12. Quamy: merchants, bankers, printers and coffee houses

A Black Boy run away from Mr. Richard Tudway, Merchant, on the 15th past, he is about 10 year old, named Quamy, in a dark coloured Coat lin’d with blue, with large Brass Buttons, a striped pair of Breeches, blue Stockins, a light coloured Cap lined with blue. Whoever gives notice of him to Mrs. Racheil Tudway at her house in Distaff Lane, or to Mr. Joseph Whitfield in the New Exchange at the Strand, shall have 20 s. Reward.

The London Gazette, 2 March 1693

The financial heart of England’s colonial empire was in the eastern section of the City of London. Radiating out from the Royal Exchange on Cornhill were the headquarters of the East India Company on Leadenhall Street, and the Royal African Company which began operations at Wanford Court just north of the exchange, before moving to Leadenhall Street, not far from East India House.¹ The incorporation of the Bank of England towards the end of the seventeenth century, with a building located no more than 250 yards west of the Royal Exchange, consolidated the institutional base of this imperial mercantile hub which linked London and England to India, West Africa, the Caribbean and North America. It is hardly surprising that the merchants and bankers helping to develop England’s empire were among those who owned enslaved people in London, often putting them to work in their households and businesses and using them as living emblems of the foundations and riches of the trade in human beings and the goods they produced.

The Royal African Company itself owned enslaved people both in West Africa and in London. In the eighteenth century at least one enslaved person ‘belonging to the Royal African Company’ escaped, in this case ‘a black Lad, nam’d Quashy’ who was apprenticed to a cooper named Negus in Wapping.² For decades the company had been sending enslaved boys to London, often to be trained in the trades and skills needed by company officials on the West African coast, and perhaps at other times as gifts for company directors, investors and supporters. In 1698, for example, company officials in London instructed their agents at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast to dispatch ‘Ten good healthy Young Negroes’ back to London. For as long as the company existed, officials sent enslaved boys to London ‘to be made Bricklayers, Carpenters, Smiths & Coopers’.³ Company officials in West Africa and in the Caribbean also sent enslaved boys to company officials, directors, investors and personal friends to serve as enslaved personal attendants. Ship captains and Royal African Company officials were thus a major source of the enslaved children, mostly boys, who served merchants, officials and other elite Londoners.⁴

From the mid seventeenth century onwards, leading merchants were prominent among the Londoners who acquired enslaved boys. In August 1659 an unnamed ‘Negro boy about nine years of age’ disappeared from St Nicholas Lane, which lay a few hundred feet northeast of London Bridge, within the neighbourhood filled with the new financial institutions of empire.⁵ A half-century or so later, John Stow reported that this street continued to be ‘inhabited by Merchants and wholesale Dealers’. In 1659 one of these was Thomas Barker and the runaway advertisement he paid for recorded that his business premises were ‘at the Sugar Loaf in that lane’.⁶ Barker appears to have been a London shipper and merchant who invested in the East India Company as well as in privateering voyages, and during the mid-1650s he had spent time in Tunis.⁷ Barker might have acquired this young boy in North Africa or he might have been aboard a ship captured by one of the privateers in which Barker invested. The advertisement that Barker placed in the Mercurius Politicus suggested that the boy ‘was lost’. While this may be true, particularly if the young boy had only recently arrived at Barker’s home, he had disappeared from the street in which Barker lived. St Nicholas Lane was no more than 500 feet in length, so it is very possible that this boy had eloped rather than become lost.

