Macintosk: a tale of two families

 

 

Marie Aymard, the matriarch in An Infinite History, never went anywhere, as far as I can tell. When the book begins in a small town in France, in 1764, she was sixty-one, and she was trying to find out what had happened to the small fortune of her late husband, a carpenter. The fortune consisted, or so she had heard, in a certain number of slaves that he had purchased in the island of Grenada. Her husband had gone to Grenada as the indentured servant to a man called Jean-Alexandre Cazaud. Cazaud was the connection between Marie Aymard’s family and the family of the Johnstones, who were the subject of The Inner Life of Empires.

The destinies of Cazaud and the Johnstones collided in Grenada. The island was ceded by France to Britain in 1763, and reconquered by the French in 1779. The intervening years were a time of, in Alexander Johnstone’s words, “the utmost state of violence & distraction.” It was a time, too, of exuberant investment in mortgages on the enslaved. Cazaud, in 1770, was one of the neighbours who signed the valuation of the Johnstones’ 266 slaves in the Bacaye plantation in Grenada, in connection with a new mortgage. The litigation over the Bacaye mortgage continued for a generation. Other mortage disputes exploded over the course of 1770s, as mortgagors “hid” their slaves from the mortgagees, or “stole away” with them to other islands. (I am trying to write about these distractions at the moment, including in "Where is Capital?")

It is here that William Macintosh comes in. Macintosh is the subject of Innes Keighren’s eagerly awaited (by me and others) book, and of his remarkable research project.  Macintosh, like Cazaud himself -- and like the pastry cook Klotz (Klocq, Blocq, Clod, Bloch, Bloth, Kloche, Kloz, Cloth, Cloche, Klots, Kloss, or Kloste) in An Infinite History -- flits into and out of the historical record in many orthographies. I have another version to contribute, “Macintosk.”

This occurs in a letter, or the translation of a letter, from the governor of Grenada to the governor of the Isles du Vent (including Martinique), dated 24 November 1774, of which Macintosh was the bearer. He went there in one of the “king’s ships.” The letter is about two mortgagors in Grenada, Louis Donde and Benjamin Hicks, who had fled the island with their slaves and a cargo of indigo. The point of the letter was to ask the French governor, as a “member of society,” to provide no protection to these two “miserable individuals,” and to give orders that “they, their slaves, of whom there are 120, as well the money proceeding from the sale of the indigo, be remitted to William Macintosk, Equier,” a “person of consideration.”

Macintosh did not sail back to Grenada with the two debtors and the 120 slaves. The most that the French governor vouchsafed, in a letter of 4 December 1774, was that Messrs Donde and Hicks would be arrested, “if they can be found in the islands of my government.” By 1778, Macintosh was himself a fugitive, in the account of his partner in the islands, William (Johnstone) Pulteney MP, brother of the Bacaye proprietor, and leading expert on the English and  Dutch law of mortgages on the enslaved.