Bridger (June 1799)

Two days after the above advertisement appeared in the Antigua Journal a second appeared in the Antigua Gazette, also published in St. John’s. The text of the two notices is virtually identical but the accompanying woodcut images are strikingly unusual. In each advertisement the crudely fashioned image of a freedom seeker on the run is accompanied by a devil.[1]

What do these images mean? There does not appear to be anything particularly distinctive about Bridger. The advertisements identify him as African, and recently purchased by Athill from Mackay, Richardson and Company. Athill believed that the freedom seeker might have sought refuge “with some of his Country Men,” meaning people from the same part of Africa who had endured the Middle Passage together. Bridger may well have arrived on board either the Mary, a Liverpool ship which had brought 181 enslaved people from West Central Africa, or the Harlequin, another English ship which brought 274 enslaved people from the same African region. Mackay and Richardson had advertised and then sold “Forty-Three Prime SLAVES” from Angola in November of 1798, quite possibly including Bridger.[2]

What might these devils have signified? In European literature and theater devils were commonly identified by their black faces, and in folk tales the devil was often referred to by such titles as “Black Knight,” “Black Jehovah” and “Black Man.” For centuries sub-Saharan Africans had often been visually identified by European artists on paper, stained glass, tapestries, and other media in ways that associated them with the devil or even as devils themselves. White men and women seeing these Antiguan advertisements might well have drawn on a symbolic lexicon that associated darkness with diabolical evil.[3]

Although the Enlightenment had weakened Europeans’ belief in the devil as an agent in human affairs, diabolical iconography did not quickly disappear from popular culture and folklore. The Prodigal Daughter, for example, was a mid-eighteenth-century work intended for children that told the story of a spoiled girl in Bristol who made a bargain with the devil. This story almost always included wood cut prints of a devil exercising a malign influence over the young woman. The Prodigal Daughter was reprinted regularly over the course of the eighteenth century, and this and similar publications kept alive the idea that the devil might be an active agent in human affairs.[4]

British enslavers in the Caribbean were terrified of the enslaved Africans who outnumbered them and who had every reason to wish evil to be visited upon their oppressors. In 1750 approximately 3,261 enslaved people lived on Antigua’s roughly one hundred square miles, but over the next fifty years almost 76,000 enslaved Africans were forcibly brought to the island: this was a society in which enslaved Africans massively outnumbered Europeans.[5] Antigua’s abortive slave rebellion of 1736 had featured obeah men as active participants. Drawing on ideas associated with the African diaspora, they administered oaths to would-be rebels and performed rites to assure the success of the rising. Whites were convinced that obeah had played a significant role in the rebellion.  Whites responded by breaking five rebels on the wheel, gibbeting six of them while alive, and slowly burning seventy-seven alive, some of the most brutal punishments imaginable.[6]

Although Athill did not describe Bridger as an obeah man, White Antiguans might have readily identified him and other new arrivals with the beliefs and practices of Africa. White people in the Caribbean regarded real or “pretended” communication with the devil by enslaved West Africans as intimately connected to violent resistance ranging from poisoning of individual Whites to engaging in a revolution of the type underway in Haiti at the time of this advertisement. With this one simple and instantly recognizable image the runaway advertisement communicated the deadly dangers inherent in the rebellious escape of enslaved people. Moreover, by matching the blackness of the devil with the dark skin of the African freedom seeker, these advertisements enhanced this sense of danger, building on the long-standing European association of light with good and darkness with evil. It was all too convenient for Europeans seeking to justify their brutal enslavement of Africans to see the skin color of the enslaved as physical evidence of savage and dangerous natures.[7]

Was the devil an accomplice or an instigator of the rebellious escape of enslaved people? In both advertisements for Bridger the devil appeared behind the freedom seeker, his arms and clawed hands raised in threat while the escaping freedom seeker looked anxiously over his shoulder at the chasing devil. The testimony of rebels in the Antiguan slave conspiracy earlier in the century had made clear that many of the enslaved were terrified of the spirit world, and of obeah men and women who were believed to exercise some of its power. Were these images intended to suggest that obeah men terrified the enslaved into resistance, including escape?

Whether consciously or not, White European readers interpreted these descriptions in ways that were informed by centuries of associating blackness both with Africans and with evil. However unusual these Antiguan images were, they nonetheless signified a range of European interpretations of enslaved Africans that drew on a European symbolic lexicon that was all but universal. The image of two black figures, with a devil running behind a freedom seeker, communicated the dangers inherent in what Whites interpreted as the uncivilized, savage, and pagan beliefs and practices of enslaved Africans who dared to challenge their subordinate position.