Part One: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

Robert walks his former colleague Titi Lee through the life and times of Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner and monster of the first order who kept a detailed diary of all his crimes against humanity. (2 Part Series) Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20170328175826/https://www.thesocialhistorian.com/journals-of-thomas-thistlewood/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170328175826/https:/www.thesocialhistorian.com/journals-of-thomas-thistlewood/ https://www.amazon.com/Miserable-Slavery-Thistlewood-Jamaica-1750-1786/dp/9766400660 https://www.bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire/content/articles/2007/03/29/thomas_thistlewood_feature.shtml https://talkafricana.com/thomas-thistlewood-the-serial-rapist/ https://talkafricana.com/derbys-dose-the-cruel-punishment-used-to-punish-slaves-in-jamaica/ https://talkafricana.com/stockmen-trade-the-19th-century-practice-of-renting-enslaved-men-to-plantation-owners-for-breeding-in-america/ https://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article/22/1%20(55)/18/133815/Thomas-Thistlewood-s-Libidinal-Linnaean?fromStore=true https://samepassage.org/thomas-thistlewood-2/ https://www.pismin.com/10.2307/40654549 https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m044g0752/fulltext.pdf 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.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Ah, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're listening to today. And maybe other days, probably other days. I'm Robert Evans, here to tell you about some of the worst people in all of history. And to talk with us about some of the worst people in all of history is someone who's not one of the worst people in all of history, but is in fact my friend, TT Lee. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I'm good. I mean, I still have time to become one of the worst people in history. So don't count me out.

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  If you really wanted to. Yeah, like I believe you could be a contender. No, no, it's like that, uh, it's like that movie where, uh, fucking, uh, Marky Mark becomes a pro football player by trying out. Like, I think you could, you could become a dictator. If you show up.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  If there was a competition show.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I need rules. If there's like a rubric, I mean, actually, there probably is. I don't know if I would do well, actually, in that competition, but.

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  See, that's, this is what, this is why none of these network state Silicon Valley dictatorship people have any sense of like, uh, fun. Cause if you had like a reality show where whoever, whoever won got to govern like 3 million people's lives as like an iron-fisted dictator? Like, the, the, the franchising potential for that show is incredible, especially if any of them become nuclear armed. I mean, my God, you could, you could keep people glued to the TV. Like, that's, that's the new reality show. Yeah.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Competition for who gets the nuclear codes. I mean, we might actually end up in better situation.

• 1:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  That than we are now. Just give it to someone else. TT, I have an important question. Yeah. How's Wu Shu? Oh, my God, Wu Shu. He's right behind me. Wait, is there a video on the, are you guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  There he is. He's. He doesn't like when he's not the center of attention as I don't know about any way. I feel like old days when we used to go into the um that big building in Hollywood to record.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  She would run around and make a lot of noise and then I had to stop bringing him because I discovered he doesn't like when he's not the center of attention.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  I love back in the day Anderson we used to hang and that was nice. That was really nice.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  He's an old doggy now. He's about to be nine, so.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Anderson will be all of had Anderson 10 years next year, which is horrific and awesome, but horrific. I would like her to age less.

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, wouldn't we all like to age less?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  Would you if if giving like the blood of a young dog to Anderson would make Anderson younger? Would you do the Peter Thiel thing with Anderson?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  I would commit so many horrific crimes to extend the lives of Anderson. If I could extend Anderson's life longer, the amount of crimes I would commit to do this. I probably shouldn't say on it on my, but my goodness, I would commit them.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Biohacker, who's the guy who like is always botoxing his penis?

• 2:56Robert Evans?

  Brian, are we talking about the guy who wants to live forever?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Oh, that vampire looking dude?

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  They're all botoxing.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  There's one, there's one guy on Twitter.

• 3:05Robert Evans?

  Brian Johnson, yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Probably him, yeah. I feel like I I wonder when, yeah, when the next dog.

• 3:11Robert Evans?

  When the dog version of that?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  The dog version of that, yeah.

• 3:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cuz it does tend to like every after five or 10 years it trickles down like people are now doing like like cosmetic surgeries for their dogs and stuff. It just takes a little while longer uh for it to for for people to be like, well, maybe my dog also needs to be ashamed that their that their their eyelids are drooping or something like that, even though they're a basset hound and that's how they're supposed to look.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I mean, they have VBL surgeries for the Labubus now. That's like a whole

• 3:42Robert Evans?

  What?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Thing on TikTok. Yeah, that there's like they like wear little doctor clothes and have little gloves and lights.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Look it up. They're great. The videos are great, but I mean.

• 3:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck. Well, I love the modern world, but you know what the modern world is built on TT? Slavery, obviously, right? We're all aware of that, both in the past and today. What a horrific transition, Robert. I wasn't given a lot of options. Start my weekend. We started this how we started this, and that was the easiest way to get to slavery. You're never more than like two steps away when you're talking about like, really any human history, to be honest. But when we talk about like, the Atlantic slave trade, right? Shadow slave trade in the Americas. A lot of like, our documentation about like, what happened is documentation of like,

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  people kind of nearer to the end of the process, who like, escaped and were able to write about it. That's not exclusively it, but you get a lot more from that period of time. Just because, you know, earlier in the system, there were, it was a lot harder for somebody to break out of that system and then to be able to like, talk about what had happened to them. And so when it comes to like, kind of the height of this period of time, one of our best sources, in terms of like, how actually brutal the system was on a day-to-day basis, is the notes, the extensive diaries of a single man, of a guy who was a plantation owner in Jamaica. And one of the worst like, documented, like, sex criminals and murderers in history, just

• 5:20Robert Evans?

  because of like, the stuff he wrote in his own diary. And this guy's name is Thomas Thistlewood, and he's someone who's like, studied by historians of slavery today, because like, you get something with him that you don't get a lot, which is like, one of the guys actually doing, it's like some of those like, internal notes that the Nazis took when they were doing their shit, where you've got like, this guy who's a part of this system, that is still like, a century away from a reckoning, you know, almost, at the time that he dies, who's just like, writing about it, it's like, this has got up this morning, and here's what I did to these people that I own. Wow. So that's what we're talking about today. This is like, a bleak story, but it's really important, not because Thistlewood himself is like, the worst specific guy who ever owned people, but more because he's a pretty

• 6:04Robert Evans?

  normal guy who owned people, who was like, unusually detailed in his note-taking, right? That's why we know about this dude. Just like a guy writing in his diary. Exactly. First of all, I want to say-

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I had no idea what, like, right before we started recording, I was like, I don't know what we're talking about today. And I asked you, I was like, is it gonna be horrific? You're like, yep, we're talking about slavery.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  This one's real bad.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 6:28Robert Evans?

  I felt the need to warn you about this.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a feeling. I'm like, you know what? It's been a while since I've done this podcast. It's, it's, it's gonna be a brutal one. But no, well, uh, yeah, well, I mean, obviously, I'm sure there's horrific things in it. It's been a while that you were talking, what you said about, um, before people realized there's a reckoning. Cause that's something like I think about a lot, like, just like, him writing in a diary feels like the most private, safe, like secretive thing, right? You just wrote it in a piece of paper. There's no such thing as Xerox. There's no like internet. You just hide it somewhere. But that's also like, one of the most lasting things. Cause nowadays, internet could go away in, you know, a hundred years.

• 7:08Robert Evans?

  And this is one of those things where this guy, yeah, like, like, like this, there's a decent chance that like, very few people's lives were like, live tweeting or streaming everything they do today, will be as known in a hundred years as Thomas Thistlewoods, because he wrote it all down on paper. And it got like, when he died, his effects wound up, and I think in a university's collection. It was like, a long, decades after his death, that Pete, someone found these and was like, oh my God. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of detail in here about how slavery worked. He's also like, our best detail on what the climate of Jamaica was like for about a hundred years. Because he was just taking like, really detailed notes. And it would be like, woke up and committed these horrible sex crimes. Here's what the weather was like, right? Like, these are the diary

• 7:51Robert Evans?

  entries that he's leaving behind. So he's, he is one of those things where you'll find, you'll find whole books by people that are just, like, exerting the stuff from his diary about the weather. Cause that's important for like, climatic science and stuff.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Like firsthand impression.

