Chapter 1: Who was Thomas Thistlewood and why is he significant?
Ah, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're listening to today, and maybe other days, probably other days. I'm Robert Evans, here to tell you about some of the worst people in all of history. And to talk with us about some of the worst people in all of history is someone who's not one of the worst people in all of history, but is in fact my friend, T.T. Lee.
Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm good. I mean, I still have time to become one of the worst people in history, so don't count me out. If you really wanted to, yeah. Don't count me out. I believe you could be a contender. No, no. It's like that movie where fucking Marky Mark becomes a pro football player by trying out. I think you could become a dictator if you show up.
If there was a competition show. Yeah, yeah.
I need rules. If there's like a rubric, I mean, actually there probably is. I don't know if I would do well, actually, in that competition, but... See, this is why none of these network state Silicon Valley dictatorship people have any sense of, like, fun.
Because if you had, like, a reality show where whoever won got to govern, like, three million people's lives as, like, an iron-fisted dictator. Like, the franchising potential for that show is incredible. Especially if any of them become nuclear armed. I mean, my God. You could keep people glued to the TV. Like, that's the new reality show. Yeah. A competition for who gets the nuclear codes.
I mean, we might actually end up in a better situation than we are now.
Just give it to someone else. Titi, I have an important question. Yeah.
How's Wushu?
Oh my god, Wushu.
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Chapter 2: What role did Thistlewood's upbringing play in his future actions?
Probably him, yeah. I feel like, I wonder when the next dog... When the dog version of that? The dog version of that, yeah. Yeah, because it does tend to, like, after five or ten years, it trickles down. Like, people are now doing, like, cosmetic surgeries for their dogs and stuff.
It just takes a little while longer for people to be like, well, maybe my dog also needs to be ashamed that their eyelids are drooping or something like that, even though they're a basset hound and that's how they're supposed to look. I mean, they have BBL surgeries for the labubus now. That's like a whole thing on TikTok.
Yeah, they like wear little doctor clothes and have little gloves and lights.
Oh my God. You gotta look it up. They're great.
The videos are great.
I definitely will.
Oh, fuck. Well, I love the modern world, but you know what the modern world has built on, Titi? Slavery, obviously, right? We're all aware of that, both in the past and today.
What a horrific transition, Robert.
Great way to start my weekend. I wasn't given a lot of options. We started this how we started this, and that was the easiest way to get to slavery. You're never more than two steps away when you're talking about really any human history, to be honest.
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Chapter 3: How did Thistlewood's early experiences shape his views on slavery?
There's a lot of detail in here about how slavery worked. He's also our best detail on what the climate of Jamaica was like for about 100 years because he was just taking really detailed notes. And it would be like, woke up and committed these horrible sex crimes. Here's what the weather was like, right? These are the diary entries that he's leaving behind.
So it's one of those things where you'll find whole books by people that are just exerting the stuff from his diary about the weather. Because that's important for climactic science and stuff.
Like first-hand impressions.
Yeah. Wow. And then there's this larger branch of scholarship that's about his crimes against humanity. But it's kind of like the Unabomber, where he is also known for his other work, you know? Interesting.
Reminds me, I don't know why I thought of Arcadia, the play, but that's too obscure of a reference, where all the notes being taken are... Anyways, I probably should not have even brought it up. I don't know the play. But anyway. No, no, no. What is that?
No, but it's because they go... Arcadia, it's a Tom Stoppard play, but in it they... Well, the reason I brought it up is because people are taking notes and trying to infer what happened, but then there's like slight misunderstandings of like...
what actually happened but I just find that interesting if he mentions like a weird obscure bird or something and you're like I just imagine some like you know bird hunter like looking through his diary like yes he was a terrible slave owner but there's a sign this extinct bird existed we've documented that this animal lived here this time too that is like the thing with his diaries is that they're both really useful to like naturalists and also to students of one of the worst things people ever did to each other
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? Who catfishes a city? Is it even safe to snort human remains? Is that the plot of Footloose? I'm comedian Rory Scovel, and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. It doesn't matter how much I fight.
