5. Francisco/Bugge: South Asians

An Indian, with a Red Jacket and Breeches much tarred, also his Cap. A tall Man, long visage, some Pockholes in his face, and ill looked, aged about 28, his Name Francisco, alias Bugge. Run away about 3 weeks ago, from Capt. John Bowers. Whoever gives Notice of him to Capt. Bowers aforesaid, at Elephant Stairs in Rotherhithe, or to Mr. Evance Goldsmith at the Black Boy in Lombard-street, shall have a Guinea Reward, and Charges.

The London Gazette, 5 March 1688

South Asians accounted for just under one quarter (24 per cent) of the enslaved men, women and children who eloped in London between 1665 and 1704. These forty-seven freedom seekers included three females aged forty, twenty and fifteen. The ages of thirty-four of the males were included in newspaper advertisements, ranging from twelve to thirty. Of these, 56 per cent were aged sixteen or younger and 76 per cent were no more than teenagers (aged nineteen years or younger). Almost half (45 per cent) were described in advertisements as Black, including two as Indian ‘Black boy’, four as ‘East India Black’ and nine as India or Indian ‘Black’. One advertisement began by defining the freedom seeker as ‘AN East India Mallatto’, while five used the term ‘tawney’ to describe the skin colour of people delineated as Indian or East Indian. Twenty advertisements did not refer to skin colour but instead used the term ‘Indian’, while one described the freedom seeker as ‘East Indian’.

The Portuguese, Dutch, French and English all traded enslaved people in East Africa, the islands of the Indian Ocean and India itself. Raids and warfare in areas such as the Bengali coast produced tens of thousands of enslaved people, while famine and natural disasters left others with little choice but to sell themselves or family members into slavery: for example, three severe famines in Madras between the 1640s and 1680s killed tens of thousands of people and forced many more into bondage. From the 1620s onwards the English East India Company made use of enslaved people in their fortified trading posts and port towns. While living and working in South Asia, Englishmen took enslaved people as personal servants: when the merchant Henry Pearle died in Bantam he ordered ‘my Black Boy Peeter’ to ‘waite upon Agent Dawes’ for a set period after which Peeter would be freed.¹ It is probable that many of the South Asians living and working in Restoration London had been brought back by Englishmen like Pearle.

The first advertisement for a South Asian freedom seeker appeared in the Public Intelligencer in March 1659, against the backdrop of the tense powerplay between the House of Commons, the army and Lord Protector Richard Cromwell.² ‘A Tawny Indian with long black Hair’ eloped from Sarah Daniel in Greenwich.³ Mrs Daniel was married to an officer in the Royal Navy, and several years later she appeared regularly in the diary of Samuel Pepys as the daughter-in-law of his landlady in Greenwich when he briefly left London to escape the plague.⁴ The freedom seeker was described in the advertisement as being ‘of a reasonable tall stature, about eighteen years of age, in a red Cap, red Waste-coat, and a striped pair of Breeches of East-India Stuff’. The advertisement was situated mid-page between a notice for several religious books, one about a lost horse and another a stolen horse, and one with information about an attack on a man. Everyday life continued in the shadow of significant political and constitutional change: within a matter of weeks the army would trigger Cromwell’s resignation, the dissolution of parliament and the beginning of the end for the republic. Perhaps such a chaotic period made escape more appealing and a new beginning appear more achievable for a well-dressed and perhaps well-qualified young man who had experience of living among and interacting with English people.

In his lively early eighteenth-century account of London and its people Thomas Brown imagined ‘the Genius of an Indian’ as his companion when he walked around the city, using this visitor to help him to describe London’s sights and sounds. As Brown and his South Asian companion walked:

our Indian cast his Eye upon one of his own Complexion, at a certain Coffee-house … and being willing to be acquainted with his Country-man, gravely enquir’d what Province or Kingdom of India he belong’d to; but the sooty Dog could do nothing but Grin, and shew his Teeth, and cry, Coffee, Sir, Tea, will you please to walk in, Sir, a fresh Pot upon my word.⁵

Required to solicit trade and serve customers, a man like this might have been a paid employee but he might also have been enslaved. While Brown’s imaginary South Asian visitor was surprised to find a countryman in London, what is more significant is that the encounter appeared routine to Brown himself. In London South Asians were far from unusual.

