Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

Robert talks about legitimately some of the worst stuff we'll ever discuss on this show. Oh my god, you guys See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Recording.

• 0:07Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  I do miss now that we used to script the Zoom lady going, "Recording in progress."

• 0:12Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. Whatever happened to the Zoom lady?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 0:15Robert Evans?

  Another job taken by automation. Um, I think it was an automated job to begin with. I think that was a robot.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:22Robert Evans?

  Who complains when the, when the robots get taken, their jobs taken by other robots, you know? We need solidarity with some of the robots against the other robots is what I'm saying.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I think, I think Wally from that, from that movie. Wally is the one that-

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  Oh no, I hate that son of a bitch.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Why? I love Wally.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'll fight, I'll fight Wally.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Leave Wally alone.

• 0:44Robert Evans?

  I don't like him at all.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Why don't you like Wally?

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  It's not his business coming around picking shit up, you know?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  You're so dumb.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  That's literally what he's programmed for.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  You're such a hater.

• 0:55Robert Evans?

  I, I am. I'm fundamentally a hater because that's my job. I'm Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast for haters by haters, often about haters.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Produced, produced by a lover.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Produced by a lover. Uh, and our guest today, TT Lee, would you like to talk about a guy we hate again some more?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  You know, do I have a choice?

• 1:18Robert Evans?

  No, no, we're recording.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  No, you know what? This is exact, I, this is what I love to do on my-

• 1:24Robert Evans?

  Is to be forced to hear about a bad man? Yeah, I was forced to read about him.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31Robert Evans?

  I mean, I forced myself. This is, this is all fundamentally on me. Yeah, I made my choices. I could have written about anyone.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I will say if I had to hear it from anyone, I would choose you, Robert Evans, so.

• 1:42Robert Evans?

  Well, thank you. So I, if I had to choose to tell anyone, I would tell you because you would, you and I share the deepest bond that two people can at work, which is you both accidentally took a huge dose of mushrooms together while filming a video for the internet.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  That is still very much, yeah, never forgotten. Every once in a while, someone will bring that up, a stranger, like, did you get high on mushrooms once?

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Online? I'm like, yeah, that was me. And I always say, by the way, it was cleared by legal. It's completely legal. We actually had a legal.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  Those were legal mushrooms. They're unregulated, you know?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  They were.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  They were very unregulated. A lot was unregulated in those days. Uh, the internet, um, before like 2016, you know?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, what a wild time.

• 2:28Robert Evans?

  Before everything got worse.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  Speaking about stuff that's much worse than that, let's get back to this horrible guy in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood.

• 2:37Speaker 03

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• 2:42Speaker 04

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• 3:10Robert Evans?

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• 3:53Robert Evans?

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• 4:17Robert Evans?

  So in part one, I discussed the fact that Thomas Thistlewood considered himself a bit of a naturalist and that his documentations of all of the different crimes he committed were in his own eyes, something he saw as a contribution to the scientific record. And he also considered like what he would specifically, the sexual violence he employed as like a part of his work as a farmer, you know, slaves aren't entirely treated the same as livestock in his mind, but they're treated more like livestock than people, right? The only reason in which they're kind of different from like is that is that they're more valuable, right? Like a slave is does an enslaved person represents a huge store of value, right? They're worth a lot, um, more than like most livestock are, right? So these are not, that's part of why even when you hear about something like, oh, he

• 5:02Robert Evans?

  caught this, this woman with a knife, it's not that common for them to kill because that's a lot of money on the line, right? That represents somebody's money. It's not out of humanitarianism or anything like that. They just, it's, it's

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty dark. Yeah.

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's all this is to them. Um, so yeah, one of the things that I find most interesting about the, uh, the journals of Thomas Thistlewood is the degree to which things that are like these really horrible sex crimes are just like bracketed in between stuff like, oh, one of my lambs gave birth or I killed a snake, right? Like he'll literally like put it in between stuff like that. Um, and in her study for Small Axe Journal, Heather Vermilion explains that by doing things like this, um, he's quote, "In closing particular rape records within signifiers of his progress, an increase in livestock and a decrease in the threatening of the undomesticated creaturely population," right? And so what he's seeing is like, what I'm doing is a part of this like taming of the

• 6:01Robert Evans?

  natural world. It's the same as getting rid of, you know, a snake that we have no use for because it will just eat our livestock or it's the same as one of my livestock giving birth, right? And Darwin's theory of evolution didn't exist yet, right? That's not published until the late 1850s, but people who would wind up being Darwin's precursors are alive and publishing books of science in this period of time. And these are a lot of the guy That Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of, right? He's like, he's, this is, this is his, we don't have like YouTube yet, but like this is very much the kind of content that he is, he is ingesting, right? Is these like early-

• 6:38Speaker 02

  His manosphere.

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  And some of them are bullshit, right? Yeah. Like this is his manosphere, right? It's like this mix of works of science and works of like literature and satire and like literal like, just like lies that are also being passed off as science. Like all of this is like part of his intellectual diet. And one of the books that was most influential-

• 6:56Speaker 02

  That's exactly like the manosphere right now.

• 6:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's, yeah. And there's, one of the, one of the things that is weirdly common with like, it's a, it relates directly to a problem we have today, is people taking works of satire seriously and then building their, their like views of the world around them. Like that, that happens today with, you know, shit like, we could talk about South Park in the movie Starship Troopers, right? Where a lot of people don't get the joke and wind up, or take the joke in a specific way and wind up using it as part of like a worldview that justifies some pretty fucked up things. And shit like that is happening back then. And one of the thing, one of the ways it happened to Thomas Thistlewood is he, he becomes

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  a fan of this like satirical tract published in 1752 called The Man Plant, or A Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed. And this is, this is like a, you've heard of like Thomas Swift's A Modest Proposal, right?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:54Robert Evans?

