Speaker 1: Also media. Uh huh, I do it's now that we
Speaker 1: used to script to the zoom Lady going recording in progress.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. Whatever happened to the zoom Lady
Speaker 2: another job taken by automation. I think it was an
Speaker 2: automated job to begin with. I think that was a
Speaker 2: who complains when the when the robots get taken their
Speaker 2: jobs taken by other robots, you know, we need solidarity
Speaker 2: with some of the robots against the other robots.
Speaker 1: I think I think Wally from that from that movie, Wally.
Speaker 3: Is the one.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I hate that son of a bitch.
Speaker 3: Why I love Wally.
Speaker 2: I'll fight I'll fight.
Speaker 3: Wally Lealy alone.
Speaker 2: I don't like him at all.
Speaker 3: Why don't you like Wally?
Speaker 2: It's not his business coming around picking ship up? You know,
Speaker 2: you're so literally what.
Speaker 3: He's programmed for. You're such a hater I am.
Speaker 2: I'm fundamentally a hater because that's my job. I'm Robert
Speaker 2: Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast for haters,
Speaker 2: by haters, often about haters.
Speaker 3: Forgive Me, produced by a.
Speaker 2: Lover, Produced by a lover and our guest today T
Speaker 2: T Lee, Would you like to talk about a guy
Speaker 2: we hate again some more.
Speaker 3: You know, do I have a choice?
Speaker 4: No? No, no, you know what this is exactly I
Speaker 4: this is what I love to.
Speaker 2: Do, is to be forced to hear about a bad man. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was forced to read about him. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: I forced myself. This is all fundamentally on me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I made my choices. I could have written about anyone.
Speaker 3: I will say, if I had to hear it from anyone,
Speaker 3: I would choose you, Robert and so.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. So I will if I had to
Speaker 2: choose to tell anyone, I would tell you, because you would.
Speaker 2: You and I share the deepest bond that two people
Speaker 2: can at work, which is you both accidentally took a
Speaker 2: huge dose of mushrooms together while filming a video for
Speaker 2: the Internet.
Speaker 4: That is still very much yeah, never forgotten. Every once
Speaker 4: in a while someone will bring that up, a stranger like, did.
Speaker 3: You get high on mushrooms once?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Online. I'm like, yeah, that was me.
Speaker 4: And I always say, by the way, it was cleared
Speaker 4: by legal it's completely legal.
Speaker 2: Actually, these were legal mushrooms. They're unregulated, you know they
Speaker 2: were they were unregulated. A lot was unregulated in those days. Uh,
Speaker 2: the Internet before like twenty sixteen. You know, yeah, before
Speaker 2: everything got worse. Yeah, speaking about the stuff that's much
Speaker 2: worse than that. Let's get back to this horrible guy
Speaker 2: in Jamaica Thomas Thistle would. So in Part one, I
Speaker 2: discussed the fact that Thomas thistle Would considered himself a
Speaker 2: bit of a naturalist, and that his documentations of all
Speaker 2: of the different crimes he committed were, in his own eyes,
Speaker 2: something he saw as a contribution to the scientific record.
Speaker 2: And he also considered like what he was specifically the
Speaker 2: sexual violence he employed as like a part of his
Speaker 2: work as a farmer. You know, slaves aren't entirely treated
Speaker 2: the same as livestock in his mind, but they're treated
Speaker 2: more like livestock than people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: The only reason in which they're kind of different from
Speaker 2: life is that is that they're more valuable, right, like
Speaker 2: a slave is does an enslave person represents a huge
Speaker 2: store of value. Right, They're worth a lot more than
Speaker 2: like most livestock are. Right, So these are not. That's
Speaker 2: part of why even when you hear about something like, oh,
Speaker 2: he caught this this woman with a knife, it's not
Speaker 2: that common for them to kill because that's a lot
Speaker 2: of money on the line, right, that represents somebody's money.
Speaker 2: It's not out of humanitarianism or anything like that. They
Speaker 2: just it's it's that's pretty dark. Yeah, yeah, that's all
Speaker 2: this is to them. Yeah. One of the things that
Speaker 2: I find most interesting about the journals of Thomas Thistlewood
Speaker 2: is the degree to which things that are like these
Speaker 2: really horrible sex crimes are just like bracketed in between
Speaker 2: stuff like, oh, one of my lambs gave birth or
Speaker 2: I killed a snake, right, Like he literally like put
Speaker 2: it in tween stuff like that. And in her study
Speaker 2: for Small Ax Journal, Heather Vermulion explains that by doing
Speaker 2: things like this, he's quote enclosing particular rape records within
Speaker 2: signifiers of his progress an increase in livestock and a
Speaker 2: decrease in the threatening of the undomesticated creaturely population, right,
Speaker 2: And so what he's seeing is like, what I'm doing
Speaker 2: is a part of this like taming of the natural world.
Speaker 2: It's the same as getting rid of, you know, a
Speaker 2: snake that we have no use for because it will
Speaker 2: just eat our livestock. Or it's the same as one
Speaker 2: of my livestock giving birth right and Darwin's theory of
Speaker 2: evolution didn't exist yet, right, that's not published until the
Speaker 2: late eighteen fifties. But people who would wind up being
Speaker 2: Darwin's precursors are alive and publishing books of science in
Speaker 2: this period of time. And these are a lot of
Speaker 2: the guys that Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of. Right,
Speaker 2: He's like, this is his We don't have like YouTube yet,
Speaker 2: but like this is very much the kind of content
Speaker 2: that he is he is ingesting, right, is these like
Speaker 2: early and some of them are bullshit? Right, yeah, Like
Speaker 2: this is his manusphere, right, is like this mix of
Speaker 2: works of science and works of like literature and satire
Speaker 2: and like literal like just like lies that are also
Speaker 2: being passed off as science. Like all of this is
Speaker 2: like part of his intellectual diet, and one of the
Speaker 2: books that was most influence.
Speaker 3: Exactly like the manuscre right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's yeah, and there's one of the one of
Speaker 2: the things that is weirdly common with like it's a
Speaker 2: it relates directly to a problem we have today is
Speaker 2: people taking works of satire seriously and then building their
Speaker 2: for their like views of the world around them. Like
Speaker 2: that that happens today with you know, shit like we
Speaker 2: can talk about South Park and the movie Starship Troopers, right,
Speaker 2: where a lot of people don't get the joke and
Speaker 2: wind up or take the joke in a specific way
Speaker 2: and wind up using it as part of like a
Speaker 2: worldview that justifies some pretty fucked up things and shit
Speaker 2: like that is happening back then. And one of the
Speaker 2: things one of the ways it happens to Thomas thistle
Speaker 2: w is he he becomes a fan of this like
Speaker 2: satirical tract published in seventeen fifty two called the Man Plant,
Speaker 2: or a Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed.
Speaker 2: And this is this is like a you've heard of
Speaker 2: like Thomas Swift's a modest proposal, right yeah, where he's
Speaker 2: like he's talking about it we should, Oh, you know,
Speaker 2: there's all these poor people starving in Ireland. What if
Speaker 2: we ate Irish babies? What if we like allowed them
Speaker 2: to be sold as food? And it's like it's a
Speaker 2: sad Like he's joking about how cruelly people talk about
Speaker 2: the poor, right and particularly poor Irish like that it's
Speaker 2: that's the joke, is like how awful his society is
Speaker 2: to this group of people, right, that they're treating their
Speaker 2: babies like a like chicken to be farmed for food,
Speaker 2: almost right, like like that's that's the point Swift was making, right,
Speaker 2: And some people get the joke and some people don't.
Speaker 2: And Thistlewood comes across a book that's a similar thing
Speaker 2: to what Thomas Swift is doing, called The Man Plant,
Speaker 2: and it's written we don't know exactly who wrote it.
