Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist

Summary

Podcast Summary

Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist
Date: November 13, 2025
Host: Robert Evans (C), with guest Titi Lee (A), and producer Sophie (B)

Overview

This episode continues the exploration of Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th-century English slave plantation overseer and diarist in colonial Jamaica, infamous for his extreme cruelty, sexual violence, and the extensive documentation of his atrocities. Host Robert Evans and guest Titi Lee dissect Thistlewood’s worldview, influences, daily atrocities, and the disturbing ways he rationalized his actions using pseudoscience, literature, and the intellectual fashions of his era. The episode blends chilling historical detail with uncomfortable humor and reflection on the persistent legacies of slavery.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Worldview and Influences of Thistlewood

[04:43]

• Thistlewood saw himself as a “naturalist,” documenting his crimes as if contributing to scientific knowledge.
• He likened the management of enslaved people to animal husbandry, citing their financial “value” as the main distinguishing factor from livestock.
• He read widely from popular pseudoscientific and satirical tracts of the day—books that mixed dubious science, satire, and outright lies.

  “His intellectual diet … a mix of works of science and works of … literal, like, just like lies that are also being passed off as science. … This is his manosphere.” (C, [06:46])

2. Misinterpretation of Satire and the “Man Plant”

[07:59]

• Thistlewood was heavily influenced by a 1752 satirical tract, “The Man Plant,” which mocked eugenic ideas by proposing ‘breeding’ superior Britons using artificial wombs and raising children like livestock.

• The satire was misunderstood by Thistlewood—he took its eugenic analogies as serious inspiration for managing and abusing enslaved people.

  “I don’t know if it’s that he missed the satire entirely or that he just like a lot of these tech bros who read science fiction…and you’re not supposed to emulate.” (C, [14:37]) “It’s a torment nexus situation where Vincent Miller is describing the torment nexus that is treating people like livestock. And Thomas Thistlewood is like, what a cool idea.” (C, [14:38])

• Discussion of how satire, when stripped of context or willfully misunderstood, can justify horrific real-life actions—a dynamic still relevant today (e.g., “The Matrix” and current online cultures).

3. Dehumanization, Eugenics, and the Logic of Plantation Slavery

[10:00-16:50]

• Reading from “The Man Plant” highlights the extreme dehumanization—comparing women to fertile fields and children to crops.

• Thistlewood’s diaries reveal the insidious way he legitimized rape and breeding of enslaved women, a logic mirrored in how later white supremacist and pronatalist discourses operated.

  “Their fecundity will only be limited by such small reposes as the necessity of lying fallow…a well-disposed … woman may furnish her country with 130 to 140 or more children.” (C quoting “The Man Plant”, [16:16])

4. The Echo Chamber and Rationalizing Atrocity

[19:43]

• Thistlewood’s reading and echoing of pseudoscience didn’t create his cruelty but served as justification.

  “He considers it to justify…his behavior…that justification may have helped him continue to find ways to explain to himself why what he was doing was okay.” (C, [20:23])

• Vermeulen (only female scholar cited on Thistlewood) notes how his practices and his engagement with pseudoscience were “reciprocal.”

• Thistlewood specifically marked the harvest season by choosing a new victim to rape after reading “The Man Plant,” literally integrating intellectual inspiration with sexual violence.

  “Thistlewood marked the time of harvest by raping an enslaved woman named Eve…” (C quoting Vermeulen, [22:11])

5. Daily Life: Violence and Routine

[23:25]

• The episode recounts repeated escape attempts by Eve, an enslaved woman—and how recapture almost always meant further rape, not just by Thistlewood but by gangs of white men on the plantation.

• Thistlewood’s diary reveals how normalized rape and extreme violence were, noting them as casually as gardening tasks.

  “All the white men, particularly on these farms, are doing this habitually. Like, it’s incredible how casually he notes this…” (C, [24:23])

• Thistlewood coded his own sexual violence in Latin but referred to his peers’ abuse in plain English—hinting at a self-aggrandizing narcissism.

6. The Culture and Detail of Sadism

[34:09]

• Jamaican slavery fostered extreme sadism, with punishments far beyond whipping, including “pickling” (rubbing wounds with salt, peppers, lime) and the notorious Derby’s Dose (forcing a person to eat another’s feces).

  “If you need to know anything about the moral quality of the white men on Jamaica at the time…the common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds.” (C, [41:42])

• Many “respectable” historians have minimized these atrocities due to discomfort or unwillingness to credit abolitionist eyewitnesses.

7. Attempts at “Kindness” and Justification

[45:01]

• Thistlewood kept meticulous track of minor “gifts” to enslaved people, like a ration of herring or rum, seemingly to burnish his own image in his diary—another form of self-delusion and justification.

  “Definitely a sign of a not nice person when they keep a tally of every nice thing they do...” (A, [46:08])

8. Resistance and Agency

[50:33]

• Despite unrelenting oppression, enslaved women found ways to resist, such as using herbal abortifacients from Thistlewood’s own gardens to prevent forced pregnancies.

  “Some of these women were using this plant as an herbal abortifacient…agency for themselves.” (C, [51:54])

9. Systemic Child Sexual Abuse

[53:01]

• Thistlewood was a pedophile, regularly purchasing and abusing young girls as young as 11 or 12, detailed in his diaries.

  “He will buy girls when they’re 11 or 12, and he will, not long after, assault them.” (C, [53:00])

• The story of Bess, bought at 11 as a personal slave for Thistlewood’s favored enslaved woman, further illustrates the intertwining of intellectual curiosity and unthinkable human cruelty.

10. Broader Culture of Sexual Exploitation

[55:47]

• Other white men of the time (e.g., William Byrd, Samuel Pepys) also kept coded diaries of sexual exploitation, showing this was not an aberration but a recognized, coded subculture among the “enlightened” elite.

  “Enlightenment era men use quotidian writing in order to document, conceal and control their exploitation of women.” (C quoting Elizabeth Polka, [59:56])

11. Scale of Sexual Violence

[61:23]

• Thistlewood documented 3,852 sexual acts with 138 women; outside Jamaica he averaged 10 encounters a year, but in Jamaica: 200+ per year, underscoring how sexual exploitation was central to plantation life.

12. Legacy, Death, and Historical Reckoning

[63:23]

• Thistlewood fathered at least 14 enslaved children and flogged his own offspring.
• He died at age 65, living a long life for the era—facing no real consequences.
• Britain, while abolishing slavery earlier than the US, never properly reckoned with the horror or the fortunes built on such atrocities.

