Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Ah and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
Speaker 2: that you're listening to today and maybe other days. Probably
Speaker 2: other days. I'm Robert Evans here to tell you about
Speaker 2: some of the worst people in all of history and
Speaker 2: to talk with us about some of the worst people
Speaker 2: in all of history. Is someone who's not one of
Speaker 2: the worst people in all of history, but it's in
Speaker 2: fact my friend T T.
Speaker 1: Lee.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the show. How are you doing.
Speaker 3: I'm good.
Speaker 4: I mean I still have time to become one of
Speaker 4: the worst people.
Speaker 2: In history, so I wanted to Yeah, like, I believe
Speaker 2: you could be a contender. No, no, it's like that.
Speaker 2: It's like that movie where fucking Marky Mark becomes a
Speaker 2: pro football player by trying out, Like I think you could.
Speaker 2: You could become a dictator if you show up.
Speaker 3: If there was a competition show, yeah I need rules.
Speaker 4: If there's like a rubric, I mean actually there probably is.
Speaker 4: I don't know if I would do well actually in
Speaker 4: that competition.
Speaker 2: But see, that's this is what this is. And none
Speaker 2: of these Network States Silicon Valley dictatorship people have any
Speaker 2: sense of like fun because if you had like a
Speaker 2: reality show where whoever one got to govern like three
Speaker 2: million people's lives as like an iron fisted dictator. Like
Speaker 2: the franchising potential for that show is incredible, especially if
Speaker 2: any of them become nuclear armed. I mean, my god,
Speaker 2: you could. You could keep people glued to the TV
Speaker 2: like that's that's the new reality, Shoe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a competition for who gets the nuclear codes.
Speaker 4: I mean, we might actually end up in better situation
Speaker 4: than we are now.
Speaker 3: Just give it to someone else.
Speaker 1: See, I have an important question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how's woo Shue? Oh my god, wooshoo. He's right
Speaker 3: behind me. Wait is there a video on that you guys? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's He.
Speaker 4: Doesn't like when he's not the underve attention as I
Speaker 4: don't know if any I feel like old days when
Speaker 4: we used to go into the that big building in
Speaker 4: Hollywood to record.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure would run around and make a lot of noise.
Speaker 4: And then I had to stop bringing him because, Yeah,
Speaker 4: but I discovered he doesn't like when he's not to
Speaker 4: send her attention.
Speaker 5: I love back in the day Anderson who Sho used
Speaker 5: to hang and that was nice, It was really nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's an old dog, you know, he's about to
Speaker 3: be nine.
Speaker 5: Anderson will be all of had Anderson ten years next year,
Speaker 5: which is horrific and awesome but horrific.
Speaker 3: I would like her to age less.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wouldn't we all like to age less?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Fair enough?
Speaker 2: Would you if giving like the blood of a young
Speaker 2: dog to Anderson would make Anderson younger? Would you do
Speaker 2: the Peter Teal thing with Anderson?
Speaker 5: I would commit so many horrific crimes to extend the
Speaker 5: lives of Anderson. If I could extend Anderson's life longer,
Speaker 5: the amount of crimes I would commit to do this
Speaker 5: I probably shouldn't say on it on Mike, but my goodness,
Speaker 5: I would commit biohacker.
Speaker 3: Who's the guy who like is always botoxing his penis?
Speaker 2: Ryan Jo? Are you talking about the guy who wants
Speaker 2: to live forever?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: That vampire all but.
Speaker 2: They're all botoxing?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there's one. There's one guy on Twitter? Yeah,
Speaker 3: probably him. Yeah. I feel like I wonder when, yeah,
Speaker 3: when the next dog?
Speaker 2: Uh when the dog version of that?
Speaker 3: The dog version of that? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it does tend to like every after five
Speaker 2: or ten years, it trickles down like people are now
Speaker 2: doing like like cosmetic surgeries for their dogs and stuff.
Speaker 2: It just takes a little while longer, uh for it
Speaker 2: for for people to be like, well, maybe my dog
Speaker 2: also needs to be ashamed that they're that there their
Speaker 2: eyelids are drooping or something like that, even though they're
Speaker 2: a bass a hound and that's how they're supposed to.
Speaker 4: I mean they have bb also droops for the labooboos.
Speaker 4: Now that's like a whole what thing on TikTok. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's like they like wear little doctor clothes and have little.
Speaker 3: Gloves and lies. Oh my, they're great. The videos are.
Speaker 2: Great, and I will fuck well, I love the modern world.
Speaker 2: But you know what the modern world is built on,
Speaker 2: tet slavery obviously, right, we're all we're all aware of
Speaker 2: that today.
Speaker 3: Horrific transition.
Speaker 2: Robert I went and I wasn't given a lot of
Speaker 2: options weekend we started the started this, how we started this,
Speaker 2: and that was the easiest way to get to slavery.
Speaker 2: You're never more than like two steps away when you're
Speaker 2: talking about like really any history, human history, to be honest,
Speaker 2: But when we talk about like the Atlantic slave trade, right,
Speaker 2: chattel slave trade in the America's uh a lot of
Speaker 2: like our documentation about like what happened is documentation of
Speaker 2: like people kind of nearer to the end of the
Speaker 2: process who like escaped and were able to write about it.
Speaker 2: That's not exclusively it, but you get a lot more
Speaker 2: from that period of time just because you know, earlier
Speaker 2: in the system there were it was a lot harder
Speaker 2: for somebody to break out of that system and then
Speaker 2: to be able to like talk about what had happened
Speaker 2: to them. And so when it comes to like kind
Speaker 2: of the height of this period of time, one of
Speaker 2: our best sources in terms of like how actually brutal
Speaker 2: the system was on a day to day basis is
Speaker 2: the notes the extensive diaries of a single man of
Speaker 2: a guy who was a plantation owner in Jamaica, and
Speaker 2: one of the worst like documented mot like sex criminals
Speaker 2: and murderers and history, just because of like the stuff
Speaker 2: he wrote in his own diary. And this guy's name
Speaker 2: is Thomas Thistlewood, and he's someone who's like studied by
Speaker 2: historians of slavery today because like you get something with
Speaker 2: him that you don't get a lot, which is like
Speaker 2: one of the guys actually doing It's like some of
Speaker 2: those like internal notes that the Nazis took when they
Speaker 2: were doing their shit, where you've got this guy who's
Speaker 2: a part of this system that is still like a
Speaker 2: century away from a reckoning, you know, almost at the
Speaker 2: time that he dies, who's just like writing about it.
Speaker 2: Is like this has got up this morning and here's
Speaker 2: what I did to these people that I own. Wow,
Speaker 2: So that's what we're talking about today. This is like
Speaker 2: a bleak story, but it's really important. Not because Thistlewood
Speaker 2: himself is like the worst specific guy who ever owned people,
Speaker 2: but more because he's a pretty normal guy who owned people,
Speaker 2: who was like unusually detailed in his his note taking. Right,
Speaker 2: That's why we know about it, like.
Speaker 3: A guy writing in his diary.
Speaker 2: That's exactly. Yes, I want to say.
Speaker 4: I had no idea what like, right before we started,
Speaker 4: I was like, I don't know what we're talking about today,
Speaker 4: and I asked you, I was like, is it gonna
Speaker 4: be perfect yep?
Speaker 3: Or diamonds?
Speaker 2: Like this one's real bad? Here we go. I felt
Speaker 2: the need to warn you about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a feeling.
Speaker 4: I'm like, you know what, it's been a while since
Speaker 4: I've done this podcast. It's it's it's gonna be a
Speaker 4: brutal one. Yeah, but no, Well, yeah, well, I mean, obviously,
Speaker 4: I'm sure there's horrific things in it. It's but while
Speaker 4: that you were talking what you said about before people
Speaker 4: realize as a reckoning, because that's something like I think
Speaker 4: about a lot, like just like him, writing in a
Speaker 4: diary feels like the most private, safe, like secretive thing. Right,
Speaker 4: you just wrote in a piece of paper. There's no
Speaker 4: such thing as xerox, there's no Internet. You just hide
Speaker 4: it somewhere. But that's also like one of the most
Speaker 4: lasting things because nowadays, and I could go away in
Speaker 4: you know, one hundred years.
Speaker 2: And this is one of those things where this guy, yeah,
Speaker 2: like like this, there's a decent chance that like very
Speaker 2: few people's lives who were like live tweeting or streaming
Speaker 2: everything they do today will be as known in a
Speaker 2: hundred years as Thomas Thistlewood's because he wrote it all
Speaker 2: down on paper and it got like when he died,
Speaker 2: his effects wound up and I think in a university's
Speaker 2: collection it was like a long decades after his death
Speaker 2: that someone found these and was like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: like there's a lot of there's a lot of detail
Speaker 2: in here about how slavery worked. He's also like our
Speaker 2: best detail on what the climate of Jamaica was like
Speaker 2: for about a hundred years because he was just taking
Speaker 2: like really detailed notes and it would be like woke
Speaker 2: up and committed these horrible sex crimes. Here's what the
Speaker 2: weather was like, right, Like these are the diary increase
Speaker 2: that he's leaving behind. So's it's one of those things
Speaker 2: where you'll find you'll find whole books by people that
Speaker 2: are just like exing the stuff from his diary about
Speaker 2: the weather because that's important for like climactic.
Speaker 3: Sciences first and impression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then there's this larger branch of scholarship that's
Speaker 2: about his crimes against humanity. But it's it's kind of
Speaker 2: like the Unobomber where he is also known for his
Speaker 2: other work.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Interesting reminds me.
Speaker 4: I don't know why I thought of Arcadia the play,
Speaker 4: but that's too obscure a reference where all the notes
Speaker 4: being taken are anyways, I.
Speaker 3: Probably wouldn't be brought up.
Speaker 2: But anyway, what is nobody.
Speaker 4: Because they go the Arcadi it is Tom Sopper play,
Speaker 4: but in it they well, the reason I brought it
Speaker 4: up is because people are taking notes and trying to
Speaker 4: infer what happened, but then there's like slight misunderstandings of
Speaker 4: like what actually happened. But I just find that interesting
Speaker 4: if he mentions like a weird obscure bird or something,
Speaker 4: and you're like, I just imagine some like you know,
Speaker 4: bird hunter, like looking through his diary, like, yes, he's
Speaker 4: a terrible slave owner, but there's a sign this extinct
Speaker 4: bird exist.
Speaker 2: We've documented that this animal lived here at this time too.
Speaker 2: That is like the thing with his diaries is that
Speaker 2: they're both really useful to like naturalists and also to
Speaker 2: students of one of the worst things people ever did
Speaker 2: to each other. So his name was Thomas Thistlewood. He
Speaker 2: was born on March sixteenth, seventeen twenty one in tupelm Lincolnshire.
