Wally from that from that movie, Wally.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Is the one.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Oh no, I hate that son of a bitch.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Why I love Wally.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I'll fight I'll fight.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Wally Lealy alone.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I don't like him at all.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Why don't you like Wally?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's not his business coming around picking ship up? You know,
you're so literally what.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
He's programmed for. You're such a hater I am.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm fundamentally a hater because that's my job. I'm Robert
Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast for haters,
by haters, often about haters.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Forgive Me, produced by a.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Lover, Produced by a lover and our guest today T
T Lee, Would you like to talk about a guy
we hate again some more.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
You know, do I have a choice?

Speaker 4 (01:19):
No? No, no, you know what this is exactly I
this is what I love to.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Do, is to be forced to hear about a bad man. Yeah.
I was forced to read about him. Yeah, I mean
I forced myself. This is all fundamentally on me. Yeah,
I made my choices. I could have written about anyone.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I will say, if I had to hear it from anyone,
I would choose you, Robert and so.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Well, thank you. So I will if I had to
choose to tell anyone, I would tell you, because you would.
You and I share the deepest bond that two people
can at work, which is you both accidentally took a
huge dose of mushrooms together while filming a video for
the Internet.

Speaker 4 (01:56):
That is still very much yeah, never forgotten. Every once
in a while someone will bring that up, a stranger like, did.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
You get high on mushrooms once?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Online. I'm like, yeah, that was me.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
And I always say, by the way, it was cleared
by legal it's completely legal.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Actually, these were legal mushrooms. They're unregulated, you know they
were they were unregulated. A lot was unregulated in those days. Uh,
the Internet before like twenty sixteen. You know, yeah, before
everything got worse. Yeah, speaking about the stuff that's much
worse than that. Let's get back to this horrible guy

(02:34):
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.

(02:54):
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.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
The only reason in which they're kind of different from
life is that is that they're more valuable, right, like
a slave is does an enslave person represents a huge
store of value. Right, They're worth a lot more than
like most livestock are. Right, So these are not. That's
part of why even when you hear about something like, oh,
he caught this this woman with a knife, it's not

(03:29):
that common for them to kill because that's a lot
of money on the line, right, that represents somebody's money.
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

(03:50):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:33):
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,

(04:56):
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

(05:18):
books that was most influence.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Exactly like the manuscre right now.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, there's yeah, and there's one of the one of
the things that is weirdly common with like it's a
it relates directly to a problem we have today is
people taking works of satire seriously and then building their
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,

(05:44):
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,

(06:07):
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

(06:28):
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.

(06:52):
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

(07:13):
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

(07:37):
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

(07:58):
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,

(08:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:32):
Point out how the direction we're going is even becoming
like less removed or more removed and less human, and
as like a point. But then people are like, great idea, yes, yes.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
And he's you know this, this is where I wanted
to go into more detail about this, but we're going
to run long anyway. But it's a fascinating work for me,
just because of how he's he's very clearly satirizing what
he sees is like an inhumanity at the highest levels
of his society, like people aren't even raising or nearing
their own kids. But part of how he chooses to
mock that is by kind of laughing at the idea

(09:06):
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

(09:27):
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,

(09:49):
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

(10:12):
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.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
Right, But he's talking about like like it's interesting that
he's talking about breeding of white people. And then there's
like this parallel world where they're talking about breeding slaves
and they're both dehumanizing. But one is like, let's breed
more of quote unquote superior white people, and the others like, let's.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Bring more of these people we don't consider human.

Speaker 4 (10:43):
Well, yeah, and so that's like such a weird like
I don't know, like a weird cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I think that's part of the satire too, is him saying, Hey,
if we apply it, here's what happens if we apply
the logic we're using on slave populations in places like
Jamaica to white English people. Isn't that fucked up? Right?
Like he's he's I think part of this is is
Miller trying to get people in his society to like
think about it this way, right. I think that's part
of the satire. So obviously this guy does not is

(11:13):
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

(11:35):
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

(11:56):
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?

Speaker 3 (12:13):
Well, you described it so well.