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Chapter 4: What does Thistlewood's diary reveal about plantation life?
Right. Like you wonder, why did the British Empire do the things that the British Empire did? Well, this is how people are living on the island when they're better off. Right. Yeah. Wow. That's like it's like these are the citizens who and this is like their norm. Yeah. How do you think they're going to treat people in Bengal? Yeah. Like, yeah, their own kids have to pay. Yeah, exactly.
So I don't know how long he spends in this internship exactly, but he probably would have been somewhere around 18 when he sets off fully on his own to make a living as a livestock dealer. Right. So he decides I don't have any land yet, but I've got some money I've saved up, some leftover from my inheritance. I'm going to start buying and selling livestock to try to make a profit. Right.
And around this time, as he's starting his career, he hooks up with a local girl for the first time, and she gets pregnant, right? He gets this young woman pregnant, and they're not married. Now, in this period of time, the early 1700s, at this social level, if you get someone pregnant as the man, you have two choices.
Choice one is convince this lady's parents to let you marry their daughter, right? And that's very much your job. She does not have a lot of choice in the matter, right? Right. That's going to vary from family to family, but this is primarily you interfacing with this young woman's family, right?
And if they don't want you to marry their daughter, if they don't see you as a suitable match, you can get in a shitload of trouble. You can go to prison for fathering a bastard, right?
So, yeah, he gets in this situation and this this lady's parents, I don't know much about this person, but and I say I don't know if literally if she is a girl like a child or if she's like she could have been anywhere from like 15 to 20, given the way things worked at the time. Right. Yikes. And I have no idea why, but her parents are like, this guy is not a suitable match for our daughter.
Maybe it's just that he's poor. Maybe they see something of the sketchiness lurking inside this man's soul. I have no idea. But they say no. And so he really is looking at like, if this girl has a kid, I could go to prison. I'm at least going to have to pay a heavy fine for what I did. But then the child doesn't come to term and he gets off scot-free, right?
But this kind of inspires him to like get the fuck out, right? Like this was my message of like I almost got in a lot of trouble here. I need to actually like escape my hometown, maybe get out of England altogether, right? And so in 1746, he travels to London and he signs a contract with the East India Company to act as a purser of supercargo on a ship headed for the Far East, right?
This means that like, you know, you've got this boat and it's taking a bunch of goods over to like India and other parts of Southeast Asia. And it's going to come back with a bunch of goods from the different places it visits on this like two year, year and a half, two year long voyage. Right. This is the age of sail. That's how long shit takes back then.
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Chapter 5: How did Thistlewood justify his actions in his diary?
Now, he's got a bunch of shit with him that he's going to try to make a fortune flipping and selling. But he also spends most of his time gambling and playing cards and speculating on investments. And he's just spending his money. And the money he's not spending on gambling, he's spending on prostitutes, right? We're talking London in the 1700s. And he talks about this in a diary, right?
Because this diary, this is like a thing that he picks up at the school that he goes to where they're like ā So this diary, are we already starting with the diary? Because I know when he was eight, he wasn't writing in it yet. Okay, so we're in diary, firsthand account mode. Yeah, he starts kind of in his early adulthood, right? And this is not a diary of his thoughts and feelings.
We learn basically nothing about how he feels. Because he's listing everything he buys and sells. So you see part of the use of this diary. Right? Yes, classic man, where it's just like... This is what dinner cost me in 1748. Right. Like this is the cost of like buying tobacco. This is how much I lost at cards last night. This is how much I paid this prostitute. Right.
And so it's both like you get you do get this weirdly detached look at the inside of this guy. But you also get like you can see why it's useful to all sorts of different scholars where they're like, well, what did it cost to get like drunk and gamble and go out with a prostitute in London in 1748? Well, this we know, actually, this guy took notes on it. Right. Or at least we have an idea.