Speaker 2: His father was Robert Thistlewood, and he was who was
Speaker 2: a moderately successful farmer. You know, so this is in
Speaker 2: you know ingelande. His dad is like an okay farmer, yeah,
Speaker 2: but not like super wealthy, right, Like his his family
Speaker 2: aren't aristocracy, but they're like landed and they're doing okay.
Speaker 2: There would be like upper middle class by the time
Speaker 2: his dad dies. And his dad dies pretty young. When
Speaker 2: Thomas is six in seventeen twenty seven. Now, this is
Speaker 2: one of those things where, like the early seventeen hundreds
Speaker 2: were kind of coming into modernity, but there's still a
Speaker 2: lot that's almost very medieval. So, like the father dies
Speaker 2: and he's got multiple sons, everything's going to the firstborn son, right,
Speaker 2: That's just the way shit tends to work. And so
Speaker 2: if you're the second born son, either like a wealthy
Speaker 2: family or of like a family like this, that's just
Speaker 2: pretty comfortable. You're not gonna inherit any of that land
Speaker 2: or really much in the way of wealth. Right, So
Speaker 2: you kind of you grow up knowing your older brother's
Speaker 2: getting everything and you're gonna have to figure out something
Speaker 2: new to do something probably not. This is what fuels colonialism, right,
Speaker 2: is to a heavy extent. You've got all these second
Speaker 2: and third sons who are like, not gonna get shit
Speaker 2: unless they get it themselves. So they go over to
Speaker 2: the New World somewhere, and they probably die of cholera
Speaker 2: in a month, but whatever. You know, some of them
Speaker 2: get rich.
Speaker 3: We could marry rich, but you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's your other option, is marrying rich. But
Speaker 2: but you know some people tried to do both, and yeah,
Speaker 2: this is kind of this is what's going to be
Speaker 2: one of these guys who from the time he's like
Speaker 2: five or six years old, knows, Okay, Dad's gone, I'm
Speaker 2: I'm kind of all my own in terms of figuring out,
Speaker 2: like what I'm going to do to make my fortune.
Speaker 2: You know, Thomas would be one of these unhappy second sons.
Speaker 2: His older brother John born in seventeen sixteen. And here
Speaker 2: it's basically everything their dad does set aside some money
Speaker 2: for Thomas, about two hundred pounds sterling. And you can
Speaker 2: never kind of convert perfectly from that kind of money
Speaker 2: to this kind of money because like most people back
Speaker 2: then didn't have money, or at least didn't use it
Speaker 2: most of the time. Like your average transaction is, like
Speaker 2: your average working class person isn't handing over money for stuff.
Speaker 2: You're often like bartering like well this time of year,
Speaker 2: here's what I got and here's what I need. Right,
Speaker 2: that's kind of a lot of a lot of the
Speaker 2: use of currency or IOUs and stuff like that. So
Speaker 2: but anyway you might translate his inheritance to like forty
Speaker 2: or fifty thousand dollars, right, it's enough, it's going to
Speaker 2: like pay for him to get through school basically, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of it because for his whole childhood he
Speaker 2: has to like pay people who are taking them in. Yeah,
Speaker 2: exactly right, So this has to last the rest of
Speaker 2: his chase. It sounds like a lot, I see, but
Speaker 2: it's got to last him until or at least until
Speaker 2: he's an adult, right, because he's he gets like moved
Speaker 2: around almost as soon as his dad dies. And basically
Speaker 2: these people who are teaching him, he's living with them,
Speaker 2: or he's at a boarding school, and so wherever he is,
Speaker 2: he's paying to be and he's paying people to take
Speaker 2: care of him for the rest of his childhood because
Speaker 2: that's kind of the only reliable social support there is.
Speaker 2: Some of these people are his relatives, but he still
Speaker 2: has to give them money because like that shit ain't free.
Speaker 3: So if you travel with your bag of money and
Speaker 3: you're like, well's coin.
Speaker 2: For you, right, you get one coin a year for
Speaker 2: taking care of me as like a seven year old.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I wonder how much that does impact him
Speaker 2: as a kid, because that's a very transactional way to
Speaker 2: think of your childhood. Like, all right, now you have
Speaker 2: this much money left if for your childhood and you
Speaker 2: have to pay this much a year to the people
Speaker 2: caring you so they could feed you, right, Like.
Speaker 4: That's a wild and you really have a sense of
Speaker 4: like how much your value is in society. And someone's like,
Speaker 4: I don't want to take care of you for this much,
Speaker 4: and you're like.
Speaker 3: Here is it. I'm worth this much to be alive, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, here's what I can pay to continue being alive, please,
Speaker 2: And yeah, he's gonna be This is going to kind
Speaker 2: of turn him into the perfect foot soldier of the
Speaker 2: British Empire because he sees relationships is very transactional, and
Speaker 2: he grows up knowing I'm gonna have to hustle constantly
Speaker 2: for everything that I'm going to get, right, especially if
Speaker 2: I want to be anywhere near as comfortable as like
Speaker 2: my dad was and my older brother is going to be.
Speaker 2: So in seventeen twenty nine and now eight year old
Speaker 2: Thomas Thistle would have sent to a school in Lincolnshire.
Speaker 2: This is a nice place, but it's not like the
Speaker 2: kind of fancy boarding school that the wealthy sons of
Speaker 2: the aristocracy are going to like send their kids to.
Speaker 2: So he winds up boarding with a relative by marriage,
Speaker 2: and he pays for his upkeep with his inheritance. And
Speaker 2: he does this in various ways over the next six
Speaker 2: years and three different schools. He studies Latin, he becomes
Speaker 2: fluent in that, he learns Greek, and he studies reading, writing,
Speaker 2: and a rhythm, and he's an intelligent kid. All signs
Speaker 2: point to the fact that he did pretty well in school.
Speaker 2: But it's also one of those things where once you're
Speaker 2: like fourteen or fifteen, you're basically grown, and they're like,
Speaker 2: it's time to apprentice in something and figure out what
Speaker 2: you're actually gonna do for a living. So at age fifteen,
Speaker 2: he moves into an uncle's house and he pays him
Speaker 2: five pounds sterling a year to be an apprentice on
Speaker 2: his farm. So he's like paying his uncle to teach
Speaker 2: him how to run a farm, but he's because he's
Speaker 2: not gonna he's gonna have to work on someone else's
Speaker 2: he's not going to inherit any land of his own.
Speaker 2: Sometime after this, a couple of years later, he.
Speaker 3: First paid internship. Unpaid internship.
Speaker 2: It's like an internship that you pay to attend at
Speaker 2: your family, like you're paying your uncle to your like
Speaker 2: to give you a paid internship, which is a shitty
Speaker 2: gig really, like having done an unpaid internship, at least
Speaker 2: you're not out anybody, right, Yeah, and it.
Speaker 3: Sounds like he's working, he's given them free labor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really fucked up actually, and this guy's his uncle. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that just that tells you something about how mercenary
Speaker 2: a lot of this culture is at the time, right,
Speaker 2: Like you wonder why did the British Empire do the
Speaker 2: things that the British Empire did? Well, this is how
Speaker 2: people are living on the island when they're better off, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, wow, that's like it's like these are the citizens
Speaker 4: who and this is like their norm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how do you think they're going to treat people
Speaker 2: in bengaal like, yeah, their own kill left to pay, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: So I don't know how long he spends in this
Speaker 2: internship exactly, but he probably would have been somewhere around
Speaker 2: eighteen when he sets off fully on his own to
Speaker 2: make a living as a livestock dealer. Right. So he decides,
Speaker 2: I don't have any land yet, but I've got some money.
Speaker 2: I've saved up some left over from my inheritance. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna start buying and selling livestock to try to make
Speaker 2: a profit. And around this time, as he's starting his career,
Speaker 2: he hooks up with a local girl for the first
Speaker 2: time and she gets pregnant. Right, he gets this, this
Speaker 2: young woman pregnant and they're not married. Now in this
Speaker 2: period of time nearly seventeen hundreds, that there's this social level.
Speaker 2: If you get someone pregnant, as the man, you have
Speaker 2: two choices. Choice one is convinced this lady's parents to
Speaker 2: let you marry their daughter, right, and that's very much
Speaker 2: your job. She does not have a lot of choice
Speaker 2: in the matter.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's going to vary from family to family, But this
Speaker 2: is primarily you interfacing with this young woman's family, right.
Speaker 2: And if they don't want you to marry their daughter,
Speaker 2: if they don't see you as a suitable match, you
Speaker 2: can get in a shitload of trouble. You can go
Speaker 2: to prison for fathering a bastard. Right. So, yeah, he
Speaker 2: gets in this situation and this lady's parents. I don't
Speaker 2: know much about this person, but and I say, I
Speaker 2: don't know if literally if she is a girl like
Speaker 2: a child, or if she's like she could have been
Speaker 2: anywhere from like fifteen to twenty, given the way things
Speaker 2: worked at the time, right, And I have no idea
Speaker 2: like why, but her parents are like, this guy is
Speaker 2: not a suitable match for our daughter. Maybe it's just
Speaker 2: that he's poor. Maybe they see something like the sketchiness
Speaker 2: lurking inside this man's soul. I have no idea, but
Speaker 2: they say no. And so he really is looking at
Speaker 2: like if this girl has a kid, I'm going I
Speaker 2: could go to prison. I'm at least going to have
Speaker 2: to pay like a heavy fine for what I did.
Speaker 2: But then the child doesn't come to term and he
Speaker 2: gets off scott free. Right. But this kind of inspires
Speaker 2: him to like get the fuck out right, Like this
Speaker 2: was my message of like I got it almost got
Speaker 2: in a lot of trouble here. I need to actually
Speaker 2: like escape my hometown, maybe get out of England altogether. Right.
Speaker 2: And so in seventeen forty six, he travels to London
Speaker 2: and he signs a contract with the East India Company
Speaker 2: to act as a purser on of super cargo on
Speaker 2: a ship headed for the Far East. This means that, like,
Speaker 2: you know, you've got this boat and it's taking a
Speaker 2: bunch of goods over to like India and other parts
Speaker 2: of Southeast Asia, and it's going to come back with
Speaker 2: a bunch of goods from the different places it visits
Speaker 2: on this like two year year and a half two
Speaker 2: year long voyage right as the age of sail, that's
Speaker 2: how long shit takes back then. And he's his job.
Speaker 2: He's getting paid to like manage the money on board. Right.
