During the early 1980s historian Peter Linebaugh and I decided to write a book about transatlantic currents of radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a project that eventually became The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press and Verso Books, 2000). But as I conducted research in southern colonial newspapers, poring over accounts of conspiracies, mutinies, and revolts by workers of all kinds, I noticed something else. It was a kind of communication that appeared repeatedly in every paper published in or near a port city: advertisements written by enslavers about fugitives who had escaped bondage by sea.
I found one curious sentence in the ads that was repeated over and over: “Masters of vessels are warned not to employ or harbor said runaways nor to take them away, or they will face the full penalties of the law.” Runaways were not specifically part of our project, but I was intrigued and began to gather material about them. I placed photocopies of the ads in a file labeled “Things I found while looking for something else.”
The file grew fatter over time. One fascinating case after another hinted at what I began to call a “maritime underground railroad.” One of my favorite figures was a man named Caesar, who ran away in 1759. He had worked on the waterfront. His enslaver believed he would try to escape as “the Cook of a Vessel, as he has been much used on board of ships.”
Caesar was apparently recaptured, for he ran away again ten years later – two escapes despite his “having no legs.” He had no easy walk to freedom, but Caesar and his fellow fugitives had captured my imagination. I began to create new files under the rubric “maritime runaways.” My chance discovery grew into something bigger. In 1990, I pulled together this expanding body of material for a plenary lecture I had been invited to give at the annual meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies in Minneapolis.
My subject? “The Maritime Frontier of Freedom.”
But that book had to wait. Conceptualizing, linking, and analyzing the acts and traditions of resistance in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America in The Many-Headed Hydra proved to be a challenge, and a lot of the research we did for the project did not make it into the final manuscript. Maritime runaways were one group of rebels among many who were not included.