The Slave Ship
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade
CHAPTER 2 - The Evolution of the Slave Ship
CHAPTER 3 - African Paths to the Middle Passage
CHAPTER 4 - Olaudah Equiano: Astonishment and Terror
CHAPTER 5 - James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon
CHAPTER 6 - John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom
CHAPTER 7 - The Captain’s Own Hell
CHAPTER 8 - The Sailor’s Vast Machine
CHAPTER 9 - From Captives to Shipmates
CHAPTER 10 - The Long Voyage of the Slave Ship Brooks
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
NOTES
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION SOURCES AND CREDITS
The Slave Ship is truly a magnificent and disturbing book—disturbing not only because it details the violence and barbarism of the free market in human beings, but it reminds us that all actors in this drama are human, including the ship’s crew. The Slave Ship is not for the fainthearted, but like the millions who took this voyage in the past, we have no choice. We have to come to terms with this history if we want to understand how this modern, racialized and globalized economy based on exploitation came to be.
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Slave Ship is a tour de force that conveys the reality of the slave trade more vividly and convincingly than ever before. I am sure that it will continue to be read as long as people want to understand a crucial episode in the birth of the modern world.
—Robin Blackburn, author of The Making of New World Slavery
This beautifully written and exhaustively researched book gives us unforgettable portraits of the captives, captains, and crewmen who came together in that particular kind of hell known as the slave ship. This is Atlantic history at its best.
—Robert Harms, author of The Diligent
Marcus Rediker is one of the most distinguished historians of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and he brings to the slave ship both an unrivaled knowledge of maritime labor and a deep theoretical perspective on the slave trade’s role in the rise of capitalism.
—Steven Hahn, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation Under Our Feet
This Atlantic epic brilliantly reveals the slave ship as a ‘vast machine,’ transforming its human cargo into slaves, and portrays precisely the variety of Africans, free and captive, in their choices and desperate struggles.
—Patrick Manning, author of Slavery and African Life
Marcus Rediker, like the incomparable Herman Melville, understands both the immediate human drama and the sweeping global context of life aboard a cramped ocean vessel in the age of sail. He uses his unique gifts to take us belowdecks, giving a human face to the inhuman ordeal of the Middle Passage.
—Peter H. Wood, author of Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America
The Atlantic’s foremost historian from below has written a master-piece; we hear the shrieks of pain, the groans of loss, and uproar of rebellion. In the end, with ex-slaves offering amazing graces to discarded sailors, the cry rises up from this magnificent book for justice and for reparation.
—Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged
ALSO BY MARCUS REDIKER
Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(with Peter Linebaugh)
Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics,
Culture, and Society, Volume One: From Conquest and Colonization
Through Reconstruction and the Great Uprising of 1877
(with the American Social History Project)
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates,
and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Marcus Rediker, 2007
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Rediker, Marcus Buford.
Slave ship : a human history / Marcus Rediker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-670-01823-9
1. Slave trade—Africa—History. 2. Slaves. 3. Merchant mariners.
4. Race relations. I. Title.
HT1322. R42 2007
306.3’62096—dc22 2007018081
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To Wendy, Zeke, and Eva
with love and hope
Introduction
Lying in the bottom of the canoe in three or four inches of dirty water with a woven mat thrown over her travel-weary body, the woman could feel the rhythmic pull of the paddles by the Bonny canoemen, but could not see where they were taking her. She had traveled three moons from the interior, much of it by canoe down the rivers and through the swamps. Several times along the way, she had been sold. In the canoe-house barracoon where she and dozens of others had been held for several days, she learned that this leg of the journey was nearing its end. Now she wiggled upward against the wet torso of another prostrate captive, then against the side of the canoe, so she could raise her head and peer above the bow. Ahead lay the owba coocoo, the dreaded ship, made to cross the “big water.” She had heard about it in the most heated threats made in the village, where to be sold to the white men and taken aboard the owba coocoo was the worst punishment imaginable.1
Again and again the canoe pitched up and down on the foamy surf, and each time the nose dipped, she could glimpse the ship like an oddly shaped island on the horizon. As they came closer, it seemed more like a huge wooden box with three tall spikes ascending. The wind picked up, and she caught a peculiar but not unfam
iliar odor of sweat, the pungency of fear with a sour trail of sickness. A shudder rippled through her body.