  “There was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated.” (C, [64:44])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On rationalization:

  “Maybe you’re just using all this stuff you’re reading as a justification to be shitty to people.” (C, [22:26])

• On missed satire:

  “It’s a torment nexus situation…What a cool idea. Why don’t I do that?” (C, [14:38])

• On normalized sadism:

  “Think about, like, something you have to do … a couple of times a week at your day job, and it’s like that for him … that’s his gig, you know?” (C, [39:29])

• On agency:

  “Some of these women were using this plant as an herbal abortifacient... It’s evidence of these people … taking some agency for themselves…” (C, [51:54])

• On historical reckoning:

  “There was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors… and how many British fortunes were based on them.” (C, [64:44])

• The bottom line:

  “He’s a normal example of the worst people ever.” (C, [53:39]) “None of them are particularly better than the others. … His whole society.” (C, [54:41])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 06:17-08:58: “The Man Plant” and how satire fueled Thistlewood’s worldview
• 14:38-16:50: Quotes from “The Man Plant” and discussion of proto-eugenics
• 19:43-22:11: Vermeulen’s analysis, rape as part of the “harvest”
• 23:25-29:21: Eve’s repeated escapes, mass sexual abuse, and punishment culture
• 34:00-42:44: Detailed discussion of sadistic punishments, including pickling and Derby’s Dose
• 50:33-51:54: Enslaved women's agency—abortifacient resistance
• 53:01-55:45: Systemic child sexual abuse—story of Bess and comparison to other 18th-century diarists
• 61:23-62:19: Numbers: Thistlewood’s documented sexual crimes
• 63:23-65:14: His children, death, and posthumous lack of accountability

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Tone and Conclusion

The hosts blend irreverent, uneasy humor (“this is a podcast for haters by haters”), grim irony, and candor, with frequent explicit acknowledgments of the horror and emotional toll of the content. Titi Lee often interrupts with incredulous, dark jokes, highlighting the emotional numbness or shock such evil provokes (“Maybe you’re just using all this stuff you’re reading as a justification to be shitty to people.” [C, 22:26]; “I don’t like that he goes by TT…” [A, 44:37]). Both wrestle with the question of how much detail is necessary to communicate the horrors without dehumanizing survivors further.

The episode concludes with a reminder that Thistlewood was not “an isolated monster,” but emblematic of a larger plantation society that normalized brutality and self-justification—an urgent reminder against sanitized historical narratives.

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For more Behind the Bastards episodes:
Visit coolzonemedia.com or listen on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Transcript

[A]

Call Zone Media.

[B]

Recording.

[C]

Uh huh.

[B]

I do miss now that we used to script the Zoom Lady. Going recording in progress.

[C]

I know, I know. Whatever happened to the Zoom Lady? Another job taken by automation. I think it was an automated job to begin with. I think that was a robot who complains when the robots get taken, their job's taken by other robots. You know, we need solidarity with some of the robots against the other robots is what I'm saying.

[B]

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

[C]

Oh, no. I hate that son of a bitch.

[A]

What?

[B]

I love Wally.

[C]

I'll fight Wally. Leave Wally alone. I don't like him at all.

[A]

Why don't you like Wally?

[C]

It's not his business. Coming around picking shit up, you know, you're so dumb.

[A]

That's literally what he's programmed for.

[B]

You're such a hater.

[C]

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

[B]

Produced by a lover.

[C]

Produced by a lover. And our guest today, Titi Lee. Would you like to talk about a guy we hate again some more?

[A]

You know, do I have a choice?

[C]

No. No.

[A]

You know what? This is exact. This is what I love to do on my.

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

That is still very much. Yeah. Never forgotten. Every once in a while, someone will bring that up. A stranger like, did you get high on mushrooms once online? I'm like, yeah, that was me. And I always say, by the way, it was cleared by legal. It's completely legal.

[C]

Those were legal mushrooms. They're unregulated, you know, they were. They were very unregulated. A lot was unregulated in those days, the Internet, before, like 2016, you know.

[A]

Yeah. What a while.

[C]

Before everything got worse. Yeah. Speaking about stuff that's much worse than that, let's get back to this horrible guy in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood. This is an iHeart podcast.

[D]

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[D]

High Key Listen to High Key.

[C]

A bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast. Speaking of crunchy, what did you think of your trainers? Run I was amazing on that show you I had. I was amazing and I was better than you would be if you went this is exactly why Bob is a good drag queen cuz she won't back down. She's not gonna go double back on that lie. I felt like you came in real hot, real strong and that is just not the game girl. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you why you're wrong and I can't wait to do this. Please listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. So in part one I discussed the fact that Thomas Thistlewood considered himself a bit of a naturalist and that his documentations of all of the different crimes he committed were, in his own eyes, something he saw as a contribution to the scientific record. And he also considered, like, what he specifically the sexual violence he employed as like a part of his work as a farmer. You know, slaves aren't entirely treated the same as livestock in his mind, but they're treated more like livestock than people. Right. The only reason in which they're kind of different from is that. Is that they're more valuable. Right. Like a slave is. Does an enslaved person represents a huge store of value, right? They're worth a lot more than like, most livestock are. Right. So these are not. That's part of why even when you hear about something like, oh, he caught this. This woman with a knife, it's not that common for them to kill. Because that's a lot of money on the line, right? That represents somebody's money. It's not out of humanitarianism or anything like that. They just. It's. It's.

[A]

Well, that's pretty dark. Ye.

[C]

Yeah, that's all this is to them. One of the things that I find most interesting about the journals of Thomas Thistlewood is the degree to which things that are like these really horrible sex crimes are just bracketed in between stuff like, oh, one of my lambs gave birth or I killed a snake. Right? He literally put it in between stuff like that. And in her study for Small Acts journal, Heather Vermeulian explains that by doing things like this, he's, quote, enclosing particular rape records within signifiers of his progress, an increase in livestock and a decrease in the threatening of the undomesticated creaturely population. Right. And so what he's seeing is like, what I'm doing is a part of this, like, taming of the natural world. It's the same as getting rid of, you know, a snake that we have no use for because it will just eat our livestock. Or it's the same as one of my livestock giving birth. Right. And Darwin's theory of evolution didn't exist yet, Right. That's not published until the late 1850s. But people who would wind up being Darwin's precursors are alive and publishing books of science in this period of time. And these are a lot of the guys that Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of, right? He's like, this is his. We don't have, like, YouTube yet, but, like, this is very much the kind of content that he is ingesting, right? Is these, like, early. Some of them are bullshit, right? Yeah, like, this is his manosphere, right? It's like this mix of works of science and works of like literature and satire and like literal, like just like lies that are also being passed off as science. Like all of this is like part of his intellectual diet. And one of the books that was most influential.

