t they could communicate with one another, since there were many African dialects among slaves, and so that they could understand their masters (Dillard 76-77). While there was some evidence that English-based pidgin was spreading along with Pidgin French during 1640 to 1659, by 1715, there were clearly was an African Pidgin English known on a worldwide scale. The author Defoe used it in The Family Instructor (1715) and in The Life of Colonel Jacque (1722), as well as in the early chapters of Robinson Crusoe (1719) (Dillard 76-77).
In the United States, then part of the British Colonies, the court records of the testimony of Tituba (1692), the journal of Sarah Kemble Knight (1704-5), and a treatise on small pox by Cotton Mather (1721) provide the first known examples. These were not authors of fiction, but neither were they skilled dialect collectors. Despite the fact that most people would not consider Cotton Mather an entertainer, he was apparently being more or less light and humorous when he included pidgin forms like grandy-many (with the added, or enclitic vowel), cutty-skin (enclitic vowel, "absence" of article--the phrase means 'cut the skin'), by 'nd by (probably bimeby, a future time adverbial of almost universal usage in Pidgin English), and nobody have smallpox any more (invariant verb form) in an indirect quotation. Mather began the quotation by stating that he had "since" met with a considerable number of Africans. Therefore, it can be concluded that he had met with them over a period of time and was familiar with their speech patterns. He knew enough about his African servants to indicate that one of them was of the "Guramante" (Coromantee) tribe, and in general seemed thoroughly familiar with the background of the people about whom he provided information (Dillard 79).
African Pidgin English may well have been in use in the United States long before the time of Mather's attestation. It is not, at any rate...