Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

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I know, I know. Whatever happened to the Zoom lady,

Speaker 1 another job taken by automation. Um,

Speaker 1 I think it was an automated job to begin with. I think that was a robot.
What do we who complains when the when the robots get taken their jobs taken by other robots, you know?

Speaker 1 We need solidarity with some of the robots against the other robots.

Speaker 1 I think Wally from that movie, Wally's the one. Oh, no, I hate that son of a bitch.
What? I love Wally.

Speaker 1 I'll fight Wally. Leave Wally alone.
I don't like him at all. Why don't you like Wally?

Speaker 1 It's not his business coming around picking shit up, you know?

Speaker 1 You're so distracted. That's literally what he's programmed for.
You're such a hater.

Speaker 1 I am. I'm fundamentally a hater because that's my job.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast for haters, by haters, often about haters.

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Speaker 1 And our guest today, T.T. Lee, would you like to talk about a guy we hate again some more?

Speaker 1 You know, do I have a choice? No, no.

Speaker 1 No, you know what? This is exactly. This is what I love to do on my.
It is to be forced to hear about a bad man. Yeah, I was forced to read about him.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Um, I mean, I forced myself.
This is this is all fundamentally on me. Yeah, I made my choices, I could have written about anyone.

Speaker 1 I will say, if I had to hear it from anyone, I would choose you, Robert Ervin. So, well, thank you.

Speaker 1 So, I would, I, if I had to choose to tell anyone, I would tell you because you would, you and I share the deepest bond that two people can at work, which is you both accidentally took a huge dose of mushrooms together while filming a video for the internet.

Speaker 1 That is still very much, yeah, never forgotten.

Speaker 1 every once in a while someone will bring that up a stranger like did you get high on mushrooms once yeah online i'm like yeah that was me and i always say by the way it was cleared by legal it's completely legal we actually had a legal legal mushrooms they're unregulated you know they were

Speaker 1 they were very unregulated a lot was unregulated in those days uh the internet um

Speaker 1 before like 2016 you know yeah what a wild time before everything got worse yeah Speaking about stuff that's much worse than that, let's get back to this horrible guy in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood.

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Speaker 1 So, in part one, I discussed the fact that Thomas Thistlewood considered himself a bit of a naturalist and that his documentations of all of the different crimes he committed were, in his own eyes, something he saw as a contribution to the scientific record.

Speaker 1 And he also considered like what he was specifically the sexual violence he employed as like part of his work as a farmer.

Speaker 1 You know, slaves aren't entirely treated the same as livestock in his mind, but they're treated more like livestock than people, right? The only reason in which they're kind of different from

Speaker 1 is that they're more valuable, right? Like a slave is, does an enslaved person represents a huge store of value, right? They're worth a lot

Speaker 1 more than like most livestock are, right?

Speaker 1 So these are not, that's part of why even when you hear about something like, oh, he caught this, this woman with a knife, it's not that common for them to kill because that's a lot of money on the line, right?

Speaker 1 That represents somebody's money. It's not out of humanitarianism or anything like that.
They just, it's, it's not. Well, that's pretty dark.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's all this is to them.

Speaker 1 so yeah, one of the things that I find most interesting about the uh the journals of Thomas Thistlewood is the degree to which things that are like these really horrible sex crimes are just like bracketed in between stuff like, oh, one of my lambs gave birth, or I killed a snake, right?

Speaker 1 Like he'll literally like put it in between stuff like that.

Speaker 1 And in her study for Small Acts Journal, Heather Vermeelian explains that by doing things like this,

Speaker 1 he's quote, enclosing particular rape records within signifiers of his progress an increase in livestock and a decrease in the threatening of the undomesticated creaturely population, right?

Speaker 1 And so what he's seeing is like what I'm doing is a part of this like taming of the natural world.

Speaker 1 It's the same as getting rid of, you know, a snake that we have no use for because it will just eat our livestock. Or it's the same as one of my livestock giving birth, right?

Speaker 1 And Darwin's theory of evolution didn't exist yet, right? That's not published until the late 1850s.

Speaker 1 But people who would wind up being Darwin's precursors are alive and publishing books of science in this period of time. And these are a lot of the guys that Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of, right?

Speaker 1 He's like,

Speaker 1 this is his, we don't have like YouTube yet, but like, this is very much the kind of content that he is ingesting, right? Is these like early

Speaker 1 and some of them are bullshit, right? Yeah. Like this is his manosphere, right?

Speaker 1 It's like this mix of works of science and works of like literature and satire and like literal, like just like lies that are also being passed off as science like all of this is like part of his intellectual diet and one of the books that was most influenced exactly like the manosphere right now yeah it there there's yeah and there's one of the one of the things that is weirdly common with like it's a weir it relates directly to a problem we have today is people taking works of satire seriously and then building their for their like views of the world around them like that that happens today with you know shit like we could talk about south Park in the movie Starship Troopers, right?

Speaker 1 Where a lot of people don't get the joke and wind up or take the joke in a specific way and wind up using it as part of like a worldview that justifies some pretty fucked up things.

Speaker 1 And shit like that is happening back then.

Speaker 1 And one of the things, one of the ways that happened to Thomas Thistlewood is he becomes a fan of this like satirical tract published in 1752 called The Man Plant, or A Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed.

Speaker 1 And this is is like a, you've heard of like Thomas Swift's a modest proposal, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Where he's like, he's talking about it, we should, oh, you know, there's all these poor people starving in Ireland. What if we ate Irish babies? What if we like allowed them to be sold as food?

Speaker 1 And it's like, it's, it's a sad, like, he's joking about how cruelly people talk about the poor, right? And particularly poor Irish.

Speaker 1 Like that, it's, that's the joke is like how awful his society is to this group of people, right? That they're treating their babies like a, like chicken to be farmed for food almost, right?

Speaker 1 Like, like that's, that's the point Swift was making, right? And some people get the joke and some people don't.

Speaker 1 And Thistlewood comes across a book that's a similar thing to what Thomas Swift is doing called The Man Plan. And it's written, we don't know exactly who wrote it.

Speaker 1 The author's pseudonym was Vincent Miller. And it's really weird because it comes out in 1752.
So there's no theory of evolution. Our knowledge of heredity is very limited in the 1750s, right?

Speaker 1 We're starting to get an understanding of it, but it is not what we'd call developed. And this work as a joke is an early eugenics text.
It's really fascinating.

Speaker 1 It's like a pre-genetics understanding of eugenics.

Speaker 1 Again, written as a bit, because

Speaker 1 the gist of this book is that this guy, Vincent Miller, is basically saying, hey, we need like

Speaker 1 there's a lot of problems like with the, there's a problem of inequality between the sexes, right? Because Because pregnancy is so dangerous and painful for women.

