11. Goude: Thames-side maritime communities

A Negro Boy named Goude, aged about 17, speaks no English, Run away on Sunday last at Six in the Evening, had on an old sad-coloured serge Coat, a pair of sad-coloured cotton Breeches, and an old black Tarry Hat on his head. Whoever brings him to Lyme-house, to Mr. John Woodfine, shall have Forty shillings reward.

The London Gazette, 23 December 1686

A significant number of freedom seekers escaped from homes and workplaces in the bustling riverside communities to the east and south of the City of London. Just over 14 per cent of London’s freedom seekers escaped from the communities on the southern banks of the Thames, and a further 32 per cent from the East End communities across the river, making a total of 46 per cent of the total of 126 who escaped from named places in London. These riverside communities were predominantly working class, filled with the homes, boarding houses and workplaces of the labourers, workers and craftsmen associated with shipbuilding and ocean-going trade, as well as the taverns and businesses that serviced such communities. If the City of London funded empire, these were the areas that worked it. Wealthier merchants, shipbuilders and businessmen emerged from these communities, some staying within them but others moving to larger houses and estates beyond their borders in Hackney, Bow and elsewhere.

A contemporary rendering of the area immediately east of the Tower of London, while highly inaccurate, is nonetheless suggestive of the significance of the maritime communities of the East End to the city’s economic life and growth (Figure 27). Hugging the northern banks of the Thames east of the Tower of London, the riverside includes St Katherine’s Stairs, Hermitage Stairs, Wapping Stairs and Shadwell Dock: to the north of Shadwell Dock the tower of St Dunstan’s in Stepney rises above the surrounding homes and businesses. This map compresses longer distances, as well as straightening out a considerable curve in the river, thereby including as much of the fast-growing East End as possible. This area of the East End looks to be no more than a few hundred yards from the Tower, but Wapping Stairs is nearly three quarters of a mile distant and Wapping invisible to a person standing on the edge of Tower Wharf. Shadwell Docks was more than a mile along the river from the Tower, and Stepney church a good mile and a half distant. Morden and Lea, the creators of this visual representation, saw the rising commerce and maritime of the area as essential to London’s growth, and showing the ships on the river and one wharf, one dock and several sets of stairs communicated to viewers the avenues along which people and trade goods were funnelled into and out of London. Although the riverside communities of the East End were spreading ever further from central London, the connections between the mercantile financial hub within the City and these maritime communities remained as tangible and as significant as this fanciful representation suggests.

Figure 27. Detail from Rob. Morden and Phil. Lea, ‘A Prospect of London and Westminster’, in London &c. Actually Surveyed, by Wm. Morgan (London, 1682), Library of Congress.

Some freedom seekers eloped from the homes and workplaces of shipbuilders: there were a growing number of shipyards to the east of Shadwell on both banks of the Thames. In 1684 ‘AN East-India Mallatto’ escaped from James Yeames, a shipwright in Ratcliff in the East End.¹ At thirty years, this man was unlikely to have been a household servant and probably worked in the shipyard to which – the advertisement stated – he might be returned. He wore clothing suited to such work: ‘a sad coloured Cloth Serge Coat and Breeches (his Coat daubed with Pitch) a blew Shirt and no Hat’. Yeames built ships for both the navy and commercial clients, and at his death in 1706 he left land and money to his wife, his daughters, his grandchildren and his sister.² Yeames’s advertisement specified that if the freedom seeker was captured he could be returned for a one guinea reward either to ‘James Yemes at his Yard at Ratcliff Cross’ or ‘to Mr Cary at the Virginia Coffee House in St. Miles Alley in Cornhill’. The identity of Cary is uncertain: he might have been a major London merchant of that name who was heavily engaged in trade with the Chesapeake and Carolina colonies, or the similarly named captain of the London slave-trade ship Oxford, which in 1683 had brought 200 enslaved people from Madagascar to Barbados.³ Given that the Cary specified in Yeames’s advertisement was operating out of the Virginia Coffee House just south of the Royal Exchange, it is more likely that he was the merchant rather than a rather more transient ship captain, although men of both professions could be found in coffee houses. But, whatever Cary’s profession, it is clear that a successful shipwright such as Yeames might easily acquire an enslaved or bound person from a ship captain or merchant and be able to call on the cooperation of a professional man in the City to aid in the recovery of his enslaved property.

