10. Quoshey: escaping from ships and their captains

A Negro, named Quoshey, aged about 16 years, belonging to Capt. Edward Archer, run away from Bell-Wharf the 25th Instant, having on a Plush Cap with black fur, a dark Wastcoat, a speckled Shirt, old Callamanca Breeches, branded on his left Breast with E.A. but not plain, and shaved round his Head. Whoever brings him to Mr. Rowland Tryon in Lime-Street, or to Mr. Richard Clearke at Bell-Wharf in Shadwell, shah have a Guinea Reward, and Charges.

The London Gazette, 30 December 1700

At least forty-two male freedom seekers escaped from ships or from ship captains who were in London, a number that represents almost one quarter (22 per cent) of all male runaways. Although a few of them were very young and probably worked as cabin boys and personal attendants for ship captains and officers, most were old enough to work as seamen aboard these ships. The ages of thirty-four are known, and they were on average just under twenty-two years old when they eloped. A half-century later Olaudah Equiano began his life aboard ship at about the age of eleven as the enslaved property of Naval Officer Michael Pascal; he was to live through his teenage years and enter adulthood working on naval and merchant ships before securing his freedom at about the age of twenty-one. This pattern of development from enslaved cabin boy to enslaved seaman suggests that bound seafarers were one of the most visible groups of bound people of colour in London, particularly in dockland areas of the city. These boys and men could be seen between the City of London and Greenwich, and perhaps as far out as Gravesend and the mouth of the Thames.¹

During these years at least some of the enslaved seamen had their first experience of life at sea as enslaved cargo aboard the Middle Passage ships taking enslaved people from West Africa to the colonies. One of these seamen was Quoshey (sic), whose Akan day name Quashey tells us that he was born on a Sunday on the Gold Coast of West Africa. On Christmas Day 1700 Quoshey was a frightened teenager who was very far from home.² The seventy-eight words of the newspaper advertisement that appeared when he eloped identified him as an object rather than an individual, the enslaved property of another man. Other than his name, age, rough clothing and the initials of his owner branded on his breast, we know nothing about him.

We can, however, make some tentative assumptions based on what we can learn of Edward Archer. Quoshey resisted his enslavement by eloping from Archer on Christmas Day. When this newspaper advertisement appeared five days later Quoshey was still at liberty. The very existence of this advertisement suggests the agency and individuality of a teenaged boy who was willing to assert his right to control over his own body by stealing himself away. Captain Edward Archer claimed ownership of Quoshey and painfully branded his initials onto the teenager’s breast, imposing his identity on the sixteen-year-old. Archer lived (or had lived) by Bell Wharf on the eastern edge of Shadwell in London’s East End. This fast-growing suburb was defined by the ocean-going ships moored on the Thames and was filled with the homes of seafarers and their families, all the industries associated with building and outfitting ships, and the taverns and businesses that supported this community. Within a few blocks were taverns such as the King of Denmark and the King of Sweden, as well as Blackamoor Alley, Parrot Alley, Sugar House Yard and Tobacco Alley, all testifying to the cosmopolitan nature of the area, its inhabitants and the goods and people they transported.³

For at least some of his career Archer was a slave-ship captain. Quoshey’s name suggests that in late 1696 or early 1697 he had been taken from a Gold Coast trading post such as Cape Coast Castle and loaded onto Archer’s ironically named ship, the Happy Return. It was a relatively small slave ship of under 100 tons, into which 122 enslaved souls were packed tightly between the decks.⁴ Of these only ninety-eight survived the Middle Passage, a mortality rate of almost one fifth. Most of the survivors were sold to Barbados planters, but Quoshey, if he was indeed aboard, was probably retained as a favourite by Archer, for as a slave-ship captain Archer was entitled to ship and either sell or keep one or several enslaved people on his own account.

The newspaper advertisement of December 1700 did not, as was common, state that Quoshey had run away from Archer but instead that the teenager ‘belonging to Capt. Edw. Archer’ had ‘run away from Bell-Wharf’. The wording makes more sense given that Archer had sailed from London on 29 November on another slave ship, the Mayflower, which like the Happy Return was destined for West Africa and then Barbados.⁵ Why did Quoshey not accompany Archer? Did the captain not trust the young boy or think him sufficiently capable to serve him? Or did Archer want to protect him from the diseases and the horrors of this deadly voyage? Or did Archer perhaps not want to use valuable space and provisions for Quoshey, instead availing himself of the opportunity to gain another enslaved person as his perquisite, to be sold in the colonies to increase his profits from the voyage or, like Quoshey, brought back to London? With whom did Quoshey reside after Archer left, and what work was he doing?