Speaker 2: The author's pseudonym was Vincent Miller. And it's really weird
Speaker 2: because it comes out in seventeen fifty two, so there's
Speaker 2: no theory of evolution. Our knowledge of heredity is very
Speaker 2: limited in the seventeen fifties, right, we're starting to get
Speaker 2: an understanding of it, but it is not what we'd
Speaker 2: call developed. And this work, as a joke is an
Speaker 2: early eugenics text. It's really fascinating. It's like a pre
Speaker 2: genetics understanding of eugenics, again written as a bit, because
Speaker 2: the gist of this book is that this guy Vincent Miller,
Speaker 2: is basically saying, hey, we need like there's a lot
Speaker 2: of problems like with the there's a problem of inequality
Speaker 2: between the sexes, right, because pregnancy is so dangerous and
Speaker 2: painful for women and part of what he's doing here
Speaker 2: is I think he's kind of making a comment on
Speaker 2: the upper class in his society, in which it's very
Speaker 2: common for women who are of high society after they
Speaker 2: give birth to hand their baby off to like a nurse, right,
Speaker 2: who's going to like actually like feed and take care
Speaker 2: of effect we raise the kid. And so part of
Speaker 2: what part of the satires is he's saying, what if
Speaker 2: we take moms and dads entirely out of the equation
Speaker 2: and raise human beings like animals on a farm. Right,
Speaker 2: And one the way he suggests doing this is like,
Speaker 2: we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's ges state
Speaker 2: embryos in an artificial womb, and that way we can
Speaker 2: keep we can we can remove human beings entirely from
Speaker 2: the business of like raising their children. Right, He's being like,
Speaker 2: this is a sad.
Speaker 4: Point out how the direction we're going is even becoming
Speaker 4: like less removed or more removed and less human, and
Speaker 4: as like a point. But then people are like, great idea, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: And he's you know this, this is where I wanted
Speaker 2: to go into more detail about this, but we're going
Speaker 2: to run long anyway. But it's a fascinating work for me,
Speaker 2: just because of how he's he's very clearly satirizing what
Speaker 2: he sees is like an inhumanity at the highest levels
Speaker 2: of his society, like people aren't even raising or nearing
Speaker 2: their own kids. But part of how he chooses to
Speaker 2: mock that is by kind of laughing at the idea
Speaker 2: of like that, like pregnancy is dangerous for women. And
Speaker 2: it's a little unclear to me if he's actually acknowledging
Speaker 2: that that's an inequality or if he's making fun of
Speaker 2: the people who see it as an inequality. Like I'm
Speaker 2: just not fully versed enough in like the satire of
Speaker 2: the seventeen fifties in England to tell you what he's
Speaker 2: trying to do more. But Vincent Miller, part of what
Speaker 2: he's doing is he's looking at this culture of upper
Speaker 2: class child neglect and he's proposing a hyperbolic solution. Right,
Speaker 2: we create an artificial womb to ges state fertilized embryos
Speaker 2: outside of the human body, and we can raise human
Speaker 2: beings like animals on a plantation. And part of one
Speaker 2: of the things that the eugenics thing that he kind
Speaker 2: of proposes here is he pretends that he's done this,
Speaker 2: He like writes claims about how I convinced this farm
Speaker 2: girl like to give me one of her after she
Speaker 2: had sex with his boy, that she liked to give
Speaker 2: me a fertilized embryo, and I took it out this way,
Speaker 2: and I grew it in a heat cow bladder. And
Speaker 2: the baby's twenty months old now, and it's much healthier
Speaker 2: than a regular baby. And for this reason, I propose
Speaker 2: that this method of growing human beings will yield a
Speaker 2: heartier offspring will get which is proto eugenic. Right, that
Speaker 2: he's saying we will improve, and again as a joke,
Speaker 2: but he's still saying we will improve through this method
Speaker 2: the breeding quality of all of the British people that
Speaker 2: we start putting into the world.
Speaker 4: Right, But he's talking about like like it's interesting that
Speaker 4: he's talking about breeding of white people. And then there's
Speaker 4: like this parallel world where they're talking about breeding slaves
Speaker 4: and they're both dehumanizing. But one is like, let's breed
Speaker 4: more of quote unquote superior white people, and the others like, let's.
Speaker 3: Bring more of these people we don't consider human.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and so that's like such a weird like
Speaker 4: I don't know, like a weird cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 2: I think that's part of the satire too, is him saying, Hey,
Speaker 2: if we apply it, here's what happens if we apply
Speaker 2: the logic we're using on slave populations in places like
Speaker 2: Jamaica to white English people. Isn't that fucked up? Right?
Speaker 2: Like he's he's I think part of this is is
Speaker 2: Miller trying to get people in his society to like
Speaker 2: think about it this way, right. I think that's part
Speaker 2: of the satire. So obviously this guy does not is
Speaker 2: not seriously suggesting this, Nor did he literally just state
Speaker 2: a baby and a cow's uh black, Like that's you
Speaker 2: can't do that, right, Like that's like he's this is
Speaker 2: a bit. It's a little unclear to me how we
Speaker 2: know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood, because he writes, he quotes
Speaker 2: extensively from this tract in his diary. He writes about
Speaker 2: it a bunch at the time that he reads it,
Speaker 2: and there's some some evidence some of the scholars who
Speaker 2: study his journals have suggested that this played like a
Speaker 2: role in his intellectual development and how he treated people.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of I kind of think I don't
Speaker 2: know if it's that he missed the satire entirely or
Speaker 2: that he just like a lot of these tech bros
Speaker 2: who read science fiction and there's like things in there
Speaker 2: that you're not emulate. The Matrix, right, it's a torment
Speaker 2: nexus situation where like Vincent Miller is describing the torment
Speaker 2: nexus that is treating people like Livestock, and Thomas Thistle
Speaker 2: was like, what a cool idea. Why don't idea exactly right?
Speaker 3: Well, you described it so well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because it's like all the people who the worst,
Speaker 4: like tech bros, will bring up like the Matrix as
Speaker 4: and it's like they completely missed the point and like
Speaker 4: and people, Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 3: It's like you completely missed it.
Speaker 2: Oh, especially when like those anti trans tech bros are
Speaker 2: big fans or like guys like entertainer fans. The Matrix
Speaker 2: is like, you motherfuckers missed the point as hard as
Speaker 2: it could be missed.
Speaker 3: You ever actually looked at this movie?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is not like the authors are around, they've
Speaker 2: talked about this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, like this is what it means.
Speaker 3: We'll never know.
Speaker 2: You're like, yeah, okay, so I think part of the
Speaker 2: big impact that this this satire satiric work has on
Speaker 2: Thomas is the way in which the author described human
Speaker 2: breeding in agricultural terms, and I'm going to quote a
Speaker 2: passage from this book. It is then easy to be
Speaker 2: conceived that by ridding the women of the plagues and
Speaker 2: fatigue of gestation, they may team anew at much shorter
Speaker 2: intervals of time. They may then become like those fertile
Speaker 2: fields that yield two or three crops in a season,
Speaker 2: and their fecundity will only be limited by such small
Speaker 2: reposes as the necessity of lying fallow will require for
Speaker 2: the reparation of the ground. They will continue longer able
Speaker 2: and apt for impregnation, so that, upon a moderate estimate,
Speaker 2: a well disposed, well constituted, and industrious woman may furnish
Speaker 2: her country with one hundred and thirty to one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty or more children. So it's very much like
Speaker 2: again talking about women like a field and talking about
Speaker 2: human babies as crops. You know, you can see a
Speaker 2: GIF is supposed to like this. I think Miller is
Speaker 2: saying this is bad, right, that's why it's a satire.
Speaker 2: But this or what is just like what a cue?