Three years later eighteen-year-old Andrew, ‘a Negro Black’, escaped ‘from his Master, Mr. Francis Johnson in Old Gravel Lane, Wapping’.⁴ Francis Johnson appears to have been a ship captain and related to the extremely wealthy Johnson shipbuilding family.⁵ Francis Johnson and Sir Henry Johnson both hailed from and maintained homes in the small Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh, as well as living and working in London’s East End. Sir Henry Johnson was in turn connected to another of the great shipbuilding families of east London. His mother Mary was the daughter of Peter Pett, a leading shipwright and commissioner of Chatham dockyard, who in turn was the son of Sir Phineas Pett, shipbuilder and surveyor general of the Royal Navy. Sir Henry Johnson was a major shipbuilder in his own right and ran the Blackwall shipyard his father had purchased from the East India Company.⁶ What did all of this mean for Andrew when he eloped on Christmas Eve 1686? Johnson was a ship captain living near the river, and a member of a familial network of shipbuilders with large workforces and connections to merchants and investors in the City of London, all of which meant that Andrew would surely have found it extremely difficult to remain at liberty. Joining the crew of an outgoing ship or finding employment in another shipyard or elsewhere in and around London would not have been easy, for Andrew was attempting to escape not just from a man but from an entire system, a network of people engaged in the practical side of empire, colonization and slavery, the people who built and maintained the ships that made possible both plantation slavery and the trade between West Africa, the colonies and London.

Figure 28. Riverside locations for the return of freedom seekers, 1659–1704. Detail from William Morgan, London &c. Actually Surveyed by William Morgan, his ma[jes]ties cosmogr. (London, 1681–2), Library of Congress. Graphic by the author.

Others in the maritime communities who owned enslaved people were less prominent than Yeames or Johnson. In October 1687 the London Gazette included an advertisement for an unnamed ‘Black Negro about 5 Foot 10 Inches high’.⁷ The freedom seeker ‘speaks pretty good English’ and was wearing a ‘Sea Coat’ and ‘a close bodied Cloth coat underneath’. He had escaped ‘from Mr. Barret in Wapping, Sail Maker’, and could be returned either to Barret or to Vernon’s Coffee House on the northern side of the Royal Exchange.⁸ Others escaped from these riverside communities but the advertisements for them did not reveal much about the work they had done or the households they had lived in. For example, ‘Zebulon, for shortness Zeb’, seventeen years old and wearing ‘Canvas Clothes, a Furr Cap, black Stockings, [and] plain soled Shoes’, eloped from Christopher Newham in Love Lane, Ratcliff.⁹ We cannot tell much about either Zebulon or Newham other than that Newham was listed as a property holder in the tax records for Ratcliff.¹⁰ Similarly ‘A tall Gold Coast Negro, [who] goes by the Name of Sam. Hind’ and ‘speaks English very well’ escaped from a Mrs. Hall in Poplar in July 1681.¹¹ There is no indication either of the work that the African-born Samuel Hind performed nor of the nature of Mrs Hall’s home and work, but Poplar was home to many who worked in or provided ancillary services for the neighbouring shipbuilding yards. Indeed, Poplar was the site of a hospital and almshouse for disabled East India Company seamen, and the Blackwall yard had originally belonged to the company.¹² South of the river a nine-year-old ‘Negro Boy’ escaped from Mrs Davis in East Greenwich. Since this was another leading shipbuilding area, this unnamed boy may have been in a household directly connected to the maritime industries, but that he was wearing silver earrings and ‘a grey Livery’ suggests he may have been a personal attendant in a more affluent household, and Greenwich was perhaps the most affluent of these riverside communities.¹³

Most runaway advertisements specified at least one location to which a recaptured runaway or information about their whereabouts might be taken. Often the first was the home or business location from which the freedom seeker had eloped, but generally another location was also specified, representing a person and place the master trusted to protect his interest in the bound or enslaved servant. As Figure 28 illustrates, from 1681 onwards a great many of London’s freedom seekers could be returned to people and locations in London’s maritime communities, illustrating the extent to which racial slavery and the bound labour of people of colour had become normative in these places.

