7. Caesar: country marks

Run away from a Gentleman of Greenwich the 16th Instant, a Negro Youth, about 17 years of Age; Nose and Mouth formed like a White-man, yet of Colour very Black, small Cuts on each side of his Face, on the Temples; his Hair Cut about a Month since, he Beats a Drum well, and plays on the Flagelet, and Recorder, he goes by the name of Caesar, when he Ran away, he took several things of value; and had on an old Gray Cloath Coate Lin’d with Green Bazs, and Pewter Buttons to it, Coloured drouget Breeches and Gray Stockins, a greay Cap turn’d up with Furr, whosoever can bring Tydings of him unto Captain William Richardson, at the Star-Inn in Fish-streethill, near the Monument, so as he may be Returned to his Master shall have two Guinies Reward and all their Charges paid.

The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 20 December 1681

Runaway advertisements published in Restoration London newspapers tended to be less detailed than those that appeared in Caribbean and North American newspapers a century later. Colonial enslavers sought to identify particular freedom seekers who might attempt to disappear into large populations of enslaved and free people of colour. With a much smaller population of people of colour in London, it was far harder for freedom seekers to reach sanctuary or to hide in plain sight, and consequently the capital’s earliest newspaper advertisements were often quite short and basic: advertisers did not believe that a great deal of descriptive detail was required to identify a freedom seeker.

On occasion advertisements described physical marks and scars on the bodies of escapees, and the physical restraints imposed upon them, presumably to aid identification. While these descriptions of markings and restraints were intended to help identify individual freedom seekers, the branded letters and markings on the shoulders, arms and breasts of some, together with the collars and chains fitted to others, show that these men, women and children had been subjected to violent assertions of ownership and control of their bodies. They were chilling evidence of the realities of enslavement in the English capital.

Some of the bound and enslaved people who were brought to seventeenth-century England also bore physical marks showing that they had been born in and had lived their early years in West Africa. There might be patterns of scars and inscribed marks on their foreheads, cheeks and perhaps upper arms and torsos, ritual bodily inscriptions that were often applied when they became young adults. This was a practice rooted in West African and Madagascan cultures and belief systems but it was not continued in the English colonies, and thus these markings served as inerasable evidence of African birth. By the mid eighteenth century Britons were labelling them ‘country marks’, assuming that particular patterns could reveal the bearer’s ‘country’ of birth in West Africa. But in seventeenth-century London there was less knowledge about them and no fixed terminology as yet to describe the markings.¹

One who bore such markings was Caesar, ‘A Negro Youth about 17 years of age’, who fled from ‘a Gentleman of Greenwich’ on 16 December 1681. Wearing a grey coat lined with green material and sporting pewter buttons, grey stockings, a fur cap and breeches, Caesar was a talented musician who could play the drum, the recorder and the flageolet (a type of flute) – the latter two popular instruments in early modern England. He thus appeared somewhat assimilated into English culture, yet his ‘very handsome Face, with some small Scars or Cuts near his Eyes’ forever marked him as African born.² A year later an unnamed ‘Negro Man’, about thirty years old and bearing ‘three small scars in each cheek’, escaped from Bell Wharf in Shadwell in the heart of the riverside East End.³ And a year after that an unnamed ‘Blackamoor’, a ‘lusty young Fellow, with Notches cross his Nose and down his Forehead, ran away from his Master’.⁴ All told, twenty-three (16 per cent) of the identifiably African freedom seekers had country marks (or other African bodily markings) upon them, and all but one of them were male. A further three advertisements included vague references to facial marks and scars, taking the possible total of those bearing country marks to approximately 18 per cent.