Speaker 4: Yeah as well, because it's even you say now I'm
Speaker 4: like it's satire. But then I'm like, I don't know
Speaker 4: how far we've Like, right, some people may look at
Speaker 4: that today and you know, there's the whole childwise breeders
Speaker 4: then look at that and be like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Look at the the pro natalist movement, right, Like there's
Speaker 2: more than a little of that in here, right, Like
Speaker 2: the of this, like, yeah, we can breed stronger and
Speaker 2: better people to improve the nature of society. It always
Speaker 2: gets to be a problem when you're thinking about like
Speaker 2: how can we how can we make the next generation,
Speaker 2: like tinker with it genetically to make it better? Which
Speaker 2: is I mean, that's part of what's interesting. This is
Speaker 2: in seventeen fifty two, this comes out and it is
Speaker 2: kind of talking about like genetic engineering in a way, right,
Speaker 2: and before we knew what those words meant. But it's
Speaker 2: a proto tract in that line of like science fiction, right,
Speaker 2: Like there's there's bits of Gatica in this, right, like
Speaker 2: that Gatica has bits of this in its DNA, if
Speaker 2: you'll forgive the term, right, the movie Gatica this idea
Speaker 2: of like we're well, by changing this, we make people
Speaker 2: that are heartier and stronger and we can ship them
Speaker 2: over sea. We're creating plantations of men, right, That's what
Speaker 2: Miller writes in this book. And then we'll ship all
Speaker 2: these people that we've grown like crops over to populate
Speaker 2: the colonies. Quote. By this means we shall see infinite
Speaker 2: broods of subjects serve to in people and enrich as
Speaker 2: well as our island, as those vast tracts in North
Speaker 2: America which are so thinly inhabited, which are now obligated
Speaker 2: to be stocked with other foreign refugees. A naturalization bill
Speaker 2: will thus be out of the question. We may also
Speaker 2: then more reasonably grasp the conquest of both the indies,
Speaker 2: our actual possessions and those which we shall infallibly by
Speaker 2: dint of superior numbers procure, will be abundantly supplied with
Speaker 2: swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as
Speaker 2: China itself. And part again, there's this knowledge that we're
Speaker 2: only peopling the new world we need. It's mostly slaves
Speaker 2: in a lot of these colonies, right, slaves or local
Speaker 2: people that we're ruling, because British people can't survive that
Speaker 2: way well in all of these places, right. And part
Speaker 2: of the joke that Miller's like, He's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: what if we could get rid of all of these
Speaker 2: non white people by just outbreeding them with these human
Speaker 2: beings we grew on a field and again saying that
Speaker 2: to satirize a lot of the attitudes at his time.
Speaker 2: But I don't think everyone gets is interprets it that way.
Speaker 2: We know Thistlewood owned a copy of this book after
Speaker 2: it was published, and he wrote about it in his
Speaker 2: diary several times. I don't know that he picked up
Speaker 2: the critique of aristocratic family dynamics, but the idea of
Speaker 2: peopling newly conquered territory and improving the quality of new
Speaker 2: generations was clearly on his mind, and that's how he
Speaker 2: saw a lot of what he was doing. I found
Speaker 2: very little analysis of his impact of this the impactless
Speaker 2: book had on him, other than what Heather vver Mullin writes,
Speaker 2: Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers, and they
Speaker 2: mostly ignore this kind of stuff. When a lot of
Speaker 2: them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all, right,
Speaker 2: like some of them like the most some of them
Speaker 2: will say is that like, Well, there's some debate as
Speaker 2: to whether or not you know, what he was doing
Speaker 2: was consensual, and it's like, well, there's really not like
Speaker 2: he owned these people. Yeah they couldn't read Latin, but yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of like this stuff gets mixed. Vermullin
Speaker 2: is one of the only female scholars that I've seen
Speaker 2: analyzed this Wood's writing, and she does center the man
Speaker 2: this book in her discussions of why he wrote about
Speaker 2: his sex crimes the way she did when discussing passages
Speaker 2: from Miller's book that he exerpted for his diary, she
Speaker 2: concludes Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his
Speaker 2: classification of enslaved women in rape records, which suggests that
Speaker 2: his practice has preceded, or at least existed in reciprocal
Speaker 2: relationship to his engagement of pseudoscientific theory. In other words,
Speaker 2: he does start writing about what he's doing. It's like
Speaker 2: he would consider his sexual exploits before he reads this book,
Speaker 2: but the way he quotes from it suggests that he
Speaker 2: considers it to justify a provided justification to his behavior right,
Speaker 2: and that justification may have helped him continue to find
Speaker 2: ways to explain to himself why what he was doing
Speaker 2: was okay, right.
Speaker 4: It's like finding yeah, like the echo chambers sort of
Speaker 4: like looking for more signs that he's going down the
Speaker 4: right path.
Speaker 2: Right right exactly, Like that's something he's got to do
Speaker 2: for himself. Here we know that during the week in
Speaker 2: which he first reads The Man Planned, he oversees the
Speaker 2: harvest season at his plantation, and he chooses to mark
Speaker 2: the occasion by picking out another victim to sexually assault.
Speaker 2: Immediately after the entry in which he notes that he's
Speaker 2: finished this book, he writes, am kum eve suptear in
Speaker 2: the old Negro house. Paid a bit, right, In other words,
Speaker 2: he slept with this woman, assaulted her on the ground,
Speaker 2: that's what supterum means it near the slave house, and
Speaker 2: he paid her the equivalent of like a dollar or two, right,
Speaker 2: And so that that's coming in immediately after he like
Speaker 2: exerts passages from this book. These things exist his like
Speaker 2: intellectual diet, and then the things that he is doing
Speaker 2: and justifying based on the stuff he's reading all exists
Speaker 2: kind of in the same continuum together Vermilini's lanes. In
Speaker 2: other words, after noting that he returned to text that
Speaker 2: imagined plantations of men thistlewood records that he raped enslaved
Speaker 2: woman named Eve, and that he did so at the
Speaker 2: estate's current harvest site. Put differently, in an engineered Eden,
Speaker 2: the pseudoscientist Vincent Miller grew his ter Philius from an
Speaker 2: egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter, Thistle
Speaker 2: would mark the time of harvest by raping an enslaved
Speaker 2: woman named Eve. Right, there's this weird degree to which
Speaker 2: what he's noting down and the things that he's partaking,
Speaker 2: he makes them almost fit the things that he's doing.
Speaker 3: See, this is why I men shouldn't be allowed to read.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like ideas.
Speaker 2: Well, I got good news about literacy levels.
Speaker 3: Too many ideas rapes.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, this is why you need this is why
Speaker 2: maybe it's useful sometimes to like do your This is
Speaker 2: the danger of the autodidact is encountering too much about
Speaker 2: the world outside the context of having to talk with
Speaker 2: other people about it. Right, who might be like, I don't, man,
Speaker 2: it seems like seems like he might have gone some
Speaker 2: crazy places with this. Maybe you're just using all this
Speaker 2: stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people.
Speaker 2: But you know, he's in a way. I think this
Speaker 2: is a product of the fact that he's isolated from
Speaker 2: the intellectual culture he's obsessed with. It's not a two
Speaker 2: way relationship. He's digesting these books and these articles, and
Speaker 2: he's talking with them about them with other white exiles,
Speaker 2: and he probably probably part of his ego is that
Speaker 2: he seems like a learned man among this population of exiles.
Speaker 2: But he also knows he's not really fit to be
Speaker 2: part of the intellectual community that he admires, right, And
Speaker 2: some of that is shown in the fact that he
Speaker 2: doesn't really understand everything he's reading.
Speaker 3: He doesn't get it, he seems to not. It goes
Speaker 3: over his head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he may not get everything right, or at least
Speaker 2: not the way that it's meant to be gotten. Now,
Speaker 2: when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own soon after
Speaker 2: he starts working as the overseer at Egypt Plantation, Eve
Speaker 2: is not one of them. This woman that we just
Speaker 2: talked about, she belonged to the Cope family, who were
Speaker 2: his employers, and as was often the case of female
Speaker 2: enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron
Speaker 2: of the plantation, Missus Cope. Was not great at this job,
Speaker 2: and it's a market. How unhappy Eve was that she
Speaker 2: escaped frequently, And this is some ofhow we get how
Speaker 2: Thomas would have punished the people that he was overseeing
Speaker 2: while he's working at this plantation. On March third, seventeen
Speaker 2: fifty five, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four
Speaker 2: people who escaped that day. The next day, he wrote,
Speaker 2: William Crookshanks, a white worker. Below Thistlewood brought Eve into
Speaker 2: the savannah to her mistress, missus Cope, but she soon
Speaker 2: made her escape again. Below this, Thomas notes in small
Speaker 2: print he slept with her under the logwood. So what
Speaker 2: he is saying there is that this other white worker
Speaker 2: catches Eve after she gets out, and he brings her
Speaker 2: back to the big house, and she escapes again, and
Speaker 2: William catches her again and then he rapes her as
Speaker 2: like a punishment for escaping, or maybe just because it's
Speaker 2: what he wanted to do. Right. Part of what we're
Speaker 2: getting here is how this is not just Thomas engaging
Speaker 2: in this behavior. This is all of the white people,
Speaker 2: all of the white men, particularly on these farms, are
Speaker 2: doing this habitually. Like it's incredible how casually. He notes this, Right,
Speaker 2: what Crookshanks does, This is not even like a significant
Speaker 2: deal to him. It's just like, well, of course he
Speaker 2: recaptured this woman, and he did that as he was
Speaker 2: taking her back, right, And Vermulin goes on to note,
Speaker 2: quote the following week, after dinner for heartily drunk white
Speaker 2: male colonists, all Thistlewood's acquaintances hauled Eve separately into the
Speaker 2: water room. The bathroom, and we're concerned with which means
Speaker 2: raped her one of them, his good friend Harry Weach twice,
Speaker 2: first and last. The following month, Eve ran away two
Speaker 2: more times and again, Like this is both how they're
Speaker 2: trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to themselves,
Speaker 2: like well, she escaped, so we have to do this,
Speaker 2: you know. It's and it's so casual, like none of
Speaker 2: them even think about it, Like this is the normal
Speaker 2: behavior for white men in the society, is to commit
Speaker 2: like rape at the drop of a hat against these
Speaker 2: people that they own, right, Like that is the normal behavior.