Speaker 1 And part of what he's doing here is, I think he's kind of making a comment on the upper class in his society, in which it's very common for like women who are of high society after they give birth to hand their baby off to like a nurse, right?

Speaker 1 Who's going to like

Speaker 1 actually like feed and take care of and effectively raise the kid?

Speaker 1 And so part of what part of the satire is, is he's saying, what if we take moms and dads entirely out of the equation and raise human beings like animals on a farm? Right.

Speaker 1 And one way he suggests doing this is like, we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's gestate embryos in an artificial womb.

Speaker 1 And that way we can keep, we can, we can remove human beings entirely from the business of like raising their children, right?

Speaker 1 He's being like, this is a satisfaction. He's trying to point out how

Speaker 1 the direction we're going is even becoming like less removed or more removed and less human and as like a point, but then people are like, great idea.

Speaker 1 yes yes and he's you know this this is right i wanted to go into more detail about this but we're we're going to run long anyway but it's a fascinating work for me just because of how he's he's very clearly satirizing what he sees as like an inhumanity at the highest levels of his society like people aren't even raising or nursing their own kids but part of how he chooses to mock that is by kind of laughing at the idea of like that like pregnancy is dangerous for women.

Speaker 1 And it's a little unclear to me if he's actually acknowledging that that's an inequality or if he's making fun of the people who see it as an inequality. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm just not fully versed enough in like the satire of the 1750s in England to tell you what he's trying to do more.

Speaker 1 But Vincent Miller, part of what he's doing is he's looking at this culture of upper class child neglect and he's proposing a hyperbolic solution, right?

Speaker 1 We create an artificial womb to gestate fertilized embryos outside of the human body and we can raise human beings like animals on a plantation.

Speaker 1 And part of one of the things that the eugenics thing that he kind of proposes here is he pretends that he's done this.

Speaker 1 He likes to writes claims about how I convinced this farm girl, like to give me one of her after she had sex with this boy that she liked to give me a fertilized embryo.

Speaker 1 And I took it out this way and I grew it in a heated cowbladder. And the baby's 20 months old now and it's much healthier than a regular baby.

Speaker 1 And for this reason, I propose that this method of growing human beings will yield hardier offspring, will get, which is proto-eugenic, right?

Speaker 1 That he's saying we could improve, and again, as a joke, but he's still saying we will improve through this method the breeding quality of all of the British people that we start putting into the world, right?

Speaker 1 But he's talking about like,

Speaker 1 it's interesting that he's talking about breeding of white people. And then there's like this parallel world where they're talking about breeding slaves.

Speaker 1 And they're both dehumanizing, but one is like, let's breed more of quote unquote superior white people.

Speaker 1 And the other is like, let's breed more of these people we don't consider human well yeah so that's like a such a weird like i don't know like a weird cognitive dissonance i think that's part of the satire too is him saying hey if we apply here's what happens if we apply the logic we're using on slave populations in places like jamaica to white english people isn't that fucked up Right.

Speaker 1 Like he's, he's, I think part of this is Miller trying to get people in his society to like think about it this way, right? I think that's part of the satire.

Speaker 1 So obviously, this guy does not, is not seriously suggesting this, nor did he literally just ate a baby in a cow's

Speaker 1 black. Like, that's, you can't do that, right? Like, that's like he's, this is a bit.

Speaker 1 It's a little unclear to me how we know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood because he, he writes, he, he quotes extensively from this tract in his diary.

Speaker 1 He writes about it a bunch at the time that he reads it. And there's some, some evidence.

Speaker 1 Some of the scholars who study his journals have suggested that this played like a role in his intellectual development and how he treated people.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of, I kind of think, I don't know if it's that he missed the satire entirely or that he just, like a lot of these tech bros who read science fiction and there's like things in there that you're not supposed to emulate.

Speaker 1 I'm just thinking about the Matrix, right? It's a torment nexus situation where like Vincent Miller is describing the torment nexus that is treating people like livestock.

Speaker 1 And Thomas Thistlewood is like, what a cool idea.

Speaker 1 Why don't I do that? Exactly what you described is so well, yeah. Because it's like all the people who the worst, like, tech bros will bring up like the Matrix as,

Speaker 1 and it's like they completely missed the point, and like, and people, yeah, it's wild. It's like you completely missed it.

Speaker 1 Oh, especially when like those anti-trans tech bros are big fans, or like guys like Andrew Tater fans of the Matrix. It's like, you motherfuckers missed the point as hard as it could be missed.

Speaker 1 Have you ever actually looked at this movie? Yeah. Yeah.
This is not like the authors around.

Speaker 1 They've talked about this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So they're like, this is what it means.
We'll never know. You're like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So I think part of the big impact that this satire or satiric work has on Thomas is the way in which the author describes human breeding in agricultural terms.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to quote a passage from this book.

Speaker 1 It is then easy to be conceived that by ridding the women of the plagues and fatigue of gestation, they may teem anew at much shorter intervals of time.

Speaker 1 They may then become like those fertile fields that yield two or three crops in a season, and their fecundity will only be limited by such small reposes as the necessity of lying fallow will require for the reparation of the ground.

Speaker 1 They will continue longer, able, and apt for impregnation, so that upon a moderate estimate, a well-disposed, well-constituted, and industrious woman may furnish her country with 130 to 140 or more children.

Speaker 1 So it's very much like, again, talking about women like a field

Speaker 1 and talking about human babies as crops. You know, you can see, again,

Speaker 1 Thomas the Swiss

Speaker 1 people are supposed to like this. I think Miller is saying, this is bad, right? That's why it's a satire, but Thistlewood is just like, what a cool idea.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is well, because even you say it now, I'm like, it's satire, but then I'm like,

Speaker 1 I don't know how far we've come. Like, right.
Some people may look at that today and, you know, there's the whole Tradwise Breeders and look at that and be like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Look Look at the pronatalist movement, right? Like, there's more than a little of that in here, right?

Speaker 1 Like, of the, of this, like, yeah, we, we, we can breed stronger and better people to improve the nature of society.

Speaker 1 It always gets to be a problem when you're thinking about, like, how can we, how can we make the next generation, like, tinker with it genetically to make it better?

Speaker 1 Um, which is, I mean, that's part of what's interesting. This is in 1752, this comes out.
And it is kind of talking about like genetic engineering in a way, right?

Speaker 1 And before we knew what those words meant, but it's a proto-tract in that line of like science fiction, right?

Speaker 1 Like there's there's bits of Gattaca in this, right? Like Gattaca has bits of this in its DNA.

Speaker 1 If you'll forgive the term, right? The movie Gattaca.

