While colonial ideologues argued that through education and religious conversion, Africans could move from the domain of “barbarism” into “civilization,” it was out of the question for European men to “go native.” Colonial officers were expected to become conversant with the traditions and customs of the people they presided over, but they were not supposed to participate in those practices, as many European men before them once had.
Crucially, the demise of publicly legitimized interracial marriages occurred at a time when ideas and expectations about marriage among Africans were rapidly changing in the Gold Coast as the result of the spread of Christianity and Western education and the creation of a dual legal system based on English and indigenous customary law, the latter of which remained malleable and responsive to social change despite its increasing codification.
Of particular importance here, the 1884 Marriage Ordinance gave Gold Coasters an alternative to customary marriage. There was no more hotly debated topic in the African-owned Gold Coast press during the decades after its introduction than the 1884 ordinance. With its Christian underpinnings, the ordinance became synonymous with “European marriage,” otherwise defined as a monogamous companionate union.
Although many elites, especially the small but growing number of educated Christian women, as well as newly educated and recently converted aspirant elites, praised the merits of ordinance marriage, a group of vocal male elites — who were typically Christian themselves — defended the institution of customary marriage and rejected ordinance marriage as an intrusive colonial imposition that fomented moral decay and social chaos by endowing women with too many rights. But even this group of men doubted the legitimacy of customary marriages when contracted across the color line. Thus, regardless of what marriage form Gold Coast elites favored, there was a consensus among this group of literate, relatively prosperous, and politically active Africans that interracial customary marriages were a thin veil for profiting from the sale of the colony’s young women to “demoralized white men,” as one Gold Coast writer put it.
In this way elite ideas about interracial customary marriages echoed colonial ideologies that cast the institution of customary marriage among Africans as “slavery in disguise.”
Much, much more can be found in her book, of course. Published by ohio university press, w athens, ohio
Recently scholars have begun to grapple with the rape and sexual exploitation of the female slaves who worked for the castles’ European residents. Even where marriages were concerned, these unions were a constitutive part of the Gold Coast littoral’s trade-based economies, which became almost exclusively focused on the slave trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. While these commercially-minded interracial unions predated and outlived the slave trade, they were nonetheless an integral part of the development of a highly functioning and elaborate slave-trading system that enriched some at the expense of many.
European traders, and the companies they represented, obviously profited the most, but many of the women in these relationships also benefited from being able to exploit the labor of those they enslaved, or to profit from their sale.
Like their counterparts in Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Madagascar, these women were “individuals, who, through chance or by design, were not victims but beneficiaries of the [slave] trade.” Thus, the model of female agency that they have often been made to represent is worthy of critical appraisal rather than applause.
It would be a gross oversimplification to assume that African women either enjoyed the status of wife and reaped the respect and financial benefits associated with their lucrative marital ties to European men, or else suffered rape in the bowels of the coast’s slave dungeons, or were bought and sold to meet the sexual and domestic needs of European men temporarily living on the coast. The binary opposition between consent and coercion obscures the complex, overlapping, and changing nature of the range of sexual relationships between African women and European men during the precolonial period, as well as the changing dynamics of power between Africans and Europeans within which these relationships were situated.
The consent/coercion binary is even less helpful for the formal colonial period, when the sexual terror associated with the slave trade ended as the slave castles were transformed into administrative centers of British colonial power, or fell into disrepair, and publicly recognized intermarriages — no longer of use to a British regime that asserted rather than negotiated its power and presence — were almost unheard of. Indeed, during the opening decades of the 20th century, Africans and Europeans alike commented on the paucity of marriages between African women and European men.
... This marked a break with the precolonial past, when European men had readily availed themselves of customary marriage rights to African women as part of a wider complex of indigenous sociocultural practices for integrating strangers into local societies and fostering trade. Accommodation and assimilation, whether through marriage or through other practices, including polygyny and concubinage, ran counter to the premise of Britain’s “civilizing mission.”
Dr. Carina Ray of Brandeis University published a book a couple of years ago "Crossing the Color: Line Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana"
It's mostly concerns 19th and 20th century mores, but I have excerpted bits from the Introduction about Pepys' times and Dutch and British behavior at Elmina:
The historical moment and socioeconomic and political imperatives that informed Dutch policies and practices [in what is now Ghana] in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries were wholly different from those of the British in the early 20th century.
