In the humid twilight of the Dutch colonial empire, where the boundaries between civilisation and wilderness blurred like watercolours in tropical rain, Jacob Bogman carved his name into history through violence, ambition, and relentless pursuit of status. His life, spanning the middle decades of the 18th century, illuminates the brutal mechanics of colonial expansion and the intimate human dramas that unfolded within its shadow.
The Making of a Colonial Warrior
Jacob Bogman emerged from the maritime world of the Dutch Caribbean in 1759, when Captain J. Loopuit certified his credentials aboard a Dutch vessel. The young man who would become both hunter and hunted, mapper and destroyer, carried within him the restless energy that characterised the colonial frontier. In these waters where European ambition met American resistance, Bogman found his calling not in commerce or cultivation, but in the darker arts of subjugation.
By 1761, he had assumed command of expeditions against the Maroons of Suriname—those courageous souls who had torn themselves free from the plantation system and carved out autonomous communities in the colony’s interior. Bogman’s patrol consisted of seven Amerindians, fifteen armed enslaved people, and fourteen burghers—a microcosm of colonial society united in their mission to crush Black freedom.
The Hunt for Bogman’s Glory
The expedition defining Bogman’s legacy began as many colonial ventures did: with hubris. For more than two weeks, his force stumbled through swamps that seemed to mock European pretensions to mastery. They found only the tracks of crabs, snakes, and tigers—the inhabitants of this watery labyrinth. The jungle, indifferent to their maps and muskets, revealed nothing of the human communities they sought to destroy.
When fortune finally smiled upon the hunters, it came in the form of ingenious scaffolding built high in the forest canopy—evidence of Maroon’s resourcefulness and intimate knowledge of their environment. Following these traces with the persistence of bloodhounds, Bogman’s men discovered what they had sought: a thriving network of four Kwinti villages, each a testament to the possibility of Black self-determination.
The largest of these settlements, containing twenty-six carefully constructed houses, Bogman immediately christened “Bogman’s Glorie”—his glory. The name itself reveals the colonial mindset: the discovery of an existing community became the discoverer’s triumph, their destruction his legacy. The villages, described as “very neat and clean” with “lush” provision grounds of plantains, yams, and beans, represented everything the plantation system claimed Black people could not achieve.
Yet Bogman’s response to this evidence of Maroon capability was swift and merciless. He ordered the immediate destruction of the crops that sustained these communities—plantains were cut down, fields were trampled, and the patient cultivation work was reduced to ash. Then came the fire. “Bogman’s Glorie” and its sister villages burned. At the same time, their inhabitants fled deeper into the forest, carrying with them the bitter knowledge that their European pursuers would offer no quarter, no recognition of their humanity or right to exist.
Days later, Bogman returned with an enlarged force—27 soldiers, 13 armed enslaved people, 50 bearers, and four free Blacks—to complete the devastation. Even in destruction, the colonial system revealed its contradictions: enslaved people helping to hunt other enslaved people, the oppressed made instruments of their oppression.
The Cartographer’s Art
Between his campaigns of destruction, Bogman pursued a different kind of conquest—the mapping of the coastline itself. In 1765, Storm van’s Gravesande, Director-General of Essequibo, reported that Captain Bogman had received orders to measure “the whole coast as far as the territory of the State goes,” chart banks and river entrances, and create a comprehensive map beginning at Cape Orange.
This was colonial knowledge-making at its most fundamental: the transformation of lived geography into European categories, the reduction of complex coastal ecosystems into navigational aids for ships carrying enslaved Africans and European goods. Bogman’s maps, if completed, would have served not exploration but exploitation, making the coast more accessible to those who sought to extract wealth from its peoples and resources.
The irony was profound: the same man who destroyed Maroon villages for their independence now worked to make the coast more penetrable to the very system the Maroons had rejected. His cartographic work, possibly contributing to charts published by G. H. van Keulen in Amsterdam in 1785, represents the quieter violence of colonial knowledge—the patient work of making the unfamiliar familiar, the resistant accessible.
The Merchant of Berbice
Bogman’s activities extended beyond Suriname into the neighboring colony of Berbice, where he engaged in maritime commerce between 1763 and 1765. His purchase of a barque for the Berbice Colony without proper authorisation reveals the freewheeling nature of colonial enterprise, where ambitious men often acted first and sought permission later. The Court of Berbice’s confusion about his unauthorised acquisition speaks to the chaotic nature of colonial administration, where lines of authority blurred as frequently as territorial boundaries.
