Thieving Three-Fingered Jack

Three-Fingered Jack" (aka Bristol, Jack Mansong) was a fugitive slave and freedom fighter who, in the late eighteenth century, terrorized the British colony of Jamaica.Although his sabotage of the colonial machine lasted only two years before he was captured and killed by Maroons in 1781, he became a Jamaican folk hero and a transatlantic model of black resistance.Thieving Three-Fingered Jack charts the literary and cultural history of his rise to fame, from the earliest reports of his exploits in the Jamaican Royal Gazette (1780) through to the Jamaica National Pantomime performance of Ted Dwyer's Mansong (1980).Frances Botkin has tracked the "badass rebel" through the archives in London, Boston, New York, Spanish Town, and Kingston.She has also followed his footsteps through rural Jamaica, consulting people from the Jamaican parishes of Saint Thomas and Portland, particularly those of Maroon descent, and across the Cunha Cunha Pass.The English figurations of Three-Fingered Jack, othering him as the terror and scourge of Jamaica, serve to reveal how the colonizers defined themselves against those whom they both enslaved and feared.But his persistence as a protagonist in contemporary Jamaican and U.S. popular culture also provides Botkin with a springboard to explore "the problematic legacy of black masculinity in the Atlantic world" (p.22).The first report of the battle between Jack's black magic (obeah) and the Christian powers of John Reeder (Quashee), the "white obi" who shot and killed him, occurred in Benjamin Moseley's A Treatise on Sugar in 1799.As Botkin points out, both William Earle's sentimental novel, Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and William Burdett's adventure story, Life and Exploits of Mansong, commonly called Three-finger'd Jack, the terror of Jamaica (1800), drew heavily on Moseley's account.But Burdett also borrowed extensively from Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior of Africa (1858).John Fawcett's Obi; or Three-Finger'd Jack, which debuted on the London stage in 1800, again cited Moseley.It is likely, however, that Fawcett's pantomime also drew on contemporary accounts of the Caribbean slave rebellions (in Saint Domingue, Saint Vincent, Suriname, and Jamaica), particularly evoking the image of the Black Jacobin, Françoise-Dominique Toussaint.(See Jenna Gibbs, "Toussaint, Gabriel, and Three Finger'd Jack: 'Courageous Chiefs' and the 'Sacred Standard of Liberty' on the Atlantic Stage," Early American Studies, 13, 3 [2015], pp.626-660.)Botkin's introduction provides a useful overview of the texts that she surveys.There is such a plethora of these, and their intertextual relationships are so multifarious, however, that the reader begins to wish as the

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Battle · Colonialism · Diaspora · Maroon · Sociology · Visual arts · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History