  Where he's like, he's talking about it, we should, oh, you know, there's all these poor people starving in Ireland. What if we ate Irish babies? What if we like allowed them to be sold as food? And it's like, it's, it's a sad, like he's joking about how cruelly people talk about the poor, right? And particularly poor Irish, like that, it's, that's the joke, is like how awful his society is to this group of people, right? That they're treating their babies like a, like chicken to be farmed for food almost, right? Like, like that's, that's the point Swift was making, right? And some people get the joke and some people don't. And Thistlewood comes across a book that's a similar thing to what Thomas Swift is doing called The Man Plant. And it's written, we don't know exactly who wrote it. Author's pseudonym was Vincent Miller.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  And it's really weird because it it comes out in 1752. So there's no theory of evolution. Our knowledge of heredity is very limited in the 1750s. Right? We're starting to get an understanding of it, but it is not what we'd call developed. And this work as a joke is an early eugenics text. It's really fascinating. It's like a pre genetics, understanding of eugenics. Again, written as a bit because the the the gist of this book is that this this guy Vincent Miller is basically saying, hey, we need like, there's a lot of problems like with the there's a problem of inequality between the sexes. Right? Because pregnancy is so dangerous and painful for women.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

  And part of what he's doing here is I think he's kind of making a comment on the upper class in his society, in which it's very common for like women who are of high society after they give birth to hand their baby off to like a nurse. Right? Who's going to like, actually like feed and take care of and effectively raise the kid. And so part of what part of the satire is, is he's saying, what if we take moms and dads entirely out of the equation and raise human beings like animals on a farm? Right? And one, the way he suggests doing this is like, we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's gestate embryos in an artificial womb. And that way we can keep, we can, we can remove human beings entirely from the business of like raising their children. Right?

• 10:06Robert Evans?

  He's being like, this is a satire.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  He's trying to like point out how how the direction we're going is even becoming like less removed or more removed and less human and as like a point. But then people are like, great idea.

• 10:19Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And he's, you know, this, this is where I wanted to go into more detail about this, but we're, we're going to run long anyway. But it's a fascinating work for me just because of how he's, he's very clearly satireizing what he sees as like an inhumanity at the highest levels of his society. Like people aren't even raising or nursing their own kids. But part of how he chooses to mock that is by kind of laughing at the idea of like that, like pregnancy is dangerous for women. And it's a little unclear to me if he's actually acknowledging that that's an inequality, or if he's making fun of the people who see it as an inequality. Like, I, and I'm just not fully versed enough in like, the satire of the 1750s in England to tell you what he's trying to do more.

• 11:01Robert Evans?

  But Vincent Miller, part of what he's doing is he's looking at this culture of upper-class child neglect, and he's proposing a hyperbolic solution, right? We create an artificial womb to gestate fertilized embryos outside of the human body, and we can raise human beings like animals on a plantation. And part of, one of the things that, the eugenics thing that he kind of proposes here is he pretends that he's done this. He like, writes claims about how, "I convinced this farm girl, like, to give me one of her after she had sex with this boy that she liked, to give me a fertilized embryo, and I took it out this way, and I grew it in a heated cow bladder. And the baby's 20 months old now, and it's much healthier than a regular baby. And through this reason, I propose that this method of growing human beings will yield

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  a heartier offspring, will get, which is proto-eugenic, right? That he's saying, we could, we'll improve, and again, as a joke, but he's still saying, we will improve through this method, the breeding quality of all of the British people that we start putting into the world, right?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  But he's talking about, like, like, it's interesting that he's talking about breeding of white people, and then there's like, this parallel world where they're talking about breeding slaves, and they're both dehumanizing, but one is like, let's breed more of, quote unquote, "superior" white people, and the other's like, let's breed more of these people we don't consider human.

• 12:19Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And so, that's like, such a weird, like, I don't know, like, a weird cognitive dissonance.

• 12:26Robert Evans?

  I think that's part of the satire, too, is him saying, hey, if we apply, here's what happens if we apply the logic we're using on slave populations in places like Jamaica to white English people. Isn't that fucked up? Right? Like, he's, I think part of this is Miller trying to get people in his society to like, think about it this way, right? I think that's part of the satire. So, obviously, this guy does not, is not seriously suggesting this, nor did he literally gestate a baby in a cow's black, like, that's, you can't do that, right? Like, that's, like, he's, this is a bit.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Too bad.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  It's a little unclear to me how, we know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood, because he writes, he quotes extensively from this tract in his diary. He writes about it a bunch at the time that he reads it. And there's some, some evidence, some of the scholars who study his journals have suggested that this played like a role in his intellectual development and how he treated people. And it's kind of, I kind of think, I don't know if it's that he missed the satire entirely, or that he just, like, a lot of these tech bros who read science fiction, and there's like, things in there that you're not supposed to emulate.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Like, The Matrix, I was just thinking about that.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  Right, The Matrix, right? It's a torment nexus situation, where like, Vincent Miller is describing the torment nexus that is treating people like livestock, and Thomas Thistlewood is like, "What a cool idea." "Why don't, why don't I do that?"

• 13:48Speaker 02

  That's exactly what you described so well, yeah. Because it's like, all the people who, the worst, like, tech bros will bring up, like, The Matrix as, and it's like, they completely missed the point. And like, and people, yeah, it's wild, it's like, you completely missed it.

• 14:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, especially when, like, those anti-trans tech bros are big fans, or like, guys like Andrew Tater fans, The Matrix is like, "You motherfuckers missed the point as hard as it could be missed."

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Have you ever actually looked at this movie?

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  This is not like, the authors are around, they've talked about this.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  Um.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like, "This is what it means, we'll never know." You're like, "Hmm, okay."

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  So I think part of the big impact that this satire satiric work has on Thomas is the way in which the author describes human breeding in agricultural terms. And I'm going to quote a passage from this book. "It is then easy to be conceived that by ridding the women of the plagues and fatigue of gestation, they may team anew at much shorter intervals of time. They may then become like those fertile fields that yield two or three crops in a season, and their fecundity will only be limited by such small reposes as the necessity of lying fallow will require for the reparation of the ground. They will continue longer able and apt for impregnation, so that upon a moderate estimate, a well-disposed, well-constituted, and industrious woman may furnish her country with 130 to 140 or more children."

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  So it's very much like, again, talking about women like a field and talking about human babies as crops, you know? You can see, again, Thomas Thistlewood is supposed to like this. I think Miller is saying, "This is bad," right? That's why it's a satire. But Thistlewood is just like, "What a cool idea."

• 15:31Speaker 02

  It is well, because even you say it now, I'm like, "It's satire," but then I'm like, "I don't know how far we've come." Like, some people may look at that today, and you know, there's the whole tradewise breeders, then look at that and be like, "Yeah."

• 15:48Robert Evans?