Country marks were so common that when Jack, ‘A Guinea Negro Boy, about 8 years old … strayed away from Mr. Peter Paggens’ in 1690, Paggens thought it worth mentioning that this African-born boy had ‘no mark in his face’.⁵ The absence of country marks was as noteworthy as their presence on the face of this young freedom seeker would have been. He had quite possibly come to Paggens on one of his ships bringing tobacco from the Chesapeake, and the very young boy surely served in this extremely wealthy family as a well-dressed and largely ornamental page boy. Captured while he was very young, Jack had not yet undergone the ritual scarification associated with passing from childhood.

One of those bearing African country marks was female, a young woman who eloped from Moses Cook on 17 March 1690. Cook did not bother to identify her by name in the advertisement he published three days later, instead describing her in disparaging terms as

a thick, short, fat, Malagascow black Maid, aged about 20, with a round scar at the corner of each Eye near her Temples, and a scar in her Neck, her Hair about two Inches long, with a Cloth-coloured Man’s Coat, a red Petticoat, a blue Shift, and a pair of Man’s Shoes.⁶

Cook was a cordwainer and this young freedom seeker had escaped from his business and home in Great Turnstile Alley in Holborn, marked by the ‘Sign of the Tobacco Roll’. Perhaps Cook believed that the country marks on her face would be more useful in identifying her than her name. Although it was not as common in Madagascar as in some areas of West Africa, ritual scarification did occur among the Malagasy people.⁷

Despite Cook’s omission, we do know this woman’s name, for three days later another record identified her as ‘Anne (formerly Grace) a black of Madagascar belonging to Moses Cook a shoemaker in Lincoln’s Inn fields’.⁸ On 20 March Anne was baptized at St Pancras Old Church on Euston Road. This church was at the northern edge of London (a few hundred yards from St Pancras Station today) and lay about two miles north of Cook’s home and workplace in Turnstile Alley. Cook owned property in the vicinity of the church, so he and perhaps Anne may well have been familiar with the area. We cannot know what was going on, whether Anne had been recaptured or returned by choice, and her baptism was in some way a result of her escape attempt. Or might she still have been at liberty when she was baptized on the same day that Cook’s runaway advertisement describing her was published? If so, what did the baptism mean to her? Was it an assertion of freedom, of independence and citizenship? Or could it have been a necessary precondition for marriage, perhaps a marriage forbidden by Cook or that she hoped would help enable her to remain free? We cannot know, for after appearing twice in records just three days apart, Anne disappeared from the archive.

Quite remarkably, another freedom seeker who appears to have had country marks can also be identified in London parish records. This young boy was described in a runaway advertisement as ‘a Negro or Blackamore boy, by name Champion, about 14 years of Age, very black and handsome, with a scar in his forehead over his nose’. Champion had escaped from Madam Brooking, who may well have been Winifred Brooking, the widow of William Brooking. The will left by William Brooking in 1682 revealed him to be a wealthy ‘gentleman’, perhaps a merchant. Given that William Brooking provided instructions for burial according to whether he died in England or ‘at Sea or in remote parts beyond the Sea’, he appears to have travelled abroad quite regularly, and so may have acquired Champion on one such voyage. It is not clear where Winifred Brooking lived and from where Champion escaped, but he could be returned to Nicholas Hamburgh in Seething Lane a few hundred yards north-west of the Tower of London at the eastern edge of the City of London.⁹

Champion escaped on 17 September 1685, but six days later he was baptized at St Giles in the Fields, beyond the western edge of the City and some two and a half miles from Seething Lane. In the parish record he was described as ‘William Champion a black aged about 14 years’, but with no mention of his mistress or of any other White person.¹⁰ The newspaper advertisement seeking his return or information about his whereabouts was published a week after his baptism of 1 October, a full two weeks after his escape. Therefore he was at liberty when he was baptized, and this must have been a decision of his own making. But we cannot know if there were any reasons beyond religious faith for William Champion’s decision, or why he sought baptism at St Giles in the Fields, although it was a popular location for the capital’s community of people of colour. Perhaps he sought comfort at a location where other Africans might support and protect him.

