A Review of “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative”

Reviewers: Brian Millen and Hampton Dodd

Review Conducted: March 31st, 2022 - April 4th, 2022

Links:

• http://revolt.axismaps.com/
• The map itself can be found at http://revolt.axismaps.com/map/

Data and Sources

• Kinds of sources
  • 18th century maps
  • Geospatial data related to the events of the uprising
  • Diaries
  • Private correspondences
  • Periodicals
  • Military and administrative records
  • Contemporary historical accounts
  • Secondary historical accounts
• Full detailed list of sources can be found at http://revolt.axismaps.com/sources.html

Processes

• The base maps were geo-referenced using the geospatial data to provide rough latitude and longitude, so that the movement of the rebels could be spatiotemporally mapped onto the 18th century maps with regard to the topography of the country and the location of the estates where the attacks took place.

Presentation

• The 18th century maps of Jamaica are used to create a base map that the events are graphed onto. A system of symbology was created to make the map legible. A key was created to indicate how many soldiers were part of a given army or militia. Troop movement was visualized by color-coded moving lines, which show in space the temporal movement of a given force during a given duration of time. Clashes with rebels were signified by a symbol as well. All of this comes together to give the viewer a spatiotemporal map that gives textual descriptions of events on the timeline of the Jamaican slave uprising. These textual descriptions are given alongside the spatiotemporal maps that shows visually the movement of rebels in space. It is through this visualization that we are granted access to the strategic planning of the rebels.

Digital Tools

• Leaflet was used to create the maps depicting the movement of rebel militias in Jamaica over time. The creation of the maps was outsourced to a company called Axis Maps.’

Languages

• English

Review

The Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative digital memories project is an animated thematic map seeking to illuminate the spatial dynamics of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Established with the support of the Mellon New Directions Fellowship, the National Humanities Center, Duke University, and Harvard University, principal investigator and curator Vincent Brown’s spatial history presentation offers viewers extensive, though not exhaustive, insight into the strategies employed by the rebels and the reciprocal tactics of the counterinsurgency. As such movements are visualized through color-coded moving lines throughout the map, viewers are provided a glimpse into the ways in which the island’s topography influenced and shape the course of the revolt and how the British military’s suppression of the revolt transpired.

Published in 2012 and seemingly rooted solely in the work of Vincent Brown and his association with a variety of scholarly collectives, the Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative project communicates exactly that which Brown intended to share in a highly effective and engaging system of storytelling. Despite the fact that certain links on the project’s website are currently broken, such as both “Home” and “Blog” in the navigation bar, the core cartographic element of Brown’s work is still in pristine condition, allowing users to intuitively scroll through time and space via the project’s Base Map from Tacky’s Revolt in St. Mary’s to final rumors of revolts on the Westmoreland Parish in October 1761. The Base Map, constructed from several adapted eighteenth-century maps in the creation of the Terrain Map and Estate Map that form the foundation for Brown’s cartographic narrative, offers fresh perspectives of these uprisings that could rarely be drawn from the unsympathetic historical accounts of the time, allowing for users to trace the rebel’s movement through space as to better “discern their strategic aims and to observe the tactical dynamics of slave insurrection and counter-revolt,” in the words of Brown.

Throughout the map, accounts of the revolt populate marked locations with excerpts from diaries, letters, military correspondence, newspapers, and recorded memories unearthed the period, bolstering and expanding the scope of Brown’s narrative. Accompanied by a symbology that works to differentiate fighting units, conspiracies, clashes, and judicial executions via a system of icons and color schemes, users can fluidly move through Brown’s masterful collection of visualized and interactive research in order to experience the contours of these rebel histories through a critical lens distanced from the slaveholder documents that have long held undue narrative authority over the memory of the 1,500 black men and women in revolt and the ways in which they expressed coordinated political intention through the lingering cartographic traces compiled through this project.

Brown concludes by noting that these spatial schemas are impossible to retrieve in their totality and must be considered as an impressionistic restructuring of lost histories. Irretrievably rooted in the maps and records of colonial geography and military logs, Brown is forthright with the inexorable limitations of this project and does well to challenge visitors to the project to reassess preconceived notions of slave revolts and engage with their historical imagination in order to better conceive a clearer picture of such significant insurrections as the Jamaica slave revolt in 1760.

In summary, Brown’s memory work does an excellent job excavating these histories, contextualizing them through a comprehensive and animated chronicle of events, and providing users with an engaging resource to spatially trace these narratives through time, thus accomplishing exactly that which the Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative project set out to achieve.