  Look at the the pronatalist movement, right? Like, there's more than a little of that in here, right? Like, of this, like, "Yeah, we can breed stronger and better people to improve the nature of society." It always gets to be a problem when you're thinking about, like, "How can we make the next generation, like, tinker with it genetically to make it better?" Which is, I mean, that's part of what's interesting. This is in 1752 this comes out. And it is kind of talking about, like, genetic engineering in a way, right? And before, we knew what those words meant. But it's a proto tract in that line of, like, science fiction, right? Like, there's bits of Gattaca in this, right? Like, Gattaca

• 16:29Robert Evans?

  has bits of this in its DNA, if you'll forgive the term, right? The movie Gattaca. This idea of, like, "Well, by changing this, we make people that..." Are heartier and stronger and we can ship them overseas. We're creating plantations of men. Right? That's what Miller writes in this in this book. And then we'll ship all these these people that we've grown like crops over to populate the colonies. Quote, "By this means, we shall see infinite broods of subjects served to in people and in rich, as well as our island, as those vast tracts in North America, which are so thinly inhabited, which are now obligated to be stocked with other foreign refugees. A naturalization bill will thus be out of the question. We may also then more reasonably grasp the conquest of both the Indies,

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  our actual possessions, and those which we shall infallibly by dint of superior numbers procure, will be abundantly supplied with swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as China itself." And part of, again, there's this this knowledge that we're only peopling the new world. We need, it's mostly slaves in a lot of these colonies, right? Slaves or local people that were ruling because British people can't survive that well in all of these places, right? And part of the joke that Miller is like, is like, no, no, no. What if we could get rid of all of these non-white people by just outbreeding them with these human beings we grew on a field? And again, saying that to satirize a lot of the attitudes at his time, but I don't think everyone gets is interprets it that way.

• 17:55Robert Evans?

  We know Thistlewood owned a copy of this book after it was published, and he wrote about it in his diary several times. I don't know that he picked up the critique of aristocratic family dynamics, but the idea of peopling newly conquered territory and improving the quality of new generations was clearly on his mind, and that's how he saw a lot of what he was doing. I found very little analysis of his impact of this, the impact this book had on him, other than what Heather Vermulin writes. Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers, and they mostly ignore this kind of stuff. When this, a lot of them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all. Right? Like some of the, like the most, some of them will say is that like, "Well, there's some debate as to whether or not, you know, what he was doing was consensual." And it's like, "Well, there's really not, like, he owned these people."

• 18:39Speaker 02

  They couldn't read Latin, I guess, but...

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they couldn't read Latin. But yeah, there's a lot of like, this stuff gets mixed. Vermuline is one of the only female scholars that I've seen analyze Thistlewood's writing. And she does center the man, this like book in her discussions of why he wrote about his sex crimes the way she did. When discussing passages from Miller's book that he excerpted for his diary, she concludes, "Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his classification of enslaved women in rape records, which suggests that his practices proceeded, or at least existed in reciprocal relationship to his engagement of pseudoscientific theory." In other words, he does start writing about what he's doing. His like, he would consider his sexual exploits before he reads this book.

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  But the way he quotes from it suggests that he considers it to justify, provide a justification to his behavior, right? And that justification may have helped him continue to find ways to explain to himself why what he was doing was okay, right?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  It's like finding, yeah, like the echo chamber sort of, like looking for more signs that he's going down the right path.

• 19:42Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly. Like, that's something he's got to do for himself here. We know that during the week in which he first reads the man plant, he oversees the harvest season at his plantation, and he chooses to mark the occasion by picking out another victim to sexually assault. Immediately after the entry in which he notes that he's finished this book, he writes, "A m cum Eve sup ter in the old negro house paid a bit," right? In other words, he slept with this woman, assaulted her on the ground, that's what sup terum means, it near the slave house, and he paid her the equivalent of like a dollar or two, right? And so that's coming in immediately after he like exerts passages from this book.

• 20:24Robert Evans?

  These things exist, his like intellectual diet, and then the things that he is doing and justifying based on the stuff he's reading, all exist kind of in the same continuum together. Vermuline explains, in other words, after noting that he returned a text that imagined plantations of men, Thistlewood records that he raped an enslaved woman named Eve, and that he did so at the estate's current harvest site. Put differently, in an engineered Eden, the pseudoscientist Vincent Miller grew his teraphilius from an egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter. Thistlewood marked the time of harvest by raping an enslaved woman named Eve, right? There's this weird degree to which what he's noting down and the things that he's partaking, he makes them almost fit the things that he's doing.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Like reference. See, this is why men shouldn't be allowed to read, you know? It's like, they get ideas and then...

• 21:14Robert Evans?

  Well, I got good news about literacy levels.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Too many ideas, too many rapes, you know?

• 21:22Robert Evans?

  Maybe, yeah, this is why you need, this is why maybe it's useful sometimes to like, do your, this is the danger of the autodidact is encountering too much about the world outside the context of having to talk with other people about it, right? Who might be like, I don't know, man, it seems like, seems like you might be going some crazy places with this. Maybe you're just using all this stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people. But, you know, he's, in a way, I think this is a product of the fact that he's isolated from the intellectual culture he's obsessed with. He's not, it's not a two-way relationship. He's digesting these books and these articles and he's talking with them, about them with other white exiles. And he probably, probably part of his ego is that he seems like a learned man among

• 22:06Robert Evans?

  this population of exiles. But he also knows he's not really fit to be part of the, the intellectual community that he admires, right? And some of that is shown in the fact that he doesn't really understand everything he's reading.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, because he doesn't get it. He seems to not, it goes over his head.

• 22:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He may not get everything, right? Or at least not the way that it's meant to be gotten. Now, when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own, soon after he starts working as the overseer at Egypt Plantation, Eve is not one of them, this woman that we just talked about. She belonged to the Cope family, who are his employers. And as was often the case of female enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron of the plantation. Mrs. Cope was not great at this job, and it's a mark at how unhappy Eve was that she escaped frequently. And this is some of how we get how Thomas would have punished the people that he was overseeing while he's working at this plantation. On March 3rd, 1755, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four people who escaped that day.

• 23:04Robert Evans?

  The next day, he wrote, William Crookshanks, a white worker below Thistlewood, brought Eve into the savanna to her mistress, Mrs. Cope, but she soon made her escape again. Below this, Thomas notes in small print, he slept with her under the logwood. So what he is saying there is that this, this other white worker catches Eve after She gets out and he brings her back to the big house and she escapes again and Thomas, William catches her again and then he rapes her as like a punishment for escaping, or maybe just because it's what he wanted to do, right? But part of what we're getting here is how this is not just Thomas engaging in this behavior. This is all of the white people, all of the white men particularly on these farms are doing this habitually. Like it's incredible how casually he notes this, right?