One merchant advertising for a freedom seeker began his notice with ‘A Black Boy run away from Mr. Richard Tudway, Merchant’, a simple sentence that encapsulates the connections between London’s mercantile elite and racial slavery.⁸ The ten-year-old freedom seeker was identified by Tudway as Quamy, probably an anglicized version of the West African Akan name Kwame. He was one of very few of the London freedom seekers who were known by African names. Quamy was dressed in a livery reflecting Tudway’s wealth and success, including ‘a dark coloured Coat lin’d with blue, … large Brass Buttons, a striped pair of Breeches, blue Stockins, [and] a light coloured Cap lined with blue’. Tudway was one of the many merchants deeply invested in the trade in enslaved people and the goods they produced. He was the co-owner of at least five slave-trading ships, three of which travelled to Antigua where he owned the Parham Hill plantation. When slavery finally ended a century and a half later Tudway’s family still owned Parham Lodge, Parham Old Work and Parham New Work plantations in Antigua.⁹ Slavery made Tudway a very wealthy man and his will included bequests of well over £1,000 in cash, the granting of his Antigua plantation to his widowed sister-in-law and her son, and the bequest of the presumably quite large residue of his estate in England to his daughter Elizabeth.¹⁰ During his lifetime a beautifully liveried enslaved African boy embodied Tudway’s wealth, success and standing. Tudway’s advertisement specified that Quamy could be returned to the merchant’s wife Rachel Tudway at their house in Distaff Lane, where no doubt the young boy had spent much of his time. How must Quamy have experienced his life with the Tudways? His African name may have been an important link to the people and the life he had lost but would have appeared appearing incongruous and exotic in his daily life and work in London; it was yet another way of othering a boy whose status was entirely different from that of the White domestic servants and employees of the Tudway family. At the age of ten years, could he have fully appreciated the deep involvement of Tudway in the slave trade and plantation slavery? What, if anything, had Quamy experienced of those institutions? And what was it that caused this terribly young boy to run away?

Like Tudway, Theodore Johnson identified himself as a merchant in the advertisement he placed for Ben, ‘A Blackamoor Boy’ aged about seventeen who had ‘Run away’ in March 1686.¹¹ Similarly, ‘William Steavens Merchant in East Lane on Rotherheth-wall’ advertised for ‘POmpe a Black Boy’ who had escaped from Steavens in May 1703 and again in January 1704.¹² Other advertisers were so well known in the merchant and banking communities as to need no such identification as merchants or financial leaders, and many newspaper readers would have recognized their names. One such was John Johnson, a goldsmith and banker who would go on to be knighted and to become lord mayor of London.¹³ In March 1690 ‘Joseph Moore, a young Negro Boy’, eloped from Johnson’s premises in Cheapside. Described as ‘straight and well-favoured’, Moore was about fifteen or sixteen years old when he ran from a household that in 1693 included his master John Johnson, Lady Johnson, their three children, a journeyman, two lodgers, two servants and a coachman.¹⁴

While merchants regularly advertised for enslaved or bound people of colour who had escaped, the business premises of booksellers, printers and coffee houses were often cited in runaway advertisements as the venues within the City’s financial district to which recaptured freedom seekers might be returned. Coffee houses were important venues for merchants, businessmen and ship owners and captains who often had no offices as such, where they imbibed the coffee and chocolate that were the fruit of enslaved labour in the colonies. Printers, most especially those who printed early newspapers, broadsheets and other advertising materials, were also significant in the distribution of information and knowledge, including notices advertising runaways or serving as agents to whom information about or even recaptured runaways themselves might be taken. Lloyd’s coffee house was a popular venue among those who owned enslaved people at home or in the colonies, for they knew it was frequented by those connected to the plantations, the Royal African and the East India companies, and to racial slavery more generally: these coffee houses were places of business as well as sociability, and Lloyd’s was the focal point of business and sociability for many involved in the slave trade and the plantations. Just three years after Edward Lloyd opened his establishment Captain John Braddyl advertised that a freedom-seeking twenty-year-old ‘Tawny Moor’ might be returned to ‘Mr. Lloyd’s Coffee-house in Tower Street’, and two years later anyone who secured ‘a Negro Man named Will’ was invited by Braddyl to give ‘notice to Mr. Lloyd at his Coffee-house’. By the time Captain Davy Breholt advertised for ‘William Peter, a Negro Man, aged about 26’, Lloyd had moved to the premises on Lombard Street that his coffee house would occupy for the next century, and Breholt suggested that any person who took William Peter into custody should return the runaway either to Breholt or to ‘Mr. Edward Lloyd at his Coffee-House in Lombard street’.¹⁵ All three of these freedom seekers had eloped from ships or from ship captains; this suggested that from its earliest days Lloyd’s was a meeting places for ship owners and captains. Lloyd’s and most of the City’s coffee houses were concentrated within a short walk of the Royal Exchange, and business with regard to commerce and shipping was regularly conducted both on the floor of the exchange and in these nearby coffee houses. In February 1665, for example, Samuel Pepys had left his office for ‘the ’Change, and at the Coffee-house with Gifford, Hubland, the Master of the ship … I read over and approved a charter-party for carrying goods to Tangier’.¹⁶ Given that enslaved people and the crops they produced were becoming an essential part of English shipping, returning freedom-seeking runaways to Lloyd’s made perfect sense.

