This volume of The Rodney Papers, the second of a projected three-vol- ume edition of the admiral's papers, covers the admiral's life from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until August 1780. During these years, Rodney, through a lavish lifestyle and a habit of gambling, squandered his fortune and fell into the clutches of moneylenders. This led him to at- tempt, without success, to recoup his finances by becoming in 1770 the commander-in-chief of the squadron at Jamaica. Upon his return from the West Indies, having by then no Parliamentary immunity, Rodney was Forced to flee to Paris to escape his creditors. Only the goodwill and money of a French nobleman, Duc de Biron, enabled a pennyless Rodney to leave Paris in 1778, just days before the beginning of the war between britain and france. In 1779 the British government, desperate for the services of an admiral who could fight and win battles, appointed Rodney commander-in-chief of the squadron in the leeward islands. On his pas- sage to the West indies Rodney fought and won the moonlight battle against the spanish and successfully relieved Gibraltar. Once in the West indies, during 1780 Rodney fought several indecisive battles, in the course of a skilful defensive campaign against superior French forces, before sailing for North America at the onset of the hurricane season. During the years 1763–1780 Rodney plunged from being a Member of Parliament, a successful admiral and the Governor of Greenwich Hospital to a debtor's exile in France only to rise again and become a victorious admiral and a national hero.

The selection of documents in this volume of The Rodney Papers deals with Rodney's career during the years following the end of the seven years War and the start of the American War. The documents cover the relief of Gibraltar and the 1780 campaign in the Leeward Islands. The present edition attempts to elucidate the role of Rodney in the military and political events of the 18th century as well as to present his views on naval affairs and on the workings of the navy as an institution. The materi- als for this volume come from the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the British Library, the New-York Historical Society and the William Clements Library of the University of Michigan.

Vice Admiral George Brydges Rodney, upon his return to England from the Leeward Islands at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, was a person of substance and position within English society, being a success- ful flag officer in the Royal Navy, the owner of a landed estate and a Member of Parliament. Nevertheless, when he hauled down his flag and came ashore, despite his many professional achievements as an officer in the Royal Navy during both the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, Rodney was in many respects singularly ill-equipped to cope with the pressures generated by the demands of peacetime. In the years between the Seven Years’ and American wars Rodney would, in a stag- gering display of ill judgement, come close to destroying his career as a navy officer, alienate his friends and patrons, and be forced to flee Eng- land in order to escape his creditors after dissipating his fortune through high living, electioneering and gambling. Over-bearing, avaricious and disfunctional, Rodney would pass the years 1763–1778 crashing through life while alternatively squandering money and attempting to grasp it.

In 1764 Rodney married Henrietta Clies. While there is no surviving record telling exactly when this event took place, there is no doubt as to the identity of the bride. Indeed, the marriage probably surprised some of Rodney's friends and acquaintances. He most probably first came into contact with the Clies family when he was a captain at Lisbon. Members of Henrietta Clies's family were retainers and employees of the Compton family when Rodney was courting his first wife Jane Compton. The rela- tionship with the Clies family was transferred to London when Rodney and his first wife established a household in England and the Clies became part of it. Then, when Jane Rodney died, Henrietta's mother assumed the role of looking after Rodney's children. Rodney's marriage to Henrietta Clies can easily be understood in human terms, especially those of loneli- ness, for in 1764, when the marriage took place, Jane Rodney had already been dead for seven years. Nevertheless, Henrietta Clies was twenty years younger than Rodney and there can be no doubt that the Clies family had been dependents.

When South African poet and statesman Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938–2018) was instructed by senior members of his party, the African National Congress (ANC), to flee the country into exile in 1961, he packed among his meagre belongings a corpus of Tswana literary classics. To him, they enshrined a set of valuables, of knowledge systems, aesthetic practices, cosmologies, and mythologies he could marshal to counter colonial modernity's anti-Black warfare. As a revolutionary writer, he used the worlds from these classics as a basis to assert the existence of other forms of being, knowing, and belonging that were otherwise to the Eurocentric, racist, capitalist, and Christian social orders imposed by colonialism and apartheid. The Tswana literatures that accompanied him into exile were material representations of the values instilled in his formative years, used as bridges to connect politics of the homeplace with those of his unfolding exile travels and writing life.

