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PERO: The Life of a Slave in Eighteenth-Century Bristol
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About PERO: The Life Of A Slave In Eighteenth-Century
PERO was an enslaved man, born on the West Indian island of Nevis. He was owned by the sugar planter and merchant John Pinney whose Mountravers estate was a key plantation on the West coast of Nevis. Pero worked as Pinneys servant at Mountravers for 18 years, having regular contact with the enslaved populations on the neighbouring estates as well as with the free people of the island. In 1783 he was taken to England where the Pinney family settled in Bristol, England. Their town house is now the citys Georgian House Museum. In 1999 a footbridge on Bristols Harbourside was named after him and his name has become a familiar one in the city. The bridge commemorates, and pays tribute to, all those Africans and West Indians who were enslaved by Bristol's merchants and planters. Their toil in the North American and Caribbean plantations made people like Pinney rich, and by the time Pero left Nevis in the 1780s, Bristol had become wealthy on the proceeds of the slave trade and plantation slavery. The authors Christine Eickelmann and David Small have pieced together the story of Pero's life as a servant in Nevis and in Bristol as well as that of some other servants and free Nevisians who travelled back and forth across the Atlantic. At a time when the black population in England totalled perhaps 15,000, their research throws light on how the eighteenth-century master and black servant relationship worked in practice.