• 23:49Robert Evans?

  What Crookshanks does. This is not even like a significant deal to him. It's just like, well, of course he recaptured this woman and he did that as he was taking her back. Right? And Vermulon goes on to note, quote, "The following week after dinner, four heartily drunk white male colonists, all Thistle Woods acquaintances, hauled Eve separately into the water room, the bathroom, and were concerned with," which means raped her. One of them, his good friend Harry Weech, twice, first and last. The following month Eve ran away two more times. And again, like this is both how they're trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to themselves. Like, well, she escaped, so we have to do this, you know?

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  It's and it's so casual, like none of them even think about it. Like this is the normal behavior for white men in this society is to commit like rape at the drop of a hat against these people that they own, right? Like that is the normal behavior.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  It's, I mean, it's also with it, I, yeah, even within like what you're saying, in the context of the time, I sense a lot of discrepancies because it's like, on one hand, he's justifying his recording of it as like science and, you know, making sure he knows who he's fathering. But then when he's with his friends, he's saying like, oh, we're just doing this to punish her. But like, that also would contradict him being the father if everyone's raping her. And so there's this like already like you can tell the, the argument's shaky to begin with. Like clearly, like what we understand is like this man's doing bad things and is driven by, you know, his bad motives and then looking for different justifications,

• 25:28Speaker 02

  but they don't even, they're not even consistent. Because if he is trying to father someone, he wouldn't be like. Actively wanting other men to father children with her, right? Because he wouldn't legally be the dad.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  No, and I mean, that's, I think, part of what that hints at here is that what matters more to him even than than that is, like, it's not just the idea of like, well, I want to insert my DNA into this population as part of the civilizing act, but the very act of asserting sexual dominance over these people we own is us civilizing the wild world. That's a lot how these guys are, that's, and what's interesting is, part of what you get from this is, because Thistlewood doesn't write about what his colleagues are doing to these women the same way he does about himself, he doesn't put it in Latin, right? He uses these kind of body terms, "they were concerned with her," right? Which is commonly meant, you know, "had sex with," kind of, when people are writing about this sort of thing.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Oh, so he puts that in English?

• 26:26Robert Evans?

  Yes, that's in English.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  So he's okay with, like, kind of like airing out their dirty laundry, but not his own?

• 26:31Robert Evans?

  I think, yeah, and I think there's a degree to which he does kind of think he's better than them and see what he's doing, even though it's not as different and better, right?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  I see.

• 26:40Robert Evans?

  Because Eve, I mean, this is a years-long thing for them, like, she runs away repeatedly because clearly her life is a nightmare, and Thomas will rape her repeatedly again, right? Often, sometimes it incites her escaping, sometimes he does it after she escapes, but he does it constantly. And he writes about him doing it fundamentally differently than he writes about his friends doing it, which is, does say something, right? It talks about the incoherence in his worldview, as you pointed out, and it just also, I think it shows this kind of narcissism, that he does think that he's special and that what he's doing is different than them, right?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:14Robert Evans?

  So the night after this, I mentioned in episode one, he's in a long-term, what he would call a relationship, we're not calling it that, but it's important to talk about how he describes it, with this enslaved woman, Phibah, right? P-H-I-B-B-A-H is how he spells it. And so she, they, he has ostensibly, there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her, like, because he talks to her, like, she, she, like, he comes back to her pretty regularly, and it clearly at least matters when she's pissed at him, and the He describes that she gets angry because she thinks of this as like them, him cheating on her, right? And I, this is kind of, again, this isn't a relation, this is like a parody of an actual relationship, like a sick, like it's, it's a perversion of everything that that's

• 27:59Robert Evans?

  supposed to be. But he does write about it like that, right? He describes the fact that after he goes over to her after assaulting Eve again, Fibba seems much out of humor about Eve yesterday, and he's angry and he doesn't know who could have told her, right? Like, who the hell let her know what I did to this woman, right?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  It's not Matty did it, just Matty got caught.

• 28:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, and is she angry because of what he's doing to this person, because of the fundamental inequalities? Or is she more just angry because like she sees him as this person that she's in a relationship with and he cheated on her? How does, how, we will never know what this looked like in her head, right? Because we don't get, he's, he's not interested in asking her. He doesn't talk to her. Like, we only get pieces of her from the outside, like we do of all of these people that he owns and is abusing. So, to talk about Eve again, she escapes in the early fall and she manages to stay free almost the entire month of October. When she was caught, Thomas, quote, whipped and chained her.

• 29:02Robert Evans?

  She subsequently escaped once more and was brought home on December 23rd and chained again. The next day, she escaped and was brought back the day after that, whereupon Thomas chained her in the cookroom. This pattern continued for years. When she ran away and was caught in the spring of 1757, Thistlewood reported her punishment thusly: "Tied her to the oven post and gave her a little correction." Now, that phrasing could mean a lot, and so that's as good a segue for any of me to discuss the corporal punishment on the plantation as it existed in the time in which Thomas was doing his job, and the precise kinds of violence that he and his peers meted out on the people that they owned. But first, bad time for an ad break, huh? Yep, sorry.

• 29:49Speaker 05

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• 30:18Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 30:42Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 31:17Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 31:28Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So...

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Oh, no. There's more.

• 31:33Robert Evans?

  There's more.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  You did say it would get worse, so you did warn me.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  It keeps getting worse.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:40Robert Evans?

  And I, I think one of the ways in which even pretty good histories now are often kind of short is that they, they talk about whipping and they talk about the amount of violence, which is important, and they even talk about like the amount of sexual violence. But there's often not detailed accountings given on like some of the most sadistic punishments. And part of it's because, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but even some historians are really uncomfortable talking about the details of the sadism of the punishments that white people engaged in, in places like Jamaica. And it is really upsetting to talk about. Thomas arrived in Jamaica as a practiced farmer and an amateur naturalist, and there's no evidence that prior to arriving here, he was a violent man or had ever so much as struck another person.

• 32:23Robert Evans?

  Maybe he had, maybe he'd been in a lot of fights, but he didn't write about it, right? We don't know. If he had not been violent prior to coming to Jamaica, this changed rapidly upon starting work at a plantation. On his first day working as assistant overseer on his first plantation on the island, his boss ordered him to give 300 lashes to his driver, who was one of the oldest enslaved people on the property. Thistlewood delivered the punishment, which was likely ordered as much to toughen him up as to punish the enslaved man in question, right? There's this, this new white guy on the farm, we gotta have him beat the absolute hell out of the most like sympathetic and liked person on the, like enslaved person.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Like testing him a bit.