To the left of the canoe, she saw a sandbar and made a decision. The paddles plashed gently in the water, two, three, four times, and she jumped over the side, swimming furiously to escape her captors. She heard splashes as a couple of the canoemen jumped in after her. No sooner had they hit the water than she heard a new commotion, looked over her shoulder, and saw them pulling themselves back into the canoe. As she waded onto the edge of the sandbar, she saw a large, stocky gray shark, about eight feet long, with a blunt, rounded snout and small eyes, gliding alongside the canoe as it came directly at her. Cursing, the men clubbed the shark with their paddles, beached the watercraft, jumped out, and waded, then loped after her. She had nowhere to run on the sandbar, and the shark made it impossible to return to the water. She fought, to no avail. The men lashed rough vine around her wrists and legs and threw her back into the bottom of the canoe. They resumed paddling and soon began to sing. After a while she could hear, at first faintly, then with increasing clarity, other sounds—the waves slapping the hull of the big ship, its timbers creaking. Then came muffled screaming in a strange language.
The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder—crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word or two wafting through: someone asking for menney, water, another laying a curse, appealing to myabecca, spirits. As the canoemen maneuvered their vessel up alongside, she saw dark faces, framed by small holes in the side of the ship above the waterline, staring intently. Above her, dozens of black women and children and a few red-faced men peered over the rail. They had seen the attempted escape on the sandbar. The men had cutlasses and barked orders in harsh, raspy voices. She had arrived at the slave ship.
The canoemen untied the lashing and pushed the woman toward a rope ladder, which she ascended with fifteen others from her canoe, everyone naked. Several of the men climbed up with them, as did the black trader in a gold-laced hat who had escorted them from the canoe house to the owba coocoo. Most of the people in her group, herself included, were amazed by what they saw, but a couple of the male captives seemed strangely at ease, even speaking to the white men in their own tongue. Here was a world unto itself, with tall, shaved, limbless trees; strange instruments; and a high-reaching system of ropes. Pigs, goats, and fowl milled around the main deck. One of the white men had a local parrot, another a monkey. The owba coocoo was so big it even had its own ewba wanta (small boat) on board. Another white man, filthy in his person, leered at her, made a lewd gesture, and tried to grope her. She lunged at the man, digging her fingernails into his face, bringing blood in several places before he disentangled himself from her and lashed her sharply three times with a small whip he was carrying. The black trader intervened and hustled her away.
As she recovered her composure, she surveyed the faces of the other prisoners on the main deck. All of them were young, some of them children. In her village she was considered middling in age, but here she was one of the oldest. She had been purchased only because the clever black trader had sold a large group in a lot, leaving the captain no choice but to take what he was offered, all or none. On the ship she would be an elder.
Many of the people on deck seemed to speak her language, Igbo, although many of them differently from herself. She recognized a couple of other groups of people from her home region, the simple Appas and the darker, more robust Ottams. Many of the captives, she would learn later, had been on board the ship for months. The first two had been named Adam and Eve by the sailors. Three or four were sweeping the deck; many were washing up. Sailors handed out small wooden bowls for the afternoon meal. The ship’s cook served beef and bread to some, the more familiar yams with palm oil to others.
The main deck bustled with noisy activity. A white man with black skin, a sailor, screamed “Domona! ” (quiet) against the din. Two other white men seemed to be especially important to everything that happened. The big man on board was the captain, whose words caused the other white men to jump. He and the doctor busily checked the newcomers—head, eyes, teeth, limbs, and belly. They inspected a family—a husband, wife, and child—who had come aboard together from her canoe. The man was taken, with tears in his eyes, through the barricado door into the forward part of the ship. From beyond the barrier, she heard the cries of another man getting pem pem, a beating. She recognized his anguished intonation as Ibibio.