Speaker 2: They've got a bunch of petty cash. Some of their
Speaker 2: they're using to like buy goods to take back. Some
Speaker 2: of it they're using to pay for like incidentals and
Speaker 2: necessities on the voyage. And he's the guy, like man,
Speaker 2: he's the ship's accountant almost right now. The ship, like
Speaker 2: the one that he's signed onto, it's going to like
Speaker 2: leave with goods loaded for you know, from the home
Speaker 2: country for homesick colonizers in India, and then it's going
Speaker 2: to come back with all sorts of shit. And you're
Speaker 2: getting paid to do your job. But you also part
Speaker 2: of like how you make good on being having a
Speaker 2: job like this is along the way, you're buying stuff
Speaker 2: at all of these different foreign ports that you're gonna
Speaker 2: sell back at home. Right, that's understood to be like
Speaker 2: a perk of the job, or.
Speaker 3: Like flipping your own side hustle.
Speaker 2: Right, you're going to like sell a bunch of tea
Speaker 2: that you bought in India for like way more money
Speaker 2: back in London or some shit like that. Right, So
Speaker 2: the ship they're gone for almost two years, like it's
Speaker 2: a long voyage, and they land back in black on
Speaker 2: August twenty seventh, seventeen forty eight, Thomas disembarks. He's now
Speaker 2: in his late twenties. He's a seasoned world traveler and
Speaker 2: an entrepreneur. He gets his back wages for the journey,
Speaker 2: which is like thirty pounds sterling something like eighty five
Speaker 2: hundred bucks in modern money, which is not a lot
Speaker 2: for like two years of hard labor on a boat.
Speaker 2: Now he's got a bunch of shit with him that
Speaker 2: he's going to try to make a fortune flipping and selling.
Speaker 2: But he also spends most of his time like gambling
Speaker 2: and playing cards and speculating on investments, and he's just
Speaker 2: spending his money, and the money he's not spending on gambling,
Speaker 2: he's spending on prostitutes. Right, Like we're talking London in
Speaker 2: the seventeen hundreds, and he talks about this in a diary, right,
Speaker 2: because this diary that this is like a thing that
Speaker 2: he picks up at the school that he goes to
Speaker 2: where you're they're like, so this diary.
Speaker 4: Are we already starting with the diary because I know
Speaker 4: when he was eight, he wasn't writing in it yet. Okay,
Speaker 4: so we're in diary first hand account mode.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He starts kind of in his early adulthood, right,
Speaker 2: and he's this is like, this is not a diary
Speaker 2: of his thoughts and feelings. We learn basically nothing about
Speaker 2: what he how he feels. This is because he's just
Speaker 2: like he's listing everything he buys and sells. So you
Speaker 2: see part of the use of his diary, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: classic man where it's just like this is what dinner
Speaker 2: costs me in seventeen forty eight, right, Like this is
Speaker 2: the cost of like buying tobacco. This is how much
Speaker 2: I lost at cards last night. This is how much
Speaker 2: I paid this prostitute. Right, And so it's both like
Speaker 2: you get you do get this weirdly detached look at
Speaker 2: the inside of this guy, but you also get like
Speaker 2: you can see why it's useful to all sorts of
Speaker 2: different scholars where they're like well, what did it cost
Speaker 2: to get like drunk and gamble and go out with
Speaker 2: a prostitute in London in seventeen forty eight? Well, this
Speaker 2: we know. Actually this guy took notes on it, right,
Speaker 2: or at least we have an idea.
Speaker 3: What did it cost?
Speaker 2: A great question? So when to anti time machines exist, No, exactly,
Speaker 2: you need to know what to bring along. I have
Speaker 2: a lot of foreign currency from the past that I
Speaker 2: keep in emergency bags in case I get transported back
Speaker 2: in time. You wind up in ancient Rome. You don't
Speaker 2: want to not have any dinari. I like, what are
Speaker 2: you going to do? You know, Oh, you got to
Speaker 2: fight for it in a gladiatorial pit.
Speaker 3: You're not. Actually you would have like an old money collection,
Speaker 3: like you.
Speaker 2: Gotta be ready. Yeah, keep that and yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: So whenever he was writing to know what it like
Speaker 2: a night out with a prostitute cost in lead in
Speaker 2: the seventeen forty eight whenever he wrote about stuff like this,
Speaker 2: he would like box off the entry about the sex
Speaker 2: stuff from the rest of his diary entries, and he
Speaker 2: would preface it with the letters xxx, which is interesting.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that went back that far. But apparently
Speaker 2: it did, or at least that's what he chose, because like,
Speaker 2: I don't think this was like a broader thing in society.
Speaker 2: Yet it may just have been a coincidence. He chose
Speaker 2: to do that to like kind of make a note
Speaker 2: that he was about to start talking about sex, and
Speaker 2: he would always write about it in Latin. And so
Speaker 2: the very first entry that we have of him writing
Speaker 2: about sex is of a night he's spent with a
Speaker 2: prostitute in seventeen forty eight, and he writes in the
Speaker 2: evening to in the evening to mouliere two shillings, right,
Speaker 2: and a mouliere is a contemporary term for a prostitute, Right,
Speaker 2: So he spends two shillings for a night with this lady, right,
Speaker 2: And he writes a G above her title, which is
Speaker 2: his way of letting her know G is the seventh letter.
Speaker 2: It's his way of noting a F alphabetically, this is
Speaker 2: the seventh woman that he's slept with. So presumably, while
Speaker 2: he's traveling around the world at various ports, he's doing
Speaker 2: you know, he's probably paying women, right, that's likely who
Speaker 2: most of a through f FR. One of them's got
Speaker 2: to be that lady that he got pregnant briefly, right,
Speaker 2: assuming like, but this also tells you a lot about
Speaker 2: him that he is. He's talking about the women that
Speaker 2: he's been with. He's just like alphabetically that right, Like
Speaker 2: that yeah, content the code.
Speaker 4: I feel like that's like yeah, because it's like you,
Speaker 4: even though it is private, there's a part of him
Speaker 4: that's like just in like yes, in case someone finds it,
Speaker 4: he's writing it in like a secret code. That's what
Speaker 4: I did want to tek a child in life, my
Speaker 4: first pink diary, like right, you.
Speaker 3: Know, like pig Latin.
Speaker 2: It's great that you pick up on that.
Speaker 3: Not quite Latin.
Speaker 4: I wasn't writing Yeah, I wasn't writing Latin back then,
Speaker 4: but pig Latin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wasn't hiring prostitutes there, so.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I would hope not. But it is, like,
Speaker 2: what you've picked up on is actually something scholars are
Speaker 2: really interested in because there's a lot of debate as
Speaker 2: to like why did he write about sex this way?
Speaker 2: Why did he do it in Latin? Right? And that
Speaker 2: is one of the theories, right as we'll talk about that. Basically,
Speaker 2: this was his way of like if somebody comes across this,
Speaker 2: I don't want anyone at least, I don't want anyone
Speaker 2: uneducated knowing what I've been writing about, you know, And
Speaker 2: from what we can tell, this is a guy who
Speaker 2: I don't know if we'd call him like a nymphomaniac today,
Speaker 2: but sex is a lot bigger part of his life
Speaker 2: than people would have admitted to then, like a polite
Speaker 2: man would have admitted to in this period of time. Right,
Speaker 2: And he tries one last time after he gets back
Speaker 2: from this overseas voyage to have a proper marriage with
Speaker 2: someone in England and like start a life on the island.
Speaker 2: He sits down with the parents of a girl that
Speaker 2: he'd known as a younger man, and he asks them like, hey,
Speaker 2: can I marry your daughter? And again he writes that
Speaker 2: they entertained him with great civility, which one of his
Speaker 2: biographers said was like that was him saying that they
Speaker 2: said no, right, that they were like they politely said, absolutely,
Speaker 2: you cannot marry our daughter. You're a creep, right, Like yeah, there's.
Speaker 3: Stuff that he like non you know, like when you
Speaker 3: meet someone.
Speaker 2: Like something's wrong behind this fucker's eyes.
Speaker 4: You hear like, oh, what's wrong with them? And then
Speaker 4: you're like, oh, I see. That's why, Like the vibes
Speaker 4: are off, something's wrong.
Speaker 2: He looks like the kind of guy who lists women
Speaker 2: alphabetically and his weird crime diary, Like, yeah, yeah, he.
Speaker 3: Just spears correct in their assessment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good call. Don't let this guy marry your daughter.
Speaker 3: Good call.
Speaker 2: So during this period of time, as at all other
Speaker 2: points in his life, Thomas read voraciously, and he took
Speaker 2: notes in his diary on what particularly interested him in
Speaker 2: the books that he was reading. In January of seventeen
Speaker 2: forty nine, this was abortions. He's really interested in. This again,
Speaker 2: tells you a lot about what what's happening elsewhere in
Speaker 2: this guy's life is he's just casually interested in how
Speaker 2: to make a bort to fasciants, right, like drugs to
Speaker 2: induce like abortion, wow or a miss like he often
Speaker 2: frames his drugs to induce a miscarriage, right, And one
Speaker 2: of his recipes. I just found this interesting because this
Speaker 2: tells you, like, again, one of the things that, oh man,
Speaker 2: the society believes at the time for an aborti fasciant
Speaker 2: at the time is one pound of bitter apples. I
Speaker 2: think that's what it means. It's it's like ld of bitter.
Speaker 2: So it's an amount of bitter apples steeped in beer
Speaker 2: and cooked at least twice. It says what it said
Speaker 2: will cause abortions certainly, so bitter apples steeped in beer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm covering my unborn baby's ears right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the good news is I don't think there's
Speaker 2: a lot of bitter apples around anymore, although depending on
Speaker 2: the state of reproductive healthcare in the near term, I
Speaker 2: don't know. I don't Also, I kind of doubt this
Speaker 2: worked very well, but maybe it did.
Speaker 3: He's like making drinks to like feed a little witch.
Speaker 2: He's making morning after pills. Yeah, he's interested, or at
Speaker 2: least he's put part of like one of the things
Speaker 2: that's theorizes that if he didn't need it, then he
Speaker 2: was taking down notes while he was like near a
Speaker 2: library on how to make basically morning after pills because
Speaker 2: he foresaw because of what had happened to him in
Speaker 2: his past, he was like, I might need to do
Speaker 2: that in the future, right like, because the other thing
Speaker 2: he's doing at the same time is he's writing down
Speaker 2: recipes for cures for venereal diseases because This is a
Speaker 2: guy who's probably by this point slept with prostitutes and
Speaker 2: ports all around the world. He's picked up a lot
Speaker 2: of VD right, Yeah, like this is not like there's
Speaker 2: no antibiotics. They don't know anything about like how to
Speaker 2: prevent disease. So he catches chlamydia, and he writes, this
Speaker 2: is like the recipe he gives for a treatment for chlamydia.