[A]

Well, it's exactly like the manosphere right now.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And there's one of the things that is weirdly common with like, it relates directly to a problem we have today is people taking works of satire seriously and then building their views of the world around them. That happens today with shit like we could talk about south park in the movie Starship Troopers, right? Where a lot of people don't get the joke and wind up, or take the joke in a specific way and wind up using it as part of a worldview that justifies some pretty fucked up things and shit like that is happening back then. And one of the ways that happens to Thomas Thistlewood is he becomes a fan of this satirical tract published in 1752 called the Man Plant or A Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed. And this is like a. You've heard of like Thomas Swift's A Modest Proposal, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Where he's like, he's talking about we should. Oh, you know, there's all these poor people starving in Ireland. What if we ate Irish babies? What if we like allowed them to be sold as food? And it's like, it's a sad. Like he's joking about how cruelly people talk about the poor, right? And particularly poor Irish. That's the joke is like how awful his society is to this group of people, right. That they're treating their babies like chicken to be farmed for food almost. That's the point Swift was making, right? And some people get the joke and some people don't. And Thistlewood comes across a book that's a similar thing to what Thomas Swift is doing called the Man Plan. And it's written. We don't know exactly who wrote it. The author's pseudonym was Vincent Miller. And it's really weird because it comes out in 1752. So there's no theory of evolution. Our knowledge of heredity is very limited in the 1750s. Right. We're starting to get an understanding of it, but it is not what we'd call developed. And this work as a joke is an early eugenics text. It's really fascinating. It's like a pre genetics understanding of eugenics. Again, written as a bit. Because the gist of this book is that this guy Vincent Miller is basically saying, hey, there's a lot of problems, like with The. There's a problem of inequality between the sexes, right? Because pregnancy is so dangerous and painful for women. And part of what he's doing here is I think he's kind of making a comment on the upper class in his society, in which it's very common for, like, women who are of high society after they give birth to hand their baby off to, like a nurse, right, who's going to like, actually, like, feed and take care of and effectively raise the kid. And so part of what. Part of the satire is he's saying, what if we take moms and dads entirely out of the equation and raise human beings like animals on a farm, right? And the way he suggests doing this is like, we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's gestate embryos in an artificial womb. And that way we can keep. We can remove human beings entirely from the business of like, raising their children. Right? He's being like, this is a sad time to me.

[A]

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

[C]

Yes, yes. And he's, you know, this is. I wanted to go into more detail about this, but we're gonna run long anyway. But it's a fascinating work for me just because of how he's very clearly satirizing what he sees as like an inhumanity at the highest levels of his society. Like, people aren't even raising or nursing their own kids. But part of how he chooses to mock that is by kind of laughing at the idea of that pregnancy is dangerous for women. And it's a little unclear to me if he's actually acknowledging that that's an inequality or if he's making fun of the people who see it as an inequality. I'm just not fully versed enough in the satire of the 1750s in England to tell you what he's trying to do more. But Vincent Miller, part of what he's doing is he's looking at this culture of upper class child neglect and he's proposing a hyperbolic solution. We create an artificial womb that. To gestate fertilized embryos outside of the human body. And we can raise human beings like animals on a plantation. And part of one of the things that the eugenics thing that he kind of proposes here is he pretends that he's done this. He, like, writes, claims about how I convinced this farm girl, like, to give me one of her after she had sex with his boy that she liked to give me a fertilized embryo, and I took it out this way and I grew it in a heated cow bladder. And the baby's 20 months old now, and it's much healthier than a regular baby. And for this reason, I propose that this method of growing human. Human beings will yield hardier offspring, which is proto eugenic, right? That he's saying we could. We'll improve. And again as a joke, but he's still saying we will improve through this method the breeding quality of all of the British people that we start putting into the world. Right?

[A]

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

[C]

I think that's part of the satire too, is him saying, hey, if we apply. Here's what happens. If we apply the logic we're using on slave populations in places like Jamaica to white English people. Isn't that fucked up? Right? Like, I think part of this is Miller trying to get people in his society to, like, think about it this way, Right? I think that's part of the satire. So obviously this guy is not seriously suggesting this, nor did he literally gestate a baby in a cow's black. Like, that's. You can't do that, right? Like that. This is a bit too bad. It's a little unclear to me how we know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood, because he writes, he quotes extensively from this tract in his diary. He writes about it a bunch at the time that he reads it. And there's some evidence, some of the scholars who study his journals have suggested that this played, like, a role in his intellectual development and how he treated people. And it's kind of. I kind of think. I don't know if it's that he missed the satire entirely or that he just like a lot of these tech bros who read science fiction. And there's, like, things in there that you're not supposed to emulate.

[A]

I was just thinking about that, right?

[C]

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

[A]

You described it so well. Yeah, because it's like all the people who the worst tech bros will bring up the Matrix as and it's like they completely miss the point. And people. Yeah, it's wild. It's like you completely missed it.

[C]

Oh, especially when like those anti trans tech bros are big fans or like guys like Andrew Tater fans of the Matrix. It's like you motherfuckers missed the point as hard as it could be missed.

[A]

Have you ever actually looked at this movie?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. This is not like the authors are around. They've talked about this. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

They're like, this is what it means. We'll never know. You're like, yeah. Okay.

[C]

So I think part of the big impact that this satire, satiric work has on Thomas is the way in which the author describes human breeding in agricultural terms. And I'm going to quote a passage from this book. It is then easy to be conceived that by ridding the women of the plagues and fatigue of gestation, they may teem anew at much shorter intervals of time. They may then become like those fertile fields that yield two or three crops in a season. And their fecundity will only be limited by such small reposes as the necessity of lying fallow will require for the reparation of the ground. They will continue longer able and apt for impregnation, so that upon a moderate estimate, a well disposed, well constituted and industrious woman may furnish her country with 130 to 140 or more children. So it's very much like again, talking about women like a field and talking about human babies as crops. You know, you can see again, like this. I think Miller is saying this is bad, right? That's why it's a satire. But thistlewood is just like, what a cool idea. This is free is. Yeah.

[A]

It is wild. Because even you say it now, I'm like, it's satire. But then I'm like, I don't know how far we've come.

[C]

Like, right.

[A]

Some people may look at that today and you know, there's the whole tradwise breeders and look at that and be.