Masters also made use of other coffee houses close to the exchange as venues for the return of runaways. When fourteen-year-old Calib escaped, Charles Pope offered a one-pound reward to anybody who ‘gives notice of him… at the Royal Coffee-house over against the Royal Exchange’.¹⁷ Pope was a merchant in Bristol, and for enslavers like him who were based outside London, coffee houses were particularly useful business venues. When a young ‘Black Boy’ disappeared from Lady Broughton’s home Marchwhiel Hall in Wales, she suggested that anyone with notice of the unnamed boy inform her or ‘Mr. John Elmore at Exeter-Change Coffee-house in the Strand’ in London.¹⁸ The coffee houses were just as useful to people in London but beyond the City’s financial district. When the East End shipbuilder James Yeames advertised for a runaway ‘East-India Mallatto’ in May 1684, he suggested that anyone with information about the freedom seeker could either contact him in Ratcliff or notify ‘Mr Cary at the Virginia Coffee House’ in the heart of the City, some two and a half miles west of Yemes’s East End shipyard.¹⁹ Smithy’s in Thames Street, Elford’s in Lombard Street, Man’s in Charing Cross, the Garter in Threadneedle Street, Garraway’s in Exchange Alley and the Carolina in Birchin Lane were just some of the coffee houses in the financial centre of the City employed by advertisers for freedom seekers.²⁰

Enslavers also made use of the offices of printers and booksellers as venues to which freedom seekers might be returned. When seventeen-year-old Zebulon escaped in October 1683, Christopher Newham placed an advertisement promising a guinea reward to anyone who gave information about ‘the said Negro, so as he may be restored again to his Master’.²¹ This information could be delivered to Newham at his premises in Love Lane in Ratcliff in the East End, ‘or to John Bringhurst, Bookseller in Gracechurch-street’ in the City. Operating under a sign showing a book, Bringhurst was a Quaker printer operating just north of London Bridge, at the southern end of the City’s financial district.²² Similarly, following Humphry’s escape from John Brooke in August 1696 a newspaper advertisement specified that the London-based contact to whom Humphry might be returned was ‘Mr Brabazon Aylmer at the Three Pigeons in Cornhill’.²³ Set against the Royal Exchange, Brabazon’s printing business was centrally located, and like other such establishments it was a place where people met and exchanged news and information.²⁴ When a ten-year-old ‘Black Boy’ who had been born in Maryland ‘Ran away from his Master Captain Richard Pery’ in London in May 1682, the only contact named in the newspaper advertisement was ‘Mr. Robert Horne, Book-seller, at the South Entrance of the Royal-Exchange, London’.²⁵ On occasion the printers mentioned as contacts in runaway advertisements were the publishers of newspapers, as when ‘Mr. Crouches Bookseller at the corner of Popes-Head-Alley, London’ was the first-named contact for information concerning the escape of a twenty-one-year-old unnamed ‘Negro’ man in August 1684.²⁶ Opposite the Royal Exchange and operating under the sign of the Prince’s Arms, Samuel Crouch supplemented the publication of books with the newspaper the True Protestant Domestic Intelligence.²⁷ Similarly, one of the contacts for information concerning Fortune who eloped in November 1684 was ‘Thomas Howkins Stationer’.²⁸ Situated just south of the Royal Exchange in George Yard (between Lombard Street and Cornhill), Howkins or Hawkins published books and for a while the City Mercury.²⁹ Seven years earlier, an advertisement for ‘A Negro Man, by name Anthony’ had named two contacts, one of them ‘Mr. Thomas Vyle at the Office of the City Mercury at the Northwest corner of the Royal Exchange’.³⁰ Newspapers and coffee houses were central pillars of London’s emerging public sphere, and were integral to the maintenance of racial slavery through runaway advertisements and the mechanisms for capture and reward initiated by these notices.