Speaker 2: Take every other day one dose of any purging pills,
Speaker 2: and continue that course if your strength will allow it,
Speaker 2: until the running change both its color and consistency and
Speaker 2: appears the same as the semen. Right, that's like this
Speaker 2: like discharge that happens when people get the clap. So
Speaker 2: he's taking these like weird bamlmes, and we don't know
Speaker 2: exactly what's in them, right, because there's these are both
Speaker 2: cures for like the clap and for you know, gnarrhea
Speaker 2: that guys are like buying on the streets. One of
Speaker 2: them is called Ciderham's common purging. One of them is
Speaker 2: called balm captive. And we don't know exactly what he
Speaker 2: was taking. But I did find a dissertation by Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Polcha for Northeastern University that discussed a similar quack remedy
Speaker 2: that this exact guy used later for the same diseases
Speaker 2: Wards Pill and Drop, which were these blue, red and
Speaker 2: white pills that were filled with arsenic and other poisons.
Speaker 2: So that's what we're taking for VD. It's like arsenic, yeah,
Speaker 2: and like mercury and shit, that's what people put in
Speaker 2: these because they like, Wow, it's the same logic that
Speaker 2: a lot of like bullshit new age medicine stuff uses
Speaker 2: today where they're like, look, it's drawing out the toxins.
Speaker 2: Where they're like, if you give someone this like arsenic,
Speaker 2: that they wind up like their body purges everything, like
Speaker 2: they wind up vomiting and like right, and so they're
Speaker 2: like it must be cleansing you.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's like, I think we covered this in Cracked,
Speaker 4: but they used to do lysyl was originally invented as
Speaker 4: like a vagina cleaner. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 4: that men didn't have great health care before either. I mean,
Speaker 4: they got there no little faster than we did.
Speaker 2: But right, yeah, twenties, Yeah, no one's doing great. And
Speaker 2: I think the logic is the same as with lysol,
Speaker 2: where it's like, well, this looks like it hurts, like hell,
Speaker 2: so it must be working, right, It's like, now you've
Speaker 2: just poisoned.
Speaker 3: Yourself, disinfect everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're all just taking arsenic. So by the
Speaker 2: spring of nineteen forty nine, things are not going well
Speaker 2: for Thomas. He has every venereal disease known to man.
Speaker 2: Run out of his money seventeen forty nine. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 2: we skipped. Yeah no, he's two hundred years.
Speaker 3: Old now, a real time traveler.
Speaker 2: Yeah no. So this guy, I mean, he's just sick
Speaker 2: as hell all the time, and he's run out of money.
Speaker 2: All the money he got doing his merchant marine. Shit,
Speaker 2: he's loan through, he's got you know, he's got some
Speaker 2: assets that he's still selling from his trip. But he's
Speaker 2: doing badly enough that he's borrowing money from his landlady,
Speaker 2: Which that's like a level of doing bad, right when
Speaker 2: like you can't eat, you're not even paying your land lady,
Speaker 2: you're like having to borrow money from her. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: he's also borrowing from his brother and complaining in his
Speaker 2: diary about how lonely he is all the time. So
Speaker 2: he takes a little trip to the continent where he
Speaker 2: tries to sell off some of his goods and he's
Speaker 2: doing badly enough that by the end of seventeen forty
Speaker 2: nine he finds himself back in London and he visits
Speaker 2: this place called the Jamaica Coffee House, And as best
Speaker 2: as I can tell, this is like a business in
Speaker 2: it it's like a cafe basically, but it's also kind
Speaker 2: of an advertisement for white people to go to Jamaica,
Speaker 2: which at the time is like, I think it's the
Speaker 2: wealthiest agricultural colony in the British Empire. They're making sugarcane, right,
Speaker 2: that's what they're growing over there, Right, they're producing sugar basically.
Speaker 2: And the Brits had had Jamaica not that long at
Speaker 2: this point. They captured it from the Spaniards in sixteen
Speaker 2: fifty five, right, so we're less than a century into
Speaker 2: like English control of the island. And they've done in
Speaker 2: this little period of time where they've dominated Jamaica. They've
Speaker 2: done their best. They're trying to settle this island, but
Speaker 2: they're having trouble because it seems to them that Jamaica,
Speaker 2: like life on Jamaica, has evolved primarily to kill English people.
Speaker 2: Like they'll send over a bunch of young white guys
Speaker 2: to do the quote unquote skilled work on you know,
Speaker 2: and a lot of that's over seer work managing these
Speaker 2: slave plantations. And most of these guys die in the
Speaker 2: first year, right, that's just known. You get a boat
Speaker 2: with like two hundred white kids from the main island,
Speaker 2: and like eighty of them are going to be or
Speaker 2: like one hundred and eighty of them are going to
Speaker 2: be dead within like a year, year and a half.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wonder why you send a bunch of people
Speaker 4: to go to already a land where people live, and.
Speaker 3: You're like, why do the people who live here keep
Speaker 3: trying to kill us? We're just trying to colonize them.
Speaker 2: It's also just like the people who live there, because
Speaker 2: this is all so you know that the slaves who
Speaker 2: are brought there, the enslaved people, also die at an
Speaker 2: elevated rate because like none of them have grown up
Speaker 2: around the various like diseases and bugs that are there, right,
Speaker 2: Like they're getting bit by mosquitoes and getting shit that Like.
Speaker 4: Oh, you mean they're just dying of natural car I
Speaker 4: thought you meant like they're being fought off.
Speaker 2: That happens. That does happen. That's part of this because
Speaker 2: there is there's a heavy maroon. They're called maroons, right,
Speaker 2: which is like people they're former slaves and descendants of
Speaker 2: former slaves who escaped Spanish plantations and formed independent communities.
Speaker 2: And these like really forested off in like mountainous chunks
Speaker 2: of the island, right. So it's areas that where it's
Speaker 2: hard to control and you can't. Great Britain has troops
Speaker 2: in Jamaica, but as soon as you send soldiers out
Speaker 2: into these like these these heavily wooded parts of Jamaica,
Speaker 2: they just start dying of diseases lest left and right.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't keep a force out there for
Speaker 2: any length of time because the natural world will kill
Speaker 2: more of them than the enemy. But the enemy will
Speaker 2: also kill them because these maroons by this point, these
Speaker 2: are the people from the slave populations who survived their
Speaker 2: first years in Jamaica, so they are hardened to the
Speaker 2: different diseases and bugs and whatnot that exist on the island.
Speaker 2: And they know these like forested, dense like rural areas,
Speaker 2: so they're able to fight very effectively this guerrilla war.
Speaker 2: So yes, it is both a mix of the natural
Speaker 2: environment and these different maroon communities that are killing all
Speaker 2: of the young white kids who come here, right, and
Speaker 2: it goes badly enough for Great Britain that about a
Speaker 2: decade before Thomas Thistlewood shows up in Jamaica, the Brits
Speaker 2: give up and they offer terms to the Maroon communities.
Speaker 2: And so they say to these like these independent chunks
Speaker 2: of the island basically that are made up of former
Speaker 2: slaves and their descendants, will recognize your independence and will
Speaker 2: recognize your self rule over your territory. And in return,
Speaker 2: you have to keep the roads open for us so
Speaker 2: we can transport goods. And you have to not raid
Speaker 2: these plantass and whenever future slaves escape from our plantations,
Speaker 2: you have to help us bring them back. You have
Speaker 2: to help us if there's an uprising by the enslaved population. Right,
Speaker 2: there's like a treaty where these these marine communities agree
Speaker 2: to all this in order to stop not have to
Speaker 2: keep fighting these constant wars with the English colonizers. Right,
Speaker 2: so this is like, you know, it's a pretty it's
Speaker 2: an ugly thing, like it's it's a morally complicated thing,
Speaker 2: but you understand the decision these like marine communities are making.
Speaker 2: They're like, well, yeah, at least we get to keep
Speaker 2: living on our own. You know, they're not quite.
Speaker 4: A sovereign nation, so there's no like big war to
Speaker 4: be fought, but they're not quite acknowledging that, like England
Speaker 4: owns the whole place, and England's like, right, we own this,
Speaker 4: but we don't, but we do, but.
Speaker 2: We're we will will recognize your right to stay in
Speaker 2: your area if you stop fucking with trade basically, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's kind of the agreement that these communities come to
Speaker 2: with these agents of the empire. You know, who else
Speaker 2: are agents of the British Empire? Maybe maybe a sponsors,
Speaker 2: especially if it's like one of those big, big London
Speaker 2: banks they might be advertising on this show. Who's to say?
Speaker 2: And we're bad, how we're feeling.
Speaker 3: Sad?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, as you might expect, my mood has
Speaker 4: gone down since before we started question.
Speaker 3: But in many ways, I'm also happy to see you,
Speaker 3: so I can see you.
Speaker 2: Too, happy to see you, happy to learn about how
Speaker 2: shitty life was in the seventh mid seventeen hundreds, like
Speaker 2: really just a bad time to be a person. So yeah,
Speaker 2: into seventeen or start of seventeen fifty, Thomas Thistlewood books
Speaker 2: Passage on a boat after saying goodbye to his friends
Speaker 2: and family, and this is goodbye forever. He's never going
Speaker 2: to see any of them again. He's like thirty, and
Speaker 2: he's saying like goodbye for because I'm going to an
Speaker 2: island almost almost certainly be dead in a year, right,
Speaker 2: And in fact, it's one of the you get this
Speaker 2: hint of how disposable these men being sent over are
Speaker 2: that like within minutes of boarding, his luggage is broken
Speaker 2: into and his liquor collection is stolen, right, And I
Speaker 2: think it's just this like, look, steal whatever you can
Speaker 2: from these guys. They're all going to be dead in
Speaker 2: six months, Like fuck it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: It's like there's no law once you enter or don't
Speaker 4: you step off of England, there's a law.
Speaker 2: It's very much like on the way to Jamaica. It's
Speaker 2: certainly like that, Like this is still a period of time.
Speaker 3: Like have you ever taken a flight on the Spirit
Speaker 3: Airlines Vegas? That's what that makes me think of.