[C]

Like, yeah, look at the pronatalist movement, right? Like, there's more than a little of that in here, right? Of this. Like, yeah, we can breed stronger and better people to improve the nature of society. It always gets to be a problem when you're thinking about like, how can we make the next generation tinker with it? Genetically to make it better, which is. I mean, that's part of what's interesting. This is in 1752, this comes out and it is kind of talking about genetic engineering in a way, right? And before we knew what those words meant. But it's a proto tract in that line of, like science fiction, right? Like there's bits of Gattaca in this, right? Like Gattaca has bits of this in its DNA, if you'll forgive the term, right? The movie Gattaca. This idea of, like, we're. Well, by changing this, we make people that are hardier and stronger and we can ship them overseas. We're creating plantations of men, right? That's what Miller writes in this book. And then we'll ship all these people that we've grown like crops over to populate the colonies. By this means we shall see infinite broods of subjects served to in people and enrich as well as our island as those vast tracts in North America which are so thinly inhabited, which are now obligated to be stocked with other foreign refugees. A naturalization bill will thus be out of the question. We may also then more reasonably grasp the conquest of both the Indies, Our actual possessions and those which we shall infallibly, by dint of superior numbers procure will be abundantly supplied with swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as China itself. And part, again, there's this knowledge that we're only peopling the New World. It's mostly slaves in a lot of these colonies, right? Slaves or local people that were ruling because British people can't survive that well in all of these places, right? And part of the joke that Miller's like is like, no, no, no. What if we could get rid of all of these non white people by just outbreeding them with these human beings? We grew on a field and again saying that to satirize a lot of the attitudes at his time, but I don't think everyone interprets it that way. We know Thistlewood owned a copy of this book after it was published, and he wrote about it in his diary several times. I don't know that he picked up the critique of aristocratic family dynamics, but the idea of peopling newly conquered territory and improving the quality of new generations was clearly on his mind, and that's how he saw a lot of what he was doing. I found very little analysis of the impact this book had on him other than what Heather Vermeulen writes. Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers, and they mostly ignore this kind of stuff. A lot of them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all. Right. The most, some of them will say is that, well, there's some debate as to whether or not what he was doing was consensual. And it's like, well, there's really not. He owned these people.

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah, they couldn't read Latin, but, yeah, there's a lot of, like, this stuff gets mixed. Vermeulen is one of the only female scholars that I've seen analyze Thistlewood's writing, and she does center the man this, like, book in her discussions of why he wrote about his sex crimes the way she did. When discussing passages from Miller's book that he excerpted for his diary, she concludes, Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his classification of enslaved women and rape records, which suggests that his practices preceded or at least existed in reciprocal relationships to his engagement of pseudoscientific theory. In other words, he does start writing about what he's doing. He would consider his sexual exploits before he reads this book. But the way he quotes from it suggests that he considers it to justify. Provide a justification to his behavior. Right. And that justification may have helped him continue to find ways to explain to himself why what he was doing was okay. Right.

[A]

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

[C]

Right, Right, exactly. Like that's something he's got to do for himself. Here we know that during the week in which he first reads the Man Plant, he oversees the harvest season at his plantation, and he chooses to mark the occasion by picking out another victim to sexually assault. Immediately after the entry in which he notes that he's finished this book, he writes, am cum Eve supter in the old Negro house, paid a bit. In other words, he slept with this woman, assaulted her on the ground. That's what supterum means. Near the slave house. And he paid her the equivalent of like, a dollar or two. Right. And so that's coming in immediately after he, like, exerts passages from this book. These things exist. His, like, intellectual diet. And then the things that he is doing and justifying based on the stuff he's reading, all exist kind of in the same continuum together, Vermeulen explains. In other words, after noting that he returned to texts that imag plantations of men, Thistlewood records that he raped an enslaved woman named Eve and that he did so at the Estate's current harvest site. Put differently in an engineered Eden, the pseudoscientist Vincent Miller grew his Terraphilius from an egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter. Thistlewood marked the time of harvest by raping an enslaved woman named Eve. Right. There's this weird degree to which what he's noting down and the things that he's partaking, he makes them almost fit the things that he's doing, like reference.

[A]

See, this is why men shouldn't be allowed to read. You know, it's like they get ideas.

[C]

Why? Well, I got good news about literacy levels.

[A]

Too many ideas, too many rapes. You know, maybe.

[C]

Yeah. This is why you need. This is why maybe it's useful sometimes to like, do your. This is the danger of the autodidact is encountering too much about the world outside the context of having to talk with other people about it. Right. Who might be like, I don't know, man, it seems like. Seems like you might be going some crazy places with this. Maybe you're just using all this stuff you're reading as a justification to be shitty to people. But, you know, he's. In a way, I think this is a product of the fact that he's isolated from the intellectual culture he's obsessed with. It's not a two way relationship. He's digesting these books and these articles and he's talking with them about them, with other white exiles. And he probably. Probably part of his ego is that he seems like a learned man among this population of exiles, but he also knows he's not really fit to be part of the intellectual community that he admires. Right. And some of that is shown in the fact that he doesn't really understand everything he's reading. Yeah.

[A]

Cause he doesn't get it. He seems to not. It goes over his head.

[C]

Yeah. He may not get everything right, or at least not the way that it's meant to be gotten. Now, when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own, soon after he starts working as the overseer at Egypt Plantation. Eve is not one of them. This woman that we just talked about, she belonged to the Cope family who were his employers. And as was often the case of female enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron of the plantation. Mrs. Cope was not great at this job. And it's a mark at how unhappy Eve was that she escaped frequently. And this is some of how we get how Thomas would have punished the people that he was overseeing while he's working at this plant. On March 3rd, 1755, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four people who escaped that day. The next day, he wrote William Cruikshanks, a white worker. Below, Thistlewood brought Eve into the savannah to her mistress, Mrs. Cope, but she soon made her escape again. Below this, Thomas notes in small print, he slept with her under the logwood. So what he is saying there is that this other white worker catches Eve after she gets out, and he brings her back to the big house, and she escapes again, and William catches her again, and then he rapes her as, like, a punishment for escaping, or maybe just because it's what he wanted to do. Right, but part of what we're getting here is how this is not just Thomas engaging in this behavior. This is all of the white people, all of the white men, particularly on these farms, are doing this habitually. Like, it's incredible how casually he notes this, right? What Crookshanks does, this is not even like, a significant deal to him. It's just like, well, of course he recaptured this woman, and he did that as he was taking her back, right? And Vermeulen goes on to note, quote, the following week, after dinner, four heartily drunk white male colonists, all Thistlewood's acquaintances, hauled Eve separately into the water room, the bathroom, and were concerned with. Which means raped her. One of them, his good friend Harry Weech, twice, first and last. The following month, Eve ran away two more times. And again, this is both how they're trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to themselves, like, well, she escaped. So we have to do this, you know, and it's so casual, like, none of them even think about it, like, this is the normal behavior for white men in this society, is to commit, like, rape at the drop of a hat against these people that they own. Right? Like, that is the normal behavior.

