Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015 by Frances R. Botkin

Reviewed by: Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015 by Frances R. Botkin Peter P. Reed Frances R. Botkin. Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2017. Pp. 240. US$125.00 hardcover, US$35.95 paperback, US$31.95 ebook. Frances Botkin’s Thieving Three-Fingered Jack is the first book to give sustained attention to one of the more important and enduring figures of resistance in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Three-Fingered Jack, also referred to as Jack Mansong, garnered fame as a black outlaw before his 1781 death at the hands of bounty hunters. His brief career was also associated indelibly with the Afro-Jamaican magico-religious practices of obeah, or “obi,” as contemporary accounts often called it. This short but evocative study introduces readers to the intercultural Atlantic history of Three-Fingered Jack, following the famous outlaw’s tracks from eighteenth-century Jamaica to Britain and the US. Grounded first in the historical evidence of Jack’s life and death, Botkin’s study then explores the later reinventions of Jack’s story. Fictional and dramatic versions of Three-Fingered Jack have appeared repeatedly throughout two centuries of popular culture, drama, and fiction, allowing new generations of storytellers to claim and reclaim-or, as Botkin puts it, to “thief” Jack’s tale for their own ends. As we might expect, Jack appeared in multiple guises along the way. First mentioned in the official record as an ambiguous and threatening outlaw, he was then presented on stage as a chivalrous and doomed pantomime antihero. That stage figure took on a life of its own, and Jack eventually emerged as an eloquent and romanticized critic of slavery in abolitionist-minded melodramas. Jack’s story, as Botkin shows, was claimed and reclaimed by competing interests. Nineteenth-century novels imagined [End Page 563] him in plantation narratives of sensational sex and violence, and twentieth-century versions used his story to comment on Jamaica’s politics and popular culture. This study offers a useful methodological model for scholarship in comparative popular cultures. There is no single authentic version of Jack’s story, as Botkin is careful to point out, and no one rightly “owns” the story-Thieving Three-Fingered Jack never purports to offer a “true story” of Jack’s life and death, instead aiming to show “what different permutations of this story tell us about storytelling in the Atlantic world” (21). Botkin draws out the rich and varied problematics of Jack’s various stories, using archived history to understand later renderings of the outlaw and his struggles. The compelling opening chapter, for example, reads the official records of an eighteenth-century Caribbean police state against the living memory of contemporary Maroons, the modern-day descendants of escaped slaves with a complex history of colonial collaboration and resistance. In the official view, Jack’s outlawry appears a chaotic crime spree, and the men who killed him willing collaborators with English policing authority. At the same time, as some of Botkin’s Jamaican sources suggest, Jack’s outlawry might also be deliberate opposition to the logic of colonialism; his killers, in that view, worked within a system that instigated black-on-black competition and violence to control unruly people living on the margins of plantation society. The ambivalence of Jack’s character and his resistance to Jamaican colonialism is one of the more important insights in Botkin’s study. Botkin’s approach to her material and to her sources should also inspire important discussions about the practical ethics of scholarship on race, slavery, and colonialism. She herself notes her relatively privileged position as a white, non-Jamaican-born investigator of histories and issues that remain important to Jamaicans today. As she points out, researching Three-Fingered Jack often led directly to larger contemporary social and political questions. That had been the case from the beginning: Jack’s 1800 appearance in Anglo-American pantomimes, for example, was arguably part of a broader response to the Haitian Revolution. In later centuries, Jack’s story continued to speak to Jamaican political practices, ideologies of nationalism, and even styles of masculinity...

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