The power relations of bygone Dutch times contrast with those of the British in 1915. Despite their long tenure on the [Gold] coast, the almost exclusively male Dutch presence remained small and was dependent on support — partly through customary law marriages with African women — from local populations.
This was hardly the case for the much larger, self-imposed British presence in the opening decades of the 20th century. The institutionalization of alien political rule, as Ato Quayson astutely observes, was characterized by “a fundamental ... conversion of what had been the relations of dependency and accommodation that had defined the commercial interactions between Europeans and local groups since the 15th century to one of domination without accountability by the end of the 19th.”
Part of this pronounced but incomplete transformation was the shift away from intermarriage. This had less to do with a distinctively British viewpoint — after all, they too had once embraced it, if less systematically than the Dutch — and more to do with the racial politics and grossly uneven power relations of formal colonialism in early 20th-century Africa and Asia.
The Dutch similarly renounced intermarriage as Dutch East India Company rule gave way to colonial rule in Indonesia and eventually condemned concubinage, albeit selectively and ineffectively. Atu’s remarks remind us that Gold Coasters remembered precolonial interracial sexual relationships in ways that emphasized their honor and respectability, not unlike many historians in more recent times.
Historical narratives about the ubiquitous nature of publicly-recognized intermarriages between entrepreneurial African women and European men during the precolonial period are important in their own right, but frequently gloss over the range of other kinds of sexual encounters, including concubinage, prostitution, and rape, that formed less visible — and hence less documented — strata of the interracial sexual economies of the Gold Coast’s precolonial trading hubs.
Although the rape of enslaved women during the Middle Passage is well documented, much less has been written about the pre-embarkation period when female captives were confined in the coast’s slave forts and castles. It is memorialized in the harrowing narratives many of the castles’ tour guides tell visitors in places like Elmina and Cape Coast.
"He says the privy council was divided, but does not mention James's attitude. James, in his memoirs, claims that he was merely preventing a few hot-heads like Northumberland from disbanding the guards. Some members of the government and most of its critics saw danger in the King's unwillingness to recall Parliament, which stood prorogued until 10 October."
Northumberland was born in 1602. We don't often hear of 65-year-olds being called "hot heads". I think this indicates how heated the privy council meeting became on the subject of the Guards (originally Charles II's pals from the exile years who provided his personal security). They are known as the Life Guards today. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
Plus Charles mobilized more "regiments" on the day the Dutch attacked the Medway. Since the Dutch are still off the coast, it seems odd they are arguing about this right now. I was chastising him for taking so long to do the call up.
On the other hand, how are they going to pay the troops? That old problem again.
"After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the shops and wiped out most of the markets, an unprecedented horde of hawkers flocked to the City from across the country to supply the needs of Londoners.
"Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both owned copies of Marcellus Laroon’s "Cries of London" (1687). Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroon’s “Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life” were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. ...
"Living in Covent Garden from 1675, Laroon sketched his likenesses from life, drawing those he had come to know through his 12 years of residence there, and Pepys annotated 18 of his copies of the prints with the names of those personalities of 17th century London street life that he recognised."
"James, in his memoirs, claims that he was merely preventing a few hot-heads like Northumberland from disbanding the guards."
Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland, 4th Baron Percy, KG (29 September 1602 – 13 October 1668) was a supporter of the Parliamentary cause in the First English Civil War. Attempts to re-enter politics after the 1660 Restoration failed, although he held several minor positions under Charles II. He died at Petworth House in October 1668.
"Among other things, that the spirits of the seamen were down, and the forces of our enemies are grown too great and many for us, and he would not have his subjects overpressed; for he knew an Englishman would do as much as any man upon hopeful terms; but where he sees he is overpressed, he despairs soon as any other; and, besides that, they have already such a load of dejection upon them, that they will not be in temper a good while again."
That's rich, Charlie. Tell the truth: They have mutinied; they have defected to the enemy; they have gone home in order to harvest what corn there is this year. No one wants to fight for you any more. Besides, you owe them for the fighting they have already done. "Overpressed" was last year's problem. Desertion is this year's.
Kevin Dixon, a local historian who contributes to Torbay Undiscovered, Lost, Forgotten, Unloved! blog, reports finding evidence that:
"Between July 10 - 14, 1666, and again on October 20, 1666 a fleet of 'Guinea Ships' assembled in Torbay. This gathering was to celebrate the foundation of the West Africa Company.