We cannot answer these questions but we can surmise that the teenager was sufficiently motivated to escape, perhaps seeking to take advantage of Archer’s absence. He may have been treated poorly by those who ruled him, or maybe Archer had denied him the opportunity to sail back to West Africa. He may have known or feared that he might be sold and transported to the colonies or he may simply have missed the captain. It is quite possible that Quoshey had developed a bond of affection with Archer, and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography shows that enslaved boys and young men could become very close to the ships’ officers who enslaved them. Indeed, having sailed on a Middle Passage ship and seen the horrors below decks as well as the terror of arrival in the Caribbean, Quoshey may, perhaps out of numbing terror, have experienced some strangely positive emotions towards the man who had preserved him from the worst of all this. If Quoshey did feel anything like affection for Archer, we would today interpret it as a form of Stockholm Syndrome, a condition in which captives develop a deep psychological link with and dependence upon their captors.⁶ Enslavement and sale in West Africa, the Middle Passage and exposure to Caribbean plantation slavery must have had a deeply traumatic effect on boys such as Quoshey, and if his escape was motivated by affection for Archer this may have been symptomatic of such trauma.

Since Archer was absent and unable to receive Quoshey from any person who might recapture him, the advertisement gave two names and locations to which Quoshey might be returned in expectation of the significant reward of one guinea. One of the contacts named in the advertisement was Richard Clearke (or Clarke) on Bell Wharf in Shadwell, who was quite possibly responsible for Quoshey during Archer’s absence. Given that Quoshey was reported to have escaped from Bell Wharf, he had probably been living and working in Clearke’s home.⁷

The second contact to whom Quoshey might be returned was Rowland Tryon on Lime Street in Aldgate ward of the City of London. The Tryons were a well-known mercantile family in the City of London with connections to the Caribbean. In the mid-1690s, six or seven years before Quoshey’s escape, Rowland Tryon appeared in the lists of tax-paying property owners in Stepney. Adjacent to Shadwell, this proximity may have been a factor in a relationship between Archer and Clearke or Tryon. But a few years later Tryon was listed as a church warden for St Dionis Backchurch on Lime Street, the address mentioned in the advertisement. Tryon was a director of the Royal African Company, a transatlantic slave trader and a merchant, and his uncle Thomas had spent five years as a merchant in Barbados. Rowland Tryon served as the colonial agent representing South Carolina, and was in Barbados when he died in 1720. The trade in enslaved people and what they produced enabled Tryon, a wealthy and successful man, to indulge himself by subscribing to the first octavo edition of the Tatler, among other things.⁸

Archer, Tryon and maybe Clearke illustrate how deeply racial slavery had permeated London, and how it connected a ship captain in the East End, and other businessmen and residents of the East End’s maritime community with the wealthy merchants and investors of the City of London and the colonies. Similar networks of connections can be seen in the advertisements for other freedom seekers associated with slave-trading ships and their captains. One such advertisement was for twenty-five-year-old Joseph, ‘a Malegasco [Madagascar] Negro Man’ who had eloped from Captain Thomas Edwards in October 1688.⁹ The Royal African Company’s monopoly of West African slave trading encouraged interlopers – those slave-trading ships owned by non-company groups and individuals – to trade in Madagascar. Between 1664 and 1687, for example, at least twenty-eight English ships carried nearly 5,000 enslaved people from Madagascar to Barbados and Jamaica; many more such enslaved people were transported across the Indian Ocean; and a few Madagascans were brought back to England.¹⁰

Edwards had captained at least one slave-trading voyage to Madagascar a decade earlier and may at that time have purchased Joseph, then a young teenager. At the turn of the eighteenth century Edwards would twice captain the James and Francis on voyages from West Africa to Jamaica. The ship was owned by Sir Bartholomew Gracedieu, a leading slave-trader and Jamaica merchant who eventually became the agent representing the colony in London. Gracedieu appeared in several London runaway advertisements as a contact to whom recaptured freedom seekers might be returned.¹¹ One of these was Tony, a ‘Black-Moor Fellow’ who had ‘RUN away from Capt. Wadlow, from on Board the Ship St. Jago’ in August 1696.¹² The advertisement promised a sizeable two-guinea reward to ‘Whoever secures him and brings him to Col. Bartholomew Gracedieu, at the Flying Hose in Thames Street’. Archer, Tryon, Edwards, Wadlow and Gracedieu were all part of London’s great web of aristocrats, gentlemen, merchants, craftsmen, ship captains and others who both made possible and profited from the trade in enslaved people and the goods they produced. In London these people were efficiently networked, and when enslaved people escaped from ships or ship captains the network went into action.

