It is tempting to say she was being regarded in the same way as the horse or its saddle (the ‘furniture’). But that would be untrue. She was not treated as a dumb animal or an inanimate possession. She was regarded both as a person and as property – valued, in terms of cash, for qualities only a human can have. Therein lies the deep evil of chattel slavery. 

She was already an excellent worker in the cotton fields (which needed many skills) but, with some training, she could be ‘a good Washer and needle woman’ – the buyer was asked to pay money for that human potential. A ‘good needle woman’ was worth something.

*  *  *

The people who plied needles, mostly Black women, not only served white slave-holders but helped to hold the society of enslaved people together – helped individuals, families and wider groups to survive slavery. Their stitching created the fabric of family and society. Some basic clothing was provided by slave-holders: for men, a jacket, trousers and hat; a dress and a hat for women. But it was given sparingly, and often grudgingly, usually once a year – sometimes at Whitsun, along with tobacco and pipes, salt, extra stock fish and other goods. This was done with some show, as if it were a display of generosity. But inadequate clothing was a common grievance, part of the grinding oppression which wore people down. Often only the material was provided – the coarse linen cloth known as osnaburgs. Three ells for a man, five for a woman, six for domestic servants and an ell-and-a-half for children. An ell was about a metre. To provide warmth, some degree of dignity and – if possible – some personal style or mark of individuality, osnaburgs had to be cut and sewn, made into clothes. It was women who did this. Needle women. 

How? Perhaps they sometimes made needles out of fish bone or hard woods but metal needles were sold in the colony stores and by enslaved hucksters who travelled between the plantations hawking their wares. Thousands of needles – and thread – were among the gifts given each year to the Amerindian tribes to ensure their help in recapturing ‘runaways’. Needles were essential in the households of planters and, one way or another, they would find their way into the hands of enslaved women.

We can see, from other newspaper advertisements, that they were often ‘Whitechapel needles’ – from the district of London which had been a centre of needle-making for centuries. You could call a perceptive person ‘as sharp as a Whitechapel needle’. Charles Dickens did it in A Christmas Carol. These women had to be as sharp as Whitechapel needles – they had to see the opportunities if they, and those they cared for and cared about, were to survive slavery. Sometimes these opportunities came at a cost.

*  *  *

Some enslaved women became free, or re-gained their freedom, because they were in sexual relationships with white men and bore their children – or because they were themselves the children of such relationships. They were a minority. Most sexually abused women and their children remained in slavery. But this was a route to freedom, open to some.  

*  *  *

Clothing was important for ‘free black’ and ‘free coloured women’ (as they would have described themselves). Something better than coarse osnaburgs. Fine dresses were a mark of their freedom – denied to enslaved women – and a display of whatever wealth they had been able to accumulate. The richest of the free coloured women in Demerara, Dorothy Thomas, had clothes shipped from London and in 1813 she was selling them from her house – Barcelona silk, checked Madras handkerchiefs, crepe, cambrics, ribbons &c. &c. &c.

*  *  *

Susanne Kerr called herself ‘a free mulatto native of the island of St Vincent’. As she lay dying in Demerara in 1814, she wrote her will – and a copy is in Scotland. Her executor was George Inglis, an Inverness-born planter in Guyana, to whom she had borne four children. The children had all been taken away by George for education at Inverness Royal Academy. Susanne was alone as she wrote her last testament. She left some of her most precious personal possessions to her sister Nanette in St Vincent – two trunks with her best ‘wearing apparel’. And among her ‘trinkets’, bequeathed to her eldest daughter Helen Inglis, now married in Scotland, was her gold thimble. Susanne, too, was a needle woman. Her gold thimble would have found its way to Scotland and, perhaps, in 1848 it went with one of Helen’s daughters – Susanne’s grand-daughters – to New Zealand.