One of the South Asian brought to London who attempted escape was Francisco, also known as Bugge, who eloped in early February 1688.⁶ About twenty-eight years old, Francisco was a ‘tall Man, [with a] long visage’ whose face was scarred by smallpox and, according to Captain John Bowers, he was ‘ill looked’, presumably meaning that Bowers judged his appearance to be unattractive. Francisco wore the clothing of a sailor, ‘a Red Jacket and Breeches, much tarred, also his Cap’. This was not surprising given that Bowers had sailed to Bantam, Surat, Calcutta, Madras and Bengal for the East India Company, making at least four voyages between 1675 and 1687 in the Persia Merchant.⁷ Bowers’s residence in London was by Elephant Stairs in Rotherhithe, one of close to a dozen landing points in this small but busy maritime district. Several days later Bowers once again advertised for Francisco, who by this point had been at liberty for almost a month.⁸

In both of the advertisements Bowers stated that if recaptured Francisco could be brought to him in Rotherhithe or to ‘Mr. Evance Goldsmith at the Black Boy in Lombard-street’ in the heart of the City. Working in premises marked by an all too appropriate sign displaying a Black boy, Stephen Evance or Evans was both a goldsmith and a banker (Figure 16).⁹ He was deeply involved in the trade of both the Royal African Company and the East India Company, working to bring gold into England and to profit from the nation’s trade in both gold and silver. Evance’s substantial loans to the Crown helped earn him a knighthood and he embodied the interests of the nascent financial sector in England’s fast-developing trade with South Asia and West Africa and the exploitation of those regions’ people for profit. Evance was a logical ally of a master such as Bowers.¹⁰

Figure 16. Representation of sign displaying the ‘Black Boy’ outside the Lombard Street premises of Stephen Evance. From F. G. Hilton Price, The Signs of Old Lombard Street (London, 1902), p. 82.

Two years later Bowers once again advertised for a runaway, this time ‘AN Indian black Girl, aged about 15, with a Brass Collar about her neck’.¹¹ Whereas Francisco’s clothing indicated that he had served Bowers as a working sailor, this unnamed girl surely had an altogether different role in his household. Bowers’s will revealed that he was married with children and grandchildren. The young South Asian girl who escaped from his household was prettily dressed in ‘a Drugget Gown and a Painted-Callico Petticoat’. Presumably she was a domestic servant working for Bowers’s wife, although it remains possible that she was escaping from a sexual bondage symbolized by the brass collar around her throat. The collar might suggest that she had already attempted escape and that Bowers was determined to do all he could to affirm his ownership of her and to make another escape attempt difficult.¹²

At least one of the South Asians who sought freedom in Restoration London escaped from a non-English household. In November 1681 an unnamed ‘Tall slender Indian Tawney, about 18 years of age’ eloped from the household of the conde de Castlemelhor in Somerset House, the royal palace on the bank of the Thames that was home to Catherine of Braganza, queen of England and wife of Charles II. Once an influential courtier in their native Portugal, Castlemelhor was one of Catherine’s senior advisers.¹³ At this time Lisbon was one of Europe’s most racially mixed cities, and by the turn of the eighteenth century perhaps one fifth of its residents were people of colour, including some South Asians.¹⁴ Many were enslaved, and when in 1662 Sir Edward Montagu, the earl of Sandwich, had escorted Catherine from Lisbon to England for her marriage to Charles II, he had purchased and brought with him ‘a little Turk and a negroe, which are intended for pages’ in his household.¹⁵ We know virtually nothing about this particular freedom seeker. The queen’s Catholicism was extremely unpopular in Protestant England and it is possible that a runaway from her household might have met a favourable reaction from Londoners and safe harbour. No image of Catherine and her enslaved servants survives. However, Pierre Mignard’s portrait of the duchess of Portsmouth, lady in waiting to Queen Catherine and a mistress of Charles II, displays an elite member of the royal court with an enslaved servant in attendance (Figure 17).