Soon after she had been examined, a white man barked at her, “Get below! Now! Hurry!” and pushed her toward a big square hole in the deck. A young woman standing nearby feared that she did not understand the order and whispered urgently, “Gemalla! Geyen gwango!” As she descended the rungs of a ladder into the lower deck, a horrific stench assaulted her nostrils and suddenly made her dizzy, weak, queasy. She knew it as the smell of awawo, death. It emanated from two sick women lying alone in a dark corner, unattended, near the athasa, or “mess-tub,” as the white men called it. The women died the following day, their bodies thrown overboard. Almost instantaneously the surrounding waters broke, swirled, and reddened. The shark that had followed her canoe had its meal at last.
The story of this woman was one act in what the great African-American scholar-activist W. E. B. DuBois called the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history”—“the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell.” Expropriated from her native land, the woman was forced aboard a slave ship to be transported to a new world of work and exploitation, where she would likely produce sugar, tobacco, or rice and make her owner wealthy. This book follows her, and others like her, onto the tall ships, those strange and powerful European machines that made it all possible.2
The epic drama unfolded in countless settings over a long span of time, centering not on an individual but rather a cast of millions.
Over the almost four hundred years of the slave trade, from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, 12.4 million souls were loaded onto slave ships and carried through a “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic to hundreds of delivery points stretched over thousands of miles. Along the dreadful way, 1.8 million of them died, their bodies cast overboard to the sharks that followed the ships. Most of the 10.6 million who survived were thrown into the bloody maw of a killing plantation system, which they would in turn resist in all ways imaginable. 3
Yet even these extraordinary numbers do not convey the magnitude of the drama. Many people captured in Africa died as they marched in bands and coffles (human trains) to the slave ships, although the lack of records makes it impossible to know their precise numbers. Scholars now estimate that, depending on time and place, some portion between a tenth and a half of the captives perished between the point of enslavement and the boarding of the slave ship. A conservative estimate of 15 percent—which would include those who died in transit and while being held in barracoons and factories on the coast—suggests another 1.8 million deaths in Africa. Another 15 percent (or more, depending on region), a million and a half, would expire during the first year of laboring life in the New World. From stage to stage—expropriation in Africa, the Middle Passage, initial exploitation in America—roughly 5 million men, women, and children died. Another way to look at the loss of life would be to say that an estimated 14 million people were enslaved to produce a “yield” of 9 million longer-surviving enslaved Atlantic workers. DuBois’s “most magnificent drama” was a tragedy.4
The so-called golden age of the drama was the period 1700-1808, when more captives were transported than any other, roughly two-thirds of the total. More than 40 percent of these, or 3 million altogether, were shipped in British and American ships. This era, these ships, their crews, and thei
r captives are the subjects of this book. During this time the mortality rate on the ships was falling, but the sheer number of deaths remains staggering: nearly a million died throughout the slave trade, a little less than half of these in the commerce organized from British and American ports. The numbers are more chilling because those who organized the human commerce knew the death rates and carried on anyway. Human “wastage” was simply part of the business, something to be calculated into all planning. This would be denounced as murder pure and simple by the African writer Ottobah Cugoano, himself a veteran of the Middle Passage, and others who built a transatlantic movement to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s.5
Where did the souls caught up in the drama come from, and where did they go? Between 1700 and 1808, British and American merchants sent ships to gather slaves in six basic regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone/the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa (Kongo, Angola). Ships carried the captives primarily to the British sugar islands (where more than 70 percent of all slaves were purchased, almost half of these at Jamaica), but sizable numbers were also sent to French and Spanish buyers as a result of special treaty arrangements called the Asiento. About one in ten was shipped to North American destinations. The largest share of these went to South Carolina and Georgia, with substantial numbers also to the Chesapeake. The drama would continue in a new act after the captives stumbled off the ships.6
On the rolling decks of the slave ship, four distinct but related human dramas were staged, again and again, over the course of the long eighteenth century. Each was meaningful in its own day and again in ours. The players in these dramas were the ship captain, the motley crew, the multiethnic enslaved, and, toward the end of the period, middle-class abolitionists and the metropolitan reading public to whom they appealed in both Britain and America.