• 8:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And then there's this larger branch of scholarship that's about his crimes against humanity. But it's kind of like the Unabomber, where he is also known for his other work, you know?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Interesting. It reminds me, I don't know why I thought of Arcadia, the play, but that's too obscure of a reference, where all the notes being taken are... Anyways, I probably shouldn't have even brought it up, but anyway.

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  No. What is that?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  No, but they, because they go, the Arcadia, it's Tom Stoppard play, but in it, they, well, the reason I brought it up is because people are taking notes and trying to infer what happened, but then there's like slight misunderstandings of like what actually happened. But I just find that interesting if he mentions like a weird obscure bird or something and you're like, I just imagine some like, you know, bird hunter like looking through his diary, like, yes, he was a terrible slave owner, but there's a sign this extinct bird existed.

• 8:56Robert Evans?

  We've documented that this animal lived here at this time, too. That is like the thing with his diaries, is that they're both really useful to like naturalists and also to students of one of the worst things people ever did to each other.

• 9:10Speaker 03

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• 9:45Robert Evans?

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• 10:20Robert Evans?

  So, his name was Thomas Thistlewood and he was born on March 16th, 1721, in Tuppam, Lincolnshire. His father was Robert Thistlewood and he was a, who was a moderately successful farmer. So this is in, in, you know, Inglewood. His dad is like, an okay farmer. Yeah. But not like, super wealthy, right? Like, his, his family aren't aristocracy, but they're like, landed and they're doing okay. They would be like, upper-middle class by the time his dad dies. And his dad dies pretty young, when Thomas is six, in 1727. Now, this is one of those things where like, the early 1700s were kinda coming into modernity, but there's still a lot that's almost very medieval.

• 11:02Robert Evans?

  So like, the father dies and he's got multiple sons, everything's going to the firstborn son, right? That's just the way shit tends to work. And so, if you're the second born son, either of like, a wealthy family, or of like, a family like this, that's just pretty comfortable, you're not gonna inherit any of that land, or really much in the way of wealth, right? So, you kind of, you, you're, you grow up knowing your older brother's getting everything, and it, you're gonna have to figure out something new to do. Something probably not, this is what fuels colonialism, right? Is to a heavy extent, you've got all these second and third sons, who are like, not gonna get shit unless they get it themselves, so they go over to the new world somewhere. And they probably die of cholera in a month, but whatever, you know?

• 11:47Robert Evans?

  Some of them get rich.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  You can marry rich, but you know.

• 11:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's your other option, is marrying rich. But, but, you know, some people tried to do both. And yeah, this is kinda, Thistlewood's gonna be one of these guys who, from the time he's like, five or six years old, knows, okay, dad's gone, I'm, I'm kind of on my own, in terms of figuring out like, what I'm gonna do to, to make my fortune, you know? Um, Thomas would be one of these unhappy second sons. His older brother, John, Bill, born in seventeen sixteen, inherits basically everything. Their dad does set aside some money for Thomas, about two hundred pounds sterling. And you can never kind of convert perfectly from that kind of money to this kind of money. Cause like, most people back then didn't have money, or at least didn't use it most of the time. Like, your

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  average transaction is like, your average working class person isn't handing over money for stuff. You're often like bartering, like, well, this time of year, here's what I got, and here's what I need, right? That's kind of a lot of, a lot of the use of currency or IOUs and stuff like that. So, but anyway, you might translate his inheritance to like forty or fifty thousand dollars, right? It's enough, it's gonna like pay for him to get through school, basically, and that's kind of it. Because for his whole childhood, he has to like pay the people who are taking him in.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  But he was six at this time.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So this has to last the rest of his childhood. It sounds like a lot.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  For the rest of his life, I see.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  But it's gotta last him until, or at least until he's an adult, right? Cause he's, he gets like moved around almost as soon as his dad dies. And basically, these people who are teaching him, he's living with them, or he's at a boarding school. And so wherever he is, he's paying to be, and he's paying people to take care of him for the rest of his childhood. Cause that's kind of the only reliable social support there is. Some of these people are his relatives, but he still has to give them money. Because like, that shit ain't free.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So you travel with your bag of money, and you're like, one coin for you?

• 13:41Robert Evans?

  Right. You get one coin a year for taking care of me as like a seven year old, right? Yeah. So I wonder how much that does impact him as a kid? Cause that's a very transactional way to think of your childhood. Like, alright, now you have this much money left for your childhood, and you have to pay this much a year to the people caring you so they could feed you, right?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  That's wild. And you really have a sense of like, how much your, your value is in society. And then someone's like, I don't want to take care of you for this much. And you're like, please, I'm worth this much to be alive. Like.

• 14:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Here's what I can pay to continue being alive. Please. And yeah, he's gonna be, this is gonna kind of turn him into the perfect foot soldier of the British Empire, because he's very, he sees relationships as very transactional. And he's, he grows up knowing, I'm gonna have to hustle constantly for everything that I'm gonna get, right? Especially if I want to be anywhere near as comfortable as like my dad was and my older brother is going to be. So in 1729, and now eight-year-old Thomas Thistle would have sent to a school in Lincolnshire. This is a nice place, but it's not like the kind of fancy boarding school that the wealthy sons of the aristocracy are going to like send their kids to. So he winds up boarding with a relative by marriage, and he pays for his upkeep with his inheritance.

• 14:56Robert Evans?

  And he does this in various ways over the next six years in three different schools. He studies Latin, he becomes fluent in that, he learns Greek, and he studies reading, writing, and arithmetic. And he's an intelligent kid, all signs point to the fact that he did pretty well in school. But it's also one of those things where, once you're like 14 or 15, you're basically grown, and they're like, it's time to apprentice in something and figure out what you're actually gonna do for a living. So at age 15, he moves into an uncle's house, and he pays him five pounds sterling a year to be an apprentice on his farm. So he's like paying his uncle to teach him how to run a farm. But he's, because he's not gonna, he's gonna have to work on someone else's, he's not gonna inherit any land of his own. Sometime after this, a couple of years later-

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Reverse paid internship, unpaid internship, reverse.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like an internship that you pay to attend at your family, like you're paying your uncle to do your, be your, like, to give you a paid internship, which is a shitty gig, really. Like, having done an unpaid internship, at least you're not out any money, right?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it sounds like he's working, he's giving them free labor.

• 16:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really fucked up, actually. And this guy's his uncle, yeah. But that just, that tells you something about how mercenary a lot of this culture is at the time, right? Like, you wonder, why did the British Empire do the things that the British Empire did? Well, this is how people are living on the island, when they're better off, right?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow, that's like, it's like, these are the citizens who, and this is like their norm.

• 16:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, how do you think they're gonna treat people in Bengal?

• 16:30Robert Evans?

  Like, yeah, their own kids have to pay. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know how long he spends in this internship exactly, but he probably would have been somewhere around 18 when he sets off fully on his own to make a living as a livestock dealer, right? So he decides, I don't have any land yet, but I've got some money I've saved up, some leftover from my inheritance. I'm going to start buying and selling livestock to try to make a profit. And around this time, as he's starting his career, he hooks up with a local girl for the first time and she gets pregnant, right? He gets this, this young woman pregnant and they're not married. Now, in this period of time, the early 1700s, that there's this social level, if you get someone pregnant as the, as the, as the man, you have two choices.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  Choice one is convince this lady's parents to let you marry their daughter, right? And that's very much your job. She does not have a lot of choice in the matter, right? That's going to vary from family to family, but this is primarily you interfacing with this, this, this, this young woman's family, right? And if they don't want you to marry their daughter, if they don't see you as a suitable match, you can get in a shitload of trouble. You can go to prison for fathering a bastard, right? So, yeah, he gets in this situation and this, this lady's parents, I don't know much about this person, but, and I say, I don't know if literally if she is a girl, like a child, or if she's like, she could have been anywhere from like 15 to 20, given the way things worked at the time, right?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 17:57Robert Evans?

  And I have no idea like why, but her, her parents are like, this guy is not a suitable match for our daughter. Maybe it's just that he's poor. Maybe they see something of like the, the sketchiness lurking inside this man's soul. I have no idea, but they say no. And so he really is looking at like, if this girl has a kid, I'm going, I could go to prison. I'm at least going to have to pay like a heavy fine for what I did. But then the child doesn't come to term and he gets off scot-free, right? But this kind of inspires him to like, get the fuck out, right? Like this was my message of like, I got it, almost got in a lot of trouble here. I need to actually like escape my hometown, maybe get out of England altogether, right?