While the word ‘slave’ was not used in a single advertisement for South Asians who eloped in late seventeenth-century London, it is clear that some of those who ran away were held in perpetual bondage. Robert Goldesbrough had spent time in the East Indies, but by the late 1680s he was living as a pensioner in Chelsea, one of a number of former East India Company employees thus situated.¹⁶ Goldesbrough had probably brought Andrew back with him, presumably as a personal servant, for despite his youth the boy spoke ‘good English’. Goldesbrough’s pension might indicate that he was in some way incapacitated and thus dependent on a bound servant. Andrew, however, resisted his bondage and Goldesborough had to take action to make escape more difficult. When Andrew eloped on 5 March 1690 he was hampered by ‘a Steel Collar on (Engraven, Mr Robt. Goldesbrough of Chelsea …) a Steel Cuff about his Wrist, and an Iron Chain from the Collar to the Cuff on the outside of his Clothes’. Such restraints were clear emblems of enslaved status. Goldesbrough’s advertisement was one of the few seventeenth-century notices with information about where the freedom seeker had gone, reporting that ‘he was seen on the Western Road 4 or 5 weeks since, pretending to be going to one Mr. Griffins in Wiltshire’. Perhaps Andrew sought employment outside of London, earning a wage as a free person rather than labouring as enslaved property, or perhaps it was a ruse to gain free passage based on the practice of using young servants of colour to run errands and deliver messages. Either way, Andrew would have had to find a way of ridding himself of his shackles to stand any chance of remaining free and creating a new life for himself in England or further afield.¹⁷

Figure 17. Pierre Mignard, Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, oil on canvas (1682), National Portrait Gallery. The jewellery, clothing and adoring gaze of this presumably enslaved girl were intended to show the wealth, privilege and benevolence of her mistress.¹⁸

Figure 18. East India Company Ships at Deptford (c.1683). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. The large ship in the centre is likely to have been Grantham’s ship Charles II. Grantham was knighted by the king on board the ship in February 1683 at the time of its launching.

It is possible that some of the people referred to simply as ‘Indian’ may have been Native Americans, but there is plenty of evidence within most of the advertisements to suggest that most if not all of these were South Asian. An advertisement in the London Gazette on 12 April 1688 sought out ‘John Newmoone, alias Shackshoone, an Indian … low of stature, and swarthy complexion’. Shackshoone had eloped from the house of Sir Thomas Grantham in Sudbury on the outskirts of London, ‘taking with him several things of value, designing to go beyond the seas’. Grantham had spent time in Virginia in the early 1670s and later in the decade had acted as an intermediary between Governor Berkeley and the colonial rebels under Nathaniel Bacon. As a merchant in London, Grantham shipped goods to and tobacco back from the colony, all of which might have suggested that Shackshoone was a Native American. Charles II had showed his appreciation of Grantham’s efforts by knighting him and helping him secure a commission to captain the Charles II, an East India Company ship (Figure 18). Grantham then served in South Asia before returning to England in 1685, having negotiated a peaceful resolution to a mutiny in Bombay by Captain Richard Keigwin and his supporters, which resulted in the award of further honours by William and Mary.¹⁹

While the label ‘Indian’, which Grantham employed in the 1688 advertisement, might have indicated that Shackshoone was either a Native American brought back from Virginia or a South Asian brought back from Bombay or elsewhere in South Asia, a separate advertisement proves that he was indeed South Asian. Eighteen months earlier Grantham had placed an advertisement in the London Gazette seeking the capture and return of ‘an Indian called Shackshoon, and his Brother called Mahomet, brought from the East-India by Sir Thomas Grantham’.²⁰ The brothers had sailed from India to London on the Charles II, arriving a few months earlier. What happened to Mahomet? Was Grantham unable to retake possession of him? Had he escaped again or had he died? There were many ships leaving London for South Asia, and it is very possible that a young man seeking passage as a working sailor would have been able to secure a position, so it may have been possible for Mahomet to make his way back home.

