4. Jack: boys

A Guinea Negro Boy, about 8 years old, named Jack, straight limb, no mark in his face, in a black cloth suit, and a black Serge Frock over them, and on his head a black Cloth Permission Cap, he strayed away from Mr. Peter Paggens in Cross-lane, on St. Mary Hill near Billingsgate, on the 3d instant, about 6 in the afternoon. Whoever shall bring the said Negro Boy to the above said Mr. Paggens, or discovers where he is, so that he may be had again, shall have 20 s. Reward.

The London Gazette, 9 June 1690

Racial slavery became commonplace in England’s Caribbean and Chesapeake colonies during the second half of the seventeenth century and planters strove to acquire enslaved adults, mostly African but some indigenous Americans. Children were less desirable than the ‘Choyce Young Negros Who will be fit for plant serwice’, the healthy young adult males Henry Drax sought for his Barbados plantation.¹ Over the course of the century more than 173,000 enslaved people disembarked in the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica, and of these almost 166,000 (96 per cent) went to Caribbean plantations, where they suffered horrifyingly high mortality rates.² In the Caribbean colonies enslaved adult workers died far more frequently than children were born, and planters replaced them with enslaved adults newly arrived from Africa who could immediately work and be productive until they too succumbed. This was not yet a mature plantation society containing social and familial units, and planters who sought nothing other than labour from the people they owned viewed children as having little value.

The situation was very different in Restoration London, however, where young boys dominated the city’s enslaved community (Figure 15). The ages or age groups of freedom seekers were included in 201 of the 212 newspaper advertisements between 1655 and 1704, and 56 per cent of these were aged nineteen or younger (or were described as ‘boy’ or ‘young’ male). Among the male freedom seekers whose age was included in advertisements, 49 per cent were aged seventeen or younger and 15 per cent were no older than 12.

Figure 15. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Portrait of an African Boy’, 17th century, Folger Shakespeare Library.

The labour of enslaved children in Restoration England was dramatically different from that undertaken by the enslaved in the Caribbean and Chesapeake colonies, where planters needed adults to undertake arduous agricultural labour to raise and process tobacco, sugar and other staple crops. Enslaved boys assisted ship captains, merchants and others as cabin boys, messengers and the like, and some became the page boys and personal attendants of men and women rich enough to purchase them. Those who were dressed in smart liveries advertised the wealth and success of the people who were profiting from England’s rapidly expanding colonial ventures and commodity trades: during the early 1660s, for example, Samuel Pepys was attended by an English boy named Wayneman Birch, dressed in an attractive livery and wearing a sword. This clothing demonstrated that the wearer was not expected to undertake the hard and dirty work done by many household servants, especially girls and young women. Adolescent males employed in this way attended the head of household from dawn to dusk, perhaps preparing his clothes and helping him dress and undress, cutting and combing his hair, and even shaving and washing him. A servant of this kind was expected to keep himself sufficiently clean, well dressed and presentable to reflect well on the master he attended about town.³

Some of London’s liveried servant boys were enslaved or bound Africans or South Asians, and a few of these tried to escape their service. Jack was ‘A Guinea Negro Boy, about 8 years old’, who had ‘strayed away from Mr. Peter Paggens’ in Billingsgate. The word ‘strayed’ suggests that Jack may have lost his way rather than escaped, although, given the value of a young enslaved boy, he might also have been kidnapped. A young boy born perhaps in West Africa, who had endured separation from his family and the horrors of the Middle Passage, Jack found himself in London far from everyone and everything that was familiar to him and may have eloped with no clear idea of a destination or what he might do. Despair may have occasioned this child’s actions.

Jack was described in the advertisement as being from Guinea and well dressed ‘in a black cloth suit, and a black Serge Frock over them’, along with ‘a black Cloth Permission Cap’ that he could wear in locations where males traditionally uncovered their heads. Jack’s dress reflected the wealth and status of his master Peter Paggen, a Huguenot merchant in London who had begun as a ship captain transporting tobacco from the Chesapeake Bay region to London. Paggen became one of the capital’s leading tobacco merchants and was appointed their colonial agent in London in 1692 by the General Assembly of Maryland, when he expanded his trading interests to include trafficking in enslaved people. Between 1699 and 1706 he was the co-owner of at least twenty-six ships that undertook transatlantic slave trading voyages, almost all destined for England’s fastest-growing and most profitable colony of Jamaica. Paggen was deeply invested in the slave trade and plantation slavery, and intimately connected with the network of London traders who were building and profiting from this endeavour: in 1703, for example, he joined with Sir Bartholomew Gracedieu and others in petitioning the Council of Trade and Plantations to allow and encourage the resettlement and defence of Port Royal following the devastating Jamaican earthquake of 1692.⁴ Upon his death Paggen left his wife the substantial income from £20,000 worth of stock in the United East India Company (the Dutch East India Company) and the Bank of England, and, having already provided one daughter with a dowry of £16,000, he left £10,000 of stock in trust for a second daughter. His daughter Catherine’s second husband was Sir Humphry Morice, a leading London slave-trader and governor of the Bank of England; Morice named one of his slave ships in honour of his wife Catherine. The wealthy community of investors in slavery and plantations were, as Paggen and his family illustrated, not even one step removed from the actual ownership of enslaved people.⁵

