Transcript

Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 59 min · 11,800 words · 165 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published November 14, 2025 (59 min, about 11,800 words). It mentions 14 people, works and ideas, including Thomas Thistlewood, Egypt Plantation, TT Lee, Vincent Miller, Heather Vermillion.

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on Thomas Thistlewood, a historical figure known for his role as a slave plantation owner and diarist, highlighting the darker aspects of his life and actions. The conversation reflects on the legacy of such figures and the implications of their deeds, often revealing a deep disdain for the injustices they perpetuated.

Key takeaways

  • The Zoom lady may be gone, but her automated legacy echoes in every recorded Zoom call.
  • Robots stealing robots' jobs? Welcome to the automation paradox; solidarity isn’t just for the ‘meatbags.’
  • Thistlewood's journals read like a gruesome farming manual—where terrible acts and livestock births coexist in chilling harmony.
  • Thomas Thistlewood's worldview? A bizarre blend of science and satire, proving misinformation can be a historic killer.
  • In today’s irony, we still see satire misconstrued as truth—just ask anyone influenced by South Park's 'deep wisdom.'

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Thomas Thistlewood, TT Lee, Heather Vermillion, Small Acts Journal
  2. – 10:00: Vincent Miller, Thomas Swift, Thomas Thistlewood, South Park
  3. – 15:00: Vincent Miller, Thomas Thistlewood, Gatka
  4. – 20:00: Thomas Thistlewood, Egypt Plantation, Heather Vermillion, Small Acts Journal
  5. – 25:00: Egypt Plantation
  6. – 40:00: Thomas Thistlewood, Egypt Plantation, Barbara Starman
  7. – 45:00: Egypt Plantation
  8. – 55:00: Thomas Thistlewood, Richard Dunn, Merryweather Lewis, William Clark
  9. – 59:09: TT Lee

Notable quotes from "Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

  • Yeah. Speaking about stuff that's much worse than that, let's get back to this horrible guy in Jamaica, Thomaswood.
    about Thomas Thistlewood · at
  • Literally like put it in between stuff like that. and in her study for Small Acts Journal, Heather Vermillion explains that by doing things like this, he's quote enclosing…
    about Heather Vermillion · at
  • For their like views of the world around them like that happens today with you know [ __ ] like we could talk about South Park or the movie Starship Troopers right where a lot…
    about South Park · at
  • Like there's there's bits of Gatka in this, right? Like Gatka has bits of this in its DNA, if you'll forgive the term, right? The movie Gatka. this [clears throat] idea of like we're well.
    about Gatka · at
  • Put differently, in an engineered Eden, the pseudocientist Vincent Miller grew his terrailious from an egg extracted from the womb of his gardener's daughter. Thistlewood marked the time of harvest by raping an enslaved woman.
    about Vincent Miller · at
  • What he's doing is different than them, right? 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…
    about Egypt Plantation · at
  • With a, 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.
    about Richard Dunn · at
  • Okay. I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before because there's a new show too called Second Screens. It's for people who if you're neurody divergent.
    about TT Lee · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Thomas Thistlewood — Person · Primary subject (historical perpetrator) · 8 mentions · first at
    Central figure discussed: an 18th-century Jamaica-based overseer/planter whose diaries document slavery, torture, and sexual violence; used as a lens on plantation brutality and Enlightenment-era 'scientific' self-justifications.
  • TT Lee — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions · first at
    Guest reacting to and discussing the material with the host; provides commentary, questions, and emotional/ethical framing, and plugs a live show at the end.
  • Vincent Miller — Person · Referenced author (pseudonymous) / intellectual influence · 7 mentions · first at
    Named as the pseudonymous author of a 1752 satirical tract ('The Man Plant') that Thistlewood quotes and appears to use as ideological justification for dehumanizing 'breeding' frameworks.
  • Heather Vermillion — Person · Referenced scholar / secondary source · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited for analysis of Thistlewood’s journal structure and how rape records are framed alongside agricultural/naturalist signifiers; used to support interpretive claims about pseudoscience and justification.
  • Richard Dunn — Person · Referenced historian / analyst · 1 mention · first at
    Credited with estimating Thistlewood’s sexual encounter rates and interpreting the diaries quantitatively; supports the episode’s statistical claims.
  • Barbara Starman — Person · Referenced historian / secondary source · 1 mention · first at
    Cited for details about Thistlewood’s purchases of enslaved people and the branding practices; provides documentary framing for acquisitions and measurements.
    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 writes of his…
  • Thomas Swift — Person · Referenced author (likely misnamed Jonathan Swift) · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited as the author of 'A Modest Proposal' as an analogy for satire being misread; the transcript says 'Thomas Swift' but context strongly indicates Jonathan Swift.
    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?
  • Merryweather Lewis — Person · Referenced diarist/explorer · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in a comparative passage about expedition diaries coding sexual encounters; used to show broader Enlightenment-era gendered documentation practices.
    And his documentation of what the violence he was doing into like a global context. Quote, Merryweather Lewis and William Clark, following the advice of Thomas Jefferson, kept…
  • William Clark — Person · Referenced diarist/explorer · 1 mention · first at
    Paired with Lewis in the comparison about diary-keeping and coded sexual documentation; supports the argument about gendered control through writing.
    And his documentation of what the violence he was doing into like a global context. Quote, Merryweather Lewis and William Clark, following the advice of Thomas Jefferson, kept…

