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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to the new books next week. I am one of your hosts of termisabakuri and today we have with us, Bhaktamayikal Tug. And it's new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambian River, a Creole community in the 18th century Atlantic world, published by Braille in 2016-26.
And this book explores an overlooked chapter of Atlantic history, the lives of enslaved Africans on James Island, Mount Kuntakinte Island, in the Gambian River, known as Castle Slaves. They were owned by European trading companies, rather than plantation owners. They repaired buildings or loaded ships, guarded warehouse. There's a lot of things kept for day.
Sick. And I'm so happy that Michael is going to tell us more about this. So Michael, welcome to new books next week. Well, thank you very much.
I'm happy to be here and always thrilled for an opportunity to talk about my work. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much.
So to begin, I'm wondering what five drew you to The Castle Slaves of James Island? Well, initially, I was working on another project that I have since gone back to, which is looking at African resistance to the Atlantic slave trade. And part of that was looking at this group of castle slaves and their resistance, which I ended up doing a chapter about, where they run away by the dozens, honestly. But I'm showing the material I had on the castle slaves to a colleague of mine who said, you have enough just for a book on these people.
And I decided that's what it was going to do. And no one had done a book on the castle slaves phenomenon. I mean, what it sounds like, right? It's like people made to work at these forests or castles along the West African coast.
The in the Gambia River along the Gold Coast area, what is the Ghana there? It's really famous. But no one had done a book about them before. A few articles here or there are mentions in other books.
But I had enough, as my colleague pointed out, I had enough material to really, you know, recreate their lives. And I felt like it was something that needed to be done. Now, these are people who I feel have been waiting 300 years to have their stories told. And the other thing that made it possible to do it, well, I'm the historian, you are.
So we sources, of course. But these sources that I had included their names and so often, whether you're looking at slavery, whatever part of the world, the enslaved people are anonymous. You know, that's certainly the case on slave ships where they're just numbers. But here I had names and that really helped to open up the possibility of seeing them as people, you know, not just as slaves, but as mothers and fathers and carpenters and black Smiths and healers and just a much fuller depiction of lives in the past than we've been able to do before.
So that's that was my motivation. You can judge whether I achieved it. Oh, you did. It's amazing.
And it's always nice. I mean, you have a whole section that really touches all names and important of names. And so I think that's really important, like to show the whole person that this person is that rather than just saying that there's something slipped by it. And so it's really touches on a lot of things.
But what I was also thinking about was that many people may be familiar with plantations slavery in the Caribbean or the Americans, but you your book really touches on the European trading companies in West Africa and how they also depended on a sliver. And I wondered why this has remained so absent from mainstream scholarship. Could you tell us why? Well, I think like I said, you know, no one's done a book on this before.
I mean, it's a sort of thing that has, you know, scholars know about it, but it hasn't really been discussed very much. There is, I'll take it back a little bit. There is one book that came out about two years ago, tracing the lives of three women from one of the forts on the Gold Coast. But it doesn't set out to do what I'm doing, which is try to portray lives of an entire community.
It follows three women and it follows them actually out of Africa to Portugal because they were subject to the Inquisition. And they were arrested and taken to Portugal and basically imprisoned there. So it's also the 17th century. It doesn't have as many details.
So, you know, my hope is, and what you know is in history, what often happens is you'll have a book on a subject and then other people will see that, other historians and start doing other books on it on different aspects of it. And so that's my hope here. My hope is my book isn't the last word on this. It's the first.
And I hope others come in and find other sources and take different approaches. And we learn much more about this phenomenon and what in West Africa. Exactly. So I hope so that people could write more about this.
And your book actually suggests that historians have focused more on the people who pass through these slave thoughts than those who lived and went there more like permanently. Why is it so important to make this distinction between countries are waiting to be exported and castle slaves who kind of formed long-term communities and all these thoughts? Right. I think, well, probably it's largely due to the fact that there's a lot more historians in the West and they're looking at the Atlantic slave trade because that's what touches the Americas, right?
You know, and we need more people doing African history to look at what's going on within the continent. And these people are definitely from the continent and on the continent. And as I said, I think that's a story that needs to be told. Thank you.