Speaker 2: That's it's like a flight. It's like a Spirit flight
Speaker 2: to Vegas, right, including some of the people on that
Speaker 2: plane are being trafficked, right, Like some number of these
Speaker 2: men on these boats with Thomas have been like knocked
Speaker 2: out the night before at a bar and they're just
Speaker 2: wake up working on a boat. Right, That's how that's
Speaker 2: how you put them in on boats in this time, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they actually get stopped by like the British Navy on
Speaker 2: their way to Jamaica, and the Navy's trying to make
Speaker 2: sure there's not like guys on there who got like
Speaker 2: beaten up at a port and are being forced into
Speaker 2: labor because it's like a it's a major problem. So
Speaker 2: it is like it is the wild West. I mean
Speaker 2: it's it's it's worse than that, but like it's there.
Speaker 2: You are in between these settled areas. There's basically no rule.
Speaker 2: But part of the appeal of Jamaica who guy like
Speaker 2: Thomas is it's known at the time, the like marketing
Speaker 2: nickname for Jamaica when they're trying to get these young
Speaker 2: white guys to move over there, is that it's the
Speaker 2: best poor man's country, right, And what that means is
Speaker 2: that if you don't have any money, you can and
Speaker 2: you don't have any standing in society back in Scotland
Speaker 2: or Ireland or you know, England, you can go to
Speaker 2: Jamaica and you will be number one, you can get
Speaker 2: rich there, and number two, you'll get respected because all
Speaker 2: white men are equally respected. That's the idea, right. It's
Speaker 2: not exactly true, but one of the things that's said
Speaker 2: about planter culture is that any white man who shows
Speaker 2: up at any plantation in Jamaica will get like he'll
Speaker 2: get put up for the night and get fed a
Speaker 2: good meal. It doesn't matter how poor you are or
Speaker 2: where you come from. There's this level of egalitarianism for
Speaker 2: white men in Jamaica. Right. And as we'll talk about,
Speaker 2: this is not entirely what it sounds like, but this
Speaker 2: is how it's being marketed, right, This is how guys
Speaker 2: like Thomas are convinced to go there. And I want
Speaker 2: to quote now from a two thousand and six article
Speaker 2: in Caribbean Quarterly by James robertson the glowing promises which
Speaker 2: encourage successive European migrants to sail to Jamaica, often shattered
Speaker 2: against the brutal island society these Johnny Newcombs encountered, an
Speaker 2: early nineteenth century bookkeeper, wrote home, regretting his choice. Instead
Speaker 2: of being a gentleman's life, it is more like a
Speaker 2: slave continuing I'll die before I'll be a planter. Though
Speaker 2: it is the best forgetting money. A person that is
Speaker 2: hard enough to manage the business make it to be
Speaker 2: an overseer and have three or four hundred pounds a year,
Speaker 2: but no one has wages equal to their hazards. Nineteen
Speaker 2: out of twenty die without getting anything, and I fear
Speaker 2: I shall be one of the unhappy number. These were
Speaker 2: daunting odds, and while the brutalizing work contrasted with the
Speaker 2: splendid prospects that had persuaded him to migrate, even if
Speaker 2: global farm boys continue to swallow recruiters golden tails, the
Speaker 2: supply was never sufficient for all the vacancies. So this
Speaker 2: is one of those.
Speaker 3: They're being recruited.
Speaker 4: Oh sorry, Well, just to clarify, when you say he's
Speaker 4: kiss he's like, I'll never be a planter. But they're
Speaker 4: still like being paid as not well to be a planter.
Speaker 4: And so they're kind of being told they could be
Speaker 4: a boss and they're being Is that right or are
Speaker 4: they already immediately going into slavery the white people.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're not owning slaves, but they're managing slaves
Speaker 2: for slave owners. That's the start of the ladder once
Speaker 2: you get over here. And what that guy is saying,
Speaker 2: with that bookkeeper saying is that the only way to
Speaker 2: really get rich is to make enough money to buy
Speaker 2: a plantation of your own and be a planter. But
Speaker 2: almost no one gets there. Nineteen out of twenty people
Speaker 2: will die before making any money at all.
Speaker 4: Right, that's what you said, Well he's not, actually, so
Speaker 4: there's not having the white people like actually do the
Speaker 4: labor still.
Speaker 2: The white people. The labor the white people are doing
Speaker 2: is making the black enslaved people. That's the labor for
Speaker 2: white Now, there are some there are some experts who
Speaker 2: are like making metal things or what not. Those there
Speaker 2: are jobs, and like that guy we heard from as
Speaker 2: a bookkeeper, so that's not the only job for these
Speaker 2: young white men. But what this guy is saying is
Speaker 2: that as soon as he got over on the island,
Speaker 2: he realizes it's a scam because there's almost no way
Speaker 2: to get make enough money to leave Jamaica again. And
Speaker 2: you're definitely going to die there, right, Like something on
Speaker 2: the island will kill you. So you've cut your life
Speaker 2: short and it's just this miserable situation. So that's that's
Speaker 2: the where Thomas stumbles into on May fourth, seventeen fiftieth,
Speaker 2: the day he gets to Jamaica, and he starts like
Speaker 2: that other guy, working as a bookkeeper and eventually an
Speaker 2: assistant overseer on a plantation. The idea is that soon
Speaker 2: he'll get promoted to overseer, but this doesn't materialize. Now
Speaker 2: Lucky for Thomas, there's not nearly enough healthy white guys, right,
Speaker 2: So when this first place that hires him, when he
Speaker 2: finds out they're not going to promote him where he
Speaker 2: wants to, he's able to get another job really easily.
Speaker 2: He survives his first six months and then his first year,
Speaker 2: and after that point options start to open up for
Speaker 2: somebody like you, because you've proven that you're not going
Speaker 2: to die right away in Jamaica, so you're valuable to hire, right.
Speaker 2: And so all of these plantations that none of them
Speaker 2: have enough white men, right, even if they have enough
Speaker 2: and slave people, they don't have enough like guys to
Speaker 2: run them for them, because the slave the enslaved population
Speaker 2: vastly outnumbers the white population, right. And this is part
Speaker 2: of why Jamaica in this period is the most productive
Speaker 2: slave plantation in the British Empire. About half of the
Speaker 2: forty five thousand tons of sugar that were imported into
Speaker 2: Britain each year came from Jamaica. And while white overseers
Speaker 2: and technical employees like Thomas were a part of the workforce,
Speaker 2: most of it isn't slaved Africans or their descendants. There's
Speaker 2: only rough numbers here, but by the time Thomas lands
Speaker 2: on the island, there's about eighteen thousand white people and
Speaker 2: about another seven thousand free black or like mixed race
Speaker 2: people on the island. Right, So like eighteen thousand white
Speaker 2: people know that there's another seven thousand free non white people.
Speaker 2: The enslaved population is one hundred and seventy thousand. And
Speaker 2: so when we talk about why there's this reputation that
Speaker 2: any white man will be treated well in Jamaica, it's
Speaker 2: because there's not as much room for the rich people,
Speaker 2: the rich white people, to exclude the poor white people
Speaker 2: because they're so outnumbered. Right, you kind of need these
Speaker 2: poor white guys at your back in case there's a
Speaker 2: slave uprising, which there will be periodically, right, And so
Speaker 2: that's the reason for this quote unquote egalitarianism. Is the
Speaker 2: wealthy plantation owners know that they need to keep these
Speaker 2: poor white guys on their side, like it makes.
Speaker 4: Probably feel well to respond to that. I think it's
Speaker 4: interesting you bring up the point about like the egalitarian
Speaker 4: and maybe they're not having room to exclude.
Speaker 3: The other white people.
Speaker 4: But I also think part of it is them being
Speaker 4: I mean it is like, you know, the white supremacy,
Speaker 4: but being surrounded by so many enslaved people and they
Speaker 4: see them as like background, They don't see them as people,
Speaker 4: so subconsciously they're gonna feel like, you know, when they
Speaker 4: see another white person, like you're on my side, as
Speaker 4: opposed to a society where everyone's white, those like aristocratic
Speaker 4: you know, one percenters look for someone else to put down. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they kind of have that space filled, and so they're
Speaker 4: gonna just be nicer. And yeah, I think that kind
Speaker 4: of leads to that like superiority complex because you just
Speaker 4: get so used to feeling like a whole nother race
Speaker 4: is the background to your supremacy.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, and that also helps
Speaker 2: explain why these poorer white guys who don't own enslaved
Speaker 2: people themselves will defend the system so much. Is that
Speaker 2: they still because of the system, they have a much
Speaker 2: higher place in society than they otherwise would. Right, Like
Speaker 2: the fact that the majority of the people are this
Speaker 2: kind of like background noise to the white population means
Speaker 2: that as a poor white you matter more like you
Speaker 2: feel like it, and that will make you more inclin
Speaker 2: line to defend the system, right Like, that's also got
Speaker 2: to be part of what's going on here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if their whole value quote unquote is managing
Speaker 3: uprisings or you know, of people, but they're going to
Speaker 3: have to convince them.
Speaker 2: Managing just this system of human slavery.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they convince themselves that those people aren't people because
Speaker 4: that they're required to be there to maintain order, you.
Speaker 3: Know, quote unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, and I should make it clear here that
Speaker 2: at the time when he arrives, Jamaica is kind of changing,
Speaker 2: But at the time he lands there, it's still the
Speaker 2: case that like, of that seven thousand or so person
Speaker 2: population of like free non white people in Jamaica, a
Speaker 2: good number of those people also own enslaved human beings
Speaker 2: and operate plantations. Right now, one of the things that
Speaker 2: will change during the time Thomas is there is that
Speaker 2: this number will get like cut down because the only
Speaker 2: people who are able to be part of the island
Speaker 2: legislature are white property owners, and they start voting to
Speaker 2: like restrict both political rights and reduce the amount of
Speaker 2: land that non white people can own during the time
Speaker 2: that they're here. So even the ones, even the non
Speaker 2: white people who are like part of the system of
Speaker 2: slavery are going to be like edged out of it
Speaker 2: over the time that Thomas is on the island by
Speaker 2: like these white slave owners who actually get to like
Speaker 2: manage things politically. Now, Thomas, like I said, he's going
Speaker 2: to live. He's going to survive his first year and
Speaker 2: then some and as a result, he's going to get treated.
