slave trader Archives - A Parcel of Ribbons

**A three masted barque and a small pink – Atlantic pinks were much larger**

By way of an occasional post, this is an illustration of why you should never give up on a brick wall.

Many years ago I discovered the wonderful Augier sisters, their name recorded sometimes as Hosier, and the name of the father who freed them in his Will was John Augier.

He was that mystery person, the one you can never get beyond, whose origins remain mysterious. But he is also an example of why it is always worth re-visiting those brick walls.

Recently I have been concentrating on local history in England. But this week I was contacted by an Augier descendant which sent me back to look at my previous research.

New material is added to online resources all the time and with help from a relatively recent family tree on Ancestry, and a new search for John Augier in other sources, I think I can update what I know about him through a story of piracy in 1671 and naturalisation in 1693.

In May 1672 Peter Brent, Serjeant Plumber to his Majesty, and John Augier, part owners of the pink Peter of London presented a petition for compensation following the seizing of their ship whose other owner was Charles Cogan¹. A ‘pink’ was a small ship with a narrow stern, derived from the Dutch word pincke meaning pinched. They had a large cargo capacity, were generally square rigged and the larger type were used in the Atlantic trade.

On board the ship, sailing from Jamaica to New York in August 1671 were the master Thomas Wayt (or Weight); John Patten a merchant, who lost in money, goods, and plate to the value of £300; Simon Reynolds and Nathaniel Radcliffe, gentlemen; merchants Richard Cook, John Pate, Robert Wendall, John White and Richard Elliot who claimed £1,435 between them. Thomas Wayte claimed £40 and Charles Cogan £1,000. All these made their claim in Jamaica in January 1672 and in May Peter Brent and John Augier claimed a further £1,000. The claims were recorded in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies which can be viewed in British History Online.

Those on board the ship, which was seized by a Captain Candelero of the St. Francisco, were taken with the ship to Campeachy (now Campeche) in Mexico. They were stripped of their clothes and possessions, had their trunks ransacked and their papers taken in spite of telling Candelero that a peace treaty was now in effect. The ship was stripped of sails and rigging before the crew and passengers were eventually released. Presumably Candelero had no use for the ship itself or not enough men to crew it.

Now here’s a small puzzle.

If John Augier part owned a ship trading between Jamaica and New York in 1671 he must have been at least in his early twenties. If he fathered daughters in the first two decades of the eighteenth century he was by then quite an old man for the times. So could the man who freed his enslaved children have been the son of the part owner of the Peter? I have found no baptism record to confirm this, but Kingston parish records do not exist before 1721.

On 05 September 1693 John Augier and his business partner Peter Caillard (who later had children with John’s daughter Susanna) both obtained naturalisation in Jamaica.² Earlier, on 15 April 1687, a Peter Caillard was one of hundreds of Huguenot refugees naturalised by the Crown.³

My first reaction was that this must mean that John Augier was probably a French Huguenot, and correspondence in French to Caillard and Augier from the Huguenot Crommelin family, who were using them to forward correspondence to Daniel Crommelin, might support this.⁴ At the time of this correspondence Caillard and Augier were based in Kingston.

The John Augier who obtained naturalisation in 1693 may have intended to patent land in Jamaica which he could not do if he was not British. Perhaps having started out trading in enslaved Africans and goods exported from Jamaica to America and England, he also wanted to settle permanently in Jamaica and profit from ownership of a plantation.

Alternatively it is possible that rather than being French John Augier was the son of a British citizen, but had been born abroad and was thus regarded legally as an alien who would have to become naturalised in order to own land in Jamaica. This situation changed in 1700 after which the children of British citizens born abroad were regarded as British.

More detail might be added to the story of John Augier by examining Jamaican land patents with which the naturalisations were recorded. These have been microfilmed but are not online.

Because Augier is a relatively uncommon name I think it is reasonable to conclude that the man who was part owner of the ship Peter sailing from Jamaica in 1671 was either the father or the grandfather of Susanna Augier and her sisters. Also that he was in partnership in Kingston, trading in enslaved Africans and Jamaican produce, with Peter Caillard the father of some of his many grandchildren, and that he owned property in the parish of St Andrew where his daughters Jane and Sarah were baptised (albeit the transcriptions have different spellings of the surname).⁵

‘America and West Indies: May 1672’, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669-1674, ed. W Noel Sainsbury (London, 1889), pp. 354-364. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol7/pp 354-364 [accessed 1 September 2024]. ↩︎
Bockstruck, LLoyd DeWitt. 2005. Denizations and Naturalizations in the British Colonies in America, 1607-1775. Baltimore, USA. Genealogical Publishing Company. p.9. https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 05 September 2024. ↩︎
Agnew, C.A.1871. Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV. London: Reeves and Turner, p.45. ↩︎
https://www.crommelin.org/history/Biographies/Frederic/Year1694-3.htm ↩︎
Baptisms (PR) Jamaica, St Andrew. 04 April 1710. AUGINE, Jane. Jamaica, Church of England Parish Register transcripts (Image 36). https://familysearch.org : accessed 05 September 2024.
Baptisms (PR) Jamaica, St Andrew.13 November 1712. AUGIRE, Sarah. Jamaica, Church of England Parish Register transcripts (Image 37). https://familysearch.org : accessed 05 September 2024. ↩︎

This is not a book to be taken lightly in any sense. It is a large and solid tome, one to be requested as a birthday or Christmas present, to be proudly displayed and frequently pored over. It is carefully researched, beautifully put together and wonderfully illustrated.