Books & papers

  • Small Acts Journal — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at
    A journal that analyzed Thomas Thistlewood's writings and actions.
    Killed a snake, right? Like he'll literally like put it in between stuff like that. and in her study for Small Acts Journal, Heather Vermillion explains that by doing things…

Places & events

  • Egypt Plantation — Place · Setting · 4 mentions · first at
    A plantation where Thomas Thistlewood worked and committed atrocities.

Media & podcasts

  • Gatka — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of discussing genetic engineering and eugenics.
  • South Park — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as an example of satire that some people take seriously.
  • Starship Troopers — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as an example of satire that some people take seriously.
    For their like views of the world around them like that happens today with you know [ __ ] like we could talk about South Park or the movie Starship Troopers right where a lot…

Full transcript with timestamps

I do. It's now that we used to script the Zoom lady going recording in progress.

I know. I know. Whatever happened to the Zoom lady? I don't know. Another job taken by automation. Um I think it was an automated job to begin with. I think that was a rob who complains when the when the robots get taken their jobs taken by other robots. You know,

we need solidarity with some of the robots against the other robots is what I'm I think I think Wall-E from that from that movie. Wall-ally is the one.

Oh, no. I hate that sound from the movie. Wall-ally. Oh, I love Wall-E. I'm I'll fight I'll fight Wall-E.

Leave Wall-E alone. Wall-E. Wall-E. It's not his business coming around picking [ __ ] up, you know.

That's literally what he's programmed for. You're such a hater. I I am. I'm fundamentally a hater. Cuz that's my job. I'm Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast for haters, by haters, often about haters. Uh,

produced me produced by a lover. Produced by a lover. Uh, and our guest today, TT Lee. Would you like to talk about a guy we hate again some more?

You know, do I have a choice? Uh, no. No. The No. You know what? This is exact I This is what I love to do

on my is to be forced to hear about a bad man. Yeah. I was forced to read about him. Um, so in part, I mean, I forced myself. This is this is all fundamentally on me. Yeah. I made my choices. I could have written about anyone.

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

well, thank you. So I would I if I had to choose to tell anyone, I would tell you because you had 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.

That is still very much [clears throat] 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. Those were legal mushrooms. They're unregulated, you know.

They were they were very unregulated. A lot was unregulated in those days. Um uh the internet um before like 2016, you know,

before everything got worse. Yeah. Speaking about stuff that's much worse than that, let's get back to this horrible guy in Jamaica, Thomaswood. Right. So, in part one, I 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 was 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 like is that is that they're more valuable, right? Like a slave is does an enslaved person represents a a huge store of value, right? They're worth a lot um 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 pretty dark. Yeah.

