A stark document settling the pre-nuptial financial affairs of George Poyntz Ricketts (1749-1800) and his soon to be wife Sophia (nee Watts, 1752-1830). The marriage brought great wealth, social prestige and political power to Poyntz Ricketts who was a white Jamaican-born plantation owner. Poyntz Ricketts wealth rested largely on the family slave-run sugar plantations in Jamaica.
The five sheets that make up this document provide a brutally clear picture of the often hidden relationship between the horrors of the slave trade and the genteel comfort of English upper-class life: the marriage between George and Sophia is here literally underpinned by the lands in Jamaica being transacted along with the lives of hundreds of black slaves, their children and their future children.
Added to this, is the harrowing reality that George Poyntz Ricketts had half-siblings who were the result of his father’s abuse of his female slaves. In Jacob Rickett’s will (George’s father) he left money for a “free mulatto” named James to be educated and placed in trade with a sum of £300 set aside for him, he also provided for “the child my Negro Aurilla is now big with” to be maintained and given “£100 or three Negroes” at the age of 21.
The Ricketts family had been established in Jamaica since the arrival of Captain William Ricards, afterwards, Ricketts (c.1633-1700), with the parliamentary army which captured the island in 1655 as the commander of Bluefields Fort in Westmoreland Parish, Cornwall County, in the south-west of the island (principal town Savanna-la-Mar).
Captain William Ricketts’s 4th son George (c.1684-1760) established a plantation at Canaan, was Custos Rotulorum of Westmoreland Parish, and a Major-General of the Militia. He is said to have had 27 children born living by his wife Sarah Wayte or Waite (c.1688-1759). His son Jacob (c. 1719-56) predeceased him. Jacob had married Hannah Poyntz and established a planation named Midgham, after his wife’s family home in Berkshire, which adjoined the Canaan Plantation. Their son was George Poyntz Ricketts (1749-1800). As Jacob Ricketts’s will (PROB 11/826/325) suggests, George Poyntz Ricketts had at least one mixed-race brother, James, with another mixed-race sibling expected at the time of his father’s death:
“ It is my will and desire that the free mulatto James be maintained and educated at School in Writing Writing [sic] and Accounts until the Age of fifteen and then put to some handicraft trade and when out of his time to be paid £300 currency to set himself up. Item it is my will and desire that the Child my Negroe named Aurilla is now big with if a Mulatto shall be manumitted effranchised and set free and shall have at the Age of twenty one years £100 or three Negroes.“
Edward Long gave an account of Westmoreland Parish in The History of Jamaica (1774), Vol. II, p. 191ff. In 1768, there were 15186 “Negroes’” 13750 cattle, 96 plantations producing 8000 hogsheads of sugar, and 96 other settlements.
George Poyntz Ricketts [GPR] was 22 at the time of his marriage to Sophia Watts while she was an “infant” (i.e. under 21). Her father William Watts (c.1722-64), a fabulously wealthy East India Company official, of South Hill Park, Bracknell, Berkshire and Hanover Square, London, was dead, and her mother Frances, née Croke (1725/8-1812) had returned to India where she married a clergyman and become known as ‘Begum Johnson’. Sophia’s brother was also under-age. Consequently the couple’s financial affairs were placed in the hands of four trustees, two for each party: Sir William Milner, 2nd Baronet, of Nun Appleton Hall, Yorkshire (a friend of the groom’s father and one his guardians when a minor), William Poyntz (1734-1809), of Midgham, Berkshire (a relative of the groom’s mother), Charles Jenkinson (1729-1808), of Parliament Street, Westminster (brother-in-law of the bride; he had married her elder sister Amelia but she had died aged 19 in 1770 soon after the birth of their first child; later 1st Earl of Liverpool), and Charles Wolfram Cornwall (1735-89), of Golden Square, Westminster (cousin and brother-in-law of Charles Jenkinson; later Speaker of the House of Commons) [hereafter Sir WM, WP, CJ and CWC]. They negotiated a very complicated pre-nuptial financial settlement for the young couple that involved matching her cash and money investments with his property and other assets in Jamaica.
Sophia was wealthier than her fiancé and her wealth was in money whereas his was tied-up in land in Jamaica. She had £9174/8/- in 3% Bank Annuities, £1870 in cash and debts, and £4222/2/6 “in reversion” (i.e., due at an unspecified date, perhaps on her mother’s death or remarriage). Under the agreement GPR was to pay her £525 for “present necessary occasions” prior to their marriage. In turn she was to pay him £4000 immediately after their marriage while he was to vest properties in Jamaica in their trustees for the benefit of any future children to the value of £1200 per annum to secure a mortgage of £10,000 with interest at 5% per annum.
