Michael Sharkey

1. Owner of one enslaved man, Richard, in St Thomas-in-the-Vale in 1817.

2. Likely to have been the Mr. Sharkey, overseer on Stirling Castle estate in St Thomas-in-the-Vale in the early 1820s when Benjamin McMahon was book-keeper on the same estate. According to McMahon, Sharkey was "a shark by nature; his vehement barbarity to the negroes was most awful. I could fill a volume with the accounts of his cruelties. Every morning daylight was ushered in with the most terrible floggings, all arising out of the most frivolous complaints, chiefly about night-watchmen." McMahon recounts that after admitting to Mr. Sharkey his reason for leaving, "He was ever afterwards my enemy, wherever his influence could extend." Sharkey was well liked by Richard Kinkead, owner of the estate, who "was constantly speaking of Sharkey as being the best overseer that ever managed the estate" even in 1830.

1. T71/25 603.

2. Benjamin McMahon, Jamaica Plantership: Eighteen Years Employed in the Planting Line in that Island (1839) pp. 30-36, 80.

We are grateful to Siddharth Singh Ahlawat for his assistance with compiling this entry.