Speaker 1 This idea of like we're, well, by changing this, we make people that are hardier and stronger and we can ship them overseas. We're creating plantations of men, right?

Speaker 1 That's that's what Miller writes in this in this book. And then we'll ship all these people that we've grown like crops over to

Speaker 1 populate the colonies.

Speaker 1 Quote, By this means, we shall see infinite broods of subjects serve to enpeople and enrich, as well as our island, as those vast tracts in North America, which are so thinly inhabited, which are now obligated to be stocked with other foreign refugees.

Speaker 1 A naturalization bill will thus be out of the question.

Speaker 1 We may also then more reasonably grasp the conquest of both the Indies, our actual possessions, and those which we shall infallibly, by dint of superior numbers, procure, will be abundantly supplied with swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as China itself.

Speaker 1 And part, again, there's this knowledge that we're only peopling the new world. We need, it's mostly slaves in a lot of these colonies, right? Slaves or local people that we're ruling, because

Speaker 1 British people can't survive that well in all of these places, right? And part of the joke that Miller is like is like, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 What if we could get rid of all of these non-white people by just outbreeding them with these human beings we grew in a field?

Speaker 1 And I, again, saying that to satirize a lot of the attitudes at his time, but I don't think everyone gets is interprets it that way.

Speaker 1 We know Thistlewood owned a copy of this book after it was published, and he wrote about it in his diary several times.

Speaker 1 I don't know that he picked up the critique of aristocratic family dynamics, but the idea of peoplingly conquered territory and improving the quality of new generations was clearly on his mind, and that's how he saw a lot of what he was doing.

Speaker 1 I found very little analysis of his impact, of this, the impact this book had on him, other than what Heather Vermoulen writes.

Speaker 1 Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers, and they mostly ignore this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 A lot of them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all, right?

Speaker 1 Like some of the, like, the most some of them will say is that, like, well, there's some debate as to whether or not, you know, what he was doing was consensual.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, there's really not. Like, he owned these people.
They couldn't read Latin, I guess.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they couldn't read Latin.

Speaker 1 But yeah, there's a, there's a lot of like, this stuff gets mixed.

Speaker 1 Vermoulin is one of the the only female scholars that I've seen analyze Thistlewood's writing, and she does center the man, this like book in her discussions of why he wrote about his sex crimes the way she did.

Speaker 1 When discussing passages from Miller's book that he excerpted for his diary, she concludes, Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his classification of enslaved women and rape records, which suggests that his practices preceded or at least existed in reciprocal relationship to his engagement of pseudoscientific theory.

Speaker 1 In other words, he does start writing about what he's doing,

Speaker 1 he would consider his sexual exploits before he reads this book. But the way he quotes from it suggests that he considers it to justify, provide a justification to his behavior, right?

Speaker 1 And that justification may have helped him continue to find ways to explain to himself why what he was doing was okay, right?

Speaker 1 He's like finding, yeah, like the echo chamber, sort of like looking for more signs that he's going down the right path. Right, right, exactly.
Like, that's something he's got to do for himself here.

Speaker 1 We know that during the week in which he first reads the man plant, he oversees the harvest season at his plantation, and he chooses to mark the occasion by picking out another victim to sexually assault.

Speaker 1 Immediately after the entry in which he notes that he's finished this book, he writes, A.M. cum ive sup ter in the old negro house paid a bit, right?

Speaker 1 In other words, he slept with this woman, assaulted her on the ground. That's what sup terum means,

Speaker 1 near the slave house, and he paid her the equivalent of like a dollar or two, right? And so that's coming in immediately after he like exerts passages from this book.

Speaker 1 These things exist, his like intellectual diet, and then the things that he is doing and justifying based on the stuff he's reading all exist kind of in the same continuum together.

Speaker 1 Vermillin explains: In other words, after noting that he returned a text that imagined plantations of men, Thistlewood records that he raped an enslaved woman named Eve and that he did so at the estate's current harvest site.

Speaker 1 Put differently, in an engineered Eden, the pseudoscientist Vincent Miller grew his pterophyphius from an egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter.

Speaker 1 Thistlewood marked the time of harvest by raping an enslaved woman named Eve, right?

Speaker 1 There's this weird degree to which what he's noting down and the things that he's partaking, he makes them almost fit the things that he's doing. Like, references,

Speaker 1 see, this is why men shouldn't be allowed to read, you know, it's like they get ideas watching them.

Speaker 1 Well, I got good news about literacy levels,

Speaker 1 Too many ideas, too many rapes, you know.

Speaker 1 Maybe, yeah, this is why you need, this is why maybe it's useful sometimes to like do your, this is the danger of the autodidact is encountering too much about the world outside the context of having to talk with other people about it, right?

Speaker 1 Who might be like, I don't know, man, it seems like, seems like you might be going some crazy places with this.

Speaker 1 Maybe you're just using all this stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people.

Speaker 1 But, you know, he's in a way, I think this is a product of the fact that he's isolated from the intellectual culture he's obsessed with. He's not, it's not a two-way relationship.

Speaker 1 He's digesting these books and these articles, and he's talking with them, about them with other white exiles.

Speaker 1 And he probably, probably part of his ego is that he seems like a learned man among this population of exiles.

Speaker 1 But he also knows he's not really fit to be part of the intellectual community that he admires, right? And some of that is shown in the fact that he doesn't really understand everything he's reading.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because he doesn't get it. He seems to not, it goes over his head.
Yeah, he may not get everything, right? Or at least not the way that it's meant to be gotten.

Speaker 1 Now, when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own, soon after he starts working as the overseer at Egypt Plantation, Eve is not one of them, this woman that we just talked about.

Speaker 1 She belonged to the Cope family, who were his employers. And as was often the case of female enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron of the plantation.

Speaker 1 Mrs. Cope was not great at this job, and it's a mark at how unhappy Eve was that she escaped frequently.

Speaker 1 And this is some of how we get how Thomas would have punished the people that he was overseeing while he's working at this plantation.

Speaker 1 On March 3rd, 1755, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four people who escaped that day.

Speaker 1 The next day, he wrote, William Crookshanks, a white worker below Thistlewood, brought Eve into the savannah to her mistress, Mrs. Cope, but she soon made her escape again.

Speaker 1 Below this, Thomas notes in small print, he slept with her under the logwood. So what he is saying there is that

Speaker 1 this other white worker catches Eve after she gets out and he brings her back to the big house and she escapes again and Thomas William catches her again and then he rapes her as like a punishment for escaping, or maybe just because it's what he wanted to do, right?

Speaker 1 But part of what we're getting here is how this is not just Thomas engaging in this behavior.

Speaker 1 This is all of the white people, all of the white men particularly on these farms are doing this habitually. Like

Speaker 1 it's incredible how casually he notes this, right? What Crookshanks does. This is not even like a significant deal to him.

