The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Bluefields Bay, Jamaica

Benjamin D. Siegel

The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Bluefields Bay, Jamaica

Year: 2020

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The memoirs of Thomas Thistlewood, a planter in Bluefields Bay, Jamaica during the 1700s, suggest that maritime traffic in the bay was sparse during the latter half of the 18th century. Only war brought ships-of-the-line to the bay, when they would gather to escort merchantmen back to Britain. One such occasion was in May 1782 when the bay hosted Admiral George Rodney’s fleet after the Battle of the Saintes, the last major naval action of the American Revolution. After an archaeological survey of the bay revealed a carronade, a cannon that debuted in the Battle of the Saintes and stayed in use only until the Napoleonic wars, as well as several anchors that might have been used aboard British ships-of-the-line, this paper takes a fresh look at the maritime cultural landscape of Bluefields Bay during the revolutionary period.