Yeah. That's all this is to them. Um so yeah, one of the things that I find most interesting about the uh the the journals of Thomas Thistlewood is the degree to which things that are like these really horrible sex crimes are just like bracketed in between stuff like oh one of my lambs gave birth or I killed a snake, right? Like he'll literally like put it in between stuff like that. Um, and in her study for Small Acts Journal, Heather Vermillion explains that by doing things like this, um, he's quote enclosing particular rape records within signifiers of his progress, an increase in livestock and a decrease in the threatening of the undomemesticated 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 uh Thomas Thistlewood is a fan of, right? He's like he's this is this is his we don't have like YouTube yet but like this is very much the kind of content that he is he is ingesting right is these like early and some of them are [ __ ] right yeah like this is his manosphere right is 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 most right now

yeah there There there's Yeah. And there's one of the one of the things that is weirdly common with like it's a we it relates directly to a problem we have today is people taking works of satire seriously and then building their for their like views of the world around them like that that happens today with you know [ __ ] like we could talk about South Park or 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 like a worldview that justifies some pretty [ __ ] [ __ ] up things and [ __ ] like that is happening back then. And one of the thing one of the ways it happens to Thomas Thistlewood is he he becomes a fan of this like satirical tract published in 1752 called the man plant or a scheme for increasing and improving the British breed. And this is this is like a you've heard of like Thomas

Swift's uh a modest proposal, right? [snorts] Yeah. 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 it's a sad like he's joking about how cruy people talk about the poor right and particularly poor Irish it like that it's that's the joke is like how awful his society is to this group of people right that they're treating their babies like a like chicken to be farmed for food almost right like like that's that's the point 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 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. Um, again written as a bit because the the the the gist of this book is that this this guy Vincent Miller is basically saying, "Hey, we need like the 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 uh 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 one the way he suggests doing this is like we have to make pregnancy less dangerous. Let's justate embryos in an artificial womb and that way we can keep we can we can remove human beings entirely from the business of like raising their children. Right? He's being like this is a sad ide how the direction we're going is even becoming like less removed or more removed and less human and as like a point but then people are like great idea.

Yes. Yes. And he's you know this this is I wanted to go into more detail about this but we're we're going to run long anyway but it's a fascinating work for me just because of how he's he's very clearly satarizing what he sees as like an inhumity 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 like that like pregnancy is dangerous for women. And it 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. Like I and I I'm just not fully versed enough in like the satire of the 1750s in England to tell you what he's trying to do more. [gasps] Um, 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, right? We create an artificial womb 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 this 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 beings will yield heartier offspring will get which is protougenic 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 the breeding quality of all of the British people that we start putting into the world, right? Um,

but he's talking about like like it's interesting that he's talking about breeding of white people and then on there's like this parallel world where they're 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.

Well, yeah. So that's like a such a weird like I don't know like a weird cognitive dissonance.

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 [ __ ] up? Right? Like he's he's I think part of this is 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. Um, so obviously this guy does not is not seriously suggesting this. Nor did he literally justate a baby in a cow's uh black. Like that's you can't do that, right? Like that's like he's this is a bit um it's a little unclear to me how we know this influenced Thomas Thistlewood because he he writes he 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 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 I I kind of think it's I it's 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 think about,

right? The Matrix, right? It's a torment nexus situation where like Vincent Miller is describing the torment nexus that is treating people like livestock and Thomas Thistle was like what a cool idea.

Why don't why don't I do that? Exactly what you described it so well. Yeah. Because it's like all the people who the worst like tech bros will bring up like the Matrix as

and it's like they completely missed the point and like and people Yeah. It's wild. It's like you completely missed it. 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 [ __ ] missed the point as hard as it could be missed.

Do you know? Yeah. Have you ever actually This is not like the authors are around. They've talked about this. [gasps]

Um Yeah. Like this is what it means. We'll never know. You're like okay. So I think part of the big impact that this 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 team a new 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 ficundity will only be limited by such small proposes as the necessity of lying will require for the reparation of the ground. They will continue longer able and app 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 um and talking about human babies as crops. You know, you can see again Thomas I don't think you're supposed to 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.

Yeah. Um, and the purpose of all it's well because even you say it now I'm like it's satsire but then I'm like I don't know how far we've like

right some people may look at that today and you know there's the whole traders and then look at that be like yeah

look at the the pronatalist movement right like there's more than a little of that in here right like of the of this like yeah we we 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 how can we make the next generation like tinker with it genetically to make it better. Um 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 like genetic engineering in a way, right? And before we knew what those words meant, but it's a protott tract in that line of like science fiction, right?