[A]

I mean, it's also within. Yeah, even within, like, what you're saying in the context of the time, I sense a lot of discrepancies because it's like, on one hand, he's justifying his recording of it as science and making sure he knows who he's fathering. But then when he's with his friends, he's saying, oh, we're just doing this to punish her. But that also would contradict him being the father if everyone's raping her. And so there's this already, you can tell the argument's shaky to begin with. Like, clearly, what we understand is this man's doing bad things and is driven by his bad motives. And then Looking for different justifications, but they're not even consistent. Because if he's trying to father someone, he wouldn't be actively wanting other men to father children with her.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Because he wouldn't legally be the dad.

[C]

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

[A]

So he puts that in English.

[C]

Yes, that's in English.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

I see.

[C]

Because Eve, I mean, this is a years long thing for them. Like, she runs away repeatedly. Cause clearly her life is a nightmare. And Thomas will rape her repeatedly again. Right. Often. Sometimes it incites her escaping, sometimes he does it after she escapes. But he does it constantly. And he writes about him doing it fundamentally differently than he writes about his friends doing it. Which does say something. Right. It talks about the incoherence in his worldview, as you pointed out. And it just also, I think it shows this kind of narcissism that he does think that he's special and that what he's doing is different than them. Right. Yeah. So the night after this, I mentioned in episode one, he's in a long term. What he would call a relationship. We're not calling it that, but it's important to talk about how he describes it with this enslaved woman. Fiba. Right. P H I B B A H is how he spells it. And so she. He has. Ostensibly there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her. Cause he talks to her, he comes back to her pretty regularly. And it clearly at least matters when she's pissed at him. And the way he describes it, she gets angry because she thinks of this as, like, him cheating on her, Right? And this is kind of, again, this isn't a relation. This is like a parody of an actual relationship, like a sick parody. It's a perversion of everything that that's supposed to be. But he does write about it like that, right? He describes the fact that after he goes over to her after assaulting Eve again, Fibba seems much out of humor about Eve yesterday. And he's angry, and he doesn't know who could have told her, right? Like, who the hell let her know what I did to this woman, right?

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah, well. And is she angry because of what he's doing to this person, because of the fundamental inequalities, or is she more just angry because, like, she sees him as this person that she's in a relationship with and he cheated on her? How does. We'll never know what this looked like in her head, right? Cause we don'. He's not interested in asking her. He doesn't talk to her. We only get pieces of her from the outside, like we do of all of these people that he owns and is abusing. So to talk about Eve again, she escapes in the early fall, and she manages to stay free almost the entire month of October. When she was caught, Thomas, quote, whipped and chained her. She subsequently escaped once more and was brought home on December 23rd and chained again the next day. She escaped and was brought back the day after that, whereupon Thomas chained her in the cookroom. This pattern continued for years. When she ran away and was caught in the spring of 1757, Thistlewood reported her punishment thusly tied her to the oven post and gave her a little correction. Now, that phrasing could mean a lot. And so that's as good a segue for any as me to discuss the corporal punishment on the plantation as it existed in the time in which Thomas was doing his job, and the precise kinds of violence that he and his peers meted out on the people that they owned. But first, Bad time for an ad break, huh? Yep. Sorry. Woof.

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[C]

And we're back. So.

[A]

Oh no, there's more.

[C]

There's More.

[A]

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

[C]

It keeps getting worse.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I think one of the ways in which even pretty good histories now are often kind of short is that they talk about whipping and they talk about the amount of violence, which is important. And they even talk about, like, the amount of sexual violence. But there's often not detailed accountings given on, like, some of the most sadistic punishments. And part of it's because we'll talk about this in a little bit, but even some historians are really uncomfortable talking about the details of the sadism of the punishments that white people engaged in in places like Jamaica. And it is really upsetting to talk about. Thomas arrived in Jamaica as a practiced farmer and an amateur naturalist. And there's no evidence that prior to arriving here, he was a violent man or had ever so much as struck another person. Maybe he had. Maybe he'd been in a lot of fights, but he didn't write about it. Right. We don't know if he had not been violent prior to coming to Jamaica. This changed rapidly upon starting work at a plantation. On working as assistant overseer on his first plantation on the island, his boss ordered him to give 300 lashes to his driver, who was one of the oldest enslaved people on the property. Thistlewood delivered the punishment, which was likely ordered as much to toughen him up as to punish the enslaved man in question. Right. There's this. This new white guy on the farm. We gotta have him beat the absolute hell out of the most, like, sympathetic and liked person on the, like, enslaved person.

[A]

Like, testing him a bit.

[C]

Yes. Are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah. And he proves cruel enough for the job. Now, as I noted, Jamaica was reputed for being a really egalitarian place for white men. Right. Even poor white men would be treated well by the rich white men. And part of why is because there's this understanding that everyone will bind together when it's time to do violence against the much larger enslaved majority. James Robertson writes that, quote, the generous hospitality of a planter's household rested on uninhibited violence in the fields. Thistle would absorb this lesson and can continued to order floggings for the rest of his life in Jamaica. And, yeah, that is. It's one of these things. He exists in Jamaica during the high point of slavery and slave plantations on the island, both because the weather is unusually good during like, 37 years that he's there. And so harvests are really good. It's just a good time climactically to be growing sugar in Jamaica. And also there's no limits whatsoever on slavery right while he is there. And that's going to start to change after he dies in 1789, not long after he passes. Anti slavery advocates are going to testify at parliament in Westminster about the abuse of enslaved people in Jamaica. Robertson writes about this quote, these included. The testimony included cruel beatings occurring not just out on lonely estates, but in gardens in Savannah Lamar, the parish's principal port, where only a hedge separated passersby from the victim. Screams more frightening still. While the witnesses stated the cries were heard with universal detestation, the perpetrator was not brought to legal punishment. Historians of slavery have made little use of these remarkable depositions, despite their early date. The arguments for disregarding such vivid testimonies was because the nascent abolitionist movement found these witnesses, so their evidence can hardly be objective. This was first offered by slavery's always plausible apologists and then repeated by historians unwilling to believe how vile slave holding societies could be. Such judicious denials helped preserve the illusion that such horrors could not exist in a British colony. So there's even this problem with a lot of histories where they're like, we can't take these accounts by anti slavery activists of how brutal the system was as literal because they're biased, because they're.