Speaker 3: It's I mean, it's also with it.
Speaker 4: I yeah, even within like what you're saying in the
Speaker 4: context of the time, I sense a lot of discrepancies
Speaker 4: because it's like, on one hand, he's justifying his recording
Speaker 4: of it as like science and you know, making sure
Speaker 4: he knows who he's fothering. But then when he's with
Speaker 4: his friends, he's saying like, oh, we're just doing this
Speaker 4: to punish her. But like that also would contradict him
Speaker 4: being the father if everyone's raping her. And so there's
Speaker 4: this like already, like you can tell the the arguments
Speaker 4: shakey to begin with, like clearly like what we understand,
Speaker 4: like this man's doing bad things and it's driven by
Speaker 4: you know, his bad motives, and then looking for different justifications,
Speaker 4: but they don't even they're not even.
Speaker 3: Consistent, because if he's trying to.
Speaker 4: Father someone, he wouldn't be like actively wanting other men
Speaker 4: to father children with her, right because you wouldn't legally
Speaker 4: be the dad.
Speaker 2: No, And I mean that's I think part of what
Speaker 2: that hint said here is that what matters more to
Speaker 2: him even than that is like it's not just the
Speaker 2: idea of like, well, I want to insert my DNA
Speaker 2: into this population as part of the civilizing act, but
Speaker 2: the very act of asserting sexual dominance over these people
Speaker 2: we own is us civilizing the wild world. That's a
Speaker 2: lot how these guys are think that's and what's interesting
Speaker 2: is part of what you get from this is because
Speaker 2: Thistlewood doesn't write about what his colleagues are doing to
Speaker 2: these women the same way he does about himself. He
Speaker 2: doesn't put it in Latin, right, he uses these kind
Speaker 2: of body terms. They were concerned with her, right, which
Speaker 2: is commonly meant you know, had sex with kind of
Speaker 2: when people were writing about this sort of thing.
Speaker 3: So he puts that in English.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's in English, So he's okay.
Speaker 3: Like kind of like airing ou their dirty laundry, but not.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, and I think there's a degree to
Speaker 2: which he does kind of think he's better than them
Speaker 2: and see what he's doing, even though it's not as
Speaker 2: different and better right, because Eve, I mean, this is
Speaker 2: a year's long thing for them, Like she runs away
Speaker 2: repeatedly because clearly her life is a nightmare, and Thomas
Speaker 2: will rape her repeatedly again right, often sometimes it incites
Speaker 2: her escaping, sometimes he does it after she escapes. But
Speaker 2: he does it constantly, and he writes about him doing
Speaker 2: it fundamentally differently than he writes about his friends doing it,
Speaker 2: which is does say something, right, It talks about the
Speaker 2: incoherence in his worldview, as you pointed out, and it
Speaker 2: just also I think it shows this kind of narcissism
Speaker 2: that he does think that he's special and that what
Speaker 2: he's doing is different than them. Right. So the night
Speaker 2: after this I mentioned in episode one, he's in a
Speaker 2: long term what he would call a relationship. We're not
Speaker 2: calling at that, but it's important to talk about how
Speaker 2: he describes it with this enslaved woman Fiba, right, phibbah
Speaker 2: is how he spells it, and so she he has.
Speaker 2: Ostensibly there's an extent to which he feels at least
Speaker 2: a little accountable to her, like because he talks to
Speaker 2: her like she she like's he comes back to her
Speaker 2: pretty regularly, and it clearly at least matters. When she's
Speaker 2: pissed at him and the way he describes it, she
Speaker 2: gets angry because she thinks of this as like them,
Speaker 2: him cheating on her, right, and I this is kind
Speaker 2: of again, this isn't a relations This is like a
Speaker 2: parody of an actual relationship, like a sick like it's
Speaker 2: it's a perversion of everything that that's supposed to be.
Speaker 2: But he does write about it like that, right, He
Speaker 2: describes the fact that after he goes over to her
Speaker 2: after assaulting Eve again, Phibi seems much out of humor
Speaker 2: about Eve yesterday, and he's angry and he doesn't know
Speaker 2: who can have told her? Right, Like, who the hell
Speaker 2: let her know what I did to this woman? Right?
Speaker 3: And mad just Maddie got caught?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, And is she angry because of what he's
Speaker 2: doing to this person, because of the fundamental inequalities, or
Speaker 2: is she more just angry because like she sees him
Speaker 2: as this person that she's in a relationship with and
Speaker 2: he cheated on her? How does how we will never
Speaker 2: know what this looked like in her head? Right, because
Speaker 2: we don't get he's not interested in asking her. He
Speaker 2: doesn't talk to her, like we only get pieces of
Speaker 2: her from the outside, like we do of all of
Speaker 2: these people that he owns and is abusing, So to
Speaker 2: talk about Eve again. She escapes in the early fall,
Speaker 2: and she manages to stay free almost the entire month
Speaker 2: of October. When she was caught, Thomas quote whipped and
Speaker 2: chained her. She subsequently escaped once more and was brought
Speaker 2: home on December twenty third and chained again. The next day,
Speaker 2: she escaped and was brought back the day after that,
Speaker 2: whereupon Thomas chained her in the cookroom. This pattern continued
Speaker 2: for years. When she ran away and was caught in
Speaker 2: the spring of seventeen fifty seven, Thistlewood reported her punishment
Speaker 2: thusly tied her to the oven post and gave her
Speaker 2: a little correction. Now that phrasing could mean a lot,
Speaker 2: And so that's as good as segue for any as
Speaker 2: me to discuss the corporal punishment on the plantation as
Speaker 2: it existed in the time in which Thomas was doing
Speaker 2: his job and ed kinds of violence that he and
Speaker 2: his peers meeted out on the people that they owned.
Speaker 2: But first bad time for an ad break. Huhugh, yep, sorry,
Speaker 2: wof and we're back.
Speaker 3: So oh no more. There's more you did put You
Speaker 3: did say it would get worse, so you did warm me.
Speaker 2: It keeps getting worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I think one of the ways in which even
Speaker 2: pretty good histories now are often kind of short is
Speaker 2: that they talk about whipping, and they talk about the
Speaker 2: amount of violence, which is important, and they even talk
Speaker 2: about like the amunosexual violence, but there's often not detailed
Speaker 2: accountings given on like some of the most sadistic punishments.
Speaker 2: And part of it's because we'll talk about this in
Speaker 2: a little bit, but even some historians are really uncomfortable
Speaker 2: talking about the details of the sadism of the punishments
Speaker 2: that white people engaged in in places like Jamaica. And
Speaker 2: it is really upsetting to talk about Thomas arrived in
Speaker 2: Jamaica as a practiced farmer and an amateur naturalist, and
Speaker 2: there's no evidence that prior to arriving here he was
Speaker 2: a violent man or had ever so much as struck
Speaker 2: another person. Maybe he had, maybe he'd been in a
Speaker 2: lot of fights, but he didn't write about it, right,
Speaker 2: We don't know if he had not been violent prior
Speaker 2: to coming to Jamaica. This changed rapidly upon starting work
Speaker 2: at a plantation. On his first day working as assistant
Speaker 2: overseer on his first plantation on the island, his boss
Speaker 2: ordered him to give three hundred lashes to his driver,
Speaker 2: who was one of the oldest enslaved people on the property.