"Those ships were on route to West Africa. The owners were an English mercantile, or trading, company set up by the Stuart family and City of London merchants.
"Originally known as The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, its charter was issued in 1660 and gave it a monopoly over English trade along the West coast of Africa. With the help of the army and navy, it established forts on the African coast.
"While its original objective was the search for gold, in 1663 a new charter was issued - this included the trade in slaves.
"... the company fell into debt in 1667 and its activities were much reduced, ..." and he found no more local content until after the end of the Diary.
St. Martin-in-the-Fields was an important church in Pepys' time as it was close to St. James's Palace and Whitehall and therefore a place for christenings, weddings and funerals. There's a print of how it looked in 1809 here; yes, 150 years on, but it gives you an idea: https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
Information about the history of Billingsgate market, and an etching showing its relationship to the Thames and fishing boats which brought in their fresh catches:
Leadenhall Street was named for the Leaden Hall Market, a large and extensive building of considerable antiquity, purchased by the great [Lord Mayor of London, Dick] Whittington in 1408 and by him presented to the City.
Charing Cross was a place frequently chosen for public punishments, probably because it was such a busy location.
The most common form of punishment was the Pillory. An offender thus exposed to public view was thereafter considered infamous. Some offences irritated the feelings of the lower classes more than others, in which case a punishment by Pillory could quickly become dangerous. John Evelyn saw someone pilloried there on 21 December, 1667.
This article doesn't agree with Wikipedia on the Carib's "excellent defences". Antigua was on Columbus' 2nd voyage. On his 1st he conquered the Arawaks:
On Oct. 12, 1492, Columbus landed on San Salvador [Bahamas]. He met Arawaks, and wrote, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features ...They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves ... They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane ... They would make fine servants ... With 50 men, we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
Columbus later said, “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”
Columbus promised Ferdinand and Isabella, “as much gold as they want ... spices and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command ... and slaves, as many as they shall order, who will be idolators.”
On his 2nd voyage, Columbus established La Isabella on an island he called Hispaniola [Haiti]. He enslaved thousands of Arawaks, working many to death trying to extract gold from ground that contained little.
Columbus sent 500 slaves back to Spain; 200 died on the voyage. Undeterred, he wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
Gruesome account of the Caribbean horrors Columbus and his followers practiced came from Fr. Bartolome de las Casas who documented his life in his *History of the Indies.* “Endless testimonies ... prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives ... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then ... The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind ... and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians ...”
On the Arawaks enslaved in mines, “husbands and wives were together only once every 8 or 9 months and when they meet they are so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they cease to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers ... had no milk to nurse them ... while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in 3 months.
“Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation ... this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated.”
Columbus did not start slavery, but practiced it violently. The enslavement of peoples by Christians -- Moslems, African Blacks, native Americans -- was explicitly approved in edicts from popes from Nicholas V in 1455 to Alexander VI in 1493.
The violence and the European diseases of influenza, smallpox, and measles annihilated the Caribbean people within 100 years.
It occurs to me that sister-in-law Esther is living at Leigh-on-Sea, which is at the mouth of the Thames, and 58 miles from Harwick (via Chelmsford and Colchester). She's got a grandstand seat for this part of the action.
I wonder if Pepys and Anglesey remembered Llewellyn.
An L&M footnote of 9/2/1663 tells us that by 1663 Pepys' friend, Peter Llewellyn, was in the service of Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, so Pepys must know a little about his reputation.
A rare modern photo of Shakespeare's house WITHOUT PEOPLE OR CARS! And a brief history of how it narrowly avoided being shipped to the USA by PT Barnum:
Slide rules of the logarithm variety were available in Pepys' time. These first primitive computing devices led directly to the earliest concepts for programmable computers emerging in the mid-19th Century.
In 1614, John Napier proposed a new mathematical method, called the logarithm, which provided for an enhanced analytical scope.
(Mathematicians and computer programmers use logarithmic exponents to simplify complex mathematical calculations and to create specific software program outcomes, such as the creation of graphs that compare statistical data.)
John Napier's work on the logarithm first appeared in Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, which became an influential text in the fields of mathematics and engineering, as well as physics and navigation.
Based on Napier's studies, the slide rule was first developed by Edmund Gunther. Gunther's Rule could be thought of as an early analog computer that used the principles of logarithms to multiply and divide.
Reverend William Oughtred further expanded on Gunther's design, combining two of Gunther's Rules to create what is now commonly regarded as the first recognizable Slide Rule.