Um like there's there's bits of Gatka in this, right? Like Gatka has bits of this in its DNA, if you'll forgive the term, right? The movie Gatka. um this [clears throat] idea of like we're well by changing this we make people that are heartier and stronger and we can ship them overseas. We're creating plantations of men, right? That's that's what Miller writes in this in this book. And then we'll ship all these these people that we've grown like crops over to impo to populate the colonies. Quote, "By this means we shall see infinite broods of subjects serve to in people and enrich as well as our island as those vast tracks 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 dent of superior numbers procure will be abundantly supplied with swarms of our own subjects and become as populous as China itself. And part of again there's this

this knowledge that we're only peopleing the new world. We need 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 in a field?" And I again saying that to satarize a lot of the attitudes at his time, but I don't think everyone gets is interprets it that way. We know Thistle would have 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 peopleing 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 his impact of this the impact this book had on him other than what Heather Vermulan writes. Uh Thomas Thistlewood has a lot of male biographers and they mostly ignore this kind of stuff when this a lot of them ignore the fact that he's committing sex crimes at all. Right? Like some of like the most some of them will say is that like well there's some debate as to whether or not you know what he was doing was consensual and it's like well there's really not like he owned these people.

They couldn't read Latin I guess but yeah they couldn't read Latin. Um, but yeah, there's a there's a lot of like this stuff gets mixed. Vermuan is is one of the only female scholars that I've seen analyze Thistlewood's writing, and she does cro center the man uh 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 exerted for his diary. She concludes Thistlewood transcribes these passages after he has begun his classification of enslaved women in rape records which suggests that his practices preceded or at least existed in reciprocal relationship to his engagement of pseudocientific theory. In other words, he does start writing about what he's doing his like what 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. We know that during

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

Right. Right. Exactly. Like that's something he's got to do for himself here. Um 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 kum eve sare in the old negro house paid a bit right in other words he slept with this woman assaulted her on the ground that's what sarum means uh it near the slave house and he paid her the equivalent of like a dollar or two right and so that that's coming in immediately after he like exerts passages from this book these these things exist his like in 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. Uh Vermillan explains, in other words,

after noting that he returned to texts that imagined 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 pseudocientist Vincent Miller grew his terrailious 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,

see, this is why men shouldn't be allowed to read read, you know? It's like they get ideas.

Well, I I got good news about literacy levels. Um, too [clears throat] many ideas, too many rapes, you know.

Maybe. Yeah. This is why you need this is why maybe it's useful sometimes to like do your This is the danger of the autodid act 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. Um 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.

He's not, 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 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. Cuz he doesn't get it. He seems to not he may not get everything right or at least not the way that it's meant to be gotten. Um now it's Yeah. So when Thistlewood starts buying people of his own uh soon after he starts working as the overseer at Egypt plantation. Eve is not one of them. Uh this woman that we just talked about, she belonged to the Cop family who are his employers. And as was often the case of female enslaved people, Eve lived under the surveillance of the matron of the plantation. Miss 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 plantation. On March 3rd, 1755, Thistlewood wrote that Eve was one of four people who escaped that day. The next day, he wrote, "William Crook Shanks, a white worker below

Thistlewood, brought Eve into the Sav into the savannah to her mistress, Mrs. Cop, but she soon made her escape again." below this uh Thomas notes in small print he slept with her under the logwood. So what he is saying there is that this this other white worker catches Eve after she gets out and he brings her back to the big house uh and she escapes again and Thomas William catches her again and then he rapes her as like a punishment for escaping or maybe just cuz 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. is all of the white people, all of the white men particularly on these farms are doing this habitually. Like it's it's it's incredible how casually he notes this, right? What Crook Shanks 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? Um and Vermulan 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. in the bathroom and were concerned with, which means raped her. One of them, his good friend Harry We twice, first and last. The following month, Eve ran away two more times. Um, and [clears throat] again, like this is the like you like this is both how they're trying to punish this woman and how they're justifying to her or to themselves like, well, she escaped, so we have to do this, you know? Um, it's 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

I mean it's also the normal behavior within I yeah even within like what you're saying in the context of the time I sense a lot of discrepancies cuz it's like on one hand he's he's justifying his recording of it as like science and you know making sure he knows who he's fathering but then when he's with his friends he's saying like oh we're just doing this to punish her but like that also would contradict him being the father if everyone's

helping her. And so there's this like already like you can tell the the argument is shaky to begin with.