There are other threads to follow. Since the 1760s thousands of women in Inverness and around the eastern Highlands could earn some much-needed cash by spinning flax into coarse linen yarn. This was taken south and woven into osnaburgs – the coarse, brown cloth given this name because it was first made is Osnabruck, in Germany. It was also known as ‘slave cloth’ and, shipped to the Caribbean, became Scotland’s most valuable export. The thread in the needle of an enslaved woman in Guyana, stitching clothes for her family, can be followed back across the Atlantic to the loom of a Scotsman in Fife and then to the hands of a Gaelic-speaking woman sitting at a spinning wheel in a Highland cottage. 

And it ran further still – for the flax was not grown in Scotland but in the Russian Empire, in fields and gardens worked by serf families. Women tended the gardens. It was bought by merchants and taken – by sled on the snow and by barge along canals and rivers from as far away as the Ukraine – to Riga and St Petersburg, from where it was shipped to Inverness and Cromarty. The thread was a line of profit, entered into many ledgers.

*  *  *

On 13 January 1806, twenty-year old Edward Fraser sat in the house on the Union estate in Berbice – the neighbouring colony to Demerara, now also part of the Republic of Guyana. That evening, by candlelight, he would try to darn his stockings and write to his mother in Inverness. He was homesick. She had sent him jars of mustard and marmalade and he wanted to thank her. In his letter he wrote that he could have told one of the enslaved women, like Jacoba the cook, to do the darning – but they would do it so badly it wasn’t worth it. If that was a small act of resistance on the women’s part  – a small unravelling of white power – then Edward did not see it. He kept going with his needle.

*  *  *

Many young men came from the north of Scotland to the coast of Berbice, where in a few years around 1800 new plantations had been created by empoldering the coastal mud-flats. They were made with the forced labour of enslaved Africans but named after homes in Scotland – or to satisfy some other whim or fancy. From Ross-shire alone, threaded along sixty miles of the Berbice coast, there were nineteen such plantation names, many of them surviving as villages today. It is a haunting litany of exploitation.

Alness, Ankerville, Brahan,
Cromarty, Culcairn, Dingwall,
Edderton, Fearn, Foulis,
Fyrish, Geanies, Glastullich,
Kiltearn, Lemlair, Nigg,
Novar, Ross, Tain, Tarlogie.

There are the same number again from around Inverness and from the east coast of Sutherland. 

*  *  *

Some of the profits made from these plantations were invested in land purchases in Scotland and in improvements in farming. One place to see this is along the northern shores of the Cromarty Firth at Nigg Bay – on the small estate of Bayfield. It was bought, along with a number of other properties in Ross-shire, by Hugh Rose, a local boy (son of a parish minister) who had made his money in dodgy-dealings with contracts for naval supplies in the Caribbean and then from plantation-ownership and slave-holding in Guyana. Hugh became the leading ‘improver’ in Easter Ross with a passion for drainage. Most of that was field drainage but at Bayfield he decided to reclaim land from the sea. That involved building sea walls, digging drainage channels and creating a sluice gate on the main water course to stop sea water flowing back up onto the new fields at high tides. In Guyana they use a Dutch word and call that a koker.

In October 2024, I walked with Maybelle Peters down a track beside one of the drainage channels at Bayfield. We had passed the bank and ditch at the back of the fields – they would call it the ‘back dam’ in Guyana. The autumn wind blew through the reeds, as it blows through the cane fields 5,000 miles away. Behind us on higher ground was Bayfield House, still said to be haunted by ‘the white lady of Bayfield’  – Hugh Rose’s wife Arabella, killed (so the story goes) by an unnamed ‘free coloured woman’ brought here from the Caribbean.

But the landscape is haunted enough without looking for her.

David Alston
Cromarty, Scotland
February 2025

SOURCES

Newspaper extracts from The Essequebo & Demerary Royal Gazette available through the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida.

Will of Susanne Kerr, Inverness Museum, Inglis Papers.

Trevor Burnard, Hearing Slaves Speak (The Caribbean Press, 2010). For the example of allocation of osnaburgs to enslaved people see p.46.

London: Real and Imagined. In a strange twist of history, this description of Whitechapel (with a reference to Whitechapel needles) was written by George Augustus Sala (1828–95), the great-grandson of the free woman of colour, Dorothy Thomas, sometimes called ‘The Queen of Demerara’.