Speaker 4 (12:14):
Yeah, because it's like all the people who the worst,
like tech bros, will bring up like the Matrix as
and it's like they completely missed the point and like
and people, Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
It's like you completely missed it.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Oh, especially when like those anti trans tech bros are
big fans or like guys like entertainer fans. The Matrix
is like, you motherfuckers missed the point as hard as
it could be missed.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
You ever actually looked at this movie?

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, this is not like the authors are around, they've
talked about this.

Speaker 4 (12:45):
Yeah, yeah, like this is what it means.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
We'll never know.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
You're like, yeah, okay, so I think part of the
big impact that this this satire satiric work has on
Thomas is the way in which the author described human
breeding in agricultural terms, and I'm going to quote a
passage from this book. It is then easy to be
conceived that by ridding the women of the plagues and
fatigue of gestation, they may team anew at much shorter

(13:11):
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

(13:33):
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.

(13:53):
But this or what is just like what a cue?

Speaker 4 (13:56):
Yeah as well, because it's even you say now I'm
like it's satire. But then I'm like, I don't know
how far we've Like, right, some people may look at
that today and you know, there's the whole childwise breeders
then look at that and be like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Look at the the pro natalist movement, right, Like there's
more than a little of that in here, right, Like
the of this, like, yeah, we can breed stronger and
better people to improve the nature of society. It always
gets to be a problem when you're thinking about like
how can we how can we make the next generation,
like tinker with it genetically to make it better? Which

(14:33):
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

(14:55):
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

(15:18):
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

(15:41):
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

(16:02):
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

(16:22):
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,

(16:44):
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,

(17:09):
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

(17:30):
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,

(17:53):
and that justification may have helped him continue to find
ways to explain to himself why what he was doing
was okay, right.

Speaker 4 (18:01):
It's like finding yeah, like the echo chambers sort of
like looking for more signs that he's going down the
right path.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Right right exactly, Like that's something he's got to do
for himself. Here we know that during the week in
which he first reads The Man Planned, he oversees the
harvest season at his plantation, and he chooses to mark
the occasion by picking out another victim to sexually assault.
Immediately after the entry in which he notes that he's
finished this book, he writes, am kum eve suptear in

(18:28):
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

(18:50):
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,

(19:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
See, this is why I men shouldn't be allowed to read.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
It's like ideas.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well, I got good news about literacy levels.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
Too many ideas rapes.

Speaker 4 (19:45):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Maybe, yeah, this is why you need this is why
maybe it's useful sometimes to like do your This is
the danger of the autodidact is encountering too much about
the world outside the context of having to talk with
other people about it. Right, who might be like, I don't, man,
it seems like seems like he might have gone some
crazy places with this. Maybe you're just using all this
stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people.

(20:09):
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.

(20:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
He doesn't get it, he seems to not. It goes
over his head.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, he may not get everything right, or at least
not the way that it's meant to be gotten. Now,
when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own soon after
he starts working as the overseer at Egypt Plantation, Eve
is not one of them. This woman that we just
talked about, she belonged to the Cope family, who were
his employers, and as was often the case of female

(21:06):
enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron
of the plantation, Missus Cope. Was not great at this job,
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

(21:26):
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

(21:46):
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

(22:08):
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

(22:28):
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,

(22:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
It's I mean, it's also with it.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
I yeah, even within like what you're saying in the
context of the time, I sense a lot of discrepancies
because it's like, on one hand, he's justifying his recording
of it as like science and you know, making sure
he knows who he's fothering. But then when he's with
his friends, he's saying like, oh, we're just doing this
to punish her. But like that also would contradict him

(23:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
Consistent, because if he's trying to.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
Father someone, he wouldn't be like actively wanting other men
to father children with her, right because you wouldn't legally
be the dad.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
No, And I mean that's I think part of what
that hint said here is that what matters more to
him even than that is like it's not just the
idea of like, well, I want to insert my DNA
into this population as part of the civilizing act, but
the very act of asserting sexual dominance over these people
we own is us civilizing the wild world. That's a

(24:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
So he puts that in English.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yes, that's in English, So he's okay.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Like kind of like airing ou their dirty laundry, but not.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
I think, yeah, and I think there's a degree to
which he does kind of think he's better than them
and see what he's doing, even though it's not as
different and better right, because Eve, I mean, this is
a year's long thing for them, Like she runs away
repeatedly because clearly her life is a nightmare, and Thomas
will rape her repeatedly again right, often sometimes it incites

(25:16):
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

(25:39):
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

(25:59):
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

(26:22):
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?

