6. ‘A black Girl’ and ‘an Indian black girl’: female freedom seekers

An Indian black Girl, aged about 15, with a Brass Collar about her Neck, in a Drugget Gown and a Painted-Callico Petticoat, Run away from Captain John Bowers in Rotherhith, on Monday night last. Whoever brings her to Captain Bowers aforesaid, shall have a Guinea Reward, and Charges.

The London Gazette, 22 September 1690

A black Girl, aged about 15 years, went away from her Master near 3 Weeks since; She had on a black Cloth Gown and Petticoat, with a brass Collar about her Neck, with this Inscription, John Campion at the Ship-Tavern at Ratcliff-Cross, his Negro. Whoever gives Notice of her to the said John Campion, shall have a Guinea Reward.

London Gazette, 5 November 1691

The very real female freedom seekers in Restoration London are all but invisible to us today, little more than ghosts in the archives. The words of those who sought them ring loud and clear across the centuries, and we can often learn a great deal about the people who claimed ownership or control of the enslaved and bound women of colour in London. But the thirteen girls and women can barely be glimpsed in the 872 words of newspaper advertisements that chronicled their escape: sometimes even their names are missing, and their silence within the archive is as complete as it is compelling.

Although they feature in only 6 per cent of advertisements for freedom seekers between 1655 and 1704, females probably comprised a significantly higher proportion of London’s population of free and enslaved people of colour. Women and girls constituted 24 per cent of the 705 men, women and children of colour who were baptized, married or buried in London between 1600 and 1710 and whose gender was recorded in the surviving parish records. Fewer enslaved and bound females were brought back to Britain, and for whatever reasons a lower proportion of them attempted to escape.

Where enslaved boys often served White men as cabin boys and personal servants, enslaved girls and young women might work as the maids and personal attendants of White women and families. During these early days of the English slave trade and plantation agriculture there were relatively few White women in South Asia, West Africa or the developing plantations of Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica and the Carolinas. In Jamaica in 1673 a population of 2,006 White women was outnumbered by more than two to one by the 4,050 White men on the island, while on Antigua in 1678 the island’s 544 White women were outnumbered by 1,236 White men.¹ During the early decades of plantation slavery and trade with South Asia it was predominantly men who brought enslaved people, generally boys or men, with them when they returned from the colonies to London or from trading or slave ship voyages. On occasion, enslaved people might be given as presents to White women in England. For example, Samuel Pepys recorded in May 1662 that the earl of Sandwich ‘had a little Turk and a negroe, which are intended for pages to the two young ladies’, his daughters;² but even here the people of colour selected to serve young elite women were boys and not girls.

The work of many of London’s female servants was arduous, including incessant cleaning, food preparation, child care and personal attendance on the family of the householder. From the daily cleaning of kitchens, staircases and public entrances to the weekly washing of clothing and household linen, to the provision of water and fuel for fires and the emptying of chamber pots, the work of female servants was constant. Some female servants, especially in larger households, focused on the personal needs of the householder or his wife, keeping their clothing in order, helping them to undress or dress and ensuring that they themselves were sufficiently clean and well dressed that they could escort the householder’s wife and children around town. Others worked in the householder’s place of business, especially in inns, taverns and shops. A few of these female servants were adolescents and women of colour.³

We do not know the name of one female freedom seeker owned by a woman, nor do we know the name of her mistress. Described simply as ‘A Negro Woman, short but thick, about 20 years of age’, she was reported to have ‘run away from her Mistress’ on 4 July 1684. The advertisement stated that her ears were pierced and that she was wearing ‘a Stuff Jacket buttoned down before, a Stuff Petticoat, black Shoos, and sad coloured Stockings … [and] a Cap with a blue Ribband on her Head’. She was dressed like many of London’s female domestic servants, her ‘stuff’ jacket and petticoat made of lighter-weight woollen fabric. However, a difference between this freedom seeker and the many White domestic servants in the capital was made chillingly clear in a second advertisement published on 14 July. To the list of her clothes was added a further detail, that this woman was ‘marked with a P and a B on her back’.⁴ The layers of clothing she wore kept her warm but also served to obscure this brand, which had probably been applied at a slave-trading post on the West African coast, aboard a slave-trading ship or on a plantation. The violent scar would forever mark her as enslaved.