It is not clear whether the Midgham Estate plantation was sold at this time to satisfy the mortgage or whether it was retained until his death. In a codicil to his lengthy Will dated 31 January 1793 (PROB 11/1342/48), GPR directed that “all and singular my Messuages Lands tenements Hereditaments and real Estate whatsoever situate lying and being in the said Island of Jamaica together with all and singular the Buildings Negro and other Slaves Cattle Coppers Mills Utensils and Appurtenances thereunto belonging and all my Estate and Interest therein” should be held in trust by a cousin, George Crawford Ricketts (1750-1811), of Spanish Town, Jamaica, to be sold as soon as possible with the balance after the payment of any debts to be applied to the residue of his estate. William Stone Woollery (1774-1805), proprietor of the Midgham and Long Pond estates in Westmoreland, Jamaica, died at sea on a voyage to England on 9 June 1805. He was the son of Robert Dunstan / Dunston Woollery (c. 1750-92), of Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica.
The newly-married couple lived at Grove Place, Nursling, Hampshire, and later at Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square, Marylebone, London. They had six children: George Poyntz Ricketts II (1774-1815), Bengal Civil Service; Charles Milner Ricketts (1776-1867), Bengal Civil Service, MP for Hereford 1871-74; Isabella (Ricketts) Batson (1782-1845); Mordaunt Ricketts (1786-1862), Bengal Civil Service, sometime Resident at the court of Lucknow, Oudh; his portrait painted as a boy in 1793 by William Owen is at the Huntington; Rev. Frederick Ricketts, DD (1788-1843), rector of Eckington, Derbyshire, domestic chaplain to the 2nd Earl of Liverpool and HRH Princess Charlotte; Edward Jenkinson Ricketts (1793; died aged 3 weeks).
GPR was appointed Governor of Tobago in 1793 and then in 1794, on the recommendation of Charles Jenkinson, now Baron Hawkesbury and President of the Board of Trade and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Governor of Barbados. He resigned as governor in 1800 due to ill-health and died at Liverpool soon after his return to England aged 50 and was buried at St George’s Church there on 4 April.
This Indenture of Release was the second part of a two-stage property transfer. The first part was the “Lease” of the property/ies under consideration to the control of the trustees for one whole year for a nominal amount (here ten shillings) while the second part “Granted bargained sold Aliened and Released” the freeholds to them for the same nominal amount.
It was issued on 11 September 1772 under the authority of Thomas Lane (1699-1773), Master in the High Court of Chancery, as attested by him in the margin of the first sheet. The wording closely follows the templates for “Plantations” in Gilbert Horsman’s Precedents for Conveyancing Settled and Approved by Gilbert Horsman, late of Lincoln’s Inn, Esq; and other eminent counsel, Vol. III (1744). It is between George Poyntz Ricketts, of Winchester, on the one part and the four trustees on the other part.
The most important feature of this deed is the list of some 180 named enslaved people found on the third page. It was standard practice to include such an inventory in the deeds of plantation sales in the West Indies. Usually attached to the deed as an appendix, it is here it is embedded in the text.
While the majority of the enslaved people listed here have imposed western names a number have retained their African names and this reveals that most were of the Akan or Twi-Fante speaking peoples of West Africa, principally found in Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) while a few are of the Igbo/Ibo-speaking peoples of south-eastern Nigeria. The rise and expansion of the Asante / Ashanti Empire in Ghana led to large numbers of war captives being sold into the Transatlantic slave trade (see Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the America, Oxford University Press, 2010). Most of the names conform to the West-African system of naming babies with male/female versions after the week-day of their birth that is long obsolete in Jamaica; see, David DeCamp, “African Day-Names in Jamaica”, in Language, Vol. 43/1 (March 1967, pp. 139-49).
Identifiable names: Men: Quashy [= Kwasi, Ghanaian (Akan) for born on Sunday], Endjoe [? = Eneji, Nigerian (Igbo) for Warrior]. Cuffee [= Kofi, Ghanaian (Akan) for born on Friday], Hany [= Hani, Arabic for Happy, Content], Cudjoe [= Koji, Ghanaian (Akan) for born on Monday; cf. Captain Cudjoe (d. 1764), leader of the Leeward Maroon community on Jamaica], Trikey [?= Chikey, Nigerian (Igbo) for God’s Strength], Quaw [Quao, Ghanaian (Akan) for born on Thursday], Quarroo [?= Quarco, Ghanaian (Akan) for Born on Wednesday], Appeah [= Appiah, Ghanaian (Akan) for First-born of Twins], Quamin [= Kwame / Kwami, Ghanaian (Akan) for Born on Saturday]. Women: Ebo Judy [= Igbo Judy], Juba Pung, Creole Juba [Juba = Ghanaian (Ashanti), for born on Monday], Tabrita Quashuba [= Quasheba, African-American variant of Akosua, Ghanaian (Akan) for a girl born on Sunday; cf. Quashy / Kwasi for boys], Little Aubali [a rare surname found today in Nigeria], Juba, ?Camimba [?= Kwamimba Saturday]. Fibba [Phibba, Ghanaian (Akan) for born on Friday], Old Aggibby and Agibby [?= Akachi, Nigerian (Igbo) for Hand of God].
This brutal list of names starkly highlights how slaves were de-humanised and reduced to the same status as animals and agricultural machinery whilst tragically being the only record of so many lives which would otherwise be unknown and enabling future researchers to give names to the nameless.