[A]

Saying they're not accountable.

[C]

Who's that biased?

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah, you should probably be talking about this as it's really bad.

[A]

Wait a minute. Yeah, I can't. Yeah, people just walking by, hearing it are like, this is like, I don't.

[C]

Even like, ooh, fuck.

[A]

These are people who are just like, if I have to look at it, I don't like it. And that's maybe a sign that we've gone too far.

[C]

That's an important part of the history of slavery too, is not just the people like Thomas who are just like, deeply have completely given their souls up to this pit of evil, but the people who like, kind of walk by it for like 10 minutes and are like, wow, that seems really bad. I got a place to be. Like, I gotta get moving, you know, like, I gotta get to work or whatever. Like yeah, that's bad. But, like, I got shit to do, you know? It's the same thing in every society to an extent. When you talk about the stuff that's horrible, but widely accepted is there's a large number of people who always know something's wrong. But, like, bro, I gotta make rent, you know, like, yeah, good stuff. So as we saw in the case when we were talking about Eve, people who often escaped numerous times and would be whipped numerous times when they were taken back by slave catchers. And when this didn't stop them from trying to escape, slave owners and overseers developed more elaborate methods of punishment. One that acted as a sort of garnish to flogging was pickling. Right. So if they want to flog you but you've already been flogged, or if you do something particularly bad, they'll pickle you after they flog you. And that's a literal term. You take pickle, spices and salt and lime juice and peppers, and you rub them in the open wounds that you've whipped into their body.

[A]

Oh, man.

[C]

That's a normal punishment. That's like a normal thing that this guy Thomas, that's his. Part of his day job, he does it like. Yeah, like. Like whatever. Think about, like, something you have to do, like, once or twice, at least, like a couple of times a week at your day job. And it's like that for him, right? Like, that's. That's his gig, you know? On a website called Same Passage, I found a detailed account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings. These include, in 1756, runaway enslaved people named Punch and Quackou were, well, flogged and then washed and rubbed in salt, pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. As noted with Eve, chains were also used as a punishment. In 1771, a runaway named Kubaw was flogged, chained, and then had a brand marked into her forehead. So she had a brand, like, burned into her head. Right. There's some evidence that's so hard to hear.

[A]

I'm sorry, it's bad. I'm still here, but this is.

[C]

We can take a minute. This is all the worst stuff that people have ever done. Yeah.

[A]

I don't know what to say.

[C]

But, I mean, part of what I'm. Part of what was upsetting as I read this was how little of this kind of stuff I had heard of. Considering myself reasonably well read. I think I'd heard a little about pickling as, like, a thing that some particular sadists did, as opposed to, like. No, no, no, this was like a norm. Like, this was a very normal thing to do. Like, this was kind of the escalation chain up from the first vlogging. Right. Is you pickle these guys. And I hate getting into this next part. Titi, I really apologize for, like, I don't like having to talk about this. There's no good way to talk about this. So I'm just going to read this. And, you know, we can move past it because this is bad. In 1756, Thomas writes that an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugar cane and was whipped. And then he made. Thomas made another enslaved person named Egypt shit in his mouth. Months later, when Derby was caught eating sugar cane again, he was flogged and pickled. And then Thomas made Hector shit in his mouth. This was a normal punishment in Jamaica. It's not the only place where it was done. But this was something that was extensively done by slave owners and overseers on the island. They would force enslaved people to defecate in each other's mouths as a punishment. Depending on the severity of the crime, the victim might even have their mouth gagged and covered. While that was the shit was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment. Right. This is a thing that. There's a version of this called Derby's dose. That's a really common, extreme punishment on the island. And it's done. It's not just done for slaves who, like, escape. Sometimes someone steals some sugar or some food, and you just do this insane thing to them. And it's like there's a degree to which it's almost a method of entertainment for some of these white guys, is coming up with these increasingly sadistic and fucked up and elaborate ways to hurt the people that they own. But if you need to know anything about the moral quality of the white men on Jamaica at the time, like, a lot of the common punishments involved rubbing shit into people's mouths or open wounds. That was a normal thing they would do, right? Yeah.

[A]

Very deeply disturbed.

[C]

It's upsetting. Yeah. It's as bad as it gets. Right. And the only good news that I can give you, if indeed it counts as good, is that most of these punishments seem to have died out after, like, 1756, 57. Right. This is kind of when Thomas starts doing this less and less. We don't know. Maybe this kind of just fell out of popularity. Maybe it was so damaging to the workforce that they stopped doing it. We don't really know. But this is something that exists and is Normal for a while, while he's early in his career and it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the period of time that he's there. But it's a pretty common. Like Derby's dose is a thing that other people are doing in Jamaica to the people that they owned. Thomas spends his first 17 years on the island working for other planters, primarily in Egypt. In 1760, he made a note of his active preparations to purchase land of his own. In 1767, he'd saved up enough to buy 160 acre farm which he named Breadnut Island. He'd been purchasing people this whole time and he'd made extra money that let him buy the land by renting them out to his boss. And so by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like 30 people and he moves them onto this plantation that he owns. Right. In an article for the social historian Barbara Starman's Rights of His Human Acquisitions, he wrote of purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid £112 for two men and £200 for one boy and three girls. The two men were named Will and Dick. Will was about 25 years old and stood 5 foot 3 and a half, 3 and 2 tenths of an inch. And Dick was about 22 years old and taller at 5ft 7 tenths of an inch. The boys and girls were Kuba aged about 15, Suki aged about 14, Maria aged about 15, and Pompey aged about 16. All were branded with Thistlewood's mark, a double TT on their right shoulders. Cause he's scarring all of these people that he owns in order to prove that he owns.

[A]

I don't like that as tt. Yeah, I don't like that he goes by tt.

[C]

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

[A]

No, he's just initials.

[C]

But Thomas Thistlewood. Yes, but. Yes, unfortunately. Yeah. Sorry.

[A]

No, there's other TTs out there. There's other.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel his dad was a Dicken named R.A. robert. So, you know, we're all true.

[A]

There you go. We're both represented here.