The years between 1650 and the turn of the eighteenth century were the earliest period of the English transatlantic slave trade and the newly developing slave-based plantation system. Consequently, African-born people outnumbered colonial- or English-born ‘creolized’ Africans, whether in the colonies or in England. Within a couple of generations White Britons in the colonies would have been inclined to assume that any younger person bearing country marks was enslaved, for locally born creoles – many of them of mixed-race ancestry – were more likely to benefit from emancipation, and thus would not have borne country marks. Yet in seventeenth-century London the status of people of colour was less clear and certainly less fixed, so why shouldn’t Fortune, ‘A Negro lately belonging to Capt. Joseph Smith Deceased’, take advantage of Smith’s death to seek freedom for himself? A ‘short squat fellow’, he bore ‘cuts on each cheek’ identifying him as African born but he clearly fancied his chances of achieving freedom.¹¹ Fortune had been in England for only a short while, arriving in London with Smith who was a wealthy merchant normally resident in Barbados. Smith had made his will before travelling from Barbados to London, in which he left sizeable sums of money to his siblings, nephews, nieces and friends, some of which was to be held in trust until the legatees came of age. Included in the legacies were one to his friend and fellow colonist William Flatt, who was to receive household goods ‘and one Negro Man Scipio’.¹² Fortune was not mentioned, but Smith’s will stipulated that after all financial bequests had been made the residue of his estate would pass on to the children of his brother Christopher, all of whom resided in Southampton, England. Had Fortune been returned to Barbados following Smith’s death and the settlement of his estate, he would probably have been regarded as part of Smith’s estate, and he would probably have been sold to a sugar planter: escape in London must have seemed a much better alternative, however alien and threatening the English capital may have appeared. But, although Smith was no longer alive to pursue Fortune, his powerful mercantile friends did not hesitate to seek out the runaway, who could be returned to Edward Clarke under the sign of the hart and three pigeons in Shoe Lane on the western edge of the City. Clarke was a leading London merchant who was eventually a director of the Bank of England, was knighted and in 1696 became lord mayor.¹³ A powerful and well-connected man, he was well positioned to preside over attempts to stymie Fortune’s bid for freedom.

One of the first mentions of country marks in a newspaper advertisement appeared in December 1664 when an unnamed ‘little Negro Boy of about 13 years of age’ disappeared and was noted to have been either ‘Lost or absented’. Wearing a grey livery, the boy bore ‘a small Cross in his forehead’. Presumably he returned or was returned because four months later another advertisement appeared after the freedom seeker once again eloped. This time it is more likely that he had escaped, for he had already been absent for a month when the advertisement appeared. The advertisement included the fact that he spoke ‘Spanish indifferently well, and good English’.¹⁴

Another African practice of bodily modification was the filing of their teeth – usually the front incisors – to sharp points.¹⁵ This was more unusual in London than the country markings and thus more worthy of note in advertisements. When an unnamed twenty-three-year-old ‘tall Negro Man’ escaped in Bristol in 1701, an advertisement described his clothing in some detail, but the only physical description other than a vague reference to his height was mention of the fact that ‘three of his upper Teeth sharp at the ends like a Dogs Teeth’.¹⁶ The man who claimed this African was in all probability Francis Rogers, a member of a prominent family of Quaker merchants in Bristol. Heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, Rogers was the owner or co-owner of at least thirteen Bristol slave-trading ships voyaging between Africa and the colonies. The first of Rogers’ slave-trading ships that we know of returned to Bristol some ten months after this freedom seeker had eloped, so he may well have come to the city aboard another merchant’s ship or on an earlier voyage partially funded by Rogers for which no evidence of his involvement survives. Rogers’ advertisement promised a sizeable three-guinea reward to anyone who captured the freedom seeker and returned him to either Rogers in Bristol or another merchant in the heart of the City of London, suggesting that Rogers thought this freedom seeker might have attempted the 120-mile journey to the capital, where he was more likely to be able to remain free or be able to join an ocean-going ship’s crew.¹⁷