Speaker 1 It's just like, well, of course, he recaptured this woman and he did that as he was taking her back, right?

Speaker 1 And Vermoulin goes on to note: quote, the following week, after dinner, four heartily drunk white male colonists, all Thistlewood's acquaintances, hauled Eve separately into the water room, the bathroom, and were concerned with, which means raped her.

Speaker 1 One of them, his good friend Harry Weech, twice, first and last. The following month, Eve ran away two more times.

Speaker 1 And again, like, this is both how they're trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to themselves. Like, well, she escaped, so we have to do this, you know?

Speaker 1 It's, and it's so casual. Like, none of them even think about it.

Speaker 1 Like, this is the normal behavior for white men in this society is to commit like rape at the drop of a hat against these people that they own, right? Like, that is the normal behavior.

Speaker 1 It's, I mean, it's also within, I, yeah, even within like what you're saying

Speaker 1 in the context of the time I sense a lot of discrepancies because it's like on one hand he's justifying his recording of it as like science and you know making sure he knows who he's following but then when he's with his friends he's saying like oh we're just doing this to punish her but like that also would contradict him being the father if everyone's raping her.

Speaker 1 And so there's this like already like you can tell the the argument's shaky to begin with Like clearly, like what we understand is like this man's doing bad things and is driven by, you know, his bad motives and then looking for different justifications, but they don't even, they're not even consistent.

Speaker 1 Because if he's trying to father someone, he wouldn't be like

Speaker 1 actively wanting other men to father children with her, right? Because he wouldn't legally be the dad.

Speaker 1 No, and I mean, that's, I think part of what that hints at here is that what matters more to him even than that is like, it's not just the idea of like, well, I want to insert my DNA into this population as part of the civilizing act, but the very act of asserting sexual dominance over these people we own

Speaker 1 is us civilizing the wild world. That's a lot how these guys are thinking.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting is part of what you get from this is because Thistlewood doesn't write about what his colleagues are doing to these women the same way he does about himself.

Speaker 1 He doesn't put it in Latin, right? He uses these kind of body terms. They were concerned with her, right?

Speaker 1 Which is commonly meant, you know, had sex with kind of when people were writing about this sort of thing. Oh, so he puts that in English.
Yes, that's in English.

Speaker 1 So he's okay with like kind of like airing out their dirty laundry, but not I think, yeah, and I think there's a degree to which he does kind of think he's better than them and see what he's doing, even though it's not as different and better, right?

Speaker 1 I see.

Speaker 1 Because Eve, I mean, this is a years-long thing for them. Like she runs away repeatedly because clearly her life is a nightmare.
And Thomas will rape her repeatedly again, right?

Speaker 1 Often sometimes it incites her escaping. Sometimes he does it after she escapes, but he does it constantly.

Speaker 1 And he writes about him doing it fundamentally differently than he writes about his friends doing it, which does say something, right?

Speaker 1 It talks about the incoherence in his worldview, as you pointed out.

Speaker 1 And it just also, I think it shows this kind of narcissism that he does think that he's special and that what he's doing is different than them, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So the night after this, I mentioned in episode one, he's in a long-term, what he would call a relationship.

Speaker 1 We're not calling it that, but it's important to talk about how he describes it with this enslaved woman, Fibba, right? P-H-I-B-B-A-H is how he spells it.

Speaker 1 And so she, he has ostensibly, there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her, like, because he talks to her, like, she, she, like, he's, he comes back to her.

Speaker 1 pretty regularly. And it clearly at least matters when she's pissed at him.
And the way he describes it, she gets angry because she thinks of this as like them, him cheating on her, right?

Speaker 1 And I, this is kind of, again, this isn't a relation, this is like a parody of an actual relationship, like a sick pair. Like it's, it's a perversion of everything that that's supposed to be.

Speaker 1 But he does write about it like that, right? He describes the fact that after he goes over to her after assaulting Eve again,

Speaker 1 Fibba seems much out of humor about Eve yesterday. And he's angry and he doesn't know who could have told her, right? Like who the hell let her know what I did to this woman, right?

Speaker 1 And not not Maddie did it, just Maddie got caught. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, and is she angry because of what he's doing to this person because of the fundamental inequalities?

Speaker 1 Or is she more just angry because, like, she sees him as this person that she's in a relationship with and he cheated on her? How does how we will never know what this looked like in her head, right?

Speaker 1 Because we don't get, he's, he's not interested in asking her. He doesn't talk to her.
Like, we only get pieces of her from the outside, like we do of all of these people that he owns and is abusing.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 to talk about Eve again, she escapes in the early fall and she manages to stay free almost the entire month of October. When she was caught, Thomas quote, whipped and chained her.

Speaker 1 She subsequently escaped once more and was brought home on December 23rd and chained again.

Speaker 1 The next day, she escaped and was brought back the day after that, whereupon Thomas chained her in the cookroom. This pattern continued for years.

Speaker 1 When she ran away and was caught in the spring of 1757, Thistlewood reported her punishment thusly: tied her to the oven post and gave her a little correction.

Speaker 1 Now, that phrasing could mean a lot, and so that's as good a segue for any as me to discuss the corporal punishment on the plantation as it existed in the time in which Thomas was doing his job and the precise kinds of violence that he and his peers meted out on the people that they owned.

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Speaker 1 And we're back.

Speaker 1 So oh no, there's more.

Speaker 1 There's more. You did, you did say it would get worse, so you did warn me.

Speaker 1 It keeps getting worse. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think one of the ways in which even pretty good histories now are often kind of short is that they talk about whipping and they talk about the amount of violence, which is important, and they even talk about like the amount amount of sexual violence, but there's often not detailed accountings given on like some of the most sadistic punishments.

Speaker 1 And part of it's because we'll talk about this in a little bit, but even some historians are really uncomfortable talking about the details of the sadism of the punishments that white people engaged in in places like Jamaica.

Speaker 1 And it is really upsetting to talk about. Thomas arrived in Jamaica as a practiced farmer and an amateur naturalist.

Speaker 1 And there's no evidence that prior to arriving here, he was a violent man or had ever so much as struck another person.

Speaker 1 Maybe he had, maybe he'd been in a lot of fights, but he didn't write about it, right? We don't know.

Speaker 1 If he had not been violent prior to coming to Jamaica, this changed rapidly upon starting work at a plantation.

Speaker 1 On his first day working as assistant overseer on his first plantation on the island, his boss ordered him to give 300 lashes to his driver, who was one of the oldest enslaved people on the property.

Speaker 1 Thistlewood delivered the punishment, which was likely ordered as much to toughen him up as to punish the enslaved man in question, right? There's this new white guy on the farm.