Enslavers also depended on goldsmiths and bankers to serve as contacts for those who might have information on the whereabouts of freedom seekers. Stephen Evance was a goldsmith whose premises on Lombard Street, immediately south of the Royal Exchange, could be identified by the sign above the doorway depicting a young Black boy. A major figure in the international bullion markets, Evance was as much a banker as a goldsmith, and he invested in the Royal African and East India companies and made substantial loans to the crown. In March 1687 Captain John Bowers named Evance as his contact in the City of London for information regarding Francisco, a twenty-eight-year-old South Asian man who had escaped.³¹

A great deal of gold was mined and circulated in West Africa, where gold jewellery was relatively common and where gold and gold dust functioned as a primary medium of trade. The desire for trade in this gold had been one of the primary attractions for the first English traders travelling to the Gold Coast, and by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a significant proportion of the gold in circulation in England had come from West Africa. Occasionally gold featured in runaway advertisements, as when seventeen-year-old Caesar escaped from ‘a Gentleman in Greenwich’ in December 1681. The newspaper advertisement described Caesar as bearing ‘small Cuts on each side of his Face, [and] on the Temples’, country marks that identified him as having been born in West Africa. Caesar was a talented musician, and his enduring connection to West African culture included ‘a Gold Ring in one Ear, with a Gold Nob to it’.³²

But if West African gold enabled Caesar to retain something of his African heritage and culture, it also enabled an attractive reward to anybody who might help in the recapture of this freedom-seeking boy. How ironic that the price of his freedom was measured out in coins named for the gold taken from his West African homeland, and bearing the Royal African Company’s emblem of a castle and a West African elephant below the head of the monarch. The newspaper advertisement seeking out Caesar promised ‘two Guinies Reward’. The guinea was a new coin, first minted in 1663, and produced largely from West African gold. Fluctuations in the value of gold meant that its actual worth, originally twenty shillings or one pound, increased to as much as twenty-five shillings before eventually settling to an accepted value of twenty-one shillings. Between 1674 and 1714 the Royal African Company minted 548,327 guinea coins from West African gold.³³ The obverse of many guinea coins featured a small elephant or sometimes an elephant and a castle, symbols of the Royal African Company, which was responsible for both the English transatlantic slave trade and the importation of the gold from which the coins were minted.

The seventeen-year-old ‘Negro Boy’ named Zebulon who ran away in October 1683, a ‘Negro Man’ named Pall who escaped from a ship moored off Ratcliff in 1686, and an unnamed sixteen-year-old ‘Negro Maid’ who eloped in 1702 and could be returned to Lloyd’s coffee house were all considered worthy of a one-guinea reward for any person who either recaptured them or provided information leading to their recapture.³⁴ Humphry, ‘a middle-sized negro Man’ aged about thirty, was worth a three-guinea reward, while Stephen was worth five guineas. A twenty-year-old ‘Native of the Leeward Islands’, well dressed in a grey livery lined with red and speaking good English, Stephen eloped in November 1701, three months after his arrival from the Caribbean. His value to William Mead was made clear by the latter’s offer of ‘5 Guineas Reward’ for information leading to his capture.³⁵ One guinea was a significant amount: during the second half of the seventeenth century a day’s labour might earn an unskilled Englishman about 10d and an unskilled woman between 3d and 4d.³⁶ If a guinea were worth 21 shillings, it would take an unskilled man twenty-five days and an unskilled woman two months to earn one guinea.

