Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
recording uh-huh i do miss now that we used to script the zoom lady going recording in progress
I know, I know. Whatever happened to the Zoom lady? I don't know. Another job taken by automation. I think it was an automated job to begin with. I think that was a robot. Who complains when the robots get taken, their jobs taken by other robots, you know? We need solidarity with some of the robots against the other robots is what I'm saying.
I think WALL-E from that movie, WALL-E is the one.
Oh no, I hate that son of a bitch.
What? I love WALL-E.
I'll fight Wally.
Leave Wally alone.
I don't like him at all.
Why don't you like Wally?
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Chapter 2: What was Thomas Thistlewood's view on enslaved people compared to livestock?
Like reference.
See, this is why men shouldn't be allowed to read, you know, it's like they get ideas.
Well, I got good news about literacy levels.
Too many ideas, too many rapes, you know.
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? Who might be like, I don't know, man, it seems like, seems like you might be going some crazy places with this.
Maybe you're just using all this stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people. Yeah.
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 he's digesting these books and these articles and he's talking with them about them with other white exiles and he probably probably part of his ego is that he seems like a learned man among this population of exiles
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.
Yeah, because he doesn't get it. He seems to not ā it goes over his head.
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Chapter 3: How did Thistlewood document his violent acts in his diaries?
Often, sometimes it incites her escaping. Sometimes he does it after she escapes, but he does it constantly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the night after this, I mentioned in episode one, he's in a long-term, what he would call a relationship. We're not calling it that, but it's important to talk about how he describes it with this enslaved woman, Phibba, right? P-H-I-B-B-A-H is how he spells it.
And so he has ostensibly, there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her because he talks to her. He comes back to her pretty regularly, right? 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 him cheating on her, right?
And this is kind of, again, this is like a parody of an actual relationship, like a sick Like it's it's a perversion of everything that that's supposed to be. But he does write about it like that. Right. He describes the fact that after he goes over to her after assaulting Eve again, 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. And not Maddie did it.
Just Maddie got caught.
Right. Yeah. Well, and is she angry because of what he's doing to this person because of the fundamental inequalities? 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 ā we'll never know what this looked like in her head, right? Because we don't get ā 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. Yeah. So 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.
She subsequently escaped once more and was brought home on December 23rd and chained again. The next day she escaped and was brought back the day after that, whereupon Thomas chained her in the cook room. This pattern continued for years. 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.
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. But first... Bad time for an ad break, huh? Yep. Sorry.
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Chapter 4: What role did satire play in Thistlewood's understanding of his actions?
Thistle would absorb this lesson and continued to order floggings for the rest of his life in Jamaica. And, yeah, that is ā it's one of these things ā he exists in Jamaica during the high point of slavery 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.
It's just a good time climatically 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. 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. 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 more frightening still while the witnesses stated the cries were heard with universal detestation the perpetrator was not brought to legal punishment historians of slavery have made little use of these remarkable depositions despite their early date
The arguments for disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement found these witnesses. So their evidence can hardly be objective. This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists and then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slaveholding societies could be.
Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion that such horrors could not exist in a British colony. 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.
Because they're saying they're not accountable. Who's not biased here, bro? It'd be crazy if you don't have a bias opinion. I mean, it's like what you were saying about historians not leaving those details out because it's hard to face and hard to talk about. I mean, literally, that's the first sign that it's so bad.
Yeah, you should probably be talking about this as it's really bad.
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 yeah 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 a sign that we've gone too far
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. I got a place to be like, I got to get moving, you know, like I gotta, I gotta get to work or whatever.
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Chapter 5: How did Thistlewood's practices reflect societal norms of his time?
Like this was a very normal thing to do. Like this was kind of the escalation chain up from the first vlogging, right, as you pickle these guys. Yeah. And I hate getting into this next part, Titi. I really apologize. I don't like having to talk about this. There's no good way to talk about this. So I'm just going to read this and... You know, we can move past it because this is bad.
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. 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.
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. They would force enslaved people to defecate in each other's mouths as a punishment.
Depending on the severity of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth gagged and covered while the shit was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment. Right. 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.
Sometimes like someone steals some sugar or some food and you just do this insane thing to them. 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.
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. That was a normal thing they would do. Right. Yeah.
Very deeply disturbed.
It's upsetting. Yeah. It's as bad as it gets, right? 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, 1757, right? 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...
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. And it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the period of time that he's there. 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.
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