• 18:38Robert Evans?

  And so in 1746, he travels to London and he signs a contract with the East India Company to act as a purser on, of super cargo on a ship headed for the Far East. This means that like, you know, you've got this boat and it's taking a bunch of goods over to like India and other parts of Southeast Asia and it's going to come back with a bunch of goods from the different places it visits on this like two-year, year and a half, two-year-long voyage, right? It's the age of sail, that's how long shit takes back then. And he's, his job, he's getting paid to like manage the money on board, right? They've got a bunch of petty cash, some of their, they're using to like buy goods to take back, some of it they're using to pay for like incidentals and necessities on the voyage. And he's the guy like, man, he's the ship's accountant almost, right?

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  Now, the ship, like the one that he signed on to, it's going to like leave with goods loaded for, you know, from the home country for homesick colonizers in India and then it's going to come back with all sorts of shit. And you, you're getting paid to do your job, but you also, part of like how you make good on being, having a job like this is along the way, you're buying stuff at all of these different foreign ports that you're gonna sell back at home, right? That's understood to be like a perk of the job.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  You're like flipping your own side hustle?

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  Right, you're gonna like sell a bunch of tea that you bought in India for like way more money back in London or some shit like that, right? So the ship, they're gone for almost two years, like it's a long voyage and they land back in Blackwall on August 27th, 1748. Thomas disembarks, he's now in his late twenties, he's a seasoned world traveler and an entrepreneur. He gets his back wages for the journey, which is like 30 pounds sterling, something like 8,500 bucks in modern money, which is not a lot for like two years of, of hard labor on a boat. Now, he's got a bunch of shit with him that he's going to try to make a fortune flipping and selling, but he also spends most of his time like gambling and playing cards and

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  speculating on investments and he's just spending his money. And the money he's not spending on gambling, he's spending on prostitutes, right? Like, we're talking London in the 1700s and he, he talks about this in a diary, right? Because this diary that, this is like a thing that he picks up at the school that he goes to where you're, they're like-

• 20:52Speaker 01

  So this diary, are we already starting with the diary? Because I know when he was eight, he wasn't writing in it yet. Okay, so we're in diary, firsthand account mode.

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he starts kind of in his early adulthood, right? And he's, this is like, this is not a diary of his thoughts and feelings. We learn basically nothing about what he, how he feels. This is, because he's just like, he's listing everything he buys and sells. So you see part of the use of this diary.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Classic man.

• 21:18Robert Evans?

  Right? Yes, classic man, where it's just like, uh, this is what dinner cost me in 1748, right? Like, this is the cost of like, buying tobacco. This is how much I lost at cards last night. This is how much I paid this prostitute, right? And so it's both like, you get, you do get this weirdly detached look at the inside of this guy. But you also get, like, you can see why it's useful to all sorts of different scholars, where they're like, well, what did it cost to get like drunk and gamble and go out with a prostitute in London in 1748? Well, this, we know, actually, this guy took notes on it, right? Or at least we have an idea.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  What did it cost?

• 21:55Robert Evans?

  Uh, great question. So when, to answer that.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Just in case time machines exist, no.

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  Exactly. You need to know what to bring along. I have a lot of foreign currency from the past that I keep in emergency bags in case I get transported back in time. You wind up in ancient Rome, you don't want to not have any denarii. Like, what are you gonna do? You know?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Okay, Robert.

• 22:15Robert Evans?

  You gotta fight for it in a gladiatorial pit? You're not doing that.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  I actually believe you would, you would have like an old money collection. Like, I do believe that.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Keep that in, yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  All right, Robert.

• 22:27Robert Evans?

  So whenever he was writing, to know what it like, a night out with a prostitute cost in London in 1748, whenever he wrote about stuff like this, he would like box off the entry about the sex stuff from the rest of his diary entries. And he would preface it with the letters XXX, which is interesting. I didn't know that went back that far, but apparently it did. Or at least that's what he chose, because like, I don't think this was like a broader thing in society yet. It may just have been a coincidence, uh, that he chose to do that, to like, kind of make a note that he was about to start talking about sex. And he would always write about it in Latin. And so the very first entry that we have of him writing about sex is of a night he spent with a prostitute in 1748. And he writes, "In the evening, two..."

• 23:10Robert Evans?

  Uh, in the evening, two mullier, two shillings, right? Uh, and a mullier is a contemporary term for a prostitute, right? So he spends two shillings for a night with this lady, right? Uh, and he writes a G above her title, which is his way of letting her know G is the seventh letter. It's his way of noting alphabetically, this is the seventh woman that he's slept with. So presumably while he's traveling around the world at various ports, he's, he's doing, you know, he's probably paying women, right? That's likely who most of A through F are. One of them's gotta be that lady that he, he got pregnant briefly, right? Assuming like, but this also tells you a lot about him, that he is, he's talking about the women that he's been with. He's just like alphabetically listing them, right? Like that, yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  That's wild, the code. I feel like that's like, yeah, cause it like you, even though it is private, there's a part of him that's like, just in case, like, yeah, in case someone finds it. He's writing it in like a secret code. That's what I did when I was like a child in my, my first pink diary, like writing, you know, like pig Latin.

• 24:09Robert Evans?

  It's, it's great that you pick up on that.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Not quite Latin. I wasn't writing, yeah, I wasn't writing Latin back then, but.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  Pig Latin, yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And I wasn't hiring prostitutes either, so.

• 24:18Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, I would hope not. But it is like what you've picked up on is actually something scholars are really interested in, cause there's a lot of debate as to like, why did he write about sex this way? Why did he do it in Latin, right? And that is one of the theories, right? As we'll talk about that basically this was his way of like, if somebody comes across this, I don't want anyone, at least I don't want anyone uneducated knowing what I've been writing about, you know?

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  And from what we can tell, this is a guy who, I don't know if we'd call him like a nymphomaniac today, but sex is a lot bigger part of his life than people would have admitted to, than like a polite man would have admitted to in this period of time, right? And he, he tries one last time after he gets back from this overseas voyage to, to have a proper marriage with someone in England and like start a life on the island. He sits down with the parents of a girl that he'd known as a younger man and he asks them like, hey, can I marry your daughter? And again, he, he writes that they entertained him with great civility, which one of his biographers said was like, that was him saying that they said no, right? That they were like, they politely said, absolutely, you cannot marry our daughter. You're a creep, right? Like.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, sounds like there's stuff that he's like, not, you know, like when you meet someone, you're like.

• 25:28Robert Evans?

  Something's wrong behind this fucker's eyes.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  You hear like, oh, what's wrong with them? And then you're like, oh, I see, that's why, like the vibes are off, something's wrong.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  He looks like the kind of guy who lists women alphabetically in his weird crime diary.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Robert Evans?

  Like, yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  Just, he just seems off.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Those parents are correct in their assessment.

• 25:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Good call. Don't let this guy marry your daughter.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Good call.

• 25:50Robert Evans?

  So during this period of time, as at all other points in his life, Thomas read voraciously, and he took notes in his diary on what particularly interested him in the books that he was reading. In January of 1749, this was abortions. He's really interested in, and this again tells you a lot about what's happening elsewhere in this guy's life, is he's just casually interested in how to make abortifacients, right? Like, drugs to induce, like, abortion.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:15Robert Evans?

  Or a mis-, like, he often frames it as drugs to induce a miscarriage, right? And one of his recipes, I just found this interesting because this tells you, like, again, one of the things that

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  the society believed at the time for an abortifacient at the time is one pound of bitter apples, I think that's what it means. It's, it's like LD of bitter, so it's an amount of bitter apples steeped in beer and cooked at least twice. It says, it said will cause abortion, certainly. So bitter apples steeped in beer, yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I'm covering my unborn baby's ears right now.

• 26:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the good news is I don't think there's a lot of bitter apples around anymore. Although depending on the state of reproductive health care in the near term, I don't know. I don't also, I kind of doubt this worked very well, but maybe it did.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  He's like making drinks to, like, feed, like, a little witch.

• 27:04Robert Evans?

  He's making morning-after pills.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  He's interest, or at least he, he's put part of, like, one of the things that's theorized is that if he didn't need it then, he was taking down notes while he was, like, near a library on how to make basically morning-after pills. Because he foresaw, because of what had happened to him in his past, he was like, I might need to do that in the future, right?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 27:24Robert Evans?