Speaker 1 We got to have him beat the absolute hell out of the most like sympathetic and liked person on the like enslaved persons. Like testing him a bit.
Yes. Are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he proves cruel enough for the job. Now, as I noted, Jamaica was reputed for being a really egalitarian place for white men, right? Even poor white men would be treated well by the rich white men.

Speaker 1 And part of why is because

Speaker 1 there's this understanding that everyone will bind together when it's time to do violence against the much larger enslaved majority.

Speaker 1 James Robertson writes that, quote, the generous hospitality of a planter's household rested on uninhibited violence in the fields.

Speaker 1 Thistle would absorb this lesson and continued to order floggings for the rest of his life in Jamaica.

Speaker 1 And yeah, that is, it's one of these things. He exists in Jamaica during the high point of slavery.

Speaker 1 and slave plantations on the island, both because the weather is unusually good during like 37 years that he's there, and so harvests are really good.

Speaker 1 It's just a good time climactically to be growing sugar in Jamaica. And also, there's no limits whatsoever on slavery, right, while he is there.
And that's going to start to change after he dies.

Speaker 1 In 1789, not long after he passes, anti-slavery advocates are going to testify at parliament in Westminster about the abuse of enslaved people in Jamaica.

Speaker 1 Robertson writes about this, quote, these included, the testimony, included cruel beatings occurring not just out on lonely estates, but in gardens in Savannah-Lamar, the parish's principal port, where only a hedge separated passers-by from the victim's screams.

Speaker 1 More frightening still, while the witnesses stated the cries were heard with universal detestation, the perpetrator was not brought to legal punishment.

Speaker 1 Historians of slavery have made little use of these remarkable depositions, despite their early date.

Speaker 1 The arguments for disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement found these witnesses, so their evidence can hardly be objective.

Speaker 1 This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists and then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slaveholding societies could be.

Speaker 1 Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion that such horrors could not exist in a British colony.

Speaker 1 So there's even this problem with a lot of histories where they're like, we can't take these accounts by anti-slavery activists of how brutal the system was as literal because they're biased.

Speaker 1 Because they're saying they're not accountable. Who's that? Why? I mean, it's hard that you're saying.

Speaker 1 It would be crazy if you don't have a biased opinion. I mean, it's like what you were saying about historians not leaving those details out because it's like it's hard to face and hard to talk about.

Speaker 1 I mean, literally, that's the first sign that it's so bad. Yeah.
And you're probably talking about this as hell.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. Yeah.
I can't. Yeah.
People just walking by hearing it are like, this is like, I don't even like. Oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 These are people who didn't, you know, they're just like, if I have to look at it, I don't like it. And that's maybe the sign that.

Speaker 1 We've gone too far.

Speaker 1 That's an important part of the history of slavery, too, is not just the people like Thomas who are just like deeply have completely given their souls up to this pit of evil, but the people who like kind of walk by it for like 10 minutes and are like, wow, that seems really bad.

Speaker 1 I got a place to be. Like, I got to get moving, you know, like, I got to, I got to get to work or whatever.
Like, yeah, that's bad, but like, I got shit to do.

Speaker 1 You know, it's the, it's the same thing in every society to an extent when you talk about the stuff that's horrible but widely accepted.

Speaker 1 Is there's a large number of people who always know something's wrong, but like, bro, I got to make rent, you know, like,

Speaker 1 yeah, good stuff.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 so as we saw in the case when we were talking about Eve, people who often escaped numerous times and would be whipped numerous times when they were taken back by slave catchers.

Speaker 1 And when this didn't stop them from trying to escape, slave owners and overseers developed more elaborate methods of punishment. One that acted as a sort of garnish to flogging was pickling, right?

Speaker 1 So, if you, if they want to flog you, but you've already been flogged, they will, or if you do something particularly bad, they'll pickle you after they flog you. And that's a a literal term.

Speaker 1 You take pickle spices and salt and lime juice and peppers and you rub them in the open wounds that you've whipped into their body. Oh, man.
Jesus Christ. That's a normal punishment.

Speaker 1 That's like a normal thing.

Speaker 1 Thomas, that's his part of his day job. He does it like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, whatever. Think about like something you have to do like once or twice, at least like a couple of times a week at your day job.
And it's like that for him, right? Like,

Speaker 1 that's his gig, you know?

Speaker 1 On a website called Same Passage, I found a detailed account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings.

Speaker 1 These include: in 1756, runaway enslaved people named Punch and Kwaku were, quote, well flogged and then washed and rubbed in salt, pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper.

Speaker 1 As noted with Eve, chains were also used as a punishment. In 1771, a runaway named Kubah was flogged, chained, and then had a brand marked into her forehead.

Speaker 1 So she had a brand like burned into her head, right?

Speaker 1 There's some evidence. This is so hard to hear.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 It's bad.

Speaker 1 I'm still here, but this is we can take a minute. Like this is

Speaker 1 all the worst stuff that people have ever done.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Don't know what to say, but I'm, I mean, there's

Speaker 1 part of what I'm frustrated, part of what was upsetting as I read this was how little of this kind of stuff I'd heard of.

Speaker 1 Like, considering myself reasonably well read, I think I'd heard a little about pickling as like a thing that some particular sadists did, as opposed to like, no, no, no, this was like a norm, like this was a very normal thing to do.

Speaker 1 Like, this was kind of the escalation chain up from the first flogging, right? As you pickle these guys.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 I, I hate getting into this next part, uh, TT. I really apologize for, like, I don't like having to talk about this.
There's no good way to talk about this.

Speaker 1 Um, so I'm just going to read this and you know, we can move past it because this is bad.

Speaker 1 Um, in 1756, Thomas writes that an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugar cane and was whipped, and then he made, Thomas made another enslaved person named Egypt shit in his mouth.

Speaker 1 Months later, when Derby was caught eating sugar cane again, he was flogged and pickled, and then Thomas made Hector shit in his mouth. This was a normal punishment in Jamaica.

Speaker 1 It's not the only place where it was done. But this was something that was extensively done by slave owners and overseers on the island.

Speaker 1 They would force enslaved people to defecate in each other's mouths as a punishment.

Speaker 1 Depending on the severity of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth gagged and covered while that was the shit was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment, right?

Speaker 1 This is a thing that there's a version of this called Derby's Dose that's a really common extreme punishment on the island. And it's done.
It's not just done for slaves who like escape.

Speaker 1 Sometimes like someone steals some sugar or some food and you just do this insane thing to them.

Speaker 1 And it's like, there's a degree to which it's almost a method of entertainment for some of these white guys is coming up with these increasingly sadistic and fucked up and elaborate ways to hurt the people that they own.