Speaker 3 (26:42):
And mad just Maddie got caught?

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah? Well, And is she angry because of what he's
doing to this person, because of the fundamental inequalities, or
is she more just angry because like she sees him
as this person that she's in a relationship with and
he cheated on her? How does how we will never
know what this looked like in her head? Right, because
we don't get he's not interested in asking her. He
doesn't talk to her, like we only get pieces of

(27:08):
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,

(27:32):
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

(27:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
So oh no more. There's more you did put You
did say it would get worse, so you did warm me.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
It keeps getting worse.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
And I think one of the ways in which even
pretty good histories now are often kind of short is
that they talk about whipping, and they talk about the
amount of violence, which is important, and they even talk
about like the amunosexual violence, but there's often not detailed
accountings given on like some of the most sadistic punishments.
And part of it's because we'll talk about this in

(28:49):
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

(29:11):
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.

(29:33):
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?

(29:54):
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

(30:15):
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,

(30:36):
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,

(30:59):
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

(31:19):
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

(31:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Because they're saying they're not accountable.

Speaker 4 (32:02):
Who's it'd be crazy if you don't have a bias.
I mean like it's it's like what you were saying
about historians not leaving those details out because it's like
it's hard and hard to talk about.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
I mean literally, that's the first sign that it's so bad.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yet this is really wait a minute, yeah I can't.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
Yeah, people just walking by hearing it are like, this
is like I don't even like fu.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Yeah are people who you know?

Speaker 4 (32:30):
I just like, if I have to look at it,
I don't like it. And that's maybe the sign that
we've gone too far.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
That's an important part of the history of slavery too.
It's not just the people like Thomas who are just
like deeply have completely given their souls up to this
pit of evil, but the people who like kind of
walk by it for like ten minutes and are like, wow,
that seems really bad. I got a place to be,
Like I gotta get moving, you know, like I gotta
I gotta get to work or whatever, Like, yeah, that's bad,
but like I got shipped to do. You know. It's

(32:56):
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

(33:19):
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.

(33:39):
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

(34:00):
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

(34:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
Sorry, I like it's bad. I'm still here, but this
is we.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
Could take a minute. This is all the worst stuff
that people have ever done. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Uh, I don't know what to say, but I mean there.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Is part of what I'm frust Part of what like
was upsetting as I read this was how little of
this kind of stuff I had heard of, considering myself
reasonably rerit well read. I think I'd heard a little
about pickling as like a thing that some particular sadists
did as opposed to like no, no, no, this was
like a norm, like this is a very normal thing
to do, Like this was kind of the escalation shainn

(35:14):
up from the first flogging, right as you pickle these guys.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
And I.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Hate getting into this next part. Tit. I really apologize for, Like,
I don't like having to talk about this. There's no
good way to talk about this. So I'm just going
to read this and you know, we can move past it,
because this is bad. In seventeen fifty six, Thomas writes
that an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugarcane

(35:42):
and was whipped and then he made Thomas made another
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

(36:04):
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

(36:25):
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

(36:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
I deeply disturbed.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
It's upsetting. Yeah, it's it's as bad as it gets, right.
And the only good news that I can give you,
if indeed it counts as good, is that most of
these punishments seem to have died out after like seventeen
fifty six, fifty seven, Right, this is kind of when
Thomas starts doing this less and less. We don't know it.
Maybe this kind of just fell out of popularity. Maybe

(37:26):
it was it was so damaging to the workforce that
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

(37:49):
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

(38:11):
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

(38:31):
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

(38:54):
scarring all of these people that he owns in order
to prove it, well, does t T Yeah?

Speaker 3 (38:59):
IKND like that he goes back.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't think about that either, But
it's it's with Thistlewood.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Right, he's justis but Thomas.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Thistlewood, yes, but yes, unfortunately, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
No, there's other there's other TT's out there.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
There's a yeah. Yeah, I feel his dad was a
dick and named Robert. So you know, we're all there,
you we're.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
Both represented here.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, well both of our names have come up in
this fucked up episode. Uh So, now that he's independent, right,
he's on, he's he's a planter. Now he's risen to
the very top of Jamaican society right about sixteen years
in and he's working his own property with like the
people that he owns, he's making them work. One thing
I'll say for him is that he vaccinates his his

(39:41):
the people he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson didn't, he
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

(40:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
A sign of a not nice person when they keep
a tally.