  Like, because the other thing he's doing at the same time is he's writing down recipes for cures for venereal diseases. Because this is a guy who's probably by this point slept with prostitutes in ports all around the world. He's picked up a lot of VD, right?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  Like, this is not, like, there's no antibiotics. They don't know anything about, like, how to prevent disease.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  So he catches chlamydia. And he writes, uh, uh, he, this is like the recipe he gives for a, a treatment for chlamydia. Take every other day, one dose of any purging pills and continue that course if your strength will allow it. Until the running change both its color and consistency and appears the same as the semen. Right. That's like this, like discharge that happens when people get the clap. So he's, he's taking these like weird balms and we don't know exactly what's in them. Right. Because there's, these are both cures for like the clap and for, you know, gonorrhea that guys are like buying on the streets. One of them's called ciderhems common purging. One of them's called balm captive. And we don't know exactly what he was taking, but I did find a dissertation by Elizabeth Polcha for Northeastern University

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  that discussed a similar quack remedy that this exact guy used later for the same diseases. Ward's pill and drop, which were these blue, red and white pills that were filled with arsenic and other poisons. So that's what he's taking for V D. It's like arsenic. Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 28:43Robert Evans?

  Mercury and shit. That's what people put in these cause they like.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:48Robert Evans?

  You, it, it's the same logic that a lot of like bullshit new age medicine stuff uses today where they're like, look, it's drawing out the toxins.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:57Robert Evans?

  Where they're like, if you give someone this like arsenic that they wind up like their body purges everything. Like they wind up vomiting and like.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Like a reset.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  Right. And so they're like, it must be cleansing you.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, I think we covered this thing cracked, but they used to do Lysol was, uh, originally invented as like a vagina cleaner. So.

• 29:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm sure the men didn't have great healthcare before either. I mean, they got there a little faster than we did, but.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Still pretty rough out there.

• 29:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No one's doing great. And I think the logic is the same as with Lysol where it's like, well, this looks like it hurts like hell. So it must be working. Right? It's like, now you've just poisoned yourself.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Disinfect everything. Yeah.

• 29:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You're all just taking arsenic. Um, so. By the spring of 1949, things are not going well for Thomas. He has every venereal disease known to man.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Wait, 1949?

• 29:50Robert Evans?

  Run out of his money. 1749.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Wow, we skipped.

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  No, he's 200 years old now. He's a vampire.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Real time traveler.

• 29:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, so this guy, I mean, he's just sick as hell all the time. And he's run out of money. All the money he got doing his merchant marine shit, he's blown through. He's got, you know, he's got some assets that he's still selling from his trip, but he's doing badly enough that he's borrowing money from his landlady, which that's like a level of doing bad, right? When like you can't, you're not even paying your landlady. You're like having to borrow money from her. Yeah. And he's also borrowing from his brother and complaining in his diary about how lonely he is all the time. So he takes a little trip to the continent where he tries to sell off some of his goods. And he's doing badly enough that by the end of 1749, he finds himself back in London and he visits this place called the Jamaica Coffee House.

• 30:41Robert Evans?

  And as best as I can tell, this is like a business and it looks like a cafe, basically. But it's also kind of an advertisement for white people to go to Jamaica, which at the time is like, I think it's the wealthiest agricultural colony in the British Empire. They're making sugarcane, right? That's what they're growing over there, right? They're producing sugar, basically. And the Brits had had Jamaica not that long at this point. They captured it from the Spaniards in 1655, right? So we're less than a century into like English control of the island. And they've done in this little period of time where they've dominated Jamaica, they've done their best. They're trying to settle this island, but they're having trouble because it seems to them that Jamaica, like life on Jamaica

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  has evolved primarily to kill English people. Like they'll send over a bunch of young white guys to do the quote unquote skilled work on, you know, and a lot of that's overseer work, managing these slave plantations. And most of these guys die in the first year, right? That's just known. You get a boat with like 200 white kids from the main island and like 80 of them are gonna be, or like 180 of them are gonna be dead within like a year, year and a half.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, gee, I wonder why you send a bunch of people to go to an already, a land where people live and you're like. Why do the people who live here keep trying to kill us? We're just trying to colonize them.

• 32:02Robert Evans?

  It's also just like the people who live there, right? Because there's also, you know, the slaves who were brought there, the enslaved people, also die at an elevated rate. Because like, none of them have grown up around the various like diseases and bugs that are there, right? Like, they're getting bit by mosquitoes and getting shit that like-

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean they're just dying of natural ca- I thought you meant like-

• 32:23Robert Evans?

  A lot.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  They're being fought off.

• 32:25Robert Evans?

  That happens. That does happen. That's part of this. Because there is, there's a heavy maroon, they're called maroons, right? Which is like people, they're former slaves and descendants of former slaves who escaped Spanish plantations and formed independent communities on these like really forested, often like mountainous chunks of the island, right? So it's areas that where it's hard to control. And you can't, Great Britain has troops in Jamaica, but as soon as you send soldiers out into these, like these heavily wooded parts of Jamaica, they just start dying of diseases left and right. You know, you can't keep a force out there for any length of time because the natural world will kill more of them than the enemy. But the enemy will also kill them.

• 33:07Robert Evans?

  Because these maroons, by this point, these are the people from the slave populations who survived their first years in Jamaica. So they are hardened to like the different diseases and bugs and whatnot that exist on the island. And they know these like forested, dense like rural areas. So they're able to fight very effectively this guerrilla war. So, yes, it is both a mix of the natural environment and these different maroon communities that are killing all of the young white kids who come here, right? And it goes badly enough for Great Britain that about a decade before Thomas Thistlewood shows up in Jamaica, the Brits give up and they offer terms to the maroon communities. And so they say to these like, these independent chunks of the island, basically, that are

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  made up of former slaves and their descendants, "We'll recognize your independence and we'll recognize your self-rule over your territory. And in return, you have to keep the roads open for us so we can transport goods and you have to not raid these plantations." And whenever future slaves escape from our plantations, you have to help us bring them back. You have to help us if there's an uprising by the enslaved population, right? There's like a treaty where these these maroon communities agree to all this in order to stop not have to keep fighting these constant wars with the English colonizers, right? So this is like, you know, it's a pretty, it's an ugly thing, like it's it's a morally complicated thing, but you understand the decision these like maroon communities are making. They're like, well, yeah, at least we get to keep living on our own, you know?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  They're not quite a sovereign nation, but they but so there's no like big war to be fought, but they're not quite acknowledging that, like, England owns the whole place and England's like, we own this, but we don't, but we do.

• 34:48Robert Evans?

  But we're we will we'll recognize your right to stay in your area if you stop fucking with trade, basically, right? Like, that's kind of the agreement that these communities come to with these agents of the empire. You know who else are agents of the British Empire? Maybe, maybe our sponsors, especially if it's like one of those big, big London banks. They might be advertising on this show. Who's to say?

• 35:15Speaker 03

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• 35:46Robert Evans?

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• 36:45Robert Evans?

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

• 36:55Robert Evans?

  And we're back. How we feeling?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Sad. Well, you know,

• 37:04Speaker 01

  as you might expect, my mood has gone down since before we started recording. But in many ways, I'm also happy to see you. So I, you know, it's like...

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  I'm happy to see you too. Happy to see you. Happy to learn about how shitty life was in the mid 1700s. Like, really just a bad time to be a person.

• 37:24Robert Evans?

  So yeah, into 17, or start of 1750, Thomas Thistlewood books passage on a boat after saying goodbye to his friends and family. And this is goodbye forever. He's never gonna see any of them again. He's like 30 and he's saying like, goodbye for it, because I'm going to an island. I'll almost certainly be dead in a year, right? And in fact, it's one of the, you get this hint of how disposable these men being sent over are, that like, within minutes of boarding, his luggage is broken into and his liquor collection is stolen, right? And I think it's just this like, look, steal whatever you can from these guys. They're all gonna be dead in six months. Like, fuck it, you know?

• 38:00Speaker 01

  It's like, there's no law once you enter, once you step... Off of England.

• 38:05Robert Evans?

  There's no law. It's very much like on the way to Jamaica. It's certainly like that. Like this is still a period of time like.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Have you ever taken a flight on the Spirit Airlines to Vegas? That's what that makes me think of.