A total of 151 of the runaway advertisements specified the value of a reward for the location or recapture of a freedom seeker, and the guinea was ubiquitous. Two offered a reward of half a guinea, seventy-five offered one guinea, thirteen offered two guineas, five offered three guineas and two promised five guineas (Figures 29 and 30). All told, ninety-seven (64 per cent) of the advertisements specified a financial reward measured in guineas. African gold had drawn English traders to the West African coast where European trade goods were exchanged for gold, some of which was then used to purchase enslaved people. Then, back in London, this same gold was used to reward anyone who recaptured an escaped enslaved person.³⁷

Figure 29. Five-guinea coin, Charles II, 1668, Cleveland Museum of Art, Norweb Collection.

The Royal Exchange, the headquarters of both the Royal African Company and the East India Company; the workplaces of printers and of publishers of newspapers; the premises and homes of merchants, goldsmiths and bankers; and the coffee houses in which such people met combined to create an imperial and commercial network within the City of London. The newspaper advertisements seeking out freedom-seeking enslaved people regularly highlighted these locations and the people who operated within and between them as the key people to whom those with information concerning runaways should turn. What did this mean for the freedom seekers themselves? When Francisco escaped from Captain John Bowers in February 1688, remaining free posed a substantial challenge.³⁸ Not only did Francisco need to evade Bowers and his friends in Rotherhithe, but he also had to do his best to avoid being noticed by any who might report him to Stephen Evance in the heart of the City of London. To Francisco and other freedom seekers in London, the sign depicting a Black boy that hung above Evance’s business premises was anything but a symbolic abstraction, for Evance and the owners of a variety of businesses in the City were deeply enmeshed in the transatlantic slave trade and in the colonial ventures built upon enslaved labour. They were committed to both the maintenance of racial slavery as it existed in London and the preservation of the property rights of enslavers within the city. Perhaps the sign of the Black boy meant little to many Londoners, existing as it did among the forest of signs identifying homes and businesses in London in the period before buildings were identified by numbers. But it surely meant much more to enslaved and bound people of colour, who knew that although they had been removed from slave ships, plantations and trading outposts they nonetheless remained subject to a society committed to their subordination. Yet some found freedom, whether for short periods or permanently. By the time Bowers placed his advertisement Francisco had been free for more than three weeks, and perhaps this newspaper advertisement was the final resort for an enslaver who feared he had lost this bound servant for good.

Figure 30. Five-guinea coin, William and Mary, 1691, Cleveland Museum of Art, Norweb Collection.

The City of London was the second key area for the return of recaptured freedom-seeking runaways, or for information pertaining to their whereabouts (Figure 31), the first being the riverside maritime communities to the east. Many newspaper advertisements specified that information or runaways themselves might be relayed to coffee houses and the places of business of printers, merchants and tradesmen in this section of the City. The Royal Exchange, the headquarters of the East India Company and of the Royal African Company, and eventually the Bank of England itself provided the rough boundaries of this area of imperial and colonial business, an area so thoroughly invested in and so deeply attuned to the slavery on which England’s colonies depended that the public display of enslaved personal attendants and then the return of those who attempted escape were part and parcel of daily business.

Figure 31. City of London locations for the return of freedom seekers, 1659–1704. Detail from London &c. actually surveyed by William Morgan, his ma[jes]ties cosmogr. (London, 1681–2), Library of Congress. Graphic by the author. Also marked on the map are the East India Company, at EIC from 1638 onwards; the Royal African Company at RAC1 between the 1660s and 1677, and at RAC2 from 1677 onwards; and the Bank of England at BANK from 1694. Key coffee houses around the Royal Exchange were Jamaica (J1); Garraway’s (G1); Jonathan’s (J2); Lloyd’s (L); Maryland (M1); Virginia (V1); Carolina (C1); Bowman’s (B1); Cole’s (C2); Elford’s (E); Batson’s (B2); Marine (M2); Royal (R); Garter (G2); Vernon’s (V2).