“A Hole Large Enough to Turn a Pigeon’s Egg In”: Fertility, Reproduction, and Matrilineal Power in 18th-Century Antigua

In 1733, Antiguan planter Josiah Martin reported on the growth of what was likely a cancerous tumor in his wife Mary’s breast to several of his male correspondents. Martin described the infection in graphic detail, writing that “the sores that lay so close together under her nipple became a hole large enough to turn a pigeon’s egg in”—a phrase that he repeated in his letters. In doing so, Martin treated seemingly private and intimate parts of his wife’s body as theatrical public knowledge. Inverting the analogy of the bird’s egg in the nest, the site of her body that had nourished their infants, now produced a fetid growth. Four years after her death from this disease, Martin remarried. Once again, his correspondence focused on maternity, reproduction, and breastfeeding. Claiming that their daughter, Betsey, was “not yet weaned” due to her mother’s “indulgence,” Martin brought an enslaved wetnurse who “suckled” Betsey from Antigua to Massachusetts.

This paper uses the letters of the Martin family as fertile ground for exploring the ties between marriage, reproduction, motherhood, and domestic slavery. Paired together, Josiah Martin’s descriptions of the bodies of his wife and the woman whom his family enslaved, highlight the dynamic between intimacy and empire. It argues that women of Caribbean origin did more than reproduce and nurse heirs. Women featured centrally in Martin’s letters because elite colonial families were regularly governed by powerful matriarchs. In their varied capacities as wives, mothers, wealth managers, political strategists, and enslavers, women relentlessly advanced their own and their families’ interests. As this paper shows, intimacy iterated very differently in the lives of the enslaved women who cooked, cleaned, sewed, and nursed the children of enslavers. Kinship groups like the Martins used enslaved domestics, the majority of whom were women, to negotiate and reinforce their affective ties.