• 38:17Robert Evans?

  That's it's like a flight. It's like a Spirit flight to Vegas, right? Including some of the people on that plane are being trafficked, right? Like some number of these men on these boats with Thomas have been like knocked out the night before at a bar. And they're just woke up working on a boat, right? That's how you that's how you put them on boats in this time, right?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:38Robert Evans?

  They actually get stopped by like the British Navy on their way to Jamaica. And the Navy is trying to make sure there's not like guys on there who got like beaten up at a port and are being forced into labor because it's like it's a major problem. So it is like it is the Wild West. I mean, it's it's it's worse than that. But like it's there. You are in between these settled areas. There's basically no rule. But part of the appeal of Jamaica to a guy like Thomas is it's known at the time. The like marketing nickname for Jamaica when they're trying to get these young white guys to move over there is that it's the best poor man's country, right? And what that means is that if you don't have any money, you can and you don't have any standing in society. Back in Scotland or Ireland or, you know, England.

• 39:24Robert Evans?

  You can go to Jamaica and you will be number one, you can get rich there. And number two, you'll get respected because all white men are equally respected. That's the idea, right? It's not exactly true, but one of the things that's said about planter culture is that any white man who shows up at any plantation in Jamaica will get like the he'll get put up for the night and get fed a good meal. It doesn't matter how poor you are or where you come from. There's this level of egalitarianism for white men in Jamaica, right? And. As we'll talk about, this is not entirely what it sounds like, but this is how it's being marketed, right? This is how guys like Thomas are convinced to go there. And I want to quote now from a 2006 article in Caribbean Quarterly by James Robertson.

• 40:08Robert Evans?

  "The glowing promises which encouraged successive European migrants to sail to Jamaica often shattered against the brutal island society these Johnny Newcomes encountered. An early 19th century bookkeeper wrote home regretting his choice. Instead of being a gentleman's life, it is more like a slave, continuing, 'I'll die before I'll be a planter, though it is the best for getting money. A person that is hard enough to manage the business, make it to be an overseer and have three or 400 pounds a year, but no one has wages equal to their hazards. Nineteen out of twenty die without getting anything, and I fear I shall be one of the unhappy number.' These were daunting odds, and while the brutalizing work contrasted with the splendid prospects that had persuaded him to migrate, even if gullible farmboys continued to swallow recruiters' golden tails, the supply was never sufficient for all the vacancies." So, this is one of those-

• 40:53Speaker 01

  They're being recruited, oh, sorry. Well, just to clarify, when you say he's, because he's like, "I'll never be a planter," but they're still like being paid just not well to be a planter. And so they're kind of being told they could be a boss. And is that right? Or are they already immediately going into slavery, the white people?

• 41:10Robert Evans?

  I mean, they're not owning slaves, but they're managing slaves for slave owners. That's the start of the ladder, once you get over here. And what that guy is saying, what that bookkeeper is saying, is that the only way to really get rich is to make enough money to buy a plantation of your own and be a planter. But almost no one gets there. Nineteen out of twenty people will die before making any money at all, right? That's what he's saying.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I thought you meant he was be, well, he's not actually, so there's not having the white people, like, actually do the labor still?

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  The white people, the labor the white people are doing is making the black enslaved people work. That's the labor for white. Now, there are some, there are some, like, experts who are, like, making metal things or whatnot. Those, there are jobs. And like, that guy we heard from is a bookkeeper. So that's not the only job for these young white men. But what this guy is saying is that as soon as he got over on the island, he realizes it's a scam. Because there's almost no way to get, make enough money to leave Jamaica again, and you're definitely going to- Die there, right? Like something on the island will kill you. So you've cut your life short and it's just this miserable situation. So that's, that's the, where Thomas stumbles into on May 4th, 1750.

• 42:18Robert Evans?

  It's the day he gets to Jamaica and he starts like that other guy working as a bookkeeper and eventually an assistant overseer on a plantation. The idea is that soon he'll get promoted to overseer, but this doesn't materialize. Now, lucky for Thomas, there's not nearly enough healthy white guys, right? So when this first place that hires him, when he finds out they're not going to promote him where he wants to, he's able to get another job really easily. He survives his first six months and then his first year. And after that point, options start to open up for somebody like you because you've proven that you're not going to die right away in Jamaica. So you're valuable to hire, right? And so all of these plantations, that none of them have enough white men, right?

• 43:03Robert Evans?

  Even if they have enough enslaved people, they don't have enough like guys to run them for them. Because the slave, the enslaved population vastly outnumbers the white population, right? And this is part of why Jamaica in this period is the most productive slave plantation in the British Empire. About half of the 45,000 tons of sugar that were imported into Britain each year came from Jamaica. And while white overseers and technical employees like Thomas were a part of the workforce, most of it is enslaved Africans or their descendants. There's only rough numbers here, but by the time Thomas lands on the island, there's about 18,000 white people and about another 7,000 free black or like mixed race people on the island, right? So like 18,000 white people, another 7,000 free non-white people.

• 43:47Robert Evans?

  The enslaved population is 170,000. And so when we talk about why there's this reputation that any white man will be treated well in Jamaica, it's because there's not as much room for the rich people, the rich white people to exclude the poor white people because they're so outnumbered, right? You kind of need these poor white guys at your back in case there's a slave uprising, which there will be periodically, right? And so that's The reason for this quote unquote egalitarianism is the wealthy plantation owners know that they need to keep these poor white guys on their side. Like enough to have some backup.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  And they probably feel, to respond to that, I think it's interesting you bring up the point about like the egalitarian and maybe they're not having room to exclude the other white people. But I also think part of it is them being, I mean, it is like, you know, the white supremacy, but being surrounded by so many enslaved people. And they see them as like background. They don't see them as people. So subconsciously, they're going to feel like, you know, when they see another white person, like you're on my side. As opposed to in a society where everyone's white, those like aristocratic, you know, one percenters look for someone else to put down. But they kind of have that space filled and so they're gonna just be nicer. And, and yeah, I think that kind of leads to that like superiority complex.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Because you just get so used to feeling like a whole nother race is the background to your supremacy. So.

• 45:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 45:18Robert Evans?

  Well, and that also helps explain why these poorer white guys who don't own enslaved people themselves will defend the system so much is that they still, because of the system, they have a much higher place in society than they otherwise would, right? Like the fact that the majority of the people are this kind of like background noise to the, the white population means that as a poor white, you matter more, like you feel like, and that will make you more inclined to defend the, the system, right? Like, that's also got to be part of what's going on here.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if their whole value quote unquote is managing uprisings or, you know, of people, but they're going to have to convince themselves that.

• 45:55Robert Evans?

  And managing just this system of human slavery. Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. They convince themselves that those people aren't people because that, that they're required to be there to like maintain order, you know, quote unquote.

• 46:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, and I should make it clear here that at the time when he arrives, Jamaica's kind of changing, but at the time he lands there, it's still the case that like of that 7,000 or so person population of like free non-white people in Jamaica, a good number of those people also own enslaved human beings and operate plantations, right? Now, one of the things that'll change during the time Thomas is there is that this number will get like cut down because the only people who are able to be part of the island legislature are white property owners and they start voting to like restrict both political rights and like reduce the amount of land that non-white people can own during the time that they're here. So even the ones, even the non-white people who are like part of the system of slavery

• 46:51Robert Evans?

  are going to be like edged out of it over the time that Thomas is on the island by like these white slave owners who actually get to like manage things politically. Now, Thomas, like I said, he's gonna live, he's gonna survive his first year and then some, and as a result, he's going to get treated, he's gonna be very valuable, right? He's going to take some pretty significant leaps very quickly in social standing and in income. He proves to be such a competent overseer that he's soon fielding offers for jobs from half of the plantations in his area, which means he's getting steady raises. His boss has to pay him more every year to keep him on because he always has places he can go. This allows him to accrue a tidy pile of ready cash and he starts buying human beings

• 47:34Robert Evans?

  of his own and he will rent them, he doesn't own land yet, so he's buying people and then he's renting them out to his bosses as laborers, right? And he's, he's pocketing the money for their labor and that's how he basically sets up passive income for himself that is going to like allow him eventually to buy a plantation of his own, is he starts by like buying people and renting them back to his boss and his boss is always going to pay above average rates for the slave labor that Thomas rents him because his boss wants to keep Thomas happy, right? Because Thomas can go anywhere he fucking wants. So that, does that kind of make sense in terms of like why this would be appealing to someone like Thomas who can survive that first year of plague, right? Like he's doing better now than he'd ever have been able to do in England because he's buying and selling human beings.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, no, it's fucked up, but it's also interesting that, I mean, like prostitution was such a big part of his earlier life because there's like already, like you said, it's so transactional, there's already this idea of like, like buying.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  You know, like a night with someone and then kind of escalating that to being like, "Well, now he thinks I'm buying this person's labor."