What did it cost? Great question. So to answer that. Just in case time machines exist. Exactly. You need to know what to bring along. I have a lot of foreign currency from the past that I keep in emergency bags in case I get transported back in time. You wind up in ancient Rome. You don't want to not have any denarii. What are you going to do? Okay, Robert.
You're going to fight for it in a gladiatorial pit? You're not doing that. I actually believe you would have an old money collection. I do believe that. You've got to be ready. Yeah, keep that and yeah. All right, Robert.
So whenever he was writing, to know what it like a night out with a prostitute cost in London in 1748, whenever he wrote about stuff like this, he would like box off the entry about the sex stuff from the rest of his diary entries. And he would preface it with the letters XXX. Which is interesting. I didn't know that went back that far, but apparently it did.
Or at least that's what he chose, because I don't think this was a broader thing in society yet. It may just have been a coincidence that he chose to do that, to kind of make a note that he was about to start talking about sex. And he would always write about it in Latin. And so the very first entry that we have of him writing about sex is of a night he spent with a prostitute in 1748.
And he writes, in the evening, two ā in the evening, two mullier, two shillings, right? And a mullier is a contemporary term for a prostitute, right? So he spends two shillings for a night with this lady, right? Right. And he writes a G above her title, which is his way of letting her know G is the seventh letter.
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Chapter 6: What were the social dynamics of Jamaica during Thistlewood's time?
That's why. Like the vibes are off. Something's wrong. He looks like the kind of guy who lists women alphabetically in his weird crime diary. Like, yeah. Those parents were correct in their assessment. Yeah. Good call. Don't let this guy marry your daughter. Good call. So during this period of time, as at all other points in his life, Thomas read voraciously.
And he took notes in his diary on what particularly interested him in the books that he was reading. In January of 1749, this was abortions. He's really interested in ā and this again tells you a lot about what's happening elsewhere in this guy's life is he's just casually interested in how to make abortifacients, right? Like drugs to induce like abortion. Wow.
Or a ā like he often frames it as drugs to induce a miscarriage, right? And one of his recipes ā I just found this interesting because this tells you like again one of the things that ā Oh, man. The society believes at the time for an abortifacient at the time is ā One pound of bitter apples. I think that's what it means. It's like LD of bitter.
So it's an amount of bitter apples steeped in beer and cooked at least twice. It says it said will cause abortion. Certainly. So bitter apples steeped in beer. Yeah. I'm covering my unborn baby's ears right now. Yeah, yeah. Well, the good news is I don't think there's a lot of bitter apples around anymore. Although depending on the state of reproductive health care in the near term, I don't know.
I don't also... I kind of doubt this worked very well, but maybe it did.
He's like making drinks to like feed...
Yes, a little witch. He's making morning after pills. Yeah, he's interest or at least he he's put part of like one of the things that's theorized is that if he didn't need it, then he was taking down notes while he was like near a library on how to make basically morning after pills because he foresaw because of what had happened to him in his past.
He was like, I might need to do that in the future. Right. Like because the other thing he's doing at the same time is he's writing down recipes for cures for venereal diseases, because this is a guy who's probably by this point slept with prostitutes and ports all around the world. He's picked up a lot of VD. Right.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How did Thistlewood's relationships with enslaved individuals evolve?
Yeah. And he's also borrowing from his brother and complaining in his diary about how lonely he is all the time. So he takes a little trip to the continent where he tries to sell off some of his goods, and he's doing badly enough that by the end of 1749, he finds himself back in London, and he visits this place called the Jamaica Coffee House.
And as best as I can tell, this is like a business and it looks like a cafe basically, but it's also kind of an advertisement for white people to go to Jamaica, which at the time is like, I think it's the wealthiest agricultural colony in the British empire. They're making sugar cane, right? That's what they're growing over there, right? They're producing sugar basically.
And the Brits had had Jamaica not that long at this point. They captured it from the Spaniards in 1655, right? So we're less than a century into like English control of the island. And they've done in this little period of time where they've dominated Jamaica, they've done their best. They're trying to settle this island.
