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Marjoleine Kars, Kit Candlin. The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Page 1567, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1567
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Extract
In December 1801 the newly appointed British governor of Trinidad, Thomas Picton, ordered the judicial torture of Louisa Calderon, a fourteen year-old free mixed-race servant girl who was suspected of minor theft. The governor subjected the girl repeatedly to “picqueting,” a procedure in which she was suspended from the ceiling by one arm and then lowered onto a spike until her weight rested on one foot. Several years later, Thomas Picton was tried in London for torture and a host of other misdeeds. His lengthy case, which was eventually dropped, became a cause célèbre.
This extraordinary drama has received much attention of late. James Epstein's recent book (Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution [2012]) uses the incident to expose the fault lines of empire. Kit Candlin makes the Calderon case the leitmotif of his book, which consists of eight loosely connected case studies build around particular people, events, and juicy records.