We shall never know the identity of this young woman or the reasons for her escape. Already free for ten days when the second advertisement was published, she achieved at least temporary freedom and may have found refuge in the growing Black communities south and east of the City of London or with a partner (Black or White) who concealed her. While legal unions between men and women of different races would soon be outlawed in colonies founded upon racial hierarchy, such marriages could and did occur in England. If she could pass as a free woman, there were employment opportunities as a maid, cook or domestic servant in London. Pepys’s diary makes clear the ubiquity of such serving people and, while some of them were enslaved, others were quite possibly free. He included numerous references to Mingo, Sir William Batten’s ‘Black’ servant, as well as the ‘blackemore’ servant of William Glanville; the death by plague of the merchant George Cocke’s ‘black’ manservant; Jack, the Black servant of Sir William Penn; and Doll, ‘a blackmoore’ from the household of merchant William Batelier who briefly worked for Pepys and his wife.⁵ We can get a sense of how Doll might have been dressed from Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1645 portrait of a young African woman wearing the dress of a domestic servant (Figure 20).⁶

Figure 20. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Head of a Black woman with a lace kerchief hat’ (1645), no. 46, plate opposite p. 88 in Folger Shakespeare Library. The woman is wearing quite expensive, albeit relatively plain, lace (in an age of incredibly opulent elite clothing), which may suggest that she was a domestic servant or attendant.

Two of the thirteen female freedom seekers had metal collars fixed around their throats when they eloped, clearly marking them as enslaved and property. Both were young and neither was named in the advertisement or on the collars that restricted them. Both sought escape from the dockside communities on the banks of the Thames, and the first eloped from Captain John Bowers in Rotherhithe on 18 September 1690. Bowers’s advertisement appeared four days later, in which he described the freedom seeker with just seven words as ‘AN Indian black girl, aged about 15’. He preferred to focus the advertisement not on the individual but on the clothes and collar that shaped her appearance, describing her apparel as ‘a Drugget Gown and a Painted-Callico Petticoat’. The heavy woollen gown may not have offered much protection against the elements over quite possibly a thin South Asian cotton garment that she may have brought with her from the East Indies.⁷

Bowers had made a voyage to Bantam in Java and Surat in India in 1682–3, another to Madras and Bengal in 1684–7 and quite possibly other voyages for which records have not survived. He was clearly well connected to East India Company captains and officials who regularly travelled between England and India. Indeed, Captain John Hyde, the president of the East India Company, had been a passenger on Bowers’s voyage in the Persia in 1681–2.⁸

Given that she was only fifteen years old and quite possibly wearing an identifiably South Asian cotton garment, it is possible that this girl had arrived in London quite recently in a ship captained by Bowers or by one of his associates. The ‘Brass Collar about her Neck’ clearly marked this girl as enslaved property and may indicate that she had attempted escape before. Seventeen years later Bowers left sizeable bequests to his wife and grandsons; that he had a family suggests that this unnamed enslaved girl was a household domestic servant but does not preclude the possibility of her having suffered sexual assault on the voyage to London or following her arrival in the city.⁹ Was she in a sexual relationship with Bowers or another male member of his household? The power imbalance meant that she enjoyed little power or agency, and the collar she wore objectified and attempted to subdue her. If there was a sexual relationship between them, how can we define it and what terms can we use to describe it? Coercion or consent suggest binary alternatives when the situation would have been far more complex: as Diana Paton has observed, terms such as ‘concubine’ or ‘paramour’ obscure too much of the nature of such relationships.¹⁰ Samuel Pepys’s diary makes clear that he regularly fondled and assaulted White female servants, and that, however much they resented his actions, it would appear that the young women in his house were not at all surprised by their master’s behaviour. Young female servants of colour, particularly those who were regarded as property by the men who held them in bondage, were even more vulnerable. The power imbalance between Bowers and this isolated young girl would have made any consensual relationship impossible. We do not know if the unnamed young woman had been assaulted by Bowers, or what prompted her to elope, but we do know that such assault was possible and common and that, whether or not it had happened in this case, this girl and others like her lived with the knowledge that it could happen at any time. All that we know for sure is that she tried to free herself.

Two and a half years earlier, a twenty-eight-year-old ‘Indian’ man named Francisco or Bugge, who had probably come to London in May 1687 on Bowers’s voyage back from Madras and Bengal, had eloped from Bowers (see pp. 81–3).¹¹ This man had already been free for almost a month when Bowers advertised for him, while the unnamed freedom-seeking girl had been absent for five days when he advertised for her, despite her flimsy clothes and the heavy brass collar designed to mark her as property. Perhaps she had been able to secure assistance in removing the collar and a change of clothes, but if she was newly arrived in London the chances of a successful escape appear remote.

A year later another female freedom seeker eloped from the riverside maritime community. About 1,000 yards north of Bowers’s home, across the Thames and past the thicket of masts and rigging of the ocean-going ships at anchor lay the densely packed East End communities of Wapping, Shadwell and Ratcliff. At their heart and just a few steps from the river was the Ship Tavern at Ratcliff Cross, from which an unnamed girl attempted to escape in 1691. This runaway was also fifteen years old and described simply as ‘A black Girl’, who like her fellow freedom seeker south of the river was dressed simply in ‘a black Cloth Gown and Petticoat’. The brass collar fitted around her neck was described in more detail than the girl herself, for its purpose was to mark her as property and make her escape from enslavement impossible. With a frankness that showed how normative he thought it was to manacle a girl he owned, her enslaver included in his runaway advertisement the words ‘with a brass Collar about her Neck, with this Inscription, John Campion at the Ship-Tavern at Ratcliff Cross, his Negro’.¹²