These commercial ventures—the bills of exchange, the receipts for goods, the protested drafts—paint a picture of a man operating in the uncertain space between legal and illegal, authorised and unauthorised. In the colonies, such ambiguity was often the price of opportunity, and Bogman navigated these waters with the same ruthless pragmatism he brought to his military campaigns.
The Marriage That Shattered a Family
By 1772, Bogman had transformed himself from hunter and cartographer into planter, residing in Demerara, where he set his sights on Sara Thibou, a woman whose life story reads like a colonial tragedy. Already twice-widowed at sixty-six—first married to Joseph Matthews, then to Cornelis Leary, by whom she claimed to have been “greatly abused”—Sara controlled the profitable plantation “De Lear. She represented wealth and vulnerability in equal measure.
The announcement of their intended marriage in late 1772 detonated like a powder keg within Sara’s family. Her children, products of her previous marriages, saw in this union not love but betrayal—a threat to their inheritance and their mother’s dignity. They considered the match “extravagant and disadvantageous. ” Their opposition crystallised around Elisabeth Matthews, Sara’s daughter by her first marriage, who had married a Mr. Waller.
The family conflict that erupted revealed the fault lines of colonial society, where personal relationships intersected with property rights, where marriage was simultaneously intimate and economic, and where the promise of profit could sever the bonds between parent and child. Elisabeth’s opposition to her mother’s marriage was so vehement that “high words” passed between mother and daughter—a euphemism that likely concealed scenes of devastating emotional violence.
Into this domestic maelstrom stepped John “Sean Rua” Bermingham, married to Sara’s daughter Doroth between his wife’s family loyalty and the brutal mach, stepped into this domestic maelstrominery of colonial justice. When Elisabeth Waller’s conduct in opposing her mother’s marriage was deemed “extremely punishable” by members of the Council of Justice in Essequibo, and she faced the prospect of criminal proceedings and imprisonment “in chains,” Bermingham’s world collapsed around him.
The man who approached Commander P. van Schuylenburg, acting as Fiscal ad interim, was not the confident planter but a desperate son-in-law driven by “panic and fear.” Van Schuylenburg, recognising opportunity when it presented itself, initially demanded twenty thousand guilders—a sum representing not justice but extortion. Through a negotiation that resembled nothing so much as a hostage exchange, the amount was reduced to eight thousand guilders. On April 9, 1773, Bermingham signed away his financial future “for John Waller or security.”
The deed was a masterpiece of colonial corruption, a document that transformed fear into debt, family loyalty into legal obligation. Bermingham’s signature, extracted under duress, became the foundation for years of legal persecution to outlast the original dispute. This was how colonial justice operated: not through the application of law but through the manipulation of relationships, the exploitation of vulnerability, the transformation of human emotions into negotiable commodities.
The Plantation’s Contested Ownership
While Bogman secured his marriage to Sara Thibou, the “De Leary” plantation’s ownership became a battlefield in its own right. After Cornelis Leary’s death, John Bermingham had taken possession of the property, asserting claims that Sara and her new husband vehemently disputed. Sara’s application for an interdict against Bermingham represented more than a property dispute; it was a widow’s fight for her economic survival and her right to determine her fate.
The Zeeland Directors’ confirmation of Sara and Jacob Bogman’s possession of the property might have settled the matter. Still, in the colonial legal system, possession was never permanent, and ownership never absolute. The 1776 court case between “Jacob Bogman qq Wed:e Leary” and “S. Burman de Vallairis qq John Birmingham” revealed that the battle for the plantation continued, with each side deploying legal strategies as complex as military campaigns.
This was colonial law at its most revealing: property rights that shifted with political winds, ownership that depended more on influence than documentation, justice that reflected power rather than equity. The plantation Sara had hoped would provide security for her final years, but it became a source of endless litigation, its fields watered with the tears of family discord.
The Pursuit of Land and Legacy
Bogman’s ambitions extended beyond his wife’s plantation to encompass vast new territories. His 1775 request for fifty rods of facade and one thousand acres behind the plantations of Salignac and Blondel near the mouth of the Demerara River revealed a man thinking in continental terms. These were not the modest claims of a small planter but the territorial ambitions of someone who saw himself as a founder of dynasties.
