“ABOUT 14 years of age ... strayed from his master’s house ... ”
“Speaks broad Scotch ... suspected to have taken the Carlisle road ... ”
“Has been on several voyages at sea ... is a good barber and shaves well ... ”
“A brass collar about her neck, on which are engraved these words ‘Gustavus Brown in Dalkeith his Negro, 1726’ ... ”
Newspaper adverts promising rewards for the return of runaway slaves in 18th-century Scotland reveal a forgotten strand in the country’s past.
The material, assembled by academics and archivists, went online today and proves how the international slave trade brought its victims to Scotland’s cities and villages.
Clippings entered into the database, part of the Runaway Slaves in Britain project, tell how enslaved and bound men, women and children escaped mercantile homes and the estates of the elite in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stranraer, Greenock and Alloa.
Some were thought to have made for the Highlands, others for the opposite coast or across the Border.
Most were of African origin, with others from the Indian sub-continent. A few more were Indigenous Americans.
Some owners promised to forgive them for “straying”, others to prosecute any who aided them.
The Glasgow University experts who launched the database – which also includes entries from England – say the result serves as a stark reminder of how “routine and unremarkable” slavery in Britain was in the 1700s.
Simon Newman, professor of history at the university’s College of Arts, told The National: “Although we can walk around Glasgow and see Buchanan Street and Glassford Street, which are named after merchants with links to the slave trade, it’s easy to think slavery is something that happened over ‘over there’.
"Slavery happened here too.”
More than 800 advertisements from 18th-century newspapers were placed by masters and owners offering rewards to anyone who captured and returned the runaways.
However, these are said to represent a “far larger” number of enslaved and bound people, as many masters did not place such ads, and a “great many” slaves and bound servants do not appear to have tried to escape.
Of those who did, some, Newman says, were trying to avoid a harsher fate – transfer to the “New World” and Caribbean colonies where they would be stripped of what little rights they had.
One example is the 1756 case of Jamie Montgomery, whose life in Ayrshire town Beith was abruptly ended when his owner forcibly removed him onto a Virginia-bound ship at Port Glasgow.
The apprentice carpenter had been accepted into the local church and baptised by the Reverend John Witherspoon, who would become a founding father of the United States, and escaped for Edinburgh, where he was detained and jailed. He died several months later, pending a hearing.
Newman said: “I’m sure he was the only black person in Beith, but he was able to join the church and live as a virtual white person. It’s possible he had formed a relationship with someone. He’s going back to a place where everything he has gained will be lost and he will simply be property. So he runs away.
“I would never want to say that Scotland or England weren’t racist, of course they were. But if you are in somewhere like Jamaica, the enslaved outnumber white men by 12 to one. Whites live in perpetual fear of slave rebellion, so they react in brutal ways.”
Some of the runaways were sailors, dock workers, craftsmen, labourers and washerwomen. Most were domestic servants in the households of elite. A slave was a status symbol and was dressed to reflect that, with adverts detailing their velvet collars, coloured waistcoats and silver buckled shoes. However, one placed in February 1727 shows how 18-year-old “Ann” had to wear a brass collar branding her the property of Dalkeith’s Gustavus Brown.
Newman said: “In Jamaica, the collar would have been iron, it would have been about punishment. This one has possibly been made by a jeweller and is about showing off.
“When he dies 35 years later there’s an older enslaved woman sold off called Nan. Was that the same woman, by then possibly a grandmother? We don’t know.”
On the loss of these stories from the nation’s memory, Newman says the process is mostly “accidental”, explaining: “Because there weren’t huge numbers of these people, because they formed relationships with the white population, they just disappeared.
“In somewhere like Glasgow or Port Glasgow, I don’t think it would be unusual to see people of colour.
“I suspect there are a good number of us who have African DNA.”
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