Speaker 2: Thistlewood delivered the punishment, which was likely ordered as much
Speaker 2: to toughen him up as to punish the enslave man
Speaker 2: in question. Right, there's this new white guy on the farm.
Speaker 2: We got to have him beat the absolute hell out
Speaker 2: of the most like, sympathetic and liked person on the
Speaker 2: enslaved persons. Yes, are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And he proves cruel enough for the job. Now, as
Speaker 2: I noted, Jamaica was reputed for being a really the
Speaker 2: egalitarian place for white men. Right, even poor white men
Speaker 2: would be treated well by the rich white men. And
Speaker 2: part of why is because there's this there's this understanding
Speaker 2: that everyone will bind together when it's time to do
Speaker 2: violence against the much larger enslave majority. James Robertson writes
Speaker 2: that quote the generous hospitality of a planter's household rested
Speaker 2: on uninhibited violence in the fields. This will would absorb
Speaker 2: this lesson and continue to order floggings for the rest
Speaker 2: of his life in Jamaica. And yeah, that is. It's
Speaker 2: one of these things. He exists in Jamaica during the
Speaker 2: high point of slavery and slave plantations on the island,
Speaker 2: both because the weather is unusually good during like thirty
Speaker 2: seven years that he's there and so harvests are really good.
Speaker 2: It's just a good time climactically to be growing sugar
Speaker 2: in Jamaica. And also there's no limits whatsoever on slavery
Speaker 2: right while he is there, and that's going to start
Speaker 2: to change after he dies. In seventeen eighty nine, not
Speaker 2: long after he passes, anti slavery advocates are going to testify,
Speaker 2: it part in Westminster, about the abuse of enslaved people
Speaker 2: in Jamaica. Robertson writes about this quote. These included. The
Speaker 2: testimony included cruel beatings occurring not just out on lonely estates,
Speaker 2: but in gardens in Savannah Lamar, the parish's principal port or.
Speaker 2: Only a hedge separated passers by from the victim's screams.
Speaker 2: More frightening. Still, while the witnesses stated the cries were
Speaker 2: heard with universal detestation, the perpetrator was not brought to
Speaker 2: legal punishment. Historians of slavery have made little use of
Speaker 2: these remarkable depositions, despite their early date. The arguments for
Speaker 2: disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement
Speaker 2: found these witnesses, so their evidence can hardly be objective.
Speaker 2: This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists, and
Speaker 2: then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slaveholding
Speaker 2: societies could be. Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion
Speaker 2: that such horrors could not exist in a British colony.
Speaker 2: So there's even this problem with a lot of histories
Speaker 2: where they're like, we can't take these accounts by anti
Speaker 2: slavery activists of how brutal the system was as literal
Speaker 2: because they're by is.
Speaker 3: Because they're saying they're not accountable.
Speaker 4: Who's it'd be crazy if you don't have a bias.
Speaker 4: I mean like it's it's like what you were saying
Speaker 4: about historians not leaving those details out because it's like
Speaker 4: it's hard and hard to talk about.
Speaker 3: I mean literally, that's the first sign that it's so bad.
Speaker 2: Yet this is really wait a minute, yeah I can't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, people just walking by hearing it are like, this
Speaker 4: is like I don't even like fu.
Speaker 3: Yeah are people who you know?
Speaker 4: I just like, if I have to look at it,
Speaker 4: I don't like it. And that's maybe the sign that
Speaker 4: we've gone too far.
Speaker 2: That's an important part of the history of slavery too.
Speaker 2: It's not just the people like Thomas who are just
Speaker 2: like deeply have completely given their souls up to this
Speaker 2: pit of evil, but the people who like kind of
Speaker 2: walk by it for like ten minutes and are like, wow,
Speaker 2: that seems really bad. I got a place to be,
Speaker 2: Like I gotta get moving, you know, like I gotta
Speaker 2: I gotta get to work or whatever, Like, yeah, that's bad,
Speaker 2: but like I got shipped to do. You know. It's
Speaker 2: the It's the same thing in every society to an extent,
Speaker 2: when you talk about the stuff that's horrible but widely accepted,
Speaker 2: is there's a large number of people who always knows
Speaker 2: something's wrong, but like, bro, I gotta make rent, you know,
Speaker 2: like yeah, good stuff. So, as we saw in the
Speaker 2: case when we were talking about Eve, people who often
Speaker 2: escaped numerous times and would be whipped numerous times when
Speaker 2: they were taken back by slave catchers, and when this
Speaker 2: didn't stop them from trying to escape, slave owners and
Speaker 2: overseers developed more elaborate methods of punishment. One that acted
Speaker 2: as a sort of garnish to flogging was pickling. Right,
Speaker 2: So if you if they need want to flog you,
Speaker 2: but you've already been flogged, they will, or if you
Speaker 2: do something particularly bad, they'll pickle you after they flog you.
Speaker 2: And that's a literal term. You take pickle spices and
Speaker 2: salt and lime juice and peppers and you rub them
Speaker 2: in the open wounds that you whipped into their body.
Speaker 2: Oh us, correct, that's a normal punishment. It's like a
Speaker 2: normal thing that this guy Tom. That's his part of
Speaker 2: his day job. He does it, like yeah, like like
Speaker 2: what I think about, like something you have to do
Speaker 2: like once or twice at least like a couple of
Speaker 2: times a week at your day job. And it's like
Speaker 2: that for him, right, Like that's that's his gig, you know.
Speaker 2: On a website called Same Passage, I found a detailed
Speaker 2: account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings.
Speaker 2: These include, in seventeen fifty six, runaway enslaved people named
Speaker 2: Punch and Quackou were quote well flogged and then washed
Speaker 2: and rubbed in salt, pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper
Speaker 2: as noted with eve chains were also used as a punishment.
Speaker 2: In seventeen seventy one, a runaway named Cuba was flogged, chained,
Speaker 2: and then had a brand marked into her forehead. So
Speaker 2: she was had a brand like burned into her head. Right,
Speaker 2: there's some evidence.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I like it's bad. I'm still here, but this
Speaker 3: is we.
Speaker 2: Could take a minute. This is all the worst stuff
Speaker 2: that people have ever done. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh, I don't know what to say, but I mean there.
Speaker 2: Is part of what I'm frust Part of what like
Speaker 2: was upsetting as I read this was how little of
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff I had heard of, considering myself
Speaker 2: reasonably rerit well read. I think I'd heard a little
Speaker 2: about pickling as like a thing that some particular sadists
Speaker 2: did as opposed to like no, no, no, this was
Speaker 2: like a norm, like this is a very normal thing
Speaker 2: to do, Like this was kind of the escalation shainn
Speaker 2: up from the first flogging, right as you pickle these guys.
Speaker 3: And I.
Speaker 2: Hate getting into this next part. Tit. I really apologize for, Like,
Speaker 2: I don't like having to talk about this. There's no
Speaker 2: good way to talk about this. So I'm just going
Speaker 2: to read this and you know, we can move past it,
Speaker 2: because this is bad. In seventeen fifty six, Thomas writes
Speaker 2: that an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugarcane
Speaker 2: and was whipped and then he made Thomas made another
Speaker 2: enslaved person named Egypt shit in his mouth. Months later,
Speaker 2: when Derby was caught eating sugarcane again, he was flogged
Speaker 2: and pickled, and then Thomas made Hector shit in his mouth.