The February 1777 council meetings that considered his requests exposed the complex politics of colonial land allocation. Only Council Bourda viewed his application favorably, while others worried about the implications for existing landowners and the proposed canal that would reshape the coastal geography. The Court’s ultimate determination that Bogman had no right to the land near the fire brigade represented more than a legal setback; it rejected his vision of himself as a man capable of reshaping the landscape to his will.
The conditional nature of the original concession to Cornelis Leary, which Bogman had hoped to expand, illuminated the precarious foundation of all colonial property rights. What seemed permanent could be revealed as temporary, what appeared secure could dissolve in the face of administrative review. Bogman’s dreams of territorial expansion died in the dry language of council minutes and legal precedent.
The Price of Colonial Ambition
The relentless pressure of legal battles and family discord took its toll. The 8,000-guilder bond that Bermingham had signed in desperation became a weapon wielded by P. van Schuylenburg with surgical precision. When Jacob Matthews, acting as Bermingham’s representative, received direct orders not to pay the bond, the stage was set for a confrontation that would span decades.
The Court’s September 20, 1774, judgment ordering payment of the full sum plus costs represented the colonial legal system at its most implacable. Bermingham’s petition for a Mandament of Revision—an appeal that the States General granted—provided temporary relief but no permanent resolution. The legal machinery, once set in motion, ground forward with inexorable persistence.
By Onceng obtained against the legal machinery of Edward M. Bermingham, John’s brother. By 1778, the determination that Edward should present himself at the “Old House on the Island of Borsselen” to answer for the debt revealed how family members became collateral damage in colonial legal warfare. The 1792 reference to John Bermingham’s continued indebtedness for the original 8,000 guilders demonstrates how colonial justice could pursue its victims across decades, transforming a moment of panic into a lifetime of financial bondage.
Death and the Division of Spoils
Around 1778, Jacob Bogman’s death brought no peace to the family he had torn apart. The administration of his estate became another battlefield, with Edward M. Bermingham initially appointed as curator before being dismissed because his brother John’s status as part-heir through Sara created a conflict of interest. Joseph Bourda’s appointment as the new curator represented not resolution but the continuation of conflict by other means.
The involvement of John Waller and Jacob Matthews as executors of Sara’s estate, their petition for deliberation rights, and their successful request to take over household goods rather than see them publicly auctioned revealed how death in colonial society meant not rest but redistribution. Every personal possession became a negotiable asset, and every family relationship became a potential source of legal claim.
Sara Thibou’s transformation from independent widow to contested estate reflected the broader position of women in colonial society—simultaneously powerful and powerless, owners of property but not masters of their fate. Her marriage to Bogman, intended to provide security in her final years, instead generated a cascade of legal consequences that would outlast her life.
The Lasting Shadows of Colonial Violence
Jacob Bogman’s biography illuminates the interconnected nature of colonial violence—how the same impulses that drove him to destroy Maroon villages also led him to shatter Sara Thibou’s family. His life reveals how colonial ambition operated simultaneously at the level of territory and intimacy, how the desire to control landscape and people was an expression of the same fundamental drive.
The man who named a destroyed village “Bogman’s Glory” was the same man who signed legal documents as “Jacob Bogman qq Wed:e Leary,” claiming authority through his wife’s previous marriage. The cartographer who mapped coastlines for European navigation was also the husband who generated lawsuits that would persist for decades. In colonial society, these were not contradictions but complementary expressions of a single worldview that saw people, places, and relationships as resources to be exploited.
The legal disputes that consumed the final years of Bogman’s life and outlasted his death represent more than family feuds or property disagreements. They reveal the human cost of colonial ambition, the way that systems designed to extract wealth from land and labour inevitably turned their violence inward, consuming the families and communities that colonial society claimed to protect.
Bogman’s legacy lives not in the villages he destroyed or the maps he drew, but in the legal documents that chronicled years of family suffering, the court records that tracked the slow destruction of relationships, the administrative files that reduced human anguish to bureaucratic procedure. In pursuing his glory, he had created a monument to colonial violence that outlasted his own life, a testament to the price of ambition in a world where humanity itself had become a commodity to be bought, sold, and destroyed.
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