Like clearly like what we understand is like this man is doing bad things and is driven by you know his

bad motives and then looking for different justifications but they don't even they're not even consistent

because if he's trying to father someone he wouldn't be like actively wanting other men to father children with her, right? cuz he wouldn't legally be the dad.

No. And I mean that's I think part of what that hints at here is that what matters more to him even than than that is like it's not just the idea of like well I 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. That's well 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 that in English.

Yes, that's in English. So, he's okay with like kind of like airing out their dirty laundry, but not

I think. Yeah. 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?

Um because Eve I mean this is a yearslong thing for them. Like she runs away repeatedly cuz 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 is 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? Um, 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? Phi BB- ah is how he spells

it. And so she they he has ostensibly there's an extent to which he feels at least a little accountable to her like cuz he talks to her like she she like he's 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 them him cheating on her right and I this is kind of again this isn't a relation this is like a parody of an actual relationship like a sick like it's it's It's it's everything. 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, uh Fiba 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? Um and we don't know part of the

Matt did it. Just Maddie got caught. Yeah. 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 how we we'll never know what this looked like in her head, right? Cuz we don't get he's he's not interested in asking her. He doesn't talk to her. Like, we only get pieces of her from the outside like we do of all of these people that he owns and is abusing. Um, so, uh, 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.

Uh, Thomas quote whipped and chained her. Uh, 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 cook room. 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 meed out on the people that they owned. But first, bad time for an ad break, huh? Yep.

Sorry. Woof. And we're back. So, oh no, there's more. There's more. This isn't going to be new to anyone. Slavery was enforced through violence.

It would get worse. So, it it keeps getting worse. War me. And I I think one of the ways in which even pretty good histories now are often kind of short is that they 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 bit 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. Um, and it 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. uh if he had not been violent prior to coming to Jamaica, this changed rapidly upon starting work at a plantation. On his first day 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 got to have him beat the absolute hell out of the most like sympathetic and liked person on the like enslaved person.

Testing him a bit. Yes. Are you cruel enough for this job? Yeah. 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 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 planters's household rested on uninhibited violence in the fields. This would absorb this lesson and 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 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 cl 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 par the parish's principal port, where only a hedge separated passers by from the victim's screams. More frightening still, while the witnesses stated the c 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 because the nent was because the nent 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 slaveolding 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."

Cuz they're saying they're not accountable. WHO'S THAT BIAS? I MEAN, IT'S BRO. YEAH.

YEAH. IT' be crazy if you don't have a biased opinion. I mean like it's it's like what you were saying about historians not leaving those details out because it's like it's hard to face and hard to talk about.

I mean literally that's the first sign that it's so bad and you should probably wait a minute.

Yeah. I can't. Yeah. People just walking by hearing it are like this is like I don't like

[ __ ] people who are just like I if I have to look at it I don't like it. And that's maybe a sign that

we've gone too far. 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 got to get moving, you know, like I got to I got to get to work or whatever." Like, yeah, that's bad, but like I got [ __ ] to do. You know, it's the it's the same thing in every society to an extent when you talk about the 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 got to make rent, you know, like, yeah, good stuff. Um, 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 you if they need want to flog you, but you've already been flogged, they will they 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.

Oh Jesus Christ. 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 what? 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. Um on a passage on a website called same passage, I found a detailed account of torture methods that Thomas listed in his writings. These include in 1756 a runaway enslaved people named Punch and Quaku were quote wellfogged 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 Kuba was flogged, chained, and then had a brand marked into her forehead. So, she was had a brand like burned into her head. Right. Um, there's some evidence.

