The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

John Tharp exploited men, women and children in Jamaica to generate his fortune and funded expeditions to Africa to kidnap and enslave more. There's no question that this was evil, b  ut there are two strands to his story which suggest he had a softer side.  When Tharp retired to his country estate in Cambridgeshire in the late 1790s, he brought with him his second wife Ann (born Ann Virgo), and her daughter from a previous marriage, Sarah Gallimore. He also brought his own daughter, Mary Hyde Tharp, and Mary's mother was an enslaved woman called Harriet Phillips, who lived on the inappropriately named Good Hope plantation.  Slave-owners and the men they employed routinely subjected enslaved women to rape and sexual exploitation -- about a tenth of all babies born on Tharp's plantations had a white father, and that figure was pretty consistent across the island. Most of them lived out their days in slavery. But Tharp appears to have cared what happened to his mixed-ra