Oughtred's slide rule designs were published by his student, William Forster, in 1632. From there, many other mathematicians and engineers developed and expanded upon Oughtred's designs, creating slide rules capable of calculating trigonometry, roots, and exponents. The slide rule made efforts at computation much faster.
The bitter undertones of 17th century cacao alluded to equally unsettling histories. By the time of the young privateer William Hughes’ 1630's Caribbean voyage, the great pre-Columbian empires had all but fallen. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been killed by Spanish and Portuguese guns, forced labor, and disease. Thousands of enslaved Africans were being taken to American plantations to replace them.
As a result of this violent, vibrant exchange, a new Mestizo culture was born, indigenous, African, and European peoples all at once.
These people in Empire’s margins — enslaved Africans coaxing sugarcane from island soil, and the Mestiza ladies who mixed indigenous knowledge into chocolate for their Spanish employers or husbands, all were the true authors of Hughes’ 1672 book, The American Physitian.
As with many natural historians of his time, William Hughes’ work was an act of information possession. His botanical buccaneering was a stand-in for the colonial project as a whole. Like all Europeans in the New World, he extracted resources and knowledge from lands and people that were not his to take.
And this is the great irony of Europeans’ enduring obsession with cocoa: William Hughes tried to benefit from his possession of New World knowledge, but that chocolate, and the indigenous traditions that created it, have possessed Europe ever since.
Comments
Second Reading
About Guinea
San Diego Sarah • Link
Part 3
While colonial ideologues argued that through education and religious conversion, Africans could move from the domain of “barbarism” into “civilization,” it was out of the question for European men to “go native.”
Colonial officers were expected to become conversant with the traditions and customs of the people they presided over, but they were not supposed to participate in those practices, as many European men before them once had.
Crucially, the demise of publicly legitimized interracial marriages occurred at a time when ideas and expectations about marriage among Africans were rapidly changing in the Gold Coast as the result of the spread of Christianity and Western education and the creation of a dual legal system based on English and indigenous customary law, the latter of which remained malleable and responsive to social change despite its increasing codification.
Of particular importance here, the 1884 Marriage Ordinance gave Gold Coasters an alternative to customary marriage. There was no more hotly debated topic in the African-owned Gold Coast press during the decades after its introduction than the 1884 ordinance. With its Christian underpinnings, the ordinance became synonymous with “European marriage,” otherwise defined as a monogamous companionate union.
Although many elites, especially the small but growing number of educated Christian women, as well as newly educated and recently converted aspirant elites, praised the merits of ordinance marriage, a group of vocal male elites — who were typically Christian themselves — defended the institution of customary marriage and rejected ordinance marriage as an intrusive colonial imposition that fomented moral decay and social chaos by endowing women with too many rights. But even this group of men doubted the legitimacy of customary marriages when contracted across the color line. Thus, regardless of what marriage form Gold Coast elites favored, there was a consensus among this group of literate, relatively prosperous, and politically active Africans that interracial customary marriages were a thin veil for profiting from the sale of the colony’s young women to “demoralized white men,” as one Gold Coast writer put it.
In this way elite ideas about interracial customary marriages echoed colonial ideologies that cast the institution of customary marriage among Africans as “slavery in disguise.”
Much, much more can be found in her book, of course.
Published by
ohio university press, w athens, ohio
The full Introduction is at
https://www.ohioswallow.com/extra…
About Guinea
San Diego Sarah • Link
Part 2
Recently scholars have begun to grapple with the rape and sexual exploitation of the female slaves who worked for the castles’ European residents. Even where marriages were concerned, these unions were a constitutive part of the Gold Coast littoral’s trade-based economies, which became almost exclusively focused on the slave trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. While these commercially-minded interracial unions predated and outlived the slave trade, they were nonetheless an integral part of the development of a highly functioning and elaborate slave-trading system that enriched some at the expense of many.
European traders, and the companies they represented, obviously profited the most, but many of the women in these relationships also benefited from being able to exploit the labor of those they enslaved, or to profit from their sale.
Like their counterparts in Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Madagascar, these women were “individuals, who, through chance or by design, were not victims but beneficiaries of the [slave] trade.” Thus, the model of female agency that they have often been made to represent is worthy of critical appraisal rather than applause.