Speaker 2: He's going to be very valuable, right, He's going to
Speaker 2: take some pretty significant leaps very quickly and social standing
Speaker 2: and an income. He proves to be such a competent
Speaker 2: overseer that he's soon fielding offers for jobs from half
Speaker 2: of the plantations in his area, which means he's getting
Speaker 2: steady raises. His boss has to pay him more every
Speaker 2: year to keep him on because he always has places
Speaker 2: he can go. This allows him to accrue a tidy
Speaker 2: pile of ready cash, and he starts buying human beings
Speaker 2: of his own and he will rint them. He doesn't
Speaker 2: own land yet, so he's buying people and then he's
Speaker 2: renting them out to his bosses as laborers, right, and
Speaker 2: he's pocketing the money for their labor. And that's how
Speaker 2: he basically sets up passive income for himself that is
Speaker 2: going to like allow him eventually to buy a plantation
Speaker 2: of his own, as he starts by like buying people
Speaker 2: and renting them back to his boss, and his boss
Speaker 2: is always going to pay above average rates for the
Speaker 2: slave labor that Thomas rints him because his boss wants
Speaker 2: to keep Tomas happy, right, because Thomas can go in
Speaker 2: where he fucking wants. So does that kind of make
Speaker 2: sense in terms of like why this would be appealing
Speaker 2: to someone like Thomas? You can survive that first year
Speaker 2: of plague, right, Like he's doing better now than he'd
Speaker 2: ever have been able to do in England because he's
Speaker 2: buying and selling human beings.
Speaker 4: And I mean, yeah, I know it's fucked up, but
Speaker 4: it's also interesting that, I mean, like prostitution was such
Speaker 4: a big part of his earlier life because that is
Speaker 4: like already, like you said, it's so transactional. There's already
Speaker 4: this idea of like like buying you know, like a
Speaker 4: night with someone, and then kind of escalating that to
Speaker 4: being like, well, and now he thinks I'm buying this
Speaker 4: person's labor. Yeah, And I mean that's completely inhumane, but
Speaker 4: I could see, like in how you're describing it, like
Speaker 4: how this man's kind of thinking will jump to that extreme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it is obviously paying your uncle to take
Speaker 2: care of you when you're like ten is different from
Speaker 2: owning humans. Paying for sex is different from chattel slavery.
Speaker 2: But he has his whole life had this variant, transactional
Speaker 2: understanding of what human be other people are right, that is,
Speaker 2: that has been with him, like since he was a
Speaker 2: little kid. That has to have some sort of impact
Speaker 2: on like why you are this way?
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: James Robertson, in his article on Jamaica during this period
Speaker 2: of time, describes this like initial mass death of new
Speaker 2: arrivals from Europe as seasoning, and one of the reasons
Speaker 2: he theorizes Thistlewood survived his period of seasoning is that
Speaker 2: he's not getting drunk every night. He's like a nerd.
Speaker 2: He's spending all of his free time writing in his
Speaker 2: diary and journaling about the weather and like reading books
Speaker 2: and so he's not just like all the constantly while sick. Right,
Speaker 2: someone stole his liquor. That may have saved his life.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And also all the arsenic you drank probably.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all that made it so that nothing else could
Speaker 2: survive it. But that's right, everybody, try drinking arsenic yourself.
Speaker 2: See if it makes you stronger. Who knows? You know
Speaker 2: our if? I think, but we could get RFK to
Speaker 2: endorse arsenic drinking arsenic? Oh God, like that's that's that's
Speaker 2: medicinal now, So Tom.
Speaker 3: You should do it.
Speaker 2: You should do your second ad Oh should I? Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 2: well here's another AD break and we're back. There's not
Speaker 2: a good way to segue into this next part. But
Speaker 2: the uh this is the first time, in December of
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty, about five months after landing on the island,
Speaker 2: is the first time that Thomas writes about committing sexual
Speaker 2: assault on an enslaved person who works on the ranch
Speaker 2: where he's working. And he writes this in his like
Speaker 2: Latin shorthand, and basically the translation is that he he's
Speaker 2: slept with this enslaved woman named Sylvia, who's a black
Speaker 2: woman from the Ebo Forest region of modern day Cameroon.
Speaker 2: In silv right, he writes that he like he lay
Speaker 2: with Sylvia in silv and silv is like a that's
Speaker 2: a shortened version of the Latin word for forest. Right,
Speaker 2: So he's kind of writing, he's kind of writing about
Speaker 2: this sex crime he's committed, almost as like a like
Speaker 2: a Latin couplet, right, Like he's he's he's not just
Speaker 2: writing about this thing that he's done, but he's clearly
Speaker 2: he's clearly drawn to this woman named Sylvia because her
Speaker 2: name is similar to the name of like this Roman goddess. Uh,
Speaker 2: this Roman term for like the wild part of the world,
Speaker 2: and this Roman term for like a goddess. Right, Like
Speaker 2: it's this he's making these weird references in his diary,
Speaker 2: like these aren't just exploitation logs. But he's he's almost
Speaker 2: like showing off his noge of like classical education while
Speaker 2: he's doing this too. And it's kind of unclear to
Speaker 2: me why he does this. I've read a couple of
Speaker 2: different theories as to why he feels drawn to do
Speaker 2: this while he's writing about these things. In her paper,
Speaker 2: Redacting Desire, Elizabeth Polka theorizes quote. Thistlewood structured his sexual
Speaker 2: exploitation Logs as an entry embedded within an entry, a
Speaker 2: private subspace into which he placed the record of his
Speaker 2: sexual activity. If Thistlewood's ten thousand pages of diaries were
Speaker 2: visualized as an architectural space, such as a domestic home,
Speaker 2: the sexual Exploitation Logs would be a locked drawer in
Speaker 2: Thistlewood's bedroom dresser, where his Latin coding functions as a
Speaker 2: locking mechanism. Within this private space, Thistlewood placed walls around
Speaker 2: sexual encounters, employing documentation to codify and order the sex
Speaker 2: act within a system of concealment, which is similar to
Speaker 2: kind of what you were saying earlier, right, Like he's
Speaker 2: locking this away for anyone. That's part of why he's
Speaker 2: making these obscure references to like Roman gods in this
Speaker 2: entry log about a sex crime, is so that the
Speaker 2: only other people who will understand what I've done, truly
Speaker 2: are other educated white men of a scientific bent, and
Speaker 2: they'll understand that what I was doing wasn't a sex crime,
Speaker 2: it was an act of science, because that's how he
Speaker 2: writes about this. Yeah, well, I.
Speaker 4: Wonder if it's like, like you said, it's more like
Speaker 4: in self defense, Like it's I don't know if he
Speaker 4: really believes it, because if he's already putting it into
Speaker 4: that box, like literally right you say he boxes it off,
Speaker 4: there's that feeling already like describes it. Yeah, he needs
Speaker 4: to separate it. And then on top of that, it's
Speaker 4: like you're kind of what you said he's writing and
Speaker 4: couple it makes me think of like, you know, you
Speaker 4: kind of code switch when you're if you're writing, like
Speaker 4: people analyze it you're lying or not. Like maybe there's
Speaker 4: a piece where he switches into like he thinks he's
Speaker 4: intellectualizing it, but really it's because he feels some sort
Speaker 4: of guilt and then it's trying to connect it or
Speaker 4: dissociate or you know, be like actually, I'm you know,
Speaker 4: kind of going into this intellectual place when I'm doing this,
Speaker 4: But really it's it's a reaction to his own feelings.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's zydiary effical. He's not needing to defend
Speaker 3: himself to anyone.
Speaker 2: Right and the fact that because it can be both
Speaker 2: right where he wants to hide this from anyone other
Speaker 2: than the people he thinks might understand why he's doing
Speaker 2: what he's done. But that implies that he understands there's
Speaker 2: something unacceptable to regular people about what he's doing.
Speaker 3: Well, could he be trying to defend himself to himself
Speaker 3: like almost.
Speaker 4: Like possibly, yeah, you know, logging his Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like what I'm doing is because he's he is a naturalist, right,
Speaker 2: and that is that those are kind of the early
Speaker 2: scientists in this period of time, is like people who
Speaker 2: are going on in the natural world and they're taking
Speaker 2: this is Eventually guys like more rigorous and better versions
Speaker 2: of this are going to you know, produce people like
Speaker 2: Charles Darwin. Right, But this this basic idea that like
Speaker 2: you go out and you're taking notes. That's why he's
Speaker 2: taking notes on the climate every day too, on the
Speaker 2: wather he's experiencing. Is there's this early scientific understanding that like, well,
Speaker 2: part of science is just documenting what you see, right,
Speaker 2: and so he is part of what he's doing is
Speaker 2: walling off these sexual experiences and documenting them as if
Speaker 2: he's doing scientific research. And I think you're right that
Speaker 2: it's part of it maybe a defense mechanism where he's
Speaker 2: trying to make this unacceptable thing acceptable, and there's maybe
Speaker 2: this level of knowledge that that will not work for
Speaker 2: a lot of people, so he has to kind of
Speaker 2: code it for the people that he sees is like him,
Speaker 2: these other scientists. One of the reasons he uses Latin
Speaker 2: probably is to connect his because that's the scientific language, right,
Speaker 2: And this also connects the work he's doing to the
Speaker 2: documentation of a scientist he greatly admired, Carl Linnaeus, who
Speaker 2: is a Swedish biologist and the person who created like
Speaker 2: the modern taxonomy system how we name species is because
Speaker 2: of Linnaeus, right, and during his time in Jamaica. Part
Speaker 2: of why and part of why this is relevant to
Speaker 2: Linaeus is Thomas is not only committing these sex crimes
Speaker 2: on enslaved people out of like some sense of desire
Speaker 2: or even a personal need for power. There's a financial
Speaker 2: motivation here, because if you get a person you own pregnant,
Speaker 2: the baby is your property. You can sell them when
Speaker 2: they're an adult. And he will repeatedly over his life.
Speaker 2: And part of what he's doing here is keeping notes
Speaker 2: as to who he's sleeping with, so he can document
Speaker 2: the parentage of different people that he's going to own
Speaker 2: and sell, right. And he sees this scientifically in the
Speaker 2: same way as people who are like breeding livestock. Right,
Speaker 2: that's what this is to him. Right, that's horrible, but
Speaker 2: that is how Thomas thinks about this, Right.
Speaker 4: That's why, like that totally changes like what I was
Speaker 4: saying before, because yeah, it definitely makes it feel more
Speaker 4: like he's just logging his property.
Speaker 2: I think there's a few things. This isn't a simple thing. Really,
Speaker 2: it's a lot in here, right, But that's part of
Speaker 2: what he's doing here.
Speaker 4: And he doesn't see them as is I mean, I
Speaker 4: guess it's probably true for most people of this time,
Speaker 4: but just hearing us, like, so he doesn't see them
Speaker 4: as his children, no, right.