• 33:02Robert Evans?

  Yes. Are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah. And he proves cruel enough for the job. Now, as I noted, Jamaica was reputed for being a really egalitarian place for white men, right? Even poor white men would be treated well by the rich white men. And part of why is because there's this, there's this understanding that everyone will bind together when it's time to do violence against the much larger enslaved majority. James Robertson writes that, quote, "The generous hospitality of a planter's household rested on uninhibited violence in the fields. Thistlewood absorbed this lesson and continued to order floggings for the rest of his life in Jamaica." And yeah, that is, it's one of these things.

• 33:41Robert Evans?

  He exists in Jamaica during the high point of slavery and enslaved plantations on the island, both because the weather is unusually good during like 37 years that he's there. And so harvests are really good. It's just a good time climatically to be growing sugar in Jamaica. And also there's no limits whatsoever on slavery, right? While he is there. And that's going to start to change after he dies. In 1789, not long after he passes, anti-slavery advocates are going to testify at Parliament in Westminster about the abuse of enslaved people in Jamaica. Robertson writes about this. Quote, "These included, the testimony included cruel beatings occurring not just out on lonely estates, but in gardens in Savannah Lamar, the parish's principal port, where only a hedge

• 34:26Robert Evans?

  separated passersby from the victims' screams. More frightening still, while the witnesses stated the cries were heard with universal detestation, the perpetrator was not brought to legal punishment. Historians of slavery have made little use of these remarkable depositions despite their early date. The arguments for disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement found these witnesses, so their evidence can hardly be objective. This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists and then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slaveholding societies could be. Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion that such horrors could not exist in a British colony." So there's even this problem with a lot of histories where they're like, "We can't take these accounts by anti-slavery activists of how brutal the system was." As literal, because they're biased.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Because they're saying they're not accountable.

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  Who's not biased here?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  That's why, I mean, it's totally what you're saying.

• 35:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd be crazy if you don't have a bias. I mean, like, it's like what you were saying about historians not leaving those details out because it's like, it's hard to face and hard to talk about. I mean, literally, that's the first sign that it's so bad.

• 35:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  And the fact that there's witnesses being like, "Wait a minute."

• 35:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I can't, yeah, people just walking by hearing it are like, "This is like, I don't need like..."

• 35:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  These are people who didn't, you know, they're just like, "If I have to look at it, I don't like it." And that's maybe the sign that... We've gone too far.

• 35:47Robert Evans?

  That's an important part of the history of slavery, too, is not just the people like Thomas, who are just like deeply have completely given their souls up to this pit of evil, but the people who like kind of walk by it for like 10 minutes and are like, wow, that seems really bad. I got a place to be. Like, I gotta get moving, you know? Like, I gotta, I gotta get to work or whatever. Like, yeah, that's bad, but like, I got shit to do, you know? It's the, it's the same thing in every society to an extent when you talk about the, the stuff that's horrible but widely accepted, is there's a large number of people who always know something's wrong, but like, bro, I gotta make rent, you know? Like, yeah, good stuff. Um, so as we saw in the case when we were talking about Eve, people who often escaped numerous times and would be whipped numerous times when they

• 36:30Robert Evans?

  were taken back by slave catchers. And when this didn't stop them from trying to escape, slave owners and overseers developed more elaborate methods of punishment. One that acted as a sort of garnish to flogging was pickling, right? So if you, if they need, want to flog you, but you've already been flogged, they will, or if you do something particularly bad, they'll pickle you after they flog you. And that's a literal term. You take pickle spices and salt and lime juice and peppers, and you rub them in the open wounds that you've whipped into their body.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 37:00Robert Evans?

  That's a normal punishment. That's like a normal thing. That this guy, Thomas, that's his, part of his day job. He does it like, yeah, like, like, whatever. Think about like something you have to do like once or twice, at least like a couple of times a week at your day job, and it's like that for him, right? Like, that's, that's his gig, you know? Um, on a website called Same Passage, I found a detailed account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings. These include, in 1756, runaway enslaved people named Punch and Kwaku were, quote, "well flogged and then washed and rubbed in salt, pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper." As noted with Eve, chains were also used as a punishment. In 1771, a runaway named Kubah was flogged, chained, and then had

• 37:42Robert Evans?

  a brand marked into her forehead. So she was, had a brand like burned into her head, right? Um, there's some evidence.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  This is so hard to hear. I'm sorry. I, like, yeah.

• 37:52Robert Evans?

  It's bad.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm still here, but this is...

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  We, we can take a minute. Like, this is all the worst stuff that people have ever done. Uh... Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Don't know what to say, but I mean,

• 38:05Robert Evans?

  Part of what I'm frustrated, part of what like was upsetting as I read this was how little of this kind of stuff I had heard of, like considering myself reasonably well read, I think I'd heard a little about pickling as like a thing that some particular sadists did as opposed to like, no, no, no, this was like a norm. Like this is a very normal thing to do. Like this was kind of the escalation chain up from the first flogging, right? As you pickle these guys.

• 38:30Robert Evans?

  And I, I, I hate getting into this next part. TD, I really apologize for like, I don't like having to talk about this. There's no good way to talk about this. So I'm just going to read this and, you know, we can move past it because this is bad. In 1756, Thomas writes that an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugarcane and was whipped and then he made, Thomas made another enslaved person named Egypt shit in his mouth. Months later, when Derby was caught eating sugarcane again, he was flogged and pickled and then Thomas made Hector shit in his mouth. This was a normal punishment in Jamaica. It's not the only place where it was done, but this was something that was extensively

• 39:14Robert Evans?

  done by slave owners and overseers on the island. They would force enslaved people to defecate in each other's mouths as a punishment. Depending on the severity of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth gagged and covered while that was the shit was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment. Right? This is a thing that there's a version of this called Derby's dose. That's a really common extreme punishment on the island and it's done. It's not just done for slaves who like escape. Sometimes like someone steals some sugar or some food and you just do this insane thing to them. And it's like, there's a degree to which it's almost a method of entertainment for some of these white guys is coming up with these increasingly sadistic and fucked up and elaborate ways to hurt the people that they own.

• 40:00Robert Evans?

