Written and performed by Brontë Crawford
This creative narrative draws from research into the mahogany trade and Lancaster’s involvement in the slave economy of the 18th Century. I carried out this research during an internship funded by Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in collaboration with the Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG).
While a conventional laying out of the objectives and detailed findings of the research can be found in a recent blog post for LBHG, I also wanted to produce an account that was more creative in its character and content. The purpose of this narrative is therefore not to present a straightforward historical account. Information extracted from the historical archive should be read less as the simple relation of facts but instead as the creative illumination of a dark and sombre history.
The narrative begins with a preface which explains more about its intention and some of the writers that inspired this work. Listen to or read the narrative below:
Preface
The following narrative is the product of several months spent in the Gillow archive at Lancaster University during 2022. Throughout this period I researched the various ways in which the Gillows’ furniture company obtained and made use of mahogany wood throughout the mid to late eighteenth century. The quotations, people, and locations alluded to in this piece have all been noted across various historical documents and academic articles; here these details are used in a creative context to illuminate the lives of those involved or drawn into the sprawling network of the mahogany trade and, by extension, the transatlantic slave trade to which mahogany circulation was not merely connected, but rather deeply rooted within. The purpose of this work is neither to present a straightforward historical account, nor to try and unravel the entwined roots of this relationship between the two trades. Rather, its intent lies within that very entanglement, the ways in which these joint histories, so often relegated to margins of our remembrance, bring further clarity to one another. As such, allusions to and information extracted from extant documents should be read less as the simple relation of facts than the illumination of a vast and sombre history, one that so often defies the scope of the imagination.
My work on this piece was particularly shaped by the writers Malika Booker and Christina Sharpe. Reading Booker’s poem Songs of Mahogany anchored me in the stark imagery of the eighteenth century, with the enduring beauty of its art and furnishing styles juxtaposed with the brutality and suffering that formed part of their creation. This is encapsulated particularly in the following lines:
“And then I realised the whole house was filled with mahogany, the doorknobs,
the banisters, the stairs themselves…it was worship and annihilation all in one”
These lines were at the forefront of my mind as I wrote about the abuse of black bodies through slave labour, particularly in the logging of the mahogany trees. Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was also instrumental in how I chose to write about the ship as not only a vessel, but a space in itself. Her statement that: ‘to be in the wake [of the ship] is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding’ reminds me that we all continue to experience the residual agonies of slavery even today, whether through our bodies, our heritage, or our natural world.
I am indebted to both women, and hope that the work I have produced remains a credit to their own.
The Dark of the Wood
At Sizergh Castle there is, to this day, a chair, upholstered in silk and set with Gothic tracery as though it were a window onto an invisible history. Invisible but for the tale charted in the grains of the dark mahogany wood, that undulate and scatter across the surface like the sea in a ship’s wake. Come closer – and try not to be seduced by your own pale reflection in the polished surface. Read not the shape of the object but the grain of the wood, the knots that once were branches, the rings that once were whole and wide as you are tall, and imagine this chair growing wild in a wood on a distant shore, the seat not only of nobility but of empire and its ghosts.
The Norfolk is a fledging beast, a leviathan born at the hands of those it would itself devour – and yet the least of all its master’s monsters, on its maiden Middle Passage, its inaugural triangle, its deck yet clean of blood.
Its first gifts: not gold but gunpowder, neither frankincense nor myrrh but fine silk and metals, copper, lead, and iron – a witches’ brew such as not even those at Pendle could have dreamed in their wretched sleep. Loaded thus the Norfolk from Lancaster took its cursed way, at the hand of Isaac, who they say was named for his father’s laughter and not the desperate cries of those that the vessel he captained would steal away.
Beneath them, the ocean is dark and still.
Picture: three islands under an excess of sky, where cattle and sheep graze among the rice and cassava fields, where chickens run wild about the pumpkin patches, where children pluck oranges and lemons like nascent suns from the trees. These islands had three names, to testify and to torment like an Old Testament God. They called them the Islands of Idols: where the false icons of Blood and Wealth held sway, where pale ghosts emerged from the sea to build to them temples that swallowed up the islands’ inhabitants and spat them out again onto the hungry ships that lingered in the bay. They called them the Islands of Loss – but whose loss does the name account for?