Speaker 1 But if you need to know anything about the moral quality of the white men on Jamaica at the time, like a lot of the common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds.

Speaker 1 That was a normal thing they would do.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Very deeply disturbed.
It's upsetting. Yeah.
It's it's as bad as it gets, right?

Speaker 1 And the only good news that I can give you, if indeed it counts as good, is that most of these punishments seem to have died out after like 1756, 57, right?

Speaker 1 This is kind of when Thomas starts doing this less and less. We don't know.
Maybe this kind of just fell out of popularity. Maybe it was...

Speaker 1 it was so damaging to the workforce that they stopped doing it. We don't really know.
But this is something that exists and is normal for a while while he's early in his career.

Speaker 1 And it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the period of time that he's there.

Speaker 1 But it's a pretty common, like derby's dose is a thing that other people are doing in Jamaica to the people that they owned.

Speaker 1 Thomas spends his first 17 years on the island working for other planters, primarily in Egypt. In 1760, he made a note of his active preparations to purchase land of his own.

Speaker 1 In 1767, he'd saved up enough to buy a 160-acre farm, which he named Breadnut Island.

Speaker 1 He'd been purchasing people this whole time, and he'd made extra money that let him buy the land by renting them out to his boss.

Speaker 1 And though, so by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like 30 people and he moves them onto this plantation that he owns, right?

Speaker 1 In an article for the social historian Barbara Starman's writes of his human acquisitions, he wrote of purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid 112 pounds for two men and 200 pounds for one boy and three girls.

Speaker 1 The two men were named Will and Dick. Will was about 25 years old and stood five foot three and a half, three and two tenths of an inch.

Speaker 1 And Dick was about 22 years old and taller at five feet seven tenths of an inch the boys and girls were kuba aged about 15 suki aged about 14 maria aged about 15 and pompey aged about 16.

Speaker 1 all were branded with thislewood's mark a double tt on their right shoulders because he's scarring all of these people that he owns in order to prove that he owns

Speaker 1 tt yeah i don't like that he goes by tt yeah i'm sorry i i i didn't think about that either but it's it's for thislewood right no no no he's just initials but yeah yeah yeah thomas thistlewood yes but yes unfortunately yeah sorry no there's other there's other tts out there there's other yeah yeah yeah i feel his dad was a dick and named robert so you know we're all

Speaker 1 true there you go we're both represented here yeah both of our names have come up in this fucked up episode uh so now that he's independent right he he's on he's he's a planter now he's risen to the very top of jamaican society right about 16 years in and he's working his own property with like the people that he owns he's making them work um one thing i'll say for him is that he vaccinates his, his, the people he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson didn't.

Speaker 1 He doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does this because he doesn't want them to die of smallpox because they're valuable assets, right?

Speaker 1 Now, that said, he could, you know, this is, he is a guy. I think he wanted to see himself as a nice master.
He makes a note of every like nice thing that he does for the people that he owns.

Speaker 1 Like around Christmas, that he gave them each 18 herrings and a bottle of rum.

Speaker 1 Some of them he made share bottles of rum, right? Not everyone got their own bottle of rum, but he like he writes about this stuff as like, see, I could be a nice guy.

Speaker 1 I'm not always a huge dick to everybody.

Speaker 1 It's definitely a sign of a not nice person when they keep a tally of every nice thing they do.

Speaker 1 Have documentation. Yeah, I don't, yeah, that's definitely a red flag.
Yeah, he's going through his own diaries being like, boy, I need to revise this a little. I come across as a monster.

Speaker 1 I'll say I gave him a herring. He writes it like not just in Latin.
He like writes it in multiple languages, Just in case you guys didn't get that. Yeah.
Yeah. I like putting it in French too.

Speaker 1 People need to know I give him rum sometimes. Draw a photo of it just in case you can't read.
Yeah. Here's a picture of me giving all my

Speaker 1 employees or slaves. Yeah, a lot of posed pictures of him handing rum bottles to scared-looking men and women.
Yikes. Speaking of not, I mean, rum, maybe rum.
I don't know if we'll get ads for that.

Speaker 1 We'll get ads for something. Here they are.

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Speaker 1 We're back talking about this monster.

Speaker 1 How much more is there?

Speaker 1 We're through the most graphic horror that we're going to talk about, which, I mean, there's a lot more that could be. You can read more about that kind of stuff if you want to.
It's bleak, you know?

Speaker 1 I've had a pretty like okay pregnancy in terms of like not crying spontaneously, but you know what? I think we're gonna we're gonna really challenge that today.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, unfortunately, yeah, we have a little bit of that coming up here, too. Uh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So I can't give you a lot of positive stories here, but one sort of good thing

Speaker 1 is that during his end on a low note. Oh, there's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 one of the positives of his situation is that while he's working at Egypt Plantation,

Speaker 1 he's like a gardener. He really likes plants.
He writes about them a lot, and he develops a preference for this specific plant, Bromeliad penguin,

Speaker 1 which he uses as like a natural fence for parts of the farms he works on.

Speaker 1 And then when he gets his own plantation, he moves these plants, which people call prickly penguins, to keep pests away from his like personal gardens.

Speaker 1 And he doesn't know this about them, but they're an herbal abortifacient, right?

Speaker 1 And there's evidence that a lot of the women who live on these plantations, both when he's an overseer and then when he owns one, know how this plant can be used and don't tell him and use it to stop him themselves from carrying his kids to term, right?

Speaker 1 Like, there's evidence. Again, when you talk about this, there's always resistance happening, even if it's not well documented, even if the historic record doesn't give it to us directly.

Speaker 1 You can tell he writes about, like, wow, there's a lot of what he calls miscarriages among these women that he thought were going to carry kids to term.

Speaker 1 And we know from other things that some of these women were using this plant as an herbal abortifasium. Oh, he didn't know, but he's

Speaker 1 kept a diary of other ways to give people miscarriages. Right.
But he didn't know about, like, again,

Speaker 1 his knowledge is never as wide as

Speaker 1 he thinks it is, right?

Speaker 1 And, and this is, I think, there's something. But the good part?

Speaker 1 Well, it's evidence of these people who are in like the worst situation imaginable taking some agency for themselves, right? Some choice of like, I'm not going to do this for you.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to deliver you a kid that you're going to own, right? I have an ability to control that and I'm going to, right?

Speaker 1 And that's an important part of the story is like the agency, these people who had very little options for exercising agency were able to like fight for, right? And they had to like do it underground.

Speaker 1 They had to hide it, but they did do it, right?

Speaker 1 Anyway, I feel like I've detailed enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the gravity of his evil to you.

Speaker 1 But there is one thing. No, one thing I want more.

Speaker 1 Well, there's one thing we should say that I'm not going to go into detail on, but I will tell you, he talks a lot about pedophilia. That is another aspect of this, right? That's something he's doing.