Speaker 4 (40:25):
Of every nice thing they do have documentary, Yeah I don't.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Yeah, that's definitely re fly.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yeah he's going through his own diaries being like, boy,
I need to revise this a little. I come across
as a monster. I'll say I gave him herring.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
He writes it like Latin.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
He like writes it in multiple languages just in case
you guys get that.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, yeah, like putting it in French too. People need
to know I gave him rum.

Speaker 4 (40:45):
Sometimes the draw a photo of it just in case
you can't read.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yeah, here's a picture of me giving all my yeah,
all my employees or slaves.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, a lot of posed pictures of him handing rum
bottles to scared looking men and women like speak thinking
of not I mean rum, maybe rum. I don't know
if we'll get ads for that. We'll get adds for something.
Here they are, we're back talking about this monastery, how

(41:19):
much we're through the most like graphic horror that we're
going to talk about, which I mean, there's a lot
more that could be. You can read more about that
kind of stuff if you want to. It's bleak, you know, I.

Speaker 4 (41:32):
Pretty like okay pregnancy in terms of like not crying spontaneously.
But you know what, I think we're gonna we're gonna
challenge that today.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah. Well unfortunately, yeah, we have a little bit of
that coming up here too. Uh yeah. So I can't
give you a lot of positive stories here, But one
sort of good thing is that during his yeah ye
a low note. One of the positives of his situations
that while he's working at Egypt Plantation, he does he's
he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes

(42:02):
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

(42:27):
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

(42:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (43:05):
But he's kept a diary of other ways to give
people miscarriages.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Right, but he didn't know about Like again, his knowledge
is never as white as he wants as he thinks
it is. Right, and this is I think there's something. Well,
it's evidence of these people who were in like the
worst situation imaginable taking some agency for themselves, right, some
choice of like I'm not going to do this for you.

(43:31):
I'm not going to deliver you a kid that you'll
then own, Right, I have an ability to control that,
and I'm going to write And that's an important part
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

(43:56):
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,

(44:16):
and he will not long after assault them.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
He definitely is up there on the list of worst motherfuckers.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
He's just about the worst person I've ever heard from.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Directly, Jesus.

Speaker 4 (44:28):
Yeah, the fact that it's his own diary, and I
don't believe that he was one of the normal ones.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
I think there were just a lot of bad people.

Speaker 4 (44:36):
I feel like I still want to hold my like
I don't know if like maybe all the bad people
were there, but like, you know, if he was a
normal really this guy does not sound normal.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Among owners of slave plantations. He's normal, right, That's very
few people even within slave societies. But like so it is,
it is these are the worst, the worst. He's a
normal example of the worst people ever.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Yeah, one of the worst. Yeah, I see.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Well that's important. Like when you get these, for example,
sanitized stories fiction and otherwise about like the pre Civil
war like South in the US, that like depicts how
oh look at these beautiful houses and this like cordial
civil society right undergirding it is the same shit, Thomas. This,
it is the exact same kind of sex crimes the

(45:22):
same kind of sadistic violence, rubbing shit into open wounds
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

(45:43):
doing shit like this. None of them are particularly better
than the others.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
I think that's kind of the important thing to take
out of Thistlewood's work, of his life's work, his diaries.

Speaker 4 (45:54):
Yeah, he's not an isolated incidence. We can't just project
like one bad guy.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yeah what a crazy No, no, no, this is his
whole society. Yeah yeah, yeah, I I oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
So you got one more? One more not a terrible thing.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, there's there's there's I mean, I don't know, it's
this like debate in my head of like how how
how much detail do we go into here? You're I
want to talk a little bit about this girl he
buys best when she's eleven years old, and he buys
her as a gift for Phiba, Right, This this woman
who he does not own. Someone else owns her, and

(46:32):
he is renting her and she is living with him
as his significant other. Right, it's a very odd. It's
a very it's not a weird relationship within this culture.
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

(46:52):
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

(47:13):
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

(47:35):
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

(47:57):
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

(48:18):
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

(48:40):
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,

(49:02):
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,

(49:23):
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

(49:45):
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

(50:06):
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.

