Fugitive Harbour: Labour, Community, and Marronage at Antigua Naval Yard

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines for the first time the history of labour at Antigua Naval Yard in English Harbour during the eighteenth century. It demonstrates the existence of a successful multi-year effort to smuggle fugitives from slavery aboard Royal Navy warships. Using original material from the dockyard, including administrative correspondence, and analysis of shipbuilding labour and the built environment, this article contends that this was a community effort that brought together ‘King’s Negroes’ enslaved by the crown with other Black Antiguans across the island. This article narrates and analyses this fugitive activity with two goals in mind. First, it uses the dockyard’s unique and largely unexamined history to make new contributions on subjects like British crown slavery, petit marronage, and naval labour. The article also uncovers conflict between the Royal Navy and colonial slaveholders and uses it to analyse tensions between slavery as a system of labour and slavery as a system of property. Second, by examining fugitives’ role in the previously-documented phenomenon of naval recruitment of fugitives, this article argues for the necessity of seeing fugitive activity at any scale as collective and provides one example of how historians can do so.