He arrived with this treasure trove in the nascent cultural and political ferment of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements (BAM) in the United States of America in 1962. He harnessed that Tswana archive – comprising dramas, novels, and an anthology of poetry – in his five collections of poetry published in the States with the intent to foster continuities between the African American struggle and the struggles of Black South Africa. Further, he understood the Black experience as connected, thereby embracing Black world politics as fundamentally opposed to the culture of Jim Crow, colonialism, and apartheid. Operating in this world of Blackness he sought to bridge geographical and linguistic chasms, to foster political solidarities through cultural relations with Black diasporans.

His literary corpus published in the States, as well as his political activities, illustrate an assertion of the existence of otherworlds within the dominant paradigm of anti-Blackness.

The previous chapter saw Kgositsile mobilize the names-songs-places dynamic to anchor his work in the bedrock of his beginnings, the homeplace of his formative years, in a poetics that centralizes the body as the most intimate of contact zones from which to foster revolutionary poetry and political solidarities. The matriarchive informed, shaped, and held together the zone of relationality and Black radical sociality through the internetworked bodies of the mothers, bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of knowledge, and celestial bodies. In setting up this chapter's concerns as being continuous with the previous one, here I offer a recap of my findings from chapter 2. Kgositsile settled on the umbilical cord as a connective tissue between his mother and himself, the son, while birth rituals generated a poetics of relation between the mother, the land in which it is buried, and the son. Further, in his shifting and sifting, he linked the bodies of his mothers and bodies of land with celestial bodies: ‘the son must move on to set like the sun and lie buried in the west, or rise again to burn in this place with newborn fire’ (1973a: 64). Here the son is exiled from the land and enlists imageries from cosmological phenomena to transubstantiate himself from the son to the sun, setting in the west, and returning with ‘newborn fire’. The choice of ‘newborn’ sets his meditation up in a dialogue with the matriarchive that makes it possible for the new-to-beborn, ‘rising again’, a (re)birth – ‘Mother, what is my name?’ – to undergird his liberatory purpose that must always be tied to the collective.

The bodies of water, central and fundamental to these relational poetics grounded in the matriarchive, are the principle of creation and creativity, recreation and regeneration that make it possible for Kgositsile to fashion poetics of death and rebirth, destruction and recreation, and flowering creativity and creation in the desolation of exile. The bodies of water in the previous chapter located the matriarchive of his formative years in continuity and locution with those encountered in exile. These were understood as held together, or, to harness the uses of the coil, gathered together by forces of the Limpopo and Mississippi Rivers, which confluence in the Atlantic and other oceans.

Throughout the period 1815 to 1865, the primary tasks undertaken by Chatham dockyard were those of constructing new ships and of undertaking large-scale repairs on older vessels. In common with most other yards, Chatham also undertook a multiplicity of further duties. Among these were the fitting and re-fitting of ships [29, 37], the care and maintenance of vessels moored in the ordinary [37] and minor repairs on operational warships. With regard to the latter, Chatham was not especially suited. In part, this was because of its great distance from the sea but also a result of the declining depth of the Medway. The river, during much of this period, was subject to considerable shoaling, there being an insufficient depth both for the larger ships of the ordinary and for rapid, trouble-free passages between the dockyard and the open sea. It was recognition of these problems that prompted John Deas Thomson, a member of the Navy Board, to submit to Lord Melville in 1829 a recommendation that Chatham should be strictly confined to those duties to which it was geographically suited [31]. However, the idea of Chatham specialising in building and large-scale repairs, was not adopted at this time and the yard continued to perform a mixture of duties throughout the nineteenth century.

The Admiralty, whenever a new vessel was to be constructed, took the initial decision with instructions forwarded to Chatham by either the Navy Board (prior to its abolition in 1832) or the Admiralty office (after 1832). Such orders were often accompanied by a set of drawings, although on occasions it might be a simple notification, with drawings sent nearer to the time of construction [56, 57, 73]. On being informed that a new ship was to be built, the Master Shipwright, whose department oversaw both construction and repair work, would consider the facilities and manpower that would be required. Of course, the administrators in London already had an awareness of docks and slips likely to be available, sometimes precisely stipulating which facility was to be used [12, 14, 28]. The choice of Chatham for construction of a new vessel was not always contingent upon the availability of a particular dock or slip; instead it might result from an accumulation of the necessary building materials at that yard [17].