  But if you need to know anything about the moral quality of the white men on Jamaica at the time, like a lot of the common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds. That was a normal thing they would do. Right? Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Very deeply disturbed.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  It's upsetting. Yeah. It's, it's as bad as it gets, right? And the only good news that I can give you, if indeed it counts as good, is that most of these punishments seem to have died out after like 1756, 57, right? This is kind of when Thomas starts doing this less and less. We don't know. It maybe this kind of just fell out of popularity. Maybe it was, it was so damaging to the workforce that they stopped doing it. We don't really know, but this is something that exists and is normal for a while, while he's early in his career and it's, it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the, the period of time that he's there. But it's a pretty common, like Derby's dose is a thing that other people are doing in Jamaica to the people that they owned.

• 41:00Robert Evans?

  Thomas spends his first 17 years on the island, working for other planters, primarily in Egypt. In 1760, he made a note of his active preparations to purchase land of his own. In 1767, he'd saved up enough to buy a 160 acre farm, which he named Bread Nut Island. He'd been purchasing people this whole time and he'd made extra money that let him buy the land by renting them out to his boss. And though, so by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like 30 people and he moves them on to this plantation that he owns, right? In an article for the social historian Barbara Starman's Rights of His Human Acquisitions, he wrote of purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid 112 pounds for two men and 200 pounds for one boy and three girls. The two men were named Will and Dick.

• 41:44Robert Evans?

  Will was 20, about 25 years old and stood five foot, three and a half, three and two tenths of an inch. And Dick was about 22 years old and taller at five feet, seven tenths of an inch. The boys and girls were Kubah, aged about 15, Suki, aged about 14, Maria, aged about 15, and Pompey, aged about 16. All were branded with Thistlewood's mark, a double TT on their right shoulders. Cause he's scarring all of these people that he owns in order to prove that he owns them.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  TT.

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  I don't like that he goes by TT.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't think about that either, but it's, it's for Thistlewood, right?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  No, he's just initials, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  Thomas Thistlewood. Yes. But yes, unfortunately. Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  No, there's other, there's other TT's out there. There's other, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:25Robert Evans?

  I feel his dad was a dick and named Robert. So, you know, we're all.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  True, there you go. We're both represented here.

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, both of our names have come up in this fucked up episode. So now that he's independent, right, he's on, he's, he's a planter now. He's risen to the very top of Jamaican society, right? About 16 years in and he's working his own property with like the people that he owns. He's making them work. One thing I'll say for him is that he vaccinates his, his, the people he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson didn't. He doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does this because he doesn't want them to die of smallpox because they're valuable assets. Right?

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  Now that said, he could, you know, this is, he's a guy. I think he wanted to see himself as a nice master. He makes a note of every like nice thing that he does for the people that he owns, like around Christmas, that he gave them each 18 herrings and a bottle of rum. Some of them he made share bottles of rum, right? Not everyone got their own bottle of rum, but he, like, he writes about this stuff as like, see, I could be a nice guy. I'm not always a huge dick to everybody.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Definitely a sign of a, a not nice person when they keep a tally of.

• 43:37Robert Evans?

  Every nice thing they do?

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Have documented, yeah, I don't, yeah, that's definitely a red flag.

• 43:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's going through his own diary. He's being like, boy, I need to revise this a little. I come across as a monster. I'll say I gave him herring.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  He writes it like not just in Latin, he like writes it in multiple languages. Just in case you guys didn't get that.

• 43:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, like putting it in French too. People need to know I give him rum sometimes.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Draw a photo of it just in case you can't read. Yeah, he has a picture of me giving all my, all my employees or slaves.

• 44:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot of posed pictures of him handing rum bottles to scared looking men and women.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  Speaking of not, I mean rum, maybe rum. I don't know if we'll get ads for that. We'll get ads for something. Here they are.

• 44:21Speaker 05

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• 44:51Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of devado dolutigrevir lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 45:50Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 46:03Robert Evans?

  We're back, talking about this monster.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  How much more is there?

• 46:09Robert Evans?

  We're through the most graphic horror that we're gonna talk about, which, I mean, there's a lot more that could be. You can read more about that kind of stuff if you want to. It's bleak, you know? I...

• 46:20Speaker 02

  I've had a pretty okay pregnancy in terms of not crying spontaneously, but you know what? I think we're gonna really challenge that today.

• 46:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, unfortunately, yeah, we have a little bit of that coming up here, too. Uh, yeah. So, I can't give you a lot of positive stories here, but one sort of good thing is that during his time...

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Let's just end on a low note. Oh, there's good.

• 46:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, on a low note. One of the positives of his situation is that while he's working at Egypt Plantation, he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes about them a lot. And he develops a preference for this specific plant, Bromeliad Penguin, which he uses as a natural fence for parts of the farms he works on. And then when he gets his own plantation, he moves these plants, which people call prickly penguins. To keep pests away from his like, personal gardens. And he doesn't know this about them, but they're an herbal abortifacient, right? And there's evidence that a lot of the women who live on these plantations, both when he's an overseer and then when he owns one, know how this plant can be used and don't tell him.

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  And use it to stop themselves from carrying his kids to term. Right? Like, there's, there's evidence, again, when you talk about this, there's always resistance happening, even if it's not well documented, even if the historic record doesn't give it to us directly. You can tell, he writes about like, wow, there's a lot of what he calls miscarriages among these, these women that he thought were going to carry kids to term. And we know from other things that some of these women were using this plant as an herbal abortifacient, right?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  And he didn't know, but he's-

• 47:52Robert Evans?

  And he didn't know.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  But he's kept a diary of other ways to give people miscarriages.

• 47:57Robert Evans?

  Right, but he didn't know about, like, again-

• 47:59Speaker 02

  But he didn't know about this one.

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  His knowledge is never as wide as he wants, as he thinks it is, right? And, and this is, I think, there's something-

• 48:07Speaker 02

  That's the good part?

• 48:09Robert Evans?

  Well, it's, it's evidence of these people who are in like, the worst situation imaginable, taking some agency for themselves, right? Some choice of like, I'm not going to do this for you. I'm not gonna deliver you a kid that you're gonna own, right? I have an ability to control that, and I'm going to, right? And that's an important part of the story, is like, the agency, these people who had very little options for exercising agency, were able to like, fight for, right? And, and they had to like, do it underground, they had to hide it, but they did do it, right?

• 48:42Robert Evans?

  Anyway, I feel like I've detailed enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the gravity of his evil to you. But there is one area-

• 48:51Speaker 02

  No, please, I want more.

• 48:52Robert Evans?