The Ship Tavern was an important enough institution to be marked on maps, and Campion was a successful vintner, wine merchant and innkeeper. Upon his death seven years later, he left bequests of more than £2,000 to his wife and four children, evidence that he had been a sufficiently successful merchant and businessman to afford to purchase an enslaved girl, perhaps to help his wife with household work or to assist in the tavern that was his place of business.¹³ During these years the wharves that lined the river a very short distance from Ratcliff Cross were some of the best landing spots east of the City of London. Long known as ‘Sailor Town’, Ratcliff was filled with sailors and ship captains, shipwrights, merchants and working men and women of all of the ancillary trades that supported the burgeoning ocean-going trade, and the Ship Tavern was a major community hub. People of colour must have regularly passed through, some of them accompanying the people who owned them, and it is conceivable that Campion had acquired this unnamed girl from a customer or business connection. When he advertised for her, this young girl had already been absent ‘near 3 Weeks’, so the collar around her neck had not restrained her actions as he had hoped. By the end of the seventeenth century there was a growing Black community in the East End, some enslaved or bound and others free; she may have found refuge there or work as a free woman, or the protection of a partner or friends, whether Black or White. The longer she was absent, presumably with the collar removed or at least obscured, the better her chance of remaining free.

These were not the only female runaways implicitly identified as enslaved in runaway advertisements. On 4 August 1691 ‘an East-India tawney Maid’ eloped. Named Corney, she was described as ‘aged about 20, short, and inclining to be fat, thick Lipp’d, long black hair by Nature, though at present cut short like a Boys’. Although not restricted by a collar, Corney was nonetheless defined in the advertisement by the short statement that she had been ‘bought at Bantam in the East-Indies’, a clear assertion of her status as purchased chattel property. It is not clear where or from whom she had escaped, and the advertisement simply promised a £1 reward to anyone who might give information leading to her recapture to a Mr Wilson in Litchfield Street near Soho. Wilson might have been the person who claimed ownership of Corney, or a contact and middleman.¹⁴

Figure 21. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Head of a Black woman in profile to left’ (1645), Folger Shakespeare Library. This young woman appears to be wearing the kind of clothing that many of London’s domestic servants might have worn.

Three of the thirteen female runaways were identified as South Asian, and the proportions of female and male freedom seekers who were South Asians were almost identical. One was the first female freedom seeker for whom a runaway advertisement has been discovered. Named Sarah, she had disappeared ‘from Mr. Simon New’s house’ on 16 January 1680, and the advertisement described her simply as ‘an Indian Woman, about 40 years of Age, Tawney Complexion, long black hair, [and] a long cut down her forehead’. It is possible that Sarah had not run away but instead, as New’s advertisement suggested, had ‘Strayed or [been] spirited’ away. However, the value of a forty-year-old woman would have been lower than that of a younger person, and a girl or young woman of colour was probably a more tempting target for those who sought to kidnap and sell such unfortunate women. New’s house was in Vere Street, an increasingly well-developed area between the City and Westminster that lay south-west of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.¹⁵

Bess eloped on 8 December 1702. Aged sixteen and described as ‘A Negro Maid’, she was wearing a striped ‘stuff Wastcoat and Peticoat’ and her dark complexion was ‘much pitted with the Small Pox’. More than three weeks later Bess was still at liberty, and Benjamin Quelch readvertised for her in early 1703.¹⁶ Quelch had been one of the men who had developed large-scale plantation slavery in Barbados and then helped transfer that system and the enslaved people who worked it to South Carolina. He was in London only temporarily, for he and his family had made their home in South Carolina where he became a major figure.¹⁷ His years in Barbados and then South Carolina would have given him direct experience of early plantation slavery at its most brutal, a system that killed Africans almost as quickly as they were imported. Both of Quelch’s newspaper advertisements for Bess mentioned that she was missing ‘a piece of her Left Ear’, possibly the result of an unusual injury but just as likely of the punitive clipping of an ear after one or more escape attempts. It is unclear why Quelch brought Bess to London. If he had travelled with his family, she may have been attending his wife and children, but if he had travelled alone he could not have employed her as he might an enslaved boy, as a personal attendant and messenger. A female attendant to a male travelling alone was unusual, and once again sexual exploitation could have been a factor.¹⁸

Quelch’s advertisement specified that if anyone captured Bess they should return her to ‘Mr Lloyd, at his Coffee House in Lombard street’, making this hub of colonial commerce in the City a party to Quelch’s attempts to reassert ownership of this freedom seeker. But twenty-five days after she ‘ran away from her Master’ Bess was still free. His advertisement had noted that ‘she speaks English well’, which may have enhanced her opportunities to create friendships or potential allies before seizing the chance of escape. Had Bess been recaptured by the time Quelch returned to Charleston, and did she then spend the rest of her life enslaved in South Carolina? Or did she become one more of the small but significant number of free women of colour in London?