Speaker 2: This was a normal punishment in Jamaica. It's not the
Speaker 2: only place where it was done, but this was something
Speaker 2: that was extensively done by slave owners and overseers on
Speaker 2: the island. They would force enslaved people to defecate in
Speaker 2: each other's mouths as a punishment. Depending on the severity
Speaker 2: of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth
Speaker 2: gagged and covered while that was the shit was still
Speaker 2: in there for extended periods of time as part of
Speaker 2: the punishment. Right, this is a thing that there's a
Speaker 2: version of this called Derby's dose. That's a really common
Speaker 2: extreme punishment on the island, and it's done. It's not
Speaker 2: just done for slaves who like escape. Sometimes like someone
Speaker 2: steals some sugar or some food and you just do
Speaker 2: this insane thing to them, and it's like there's a
Speaker 2: degree to which it's almost a method of entertainment for
Speaker 2: some of these white guys is coming up with these
Speaker 2: increasingly sadistic and fucked up and elaborate ways to hurt
Speaker 2: the people that they own. But if you need to
Speaker 2: know anything about the moral quality of the white men
Speaker 2: on Jamaica at the time, Like a lot of the
Speaker 2: common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds.
Speaker 2: That was a normal thing they would do, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I deeply disturbed.
Speaker 2: It's upsetting. Yeah, it's it's as bad as it gets, right.
Speaker 2: And the only good news that I can give you,
Speaker 2: if indeed it counts as good, is that most of
Speaker 2: these punishments seem to have died out after like seventeen
Speaker 2: fifty six, fifty seven, Right, this is kind of when
Speaker 2: Thomas starts doing this less and less. We don't know it.
Speaker 2: Maybe this kind of just fell out of popularity. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was it was so damaging to the workforce that
Speaker 2: they stopped doing it. We don't really know. But this
Speaker 2: is something that exists and is normal for a while
Speaker 2: while he's early in his career, and it's it stops
Speaker 2: being normal kind of somewhat later in the period of
Speaker 2: time that he's there. But it's a pretty common like
Speaker 2: Derby's dose is a thing that other people are doing
Speaker 2: in Jamaica to the people that they owned. Thomas spins
Speaker 2: is first seventeen years on the island working for other planters,
Speaker 2: primarily in Egypt. In seventeen sixty he made a note
Speaker 2: of his active preparations to purchase land of his own,
Speaker 2: and seventeen sixty seven he'd saved up enough to buy
Speaker 2: one hundred and sixty acre farm, which he named bread
Speaker 2: Nut Island. He'd been purchasing people this whole time, and
Speaker 2: he'd made extra money that led him buy the land
Speaker 2: by renting them out to his boss. And though so
Speaker 2: by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like
Speaker 2: thirty people, and he moves them onto this plantation that
Speaker 2: he owns right. In an article for the social historian
Speaker 2: Barbara Starman's Writes of his human acquisitions, he wrote of
Speaker 2: purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid one hundred and
Speaker 2: twelve pounds for two men and two hundred pounds for
Speaker 2: one boy and three girls. The two men were named
Speaker 2: Will and Dick. Will was about twenty five years old
Speaker 2: and stood five foot three and a half three and
Speaker 2: two tenths of an inch, and Dick was about twenty
Speaker 2: two years old and taller at five feet seven tenths
Speaker 2: of an inch. The boys and girls were Kuba, aged
Speaker 2: about fifteen. Suki aged about fourteen, Maria aged about fifteen,
Speaker 2: and Pompey, aged about sixteen. All were branded with Thistlewood's
Speaker 2: mark a double TT on their right shoulders. Because he's
Speaker 2: scarring all of these people that he owns in order
Speaker 2: to prove it, well, does t T Yeah?
Speaker 3: IKND like that he goes back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't think about that either, But
Speaker 2: it's it's with Thistlewood.
Speaker 3: Right, he's justis but Thomas.
Speaker 2: Thistlewood, yes, but yes, unfortunately, yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3: No, there's other there's other TT's out there.
Speaker 2: There's a yeah. Yeah, I feel his dad was a
Speaker 2: dick and named Robert. So you know, we're all there,
Speaker 2: you we're.
Speaker 3: Both represented here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well both of our names have come up in
Speaker 2: this fucked up episode. Uh So, now that he's independent, right,
Speaker 2: he's on, he's he's a planter. Now he's risen to
Speaker 2: the very top of Jamaican society right about sixteen years
Speaker 2: in and he's working his own property with like the
Speaker 2: people that he owns, he's making them work. One thing
Speaker 2: I'll say for him is that he vaccinates his his
Speaker 2: the people he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson didn't, he
Speaker 2: doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does
Speaker 2: this because he doesn't want them to die of smallpox,
Speaker 2: because they're valuable assets. Right now, that said he could
Speaker 2: you know this is he is a guy. I think
Speaker 2: he wanted to see himself as a nice master. He
Speaker 2: makes an note of every like nice thing that he
Speaker 2: does for the people that he owns, like around Christmas,
Speaker 2: but he gave them each eighteen herrings and a bottle
Speaker 2: of rum. Some of them he made share bottles of rum. Right,
Speaker 2: not everyone got their own bottle of rum. But he
Speaker 2: like he writes about this stuff, is like, see, I
Speaker 2: could be a nice guy. I'm not always a huge
Speaker 2: dick to Everybody's definitely.
Speaker 3: A sign of a not nice person when they keep
Speaker 3: a tally.
Speaker 4: Of every nice thing they do have documentary, Yeah I don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's definitely re fly.
Speaker 2: Yeah he's going through his own diaries being like, boy,
Speaker 2: I need to revise this a little. I come across
Speaker 2: as a monster. I'll say I gave him herring.
Speaker 3: He writes it like Latin.
Speaker 4: He like writes it in multiple languages just in case
Speaker 4: you guys get that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like putting it in French too. People need
Speaker 2: to know I gave him rum.
Speaker 4: Sometimes the draw a photo of it just in case
Speaker 4: you can't read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's a picture of me giving all my yeah,
Speaker 3: all my employees or slaves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of posed pictures of him handing rum
Speaker 2: bottles to scared looking men and women like speak thinking
Speaker 2: of not I mean rum, maybe rum. I don't know
Speaker 2: if we'll get ads for that. We'll get adds for something.
Speaker 2: Here they are, we're back talking about this monastery, how
Speaker 2: much we're through the most like graphic horror that we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about, which I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 2: more that could be. You can read more about that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff if you want to. It's bleak, you know, I.
Speaker 4: Pretty like okay pregnancy in terms of like not crying spontaneously.
Speaker 4: But you know what, I think we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 4: challenge that today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well unfortunately, yeah, we have a little bit of
Speaker 2: that coming up here too. Uh yeah. So I can't
Speaker 2: give you a lot of positive stories here, But one
Speaker 2: sort of good thing is that during his yeah ye
Speaker 2: a low note. One of the positives of his situations
Speaker 2: that while he's working at Egypt Plantation, he does he's
Speaker 2: he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes
Speaker 2: about them a lot, and he develops a preference for
Speaker 2: this specific plant, Bromeliad penguin, which he uses as like
Speaker 2: a natural fence for parts of the farms he works on.
Speaker 2: And then when he gets his own plantation, he moves
Speaker 2: these plants, which people call prickly penguins, to keep pests
Speaker 2: away from his personal gardens. And he doesn't know this
Speaker 2: about them, but they're an herbal aborde fascian, right, And
Speaker 2: there's evidence that a lot of the women who live
Speaker 2: on these plantations, both when he's an overseer and then
Speaker 2: when he owns one, know how this plant can be
Speaker 2: used and don't tell him and use it to stop
Speaker 2: him themselves from carrying his kids to term. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: there's evidence again, when you talk about this, there's always
Speaker 2: resistance happening, even if it's not well documented, Even if
Speaker 2: the historic record doesn't give it to us directly, you
Speaker 2: can tell he writes about like, wow, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of what he calls miscarriages among these women that he
Speaker 2: thought were going to carry kids to term. And we
Speaker 2: know from other things that some of these women were
Speaker 2: using this plant as an herbal Abortifacio, and he didn't know.
Speaker 4: But he's kept a diary of other ways to give
Speaker 4: people miscarriages.
Speaker 2: Right, but he didn't know about Like again, his knowledge
Speaker 2: is never as white as he wants as he thinks
Speaker 2: it is. Right, and this is I think there's something. Well,
Speaker 2: it's evidence of these people who were in like the
Speaker 2: worst situation imaginable taking some agency for themselves, right, some
Speaker 2: choice of like I'm not going to do this for you.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to deliver you a kid that you'll
Speaker 2: then own, Right, I have an ability to control that,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to write And that's an important part
Speaker 2: of the story is like the agency. These people who
Speaker 2: had very little options for exercising agency were able to
Speaker 2: like fight for right and and they had to like
Speaker 2: do it underground, they had to hide it, but they
Speaker 2: did do it right anyway. I feel like I've detailed
Speaker 2: enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the
Speaker 2: gravity of his to you. But there is one area
Speaker 2: I want more. Well, there's one thing we should say
Speaker 2: that I'm not going to go into detail on, but
Speaker 2: I will tell you he talks a lot about pedophilia.