  Well, there's one thing we should say, that I'm, I'm not gonna go into detail on, but I will tell you, he talks a lot about pedophilia. That is another aspect of this, right? That's something he's doing. He will buy girls when they were 11 or 12, and he will, not long after, assault them.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  He definitely is up there on, on the list of worst motherfuckers.

• 49:12Robert Evans?

  He's, he's just about the worst person I've ever heard from directly.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  The fact that it's his own diary-

• 49:19Speaker 02

  And I don't believe that he was one of the normal ones. I think there were just a lot of bad people. I, I feel like I still wanna hold my, like- I don't know if like, maybe all the bad people were there, but like, I don't know if he was, was he normal? Really? This guy does not sound normal.

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  Among owners of slave plantations, he's normal, right? That's very few people, even within slave societies, but like, so it is, it is, these are the worst people.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Among the worst group of people ever.

• 49:46Robert Evans?

  He's a normal example of the worst people ever. Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  One of the worst. Yeah, I see.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  Well, that's important. Like when you get these, for example, sanitized stories, fiction and otherwise, about like the, the, the pre-civil war, you like, South in the US that like depicts how, oh, look at these beautiful houses and this like cordial civil society, right? Undergirding it is the same shit, Thomas. This, it is the exact same kind of sex crimes, the same kind of sadistic violence, rubbing shit into open wounds and pickling people and whatnot. Just like, that's all of these guys wearing these fancy coats who got painted in their plantation houses. They're all the same kind of guy as Thomas Thistlewood, right? Those are the people who are the same, right? All of these people who own human beings and make their living off of it are all doing shit like this.

• 50:32Robert Evans?

  None of them are particularly better than the others, right? I think that's kind of the important thing to take out of Thistlewood's work, like of, of his life's work, his diaries.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's not an isolated incident. We can't just project like, one bad guy. Yeah.

• 50:47Robert Evans?

  What a crazy asshole. No, no, no. This is his whole society. Yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:52Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, I, I.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So you got one more, one more knockout terrible thing.

• 50:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's, there's, there's, I mean, I don't know. It's this like debate in my head of like, how, how, how much detail do we go into here?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Let's hear it.

• 51:08Robert Evans?

  I want to talk a little bit about this girl he buys, Bess, when she's 11 years old. And he buys her as a gift for Fibba, right? This, this woman who he does not own, someone else owns her and he is renting her and she is living with him as his significant other, right? It's a very odd, it's a very, it's not a weird relationship within this culture. This kind of stuff happens all the time, but it's like weird to contemplate. Yeah, he's paying a white person, right, to have, who owns Fibba, right? He does buy her freedom when he dies, kind of, but like, yeah, it's, it's a very, like, that is the situation here. And he, he buys her a little girl to be basically her personal slave, right?

• 51:54Robert Evans?

  And for the first couple of years that this girl, Bess, is there, she's an assistant to Fibba, and she's, uh, he also uses her as a runner, right? He'll send this, this little girl, this 11-year-old girl, running across the island on foot, and he'll, to bring, exchange books with his friends on other plantations. She's his postal service, in a way, right? Like, there's one point where, like, uh, he'll, he sends a letter to a doctor friend of his, and she runs back to him with a copy of the works of Francis Bacon that her, that this guy he sent a letter to sends back with her, right? So this is kind of, this is how, like, social, like, this is how these guys are all staying in touch in Jamaica. It's how they share letters, and books, and their thoughts on, on the scientific discoveries of the day.

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  In 1778, this girl, Bess, runs back to the plantation with a copy of Benjamin Franklin's "Experiments and Observations on Electricity." That's how modern this is, right? He finds out about the shit Ben Franklin is working on because this girl he buys at 11 runs back to his house with a copy of the book that some other white dude gave her, right? To give to her master. At the same time as this knowledge is being transmitted, abuse is being transmitted. Thomas is going to sexually abuse this girl. We assume people he's sending her to do this, too. In an excellent dissertation for the English Department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth Polka writes, "One can't help but wonder if Bess spent any time looking through Franklin and Bacon's printed works on her journeys between the homes of these men, particularly

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  Franklin's observations and experiments, which was illustrated with engraved plates depicting laden jars spreading currents of electricity. One especially wonders about Bess's interactions with the text when considering that in August of 1766, shortly after Thistlewood acquired his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistlewood flogged a then-12-year-old Bess for meddling with my watch and telescope in the great house Piazza. Three years later, after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescope, Thistlewood first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the location, east of the pond." Uh, she was 15. And part of, again, these stories you don't get directly, but there's this, this girl who is in this terrible situation and is very intellectually curious. He describes her as messing with the telescope. She's trying to understand

• 54:00Robert Evans?

  this. She's trying to look out at the stars, probably, right? Like, it's not, it's very reasonable that Polka wonders if she would have, during this, what little time she had alone, taken a glimpse at some of these books, because this is clearly a curious child, right? And she's just completely locked away from exploring any of that by the system of heinous abuse that, that she is never able to escape, right? And this is, it's important to note, when I, when I talk about this not being that abnormal within the mainstream white, high society at the time, there's a really good passage in Polka's dissertation that talks about, like, does a good job of putting Thomas's habits and his documentation

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  of what the violence he was doing into like a global context. Quote, "Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, following the advice of Thomas Jefferson, kept extensive diaries of their North American settler colonial mission into Native Territory, in which they would occasionally record details of the sexual encounters between the men on their surveying expedition and the Native women, as well as the spread of venereal disease. These recordings were later printed in either French or Latin by editors as means of coding the explicit details, just like Thistlewood did. Eighteenth-century Virginia planter William Byrd also kept a coded log of his sexual activity as a means of control. More specifically, Richard Godbeer explains that he was anxious to control himself as he was to control others. Further, Godbeer concludes that Byrd experienced chronic tension within the Chesapeake's

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  white population during the 17th century and fostered an obsession with control in colonial Southern society, while the elites' emulation of English gentry culture necessitated an intense self-consciousness and careful scrutiny of one's personal behavior. Like Thistlewood, Byrd coded his diary in shorthand. However, unlike Thistlewood, Byrd's entire diary was coded, not only the segments related to sexual exploitation, and he kept the diary in a locked library. And Kenneth Lockridge speculates that Byrd's shorthand may have been intended above all to hide Byrd's further encoded self from his wife. In an even more well-known instance of sexual documentation, diarist Samuel Peppes, who also recorded his sex acts, occasionally coded his sexual activity in Latin, as well as in French and Spanish. What emerges in this cross-comparison of 18th-century diarists is a gendered coding

• 56:09Robert Evans?

  of sexual documentation, where Enlightenment-era men use quotidian writing in order to document, conceal, and control their exploitation of women. That's what I mean when I say like, this guy is not that weird for his social level, you know?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Well, and because women weren't, so it was like a code because women

• 56:26Robert Evans?