It's so hard to hear. I'm sorry. I like I'm I I'm I'm still here, but this is we we could take a minute. Like this is

uh all the worst stuff that people have ever done. Uh yeah. Uh I don't know what to say, but I I mean this

I feel like this entire video, if you're watching, is just me making faces. So I'm like,

no. And um it's like part of what I'm frust part of what like was upsetting as I read this was how little of this kind of stuff I had heard of. Like considering myself reasonably well read, I think I'd heard a little about pickling as like a thing that some particular satists did as opposed to like 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. Um and I I I hate getting into this next part. Uh TT I I really apologize for like I don't like having to talk about this. There's no good way to talk about this. Um, so I'm just going to read this and you know, we can move past it cuz this is bad. Um,

in 1756, Thomas writes that a slave an enslaved person named Derby was caught eating sugarcane and was well it whipped and then he made Thomas made another enslaved person named Egypt [ __ ] in his mouth. Months later, when Derby was caught eating sugarcane again, he was flogged and pickled and then Thomas made Hector [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] was still in there for extended periods of time as part of the punishment. Right? This is a thing that's 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 like 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 a method of entertainment for some of these white guys is coming up with these increasingly sadistic and [ __ ] up and elaborate ways to hurt the people that they own. Um, 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 [ __ ] into people's mouths or open wounds. That was a normal thing they would do,

right? Yeah. Very deeply disturbed. It's upsetting. Yeah, it's it's as bad as it gets, right? Um, 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 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 it's it stops being normal kind of somewhat later in the 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.

Um, 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 a 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 though, so by the time he buys this plantation, he owns like 30 people, and he moves them onto this plantation that he owns, right? Um, in an article for the social historian Barbara Starman's writes of his human acquisitions, he wrote of purchasing several slaves, remarking that he paid £112 for two men and 200 uh pounds for one boy and three girls. The two men were named Will and Dick. Will was about 25 years old and stood 5' 3 and 1/2 uh 3 and 210 of an inch. And Dick was about 22 years old and taller at 5' 7/10 of an

inch. The boys and girls were Kuba aged about 15, Suki aged about 14, Maria aged about 15, and Pompy aged about 16. All were branded with Thistlewood's mark, a double TT on their right shoulders cuz he's scarring all of these people that he owns in order to prove that he owns

that is Titi. Yeah, I don't like that he goes by Titi. Yeah, I'm sorry. I I I didn't think about that either, but it's it's for Thistlewood right?

He's just initials, but Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thomas Thistlewood. Yes. But yes, unfortunately. Yeah. There's other there's other tits out there. There's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel his dad was a dick and named Robert. So, you know, we're all Um, so Thomas is

True. There you go. We're both represented here. Yeah. Both of our names have come up in this [ __ ] up episode. Uh, so now that he's independent, right, he he's on he's 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. Um, one thing I'll say for him is that he vaccinates his his the people he owns, which like Thomas Jefferson didn't. Um, he doesn't do this because he's a nice man. He does this because he doesn't want them to die of smallox because they're valuable assets, right? Um, now that said, he could, you know, this is he is a guy I think he wanted to see himself as a nice master. He makes a note of every like nice thing that he does uh for the people that he owns like around Christmas that he gave them each 18 herrings and a bottle of rum. Um some

of them he made share bottles of rum, right? Not everyone got their own bottle of rum, but he like he writes about this stuff as like see I could be a nice guy. I'm not always a huge dick to everybody. Um, I think that's just something

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

Have document. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, that's definitely a red flag. 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 hairring.

He writes it like not just in Latin, he like writes it in multiple languages just in case, too.

People need to know I gave him photo of it just in case you can't read. Yeah. Here's a picture of me giving all my All my employees are

a lot of posed pictures of him handing rum bottles to scared looking men and women.

Um 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 are. We're back talking about this monster.

How much more is there? We're we're we're through the most like graphic horror that we're going to 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

I've had a pretty like okay pregnancy in terms of like not crying spontaneously, but you know what? I think we're going to we're going to really challenge that today.