• 48:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And I mean, that's completely inhumane, but I could see like in how you're describing it, like how this man's kind of thinking will jump to that extreme.

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because it is obviously paying your uncle to take care of you when you're like 10 is different from owning humans. Paying for sex is different from chattel slavery. But he has his whole life been had this very transactional understanding of what human be other people are, right? That is, that has been with him like since he was a little kid. That has to have some sort of impact on like why you are this way. So James Robertson in his article on Jamaica during this period of time describes this like initial mass death of new arrivals from Europe as seasoning. And one of the reasons he theorizes Thistlewood survived his period of seasoning is that he's not getting drunk every night. He's like

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  a nerd. He's spending all of his free time writing in his diary and journaling about the weather and like reading books. And so he's not just like drinking constantly while sick.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Someone stole his liquor.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  Right. Someone stole his liquor. That may have saved his life.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also all the arsenic he drank probably.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All that arsenic made it so that nothing else could survive in his body.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  That's right, everybody. Try drinking arsenic yourselves. See if it makes you stronger. Who knows? You know, I think that we could get RFK to endorse arsenic. Drinking arsenic?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  Like, that's medicinal now. So.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  Thomas.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  But you should do your second ad.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, should I? Okay. Yeah. Well, here's another ad break.

• 50:20Speaker 05

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• 50:50Robert Evans?

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• 51:50Robert Evans?

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• 52:01Robert Evans?

  And we're back. There's not a good way to segue into this next part, but this is the first time, in December of 1750, about five months after landing on the island, is the first time that Thomas writes about committing sexual assault on an enslaved person who works on the ranch where he's working. And he writes this in his Latin shorthand. And basically, the translation is that he slept with this enslaved woman named Sylvia, who is a black woman from the Ibo forest region of modern-day Cameroon, in sylve. Right? He writes that he lay with Sylvia in sylve. And sylve is like, that's a shortened version of the Latin word for forest, right?

• 52:42Robert Evans?

  So he's kind of writing about the sex crime he's committed almost as like a Latin couplet, right? Like, he's not just writing about this thing that he's done, but he's clearly drawn to this woman named Sylvia because her name is similar to the name of this Roman goddess, this Roman term for like... The wild part of the world and this Roman term for like a goddess, right? Like it's this, he's making these weird references in his diary. Like, these aren't just exploitation logs, but he's, he's almost like showing off his knowledge of like classical education while he's doing this too. And it's kind of unclear to me why he does this.

• 53:27Robert Evans?

  I've read a couple of different theories as to like, why he feels drawn to do this while he's writing about these things. In her paper, Redacting Desire, Elizabeth Polka theorizes, quote, Thistlewood structured his sexual exploitation logs as an entry embedded within an entry, a private subspace into which he placed the record of his sexual activity. If Thistlewood's 10,000 pages of diaries were visualized as an architectural space, such as a domestic home, the sexual exploitation logs would be a locked drawer in Thistlewood's bedroom dresser, where his Latin coding functions as a locking mechanism. Within this private space, Thistlewood placed walls around sexual encounters, employing documentation to codify and order the sex act within a system of concealment.

• 54:10Robert Evans?

  Which is similar to kind of what you were saying earlier, right? Like, he's, he's locking this away for anyone. That's part of why he's making these obscure references to like Roman gods in this entry log about a sex crime. Is so that the only other people who will understand what I've done truly are other educated white men of a scientific bent. And they'll understand that what I was doing wasn't a sex crime, it was an act of science. Because that's how he writes about this. Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Well, I wonder if it's like, like you said, it's more like in self, like it's, I don't know if he really believes it because if he's already putting it into that box, like literally, right? You say he boxes it off. There's that feeling already like.

• 54:51Robert Evans?

  He describes it.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he needs to separate it. And then on top of that, it's like you're kind of what you said, he's writing a couple of it. It makes me think of like, you know, you kind of code switch when you're, you know, if you're writing like, people analyze if you're lying or not, like maybe there's a piece where he switches into like, he thinks he's intellectualizing it, but really it's because he feels some sort of guilt. And then is trying to connect it or dissociate or, you know, be like, actually, I'm, you know, kind of going into this intellectual place when I'm doing this. But really, it's, it's a reaction to his own feelings. I mean, it's his diary after a while. He's not needing to defend himself to anyone.

• 55:30Robert Evans?

  Right. And, and the fact that, because i- it can be both, right? Where he, he wants to hide this from anyone other than the people he thinks might understand why he's doing what he's done. But that, that implies that he understands there's something unacceptable to regular people about what he's doing.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Well, could he be trying to defend himself to himself? Like, almost like?

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  Possibly, yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  You know, logging his, yeah, I don't know.

• 55:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like, what I'm doing is, because he's, he is a naturalist, right? And that is, those are kind of the early scientists in this period of time. It's like, people who are going out into the natural world and they're taking, this is eventually, guys like, more rigorous and better versions of this are going to, you know, produce people like Charles Darwin, right? But this, this basic idea that like, you go out and you're taking notes, that's why he's taking notes on the climate every day, too, on the weather he's experiencing, is there's this early scientific understanding that like, well, part of science is just documenting what you see, right? And so, he is, part of what he's doing is walling off these sexual experiences and documenting them as if he's doing scientific research. And I think you're right, that it's part of, part of it may be a defense

• 56:37Robert Evans?

  mechanism, where he, he's trying to make this unacceptable thing acceptable. And there's maybe this level of knowledge that that will not work for a lot of people. So he has to kind of code it for the people that he, he sees as like him, these other scientists. One of the reasons he uses Latin, probably, is to connect his, because that's the scientific language, right? And this also connects the work he's doing to the documentation of a scientist he greatly admired, Carl Linnaeus, who was a Swedish biologist and the person who created like, the modern taxonomy system. How we name species is because of Linnaeus, right? And during his time in Jamaica, part of why, and part of why this is relevant to Linnaeus, is Thomas is not only committing these sex crimes on inside.

• 57:23Robert Evans?

  Slave people out of like some sense of desire or even a personal need for power. There's a financial motivation here because if you get a person you own pregnant, the baby is your property. You can sell them when they're an adult and he will repeatedly over his life. And part of what he's doing here is keeping notes as to who he's sleeping with. So that he can document the parentage of different people that he's going to own and sell. Right. And he sees this scientifically in the same way as people who are like breeding livestock. Right. That's what this is to him. Right. That's horrible. But that is how Thomas thinks about this. Right?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  That's wild. Like, that totally changes what I was saying before. Cause yeah, it definitely makes it feel more like he's just logging his property.

• 58:09Robert Evans?

  I think there's a few things he's doing. This isn't a simple thing, really. It's we, it's a lot in here. Right. Um, but that is, that's part of what he's doing here.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And he doesn't see them as his, I mean, I guess that's probably a true for most people of his time, but just.

• 58:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Hearing that's like, so he doesn't see them as his children.

• 58:28Robert Evans?

  No, I mean, he, he doesn't.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Fathering a child with an inside person?

• 58:33Robert Evans?

  He knows they literally are biologically his children, but he does not see them as human beings fully. I think that's probably accurate. Like all people living in these situations, there's a lot of weird relationships here that are all deeply unequal and fucked up and also like difficult to categorize and understand. We will talk about that some. But yeah, part of what he's doing here is, is like writing about what he's like these, what's happening as if he's like breeding livestock. That's an aspect of like what he's doing here. And, you know, beyond that, he's also, he's his era's equivalent of like a nerd, right? He's into science is like a cool thing for a chunk of like the educated aristocracy. It's a thing you do as like a hobby. Right?

• 59:19Robert Evans?