More and more people of colour were living and working in the capital’s maritime communities. Although it is difficult to learn anything about them and their lives, their place in communities tied to ocean-going shipbuilding and imperial trade is clear. Occasionally the surviving records enable us to learn a little more and to speculate about the individuals who resisted. One such was ‘A Negro Boy named Goude, aged about 17, [who] speaks no English, [and who] Run away, on Sunday last, at Six in the Evening’.¹⁴ These sparse words chronicling Goude’s attempt to escape from John Woodfine reveal very little about the freedom seeker. What experiences, what suffering, what hopes, pride, fears and desperation are hidden behind these words? The fifty-seven words of this advertisement – as ever, probably the only surviving record of this person – are those of an enslaver asserting legal control of Goude and defying his agency by defining the teenager by his clothing, his single name and his subordinate status.

How much suffering had seventeen-year-old Goude endured by the time he escaped into London in December 1686? It is quite possible that, as little as a year earlier, he had been living free and with his family in the Kingdom of Dahomey in the northern section of present-day Benin, a world away from London and England. We cannot know how or when he was enslaved, but like many others Goude might have been transported to the Kingdom of Allada (Ardra) on the infamous Slave Coast. During the 1670s and 1680s a rapidly growing number of enslaved people were transported from the Slave Coast to the Americas, and most had been brought to Allada by canoe through the region’s coastal lagoons, often by merchants from Lagos. Many had come from great internal slave markets deep in the interior, often from Dahomey in the north. The name Goude, or very similar names, were common in this region, including Goodie, Ogoodoo, Agoddy, Ahdagood.¹⁵

Perhaps Goude had never seen the ocean before. What must enslaved Africans have thought as they came to the trading posts and saw many more manacled people like themselves, and the European traders and their ships? Olaudah Equiano memorably described a similar experience of first seeing the ocean and slave ships at anchor, recalling that these sights ‘filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind’.¹⁶ In one of the coastal trading ports, one of the largest being Ouidah, Goude would have been sold to agents of the Royal African Company and then loaded onto John Woodfine’s ship the John Bonadventure. Woodfine worked for England’s Royal African Company, as did his slave-trading brother Thomas, captain of the sister ship Sarah Bonadventure. John Woodfine took the John Bonadventure to West Africa in 1678, 1680, 1684, 1686 and 1689, and the Sarah Bonadventure in 1682, and a total of 2,816 enslaved Africans disembarked from these voyages that he oversaw. John Woodfine and John Carter, the Royal African Company agent at Ouidah, served the company well, and on this particular voyage Carter recorded on 1 March 1686 that Woodfine’s ship ‘is about halfe slaved, and [I] doubt not that he will be compleated in less than ten days more’. The John Bonadventure sailed from Africa with 582 enslaved people on board, half of them adult men, a third adult women and the remainder children like Goude.¹⁷

Try as we might, we can never recapture the physical and psychological trauma of the Middle Passage. Equiano believed that those who died and were thrown overboard were better off than those who survived: ‘Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.’¹⁸ One hundred and forty of those on the John Bonadventure, a horrifying 24 per cent, died before arrival in Jamaica. Woodfine’s employers were always concerned about ‘any mortallity [that] should happen among yo’r negroes in yo’r voyage’, a concern that they had communicated in their written instructions to his brother Thomas in 1685, signing their letter to him with the cheery and affectionate salutation ‘Your loving Friends’. But their concern was financial rather than humanitarian, and Thomas Woodfine had been enjoined by his supervisors to have completed ‘a Certificate under yo’r Mates and Chirugeons hands testifying the Time of the Death of such as shall happen to dye, for Wee shall allow of none, but what are so certifyed to be dead’.¹⁹

‘As shall happen to dye’: these words imply that such mortality was natural, an act of God, an unfortunate and unavoidable weakening of profit margins. The enslaved such as Goude had an altogether different experience of the deaths of men, women and children chained together and mired in human filth. These voyages are the stuff of nightmares, but for Goude and millions like him the Middle Passage was a real-life experience that probably never left him, forever shaping his understanding of White people and the society into which he had been violently drawn. Goude’s experiences may have been mediated by Woodfine selecting him from the mass of humanity below decks to serve him as a cabin boy. Consequently, instead of being sold to the sugar planters of Jamaica, he remained aboard the John Bonadventure and accompanied Woodfine back to London and his home in Limehouse, almost certainly as Woodfine’s personal property.²⁰