But they're having trouble because it seems to them that Jamaica, like life on Jamaica has evolved primarily to kill English people. Like they'll send over a bunch of young white guys to do the quote unquote skilled work on, you know, and a lot of that's overseer work, managing these slave plantations. And most of these guys die in the first year. Right. That's just known.
You get a boat with like 200 white kids from the main island and like 80 of them are going to be or like 180 of them are going to be dead within like a year, year and a half. I wonder why you send a bunch of people to go to an already... A land where people live and you're like, why do the people who live here keep trying to kill us? We're just trying to colonize them.
It's also just like the people who live there, right? Because there's also, you know, the slaves who are brought there, the enslaved people also die at an elevated rate because like none of them have grown up around the various like diseases and bugs that are there, right? Like they're getting bit by mosquitoes and getting shit that like- Oh, you mean they're just dying of natural causes?
I thought you meant like they're being fought off. That happens. That does happen. That's part of this because there's a heavy maroon. They're called maroons, right? Which is like people, they're former slaves and descendants of former slaves who escaped Spanish plantations and formed independent communities. And these like really forested, often like mountainous chunks of the island, right?
So it's areas where it's hard to control. Great Britain has troops in Jamaica, but as soon as you send soldiers out into these heavily wooded parts of Jamaica, they just start dying of diseases left and right. You can't keep a force out there for any length of time because the natural world will kill more of them than the enemy.
But the enemy will also kill them because these maroons, by this point, these are the people from the slave populations who survived their first years in Jamaica. So they are hardened to the different diseases and bugs and whatnot that exist on the island. And they know these forested, dense-like rural areas. So they're able to fight very effectively this guerrilla war.
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Chapter 8: What legacy did Thomas Thistlewood leave behind?
But in many ways, I'm also happy to see you. I'm happy to see you, too. Happy to see you. Happy to learn about how shitty life was in the mid-1700s. Like, really, just a bad time to be a person. So, yeah, start of 1750, Thomas Thistlewood books passage on a boat after saying goodbye to his friends and family. And this is goodbye forever. He's never going to see any of them again.
He's, like, 30, and he's saying, like, goodbye, because I'm going to an island. I'll almost certainly be dead in a year, right? Yeah. And in fact, it's one of the you get this hint of how disposable these men being sent over are that like within minutes of boarding, his luggage is broken into and his liquor collection is stolen. Right.
And I think it's just this like, look, steal whatever you can from these guys. They're all going to be dead in six months. Like, fuck it. You know, it's like there's no law once you enter, once you step in. Off of England. There's no law. It's very much like on the way to Jamaica. It's certainly like that. Like this is still a period of time.
Have you ever taken a flight on the Spirit Airlines to Vegas? That's what that makes me think of. It's like a Spirit flight to Vegas, right?
Yeah.
Including some of the people on that plane are being trafficked, right? Like some number of these men on these boats with Thomas have been like knocked out the night before at a bar and they just wake up working on a boat. Oh boy. Right. That's how you put men on boats in this time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They actually get stopped by like the British Navy on their way to Jamaica.
And the Navy is trying to make sure there's not like guys on there who got like beaten up at a port and are being forced into labor because it's like it's a major problem. So it is like it is the Wild West. I mean, it's it's it's worse than that. But like it's there you are in between these settled areas. There's basically no rule. But part of the appeal of Jamaica to a guy like Thomas is
Is it's known at the time the like marketing nickname for Jamaica when they're trying to get these young white guys to move over there is that it's the best poor man's country. Right. And what that means is that if you don't have any money, you can and you don't have any standing in society back in Scotland or Ireland or England.
You can go to Jamaica and you will be ā number one, you can get rich there. And number two, you'll get respected because all white men are equally respected. That's the idea, right? It's not exactly true. But one of the things that's said about planter culture is that any white man who shows up at any plantation in Jamaica ā he'll get put up for the night and get fed a good meal.
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