Shackshoon’s situation was unusual. The second advertisement described him as ‘having a Child growing out of his side’. A newsletter dated 5 February 1687 reported that

On Thursday at the Common Pleas was a trial between the monster (a man that hath a child growing out of his side) and Sir Thomas Grantham upon a writ de homine replegiando. Sir Thomas had contracted with him to come over from the Indies for six months and then to return, but has kept him like a slave longer and got a great deal of money by showing him; so he prays to be relieved according to law. The judges (it being a novel case, though the man has been christened since he came here) will consult all their brethren about it and have since ordered him to be bailed.²¹

The case reports describe Shackshoon as having ‘the perfect shape of a child growing out of his breast as an excresency, all but the head’. This is almost certainly a case of a parasitic twin in which one conjoined twin ‘ceases development during gestation and becomes vestigial to the fully formed dominant twin’.²² Grantham had brought Shackshoon from India ‘and exposed [him] to the sight of the people for profit’. However, Shackshoon had apparently ‘turned Christian and was baptized’, after which he ‘was detained from his master’ by sympathetic church members. Grantham ‘claimed a property’ in Shackshoon and employed a writ de homine replegiando to secure him; a local sheriff enforced the writ and returned Shackshoon to Grantham but without affirming the latter’s rights of ownership. Chief Justice of the Common Pleas Edward Herbert ruled in favour of Grantham, ordering the sheriff to redraft his decision to confirm Grantham’s rights over his enslaved property.²³

Herbert tended to rule in favour of the interests of the king, and was to follow James II into exile. Given James’s leadership of the Royal African Company and the English slave trade, it is hardly surprising that Herbert ruled thus.²⁴ Shackshoon’s second escape a little over a year later is all the more understandable, and perhaps he had support and shelter from people who had supported him in his baptism and his legal struggle. Herbert was a political appointment by James II who was, in the words of one scholar, ‘sadly deficient in professional knowledge’; his failure to report his cases in detail means that ‘we are not even amused by his blunders, which are said to have been many and grievous’.²⁵ Herbert’s decision must have been anything but amusing to Shackshoon, who was forced to return to a man who claimed ownership of and exploited him, and then to have that man’s ownership of him legally confirmed. It is hardly surprising that a few months later Shackshoon once again attempted to gain his freedom. His physical condition cannot have made this easy, so it is hard to imagine his attempting escape without external aid.

Five years later, on 9 June 1703, an unnamed ‘Negro Servt. Man of Sr. Tho. Grantham’ was buried at St Mary’s in Sunbury.²⁶ A year later Grantham himself died and his will stipulated that at least 200 guineas be spent on a marble memorial, which still exists, extolling Grantham as ‘a most generous … benefactor’. One among numerous bequests to family and to the poor in two different parishes was his gift to ‘any man or woman that shall be in my service at the day of my death the sum of five pounds apiece’, but there was no mention of Shackshoon.²⁷ Given that White Englishmen sometimes used the terms ‘Black’ and even ‘Negro’ to describe South Asians as well as Africans, it may have been Shackshoon who had predeceased Grantham one year earlier and whose baptism entitled him to a Christian burial.

Figure 19. John Thomas Smith, ‘The Old Fountain in the Minories’ (London, 1798). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The determination of some freedom seekers to achieve a greater degree of self-determination is all too clear. On 10 November 1690 the London Gazette included an advertisement for ‘AN Indian Boy aged about 19’ who had ‘run away from William Johnson Esq; at Brumly near Bow’. Johnson reported that the unnamed runaway was ‘bushy hair’d’ and well dressed in ‘a blew Livery lined with Orange-Colour and White, and Tin Buttons’. Bromley by Bow lay just north of Poplar in the fast-expanding East End of greater London, and the young freedom seeker could be returned to Johnson there or to a Captain Noble at the Fountain Tavern in the Minories in Portsoken ward in the north-eastern corner of the City of London (Figure 19).

