Times of the Islands Fall 2021

the reef over shallow water? Did it try to recover the supplies
still on the wreck? After a lengthy battle and taking
some risk, the pirates would probably want to recover
some booty for their efforts rather than just sail away.
Brown’s choice
Most noteworthy is the undaunted courage of the men in
battle, as indicated in Brown’s prideful letter to his father
and the Gazette account. The crew may even have saved
Brown after his imprudent brawl with the better armed
pirates, though they surely fought to survive and save
themselves first.
In an astonishing twist of irony, the pirate ship they
encountered may well have included escaped slaves.
Indeed, former slaves sometimes made up as much as
1/4 of a pirate ship’s crew. On board, these men instantly
went from bondage to liberation with the same claim to
a share of the booty and a vote in the election of the
ship’s captain as the rest of the crew. Many pirate ships
practiced this early form of democracy decades before
citizens of imperial regimes acquired anything resembling
equal rights.
It is entirely possible that Brown’s crew, caught up in
his reckless showdown, were in fact battling free men who
were recently enslaved like them. On occasion, pirates
of the Caribbean would deliberately put Black pirates
prominently on deck brandishing weapons to intimidate
merchant vessels they intended to attack. If the pirates
attacking Brown’s sloops did this, they they could have
been quite visible to Brown’s Black crew in the course of
battle. We’ll never know if they actually saw each other or
if they reflected on their respective fates in the moment.
But it is fascinating to speculate, as it adds another layer
to the tangled, intriguing history of our Islands.
Though Brown clearly admired his men’s performance,
he still could not muster the courage to see them
as fellow human beings deserving of freedom. Standing
shoulder to shoulder as cannon and musket balls and
grape shot whizzed past their heads was not enough to
crack Brown’s conviction that the men risking their lives
for him were still his property. And that is the saddest
part of this tale.
Thanks to influential contacts in England, Brown
would be granted a large tract of fertile land on St. Vincent
to cultivate sugar cane. In 1802 he began moving those
he had enslaved (he says 623, but I believe that number
to be vastly overstated) from North Caicos to St. Vincent.
“Black Caribs,” a cultural and racial mix of Carib Indians
and shipwrecked slaves from Africa, already inhabited the
This oil painting depicts the “Black Caribs” who lived on St. Vincent
when Thomas Brown was granted land there to cultivate sugar cane.
land Brown had been granted. But that is another story
for another time. Suffice to say that the Black Carib values
of acceptance and integration were lost on the planters
who took over. Brown died there in 1825 at the age of
75 without freeing any of those he had enslaved, except
maybe for one or two who may have been his offspring,
which itself is telling.
History passes judgment on how we handle the
challenges handed us by fate. But the light glares more
harshly on those with means and privilege because they
have the power to change the lives of those who have
none. In the end, Brown is both hero and anti-hero of
his own story. His audacious bravery, force of character
and defiance of convention remain undisputed. But on
that searing summer afternoon off West Caicos, when the
enslaved men in the stout sloop stood tall for Brown, he
chose to keep them captive. And for that he must be held
to account, even centuries later. a
Ben Stubenberg (bluewaterben@gmail.com) is a contributing
writer to Times of the Islands and a popular story
teller about pirates in TCI. He is the co-founder of the TCI
swim and tour adventure company, Caicu Naniki, and the
annual “Race for the Conch” Eco-SeaSwim.
AGOSTINO BRUNIAS
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