Speaker 2: I mean he does a person. He knows they literally
Speaker 2: are biologically his children, but he does not see them
Speaker 2: as human beings. Fully. I think that's probably accurate. Like
Speaker 2: all people living in these situations, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: weird relationships here that are all deeply unequal and fucked
Speaker 2: up and also like difficult to categorize and understand. We
Speaker 2: will talk about that some. But yeah, part of what
Speaker 2: he's doing here is like writing about what he's like
Speaker 2: these what's happening, as if he's like breeding livestock, that's
Speaker 2: an aspect of like what he's doing here, and you know,
Speaker 2: beyond that, he's also he's his era's equivalent of like
Speaker 2: a nerd, right, he's into science is like a cool
Speaker 2: thing for a chunk of like the educated aristocracy. It's
Speaker 2: a thing you do as like a hobby, right, And
Speaker 2: so's he has this sense of like, I'm not quite
Speaker 2: as good as a lot of other people because he
Speaker 2: doesn't grow up super rich, and he doesn't he's not
Speaker 2: fit for high society where he comes from. And so
Speaker 2: this is kind of how he tries to fit himself
Speaker 2: in right, is by framing himself and presenting himself to
Speaker 2: others as a man of science. There's a really good
Speaker 2: article on this called Thomas Thistlewood's Libidinal Linnaean Project for
Speaker 2: Small Acts Journal by Heather Vermulian, and she proposes a
Speaker 2: likely symbolic explanation for why Thomas wrote about this very
Speaker 2: first sex crime on the island the way that he did.
Speaker 2: Thistlewood may have attend intended more than a play on
Speaker 2: words with his description of the rape of Sylvia in
Speaker 2: the silv His choice to attack this woman in particular
Speaker 2: may have carried symbolic weight, as Robert Pogue Harrison writes
Speaker 2: the traditional legends of Rome's foundation tell us that the
Speaker 2: city was born of the forests, but they also suggest
Speaker 2: that Rome had had to turn against its matrix in
Speaker 2: order to fulfill its destiny. According to Livy, Harrison explains, Romulus,
Speaker 2: the founder of Rome, belonged to the Sylvian family line,
Speaker 2: as is the case in many foundation myths, the Rape
Speaker 2: of the Sabines, the Rape of Lucretia. It is sexual
Speaker 2: violence that sets the story in motion. Romulus and his
Speaker 2: twin brother Remus were born when Mars, the Roman god
Speaker 2: of war, raped the vestal virgin Raya Silvia. Viewed in
Speaker 2: this light, this Wilwood perpetuated his initial act of terrestrial
Speaker 2: rape against an enslaved woman whose name evokes a spirit
Speaker 2: or goddess of the wood, targeted for Roman conquest, as
Speaker 2: well as Reya Silvia, targeted for divine rape. His act
Speaker 2: also conjures the very manner in which Romulus populated Rome,
Speaker 2: by capturing women from nearby cities and forcing them into
Speaker 2: relation with Rome's founding men. Thisilwood's rape of Sylvia may
Speaker 2: well participate in this classic genealogy of mystified sexual violence.
Speaker 2: Ambiguous parentage, colonization and captivity, and the imperial domesticating of
Speaker 2: unruly forested land as a sign of progress. Right, So
Speaker 2: this is he sees this as part of this very
Speaker 2: scientific and high minded colonial pride. England is colonizing and
Speaker 2: civilizing the wilderness and making it better. And these sex
Speaker 2: crimes I'm committing are a part of this scientific effort
Speaker 2: to improve via not just like you know, by developing
Speaker 2: the land, but by inserting my DNA into these populations.
Speaker 2: That's how he's thinking about this, right, I mean, because that's.
Speaker 3: Like what I mean.
Speaker 4: I can see like, I mean that very well written interpretation.
Speaker 3: But is he is he really like that? Like I
Speaker 3: don't want to say com smart, but is he really
Speaker 3: like thinking that deep?
Speaker 2: Or this would have been all of these ancient Roman
Speaker 2: myths and all of this knowledge of Latin. This was
Speaker 2: part of a normal education for a man of his
Speaker 2: stature at this time, you got an intensely detailed classical education,
Speaker 2: right because in part the British Empire is portraying itself
Speaker 2: as in this line of civilizing imperial western forces, right
Speaker 2: these and in this line of like because the Greeks
Speaker 2: and the Romans are very much admired for their understanding
Speaker 2: of the natural world right and for the their their
Speaker 2: power and command over it in an area in which
Speaker 2: that was seen as having been less common elsewhere, and
Speaker 2: part of why Latin is still the knowledge the language
Speaker 2: of science at the day. And it's also Thistlewood doesn't
Speaker 2: he doesn't want to see himself as just a guy
Speaker 2: trying to get rich and committing horrible crimes against other
Speaker 2: human beings. He wants to see himself as part of
Speaker 2: this noble global endeavor to civilize the world.
Speaker 3: And that's mythological.
Speaker 4: It's very yeah, that there is a parallel to what
Speaker 4: I see, I mean what I see happening now with
Speaker 4: a lot of white supremacy because they talk a lot
Speaker 4: about classical literature and referring to classical like and you know,
Speaker 4: biblical memes or imagery. I know, like Hillsdale College.
Speaker 3: Is one that you know, very.
Speaker 4: Conservative and they really focus on teaching classical, classical stories
Speaker 4: to children, and very much in the same way you're
Speaker 4: talking about sort of like upholding these images that are yes,
Speaker 4: you know, eurocentric.
Speaker 2: Myths, and it's it's this, this is a this is
Speaker 2: a massive part. This is not just a part of fascism.
Speaker 2: But this is a part of selling any fucked up
Speaker 2: thing to young men, as you convince them they're doing
Speaker 2: something great. Right. This thing that we could just say
Speaker 2: is you giving into your base impulses is also heroic
Speaker 2: and it puts you in line with divinity and you're
Speaker 2: part of this great civilizing mission. Right. We've been telling
Speaker 2: young men that in every society that's ever existed to
Speaker 2: get him to do fucked up shit, right, And that
Speaker 2: doesn't by the way, that's not to say, oh, Thistlewood's
Speaker 2: just a victim, no, no, no, no, no. He is choosing
Speaker 2: to find a justification for the cruel, violent, vicious things
Speaker 2: that he wants to do and that he increasingly finds appealing,
Speaker 2: because he becomes a worse and worse person the more
Speaker 2: he gives into this, and that means you need to
Speaker 2: come up with increasingly like lofty intellectual justifications for the
Speaker 2: horrors you're committing. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, to be clear, I know there's there been times
Speaker 4: where I'm like, yeah, oh, that's interesting he said that.
Speaker 4: I understand that for the listeners who don't know me, like,
Speaker 4: I'm very much like, oh yeah, there's no justifation from
Speaker 4: the beginning to the end, like this leg owner, I'm
Speaker 4: already like, yeah, not trying to be like justify it.
Speaker 4: But it is so interesting to me to dive into
Speaker 4: like the details, because it is like why are we
Speaker 4: still here in some ways, like years later, why are
Speaker 4: we still seeing people like this? I mean not in
Speaker 4: the exact way, but how does it happen?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: I think this is an important half not even half,
Speaker 2: but this is an important part of the story. Is
Speaker 2: not how they lived with themselves, but how they felt
Speaker 2: good about themselves for doing this, and.
Speaker 3: How they justify it in their own world that they're heroes.
Speaker 2: And yeah he is, but he is. He is literally
Speaker 2: raping civilization into these people. That's how he thought about
Speaker 2: it in a very literal way in a lot of
Speaker 2: like I mean, he wouldn't have called it rape, but
Speaker 2: like that's what he's doing, you know. And and he
Speaker 2: also writes repeatedly about a lot of these people not
Speaker 2: wanting it right. He will write basically they did, they
Speaker 2: weren't into it, or they weren't like he will add
Speaker 2: that he takes notes on that sort of thing too.
Speaker 2: That's part of the documentation.
Speaker 4: Does he describe the like sexy had with not in
Speaker 4: detention women he dated, like, no, that's.
Speaker 2: Not what.
Speaker 3: Did he describe the sexy had with women that.
Speaker 4: Were like dating differently than the woman he raped, or
Speaker 4: they're kind of all seen as like objects.
Speaker 2: We don't get any of that.
Speaker 3: We don't know.
Speaker 2: We know because of things that little bits side bits
Speaker 2: of his life that we get. We know that he
Speaker 2: got a woman who was roughly at his social level,
Speaker 2: pregnant when he was younger, and that the relationship didn't
Speaker 2: work out. Right. We know that he never writes about
Speaker 2: anything that could be termed an equivalent relationship between two
Speaker 2: people choosing to be like, right, he writes about paying
Speaker 2: for sex and you know, I don't know about the
Speaker 2: ethics of where you want to put the ethics of
Speaker 2: sex work in seventeen hundreds London, but it's different than
Speaker 2: what he's doing in Jamaica. And he writes about sex
Speaker 2: crimes that he commits in Jamaica. Right, he does. Right,
Speaker 2: there is an enslaved woman with whom he has a
Speaker 2: long relationship that is obviously not a consensual relationship, but
Speaker 2: he writes about it as if it is because that's
Speaker 2: his interpretation. That's how he feels about it. We get
Speaker 2: a little of that, and it's still pretty brutal because
Speaker 2: he's still like I mean, yeah, we'll talk unfortunately about
Speaker 2: too much of that. But in January of seventeen fifty three,
Speaker 2: this Thistlewood yeah sorry, takes on his most prestigious job
Speaker 2: yet he gets made overseer of the large and profitable
Speaker 2: Egypt Plantation. This is still in Jamaica, it's just called Egypt.
Speaker 2: He's paid the princely sum of sixty pounds sterling a
Speaker 2: year for his labor. Immediately after he moves to the plantation,
Speaker 2: he commits another sex crime on another young enslaved woman
Speaker 2: named Flora, replicating his Sylvia silver word play by mentioning
Speaker 2: her within several lines of a passage discussing the plantation's
Speaker 2: Flora right, and he writes that he paid her four
Speaker 2: bits after doing this. And this is something you get periodically,
Speaker 2: some of these fortune to No, it's a type of currency.
Speaker 2: It's two t's. Unfortunately, well, I don't know, probably yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know where to take that. But it's a bit.
Speaker 2: You may have heard of like this used especially like
Speaker 2: pirate literature, Like a bit is a if you've heard
Speaker 2: of a piece of eight, like Spanish pieces of eight,
Speaker 2: Like that's a Spanish reel, is a piece of eight,
Speaker 2: or is like it's eight pieces of eight and you
Speaker 2: would like break off the little piece. That's like pirate money.
Speaker 2: It was a Spanish reality, and a bit was equivalent
Speaker 2: to like one eighth of a Spanish reel, right, which
Speaker 2: is again the money in pirate movies. As a general rule,
Speaker 2: So four bits that he gives this woman is half
Speaker 2: of a piece of eight, and depending on the source,
Speaker 2: that's equivalent from like fifty cents to like one thousand
Speaker 2: dollars in modern money, because it's really not easy to
Speaker 2: actually draw an equivalent based on the context. I think
Speaker 2: this is the equivalent of him giving her like five
Speaker 2: or ten dollars.
