Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Images, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Keeping Family
- Part 1 Surviving Slavery, Transportation and Forced Labour
- Part 2 On the Road: Mobility, Wellbeing, and Survival
- Part 3 In the Absence of Family, Support in Unfamiliar Environments
- Part 4 Managing Kinship-Based Businesses and Trading Networks
- Part 5 Ensuring the Survival of Maritime Families
- General Index
- Index of Persons
3 - ‘If I Should Fall Behind’: Motherhood, Marriage, and Forced Migration in the Mid-Nineteenth- Century Leeward Islands
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Images, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Keeping Family
- Part 1 Surviving Slavery, Transportation and Forced Labour
- Part 2 On the Road: Mobility, Wellbeing, and Survival
- Part 3 In the Absence of Family, Support in Unfamiliar Environments
- Part 4 Managing Kinship-Based Businesses and Trading Networks
- Part 5 Ensuring the Survival of Maritime Families
- General Index
- Index of Persons
Summary
Abstract
What happens when a mother has to leave her young child and husband behind to go far away to work? Matilda Percival, a free woman of colour, lived separated from her family for at least two years, and maintained contact by writing home. This chapter uses Matilda's letters as the basis for a discussion of not just Matilda and her family, but a larger exploration of how enslaved and free people of colour maintained family relationships in the mid-nineteenth century. Themes such as migration, information networks, and family structures will form the background to a story that revolves around the struggle of one small family to deal with distance, sickness, uncertainty, financial insecurity, and jealousy.
Keywords: Caribbean; family; women; migration; labour; free people of colour
Who wouldn't have wanted to leave St. Eustatius in 1860? This tiny island of around 21 sq. km – little more than an atoll sticking out of the Caribbean – was over half a century into its decline. In the late eighteenth century, this ‘Golden Rock’ was the ‘Emporium to the World’, a place integral to the success of the American Revolution, and worthy of sacking by a British Admiral. However, these days were long past by the time Mathilda Percival, a free woman of colour, sailed to St. Thomas between late 1859 and early 1860. Hurricanes, the English occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, the decline in the viability of slave labour, marronage, global shifts in sugar production, and the concomitant migration of its population, not to mention the marked disinterest of the Dutch colonial administration, had plunged the island into a malaise from which it still has not recovered. By the mid-nineteenth century, the island's modest sugar plantations were largely abandoned. The island was running a continual deficit, which the Dutch colonial administrators begrudgingly and irregularly refilled. Its population had started to drift away to North America and the other nearby Leeward islands, particularly Swedish St. Barthélemy, and Mathilda's destination – Danish St. Thomas.
Mathilda travelled alone, leaving her husband, John James Percival, and young daughter, Adriana, behind on St. Eustatius. She was separated from her family for at least two years.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 1550–1850 , pp. 79 - 100Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020