  Even free women, right.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  They weren't educated, couldn't read Latin.

• 56:30Robert Evans?

  Or were less likely to be, right?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  That makes me wonder about the whole Catholic Church. I mean, I guess now they're not doing all the sermons in Latin, but didn't they for a long time do everything in Latin?

• 56:40Robert Evans?

  They did for a long time.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  And they have all the sex crimes.

• 56:43Robert Evans?

  And part of that, I mean, there was argument, like, and this is part of like the Protestant referramation, that there's this part of that is out of a desire to keep preaching and keep responsibility for like interpreting the word of God out of the common man, right? Right? You have to be learned it to some extent to read the Bible and talk about it in Latin. And that cuts down the number of people who might be, because, you know, part of the thing, part of the thing the Catholic Church wanted to stop was anyone who had a different opinion about Christianity going into business for themselves, which is where we are right now, right? Like, that's the way, that's what Protestant is, is like, anyone can go into business for themselves, as like interpreting the word of God, basically. So there is something to what you say, right? And that-

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's all those sex crimes in the Bible, so maybe-

• 57:27Robert Evans?

  There's plenty of sex crimes in the Bible.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  ... maybe it was just all a code all along.

• 57:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, over the course of his 37 years in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood recorded exactly 3,852 sexual acts with 138 different women. The vast majority of these women were enslaved, the vast majority of these acts would have been sexual assault. In his analysis of the diaries-

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 57:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, 3,852, with a, you know, somewhere around 130 victims would be the way of looking at it. One of the people who analyzed the diaries, Richard Dunn, estimated that prior to coming to Jamaica, Thomas would have averaged at most around 10 sexual encounters per year. On the island, this increased to about 200, sometimes more. So part of when you're looking at what motivated him to become a slave owner and a planter, sexual opportunity is not 0% of that story, right? He finds ways to justify it that are heavier, but this does come down to that, you know, that's part of what this comes down to.

• 58:24Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Horrific.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  So did he ever have kids or raise a family?

• 58:29Robert Evans?

  He has about 14 kids, all who are born enslaved.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  All enslaved people?

• 58:35Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. And he does, he writes about, he has a child with Thibas. And he writes about punishing, like having this kid whipped, you know, for disobedience. This, this child dies in 1780, you know, which is about six years before Thomas passes on. So his, his children, I mean, they're living these difficult lives. They're working on plantations, right? So they don't benefit from easy lives, right? And yeah, I mean, it's a, there's a lot that's complicated here and like what's going on with him and Thibas? And, and how he sees these, these relationships with the people that he brings into the world this way.

• 59:17Robert Evans?

  But it's all based on kinds of exploitation, right? Like that's, that's what's happening here fundamentally. It's all exploitation. That's the only kind of relationship that he has with any of these people is one based on ownership.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Does he at least die of something horrific?

• 59:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, there's not really a lot of good ways to die in that period of time. He, he lives a long life for the era, though, unfortunately. He doesn't pass until 1786 and he's 65 years old. Which for a white guy in Jamaica, he lives a pretty long life and he dies.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Does he ever just like eat shit just to try it out? And then, so I just want to know if this man has eaten shit, his own shit before.

• 59:53Robert Evans?

  I mean.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  For science, you know?

• 59:55Robert Evans?

  Maybe, I don't know. He probably experimented with. Yeah, no documentation of him eating his own shit.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  His own shit.

• 1:00:05Robert Evans?

  Him being shitty, that's most of his documentation. And yeah, there's a, there's nothing happy to say about this story other than that he does die eventually. And, you know, not long after his death, the abolitionist movement really starts to get going within the British Empire. And gradually this kind of stuff becomes seen as much as is covered, as we've talked about. It's never fully reckoned with, you know, when, when the Great Britain ban slaver. And in their colonies, they never really look that deeply into what guys like Thistlewood are doing, right? There's kind of this acknowledgement that like, well, that was bad. That was a bad system. People, it was bad that things were doing that. And it's good that we stopped it. Let's focus on the fact that we stopped it and how nice that is.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  We were faster to stopping it than the Americans, right? And they did definitely end slavery faster than the United States did. But there's also this level to which there was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated. And how many British fortunes were based on them? On selling and buying people on these plantations, on the profits from these plantations, on selling stuff to these people, on running the boats? Like, that's, that's never reckoned with, right?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Well, and so much of that in the colonial England was like, also far away from them, like you said, but then in America, it's like, right there, your neighbors are doing it. And so that's even wilder that they continued longer in America. So, yeah.

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep. And remember, just this bad, you know, like, this is not, Jamaica was not worse than Virginia. Like, all of this is the similar kinds, maybe slightly different tactics, and how you psychologically and physically abuse people, but not always even that, you know? A lot of the same tactics. Anyway.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:02:01Robert Evans?

  We're done. Sorry.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  That's the end. Okay. Well, at least it's over.

• 1:02:05Robert Evans?

  It's over.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Horrific. TT, you have anything you want to plug?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  No. I feel like I should not plug anything right now, except for, I guess, go take a hot bath and cry, but.

• 1:02:18Robert Evans?

  Take a hot bath, cry.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  I hear you. Okay, I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before I give birth.

• 1:02:25Robert Evans?

  There we go. There we go.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Because there's a new show too, called Second Screens. It's for people who, you know, if you're neurodivergent like me, and you don't want to be, you can be on your phone the whole time. Second Screen, hosted by Madison Shepherd. Next one is December 1st. Yeah. And you could bring your phone and be on your laptop or phone while you're on, while you're watching the show. So I'll be on that show. And then I'll probably not do comedy for a while.

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  Well, those are both good choices. And I wish you the best of luck with the kid.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Take advantage of seeing them one last time.

• 1:02:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  And I hope you take advantage of having a baby, because that that'll be fun. That'll be much, much, that'll be affirming and good. The world's horrible, do things that are good.

• 1:03:11Speaker 07

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:03:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, what a strange way to end this pod, but, um, but thank you for having me on. It's always a pleasure to see you and, you know, take a moment to think about all the horrible things humanity's capable of.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  Yes. All right, everybody. Horrible things, done.

• 1:03:31Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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