Speaker 2: That is another aspect of this, right, that's something he's doing.
Speaker 2: He will buy girls when they were eleven or twelve,
Speaker 2: and he will not long after assault them.
Speaker 1: He definitely is up there on the list of worst motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: He's just about the worst person I've ever heard from.
Speaker 1: Directly, Jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the fact that it's his own diary, and I
Speaker 4: don't believe that he was one of the normal ones.
Speaker 3: I think there were just a lot of bad people.
Speaker 4: I feel like I still want to hold my like
Speaker 4: I don't know if like maybe all the bad people
Speaker 4: were there, but like, you know, if he was a
Speaker 4: normal really this guy does not sound normal.
Speaker 2: Among owners of slave plantations. He's normal, right, That's very
Speaker 2: few people even within slave societies. But like so it is,
Speaker 2: it is these are the worst, the worst. He's a
Speaker 2: normal example of the worst people ever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the worst. Yeah, I see.
Speaker 2: Well that's important. Like when you get these, for example,
Speaker 2: sanitized stories fiction and otherwise about like the pre Civil
Speaker 2: war like South in the US, that like depicts how
Speaker 2: oh look at these beautiful houses and this like cordial
Speaker 2: civil society right undergirding it is the same shit, Thomas. This,
Speaker 2: it is the exact same kind of sex crimes the
Speaker 2: same kind of sadistic violence, rubbing shit into open wounds
Speaker 2: and pickling people and whatnot. Just like, that's all of
Speaker 2: these guys wearing these fancy coats who got painted in
Speaker 2: their plantation houses. They're all the same kind of guy
Speaker 2: as Thomas Thistlewood. Right, those are the people who are
Speaker 2: the same. Right, All of these people who own human
Speaker 2: beings and make their living off of it are all
Speaker 2: doing shit like this. None of them are particularly better
Speaker 2: than the others.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of the important thing to take
Speaker 2: out of Thistlewood's work, of his life's work, his diaries.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's not an isolated incidence. We can't just project
Speaker 4: like one bad guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah what a crazy No, no, no, this is his
Speaker 2: whole society. Yeah yeah, yeah, I I oh yeah.
Speaker 3: So you got one more? One more not a terrible thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's there's I mean, I don't know, it's
Speaker 2: this like debate in my head of like how how
Speaker 2: how much detail do we go into here? You're I
Speaker 2: want to talk a little bit about this girl he
Speaker 2: buys best when she's eleven years old, and he buys
Speaker 2: her as a gift for Phiba, Right, This this woman
Speaker 2: who he does not own. Someone else owns her, and
Speaker 2: he is renting her and she is living with him
Speaker 2: as his significant other. Right, it's a very odd. It's
Speaker 2: a very it's not a weird relationship within this culture.
Speaker 2: This kind of stuff happens all the time, but it's
Speaker 2: like weird pains contemplate. Yeah, he's paying for a white
Speaker 2: person right to have who owns Phiba? Right, he does
Speaker 2: buy her freedom when he dies kind of, but like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's a very like that is the situation here,
Speaker 2: and he he buys her a little girl to be
Speaker 2: basically her personal slave. Right, And for the first couple
Speaker 2: of years that this girl best is there. She's an
Speaker 2: assistant to Fiba, and she's he also uses her as
Speaker 2: a runner. Right, He'll send this this little girl, this
Speaker 2: eleven year old girl running across the island on foot,
Speaker 2: and he'll to bring exchange books with his friends on
Speaker 2: other plantations. She's his postal service in a way. Right.
Speaker 2: Like there's one point where like he sends a letter
Speaker 2: to a doctor friend of his and she runs back
Speaker 2: to him with a copy of the works of Francis
Speaker 2: Bacon that he that this guy he sent a letter
Speaker 2: to sends back with her right. So this is kind
Speaker 2: of this is how like social like. This is how
Speaker 2: these guys are all staying in touch in Jamaica. It's
Speaker 2: how they share letters and books and their thoughts on
Speaker 2: the scientific discoveries of the day. In seventeen seventy eight,
Speaker 2: this girl Best runs back to the plantation with a
Speaker 2: copy of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity. That's
Speaker 2: how modern this is. Right, he finds out about the
Speaker 2: shit ben Franklin is working on because this girl he
Speaker 2: buys at eleven runs back to his house with a
Speaker 2: copy of the book that some other white dude gave
Speaker 2: her right to give to her. Master. At the same
Speaker 2: time as this knowledge is being transmitted, abuse is being transmitted.
Speaker 2: Thomas is going to sexually abuse this girl. We assume
Speaker 2: people he's sending her to do this too. And an
Speaker 2: excellent dissertation for the English Department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Polka writes, one can't help what wonder if Best spent
Speaker 2: any time looking through Franklin and Bacon's printed works on
Speaker 2: her journeys between the homes of these men, particularly Franklin's
Speaker 2: Observations and Experiments which was illustrated with engraved plates depicting
Speaker 2: Leyden jars spread in currents of Electricity One especially, he
Speaker 2: wonders about Bess's interactions with a text when considering that
Speaker 2: an August of seventeen sixty six, shortly after Thistle would
Speaker 2: acquire his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistle would flog a
Speaker 2: then twelve year old Best for meddling with my watch
Speaker 2: and telescope in the Great House piazza. Three years later,
Speaker 2: after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescope, Thistle would
Speaker 2: first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the
Speaker 2: location east of the Pond was fifteen and part of Again,
Speaker 2: these stories you don't get directly, but there's this girl
Speaker 2: who is in this terrible situation and is very intellectually curious.
Speaker 2: He describes her as messing with the telescope. She's trying
Speaker 2: to understand this. She's trying to look out at the stars,
Speaker 2: probably right, like it's not. It's very reasonable that Polka
Speaker 2: wonders if she would have, during this what little time
Speaker 2: she had alone, taken a glimpse at some of these books,
Speaker 2: because this is clearly a curious child, right and she's
Speaker 2: just completely locked away from exploring any of that by
Speaker 2: the system of heinous abuse that she is never able
Speaker 2: to escape, right. And this is it's important to note
Speaker 2: when I talk about this not being that abnormal within
Speaker 2: the mainstream white high society at the time. There's a
Speaker 2: really good passage in Polka's dissertation that talks about like
Speaker 2: does a good job of putting Thomas's habits and his
Speaker 2: documentation of what the violence he was doing into like
Speaker 2: a global context. Quote Meriwether Lewis and William cla Ark,
Speaker 2: Following the advice of Thomas, Jefferson, kept extensive diaries of
Speaker 2: their North American settler colonial mission into Native territory, in
Speaker 2: which they would occasionally record details of the sexual encounters
Speaker 2: between the men on their surveying expedition and the Native women,
Speaker 2: as well as the spread of venereal disease. These recordings
Speaker 2: were later printed in either French or Latin by editors
Speaker 2: as means of coding the explicit details, just like Thistlewood did.
Speaker 2: Eighteenth century Virginia planter William Bird also kept a coded
Speaker 2: log of his sexual activity as a means of control.
Speaker 2: More specifically, Richard Godbeer explains that he was anxious to
Speaker 2: control himself as he was to control others. Further, Godbeer
Speaker 2: concludes that Bird experienced chronic tension within the Chesapeake's white
Speaker 2: population during the seventeenth century and fostered an obsession with
Speaker 2: control in colonial Southern society. While the elite's emulation of
Speaker 2: English gentry culture necessitated an intense self consciousness and careful
Speaker 2: scrutiny of one's personal behavior. Like Thistlewood, Bird coded his
Speaker 2: diary in shorthand. However, unlike Thistlewood, Bird's entire diary was
Speaker 2: coded not only the segments related to sexual exploitation, and
Speaker 2: he kept a diary in a locked library, and Kenneth
Speaker 2: Lockridge speculates that birds shorthand may have been intended above
Speaker 2: all to hide Bird's further encoded self from his wife.