We do not know exactly when Goude and Woodfine arrived in Limehouse, which is where Goude made his escape. The John Bonadventure had left Jamaica on 7 August 1686, so the ship probably arrived in London between October and December.²¹ By the end of 1686 Goude had been under the control of White men for about nine or ten months, yet according to Woodfine he ‘speaks no English’. Perhaps he was struggling to learn this strange new language of absolute domination and horrible violence, a language of power and subordination. Or perhaps this traumatized teenager had retreated into himself, hiding behind his own silence. Indeed, he may have known English better than he revealed. Woodfine had dressed him for work on board ship and as his personal servant on land, and Goude had exchanged the loose-fitting and brightly coloured thin fabrics of West Africa for an old tarred hat, and an equally old coat and breeches, the latter described as ‘sad’ or sombre coloured. It is hard not to imagine the drab, sad colouring matching the mental state of the boy who wore these clothes.

But the very existence of this short advertisement suggests more than sad subordination: perhaps absolute desperation, quiet courage or angry resistance. While he would have been one of the many anonymous souls who had been incarcerated on the John Bonadventure, the only surviving record that names and identifies him simultaneously testifies to the fact that Goude resisted his enslavement. As London prepared for Christmas, a festival that surely meant nothing to him in a place he could hardly comprehend, Goude ran away from Woodfine. To resist enslavement by seeking freedom in Barbados or Jamaica or South Carolina took courage enough: the penalties for such resistance were harsh and the opportunities for success few. But at least in these colonies there were many enslaved people of colour who might harbour or assist runaways. For a teenage boy torn from family and community in West Africa and traumatized by the death and suffering of a Middle Passage voyage, the courage to elope into the alien environment of an overwhelmingly White London is astonishing.

As with all the advertisements for people of colour who escaped into seventeenth-century London, we can learn far more about those who advertised for them and the people to whom they might be returned. As the captain of at least six successful slave-trading voyages for the Royal African Company, John Woodfine had become a relatively wealthy and successful man who would take possession of the Manor House in the countryside north of Ratcliff, complete with a park filled with deer. When he died in 1693 Captain John Woodfine was not even fifty years old, yet he left parcels of land in Middlesex and Essex to each of his five children as well as £100 to his mother. The trade in Africans had made Woodfine wealthy, and he could well afford an enslaved cabin boy or personal attendant.

Goude was not the first of these, for Woodfine had published another advertisement five and a half years earlier.²² The earlier notice specified that an unnamed ‘Negro Boy’ who had escaped was aged between 14 and 16 and ‘speaks very bad English’, which means that this was not Goude (who more than five years later was described by Woodfine as being seventeen years old and speaking no English at all). This unnamed boy had probably come from the Gold Coast of West Africa, where Woodfine and the John Bonadventure had recently taken on board 560 enslaved people, half of them being men, 40 per cent women and 5 per cent each boys and girls. Only 401 were alive when the ship docked in Barbados, a crippling but far from exceptional mortality rate of 28 per cent.²³ The Royal African Company agents in Barbados reported that Woodfine had taken possession of his ‘Commiss’n Negroes’, one of whom in all likelihood was this young boy whom Woodfine had chosen to retain and bring back to London’s East End rather than sell.²⁴

We do not know precisely when the John Bonadventure sailed back up the Thames but it was probably late in 1680 or early in 1681, and this unnamed boy attempted to escape in June of the latter year. As a person who advertised for two runaways, Woodfine clearly was one of the growing number of aristocrats, gentlemen, merchants and sea captains who could afford the personal benefits of enslaved labour, and who enjoyed advertising his success through the ownership of such boys. Had the first unnamed boy died, or had Woodfine sold him in London, West Africa or the Caribbean on a subsequent voyage, later replacing him with Goude and perhaps others? Or had the escape attempt of either or both of the unnamed first boy and Goude perhaps succeeded? We cannot know, and in the end all these records tell us for sure is that these two enslaved boys who had endured the Middle Passage had the audacity and courage to resist their bondage in London by attempting to escape. And that is no small thing.