For the enslaved boys and young men plucked from the holds of slave-trading ships and then selected to serve the men who captained them, the prospect of another hellish Middle Passage voyage may have been sufficient motive for escape. Working on deck would have done little to diminish the horror of such voyages. A ‘Negro Man-servant nam’d Peter, aged about 31 Years’ was described in an advertisement as ‘a lusty well-set man, of a stern Countenance’.¹³ His dour countenance may have been shaped in part by the seafaring life implied by the fact that he was described as ‘belonging to the Sloop, the New Content of Jamaica, Francis Morgan Commander, lying at Lime-House Hole’ on the Thames. Two days after this advertisement appeared, the New Content sailed for the Gold Coast of West Africa where the ship took on 139 enslaved people, 120 of whom would survive this hell only to enter another when they disembarked in Jamaica.¹⁴ The advertisement specified that if Peter was recaptured he was to be returned to Francis Morgan, the captain of the New Content, or to Charles Kent in Old-Change in Cheapside. Kent was the owner or co-owner of ships engaged in at least seven early eighteenth-century slave-trading voyages.¹⁵ Was Peter aboard the New Content when it sailed or had he remained free long enough to avoid months of witnessing and sharing the immiseration of the enslaved aboard ship? We shall never know.

Enslaved people who worked aboard ships trading between London, West Africa, the Americas and beyond may have seen London as one of the best venues for an escape. It was the largest city many freedom seekers had ever encountered, and its cosmopolitan population presented a better opportunity for establishing a new life and identity than the dangerous trading posts of West Africa or the small ports of the new English colonies, all of them locations in which a person of colour faced the danger of re-enslavement, probably on far worse terms. In January 1700 Joseph Kidd escaped ‘from on board the Providence of London, John Hendricx Commander’.¹⁶ A twenty-eight-year-old ‘Negro’ speaking ‘indifferent good English and Portuguise’, Kidd escaped from a slave-trading ship soon to leave for West Africa, Antigua and Virginia, perhaps a voyage he hoped to avoid.¹⁷ Similarly, an unnamed ‘Negro Man aged about 20’ eloped ‘from on board the Sussex Sloop. W. Rhett Commander’ in August 1694; two months later, when the newspaper advertisement appeared, this man still had not been recaptured.¹⁸ William Rhett had been a merchant ship captain earlier in life before moving with his young family to South Carolina, where he held senior offices under the lords proprietor of Carolina, including comptroller of customs for that colony and for the Bahamas. A wealthy man who almost certainly owned enslaved people, he appears to have brought this enslaved man to London. When Rhett returned to the heart of the South Carolina plantation complex, this enslaved man with ‘a stern countenance’ perhaps managed to avoid a return to South Carolina slavery. The sizeable home Rhett built on Point Plantation on the outskirts of Charleston survives to this day as one of the city’s oldest homes, this building and a surviving portrait of Rhett providing tangible evidence of the man and his success even today. Little survives in the historical records – beyond this one newspaper advertisement – of the man who escaped from Rhett’s ship in London.¹⁹

Like Equiano a few decades later, some enslaved people in London were the property of officers of the Royal Navy. In 1692 an unnamed ‘tall slender Negro’ was reported to have ‘RUN away from Their Majesties Ship the Dragon’.²⁰ Recently rebuilt and re-outfitted at a Deptford shipping yard, the Dragon was commanded by William Vickars, who may have owned this unnamed freedom seeker.²¹ But the advertisement did not mention Vickars as owner or a contact person for the one-guinea reward, instead suggesting that if recaptured this man could be brought to ‘Mr. Guy’s at the Swan Tavern over against the Royal Exchange’. This may have been Thomas Guy, a major London bookseller who made a fortune by printing English bibles for Oxford University, investing in South Sea Company stock and then selling before that company’s crash, and profiting from the purchase of discounted tickets for the outstanding pay of sailors. If this was indeed the man who would pay one guinea to the person who brought him a runaway man of colour, how ironic it seems to us that at his death the bulk of Guy’s fortune would establish the London hospital named in his honour.²² But in Restoration London the ownership of enslaved Black people and humanitarianism towards White Londoners were not seen as incompatible.

