John Gabriel Stedman
John Gabriel Stedman went to Suriname to hunt runaway slaves for the Dutch and came back with the book that taught Europe what a slave colony looked like. He was born in 1744 in the Netherlands to a Scottish officer of the Scots Brigade in Dutch service and a Dutch mother, joined the brigade himself at sixteen, and in 1772 volunteered for a corps of marines the States General were sending to Suriname, where the plantations along the rivers were being raided by the Maroons of Boni, escaped slaves who had built villages in the forest and fought from them. He was there from 1773 to 1777, marching through swamp after an enemy his columns rarely saw, losing most of his men to fever, and keeping a diary and a sketchbook. What he drew and wrote down was the colony: the planters' tables, the flogging of a woman for refusing an overseer, a man broken on the rack, a man hung alive by a hook through the ribs. He also fell in love with Joanna, an enslaved girl of fifteen of mixed descent, lived with her by a local arrangement the colony recognised, had a son by her, and could not afford to buy her freedom before he sailed; she died in 1782, still a slave, and the boy, freed and sent to him, drowned as a midshipman. The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam appeared in London in 1796 with eighty plates, sixteen of them engraved by William Blake from Stedman's drawings, and it was those images - the flagellated woman, the hanged man - that the abolitionists took up and reprinted for the next fifty years. The publisher had rewritten the text to soften it and Stedman raged in his diary that it was full of lies. He was not an abolitionist himself; he thought the trade should go on and the cruelty should stop, and the book undermined the distinction. He died at Tiverton in Devon in 1797. The Dutch Suriname page names him for what the plates showed.
- Lived: 1744 CE – 1797 CE
- Nationality: Dutch-Scottish
- Roles: soldier, writer, artist