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

hello note. Oh, there's a low note. One of the positives of his situation is that while he's working at Egypt Plantation, he he he's like a gardener. He really likes plants. He writes about them a lot. And he he develops a a preference for this specific plant, bromelad penguin, um 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, to keep pests away from his like personal gardens. and he doesn't know this about them, but they're an herbal abortian, right? Um, and there's evidence that a lot of the women who live on the 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 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 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 oral as an an herbal abortion, right? And he didn't know,

but he's kept a diary of other ways to give people miscarriages, right? But he didn't know about like again, but he didn't know about this one. His knowledge is never as wide as he wants as he thinks it is. Right. And and this is I think there's something

the good part. Well, it's it's evidence of these people who are in like 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 going to 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 and they had to like do it underground. They had to hide it, but they did do it, right? Um yeah.

Anyway, uh I feel like I've detailed enough of his horrible sex crimes to get across the gravity of his evil to you. Um but there is one area

I want more. Well, there's one thing we should say that I'm I'm not going to go into detail on, but I will tell you he talks a lot about pedophilia. 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. Yeah,

he definitely is up there on on the list of worst. He's just about the worst person I've ever heard from directly.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, the fact that it's his own. 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 I still want to hold my like I don't know if like

maybe all the bad people were there but like I don't know if he was he was normal really this guy normal

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 worst group of people he's a normal example of the worst people ever yeah

one of the worst yeah I see well that's important like when you get these for example sanitized stories, fiction and otherwise about like the the the pre- civil war u like south in the US that like depicts how oh look at these beautiful houses and this like cordial civil society right undergirling it is the same [ __ ] Thomas this it is the exact same kind of sex crimes the same kind of sadistic violence rubbing [ __ ] into open wounds and pickling people and whatnot just be 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 as Thomas Thistle would, 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 [ __ ] 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 isolated diaries. We can't just project like one bad guy. Yeah. What a crazy [ __ ] No, no, no. This is his whole society. Yeah.

Yeah. Um Yeah. Yeah. Um, and yeah. Uh, so yeah, I I [sighs] Oh, yeah. So, you got one more one more knockout terrible thing.

Yeah, there's there's there's I mean, I don't know. It's this like debate in my head of like how how how much detail do we go into here? Um, 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 this woman 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 to have who owns Fiba, right? He does buy her freedom when he dies kind of, but like yeah, it's it's a very like that is the situation here. And he he buys her a little girl to be basically her personal slave.

So [ __ ] up. And for the first couple of years that this girl Bess is there, she's an assistant to Fiba and she's uh he also uses her as a runner, right? He'll send this 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 like uh he'll 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 her 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. how they share letters and books and their thoughts on on the scientific discoveries of the day. In 1778, this girl best 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 [ __ ] 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? Um to give to her master. Um, 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. In an excellent dissertation for the English department at Northeastern University, Elizabeth Pulka 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 laden jars spreading currents of electricity. One especially wonders about Bess's interactions with the text

when considering that in August of 1766, shortly after Thistlewood acquired his copy of Franklin's texts, Thistlewood flogged then a then 12-year-old Bess for meddling with my watch in telescope in the great house Piaza. 3 years later after inflicting punishment for interacting with the telescope, Thistlewood first recorded raping Bess. This event is marked by the location east of the pond. uh she was 15 and part of again these stories you don't get directly but there's this 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 Pa wonders if she would have

during this what little time she had alone taken a glimpse at some of these books cuz this is clearly a curious child right and she's just completely locked away from exploring any of that by this system of heinous abuse that that she is never able to escape. Right. Um [clears throat] yeah, and this is it's important to note when I when I talk about this not being that abnormal within the mainstream white so high society at the time, there's a really good passage uh in uh Pulka'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. Quote, "Merryweather 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 veneerial disease. These recordings were later printed in either French or Latin by editors as means of uh coding the explicit details, just like Thistlewood did. 18th century Virginia planter William Bird also kept a coded log of his sexual activity as a means of control. More specifically, Richard Godbear explains that he was anxious to control himself as he was to control others. Further, God concludes that Bird 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 elitees 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 shortorthhand. 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 Lockidge speculates that Bird's shortorthhand may have been intended above all to hide Bird's further encoded self from his wife. In an even more well-known instance of sexual documentation, diarist Samuel Pepes, 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?

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

or were less likely to be. Right. Right. 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?