Speaker 1 He will buy girls when they're 11 or 12, and he will, not long after, assault them. He definitely is up there on the list of worst motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 He's just about the worst person I've ever heard from directly. Jesus

Speaker 1 Christ. Yeah.
The fact that it's his own diary. And I don't believe that he was one of the normal ones.
I think there were just a lot of bad people.

Speaker 1 I feel like I still want to hold my, like, I don't know if, like, maybe all the bad people were there, but, like, you know, if he was, this was normal, really? This guy does not sound normal.

Speaker 1 Among owners of slave plantations, he's normal, right? That's very few people. I guess that's not even within slave societies.
But, like, so it is, it is, these are the worst people.

Speaker 1 Among the worst group of people. He's a normal example of the worst people ever.
Yeah. One of the worst.
Yeah, I see. Well, that's important.

Speaker 1 Like, when you get these, for example, sanitized stories, fiction and otherwise, about like the

Speaker 1 pre-Civil War like South in the U.S. that like depicts how, oh, look at these beautiful houses and this like cordial civil society, right? Undergirding it is the same shit.
Thomas Thistlewood.

Speaker 1 It is the exact same kind of sex crimes. It's the same kind of sadistic violence, rubbing shit into open wounds and pickling people and whatnot.

Speaker 1 Just like that's all of these guys wearing these fancy coats who got painted in their plantation houses. They're all the same kind of guy as Thomas Thistlewood, right?

Speaker 1 Those are the people who are the same, right? All of these people who own human beings and make their living off of it are all doing shit like this.

Speaker 1 None of them are particularly better than the others, right? I think that's kind of the important thing to take out of Thistlewood's work, like of his life's work, his diaries.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's not an isolated incident.

Speaker 1 We can't just project like one bad guy. Yeah.
What a crazy asshole. No, no, no.
This is his whole society. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I, I, oh, yeah.
So you got one more, one more knocked out, terrible thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's, there's, there's, I mean, I don't know, it's this like debate in my head of like, how, how, how much detail do we go into here? Let's hear it.

Speaker 1 I want to talk a little bit about this girl he buys, Bess, when she's 11 years old, and he buys her as a gift for Fibba, right?

Speaker 1 This, this woman who he does not own, someone else owns her, and he is renting her, and she is living with him as his significant other, right?

Speaker 1 It's a very odd, it's a very, it's not a weird relationship within this culture. This kind of stuff happens all the time, but it's like weird

Speaker 1 to contemplate. Yeah, he's paying for a white person right to have that who owns Fibba, right?

Speaker 1 He does buy her freedom when he dies, kind of, but like, yeah, it's, it's a very, like, that is the situation here. And he, he buys her a little girl to be basically her personal slave.
So fucking up.

Speaker 1 And for the first couple of years that this girl Bess is there, she's an assistant to Fibba. And she's, he also uses her as a runner, right?

Speaker 1 He'll send this little girl, this 11-year-old girl, running across the island on foot and he'll to bring, exchange books with his friends on other plantations.

Speaker 1 She's his postal service in a way, right?

Speaker 1 Like there's one point where like he'll, he sends a letter to a doctor friend of his, and she runs back to him with a copy of the works of Francis Bacon that her, that this guy he sent a letter to sends back with her, right?

Speaker 1 So this is kind of, this is how like social, like, this is how these guys are all staying in touch in Jamaica.

Speaker 1 It's how they share letters and books and their thoughts on the scientific discoveries of the day.

Speaker 1 In 1778, this girl best runs back to the plantation with a copy of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity. That's how modern this is, right?

Speaker 1 He finds out about the shit Ben Franklin is working on because this girl he buys at 11 runs back to his house with a copy of the book that some other white dude gave her, right?

Speaker 1 To give to her master.

Speaker 1 At the same time as this knowledge is being transmitted, abuse is being transmitted. Thomas is going to sexually abuse this girl.
We assume people he's sending her to do this too.

Speaker 1 In an excellent dissertation for the English department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth Polka writes, One can't help but wonder if Bess spent any time looking through Franklin and Bacon's printed works on her journeys between the homes of these men, particularly Franklin's observations and experiments, which was illustrated with engraved plates depicting Leyden jars sprouting currents of electricity.

Speaker 1 One especially wonders about Bess's interactions with the text when considering that in August of 1766, shortly after Thistlewood acquired his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistlewood flogged a then 12-year-old Bess for meddling with my watch and telescope in the Great House Piazza.

Speaker 1 Three years later, after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescope, Thistlewood first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the location, east of the pond.

Speaker 1 She was 15. And part of, again, these stories you don't get directly, but there's this girl who is in this terrible situation and is very intellectually curious.

Speaker 1 He describes her as messing with the telescope. She's trying to understand this.
She's trying to look out at the stars, probably, right?

Speaker 1 Like, it's not, it's very reasonable that Polka wonders if she would have, during this, what little time she had alone, taken a glimpse at some of these books, because this is clearly a curious child, right?

Speaker 1 And she's just completely locked away from exploring any of that by the system of heinous abuse that she is never able to escape, right?

Speaker 1 And this is, it's important to note, when I talk about this not being that abnormal within the mainstream white high society at the time, there's a really good passage in Polka's dissertation that talks about, like, does a good job of putting Thomas's habits and his documentation of what the violence he was doing into like a global context.

Speaker 1 Quote, Merriweather Lewis and William Clark, following the advice of Thomas Jefferson, kept extensive diaries of their North American settler colonial mission into native territory, in which they would occasionally record details of the sexual encounters between the men on their surveying expedition and the native women, as well as the spread of venereal disease.

Speaker 1 These recordings were later printed in either French or Latin by editors as means of coding the explicit details, just like Thistlewood did.

Speaker 1 18th century Virginia planter William Byrd also kept a coded log of his sexual activity as a means of control.

Speaker 1 More specifically, Richard Godbear explains that he was anxious to control himself as he was to control others.

Speaker 1 Further, Godbear concludes that Byrd experienced chronic tension within the Chesapeake's white population during the 17th century and fostered an obsession with control in colonial southern society, while the elite's emulation of English gentry culture necessitated an intense self-consciousness and careful scrutiny of one's personal behavior.

Speaker 1 Like Thistlewood, Byrd coded his diary in shorthand.

Speaker 1 However, unlike Thistlewood, Byrd's entire diary was coded, not only the segments related to sexual exploitation, and he kept the diary in a locked library.

Speaker 1 And Kenneth Lockridge speculates that Bird's shorthand may have been intended above all to hide Byrd's further-encoded self from his wife.