Speaker 2: In an even more well known instance of sexual documentation,
Speaker 2: diaris Samuel Peppies, who also recorded his sex acts, occasionally
Speaker 2: coded his sexual activity in Latin as well as in
Speaker 2: French and Spanish. What emerges in this cross comparison of
Speaker 2: eighteenth century diarists is a gendered coding of sexual documentation,
Speaker 2: where Enlightenment era men use quotidian writing in order to
Speaker 2: document conceal and control their exploitation of women. That's what
Speaker 2: I mean when I say, like, this guy is not
Speaker 2: that weird for his social level, you know well, and.
Speaker 4: Because women weren't so it was like a cocauzed women.
Speaker 4: Women educated couldn't read Latin.
Speaker 2: Or were less likely to be right.
Speaker 3: I do wonder about the whole Catholic Church.
Speaker 4: I mean, I guess now they're not all Germans and Latin,
Speaker 4: But didn't they for a long time do everything in Latin?
Speaker 2: They did for a long time, and they have already crimes.
Speaker 2: And part of that, I mean, there was argument like
Speaker 2: and this is part of like the Protestant Reformation, that
Speaker 2: there's this part of that is out of a desire
Speaker 2: to keep preaching and keep responsibility for like interpreting the
Speaker 2: Word of God out of the common man, right, right,
Speaker 2: you have to be learned to some extent to read
Speaker 2: the Bible and talk about it in Latin. And that
Speaker 2: cuts down the number of people who might be because
Speaker 2: you know, the part of the thing the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: wanted to stop was anyone who had a different opinion
Speaker 2: about Christianity going into business for themselves, which is where
Speaker 2: we are right now, right like that's the way. That's
Speaker 2: what Protestant is is like anyone can go into business
Speaker 2: for themselves as like interpreting the word of God basically,
Speaker 2: So there is something to what you say, right and that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's all those sex crimes in the Bible,
Speaker 3: so maybe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's plenty of sex crimes all along. Yeah. Over
Speaker 2: the course of his thirty seven years in Jamaica, Thomas
Speaker 2: Thistlewood recorded exactly three thousand, eight hundred and fifty two
Speaker 2: sexual acts with one hundred and thirty eight different women.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of these women were enslaved. The vast
Speaker 2: majority of these acts would have been sexual assault, and
Speaker 2: his analysis of the diary, which you'd done, estimated yeah,
Speaker 2: three and fifty two with a you know, somewhere around
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty victims would be the way of
Speaker 2: looking at it. One of the people who analyzed the diaries,
Speaker 2: Richard Dunn, estimated that prior to coming to Jamaica, Thomas
Speaker 2: would have averaged at most around ten sexual encounters per year.
Speaker 2: On the island, this increased to about two hundred sometimes
Speaker 2: more so. Part of when you're looking at what motivated
Speaker 2: him to become a slave owner and a planter. Sexual
Speaker 2: opportunity is not zero percent of that story, right. He
Speaker 2: finds ways to justify it that are heavier. But this
Speaker 2: does come down to that, you know, That's part of
Speaker 2: what this comes down to. Cool stuff or so did
Speaker 2: he ever ever have kids or raise a family? He
Speaker 2: has about fourteen kids, all who are born en slaves, yep, yep,
Speaker 2: and he does. He writes about he has a child
Speaker 2: with Thiba, and he writes about punishing like having this
Speaker 2: kid whipped, you know, for in disobedience. This this child
Speaker 2: dies in seventeen eighty, you know, which is about six
Speaker 2: years before Thomas passes on. So his children, I mean,
Speaker 2: they're living these difficult lives. They're working on plantations, right,
Speaker 2: so they don't benefit from easy lives, right, And yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it's a there's a lot that's complicated here.
Speaker 2: And like what's going on with him in Fhiba in
Speaker 2: how he sees these relationships with the people that he
Speaker 2: brings into the world this way, But it's all based
Speaker 2: on kinds of exploitation, right, Like that's what's happening here. Fundamentally,
Speaker 2: it's all exploitation. That's the only kind of relationship that
Speaker 2: he has with any of these people is one based
Speaker 2: on ownership?
Speaker 1: Does he at least die of something horrific?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's not really a lot of good
Speaker 2: ways to die in that period of time. He lives
Speaker 2: a long life for the era though unfortunately he doesn't
Speaker 2: pass until seventeen eighty six and he's sixty five years old,
Speaker 2: which for a white guy in Jamaica, he lives a
Speaker 2: pretty long life. And he dies, does he ever?
Speaker 3: Just like each ship just to try it out?
Speaker 4: And then so I just want to know if this
Speaker 4: man has eaten his own ship before, I mean for science, you.
Speaker 2: Know, maybe I don't know. Uh, he proad like Yeah,
Speaker 2: no documentation of him eating his own ship, but him
Speaker 2: being shitty that's most of his documentation. And yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a there's nothing happy to say about this story than
Speaker 2: that he does die eventually. Uh, and you know, not
Speaker 2: long after his death, the abolitionist movement really starts to
Speaker 2: get going within the British Empire, and gradually this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff becomes seen as much as his coverage. As
Speaker 2: we've talked about, it's never fully reckoned with you know,
Speaker 2: when when the Great Britain banned slavery and in their
Speaker 2: colonies they never really look that deeply into what guys
Speaker 2: like Thistle what are doing. Right, there's kind of this
Speaker 2: acknowledgment that like, well, that was bad, that was a
Speaker 2: bad system people. It was bad that things were doing that,
Speaker 2: and it's good that we stopped it. Let's focus on
Speaker 2: the fact that we stopped it, and how nice that is.
Speaker 2: We were faster to stopping it than the Americans. Right,
Speaker 2: and they did definitely in slavery, faster than the United
Speaker 2: States did. But there's also this level to which there
Speaker 2: was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with
Speaker 2: the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated, and how
Speaker 2: many British fortunes were based on them, on selling and
Speaker 2: buying people, on these plantations, on the profits from these plantations,
Speaker 2: on selling stuff to these people, on running the boats,
Speaker 2: like that's that's never reckoned with Yeah, right, we one so.
Speaker 4: Much of that in the colonial England was like also
Speaker 4: far away from them, like you said, But then in
Speaker 4: America it's like right there, your neighbors are doing it,
Speaker 4: and so that's even wilder that they continued longer in America.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's ye. And remember just this bad you know,
Speaker 2: like this is not Jamaica. It was not worse than Virginia.
Speaker 2: Like all of this is the similar kinds of maybe
Speaker 2: slightly different tactics and how you psychologically and physically abuse people,
Speaker 2: but not always even that you know a lot of
Speaker 2: the same tactics. Anyway, Jesus Christ, we're done. Sorry, that's
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, at least it's over.
Speaker 2: It's over.
Speaker 1: T you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 4: No, I feel like I should not plug anything right
Speaker 4: now except for I guess go take a hot bath
Speaker 4: and cry.
Speaker 2: But cry.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before.
Speaker 2: I give birth, because we go there, we go.
Speaker 4: Because it's a new show too, called Second Screens. It's
Speaker 4: for people who uh uh, you know, if you're neuro
Speaker 4: a diversion like me and you don't want to be
Speaker 4: you can be on your phone the whole time. Second
Speaker 4: Screen hosted by Madison Shepherd. Next one is December first. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and you can bring your phone and be on your
Speaker 4: laptop or phone while you're on wile you're watching the show.
Speaker 4: So I'll be on my show and then I'll probably
Speaker 4: not do comedy for a while.
Speaker 2: Well those are both good choices and I wish you
Speaker 2: the best a.
Speaker 1: Lot seeing them one last time.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And I hope you take advantage of having
Speaker 2: a baby, because that that'll be fun, that'll be much much,
Speaker 2: that'll be affirming and good. The world's horrible things that
Speaker 2: are good.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what a strange way to end this pod. But
Speaker 4: thank you for having me on. You're always a pleatter
Speaker 4: to see you, and you know, take a moment to
Speaker 4: think about all the horrible things humanity is capable of.
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, everybody, Horrible things done.
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