The trade in enslaved people and the crops they raised had made Paggen an extremely wealthy man, and an attractive, well-liveried enslaved boy who attended him enabled Paggen to flaunt his wealth and its human source. Jack was almost certainly one of a number of servants living and working in Paggen’s house, and, although his work and clothing may have made him appear more privileged than those tasked with the drudgery of cooking and cleaning, he was almost certainly less free than the servants who could change employer at the end of annual contracts or even leave the household at will and quite likely not be pursued for breach of contract. How did Paggen’s use of Jack and his clothing to display success and wealth feel to an eight-year-old whose life and person were being deployed to embody the success of another person, his life and individuality stripped away in the few words of an advertisement and an anonymizing uniform? An unnamed ‘Guinea Negro Boy’, he was less than a person, an adjunct to Paggen rather than an individual. Almost certainly torn from his mother, his family and his culture at a very tender age, where could he have found comfort, friendship and love? Perhaps in Paggen’s household and from other servants, but to the Paggens he was valuable property as much as he was a family member.

Samuel Pepys owned an enslaved ‘neager-boy’ who had been given to him in 1675 by Lieutenant Howe of the Phoenix. It appears that Pepys owned this unnamed boy for five years before selling him in June 1680.⁶ It is unclear if this boy ever attempted escape, but the brief notes of his existence and the years he spent in the Pepys household remind us that there were almost certainly many more enslaved boys who did not escape or who were not the subject of advertisements than there were young freedom seekers who appear in the pages of Restoration London’s newspapers. The courage of the children and young adults who did elope, and the terror of those who were kidnapped – quite possibly to be sold – are not easily communicated in the few dry words of advertisements. An ‘East India slim-Boy, aged about 14’ eloped in late January 1689.⁷ He could be returned for the reward of one guinea to Margaret Cooper on Threadneedle Street, just north of the Royal Exchange. A different Jack, ‘whose Indian name is Mottaw’, was between eleven and twelve years old when he eloped in early November 1690.⁸ The ‘blue stroke between his Eye-brows’ may have been a Hindu bindi, a brightly coloured marking representing the third, invisible eye.⁹ If so, perhaps Jack kept marking himself in this way to connect himself to his home, his family and his culture. The blue stroke and Mottaw’s pierced ears, which would have been unusual in London at this time, were described in the advertisement, along with his clothing, in the hope of identifying the freedom seeker, yet he had already been absent for almost a month when the advertisement appeared.

Peter, who was about thirteen years old, escaped from Gilbert Bruning’s home near Drury Lane in mid-September 1687.¹⁰ This boy had arrived from Surinam some three years earlier and had learned to speak ‘pretty good English’. Having spent almost one quarter of his life in the city, Peter had no doubt learned his way around London and he had perhaps made friends and forged relationships that made escaping more practical. Gilbert and his brothers Francis and John had been planters in Surinam under both Dutch and English rule, and Gilbert and John had owned ‘as considerable a plantation in Surinam as any Englishman’. Peter had probably accompanied Bruning from that colony back to London, serving him as a well-dressed personal attendant.¹¹ Described by Bruning as ‘well favour’d’, Peter apparently looked the part of an attractive, young enslaved servant; when he eloped he was dressed accordingly ‘in a sad hair colour Cloth Sute lin’d with the same colour, his Coat faced with Red Cloth, and white Pewter Buttons’. Smart without being as ostentatiously attired as the expensively liveried enslaved servants of some men and women, Peter was nevertheless far better dressed better than most of the capital’s young White servants. When Bruning died six years later he left plantations in Surinam and Antigua to various family members. It is unclear whether Peter, or for that matter any of the other enslaved or bound servants in London, was still with the family and considered a part of the ‘goods and chattels in England, Holland and the Island of Antigua’ that Bruning left to his wife. Bruning’s legacy of the ‘goods and chattels’ of his Surinam plantation probably included enslaved people, and so the absence of any specific mention of people as property does not necessarily mean that Peter or somebody like him was not part of Bruning’s estate.¹²

Many of the enslaved boys in the capital had arrived on ships on which they had served as the cabin boy and attendant of the captain, who often then sold the boy on. An unnamed ‘Mollatta Boy about Eleven years of Age’ was described as having a ‘yellow Complexion, [and] wooly Hair like a Negro’.¹³ He had eloped from ‘Capt. John Symonds of his Majesty’s Navy’ who had captained HMS Tiger, an older frigate recently rebuilt in the Deptford shipyard of John Shish.¹⁴ According to Symonds, the boy, who had escaped about ten days earlier, ‘has been seen several times about Town’, perhaps enjoying his escape from the hard life aboard ship.