It would be a gross oversimplification to assume that African women either enjoyed the status of wife and reaped the respect and financial benefits associated with their lucrative marital ties to European men, or else suffered rape in the bowels of the coast’s slave dungeons, or were bought and sold to meet the sexual and domestic needs of European men temporarily living on the coast. The binary opposition between consent and coercion obscures the complex, overlapping, and changing nature of the range of sexual relationships between African women and European men during the precolonial period, as well as the changing dynamics of power between Africans and Europeans within which these relationships were situated.
The consent/coercion binary is even less helpful for the formal colonial period, when the sexual terror associated with the slave trade ended as the slave castles were transformed into administrative centers of British colonial power, or fell into disrepair, and publicly recognized intermarriages — no longer of use to a British regime that asserted rather than negotiated its power and presence — were almost unheard of. Indeed, during the opening decades of the 20th century, Africans and Europeans alike commented on the paucity of marriages between African women and European men.
... This marked a break with the precolonial past, when European men had readily availed themselves of customary marriage rights to African women as part of a wider complex of indigenous sociocultural practices for integrating strangers into local societies and fostering trade. Accommodation and assimilation, whether through marriage or through other practices, including polygyny and concubinage, ran counter to the premise of Britain’s “civilizing mission.”
About Guinea
San Diego Sarah • Link
Dr. Carina Ray of Brandeis University published a book a couple of years ago
"Crossing the Color: Line Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana"
It's mostly concerns 19th and 20th century mores, but I have excerpted bits from the Introduction about Pepys' times and Dutch and British behavior at Elmina:
The historical moment and socioeconomic and political imperatives that informed Dutch policies and practices [in what is now Ghana] in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries were wholly different from those of the British in the early 20th century.
The power relations of bygone Dutch times contrast with those of the British in 1915. Despite their long tenure on the [Gold] coast, the almost exclusively male Dutch presence remained small and was dependent on support — partly through customary law marriages with African women — from local populations.
This was hardly the case for the much larger, self-imposed British presence in the opening decades of the 20th century. The institutionalization of alien political rule, as Ato Quayson astutely observes, was characterized by “a fundamental ... conversion of what had been the relations of dependency and accommodation that had defined the commercial interactions between Europeans and local groups since the 15th century to one of domination without accountability by the end of the 19th.”
Part of this pronounced but incomplete transformation was the shift away from intermarriage. This had less to do with a distinctively British viewpoint — after all, they too had once embraced it, if less systematically than the Dutch — and more to do with the racial politics and grossly uneven power relations of formal colonialism in early 20th-century Africa and Asia.
The Dutch similarly renounced intermarriage as Dutch East India Company rule gave way to colonial rule in Indonesia and eventually condemned concubinage, albeit selectively and ineffectively. Atu’s remarks remind us that Gold Coasters remembered precolonial interracial sexual relationships in ways that emphasized their honor and respectability, not unlike many historians in more recent times.
Historical narratives about the ubiquitous nature of publicly-recognized intermarriages between entrepreneurial African women and European men during the precolonial period are important in their own right, but frequently gloss over the range of other kinds of sexual encounters, including concubinage, prostitution, and rape, that formed less visible — and hence less documented — strata of the interracial sexual economies of the Gold Coast’s precolonial trading hubs.
Although the rape of enslaved women during the Middle Passage is well documented, much less has been written about the pre-embarkation period when female captives were confined in the coast’s slave forts and castles. It is memorialized in the harrowing narratives many of the castles’ tour guides tell visitors in places like Elmina and Cape Coast.
About Friday 12 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
"He says the privy council was divided, but does not mention James's attitude. James, in his memoirs, claims that he was merely preventing a few hot-heads like Northumberland from disbanding the guards. Some members of the government and most of its critics saw danger in the King's unwillingness to recall Parliament, which stood prorogued until 10 October."
Northumberland was born in 1602. We don't often hear of 65-year-olds being called "hot heads". I think this indicates how heated the privy council meeting became on the subject of the Guards (originally Charles II's pals from the exile years who provided his personal security). They are known as the Life Guards today. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
Plus Charles mobilized more "regiments" on the day the Dutch attacked the Medway. Since the Dutch are still off the coast, it seems odd they are arguing about this right now. I was chastising him for taking so long to do the call up.
On the other hand, how are they going to pay the troops? That old problem again.
About Friday 12 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
Northumberland is in our Encyclopedia
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Great Fire of London
San Diego Sarah • Link
"After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the shops and wiped out most of the markets, an unprecedented horde of hawkers flocked to the City from across the country to supply the needs of Londoners.
"Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both owned copies of Marcellus Laroon’s "Cries of London" (1687). Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroon’s “Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life” were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. ...
"Living in Covent Garden from 1675, Laroon sketched his likenesses from life, drawing those he had come to know through his 12 years of residence there, and Pepys annotated 18 of his copies of the prints with the names of those personalities of 17th century London street life that he recognised."
TO SEE THE HAWKERS AND STREET CRIERS
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
About Friday 12 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
"James, in his memoirs, claims that he was merely preventing a few hot-heads like Northumberland from disbanding the guards."
Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland, 4th Baron Percy, KG (29 September 1602 – 13 October 1668) was a supporter of the Parliamentary cause in the First English Civil War. Attempts to re-enter politics after the 1660 Restoration failed, although he held several minor positions under Charles II. He died at Petworth House in October 1668.
About Friday 12 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
"Among other things, that the spirits of the seamen were down, and the forces of our enemies are grown too great and many for us, and he would not have his subjects overpressed; for he knew an Englishman would do as much as any man upon hopeful terms; but where he sees he is overpressed, he despairs soon as any other; and, besides that, they have already such a load of dejection upon them, that they will not be in temper a good while again."
That's rich, Charlie.
Tell the truth: They have mutinied; they have defected to the enemy; they have gone home in order to harvest what corn there is this year. No one wants to fight for you any more. Besides, you owe them for the fighting they have already done.
"Overpressed" was last year's problem. Desertion is this year's.
About Tuesday 10 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
Kevin Dixon, a local historian who contributes to Torbay Undiscovered, Lost, Forgotten, Unloved! blog, reports finding evidence that:
"Between July 10 - 14, 1666, and again on October 20, 1666 a fleet of 'Guinea Ships' assembled in Torbay. This gathering was to celebrate the foundation of the West Africa Company.
"Those ships were on route to West Africa. The owners were an English mercantile, or trading, company set up by the Stuart family and City of London merchants.
"Originally known as The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, its charter was issued in 1660 and gave it a monopoly over English trade along the West coast of Africa. With the help of the army and navy, it established forts on the African coast.
"While its original objective was the search for gold, in 1663 a new charter was issued - this included the trade in slaves.
"... the company fell into debt in 1667 and its activities were much reduced, ..." and he found no more local content until after the end of the Diary.
About Monday 8 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
"I was interested in Evelyn's new fuel."
Me too, James ... do we know Evelyn's invention by another name?
About St Martin-in-the-Fields
San Diego Sarah • Link
St. Martin-in-the-Fields was an important church in Pepys' time as it was close to St. James's Palace and Whitehall and therefore a place for christenings, weddings and funerals. There's a print of how it looked in 1809 here; yes, 150 years on, but it gives you an idea:
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
About Billingsgate
San Diego Sarah • Link
Information about the history of Billingsgate market, and an etching showing its relationship to the Thames and fishing boats which brought in their fresh catches:
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
About Leadenhall Street
San Diego Sarah • Link
Leadenhall Street was named for the Leaden Hall Market, a large and extensive building of considerable antiquity, purchased by the great [Lord Mayor of London, Dick] Whittington in 1408 and by him presented to the City.
A print of the Market is here:
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
About Monday 15 October 1660
San Diego Sarah • Link
Charing Cross was a place frequently chosen for public punishments, probably because it was such a busy location.
The most common form of punishment was the Pillory. An offender thus exposed to public view was thereafter considered infamous. Some offences irritated the feelings of the lower classes more than others, in which case a punishment by Pillory could quickly become dangerous. John Evelyn saw someone pilloried there on 21 December, 1667.
An 18th century print can be seen here:
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…
And Evelyn is here:
http://brittlebooks.library.illin…
About Antigua, West Indies
San Diego Sarah • Link
This article doesn't agree with Wikipedia on the Carib's "excellent defences". Antigua was on Columbus' 2nd voyage. On his 1st he conquered the Arawaks:
On Oct. 12, 1492, Columbus landed on San Salvador [Bahamas]. He met Arawaks, and wrote, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features ...They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves ... They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane ... They would make fine servants ... With 50 men, we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
Columbus later said, “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”
Columbus promised Ferdinand and Isabella, “as much gold as they want ... spices and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command ... and slaves, as many as they shall order, who will be idolators.”