That story needs to be told. And you tell it with the archive itself. So what can we do with company correspondence, records, punishment, logs, wage list, death, registers, and this way created by antlevus. And wisely so you say it's in your book, not by the antlevus.
So how did you approach reading these records in quotes against the Greek? Right. It's, you know, I'm happy to have the sources that I do because I obviously was able to work with them. You know, you always wish you had more.
You know, in all of this, there's only one instance of words from one of the enslaved people. And that's, you know, and that's my main example of Hector, this carpenter, who talks in Insulin Way to one of the Europeans and that is punished for it. But the rest, right, we have to look at things like expense accounts to see, you know, what the companies are spending for the castle slaves. We have to see, you know, things like the kind of clothing that they're providing them, what kind of food they're getting, what their housing is like, and use those to try to create some picture of what their lives would have been like.
So you know, it's a, it's a lament of everyone who works on histories of enslaved people that the sources are coming from the enslavers. So, but oftentimes in history, those are actually the best sources because they're sources in spite of themselves, you know, these, the people writing these down are not writing these down, you know, for posterity, they're just keeping expense records. Yeah, so, so what they're writing often then is, is, is pretty accurate, you know, subject to normal errors and so on. So the, the evidence in spite of itself or however you want to look at it is, is still fairly strong.
And once again, having lists of names is, is really key. So when you encounter someone mentioned in Olin person, like someone who received some amount of money, someone punished for disobedience, how do you reconstruct a human life from sex fragments? And then we talk about this in detail, like you want to remain honest about what archive could tell us, acknowledging the silences, but then tell also trying to tell the story as full as you can. So I was wondering how you manage this as well.
Well, you know, I feel as a historian, I'm torn into ways. One is I'm, I stick fairly close to sources, right? But I also feel a tremendous responsibility to these people. And I'm not going to hide that.
I am really sympathetic toward these individuals and I want to do a good job for them. You know, I mean, there are people out there who are descended from these people. And you know, and I, you know, I feel like I need to do a good job. So with these fragments, I think I start by seeing them as people and start to think about their experiences.
How would someone react in this situation? Right? What would be the effect of having a certain job at the fort? What would be the effect of receiving the punishment they do?
How would they experience that in their lives and emotionally? And you can do that, you know, comparative examples, looking at other situations of enslaved people, there's quite a few histories, you know, obviously from the Americas. There's some from Africa as well. I wrote a piece about enslaved women in Uganda in the 19th century.
So there's more evidence from 19th and even in the 20th century. And you can't project backwards entirely, but people are people and you can see them how they respond in certain situations. And, you know, and there are times in this book where I say, this is likely what happened. This is likely what that person did, you know, and you know, as long as I'm clear about it, I think that's still legitimate.
Yes. And I acknowledge that you even put slightly in there, but this is likely in that book. So I see how you want to carefully reconstruct the story, but not also making up things that are not necessarily there. So you are very careful with the sources you have and you're very close to the sources you have as well.
And one thing I wanted to touch on was the argument that castle slavery was slavery of another type. And castle slaves left in military commercial outposts, some received wages or allowances. So they kind of were highly skilled in what they do and somewhere soldiers and sailors. So I'm wondering how does this complicate our border understanding of slavery in West Africa?
Right. And not just West Africa around the Atlantic world, I would say, you know, people who think about slavery, for example, in the Americas, whether it's a sugar plantation or whether it's a cotton plantation in the US out, might look at this and think that it's not really slavery. Right. Because of the positions such as soldier, that's not something you see a lot in the United States.
The Americas, although it's very common in Muslim societies and in West Africa. So right there, we're seeing sort of an African phenomenon being pursued by these by the European companies. So, you know, what gets to the heart of the question of what is slavery, right? Right.
You know, people talk about, I mentioned in the book, the ironic phrase, slave wages, you know, these castle slaves that began being a river, all got monthly wages. They were paid. They had set work hours that were respected. When they did over time, they got paid more.
It's not things you would necessarily associate with slavery. And I argue that, you know, they're able basically to have certain perks and have what seems to be a better life in many ways, more time off, things like that, because the companies were so reliant on it. Right. But that doesn't detract from the fact that they're enslaved.
They're owned by somebody else. And the other hallmarks of slavery, like thumbscrews, floggings, those things happen to them. And I think it's also a hallmark of their spirit and a testimony to the fact that they are enslaved and nobody wants to be enslaved, that they run away, you know, by the dozen. And successfully.
So it's not like in the Americas where it's hard to do. I mean, it is hard because most of them are being kept on an island, right? On James Island and the river is basically like a moat around this island, trapping them in. But there are boats and canoes, of course.
And, you know, so we see, we see aspects of slavery here, which are different than what you might expect. But as I pointed out, they're not that different from slavery in other places in West Africa. The slave soldier phenomenon, for example, the schedule of time off, for example, is the same for indigenous slavery in nearby Senegal. So what I think is important are the details and saying slavery can be different things.
And this is one of them. Thank you so much. I think it's always important for us to be clear what we are dealing with. And I think you do mention that even I think the introduction you talk about why it decides to still use castle slaves, no in very well that we tend to use enslaved people.
That is a different type. And that's the best way to capture it is to stick to the castle slave itself. And that takes me about to name it. And slave also we named enslaved people.
And which is related to what's called social, the cutting of people from their family, from their secretary, from their identity. But in your work, in your book, you actually seem to show that people still rethink their African names for a lot of better bilingual names, rule of names, which were tied to their family or tied to their identity or tied to how they see themselves. Why was this kind of naming so important for people? Was it to preserve their names or was it to help them to resist?
I think it's both. Now, just to clarify, in the Americas, certainly in the US South, for example, when people were enslaved, they were renamed. But they renamed usually just in the official records. We have evidence that they kept their African name to use within their family and in their community, but the enslavers wouldn't use it.
And that's one reason why names are so important because it's about this issue of control. It's the enslavers saying, no, you're not, you know, you are Fred now, right? I mean, it's taking it's that issue of control. So I think for the castle slaves in the Gambia River, for the fact that so many of them were able to retain their African names, it's saying that they're retaining control over their lives in some way, as well as over their identity.
And as you know, African names, very a lot of power and a lot of information with them, right? About your origins, your birth order, your people, your religion, your gender. I mean, names tell a lot of information there. So I think that was very important for them.
And very likely the ones who were named Bristol and Hector and other things probably retained an African name that they use within the community, but it's just lost to us because it didn't show up in the records. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park.
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Thank you so much. I like how you distinguished between what's commonly used maybe among the enslaved or within their communities and what's actually on record. So we only get asked what's on record. And like you say in your book, most enslaved people did not write these documents.
And so you don't get to hear from the upper spats of. And but to the names, you talk, gender seems to run through drought the book in very fascinating ways. I'm very interested in gender and sexuality. And since we are talking about names, it seems women were more likely to retain the African names.
Is it because it was connected to Keisha, child birth, caregiving, why? I'm quite curious. Yeah, I'm very interested in gender and sexuality studies. That was my early research.
And so you definitely see that in here. I wish there were more. But there aren't as many women on this island as there are men. The men outnumber the women about four to one.
And the women don't have formal jobs like the men do. So they don't show up in the records as much. So we just simply don't have as much information about them. It's my theory that the women who almost really universally retain their African names here, I think it's largely because the Europeans don't care.
You know, they're they see the men as more important. I mean, this is all European men running these forts. And I think they see the male workers as more important, but they also see them, I think, as more of a threat. So the renaming once again is an effort at control and controlling the men among castle slaves.
And I don't think they see the women as a threat and therefore they don't even bother trying to rename them. So you know, that well, it turns out to be to their advantage in some ways. You know, I think they're not the surveillance over the women is not as great as it is over the men. Yeah, but downside is not as much as right in the bottom.
And so we can't know as much. Indeed, the women were a minority among the castle slaves like you've you write about. Yes, they seem to be very central to communal life. They were cooks.
They were partners. They were mother. Yeah, and I argue in the last chapter that they're also central to the culture that develops there where the castle slaves develop this wall scholarship like Creole culture, which is a blend of African culture. In this case, two African groups because some of the castle slaves are from the region there and some were brought up from the Gold Coast.
But it's a mixture of these different African cultures and an Atlantic or European culture in some ways. Well, it's really global. I mean, they're wearing cloth from India and, you know, drinking rum from the Caribbean and you know, it's a broad culture. But the women are central in that.
Generally, certainly in African societies, women, of course, are more tasked with raising children and that's where you start passing on culture within your community. And specifically among the castle slaves here, the women also live longer. They had a much lower mortality and we're also more less likely to be able to escape. So their presence on the island is a steadier one.
So when it comes to kind of the centrality for the community, they're playing a big role. I've used earlier work I wrote about enslaved women. I said in Uganda and I used the term women as social glue. I think women are what hold the society together.
And that's obviously a very strong role here. I like that the social women are the social blue. I should read that. It's a bit of a previous way, Castle.
And as much as they play the central communal life, unfortunately, women and girls were particularly vulnerable to sexual acquisition and exploitation, especially those who were trades lives for lack of sex. So how does gender reshape the story of slavery on James Island? Well, the other thing to know is, I mentioned that men outnumber women among the castle slaves about four to one. Among enslaved people who are brought to the island, the so-called trade slaves, the people who are being intended to be shipped to the Atlantic, men outnumber women among them, seven or eight to one.
And that's because where most of these captives are coming from is up the river into the African interior. And it's sort of a frontier area where captives are being taken and they're sold off to the northeast into the Sahara or toward the coast for the Atlantic slave trade. And what tends to happen is the women are being sold into the Sahara slave trade, because there's greater demand for women in the Sahara and North Africa and the men that are being sold toward the Atlantic. So in this area then, as I said, it's about seven or eight to one.
So there's a gender disparity there already among the population of trade slaves or those going to the Atlantic. So the issue of gender then is quite important, I think. And what studies have shown is that actually it sounds counterintuitive, but resistance on slave ships, for example, is more likely to happen when you have a higher percentage of women on board. And yeah, and so I said, it seems counterintuitive.
What seems to happen though is the women were less closely guarded. So they're able to get their hands on tools, weapons and so on, pass them to the men, and then you have greater resistance. So women may not, we don't know actually, we may not be doing as much of the direct fighting, but they're an integral part in what's happening. And so I suspect the same thing is happening on James Island, but once again, the women are not being written about so much.
There is also, did you mention the issue of potential sexual coercion or sexual exploitation? And the castle slaves on James Island at the Amia River here had a certain status. And as I said, their work hours are respected, their train in various trades and so on. And it seems that that may have helped give them some protected status.
The one incident that we have in the records of sexual exploitation happened to three women who were trade slaves, not to the castle slaves. And I relate a story in the book, whereas British guy shows up in a sailing ship and goes to the island and asks other people the island to provide him with black girls. He wants to be provided with sexual services and they tell him no. And there are, it's like women there among the trade slaves.
And you would presume slavery, well, it's about coercion, it's about violence, threats of violence, they could they have forced these women on a ship. I suppose so, but something stops them. And it may well be the number of armed castles slaves who were there because these men all had access to weapons and they were partnering with the women. So I think they do have some sort of status there.
They give some sort of protection. There's only one individual, one woman among the castle slaves who ends up being put on board of a slave ship and sent to the Americas. And I don't know why. It could have been for sexual purposes, it may be.
But it's just one of those things we won't know. So I know as much as women appear to kind of exercise some form of agency, code or constraint, it's also reading structures that they did not control. And so sometimes it's really difficult to constract all this as a historian, right? Right.
I think you're used to the word agency is an excellent one. And I try to see that in a number of things. In when you have a chapter on sickness and death and you see the centrality of women certainly there as healers, women in one of many societies are nurses and the first healers and so on. But I think that's the African community of castles, slaves taking some agency and control of healing because their alternative is a white European male doctor.
And it's pretty clear that they don't want that. All the healers that they choose are African women. And I think you're right. That shows agency to me.
We will come back to healing. But since we're talking about women, I thought we should talk about family life because it's one of the moving parts of your book where you pay strong attention to family life. And that's despite them living in this fortified labor camp, castles, slaves married, they had children, they baptized these children. They kind of formed different forms of partnership.
So how should we interpret these intimate relationships where these relationships are primarily emotional or familial or where they just survival strategies? Well, I think first off what we see is when we see the community of castles, like, the people who were forming on the island and especially from the 1750s onward, when they had a separate area of the island of themselves and dedicated housing. And there's a beautiful image actually used for the cover as well as on the inside of that book that a surveyor did that shows their housing. And I've looked at the drawings that he had done at other places along the coast and he's very accurate, even down to the policemen of trees and so on.
So I think it's a very good depiction there. But what we see is they're forming an African village. And as you know, of course, African villages aren't necessarily just about families. And we have households because a household can contain a lot of different people, not just, you know, not just a nuclear family, right?
And certainly we have a number of people here who were children who were living in foster arrangements. You had widows, you had others who were on the island here. And so what we see is as a village or a household level society. But I think what then this is where I don't have direct evidence, but you look at people and look at African villages and societies and people want, well, they want to live a normal life as much as possible.
Right. So what we see is that most of us want security. You know, we want to raise children. We want them to be, you know, healthier and have a better life than we did.
And I think those are fundamentally universal things. And certainly within Africa, it's a very, well, as a result of a pro-natalist society's typically very pro-children. Okay. And having children is as, you know, confers respect on the parents as well.
Right. So I think that, yeah, you know, there is some desire on the part of these people enslaved as they are to live as normal life as possible. They want a partner. They want to have children.
They want to build a community. Okay. So that is a type of resistance in itself. Powerful resistance.
Yeah. You see that, you see that once again, it's these situations in the Americas where people were forbidden from getting married sometimes. Right. So to be able to take that power and actually make the companies pay for it.
Right. You know, they were paying this Catholic priest to come in and baptize the children every year. Right. So, which is a way, of course, a very important rite of passage for welcoming somebody into a community.
And so, you know, you're taking the same thing with the, with holding funerals, right? You know, you're taking control of these, these events in life and turning it into a way to help create connections across your community. And I think that's, I think that's very intentional. Thank you.
So that means family life was really important and not just funding in terms of nuclear family, more importantly, like you said, and household were very important. But also, you're noting your book that diseases, they've punished, made, still, made, wasn't forming this kinship for lack of better kinship ties or family ties. Then this kind of tracks or instability make people even now value kinship ties more. Would you say that?
Because sometimes when something trappings you, will you once hold on to something more? Yeah. I think what it, I think what it does is it creates stronger bonds because, you know, when you're ill, you want somebody to take care of you, right? Yeah.
And you need to look around your community and say, who's going to do that? You know, and that creates a bond for you to know that somebody's going to take care of you. And for somebody else to know that you'll take care of them. And so having the healer and once again, having them company pay for it, which was incredible, having the African woman doctor there is huge.
And same thing with funerals. And as you know, in African society, the, you know, the, you know, the, the, one of the most exalted status isn't being king, it's being an ancestor, you know, but you can't be an ancestor first off without, you know, descendants, but also you have to be remembered. There have to be people behind you who remember you. Right.
And so, you know, having a funeral is just the first step of that. But it's also having a community of people who will, you know, pay respects to your grave, will remember you down the road, maybe named children after you. And, you know, that's, that's what creates, well, as a scholar said, the ties that bind, right? The way that people come together and stay together because there is this reliance on other people.
And so I think that's what we see here on James Island as well, among the castle slaves. They've been ripped out of their communities, whether they be from the Gold Coast or from the interior up the Gambia River. And when they get here and they're, I'm sure they're disoriented, they're in a strange environment. They're on this barren rock in the middle of a river.
Well, that's not a normal place for anybody to live, right? But they make the most of it. Thank you. They make the most of it.
And talking about that, they tried to find healing and I was so fascinated by the discussion on healing. Right about Andelia, the Madinga Hila, whose medical knowledge was valued not just only by the castle slaves, but also the Europeans. So what role did African healing practices play in this community? Well, I think it might play several.
Obviously the functional part of health. I mean, this, this place, this island in the river is notoriously unhealthy, right? I mean, you know, the whites here, Europeans are coming here. Their mortality in the first year is 40%.
Right? Year after year, it's 10%. Which means they're losing half their people. I mean, death is just hanging over this island all the time.
And it's probably worse for the trade slaves who are kept naked in a dungeon, essentially, where, I mean, you just took down the list and, you know, dozens dying. And, you know, and this is a small island, right? You cannot escape this. You cannot escape the impact of sickness and death on this island.
Right? So with that being so prevalent, obviously the role at Hila is so important. And I think, so to say functionally it's important because when someone's ill, they want to get healthy. And the others on the island want them to get healthy because they're all packed on a small place, which is easy to just, you know, flow back and forth.
We've got smallpox here, you know, a number of outbreaks through the years. So there's that. But I saw healing is about other things. It's about caring for people, right?
It's about power. Right? There's a spiritual element to that as well. You know, and that's true whether it's African healing or it's a faith healer.
You know, so it touches so many fundamental parts of life that it really becomes a key element. And as for her, and Dilia, I mean, it's also clearly important to the trading companies because they pay her salary for several years, right? I mean, that's, I mean, that kind of blew my mind, honestly, to see that. You would think maybe the castle slaves who are once again getting wages, like money together pay, but the company obviously is valuing her as well.
You know, and I think that's a huge statement. It is. It is. I mean, you do mention that the medicine wasn't just for treating illness, but also it was kind of a way of holding the community together.
And I was also wondering because on Dilia and me, perhaps many other healers may have carried with them and knowledge about heaves, about rituals, about child base and like you rightly say about spiritual protection. And it wasn't just for the benefits of the enslaved, but also for the Europeans who really struggled to survive there. So the Europeans recognized because she was definitely paid as you document, but the Europeans recognized the expertise of these healers because they had no alternative or did they genuinely once they did service from them. Well, my answer would be speculation, but I, you know, there were certainly a lot of times when the fort was supposed to have a doctor and they didn't.
But would you look at what 18th century medicine was? Okay. There were, well, there were no specific medicines in European medicine. Okay.
They had some substances they would use for almost anything. Okay. Opium and mercury mostly. And then they would bleed people, which, you know, had the effect of just weakening them.
So, I mean, European medicine just was not effective. But clearly, and Dilia and the others are, you know, we see time and again where they are healing people and their people are sick and they're being healed and and they survive and end up living for years after that. Well, you know, once again, this is a small island and the European sea, everything is going on here. They must see that and they must see this as effective.
So it wouldn't surprise me if they were having treatment from her as well. Once again, it doesn't show up in the records, but well, as you say, with no alternative and the evidence that's effective, we probably did. And we know some of them were sent, you know, off the island to places, to villages on the North Bank of the River, for example, where they were treated by other people too. So they are receiving African treatment.
So it's once again, it's one of these cultural elements that's a mixing, I think, of things. But as you say, there's herbs involved, for example, quite often, but those won't grow on the island. Nothing grows on the island. It's basically barren, which means they have to regularly travel off the island to acquire those.
So they're dedicating resources to this. You know, it tells me that they see it as important and effective. You did mention that people faced malaria, smallpox, poor sanitation, or safe drinking water, overcrowding, and some forms of violence as well. And Europeans died that the roots were really high.
But castles lived, seems to bother better than of sustaining daily life. When there were cats, like James Island was an extraordinarily dead, deadly place. And in this condition, it's a fennel, what's often called cries, where prides elaborate, emotional, but also communal. What were these rituals so important?
Well, I think you're along with healing, that death is one of the, well, it's our defining traits, you know, right? Mortality, okay? And every society has to deal with that somehow, both. Then I've got a spiritual way explaining it, answering the question of what comes next and so on.
But also for the survivors, right? And a funeral then has kind of the dual purpose then of being for the deceased, but also for the living. And like healing, you know, it's one of these, as I said a few minutes ago about healing, it's one of these things that you want to know someone will do for you when your time comes, right? That we can rely on each other.
And now of course we put these in wills and so on, and this is what I want to happen, and whether I want to be buried or cremated or whatever it is. It's clearly important to people, right? You know, the trade slaves on the island who are dying in large numbers. There are no funerals.
There's probably no burials. Very likely their bodies are thrown into the river, right? So for the castle slaves who of course see that, to be able to say, we need this, we need this ritual, this is important for us. And again, to have the company providing the resources and the ability to do that.
And then of course, ultimately the burial, which is happening off the island, down on the north bank of the river there, is a communal ritual then that helps to bind this community together, right? It takes care of the dead, but it's also really about the feelings of the living as well, right? And well, that's got even in a nutshell. And he just said, these are these are raucous, loud public affairs, right?
There's music, there's drinking, there's feasting, there's gunfire going off, you know, in celebration of a life and marking a death. And it's really something that's where the entire community can come together and take part. Thank you. So you write about funerals and show actually from what you are saying that it's all parts of people expressing their own humanity and being in community.
And you also know how company officials complain about the expenses of these funerals, yet to take a private drum, and that applies for them. Well, I think that comes down to another point I make at several points throughout the book is they sort of had to, because they know how reliant they are on this group of castle slaves who are running almost everything here, right? You know, the only thing they're not doing is keeping the account books on the island. But they're, you know, they're carpenters, they're blacksmiths, they're masons, they're soldiers, they're sailors, they're not just sailors, actually they're captains on these vessels, some of which are ocean, size of ocean going vessels.
They are doing so many jobs on this island that are key to the survival and functioning of the people there, including the Europeans. Well, and also, well, the probably the most fundamental thing, water. There is no water on this island. It is a barren rock.
They have to the castle slaves. There's a guy who's called a Petruun or captain of the water boat has to take a crew every day to go fill up water casks on the mainland, either on the north bank or the south bank or the river. And, you know, that there's no way to look at that and not see that it's fundamental to the survival of everybody on this rock. Okay.
And so I think the castle slaves are able to leverage that reliance on them into, well, some perks and privileges and rewards and so on, as well as respect. You know, I see a number of times in there when the records where the Europeans are complaining, you know, the governor or whoever the agents are in charge are complaining about the European craftsmen. Oh, that's the European carpenter guy. We hired is no good.
The European soldiers aren't very good. So there are children, some of them. I don't see those complaints about the castle slaves. You know, they are skilled.
They're doing their jobs and their jobs that everybody here relies on. And I think that gives them a status and a measure of respect. I don't see anything in the records that you might expect of, you know, white people complaining about slaves, you know, you know, denigrating them for being lazy or anything like that. Not one mention over decades.
And thank you so much. I'm interesting. I saw the sheer number of escape attempts. I think even the stats which the story of Hexa tells us he attempted.
And I think you know it's about Sisti from James Island, who had never recaptured. The number is strikingly like. And then I just thought about how it tells us about ideas about resistance in West Africa. And what do these escape attempts tell us about?
And slave Africans imagine freedom. Right. And I think I have, I think it's 50 or more documented escape attempts or escapes. But that's just for a short period of time because of record time.
Very good. You know, if we, if it happened at the same level, we could extrapolate out. We're talking, we're talking potentially hundreds. You know, and we know there were castles slaves on the island from the 1680s till 1779.
So 90 some odd years. And in that time, the castle slave population would have accounted for between probably one and 2,000 people over that time. So we could be talking hundreds of people escaping here. Men more than women.
I argue most of the weather is more men than women on the island. But men also had more opportunity. They're the ones who are sailors on boats and things like that. So, you know, you have to get off the island obviously to escape.
They had the opportunity to do so. I think women also are tied to the island more, most often because of children. There's no evidence of any escape attempts of women and children together off the island. Just one woman who went with a man who probably was our partner.
But I think it tells us, back to your direct question, it tells us fundamentally about concepts of bondage and freedom. Because if you look at the situation here, in many ways, the castle slaves had a somewhat privileged existence. Once again, they're getting wages. Their housing is provided.
Their food, their clothing, their tobacco, alcohol, their respective positions, their training, et cetera, et cetera. It certainly looks much better than someone who's held on a sugar plantation, right? With a much higher mortality rate and work hours and so on. So you have a situation where these people have what looks objectively like a relatively good life and they're fleeing from, right?
And I think that tells us right there about concepts of freedom, right? No matter how benign enslavement might be, and people talk about this system is better than the system, et cetera. Well, first I don't look at systems. I look at experience, people's lives.
And the fact is, I think nobody wants to be controlled by somebody else. There is a fundamental deep-seated need for freedom. And it's not just the castle slaves. You'll see it in my next book where I look at resistance.
The train slaves are rising up. And it's slave uprising on the island several times. And they say, you know what? We don't deserve this.
You're not going to ship us off the island. We would rather die. And they do. And same thing is, when they get onto ships and they rise up, they would rather die than be shipped to the Americas.
And the castle slaves would rather die trying to escape than live this life that's being forced on them. Thank you so much. You point out that you are not talking about systems. You are rather focused on experiences.
And I really like that. Because then we get to see people. We get to see hexa. We get to see steve.
We get to see Ducani and Delia. And it makes me think about how we can strike the balance between micro history and big picture analysis. Because there is something available that's really like. We see the silences, but we also see that many people lived.
They loved. They formed community. They resisted. They felt sick.
Some died. And it makes me question what kind of history do we want to write? And if we want to like it, I'm not framing the question of how do you write about life that's me and in silence. But how do you also tell the story from experience?
I really like how you do. Like I told you, I was a spectrum. Like this very big book. And I was like, this is really nice.
Because you really make us see these people. And when you said you have fun nights of the story, we still get to see some kind of big picture analysis using life like people's story. And they were named as well. I really like that.
What I'm trying to do is, well, what I was really inspired by were some works on communities, obviously, people. And I cite them in the book. There's Richard Dunn who did this 500 page book. He's looking at it's like people in Virginia and Jamaica.
And basically doing a comparative analysis. And there's another work by Lorena Walsh that looks at community of people in Virginia. I wanted to do something like that, but in Africa. And basically bring Africa into this conversation about Atlantic slavery and what it was.
And so to do that, then I ended up focusing on things that interest me. Where if I go to a historic home or I go to a castle in Europe or something and I'm not interested in the throne. I'm not interested in the big room. I'm interested in the kitchen.
I'm interested in where do these people go to the bathroom? I mean, I think life is about the details. And I'm fortunate because of the sources that I have to recover some of those details here for this group of people who haven't been written about before. But I think then, as I said, that adds to our knowledge about Atlantic slavery, but in Atlantic slavery that's been tilted toward the Americas, right, up toward US history in the Caribbean and Brazil and so on.
But to be able to say, look, this is happening in Africa as well. And it's happening here in a different way. I think brings Africa into this conversation in a way that it hadn't before, then before, especially for the 18th century, when sources are fewer than we would like. Thank you so much, Michael.
I have questions which was on if you were to write another chapter, what would it be? But you did mention that you are working on something on resistance, on curious what are you working on now? Well, my next book is going to be about African resistance from the same area, region around the Gambia River, looking at African resistance to the Atlantic slave trade. And what I'm looking at, well, first off, let me tell you what I found, which is resistance is much more widespread than we thought.
It's much more successful than we thought it was. And it's extremely violent. But I'm looking at everything, and people have written about resistance before, but they've tended to focus on certain types, like revolt-sense slave ships or rebellions in the Americas, or running away from the old plantation, things like that. What I wanted to do instead was to look at all of those types of resistance in this one area.
So I think we can see a bigger picture of what's going on. And the bigger picture, as I said, is much more common than we thought, and it's much more effective than we thought. So then, you know, this Castle Slays book grew out of that. But now that Castle Slays book is published, I can get back to what was the original project, and hopefully have that done it about a year or so.
So I'll let you know when it's out. And also, I look forward to it, and I hope we could have a follow-up kind of a series on your next book on resistance. I'm curious what you have for us. So thank you so much, Dr.
Michael Pike, for joining us and for bringing these lives out of the archives to us. And this has been the book, the Castle Slays of the Gambia River, a Creole, community in the 18th century Atlantic world, published by Brill in 2026. And it's been such a pleasure, haven't you? I really appreciate it.
Thank you. And to all the listeners, thank you. And please read the book, it's really a good read, very provocative, and it will make you ask so many questions. Thank you so much, Michael.
Thank you very much.