“The best poor man's country”? Thomas Thistlewood in eighteenth-century Jamaica

Abstract

What enabled a white immigrant to succeed in eighteenth-century Jamaica? An exchange in the opening pages of Marly, a novel written and set in early nineteenth-century Jamaica, highlights both how a later generation of white immigrants viewed a land of opportunity and the continuing challenges of adapting to its slave-holding society. Fresh off the boat, two Scots lads meet a fellow Scot who has become a well-established attorney. He tells them will find the manners of this island very different from Scotland; but in a very short time, the prejudices you have imbibed in your own country, will wear off and then you will feel yourselves very comfortable. Take my word for it, this is the best poor man's country in the world, for with industry and economy, every man here may prosper. Were these assertions justified, either in 1750s, '60s and '70s or in the 1820s? Trevor Burnard's new book on Thomas Thistlewood engages with such claims, while considering the wider repercussions for all of the island's residents, black and white, enslaved and free, of the moral suppleness of the successive white immigrants who became comfortable with Jamaica's brutal social norms. The diaries compiled by Thomas Thistlewood, an immigrant from England who came out to in 1750 and died there in 1786, provide fascinating insights into the process of adaption and creolisation he, and the slaves he sought to control, all underwent. That Thistlewood's notebooks survive at all is remarkable. The fullness of the record they provide is more remarkable still. For thirty-six years he kept a daily journal, besides filling literary commonplace books, garden books and a weather log. The resulting archival hoard offers fascinating glimpses into the everyday life in one of Britain's richest colonies. This is not only by far the fullest diary from eighteenth-century Jamaica, but these notebooks also cover a longer span than any other Jamaican journals from this period, including the history-cum-journal written by John Taylor, a soon-returning potential immigrant who visited in 1687, the Journal of a Residence in Jamaica compiled by Admiral Hovinden Walker during his service on the island in 1712; the journals of Nicholas Phillips, an English merchant who arrived in 1759 and married into a planting family, the scrappy notes kept by the island-born James Pinnock, a future Advocate General of Jamaica, the vivid recollections penned by William Hickey, a well connected Anglo-Irish lawyer who came out to make a career in Kingston in 1775 before shifting to greener pastures in India, the brief summaries that Henry Turton, a Kingston lawyer, scribbled at the back of his 1796 Almanac, or even the very full diary compiled between 1801 and 1805 by Lady Maria Nugent, the wife of Jamaica's then Governor.2 Thistlewood's collections are also fuller than the memoranda compiled by another lower middle class English emigrant, Samuel Eusebius Hudson, whose integration into the slaveholding society in Cape Town at the start of the nineteenth century has prompted a thought-provoking study by Kirsten McKenzie on what cultural adjustments were involved in becoming an English slave-owner there.3 We will not come away liking Thomas Thistlewood, but his journals do allow us to understand far more about the island he knew. Since Thistlewood's papers were rediscovered in the 1970s several scholars have explored them. The first of these, Douglas Hall's powerful In Miserable Slavery, used the diaries to reconstruct the lives of individuals in a slave-holding society, not only Thistlewood but also his principal enslaved African-Jamaican companion, Phibbah. Hall, who fanned in western himself, read Thistlewood's agricultural notes with an informed eye to trace how he ran the property he purchased there, noting where attempts to grow new crops could be turned to social advantage with gifts of cherries or cabbages prompting invitations to dine with the parish's leading planters. …