The Common Wind. Julius S. Scott

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СКАЧАТЬ to this vicious “mob of vagabonds and adventurers hurling themselves upon these shores … without trade or property … No citizen or inhabitant dares to trust them.”⁶⁴ They shared equally with the free people of color in the blame for a rise in urban crime, and authorities at the Cap accused them of bringing with them all the vices of the European urban proletariat, among them “robberies, brawls, gambling, libertinism, mutinies, even sedition.”⁶⁵ The governor of Martinique, another French Caribbean colony, even breathed a sigh of relief when large numbers of restless urban whites departed his island for Saint-Domingue, “where they may give themselves up to hunting and disorder, and where licentious liberty is complete.”⁶⁶ A lieutenant in the French navy who saw service in the Caribbean in 1790 and 1791, presciently predicted that the urban petits blancs, this “refuse of all nations,” would become “one of the best elements of propaganda for revolutionary agitation.”⁶⁷

      The lower orders of whites in the cities consisted of more than just poor adventurers. A substantial number of them were deserters from the military, masterless men by choice whom colonial authorities mentioned in the same breath with runaway slaves. All over the Caribbean, commanders of colonial regiments complained both about the quality of the men sent out from home and of the willingness of their charges to shirk their prescribed duties in favor of the chance for independence. The British governor of St. Vincent expressed this frustration in 1777, calling the latest crop of recruits “the very scum of the Earth. The Streets of London must have been swept of their refuse, the Gaols emptied … I should say the very Gibbets had been robbed to furnish such Recruits, literally most of them fit only … to fill a pit with.”⁶⁸ The unenviable reputation of European servicemen posted to the West Indies as “undisciplined men” of “irregular habits” stalks them in the recent literature as relentlessly as it did in the eighteenth century.⁶⁹

      Rates of desertion climbed when war and rumors of war drove soldiers away from the barracks and sailors off the ships, but, like all the other forms of popular resistance present in the Caribbean, desertion was a time-honored tradition in both war and peace by the close of the eighteenth century. Invitations to desert were not lacking. Discipline in colonial regiments was rigid and uncompromising; frequent epidemics ravaged the ranks of newly arrived troops, confined as they often were in close and unsanitary quarters; and many opportunities to participate in local cultures beckoned. Deserters from Spanish regiments enjoyed the unique option of taking refuge in churches, where law and custom protected them from apprehension. But others of all nationalities eagerly shipped themselves aboard small merchant or contrabanding vessels, lost themselves in cities, or wandered from place to place as vagrants.

      In the early 1790s, the political currents then swirling about the Atlantic basin also led soldiers and sailors to desertion and other more direct forms of resistance to military authority. Advertisements for deserters in Jamaica regiments suggest such political avenues of explanation. For example, many reports describe deserters of Irish background. James Regan, whose heavy brogue branded him as distinctive, deserted the Kingston barrack in 1792, taking with him the clothes, money, and even the commission of his English captain. He then hired a horse and a young black guide, traveled across the island to “one of the Northside ports,” and tried unsuccessfully to pass himself off as his captain in an effort to gain passage off the island.⁷⁰ A group of five deserters from the 62nd Regiment which absconded around the same time included only one Englishman and three Irishmen.⁷¹ Henry Hamilton, another native of Ireland and a weaver by trade, left the barrack at Stony Hill with an older Scottish comrade, also a weaver, in August, 1793.⁷² The apparent unrest among Irish soldiers and seamen in royal service in the early 1790s coincides closely with the emergence of nationalist republicanism in Ireland, a new and vital stage in the developing opposition to British rule. If deserters from British regiments in the West Indies included Irish dissidents, such activity provides some background to the role which the United Irishmen would play in the naval mutinies of 1797 at Spithead and the Nore. In the Caribbean itself, such a radical stream might sometimes find an immediate outlet in local struggles against the British. Just after the black rebels of Saint-Domingue captured Cap Français in the late spring of 1793, the commander of a British armed cutter serving off the coast of the rebellious colony identified a notorious “Irishman of prodigious size” and thick brogue as “a deserter from his cutter, on board of which he had acted as boatswain.” The deserter had recently been spotted as one of the motley crew of a large “rowboat, armed with fifty or sixty men of all colors” which preyed on British and American shipping and had apparently made common cause with the black rebels on land.⁷³

      The wide-ranging efforts of colonial governments to discourage such behavior echo parallel efforts to control runaway slaves. In Jamaica, advertisements for military deserters appeared in newspapers on the same pages as notices for slave deserters, and apprehended deserters could expect the kind of swift and severe punishment routinely meted out to rebellious slaves. Early in 1791, military authorities sentenced “a marine and a seaman” guilty of deserting one of the king’s warships in Port Royal to receive 500 lashes each, though later “the Admiral humanely remitted half the punishment.”⁷⁴ Governors, officers, the Assembly, and private citizens also offered bounties for aid in the recovery of deserters, in much the same fashion as they did for absent slaves. Often the lines between different forms of desertion became blurry indeed. For example, when authorities apprehended mulatto Josef Isidro Puncel at two in the morning near the gates of the central plaza in Havana, they jailed him as a runaway slave, only to find upon closer investigation that he was actually a free deserter from the armada.⁷⁵ On the other hand, since the security of planters, merchants, colonial officials, and their families depended in large measure upon the strength, loyalty, and readiness of military forces, they enjoyed some leeway which runaway slaves did not possess. Early in 1789 and again four years later, as the prospect of war loomed on the horizon, the Spanish Crown attempted to bring deserters back into the fold by issuing an amnesty covering all those found guilty of desertion and contrabanding, both at large and in prison.⁷⁶

      One particular incident of desertion involving a group of British regimental musicians provides a rare glimpse into Governor Balcarres’s “Pandora’s Box”—the complex urban underground protecting fugitives from the discipline of Caribbean slave society. Too often ignored by military historians, musicians were integral to British army regiments in the West Indies and elsewhere, and their role as well as their numbers appear to have expanded between the middle of the eighteenth century and the era of the Napoleonic wars.⁷⁷ As military bands in Europe broadened both in size and instrumentation during this period, black musicians became increasingly prominent and by the 1780s could be found playing beside whites in all parts of the continent. Crashing cymbals and beating kettledrums, tambourines, bass drums, triangles, and so-called “Jingling Johnies,” blacks in British bands brought with them new sounds which the bands eagerly incorporated as part of the ongoing process of cultural borrowing which had always characterized British military music.⁷⁸ More extensive borrowing occurred in the West Indies. In the islands, blacks appeared in European military bands very early in the century; black drummers performed in French regiments at least as early as the 1720s. By the end of the century, British regimental bands also drew readily upon black talent. The presence of local black musicians in these bands not only affected their music, but also provided disaffected British musicians routes of access to the vibrant musical culture of the islands and ultimately to the underground which nourished it.

      In the 1790s in Jamaica, musicians from British regiments appear especially prone to desertion. This was certainly the case in the 10th Regiment of Foot stationed near Kingston. In April of 1793, the commanding officer of the 10th Regiment circulated in local newspapers notices for musicians who had absconded at different times that month. One of these deserters was Samuel Reed, an Irish “labourer” of about twenty-five who had played the clarinet and other instruments. Just days after Reed’s disappearance, Joseph Lees, a drummer, left the barracks to join him.⁷⁹

      Perhaps Reed and Lees were attempting to join two fellow musicians who had been absent for more than a year. In dramatic fashion late in February 1792, ten СКАЧАТЬ