The final name we cannot know, for it was spoken in Kaloum by the people who raised their cattle and plucked their fresh fruit and sang their songs on the isle they called their home. Such a name remains as lost if it were written in the yellow sands that were soon turned red beneath their feet.
The Norfolk arrives in the eighth year of Miles Barber’s reign, in 1763. By now they are called the Islands of Loss and few can remember that they were ever called anything else. The factory-fortress has devoured all the rice, the cattle, the children, the sound of songs on the wind and the sky is black with smoke and storms above the network of barracoons and blacksmith’s, warehouse and wharfs, magazines and houses of merchandise, all sprung up from the soil that had once brought forth pumpkins and oranges and lemons. Two hundred and thirty-six prisoners spill onto the Norfolk from the bowels of the factory that had given their island its newest name. On the other side of the Atlantic, two hundred and two would eventually find themselves in Jamaica – and who can say what became of thirty-four that were lost except that their shades abide still in the wake of the ship.
The dark of the wood is the dark of the forest and the dark of the barren earth that came after, its trees felled and floated downriver like bodies set mournfully adrift on the water. The dark of the wood is the dark of the other bodies that broke it, and broke against it, backs and bones bending under the weight of the logs, breath released in time with the swing of the axe, new trees fed on blood instead of water. The dark of the labouring mass of bodies is the dark of the open ocean on which a vessel approaches, a ship with a fully belly and still open mouth, awaiting its tripartite bounty. Flesh in exchange for wood, say the ripples of the ocean in its wake, and the sails shudder.
A crowded harbour under the beating sun, an iron-grey stretch of sea, a forest of masts beset by seagulls and a clattering wind. The clangour of human voices, of ships’ bells and interminable strings of chains. The scrawl of a custom collector’s eagle feather quill on a shipping manifest Two hundred and two negro souls, accounted between columns for cargoes of mules and cattle and casks of Madeira wine. Thus, do we find the Norfolk at Kingston, Jamaica, in October 1764, lying in wait for the weight of human bodies to be replaced by those of fallen trees.
Christmas comes at home with holly wreaths and roast beef, with hymns and carols and plum pudding, round and delicious as the globe. In Kingston it passes in the masters’ houses with the downing of rum and stewed mudfish and musk melon shared with friends. For those borne on the Norfolk it passes with nightly floggings and silence enforced on the penalty of pain.
Still the Norfolk itself sits idle in the bay, loaded with sugar, rum, and four hundred or so planks of mahogany. The ship’s hold is dark, and with its new load grows darker still: a blackness that swims with the grains of mahogany wood and bloodstains on the floor. At last, with the coming of the New Year and when January has all but melted away, the Norfolk sets sail for England, to complete, at last, the triangle of its voyage.
Here, an interlude: another ship, the Don Carle, sprung a leak and flooded amid the violent gales of East Coast storms, casts its cargo and crew upon the mercy of the sea. Rescue by the Jane is no boon, no safe harbour, for how are they to live upon these meagre portions of bread and rum without wishing to return to the embrace of the wild water, where they might be drowned or dashed against the rocks without ever having to feel the pangs of hunger or the burn of interminable thirst? Enter the Norfolk, parting the bloodred Atlantic, arriving like the fish that swallowed Jonah to pluck these lost sailors from their peril and enfold them into its cargo bound for Lancaster. Against the wild winds and thunder they nestle among the tierces of slave-picked sugar, rest their heads against the beams to which were once bound countless bare and bloodied feet, find warmth and steadiness in the mahogany beams that lie like broken bodies in the hold. If they sense the breath of its ghosts on their skin, feel the fingerprints of those that wrought timber from tree, or hear moans and sighs in the lapping of the waves, then none of these are potent enough to wake them from a peaceful, dreamless sleep.
Rain greets Isaac and the Norfolk and the shipwrecked sailors at Lancaster. There is something comforting about the heavens opening in a tearful welcome back onto home soil. So too does the wood of the mahogany tree weep, for being uprooted, for its wretched journey across the sea. In the quiet of the ship’s hold, in the bustle of the Lancaster woodyard, these planks of mahogany shed the last dregs of the moisture gathered from their native soil, the last of their Caribbean rain. Whether it takes two months or two years, a season or a century, at long last all their tears are shed, their flesh dry and parched. They are ripe, at last, for metamorphosis.
The furniture makers of Lancaster are a gallery of shrewd businessmen and master craftsmen. Under their gazes the Norfolk’s pile of mahogany diminishes with each hour, distributed among the cabinetmakers of Lancaster to be fashioned into tea trays and writing desks, bookcases and fire screens, yardsticks and washing stands, cisterns and antepediums alike. Among its takers: men who come with the name of Gillow in their mouths and sometimes scrawled in black onto the promissory notes that pass from one hand to another, subject to only a cursory glance before a bargain is struck.
For although no one from Lancaster to London would claim that the furniture of the Gillow workshops is at the height of fashion, few well-to-do homes are complete without at least one set of chairs with eagle-claw feet or a bookcase with Chinese-sash doors, the landmarks of a quiet kingdom under the rule of Robert and Richard Gillow. Now, with the Age of Mahogany at its dizzying height, the workshops on Castle Hill begin to smell of the mahogany forest, rich and dark and fiery, and scatter sawdust in shades of beige and brown and crimson like ashes from their windows; the bite of saws into wood, the hammering of nails and the scrape of chisels, the grind of metal upon wood, all like courtly chatter coming in through the windows of the brothers’ quiet office. If they talked, let us imagine it was of business, of whether to use this hinge or that doorknob, and that the silences between them were comfortable. If they were idle, let us imagine that their minds drifted across the oceans in the wake of their own ships, always stopping short of shores where they would land. If they worked, let us imagine that sounds and smells from the outside gave as much shape to their sketches as their own imaginations.
Customers often place their orders in inert, imprecise terms. Thus Richard Gillow becomes animator, assembling an array of desirable parts – a brass lock, a fluted pillar, a haircloth bottom – to create specimens anew. Truly the office is never silent, even in the absence of the noise outside, because even late into the night Richard remains sketching, sketching, giving new shape to the words of such men as Charles Strickland, who writes to commission a set of mahogany chairs for his home, a castle nestled amid the emerald fells of Cumbria…
We did not know by your letter whether you meant to have the arm’d chairs with stuffed backs and seats or mahogany backs therefore have drawn of both sorts…
In the end, he chose the mahogany.
At the end of its feverish passage, hot, Jamaican rain all sweated out cold, the mahogany that came to England in the hold of the Norfolk is laid out upon the workbench. Ready for vivisection, for the crosscutting that will splinter the grains like bones, for the shimmer of the saw that will make arms and legs of shapeless flesh. Sharp edges sanded down to gentle curves, varnished to an unnatural gleam. Soon it will be the task of Sizergh’s servants to keep it polished to a shine, to unpick loose threads from the worn yellow silk, to ensure it remains in position at the head of the mahogany dining table. Their reflections glance off the wood like silver fish darting beneath the surface of a vast ocean. It is an ocean as dark as lost forests and the bodies that felled them; an ocean that swells in the wake of the ships that ships that turned it black with blood and soil, turning up old ghosts from its depths.
And as we listen, it begins to speak.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Gordon Walker for his guidance during the internship work and support with making the recording and for editing and adding background sound effects. I am also grateful to Sunita Abraham for her support during the internship and to Edge Hill University for providing recording facilities.
Copyright
Copyright for this narrative text is held by Bronte Crawford. Permission for reuse is given under the CC BY-NC-ND license. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator
BBC Copyright for all sound effects with permission for educational, research and not for profit purposes. Sourced from https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/
Further requests for information may be directed to Brontë at crawfordbronte@gmail.com or via X @Bronte__C.
LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY GROUP 
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