One resourceful young freedom seeker gives us an impression of the possible routes to freedom available to these children and young adults. In November 1673 an eleven-year-old ‘black Boy’ who ‘goes by the name of William Moorfield’ eloped from Thomas Lewis on Crutched Friars, which lay immediately north of the Navy Office and just to the west of the Tower of London.¹⁵ Four months later an advertisement specified that William might be returned to Lewis or to ‘John Knight, at the King’s great Wardrobe, in the Savoy’. The identity of Knight is unclear: he may have been an official with responsibility for naval supplies or have worked for the treasurer of the Customs House, since at that time men with that name and those positions appear to have resided at or near by the Savoy.¹⁶

Remarkably, we know a little more about what the freedom seeker himself achieved, for just over a year later Lewis readvertised for Moorfield, by now a ‘Black Boy about twelve years old’, who had escaped once again. But in this second advertisement Lewis noted that during Moorfield’s earlier attempt at freedom, after he had escaped ‘near five Moneths past’, he had ‘put himself into service with Mr. Gorey, living near Mulgrave house at Charing Cross’.¹⁷ In short, Moorfield had sought, like many White servants, to enter service as a paid free worker. What is perhaps most remarkable is that Gorey’s home was no more than two miles from Thomas Lewis’s home whence Moorfield had escaped, and no more than 1,000 yards west along the Strand from John Knight’s home at the Savoy. The size and density of London, together with the growing number of people of colour working in the households and businesses of a range of Londoners, appear to have made it possible for freedom seekers to hope to evade recapture while remaining in the City, hiding in plain sight as free paid workers of employers they had chosen. Moorfield escaped for the second time at the end of March 1674, only ten days or so after Gorey had returned him to Lewis. Gorey was clearly determined to prevent Moorfield from escaping again and so had arranged for the fitting of ‘a Lock and Chain about his Neck’, highly visible evidence both of Moorfield’s enslaved status and of Lewis’s determination that, after absenting himself for almost half a year, Moorfield would not escape again. The fitting of a collar and chain – a punishing restraint commonly used by enslavers in the colonies – makes clear that Lewis claimed Moorefield as enslaved property, for the imposition of such a restraint upon a free labourer was extremely unlikely. Employed servants who eloped usually were pursued only if they had stolen goods, and if caught they might be punished, but not by the fitting of restraints considered inappropriate for free Englishmen.

Enslaved boys might also seize the opportunities for freedom presented by the death or departure of the men who owned and had brought them to London. Toby, ‘a lusty Negro Boy’, was about fourteen years old when he escaped from Anthony Reynolds on 20 April 1691.¹⁸ The advertisement placed by Reynolds stated that Toby ‘lived formerly with Mr. Beacham against St. Lawrence Church by Guildhall’. It is possible that Toby was or had been the enslaved property of Edmund Beauchampe who had lived in that area: in his will Beauchampe described himself as both ‘Mercer of London and … County Clerke of Somerset in the Province of Maryland’, and he was in Maryland when he died in September 1691.¹⁹ Although Toby was ‘lusty’ and so presumably in good health, he ‘goes bending in the Back, and stammers much at his first speaking’. Stammering, especially when it was an occasional rather than a constant condition, might well reflect the psychological impact of the fear experienced by an enslaved person, in this case a child perhaps brought from Maryland to London (and perhaps from Africa to London before then) and left in the capital with a virtual stranger when Beauchampe returned to the Chesapeake. It is unclear what Toby’s status was, for although the advertisement states that he had ‘RUN away from’ Reynolds it is not clear if Reynolds now owned Toby or was exercising temporary control over him.

The runaway advertisements for boys and young adult males who fled indicate that some, like William Moorfield, were able to remain free for extended periods and perhaps permanently. Typical of these are ten-year-old John Moor, who had been gone for over two weeks when an advertisement for him appeared; twelve-year-old Andrew, who had been absent for well over one month; fourteen-year-old Calib, who had been gone for almost the same length of time; and eleven-year-old William Moorfield, who had been absent for an impressive four months.²⁰ That so many could remain free for so long was an indication of the presence of a significant number of boys of colour in Restoration London, which enabled freedom seekers to blend into a larger population. While a few were the richly liveried attendants to extremely wealthy men and women, others were intended to show the wealth and success of affluent yet less prestigious people, and yet more were dressed in the working clothes of those who worked for ship captains, merchants and other traders and business people. Young boys from South Asia and Africa were not simply present in London: they were a part of the city, integrated into the rhythms of life and work of the bustling metropole of a fast-growing empire. Some eloped and, while many were recaptured, others may have been able to fashion some kind of life for themselves as Londoners and as the youngest members of the capital’s community of people of colour.