Speaker 4: Right, he's giving that's that And that wasn't something he normal.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's not a standard practice he.
Speaker 2: Did sometimes he wasn't different time and it Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I don't think I don't think like I think some
Speaker 2: of it is that maybe it makes him feel better,
Speaker 2: like this is more like what he was doing with
Speaker 2: the sex workers in England than what it is, which
Speaker 2: is a sex crime. And I think some of it
Speaker 2: is that this just makes it easier for him.
Speaker 3: Right, Like it was there a world where there are
Speaker 3: where there were also people doing like sex work on
Speaker 3: the side.
Speaker 2: Yes, like that, that's that's a that's a thing too,
Speaker 2: is that like if your flora, maybe this is how
Speaker 2: you make money because there's not a lot of options
Speaker 2: open to you to do that. We like, we really
Speaker 2: don't know how this conversation starts. Like we know that
Speaker 2: this is a sex crime just because of the slave
Speaker 2: and not free relationship, right, but we don't know if
Speaker 2: she would have seen herself as like, well, this is
Speaker 2: the way for me to make money, right, there's not
Speaker 2: a lot more or if he just assaulted her and
Speaker 2: then threw some money on the ground, like both of
Speaker 2: the either of those could be the case. There's never
Speaker 2: any way to know. Yeah, and all of them are bad.
Speaker 2: It's just that we don't really know what was happening here.
Speaker 2: That said, it is worth it. He starts after floor,
Speaker 2: he picks out another African born and slave field worker,
Speaker 2: and he starts what he described as a relationship with her, right,
Speaker 2: and he describes Ginny as consenting to the liaison. Obviously
Speaker 2: she didn't have choice here, but it's worth exploring what
Speaker 2: she would have seen as the benefits of a relationship
Speaker 2: like this, because that does paint a bleaker story. And
Speaker 2: we get some hint as to that in Robertson's article,
Speaker 2: because he writes that the tour together for nearly a year,
Speaker 2: but quote, she increasingly alienated his affections by heavy handed
Speaker 2: attempts to intervene when he assigned punishments, bringing a knife
Speaker 2: to bed proof the final straw. So what I take
Speaker 2: from this she did, che did and Jenny any quote Again,
Speaker 2: I use the word choice loosely here, but one of
Speaker 2: the few choices available to her was if I get
Speaker 2: in this guy's good graces and pretend that I like him,
Speaker 2: the next time he tries to beat one of my friends,
Speaker 2: I can convince him to stop, right, And that's.
Speaker 4: Eventually yeah, yeah, yes, he's already interested in her. If
Speaker 4: she refuses, it's gonna be worse.
Speaker 3: So like kind of puts up.
Speaker 2: Maybe I can use this position to help some people.
Speaker 2: And Thistlewood gets annoyed at her right because she's yelling
Speaker 2: at him when he beats people. Uh, And eventually she
Speaker 2: decides I might need to kill this guy, and maybe
Speaker 2: I can't convince him to not be so much of it,
Speaker 2: and so she brings a knife to bed and he
Speaker 2: catches her, right, and this is the end of whatever
Speaker 2: you want to call this, like very very bleak thing, right,
Speaker 2: But that does it tells us a lot about how
Speaker 2: someone in Ginny's position may have thought about what was
Speaker 2: happening as like, well, maybe this is an opportunity to
Speaker 2: gain some control over my life and my friends' lives.
Speaker 3: Right, And what does he do when he finds the
Speaker 3: knife and he.
Speaker 2: Kicks her out? Basically, I mean she gets punished for this.
Speaker 2: She was almost certainly would have been would have been
Speaker 2: like whipped for this, and there were to talk about
Speaker 2: worst but.
Speaker 3: She killed them. She should have just killed him.
Speaker 2: I don't think she got the chance. I know, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it does seem like what she wanted.
Speaker 4: To because it's like, yeah, even if she could, she
Speaker 4: would get in trouble after that, So it's it would
Speaker 4: have been kind of game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's no good options for someone, and it's
Speaker 2: like she's taking trying to take the best option, which
Speaker 2: is at least gaining some level of control, trying to
Speaker 2: write and it doesn't work out, and almost as soon
Speaker 2: as things end, he with Ginny As a result of this,
Speaker 2: he picks a new victim slash partner, an enslaved woman
Speaker 2: named Fibba. She had been the last overseers mistress and
Speaker 2: she was his cook. When he starts at Egypt Plantation
Speaker 2: in December of seventeen fifty three, they are physically together
Speaker 2: for the first time. Again, this is a sex crime,
Speaker 2: but she is It is framed in his life, and
Speaker 2: she is at least acceding to this image of it
Speaker 2: to him as a romantic relationship, and they will be
Speaker 2: together the rest of his life in this kind of
Speaker 2: grotesque parody of marriage. And again I want to reiterate
Speaker 2: here at the end of this that nothing we're talking about.
Speaker 2: We have all this detail about Thomas, and it's hideous
Speaker 2: the things he did, and we barely scratch the surface.
Speaker 2: It's really important that I lay out here something that's
Speaker 2: going to need to carry us through the rest of
Speaker 2: the episode, which is that there's no evidence Thomas Thistlewood
Speaker 2: was particularly bad for a slave owner or an overseer
Speaker 2: and Jamaica in this period of time, or would have
Speaker 2: been considered bad in the Confederacy in North America right
Speaker 2: or in what became the Confederate states. There's no evidence
Speaker 2: that he was particularly violent. There's no evidence that he
Speaker 2: was a committed rape on a wider scale than his peers.
Speaker 2: They were all like this. He just kept a diary, right,
Speaker 2: And so when we tell.
Speaker 3: Me like he was sort of an average of what
Speaker 3: people may have been acting, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, because part of the thing is no one
Speaker 2: notices shit about this guy's diary until like the I
Speaker 2: think it's the early twentieth century when this rule. It
Speaker 2: might have been after the US Civil War when people
Speaker 2: started first started looking into it, but people who owned
Speaker 2: slaves at the time in Jamaica didn't think anything of
Speaker 2: what he was writing. This was not extreme, This was
Speaker 2: not horrifying. This was an upsetting. This was a guy
Speaker 2: chronicling daily life in a normal way. Like what he
Speaker 2: wrote about doing to these people was no different than
Speaker 2: him taking notes about the weather. That's very much still.
Speaker 4: Sort of an outcasting type of Well, so that's interesting
Speaker 4: because it kind of I feel like it draws like
Speaker 4: the people who end up going into being sleeve owners
Speaker 4: probably all have that like already those fucked up yet flags.
Speaker 4: But it sounded like, yeah, early in his life, like
Speaker 4: people saw red flags and then all those people congregated.
Speaker 2: And became right. Yeah, it is still like.
Speaker 4: Just like it's not like this is like these are
Speaker 4: the good I mean, I don't know just by bristle
Speaker 4: to that, because it's still like there is evidence that
Speaker 4: these people were seen as like not like I don't
Speaker 4: want my daughter to marry someone like this.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what I'm saying within the context of people
Speaker 2: who were running plantations. He was not abnormal, right.
Speaker 3: While there politics were like they're all kind of fucked up.
Speaker 2: And yeah, those people are certainly all going to be
Speaker 2: more fucked in the head than some random dude who
Speaker 2: like lives in London and works like at a like
Speaker 2: at a counting house, or is like lives a little
Speaker 2: further north and is working in like the first coal
Speaker 2: mines that open. Those guys are part of a slave state,
Speaker 2: but they're not thinking about what's They would probably be
Speaker 2: upset if you were to explain to them what Thomas
Speaker 2: Thistle what's putting it his diary, because it's it's more upsetting.
Speaker 2: Which isn't to say that they'd feel about the way
Speaker 2: we do. But like this is these are all of
Speaker 2: these slave societies are really brutal, right, and It's why
Speaker 2: whenever you get abolition movements a big thing. These abolition
Speaker 2: movements are doing both the first one that sets up
Speaker 2: that gets slavery outlawed in the British Empire and the
Speaker 2: one in the United States. A big part of what
Speaker 2: abolitionists are doing is just taking, when they can, very
Speaker 2: normal accounts of daily life in these places where chattel
Speaker 2: slavery is the norm, right, and talking about them to people,
Speaker 2: because to people who live outside of that, it's fucked
Speaker 2: up and horrifying, right, Like, even if those people are
Speaker 2: not what we would call it have a modern attitude
Speaker 2: on race or anything like that, they're still horrified by
Speaker 2: a lot of what they're hearing about because it's really bad,
Speaker 2: you know. But yeah, within that community, Thomas is a
Speaker 2: normal guy within the community of assholes. He's a normal asshole.
Speaker 2: I think it's the way I would come down.
Speaker 3: On him, right, Not an exceptional asshole.
Speaker 2: No, No, he just kind of is more of a
Speaker 2: nerd about being an asshole than most people. And that's
Speaker 2: part one. Teresa, how are you feeling.
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: I mean, however you expect. I feel like I'm not
Speaker 4: being very like lighthearted or funny, which lighthearted about Yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know if I'm doing hey in my my role,
Speaker 4: but I'm learning a lot and definitely feeling uh sad
Speaker 4: for humanity. But yeah, I don't know should I be
Speaker 4: like commenting more? I feel like there's I never know
Speaker 4: you find a balance without being.
Speaker 3: Too uh to like joke a lot of fucked up.
Speaker 2: This is a real bad, real bleak one. Like there's
Speaker 2: not a lot.
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna listen and be like, oh that's bad. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't want to like, yeah, I hope, I hope
Speaker 4: I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Okay, but yeah, you're You're fine. It's just bad stuff.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, do you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 1: T T.
Speaker 4: You know, truly not much going on right now because
Speaker 4: I'm about to have a baby, but you know, my
Speaker 4: my friends Zach Persard just came out with the book,
Speaker 4: and so I'll plug his book. It's it's a it's
Speaker 4: like kind of like a parody of like those like
Speaker 4: speaky stories, but it's a Christmas one. It's called Stories
Speaker 4: to Make You Scared of Christmas. Zach bar You've get
Speaker 4: a free book online or you can buy it on Amazon,
Speaker 4: So check it out.
Speaker 3: It's a very funny comedian.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, check that out everybody. Uh and yeah we
Speaker 2: will be back.
Speaker 1: E T.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being on the show. Well
Speaker 2: we'll talk to you again for a really depressing part too, Keawait.
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