Apparently this young freedom seeker was either captured or chose to return, for he eloped again four months later. This time Johnson advertised that the young man’s name was Toby, ‘pretty tall and slender, and his Hair newly cut off’, that he was wearing his orange and blue livery and that a week earlier he had been ‘seen in Essex the day he went away’. Again Toby was taken back; one month later he escaped for a third time. On this occasion Johnson described him as ‘thin fac’d, his Head shaved, and the Hair a little grown’. Instead of his recognizable blue and orange lined livery, Toby eloped wearing ‘an old Fustion Frock’, the more anonymous working clothing of many White and Black Londoners. There were no further advertisements. Toby’s bid for freedom may have succeeded and Johnson may have tired of the cost and trouble of pursuing him, or he may have been recaptured and punished to such an extent that he did not again escape and occasion yet another newspaper advertisement. Whatever his eventual fate, a succession of advertisements like these reveal Toby’s courage and his determination to be free of Johnson.²⁸

On rare occasions, advertisers indicated that freedom seekers had been seen since their escape. On 6 July 1702 ‘an Indian Black Boy’ named Morall escaped ‘from his Masters House in Drury-Lane’ in the parish of St Giles in the Fields, which lay between the City of London and Westminster. About fifteen years old, long-haired and speaking ‘very good English’, Morall had left wearing ‘a brown Fustian Frock, a blue Wastcoat and Scarlet Shagg Breeches’. The advertisement noted that since his escape a week earlier Morall had been seen in Hampstead, Highgate and Tottenham Court, all of them north of the residence from which he had escaped. If he had been in these places Morall was heading away from the river and the possibility of serving on a ship bound for India or indeed anywhere away from London, and so was presumably seeking a different life and employment in or around London and its suburbs, away from Drury Lane.²⁹ Other freedom seekers, however, were almost certainly seeking to leave London and England aboard a ship and thus were engaged in ‘maritime marronage’, hoping to achieve the relative freedom and rough equality among working seafarers.³⁰ One such was an unnamed ‘Slender middle sized India Black’ who eloped from the service of Mrs. Thwaits in Stepney wearing a ‘dark grey Livery with Brass Buttons’. Stepney was at the heart of the riverside docks and maritime communities of London’s East End and, according to Mrs Thwaits, the freedom seeker was ‘supposed to be gone on board some Ship in the Downs’, the anchorage for ocean-going ships at the mouth of the Thames estuary.³¹ It was not unusual for captains with insufficient crews to take on men from the Kent and Essex coastal communities on either side of the Downs: given that these men were ready to embark on lengthy voyages the captains probably did not ask questions or demand evidence of a volunteer’s freedom to join the ship’s company.

Mostly associated with ship captains, merchants and wealthy aristocrats, enslaved and bound South Asians in late seventeenth- and turn of the eighteenth-century London were generally young and male, serving as sailors, personal servants, liveried attendants and in a few cases maids and perhaps sexual victims. Together with parish registers recording the baptism, marriage and burial of South Asians, these newspaper advertisements testify to the presence of a small but noticeable community of people from India in greater London. Their status was even less clear than that of Africans, given that from the mid seventeenth century onwards the transatlantic slave trade and the rapid development of plantation slavery began to make African slavery a foundation of England’s fast-growing economy and empire. While slavery and forms of unfreedom existed in India, they played a less well-known and visible role in England’s increasing trade and empire building. The shackles worn by Andrew and by an unnamed South Asian girl and boy offer the starkest evidence that at least some of the South Asians who were the subject of London newspaper advertisements were attempting to escape from enslavement.³²