  And so he's, he's, he has this sense of like, I'm not quite as good as a lot of other people. Cause he doesn't grow up super rich and he doesn't, he's, he's not fit for high society where he comes from. And so this is kind of how he tries to fit. Himself in, right, is by framing himself and presenting himself to others as a man of science. There's a really good article on this called Thomas Thistlewood's Libidinal Linnean Project for Small Axe Journal by Heather Vermulian, and she proposes a likely symbolic explanation for why Thomas wrote about this like very first sex crime on the island the way that he did. Thistlewood may have intended more than a play on words with his description

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

  of the rape of Sylvia in the sylve. His choice to attack this woman in particular may have carried symbolic weight. As Robert Pogue Harrison writes, "The traditional legends of Rome's foundation tell us that the city was born of the forests, but they also suggest that Rome had to turn against its matrix in order to fulfill its destiny." According to Livy, Harrison explains, "Romulus, the founder of Rome, belonged to the Sylvian family line. As is the case in many foundation myths, the rape of the Sabines, the rape of Lucretia, it is sexual violence that sets the story in motion. Romulus and his twin brother Remus were born when Mars, the Roman god of war, raped the vestal virgin Rea Sylvia. Viewed in this light, Thistlewood perpetuated his initial act of terrestrial rape against an enslaved woman whose name evokes a spirit or goddess of the wood targeted for Roman conquest, as well

• 1:00:46Robert Evans?

  as Rea Sylvia targeted for divine rape. His act also conjures the very manner in which Romulus populated Rome by capturing women from nearby cities and forcing them into relation with Rome's founding men. Thistlewood's rape of Sylvia may well participate in this classic genealogy of mystified sexual violence, ambiguous parentage, colonization and captivity, and then the imperial domesticating of unruly forested land as a sign of progress." Right? So this is, he sees this as part of this very scientific and high-minded colonial project. England is colonizing and civilizing the wilderness and making it better. And these sex crimes I'm committing are a part of the scientific effort to improve via not just like,

• 1:01:31Robert Evans?

  you know, by developing the land, but by inserting my DNA into these populations. That's how he's thinking about this. Right?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Does he say, I mean, is because that's like, I mean, I can see like, I mean, that very well-written scholarly interpretation, but is he?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Is he really like that? Like, I don't want to call him smart, but is he really like thinking that deep?

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This would have been all of these ancient Roman myths and all of this knowledge of Latin. This was part of a normal education for a man of his stature at this time.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:02:04Robert Evans?

  You got an intensely detailed classical education, right? Because in part, the British Empire is portraying itself as in this line of civilizing imperial Western forces, right? These, and in this line of like, because the Greeks and the Romans are very much admired for their understanding of the natural world, right? And for their power and command over it, in an area in which that was seen as having been less common elsewhere. And part of why Latin is still the language of science at the day. And it's also Thistlewood doesn't, he doesn't want to see himself as just a guy trying to get rich and committing horrible crimes against other human beings. He wants to see himself as part of this noble global endeavor to civilize the world.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Almost mythological.

• 1:02:50Robert Evans?

  It's very mythological. Yes.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  That, there's a parallel to what I see, I mean, what I see happening now with a lot of white supremacists.

• 1:02:57Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Because they talk a lot about classical literature and referring to classical, like, and, you know, biblical memes or imagery. I know like Hillsdale College is one that, you know, very

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Extremely conservative. And they really focus on teaching classical, classical stories to children and very much in the same way you're talking about, sort of like upholding these like images that are,

• 1:03:21Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  You know, Eurocentric myths.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's this, this is, this is a massive part, this is not just a part of fascism, but this is a part of selling any fucked up thing to young men, is you convince them they're doing something great, right? This thing that we could just say is you giving into your base impulses is also heroic and it puts you in line with divinity and you're part of this great civilizing mission, right? We've been telling young men that in every society that's ever existed to get them to do fucked up shit, right? And that doesn't, by the way, that's not to say, oh, Thistlewood's just a victim. No, no, no, no, no. He is choosing to find A justification for the cruel, violent, vicious things that he wants to do. And that he increasingly finds appealing because he becomes a worse and worse person. The more he gives into this.

• 1:04:10Robert Evans?

  And that means you need to come up with increasingly like lofty intellectual justifications for the horrors you're committing. Right?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Well, to be clear, I'm not, I mean, because I know there's been times when I'm like, oh, that's interesting. He said that.

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  No, no, you need to understand this, right?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  For the listeners who don't know me, like, I'm very much like, oh, yeah, there's no justification. I, from the beginning to the end, like this slave owner, I'm already like, yeah, not trying to be like justify it. But it is so interesting to me to dive into like the details because it is like, why are we still here in some ways? Like years later, why are we still seeing people like this? I mean, not in the exact way, but how, how does this happen, you know?

• 1:04:47Robert Evans?

  I, I, I think this is an important half, not even half, but this is an important part of the story is not how they lived with themselves, but how they felt good about themselves for doing this.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  And how they justify it in their own world, that they're heroes.

• 1:05:02Robert Evans?

  And yeah, he is, but he is, he is literally raping civilization into these people. That's how he thought about it in a very literal way in a lot of like, I mean, he wouldn't have called it rape, but like, that's what he's doing, you know? Um, and he sees this as part of his civilization mission.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  It off separately.

• 1:05:18Robert Evans?

  And he also writes repeatedly about a lot of these people not wanting it. Right? He will write basically they did, they weren't into it or they weren't like, like he will add that. He takes notes on that sort of thing, too. That's part of the documentation.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Does he describe the like sex he had with?

• 1:05:34Robert Evans?

  Not in detail.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  You know, women he, women he dated, well, no, like, that's not what I meant. I meant that, um, did he describe the sex he had with women that were like dating differently than the woman he raped? Or they're kind of all seen as like objects?

• 1:05:48Robert Evans?

  We don't get any of that.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 1:05:51Robert Evans?

  We know because of things that little bits, side bits of his life that we get. We know that he got a woman who was roughly at his social level pregnant when he was younger and that the relationship didn't work out. Right? We know that. He never writes about anything that could be termed a. An equivalent relationship between two people choosing to like, right? He writes about paying for sex and, you know, I don't know about the ethics of where you want to put the ethics of sex work in 1700s London, but it's different than what he's doing in Jamaica. And he writes about sex crimes that he commits in Jamaica, right? He does write, there is a, there is an enslaved woman with whom he has a long relationship that is obviously not a consensual relationship, but he writes about it as if it is because

• 1:06:34Robert Evans?

  that's his interpretation, that's how he feels about it. We get a little of that and it's still pretty brutal because he's still like, I mean, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk unfortunately about too much of that. But in January of 1753.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Can't wait.

• 1:06:48Robert Evans?

  Thistlewood, yeah, sorry. Takes on his most prestigious job yet. He gets made overseer of the large and profitable Egypt plantation. This is still in Jamaica, it's just called Egypt. He's paid the princely sum of 60 pounds sterling a year for his labor. Immediately after he moves to the plantation, he commits another sex crime on another young enslaved woman named Flora, replicating his Sylvia Silv- wordplay by mentioning her within several lines of a passage discussing the plantation's Flora, right? And he, he writes that he paid her four bits after doing this. And this is something you get periodically, some of these women.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Like four jokes, like punchlines?

• 1:07:26Robert Evans?

  He will give money to. No, it's a type of currency. It's, it's two Ts. Unfortunately, well, I don't know, for probably, yeah, I don't know where to take that, but it's a bit, you, you may have heard of like this used, especially in like pirate literature, like a bit is a, if you've heard of a piece of eight, like Pete, Spanish pieces of eight, like that's a Spanish real is a piece of eight. Or is like, it's eight pieces of eight and you would like break off the little piece. That's like pirate money was a Spanish real. And a, a bit was equivalent to like one eighth of, of a Spanish real, right? Which is again, the money in pirate movies as a general rule. So four bits that he, he gives this woman is half of a piece of eight. And depending on the source, that's equivalent from like 50 cents to like a thousand dollars

• 1:08:11Robert Evans?

  in modern money. Because it's really not easy to actually draw an equivalent, based on the context, I think this is the equivalent of him giving her like five or $10, right?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  But he's giving her, but that's, and that wasn't something he normal, I mean, it's not standard practice.

• 1:08:26Robert Evans?

  He did sometimes. He, he wasn't every time and it was, yeah, and I don't think, I don't think.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Like a tip or something? Cause he's like.

• 1:08:33Robert Evans?

  Like.

• 1:08:35Robert Evans?