Another enslaved deserter from the Royal Navy was a nineteen-year-old ‘Tall Negro Black’ who was reported to have ‘Run away from Captain Joseph Waters, on Board Their Majesties Ship the Charles Galley at Portsmouth’ in August 1692.²³ Portsmouth was the home base of the Royal Navy, but advertising in a London newspaper made sense both because of its wide circulation and because an escapee might relatively easily travel the seventy miles from England’s south coast to the capital. The Charles Galley had been built by Phineas Pett in his Woolwich shipyards some two decades earlier, and just three months earlier the ship had been engaged in the battle of Barfleur off the French coast, after the French fleet had been deployed by Louis XIV to restore James II to the English throne. Perhaps this freedom seeker had seen enough of battle for the country that had enslaved him.²⁴ John Symonds, the captain of HMS Tiger, did not hesitate to state that the ‘Mollatta Boy about Eleven Years of Age, yellow Complexion, wooly Hair like a Negro’ who had escaped in April 1701 ‘belongs to Capt. John Symonds of his Majesty’s Navy’.²⁵ It is a statement of ownership, an affirmation of enslaved status made during an age when monarchs led the way in chartering and investing in the very companies that made the slave trade and plantation colonies possible. Owning enslaved people and serving the Crown were intimately aligned, and the Royal African Company was royal in much more than name alone.

Others ran from merchant ships of various kinds, or from the captains who commanded them. A ‘Tall Slender Negro’ eloped from John Gandy at Poplar, located in the East End just above the Isle of Dogs.²⁶ The freedom seeker ‘speaks some English, [and] came from the East Indies in the Loyal Merchant’, an East India Company ship that had only recently returned from a two-year voyage to Bombay and Surat.²⁷ If captured, the runaway could be returned to Gandy in Poplar or to the Virginia Coffee House, a focal point of colonial trade on Threadneedle Street behind the Royal Exchange.²⁸ Another runaway who might be returned to the Virginia Coffee House was ‘a negro man of middle stature, well set, full face, [who] speaks very broken English’.²⁹ He had escaped ‘from the Ship Maryland Merchant’ anchored on the Thames just off Deptford in late September 1701. At least one of those who escaped from ships and their captains was South Asian. An unnamed ‘Indian Black Boy, aged about 14 or 15, middle statured, short Neck’d, pretty full Bodied, full Eyed, has no Hat, pretty long Legg’d, but somewhat small with blue Stockins, and an old mix’d grey Coat’ had eloped from John Daniel in October 1691.³⁰ A decade earlier Daniel had undertaken a voyage to Bantam and beyond, becoming one of the first English sailors to see the western shores of Australia.³¹

It was far from uncommon for boys and men of colour to serve on the ships that sailed between London, West Africa, South Asia and the colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Consequently, such boys and men were a familiar sight in the maritime communities east of the City of London, working on or around ships anchored on the Thames, walking on the docks and stairs leading to the river or taking their places in the area’s taverns and inns.³² It is no surprise that the earliest fixed Black communities in London sprang up in these places. For some the rough equality of seafaring may have appealed, for although this was a dangerous and poorly paid profession, sailors were required to live and work cooperatively at sea, and close bonds formed between people of different races during times of danger at sea. While some who were enslaved or bound to ship captains may have eloped, they and others may then have sought to serve on other ships as free men, engaging in ‘maritime marronage’.³³ Despite his own enslavement and experience of the Middle Passage, Equiano nonetheless made clear in his autobiography that, even while enslaved, there were times when ‘I was very happy, for I was extremely well treated by all on board’.³⁴ But not all enslaved or even free Black sailors were thus situated, and the voyages that took these boys and men back to South Asia and West Africa may have been psychologically as well as physically uncomfortable, requiring these sailors of colour to live and work on the ships of the White British empire. Such service could be dangerous too, for unscrupulous captains might easily sell an enslaved or even a free man of colour in the Caribbean or North America, where a healthy and ‘seasoned’ individual could command a hefty price. It is not surprising that so many of the boys and men identified in newspaper advertisements in Restoration London were associated with ships and ship captains. Nor is it surprising that so many chose to attempt escape.