8. Benjamin: branded

Benjamin, a Middle siz’d Negro, Aged about 20, both ears cut or clipped, and Branded on both Shoulders, went away on Saturday last from Theodore Palaologus. Whoever brings him to Doctor John Moiles in Ratcliff-Highway, shall have a Guinea’s Reward and Charges.

The London Gazette, 13 October 1692

Country marks and filed teeth had meaning and significance for Europeans and most especially for the Africans thus marked. They were inerasable emblems of African nativity and upbringing, and thus assertions of an original cultural identity. As the years passed, a bound or enslaved African’s memory of their family, of the geography, flora and fauna, and of the people, places, beliefs and traditions of their homeland might all fade, but their country marks and scarred teeth endured as abiding emblems of African identity. Sometimes, however, it was not these African emblems that marked the bodies of London’s enslaved but rather the markings, mutilations or physical constraints violently imposed on enslaved bodies by enslavers. In March 1690 an unnamed ‘Negro’ eloped ‘from on Board the Ship Loyal trade, from Bristol’. The Bristol merchant Abraham Birkin made no mention of this man’s clothing, perhaps because readers would assume that the man was wearing seafaring garb, but he did describe his physical characteristics, noting ‘all his Teeth before filed sharp, with two burnt Marks on his Shoulders’. These brands forever marked the man as enslaved, symbolically asserting the supremacy of White claims to his body over his membership in West African society demonstrated by his filed teeth.¹

An unnamed man described by James Thomas as a ‘Negro Man or Blackamore’ was twenty-one years old when he escaped in 1695. The advertisement reported that ‘Through his Nostrills have been holes’, almost certainly an African body modification, but the additional information that ‘one of his Ears have been cut away’ is something else entirely. The freedom seeker ‘speaks good English’ and ‘formerly lived in Barbados’, a colony in which attempted escape from enslavement could be punished by the mutilation of noses and ears, with even worse punishments for repeat offenders. The author of the advertisement may have been the James Thomas sent to Barbados in 1659 as an indentured servant, bound to labour for five years. If so, he had become one of a minority of such labourers who survived his period of servitude and then made enough money to acquire enslaved people. Thomas could afford to dress this unnamed man in ‘a new Livery Coat and Wastcoat, a light Brown Cloath lin’d with Blew, a gilded flat Button, the Wastcoat Scarlit and blew small stript Callamanco with the same Button, and a stript and flowered Fustian Frock with a gilded flat Button’. The description of clothing was far more extensive than the description of the man wearing these garments, and Thomas’s angry assertion that the freedom seeker ‘pretends to be a Sea-man’ implied that he had attempted escape before and that he might soon sell his valuable clothing, exchange it for the cheaper rough and tarred fabrics of the seafarer, and seek work aboard an ocean-going ship. Already absent for five weeks, this man may even have been at sea by the time Thomas wrote and published his advertisement.²

In June 1674 ‘a Blackamoor Man’ escaped from John Seyntaubyn in Cornwall. Tall and slender and wearing loose-fitting old clothes, this freedom seeker ‘names himself John Angola’, an interesting identification with Africa in his surname. But it was the brand marks on his body –rather than his stature, his clothing or his name – that were most noticeable: a London newspaper advertisement described him as ‘Iron-marked in his Brest with the sign of a Greyhound, and in his Left-side, with the sign of a Hawk flying’.³ Nine years later ‘a Blackamore Boy, about 14 or 15 Years old’ eloped wearing black clothes and with ‘a Ring in one of his Ears’. This unnamed boy was rendered more identifiable by the brand marks ‘Imprest upon one of his Shoulders with an Iron, the Letters R.G.’, almost certainly the initials of a past or present master.⁴

In the Caribbean and southern colonies brand marks of symbols and the initials of slave-owners were often visible on shoulders and breasts, for arduous plantation labour in a sultry climate meant that enslaved labourers wore relatively little or loose-fitting and open clothing while working. In London’s colder climes these brand markings were generally covered by clothing, but descriptions of these markings in advertisements suggest that those who took up suspected freedom seekers would nonetheless seek to identify them by the marks of White ownership burned into their flesh. It would have been far more difficult for Peter to hide the ‘mark burnt in his forehead and brest’ when he eloped in 1662, or for the twenty-six-year-old man Johanna to hide the ‘two Rings burnt in his Forehead’, even though they were ‘almost worn out’.⁵ While the mark on his breast was probably a brand mark indicating the identity of his owner, it was unusual to burn a slave-holder’s initials onto the forehead of an enslaved person. However, colonial legislatures by this time had begun to mandate both the mutilation of noses and ears and the branding of faces for the punishment of serious offences by the enslaved, including repeated attempts at escape. Thus, in July 1640 the Virginia General Court ordered that Emmanuel, an enslaved man who had eloped and been recaptured, ‘receive thirty stripes and to be burnt in the cheek with the letter R and to work in shackles for one year or more’.⁶ London freedom seekers with brands on their faces had almost certainly received these as punishment in the North American or Caribbean colonies.

Benjamin, ‘Aged about 20’ when he sought freedom in London in October 1692, appears to have been marked as property and then again as punishment for attempting escape. Theodore Palaeologus gave no description of Benjamin’s stature and countenance other than the vague reference to his being ‘Middle siz’d’, but noted that the young man had ‘both Ears cut or clipped, and [was] branded on both shoulders’.⁷ While the latter were marks of ownership, the former were most likely the scars of punishment for resistance or escape. Palaeologus was an unusual English colonist. His grandfather, a descendant of Constantine XIII, the last reigning sovereign of the Byzantine empire, had arrived in England in 1628, and he and his three sons had all fought on the Royalist side during the Civil War. One of these sons, Ferdinand, then emigrated to Barbados where he became a planter in St John’s parish, and by 1680 the estate he co-owned with Alexander Beale, clearly visible on Richard Ford’s 1685 map of the island, was worked by seventy enslaved people.⁸ Ferdinand Palaeologus died in Barbados in 1678, leaving half of his share of the ‘plantation, with all profit, stock, and goods thereunto belonging’ to his son Theodore, who would gain the remainder upon the death of his mother. Perhaps Theodore had brought Benjamin with him when he moved back to London and settled in Stepney in the East End. Benjamin’s status was inscribed upon his body, and he was branded as property and mutilated, most probably as punishment for previous escape attempts. During these early years of plantation slavery in Barbados, White labour was being completely replaced by enslaved African labour, and as the sugar plantation system took hold, planters were destroying Black bodies almost as fast as they could import them. Any enslaved man who had been in Barbados during this period, with its violent horrors etched upon his body, would have had every reason to seek freedom.⁹