Speaker 1 In an even more well-known instance of sexual documentation, diarist Samuel Pepys, who also recorded his sex acts, occasionally coded his sexual activity in Latin, as well as in French and Spanish.

Speaker 1 What emerges in this cross-comparison of 18th-century diarists is a gendered coding of sexual documentation, where Enlightenment-era men use quotidian writing in order to document, conceal, and control their exploitation of women.

Speaker 1 That's what I mean when I say, like, this guy is not that weird for his social level, you know? Well, and because women weren't part, so it was like a code because women

Speaker 1 weren't educated, couldn't read Latin or were less likely to be, right? That makes me wonder about the whole Catholic Church.

Speaker 1 I mean, I guess now they're not doing all the sermons in Latin, but didn't they for a long time do everything in Latin? They did for a long time. And they have all the sex crimes.

Speaker 1 And part of that, I mean, there was argument, like, and this is part of like the Protestant Reformation, that there's this part of that is out of a desire to keep preaching and keep responsibility for like interpreting the word of God out of the common man, right?

Speaker 1 Right. You have to be learned to some extent to read the Bible and talk about it in Latin.

Speaker 1 And that cuts down the number of people who might be, because, you know, part of the thing, part of the thing the Catholic Church wanted to stop was anyone who had a different opinion about Christianity going into business for themselves, which is where we are right now, right?

Speaker 1 Like that's the way, that's what Protestant is, is like anyone can go into business for themselves as like interpreting the word of God, basically.

Speaker 1 So there is something to what you say, right? And that. yeah, and there's all those sex crimes in the Bible.
So maybe there's plenty of sex crimes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Over the course of his 37 years in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood recorded exactly 3,852 sexual acts with 138 different women. The vast majority of these women were enslaved.

Speaker 1 The vast majority of these acts would have been sexual assault. In his analysis of the diaries, Richard Dunn estimated,

Speaker 1 yeah, 3,852 with a, you know, somewhere around 130 victims would be the way of looking at it.

Speaker 1 One of the people who analyzed the diaries, Richard Dunn, estimated that prior to coming to Jamaica, Thomas would have averaged at most around 10 sexual encounters per year on the island.

Speaker 1 This increased to about 200, sometimes more. So, part of when you're looking at what motivated him to become a slave owner and a planter, sexual opportunity is not 0% of that story, right?

Speaker 1 He finds ways to justify it that are heavier, but this does come down to that. You know, that's part of what this comes down to.

Speaker 1 Cool Cool stuff.

Speaker 1 Horrifying. So did he ever have kids or raise a family? He has about 14 kids,

Speaker 1 all who are born enslaved.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1 And he does, he writes about, he has a child with Fiba,

Speaker 1 and he writes about punishing, like having this kid whipped, you know, for

Speaker 1 disobedience.

Speaker 1 This child dies in 1780, you know, which is about six years before Thomas passes on. So his children, I mean, they're living these difficult lives.
They're working on plantations, right?

Speaker 1 So they don't benefit from easy lives, right?

Speaker 1 And yeah, I mean, it's

Speaker 1 there's a lot that's complicated here and like what's going on with him and Fiba in how he sees

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 relationships with the people that he brings into the world this way, but it's all based on kinds of exploitation, right?

Speaker 1 Like that's, that's what's happening here fundamentally. It's all exploitation.
That's the only kind of relationship that he has with any of these people is one based on ownership.

Speaker 29 Does he at least die of something horrific?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, there's not really a lot of good ways to die in that period of time. He lives a long life for the era, though, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 He doesn't pass until 1786, and he's 65 years old, which for a white guy in Jamaica, he lives a pretty long life. And he dies, does he ever just like eat shit just to try it out?

Speaker 1 And then, so I just want to know if this man has eaten shit, his own shit before. I mean, for science, you know,

Speaker 1 maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 1 He probably documentation of like, yeah, no documentation of him eating his own shit. His own shit.
Him being shitty. That's most of his documentation.

Speaker 1 And yeah,

Speaker 1 there's nothing happy to say about this story other than that he does die eventually.

Speaker 1 And, you know. Not long after his death, the abolitionist movement really starts to get going within the British Empire.

Speaker 1 And gradually this kind of stuff becomes seen as much as it's covered, as we've talked about, it's never fully reckoned with. You know, when

Speaker 1 Great Britain banned slavery

Speaker 1 in their colonies, they never really look that deeply into what guys like Thistlewood are doing, right? There's kind of this acknowledgement that like, well, that was bad. That was a bad system.

Speaker 1 People, it was bad that things were doing that. And it's good that we stopped it.
Let's focus on the fact that we stopped it and how nice that is.

Speaker 1 We were faster to stopping it than the Americans, right?

Speaker 1 And they did definitely end slavery faster than the United States did, but there's also this level to which there was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated and how many British fortunes were based on them, on selling and buying people on these plantations, on the profits from these plantations, on selling stuff to these people, on running the boats.

Speaker 1 Like that's, there's, that's never reckoned with, right?

Speaker 1 Well, and so much of that in the colonial England was like also far away from them, like you said. But then

Speaker 1 in America, it's like right there. Your neighbors are doing it.
And so that's even wilder that they continued longer in America. So yeah, that's wild.
And remember, just this bad, you know? Like,

Speaker 1 this is not Jamaica, it was not worse than Virginia.

Speaker 1 Like, all of this is the similar kinds, maybe slightly different tactics in how you psychologically and physically abuse people, but not always even that, you know, a lot of the same tactics. Anyway,

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ. We're done.

Speaker 1 Sorry. That's the end.
Okay. Well, at least it's over.
It's over. Horrific.
TT, you have anything you want to plug?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I feel like I should not plug anything right now, except for, I guess, go take a hot bath and cry.

Speaker 1 Take a hot bath. Yeah.
Cry. I hear you.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before I give birth. There we go.
There we go. Because it's a new show, too, called Second Screens.
It's for people who,

Speaker 1 you know, if you're neurodivergent like me and you don't want to be, you can be on your phone the whole time.

Speaker 1 Second screen hosted by Madison Shepard. Next one is December 1st.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you can bring your phone and be on your laptop or phone while you're watching the show. So I'll be on that show.
And then I'll probably not do comedy for a while. Well,

Speaker 1 those are both good choices and i wish you the best of luck

Speaker 1 seeing them one last time

Speaker 1 yeah yeah

Speaker 1 and i hope you take advantage of having a baby because that that'll be fun that'll be much much that'll be affirming and good

Speaker 1 the world's horrible do things that are good oh my gosh yeah yeah what a strange way to end this pod but um but thank you for having me on always a pleasure to see you and you know take a moment to think about all the horrible things humanity's capable of yes All right, everybody.

Speaker 1 Horrible things done.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Speaker 14 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So, as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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