Catalogue of the Injustices and Cruelties Borne Upon the Persons and Minds of the Enslaved Negroes on a Barbadoes Plantation in the West Indies

The Catalogue of the Injustices and Cruelties Borne Upon the Persons and Minds of the Enslaved Negroes on a Barbadoes Plantation in the West Indies is a record of abuses at Faith Plantation that Titch secretly compiled while living there. Its importance lies both in what it documents and in the political purpose it serves: turning witnessed cruelty into evidence for an abolitionist campaign, even as the story shows that written records cannot restore the lives they classify or speak fully in their place.

Creation and Purpose

Titch reveals the Catalogue to Washington Black beneath the scientific treatise they have been preparing for the Royal Society. The thick sheaf bears a full title identifying its subject as the injustices and cruelties endured by enslaved people at a Barbados plantation. Titch explains that his friend Samuel in London urged him to visit the family plantation and take notes on what he saw. A group of allies was gathering accounts of observed cruelty, with the intention of eventually delivering them to an influential friend in Parliament.

The document therefore belongs to two projects that Titch keeps together: scientific work and abolitionist witnessing. He says that Washington’s scientific work may also prove useful, but the Catalogue is not simply an appendix to their research. Titch describes slavery as a moral stain and argues that Black people are entitled to rights and freedom. His account makes recording abuse a deliberate political act, not merely a private exercise in observation.

What the Record Witnesses

The Catalogue is grounded in the plantation’s changing system of control. After a new master takes over Faith, he dismisses the old overseers and brings in rough men from the docks. Punishments and killings follow. Washington recalls people being maimed, whipped, hanged, or shot, and describes James being killed after attempting to escape. The enslaved workers are then made to pass the remains of the pyre and receive a second branding. These events give the record its force as testimony: violence is not an isolated incident but an organized means of governing labor and deterring resistance.

Titch adds Big Kit to his notes after seeing her at dinner, when Washington has not recognized her and is distressed by her condition. The Catalogue thus records not only a generalized account of the plantation but the condition of a person central to Washington’s own past. Titch tells him that her treatment will matter to those reading the report. That inclusion turns the document into a point where political evidence and intimate memory meet, though Washington is initially more alarmed by the danger of the master discovering it than able to absorb its purpose.

Circulation and Consequences

Titch intends the reports to reach people with influence in Parliament, linking the private act of observation to a wider campaign against slavery. The later scenes broaden that institutional setting: an organization holding records is described as continuing to combat slavery even after emancipation in the West Indies, because slavery remains entrenched in America. The Catalogue’s abolitionist logic therefore persists beyond the plantation and beyond formal emancipation in one colonial setting.

The document also exposes the precarious position of its makers and subjects. Titch asks his brother to release Washington permanently, but the master refuses because he will not lose fifteen enslaved workers and cannot spare the field labor. On the voyage to America, Captain Benedikt challenges Titch’s claim that Washington is a friend and calls him property. Titch responds by describing Washington as his personal assistant and a skilled scientific illustrator, invoking the interest of powerful men in England. The exchange shows that the Catalogue’s moral argument exists alongside a system that continues to define Washington as property and to treat his skill as subordinate to his legal status.

Archives, Memory, and Limits

Years later, Washington encounters plantation records in a wooden box at an abolitionist organization. Among the papers is the advertisement that Titch and Washington had previously seen in Virginia: a reward notice issued by John Francis Willard on behalf of Erasmus Wilde, identifying Washington as an enslaved fugitive and describing his appearance and clothing. The notice offers a stark counterpoint to the Catalogue’s purpose. Both are written records, but one seeks to capture Washington as property, while the other is intended to expose the violence of enslavement.

The records also include an apprenticeship log listing workers’ names and death dates. Washington finds Big Kit’s death recorded there, after first searching for the name Nawi, the name she had told him was her true one. The register’s orderly columns make her life appear as a dated entry among plantation workers; for Washington, that administrative plainness intensifies the loss rather than explaining it. His response reveals a limit shared by documentary evidence and abolitionist testimony: a record can establish what happened and preserve a trace, but it cannot contain the person whose life it files away.

The Catalogue consequently occupies an uneasy space between witness and archive. It gathers observations to contest a system that treats enslaved people as labor and property, yet its political force depends on translating their lives into written evidence for readers with power. Washington’s later encounter with the plantation books brings that tension into focus: the written page can expose the machinery of enslavement, but it cannot undo the harm or substitute for the voices and relationships the records only partially preserve.