Early Modern History

Carla Gardina Pestana delivers this Society of Fellows lecture at The Huntington. In 1685, after he supported the invasion of the Duke of Monmouth, who aimed to take the throne from his uncle, James II, the “Chyrurgion” (surgeon) Henry Pitman was transported to labor on the Caribbean island colony of Barbados as a convicted rebel. Four years later, Pitman returned to England to publish an account of his servitude, escape, encounters with privateers, and other “strange adventures”. "A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman" reveals a 17th-century English Caribbean fraught with brutality.