  I think some of it is that maybe it makes him feel better. Like this is more like what he was doing with the the sex workers in England than what it is, which is a sex crime. And I think some of it is that this just makes it easier for him. Right? Like it.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Was there a world where there are where there were also enslaved people doing like sex work on the side?

• 1:08:57Robert Evans?

  Yes, like that, that's, that's, that's a thing, too, is that like if you're Flora, maybe this is how you make money because there's not a lot of options open to you to do that. We like, we really don't know how this conversation starts. Like, we know that this is a sex crime just because of the slave and non and free relationship. Right? But we don't know if she would have seen herself as like, well, this is the a way for me to make money.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:20Robert Evans?

  There's not a lot.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Get me more money.

• 1:09:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Or if he just assaulted her and then threw some money on the ground. Like both of the either of those could be the case. We there's not.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  All of them are bad.

• 1:09:30Robert Evans?

  Way to know. Yeah, and all of them are bad. It's just that we don't really know what was happening here. That said, it is worth it. He starts after Flora. He picks out another African born enslaved field worker and he starts what he described as a relationship with her. Right? And he describes Jenny as consenting to the liaison. Obviously, she didn't have choice here. But it's worth exploring what she would have seen as the benefits of a relationship like this, because that does paint a bleaker story. And we get some hint as to that in Robertson's article because he writes that the two were together for nearly a year, but quote, "She increasingly alienated his affections by heavy handed attempts to intervene when he assigned punishments. Bringing a knife to bed proved the final straw." So what I take from this is that Jenny.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  She brought a knife to bed or he brought?

• 1:10:15Robert Evans?

  Yes, she did. She she did. And Jenny, Jenny, quote, again, I use the word choice loosely here, but one of the few choices available to her was, "If I get in this guy's good graces and pretend that I like him, the next time he tries to beat one of my friends, I can convince him to stop." Right?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:10:34Robert Evans?

  And that's

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Robert Evans?

  Eventually, yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Toxic, manipulative, very fucked up.

• 1:10:39Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's already interested in her. If she refuses, it's gonna be worse. So like, kind of

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Put some

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  Maybe I can use this position to help some people and Thistlewood gets annoyed at her, right? Because she's yelling at him when he beats people. And eventually she decides, I, I might need to kill this guy. Maybe I can't like convince him to not be so much of it. And so she brings a knife to bed and he catches her, right? And this is the end of whatever you want to call this, like, very, very bleak thing, right? But that does, it tells us a lot about how someone in Ginny's position may have thought about what was happening. It's like, well, maybe this is an opportunity to gain some control over my life and my friends' lives, right?

• 1:11:22Robert Evans?

  And, yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  What does he do when he finds the knife in the bed?

• 1:11:25Robert Evans?

  He kicks her out, basically. I mean, she gets punished for this. She was almost certainly would have been, would have been like whipped for this. And there were, as we'll talk about, worse, but no, she's not

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  She should have just killed him.

• 1:11:38Robert Evans?

  I don't think she got the chance.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  No, she wasn't. I know.

• 1:11:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:42Robert Evans?

  It does seem like maybe that's what she wanted to do.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause it's like, yeah, even if she could, she would get in trouble after that. So it's almost like there's this kind of game.

• 1:11:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's, there's no good options for someone. It's like, she's taking, trying to take the best option, which is at least gaining some level of control, trying to, right? And it doesn't work out. And almost as soon as things end with Ginny as a result of this, he picks a new victim slash partner, an enslaved woman named Fibah. She had been the last overseer's mistress and she was his cook when he starts at Egypt plantation. In December of 1753, they are physically together for the first time. Again, this is a sex crime, but she is, it is framed in his life and she is at least acceding to this, like, image of it to him as a romantic relationship. And they will be together the

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  rest of his life in this kind of grotesque parody of marriage. And again, I want to reiterate here at the end of this, that nothing we're talking about, we have all this Detail about Thomas and it's hideous the things he did and we barely scratched the surface. It's a really important that I I lay out here, something that's gonna need to carry us through the rest of the episode, which is that there's no evidence Thomas Thistlewood was particularly bad for a slave owner or an overseer in Jamaica in this period of time. Or would have been considered bad in the Confederacy in North America, right? Or in the what became the Confederate States. There's no evidence that he was particularly violent.

• 1:13:12Robert Evans?

  There's no evidence that he was a committed rape on a wider scale than his peers. They were all like this. He just kept a diary, right? And so when we talk about like-

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  You mean like if he was sort of an average of what people may have been acting like? Yeah.

• 1:13:25Robert Evans?

  Yes, because part of the thing is no one notices shit about this guy's diary until like the, I think it's the early 20th century when this or it might have been after the US Civil War when people started, first started looking into it. But people who owned slaves at the time in Jamaica didn't think anything of what he was writing. This was not extreme. This was not horrifying. This wasn't upsetting. This was a guy chronicling daily life in a normal way. Like what he wrote about doing to these people was no different than him taking notes about the weather. That's very much how they saw it.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Outcasty type of guy. Well, so that's interesting because it kind of, I feel like it draws like the people who end up going into being slave owners probably all have that, like already those fucked up red flags, but it sounded like

• 1:14:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Early in his life, like people saw red flags and then all those people congregated and became

• 1:14:15Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  These, but there is still like, just like, it's not like this is like, these are the good, I mean, I don't know, just I bristle at that because it's still like, there is evidence that these people were seen as like, not like, I don't want my daughter to marry someone like this.

• 1:14:29Robert Evans?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. Within the context of people who were running plantations, he was not abnormal, right?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Like Wall Street or politics where like, they're all kind of fucked up and-

• 1:14:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, those people are certainly all gonna be more fucked in the head than some random dude who like lives in London and works like at a like at a counting house or is like, lives a little further north and is working in like the first coal mines that opened. Those guys are part of a slave state, but they're not thinking of- About what they would probably be upset if you were to explain to them what Thomas Thistle was putting in his diary because it's it's more upsetting, which isn't to say that they'd feel about it the way we do. But like this is, these are all of these slave societies are really brutal, right? And it's why whenever you get abolition movements, a big thing these abolition movements are doing, both the first one that sets up that gets slavery outlawed in the British Empire and

• 1:15:18Robert Evans?

  the one in the United States, a big part of what abolitionists are doing is just taking when they can very normal accounts of daily life in these places where chattel slavery is the norm and right and talking about them to people because to people who live outside of that, it's fucked up and horrifying, right? Like even if those people are not what we would call it have a modern attitude on race or anything like that, they're still horrified by a lot of what they're hearing about because it's really bad, you know? But yeah, within that community, Thomas is a normal guy. Within the community of assholes, he's a normal asshole. I think it's the way I would come down on him, right?

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  Not an exceptional asshole. Yeah.

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  No, no, he just kind of is a more of a nerd about being an asshole than most people. And that's part one. Teresa, how you feeling?

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, however you expect, I feel like I'm not being very like lighthearted or funny, which I hope is okay.

• 1:16:17Robert Evans?

  There's not much to be lighthearted about.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if I'm doing okay in my role, but I'm learning a lot and definitely feeling sad for humanity. But yeah, I don't know. Should I be like commenting more? I feel like there's I get this.

• 1:16:29Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Trying to find a balance without being too, too like jokey. A lot of fucked up misinformation.

• 1:16:36Robert Evans?

  This is a real bad, real bleak one. Like there's not, there's not a lot to say.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm not sure. I'm just gonna listen and be like, oh, that's bad.

• 1:16:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's not a lot to joke about here.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  I don't want to like, yeah, I hope I'm doing okay, but.

• 1:16:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're, you're, you're fine. It's just bad stuff. Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you have anything you want to plug, TT?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  You know, truly not much going on right now because I'm about to have a baby. Um, but you know, my, my friends, Zach Bussard just came out with a book and I saw, I'll plug his book. It's, it's a, it's like, kind of like a parody of like those like spooky stories. Um, but it's a Christmas one. It's called Scary Stories to Make You Scared of Christmas. Zach Bussard, it's, uh, you can get a free ebook online or you can buy it on Amazon. So check it out. He's a very funny comedian.

• 1:17:26Robert Evans?

  Hell yeah. Check that out, everybody. Uh, and yeah, we will be back. TT, thank you so much for being on the show. We will talk to you again for a really depressing part two.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Can't wait.

• 1:17:41Speaker 06

  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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