(50:27):
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

(50:48):
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,

(51:10):
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

(51:30):
I mean when I say, like, this guy is not
that weird for his social level, you know well, and.

Speaker 4 (51:35):
Because women weren't so it was like a cocauzed women.
Women educated couldn't read Latin.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Or were less likely to be right.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
I do wonder about the whole Catholic Church.

Speaker 4 (51:46):
I mean, I guess now they're not all Germans and Latin,
But didn't they for a long time do everything in Latin?

Speaker 2 (51:51):
They did for a long time, and they have already crimes.
And part of that, I mean, there was argument like
and this is part of like the Protestant Reformation, that
there's this part of that is out of a desire
to keep preaching and keep responsibility for like interpreting the
Word of God out of the common man, right, right,
you have to be learned to some extent to read
the Bible and talk about it in Latin. And that

(52:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Yeah, and there's all those sex crimes in the Bible,
so maybe.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, there's plenty of sex crimes all along. Yeah. Over
the course of his thirty seven years in Jamaica, Thomas
Thistlewood recorded exactly three thousand, eight hundred and fifty two
sexual acts with one hundred and thirty eight different women.
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,

(53:01):
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

(53:22):
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,

(53:48):
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,

(54:10):
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,

(54:35):
it's all exploitation. That's the only kind of relationship that
he has with any of these people is one based
on ownership?

Speaker 1 (54:42):
Does he at least die of something horrific?

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Yeah, I mean there's not really a lot of good
ways to die in that period of time. He lives
a long life for the era though unfortunately he doesn't
pass until seventeen eighty six and he's sixty five years old,
which for a white guy in Jamaica, he lives a
pretty long life. And he dies, does he ever?

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Just like each ship just to try it out?

Speaker 4 (55:01):
And then so I just want to know if this
man has eaten his own ship before, I mean for science, you.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Know, maybe I don't know. Uh, he proad like Yeah,
no documentation of him eating his own ship, but him
being shitty that's most of his documentation. And yeah, there's
a there's nothing happy to say about this story than
that he does die eventually. Uh, and you know, not

(55:29):
long after his death, the abolitionist movement really starts to
get going within the British Empire, and gradually this kind
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

(55:50):
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

(56:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (56:33):
Much of that in the colonial England was like also
far away from them, like you said, But then in
America it's like right there, your neighbors are doing it,
and so that's even wilder that they continued longer in America.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
So yeah, that's ye. And remember just this bad you know,
like this is not Jamaica. It was not worse than Virginia.
Like all of this is the similar kinds of maybe
slightly different tactics and how you psychologically and physically abuse people,
but not always even that you know a lot of
the same tactics. Anyway, Jesus Christ, we're done. Sorry, that's

(57:15):
the end.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
Okay, well, at least it's over.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
It's over.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
T you have anything you want to plug?

Speaker 4 (57:22):
No, I feel like I should not plug anything right
now except for I guess go take a hot bath
and cry.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
But cry.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Okay, I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
I give birth, because we go there, we go.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Because it's a new show too, called Second Screens. It's
for people who uh uh, you know, if you're neuro
a diversion like me and you don't want to be
you can be on your phone the whole time. Second
Screen hosted by Madison Shepherd. Next one is December first. Yeah,
and you can bring your phone and be on your
laptop or phone while you're on wile you're watching the show.

(58:00):
So I'll be on my show and then I'll probably
not do comedy for a while.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Well those are both good choices and I wish you
the best a.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Lot seeing them one last time.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Yeah yeah, And I hope you take advantage of having
a baby, because that that'll be fun, that'll be much much,
that'll be affirming and good. The world's horrible things that
are good.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:25):
Yeah, what a strange way to end this pod. But
thank you for having me on. You're always a pleatter
to see you, and you know, take a moment to
think about all the horrible things humanity is capable of.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Yes, all right, everybody, Horrible things done.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes Everyonenesday and Friday.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (59:02):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards.