ABSTRACT

This article examines for the first time the history of labour at Antigua Naval Yard in English Harbour during the eighteenth century. It demonstrates the existence of a successful multi-year effort to smuggle fugitives from slavery aboard Royal Navy warships. Using original material from the dockyard, including administrative correspondence, and analysis of shipbuilding labour and the built environment, this article contends that this was a community effort that brought together ‘King’s Negroes’ enslaved by the crown with other Black Antiguans across the island. This article narrates and analyses this fugitive activity with two goals in mind. First, it uses the dockyard’s unique and largely unexamined history to make new contributions on subjects like British crown slavery, petit marronage, and naval labour. The article also uncovers conflict between the Royal Navy and colonial slaveholders and uses it to analyse tensions between slavery as a system of labour and slavery as a system of property. Second, by examining fugitives’ role in the previously-documented phenomenon of naval recruitment of fugitives, this article argues for the necessity of seeing fugitive activity at any scale as collective and provides one example of how historians can do so.

摘要

本文首次考察了 18 世纪英国港口安提瓜海军造船厂的劳工历史。它证明了多年来成功地将逃犯从皇家海军军舰上从奴隶制中走私的努力的存在。本文使用造船厂的原始材料，包括行政信函，以及对造船工人和建筑环境的分析，认为这是一项社区努力，将被王室奴役的“国王的黑人”与全岛的其他黑人安提瓜人聚集在一起。本文基于两个目标叙述和分析了这次逃亡活动。首先，它利用造船厂独特且很大程度上未经审查的历史，在英国王室奴隶制、小婚姻和海军劳工等主题上做出了新的贡献。这篇文章还揭示了皇家海军与殖民奴隶主之间的冲突，并用它来分析作为劳动制度的奴隶制与作为财产制度的奴隶制之间的紧张关系。其次，通过研究逃犯在先前记录的海军招募逃犯现象中的作用，本文论证了将任何规模的逃犯活动视为集体活动的必要性，并提供了历史学家如何做到这一点的一个例子。