Thomas Thistlewood - Diary

Diary

His diary, The Diary of Thomas Thistlewood is a detailed record of his life and daily activities, providing a rare and detailed insight into plantation life, from agricultural techniques to slave-owner relations.

In his diary, which eventually ran over 14,000 pages, he describes the brutal treatment of slaves:

Thomas Thistlewood's Jamaica was not much like Landon Carter's Virginia. The sugar-producing island of Jamaica was by far the richest colony in all of the British Empire. Although Thistlewood was only of the "middling ranks" among whites in Jamaica and he was nowhere near as rich as Carter, who was one of the first families of colonial Virginia, still, at his death, this Jamaican planter had at least ten times as much wealth as the average white Briton in other parts of the empire. But it was not just the different levels of wealth in the two slave societies that distinguished them from one another; it was the different proportions of whites to African slaves that mattered more. Indeed, the extreme racial imbalance in Jamaica affected everything in the society. With whites making up only one in nine of the population, Jamaica was one of the most extensive racially based slave societies in history. During his first year on the island, Thistlewood lived in an almost exclusively black world. For weeks on end he saw no white people at all. Later he settled in the rural western end of the island where the proportion of slaves to whites was as high as fifteen to one.

Consequently, whites like Thistlewood lived in an Africanized society that rested on white fear, white equality, and white brutality. With almost no restraints placed on their personal freedom, whites ruled their slaves with a degree of violence that left outside observers aghast. Thistlewood routinely punished his slaves with fierce floggings and other harsh punishments, some of them sickeningly ingenious. One of his favorites was "Derby's dose," in which a slave was forced to defecate into the offending slave's mouth, which was then wired shut for four or five hours.

Thistlewood was not an uneducated man. He was a prolific book buyer and reader; he practiced medicine on his slaves and was something of an expert in botany and horticulture—in other words, he was quite civilized by Jamaican standards. Although Trevor Burnard at one point calls Thistlewood "a brutal sociopath," he generally suggests that Thistlewood's treatment of his slaves was not that unusual. Unlike Landon Carter and other rich eighteenth-century Virginia planters, who often developed a paternalistic attitude toward their slaves, most Jamaican whites were convinced that only the severe application of brute force could keep the numerous African slaves under control.

And it was largely an African slave population, dependent on continual importations from Africa. The rate of mortality was so high and the birth rate so low among the slaves that they could not reproduce themselves. "As a result," writes Burnard, "white Jamaicans bought rather than bred their labor force and were the mainstays of the flourishing British slave trade." In fact, one third of all slaves brought to the New World in British carriers ended up in Jamaica. Such was the death rate that a half-million slaves had to be imported in order to increase the island's slave population by a quarter of a million.

The mortality rates for whites in Jamaica were nearly as severe. Over one third of white immigrants died—usually from tropical diseases—within three years of arriving in the Caribbean. If an immigrant could stay alive, however, as Thistlewood did, then he could prosper to a degree that he could never have matched in Britain or even in North America. Whites, especially if they could manage slaves, were in such short supply that they could write their own tickets. Thistlewood arrived in Jamaica in 1750 at age twenty-nine with very few possessions. He was immediately sought after as an overseer and his wages rapidly rose to three figures a year, an enormous sum when compared to the average salaries of white British or North American workers. He bought slaves and hired them out, and although he could have continued to make more money working for others, he decided in the mid-1760s to become an independent landowner, not as a rich sugar producer but as a modestly well-to-do market gardener and horticultural expert for the western end of the island. He acquired local respectability, often dining with the wealthiest planters in his parish, and served in several local offices, including justice of the peace.