They did for a long time. And they have all the sex crimes. And part of that, I mean, there there was argument like, 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 be learned to some extent to read the Bible and talk about it in Latin. And that cuts down the number of people who might be cuz 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 way that's what Protestant is is like anyone can go into business for themselves as like a interpreting the word of God basically. Um so there is something to to what you say right and that

yeah and there's all those sex crimes in the Bible so maybe There's plenty of sex all along.

Yeah. Uh 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 assault. In his analysis of the diaries, Richard Dunn estimated,

yeah, 3,852 with a, you know, somewhere around 130 victims would would be the way of looking at it. Um, 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 planter, sexual opportunity is not 0% 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.

Um, cool stuff. Uh horrific. So did he ever ever have kids or raise a family? He has about 14 kids uh all who are born enslaved.

All enslaved people. Yep. Yep. Uh and he does he writes about he has a child with Fiba. Uh and he writes about punishing like having this kid whipped, you know, for in in disobedience.

Um this this child dies in 1780, you know, which is about 6 years before Thomas passes on. So his his children, I mean, they're living these difficult lives. They're working on plantations, right? Um so they don't benefit from easy lives, right? Uh and yeah, I mean it's uh there's a lot that's complicated here and like what's going on with him and Fiba and and how he sees these these relationships with the people that he brings into the world this way, but it's all based on kinds of exploitation right? um like that's 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 is one based on ownership.

Does he at least die of something horrific? Yeah, I mean there's not really a lot of good ways to die in that period of time. He 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.

Live long. Does he ever just like eat [ __ ] just to try it out? And then so I just want to know if this man has eaten [ __ ] his own [ __ ] before.

I mean, for science, you know, maybe. I don't know. Uh he probably Nocuation of like

Yeah. No documentation of him eating his own [ __ ] Him being shitty. That's most of his documentation.

Um and yeah, there's uh there's nothing happy to say about this story other than that he does die eventually. Uh, 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 seen. As much as it's covered, as we've talked about, it's never fully reckoned with. You know, when when the Great Britain bans slavery in the 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 we we were faster to stopping it than the Americans, right? And they 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 perpet per perpetrated and how many British fortunes were based on them on on selling and buying people on these

plantations on the profits from these plantations on selling stuff to these people on running the boats like that's there's that's never reckoned with right

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 yeah, that's wild.

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

Anyway, Jesus Christ. Sorry. That's the end. Okay. Well, at least it's over. It's over.

Horrific. Ti, you have anything you want to plug? It's it's it's rough stuff. No. I feel like I should not plug anything right now except for I guess go take a hot bath and

take a hot cry. Yeah, I don't know. I hear you. Um, okay. I'll tell you guys about the show I'm doing before

because there's a new show too called Second Screens. It's for people who um uh you know, if you're neurody divergent like me and you don't want to be you can be on your phone the whole time. Um, I'm just doing the show. I'm like literally trying to find where. God damn it. Just second screen hosted by Madison Shepard. Oh, here we go.

Next one is December 1st. Um yeah, and you can bring your phone and be on your laptop or phone while you're on while you're watching the show. So, I'll be on that show and then I'll probably not do comedy for a while.

Well, those are both good choices and I wish you the best of luck. Take advantage of seeing them one last time.

Yeah. Yeah. And I hope you take advantage of having a baby cuz that that'll be fun. That'll be much much that'll be affirming and good. [gasps]

The world's horrible. Do things that are good. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. What a strange way to end this pod. But um but thank you for having me on. Always a pleasure to see to see you

and you know take a moment to think about all the horrible things humanity is capable of.

Yes. All right everybody. Horrible things done.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

Robert Evans (Host), TT Lee (Guest).

What is "Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS" about?

The discussion centers on Thomas Thistlewood, a historical figure known for his role as a slave plantation owner and diarist, highlighting the darker aspects of his life and actions. The conversation reflects on the legacy of such figures and the implications of their deeds, often revealing a deep disdain for the injustices they perpetuated.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Thomas Thistlewood, Egypt Plantation, TT Lee, Vincent Miller, Heather Vermillion, Small Acts Journal. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Part Two: Thomas Thistlewood: Slave Plantation Owner and Diarist | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 59 min; the transcript is about 11,800 words in 165 timestamped sections.

More from Behind the Bastards

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.