soldiers and sailors to desertion and other more direct forms of resistance to military authority. Advertisements for deserters in Jamaica regiments suggest such political avenues of explanation. For example, many reports describe deserters of Irish background. James Regan, whose heavy brogue branded him as distinctive, deserted the Kingston barrack in 1792, taking with him the clothes, money, and even the commission of his English captain. He then hired a horse and a young black guide, traveled across the island to “one of the Northside ports,” and tried unsuccessfully to pass himself off as his captain in an effort to gain passage off the island.70 A group of five deserters from the 62nd Regiment which absconded around the same time included only one Englishman and three Irishmen.71 Henry Hamilton, another native of Ireland and a weaver by trade, left the barrack at Stony Hill with an older Scottish comrade, also a weaver, in August, 1793.72 The apparent unrest among Irish soldiers and seamen in royal service in the early 1790s coincides closely with the emergence of nationalist republicanism in Ireland, a new and vital stage in the developing opposition to British rule. If deserters from British regiments in the West Indies included Irish dissidents, such activity provides some background to the role which the United Irishmen would play in the naval mutinies of 1797 at Spithead and the Nore. In the Caribbean itself, such a radical stream might sometimes find an immediate outlet in local struggles against the British. Just after the black rebels of Saint-Domingue captured Cap Français in the late spring of 1793, the commander of a British armed cutter serving off the coast of the rebellious colony identified a notorious “Irishman of prodigious size” and thick brogue as “a deserter from his cutter, on board of which he had acted as boatswain.” The deserter had recently been spotted as one of the motley crew of a large “rowboat, armed with fifty or sixty men of all colors” which preyed on British and American shipping and had apparently made common cause with the black rebels on land.73
The wide-ranging efforts of colonial governments to discourage such behavior echo parallel efforts to control runaway slaves. In Jamaica, advertisements for military deserters appeared in newspapers on the same pages as notices for slave deserters, and apprehended deserters could expect the kind of swift and severe punishment routinely meted out to rebellious slaves. Early in 1791, military authorities sentenced “a marine and a seaman” guilty of deserting one of the king’s warships in Port Royal to receive 500 lashes each, though later “the Admiral humanely remitted half the punishment.”74 Governors, officers, the Assembly, and private citizens also offered bounties for aid in the recovery of deserters, in much the same fashion as they did for absent slaves. Often the lines between different forms of desertion became blurry indeed. For example, when authorities apprehended mulatto Josef Isidro Puncel at two in the morning near the gates of the central plaza in Havana, they jailed him as a runaway slave, only to find upon closer investigation that he was actually a free deserter from the armada.75 On the other hand, since the security of planters, merchants, colonial officials, and their families depended in large measure upon the strength, loyalty, and readiness of military forces, they enjoyed some leeway which runaway slaves did not possess. Early in 1789 and again four years later, as the prospect of war loomed on the horizon, the Spanish Crown attempted to bring deserters back into the fold by issuing an amnesty covering all those found guilty of desertion and contrabanding, both at large and in prison.76
One particular incident of desertion involving a group of British regimental musicians provides a rare glimpse into Governor Balcarres’s “Pandora’s Box”—the complex urban underground protecting fugitives from the discipline of Caribbean slave society. Too often ignored by military historians, musicians were integral to British army regiments in the West Indies and elsewhere, and their role as well as their numbers appear to have expanded between the middle of the eighteenth century and the era of the Napoleonic wars.77 As military bands in Europe broadened both in size and instrumentation during this period, black musicians became increasingly prominent and by the 1780s could be found playing beside whites in all parts of the continent. Crashing cymbals and beating kettledrums, tambourines, bass drums, triangles, and so-called “Jingling Johnies,” blacks in British bands brought with them new sounds which the bands eagerly incorporated as part of the ongoing process of cultural borrowing which had always characterized British military music.78 More extensive borrowing occurred in the West Indies. In the islands, blacks appeared in European military bands very early in the century; black drummers performed in French regiments at least as early as the 1720s. By the end of the century, British regimental bands also drew readily upon black talent. The presence of local black musicians in these bands not only affected their music, but also provided disaffected British musicians routes of access to the vibrant musical culture of the islands and ultimately to the underground which nourished it.
In the 1790s in Jamaica, musicians from British regiments appear especially prone to desertion. This was certainly the case in the 10th Regiment of Foot stationed near Kingston. In April of 1793, the commanding officer of the 10th Regiment circulated in local newspapers notices for musicians who had absconded at different times that month. One of these deserters was Samuel Reed, an Irish “labourer” of about twenty-five who had played the clarinet and other instruments. Just days after Reed’s disappearance, Joseph Lees, a drummer, left the barracks to join him.79
Perhaps Reed and Lees were attempting to join two fellow musicians who had been absent for more than a year. In dramatic fashion late in February 1792, ten musicians—no doubt most of the band—had deserted from the 10th Regiment and headed for Kingston. Apparently the escape was well planned. The deserters first found shelter at the home of an old friend, a brown man called Jacob Hyam, who had himself recently served as a fifer to an artillery company in the same regiment. Closely following their trail, military authorities apprehended three of the musicians at Hyam’s home; the rest escaped. Several days later, three more of the deserters were caught, this time hiding out at the home of “an old white woman named Mary Ellis” who lived in a dark and seamy section of Kingston popularly known as “Damnation-alley.” Here those tracking the four who remained at large discovered that only a day or two before, “finding themselves warmly pursued,” the alert musicians “parted company, and took different routes.” Two of the remaining four were soon taken up shortly before they boarded a vessel at Savanna-la-Mar.80
By late March, then, only two of the original ten had managed to elude the authorities, George Theodorus Eskirkin (a native of Ireland known to friends simply as “Dorus”) and Quebec native John Sims. Both Eskirkin and Sims were accomplished musicians whose talents and interests included but ranged beyond mastery of the staple instruments issued to military musicians—the flute, hautboy, fife, and clarinet. Eskirkin, in the words of his commander, could “beat the drum,” and Sims enjoyed the “violin, violin-cello, harpsichord … basoon, and guitar.” Although the musical backgrounds of these two men differed in fundamental ways from those of the local musicians, their interests in the types of percussive and stringed instruments popular among black musicians in Jamaica may have enabled them to find kindred spirits in the underground who continued to help them evade the clutches of their pursuers. After leaving Jacob Hyam (now confined in the parish jail for having harbored the fugitives) and Mary Ellis, Sims and Eskirkin remained a step ahead of the law and moved to nearby Spanish Town, where they were often seen in the company of another notorious musician, “a black man named Jack Nailor,” like Sims “a Fiddler” who made his home somewhere “in the Jew market.” Either under Nailor’s tutelage or on their own, the two deserters began taking up disguises in order to lose themselves amid the comings and goings of the capital. Sometimes they appeared as British seamen, dressed in long black stockings and tarred baggy trousers; at other times they became Spanish, effecting accents and walking about with “coloured handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and striped linen jackets and trousers.” By mid-summer, exasperated authorities had all but given up on trying to apprehend Eskirkin and Sims, whom they now described as literally indistinguishable from their darker-skinned companions in Kingston and Spanish Town. Said to be “fishing and shooting” along the southern coast, the two musicians had come to “look as brown as some people of colour.” There is no record of either having been taken up and returned to military duty.
For Dorus and John, music proved to be the thread of common experience linking their adventure to the struggles of masterless men and women in Kingston’s