On his 2nd voyage, Columbus established La Isabella on an island he called Hispaniola [Haiti]. He enslaved thousands of Arawaks, working many to death trying to extract gold from ground that contained little.
Columbus sent 500 slaves back to Spain; 200 died on the voyage. Undeterred, he wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
Gruesome account of the Caribbean horrors Columbus and his followers practiced came from Fr. Bartolome de las Casas who documented his life in his *History of the Indies.* “Endless testimonies ... prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives ... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then ... The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind ... and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians ...”
On the Arawaks enslaved in mines, “husbands and wives were together only once every 8 or 9 months and when they meet they are so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they cease to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers ... had no milk to nurse them ... while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in 3 months.
“Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation ... this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated.”
Columbus did not start slavery, but practiced it violently. The enslavement of peoples by Christians -- Moslems, African Blacks, native Americans -- was explicitly approved in edicts from popes from Nicholas V in 1455 to Alexander VI in 1493.
The violence and the European diseases of influenza, smallpox, and measles annihilated the Caribbean people within 100 years.
https://www.chieftain.com/opinion…
About Wednesday 10 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
It occurs to me that sister-in-law Esther is living at Leigh-on-Sea, which is at the mouth of the Thames, and 58 miles from Harwick (via Chelmsford and Colchester). She's got a grandstand seat for this part of the action.
About Tuesday 9 July 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
I wonder if Pepys and Anglesey remembered Llewellyn.
An L&M footnote of 9/2/1663 tells us that by 1663 Pepys' friend, Peter Llewellyn, was in the service of Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, so Pepys must know a little about his reputation.
About Sir Edward Walker (Garter King of Arms)
San Diego Sarah • Link
A rare modern photo of Shakespeare's house WITHOUT PEOPLE OR CARS! And a brief history of how it narrowly avoided being shipped to the USA by PT Barnum:
https://englishbuildings.blogspot…
About Tuesday 14 April 1663
San Diego Sarah • Link
Slide rules of the logarithm variety were available in Pepys' time. These first primitive computing devices led directly to the earliest concepts for programmable computers emerging in the mid-19th Century.
In 1614, John Napier proposed a new mathematical method, called the logarithm, which provided for an enhanced analytical scope.
(Mathematicians and computer programmers use logarithmic exponents to simplify complex mathematical calculations and to create specific software program outcomes, such as the creation of graphs that compare statistical data.)
John Napier's work on the logarithm first appeared in Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, which became an influential text in the fields of mathematics and engineering, as well as physics and navigation.
Based on Napier's studies, the slide rule was first developed by Edmund Gunther. Gunther's Rule could be thought of as an early analog computer that used the principles of logarithms to multiply and divide.
Reverend William Oughtred further expanded on Gunther's design, combining two of Gunther's Rules to create what is now commonly regarded as the first recognizable Slide Rule.
Oughtred's slide rule designs were published by his student, William Forster, in 1632. From there, many other mathematicians and engineers developed and expanded upon Oughtred's designs, creating slide rules capable of calculating trigonometry, roots, and exponents. The slide rule made efforts at computation much faster.
For more about the history of the development of the computer:
https://interestingengineering.co…
About Chocolate
San Diego Sarah • Link
The bitter undertones of 17th century cacao alluded to equally unsettling histories. By the time of the young privateer William Hughes’ 1630's Caribbean voyage, the great pre-Columbian empires had all but fallen. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been killed by Spanish and Portuguese guns, forced labor, and disease. Thousands of enslaved Africans were being taken to American plantations to replace them.
As a result of this violent, vibrant exchange, a new Mestizo culture was born, indigenous, African, and European peoples all at once.
These people in Empire’s margins — enslaved Africans coaxing sugarcane from island soil, and the Mestiza ladies who mixed indigenous knowledge into chocolate for their Spanish employers or husbands, all were the true authors of Hughes’ 1672 book, The American Physitian.
As with many natural historians of his time, William Hughes’ work was an act of information possession. His botanical buccaneering was a stand-in for the colonial project as a whole. Like all Europeans in the New World, he extracted resources and knowledge from lands and people that were not his to take.
And this is the great irony of Europeans’ enduring obsession with cocoa:
William Hughes tried to benefit from his possession of New World knowledge, but that chocolate, and the indigenous traditions that created it, have possessed Europe ever since.
For more, see
https://www.atlasobscura.com/arti…