[C]

Yeah. Both of our names have come up in this fucked up episode. So now that he's independent, right, he's a planter now, he's risen to the very top of Jamaican society, right. About 16 years in, and he's working his own property with like the people that he owns. He's making them work. One thing I'll say for him is that he vaccinates the People he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson did. He doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does this because he doesn't want them to die of smallpox because they're valuable assets. Right? Now that said, he could. He's a guy, I think he wanted to see himself as a nice master. He makes a note of every nice thing that he does for the people that he owns around Christmas that he gave them each 18 herrings and a bottle of rum. Some of them he made share bottles of rum. Right. Not everyone got their own bottle of rum. But he writes about this stuff as like, see, I can be a nice guy. I'm not always a huge dick to everybody.

[A]

Definitely a sign of a not nice person when they keep a tally of every nice thing they do have document.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, that's definitely a red flag.

[C]

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

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Draw a photo of it just in case you can't read. Yeah. Here's a picture of me giving all my.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

All my employees or slaves.

[C]

Yeah. A lot of posed pictures of him handing rum bottles to scared looking men and women. Yikes. Speaking of not, I mean rum. Maybe rum. I don't know if we'll get ads for that. We'll get ads for something here. They.

[D]

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[C]

When you.

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[C]

We're back talking about this monster.

[A]

How much more? Where is there?

[C]

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

[A]

Pregnancy in terms of not crying spontaneously, but you know what? I think we're gonna really challenge that today.

[C]

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

[A]

And on A low note. Oh, there's good.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And on a low note. One of the positives of his situation is that while he's working at Egypt Plantation, he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes about them a lot. And he develops a preference for this specific plant, bromeliad penguin, which he uses as, like, a natural fence for parts of the farms he works on. And then when he gets his own plantation, he moves these plants, which people call prickly penguins ones, to keep pests away from his personal gardens. And he doesn't know this about them, but they're an herbal abortifacian. Right. And there's evidence that a lot of the women who live on these plantations, both when he's an overseer and then when he owns one, know how this plant can be used and don't tell him and use it to stop him themselves from carrying his kids to term. Right. Like, there's evidence. Again, when you talk about this, there's always resistance happening. Even if it's not well documented, even if the historic record doesn't give it to us directly. You can tell. He writes about, like, wow, there's a lot of what he calls miscarriages among these women that he thought were going to carry kids to term. And we know from other things that some of these women were using this plant as an herbal abortifacie. Oh.

[A]

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

[C]

And he didn't know, but he's kept.

[A]

A diary of other ways to give people miscarriages.

[C]

Right. But he didn't know about, like, Again.

[A]

But he didn't know about this one.

[C]

His knowledge is never as wide as he wants as he thinks it is. Right. And this is. I think there's something that's the good part. Well, it's evidence of these people who are in the worst situation imaginable, taking some agency for themselves. Right. Some choice of, like, I'm not going to do this for you. I'm not gonna deliver you a kid that you'll then own. Right. I have an ability to control that, and I'm going to. Right. And that's an important part of the story is, like, the agency. These people who had very little options for exercising agency were able to, like, fight for. Right. And they had to, like, do it underground. They had to hide it, but they did do it. Right. Anyway, I feel like I've detailed enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the gravity of his evil to you, but there is one area I want more. Well, there's one thing we should say that I'm not gonna go into detail on, but I will tell you, he talks a lot about pedophile Ophelia. That is another aspect of this. Right. That's something he's doing. He will buy girls when they're 11 or 12, and he will, not long after assault them.

[B]

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

[C]

He's just about the worst person I've ever heard from directly. Jesus Christ.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The fact that it's his own diary.

[A]

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

[C]

Among owners of slave plantations, he's normal. Right. That's very few people, even within slave societies. But, like, so it is. It is. These are the worst people among the.

[A]

Worst group of people ever.

[C]

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

[A]

One of the worst. Yeah. I see.

[C]

Well, that's important, like, when you get the. These, for example, sanitized stories, fiction and otherwise, about, like, the pre Civil War south in the US that, like, depicts how. Oh, look at these beautiful houses and this, like, cordial civil society, right. Undergirding. It is the same shit, Thomas. This. It is the exact same kind of sex crimes. It's the same kind of sadistic violence, rubbing shit into open wounds and pickling people and whatnot. Just like that's all of these guys wearing these fancy coats who got painted in their plantation houses. They're all the same kind of guy as Thomas Thistle. Thistlewood. Right. Those are the people who are the same. Right. All of these people who own human beings and make their living off of it are all doing shit like this. None of them are particularly better than the others. Right. I think that's kind of the important thing to take out of Thistlewood's work, like, of his life's work. His diaries.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

So you got one more knockout. Terrible thing.

[C]

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

[A]

Let's hear it.

[C]

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

[A]

Oh, that's so fucked up.

[C]