Jackie Ranston came to the story via the history of the Lindo family and rather than simply begin with the birth of the artist, born in Kingston in 1794 the son of Abraham Medes Belisario and Esther Lindo, she first sets him in his Jewish family context. The families fled to England from the Inquisition and settled in the small London Jewish community. Ranston traces their activities in London and Europe and then tracks them to Jamaica where Abraham Mendes Belisario arrived as an adventurous 18 year-old in 1786, and where Alexandre Lindo, who had arrived two decades earlier, was already established as a property developer, slave trader and Kingston’s leading Jewish merchant. In 1791 Abraham married Lindo’s daughter Esther who brought with her a generous marriage settlement.

Early in the nineteenth century Alexandre Lindo lent large sums to the French, then in conflict with the British, and subsequently unable to recover his money died demented and bankrupt in London in 1812. The Belisario family were also back in London and suffering hard times – Esther and her daughters set up a boarding school for Jewish girls in Clapton, and in 1809 Abraham Mendes Belisaro was appointed to manage a sugar estate on Tortola. There the slaves were treated with unimagineable cruelty, particularly by Arthur Hodge, owner of the Bellevue estate. Such were his excesses that he was eventually prosecuted for murder, most unusually the testimony of a black woman was accepted by the court, and Hodge was hanged. Abraham Belisario had the account of the trial published in London at his own expense, but never returned to live there, dying in Tortola in 1825 a year after Esther had died in London.

Meanwhile young Isaac Mendes Belisario had become a pupil of Robert Hills and one of his first known works was a watercolour of the interior of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, painted in 1812. For two decades he painted in London, became a member of the Stock Exchange, had a short lived partnership with his uncle Jacob, who had a role in the fraudulent Poyais scheme (involving a fictional Central American state) and eventually, having finally obtained access to some family funds from the sale of the last remaining Lindo properties to Simon Taylor, left London for Jamaica for the sake of his health.

Given what we know of the graveyard that Jamaica could be for white settlers this may seem an odd ddecision, until you also remember what a damp, crowded, insanitary and smog filled city London was in the 1830s.

Isaac arrived in Kingston in December 1834 and having made contact with various cousins still on the island, immediately sought out premises for a studio. Among four portraits he painted in 1835 were those of Jamaican Chief Justice Sir Joshua Rowe and his wife. Later he was commissioned by the Marquess of Sligo to paint his Jamaican estates, the Marquess having been appointed as Governor of Jamaica. Sligo was a descendant of Dennis Kelly, who with his brothers had owned large estates in Jamaica and whose Wills are transcribed here.

Jackie Ranston’s book takes its title from the prospectus that Belisario prepared during the time that Sligo was Governor Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica. The lithographs were planned to illustrate the carnival known as Jonkonnu or John Canoe a fusion of African and European traditions dating back to the early days of slavery, and Belisario researched carefully for the accompanying text. Ranston’s book reproduces in full folios 1, 2 and 3, which came out in 1837 and 1838.

At this point Belisario ran into trouble, he had lost the services of the person who coloured the prints, and his own health was suffering. In fact he had tuberculosis and he now returned home to live with his sisters in Clapton, where the damp air from Hackney Marshes can have done little to improve his condition. Perhaps it was this that prompted him to journey once more to Kingston where not long after his return he witnessed a catastrophic fire which began in a foundry on Harbour Street and destroyed a swathe of downtown Kingston. Belisario captured the event in three dramatic lithographs and a map of the area affected by the fire, on which he collaborated with Adolphe Duperly.

Some time after this, Belisario left Jamaica for the last time and he died at his sisters’ home in Lower Clapton on the 4th of June 1849.

Apart from a number of maps, the book contains family trees of the Lindo and Belisario families, extensive endnotes and bibliography, and is fabulously well illustrated, not only with Belisario’s work but with numerous images relating to Jewish history, Jamaica, slavery and emancipation. Underpinning it all is a wealth of detailed research.

This is a fabulous book, and while not cheap is absolutely worth the price for anyone interested in Jamaica, Belisario, his background and his art.

Belisario : sketches of character : a historical biography of a Jamaican artist by Jackie Ranston. Mill Press, Kingston, Jamaica 2008

ISBN: 9768-16816-1 and ISBN 13: 978-9768-16816-0

A Parcel of Ribbons

Eighteenth Century Jamaican Family History

Tag Archives: slave trader

Never Give Up – seeking John Augier

Belisario – a great Jamaican artist