And for the first couple of years that this girl Bess is there, she's an assistant to fiba and he also uses her as a runner, right? He'll send this little girl, this 11 year old girl running across the island on foot and he'll to bring exchange books with his friends on other plantations. She's his postal service in a way, right? Like there's one point where, where like he sends a letter to a doctor friend of his and she runs back to him with a copy of the works of Francis Bacon that this guy he sent a letter to sends back with her, right? So this is kind of, this is how like social, like this is how these guys are all staying in touch in Jamaica. It's how they share letters and books and their thoughts on the scientific discoveries of the day. In 1778, this girl Bess runs back to the plantation with a copy of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity. That's how modern this is, right? He finds out about the shit Ben Franklin is working on because this girl he buys at 11 runs back to his house with a copy of the book that some other white dude gave her, right, to give to her master. At the same time as this knowledge is being transmitted, abuse is being transmitted. Thomas is going to sexually abuse this girl. We assume people he's sending her to do this too. And an excellent dissertation for the English department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth Polka writes, one can't help but wonder if Bess spent any time looking through Franklin and Bacon's printed works on her journeys between the homes of these men, particularly Franklin's Observations and Experiments, which was illustrated with engraved plates depicting Leyden jars sprouting currents of electricity. One especially wonders about Bess interactions with the text when considering that In August of 1766, shortly after Thistlewood acquired his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistlewood flogged a then 12 year old Bess for meddling with my watch and telescope in the great house piazza. Three years later, after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescop, Thistlewood first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the location east of the pond. She was 15 and part of again these stories you don't get directly, but there's this girl who is in this terrible situation and is very intellectually curious. He describes her as messing with the telescope. She's trying to understand this. She's trying to look out at the stars probably. Right? Like it's not. It's very reasonable that Polka wonders if she would have during this, what little time she had alone taken a glimpse at some of these books. Cause this is clearly a curious child, right. And she's just completely locked away from exploring any of that by the system of heinous abuse that she is never able to escape. Right. And this is, it's important to note when I talk about this not being that abnormal within the mainstream white high society at the time. There's a really good passage in Polka's dissertation that talks about like does a good job of putting Thomas's habits and his documentation of what the violence he was doing into like a global context. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, following the advice of Thomas Jefferson, kept extensive diaries of their North American settler colonial mission into native territory in which they would occasionally record details of the sexual encounters between the men on their surveying expedition and the native women, as well as the spread of venereal disease. These recordings were later printed in either French or Latin by editors as means of coding the explicit details. Just like thistlewood did. 18th century Virginia Planter William Byrd also kept a coded log of his sexual activity as a means of control. More specifically, specifically, Richard Godbeer explains that he was anxious to control himself as he was to control others. Further, Godbeer concludes that Byrd experienced chronic tension within the Chesapeake's white population during the 17th century and fostered an obsession with control in colonial Southern society. While the elite's emulation of English gentry culture necessitated an intense self consciousness and careful scrutiny of one's personal behavior. Like Thistlewood, Bird coded his diary in shorthand. However, unlike Thistlewood, Bird's entire diary was coded not only the segments related to sexual exploitation and he kept the diary in a locked library. And Kenneth Lockridge speculates that Byrd shorthand may have been intended above all to hide Byrd's further encoded self from his wife. In an even more well known instance of sexual documentation, diarist Samuel Pepys, who also recorded his sex acts, occasionally coded his sexual activity in Latin as well as in French and Spanish. What emerges in this cross comparison of 18th century diarists is a gendered coding of sexual documentation where Enlightenment era men use quotidian writing in order to document, conceal and control their exploitation of women. That's what I mean when I say like this guy is not that weird for his social level, you know.

[A]

Well, and because women weren't. So it was like a code because women weren't educated, couldn't read Latin or.

[C]

Were less likely to be. Right.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah. And there's all those sex crimes in the Bible, so maybe there's plenty of sex crimes in the Bible all along.

[C]

Yeah. Over the course of his 37 years in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood recorded exactly 3,852 sexual acts with 138 different women. The vast majority of these women were enslaved. The vast majority of these acts would have been sexual. In his analysis of the diaries, Richard Dunn estimated. Yeah, 3852 with somewhere around 130 victims would be the way of looking at it. One of the people who analyzed the diaries, Richard Dunn, estimated that prior to coming to Jamaica, Thomas would have averaged at most around 10 sexual encounters per year on the island. This increased to about 200, sometimes more. So part of when you're looking at what motivated him to become a slave owner, And a plan. Sexual opportunity is not zero percent of that story. Right. He finds ways to justify it that are heavier. But this does come down to that, you know, that's part of what this comes down to. Cool stuff.

[A]

Horrific. So did he ever have kids or raise a family?

[C]

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

[A]

Born enslaved people.

[C]

Yep. Yep. And he does. He writes about. He has a child with Thiba, and he writes about punishing, like, having this kid whipped, you know, for disobedience. This child dies in 1780, you know, which is about six years before Thomas passes on. So his children, I mean, they're living these difficult lives. They're working on plantations. Right. So they don't benefit from easy lives. Right. And, yeah, I mean, there's a lot that's complicated here and, like, what's going on with him and FIBA and how he sees these relationships with the people that he brings into the world this way. But it's all based on kinds of exploitation, right? Like, that's what's happening here. Fundamentally, it's all exploitation. That's the only kind of relationship that he has with any of these people is one based on ownership.

[B]

Does he at least die of something horrific?

[C]

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

[A]

Does he ever just, like, eat shit just to try it out? And then. So I just want to know if this man has eaten his own shit before. I mean, for science, you know, maybe.

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

He probably experimented of, like.

[C]

Yeah, no documentation of him eating his own shit, his own shit, him being shitty. That's most of his documentation. And, yeah, there's nothing happy to say about this story other than that he does die eventually. And, you know, not long after his death, the abolitionist movement really starts to get going within the British Empire. And gradually, this kind of stuff becomes serious. Seen as much as it's covered, as we've talked about, it's never fully reckoned with. When Great Britain banned slavery in their colonies, they never really look that deeply into what guys like Thistlewood are doing. Right. There's kind of this acknowledgement that, like, well, that was bad. That was a bad system, people. It was bad that things were doing that, and it's good that we stopped it. Let's focus on the fact that we stopped it and how nice that is. We were faster to stopping it than the Americans. Right. And they did definitely end slavery faster than the United States did. But there's also this level to which there was never any kind of organized attempt to grapple with the kind of horrors that had been perpetrated. And how many British fortunes were based on them, on selling and buying people on these plantations, on the profits from these plantations, on selling stuff to these people, on running the boats. That's never reckoned with. Right.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[B]

Jesus Christ.

[C]

We're done. Sorry.

[A]

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

[C]

It's over.

[A]

Horrific.

[B]

Titi, you have anything you want to plug?

[A]

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

[C]

But take a hot bath. Cry.

[B]

I hear you.

[A]

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

[C]

There we go.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[B]

Luck with the kid seeing them one last time.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. What a strange way to end this pod. But. But thank you for having me on. Always a pleasure to see you. And, you know, take a moment to think about all the horrible things humanity's capable of.

[C]

Yes. All right, everybody. Horrible things done.

[B]

Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone meet. 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 behindthebastards.

[D]

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[H]

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[I]

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[C]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. And guess what?

[J]

I'm Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

[C]

And guess what? What?

[J]

I'm stressed. I got invited to a friendsgiving and now there's the big question of what to bring.

[C]

Well, just bring a bottle of Casamigos.

[J]

Oh, Casamigos.

[C]

Of course. Nothing brings people together like a batch of Casamigos margaritas.

[J]

A Casamigos margarita really, really is the perfect cocktail.

[C]

Plus Casamigos goes with everything.

[J]

Turkey, stuffing, Mac and cheese.

[C]

Oh, I was thinking more cranberry juice or ginger beer, but that works too well.

[J]

You know the iconic rule of culture number 743. Anything goes with my Casamigos this friendsgiving. You know what everyone will be grateful for.

[C]

Cosamigos.

[J]

I was gonna say you and cosmigos.

[C]

Ooh. Let's keep it in that order. Order, please.

[J]

Drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

[C]

This is an I heart podcast.