The first drama centered on the relations between the slave-ship captain and his crew, men who in the language of the day must have neither “dainty fingers nor dainty noses,” as theirs was a filthy business in almost every conceivable sense.7 Captains of slavers were tough, hard-driving men, known for their concentrated power, ready resort to the lash, and ability to control large numbers of people. Violent command applied almost as much to the rough crews of the slavers as to the hundreds of captives they shipped. Discipline was often brutal, and many a sailor was lashed to fatality. Moreover, for sailors in the slave trade, rations were poor, wages were usually low, and the mortality rate was high—as high as that of the enslaved, modern scholarship has shown. Sailors captured this deadly truth in a saying:
Beware and take care
Of the Bight of Benin;
For the one that comes out,
There are forty go in.
Many died, some went blind, and countless others suffered lasting disability. Captains and crews therefore repeatedly clashed, as could be suggested even by names: Samuel Pain was a violent slave-ship captain; Arthur Fuse was a sailor and mutineer. How did captains recruit sailors to this deadly trade in the first place, and how did these relations play out? How did relations between captain and crew change once the enslaved came aboard?8
The relationship between sailors and slaves—predicated on vicious forced feedings, whippings, casual violence of all kinds, and the rape of women captives—constituted the second drama. The captain presided over this interaction, but the sailors carried out his orders to bring the enslaved on board, to stow them belowdecks, to feed them, compel them to exercise (“dance”), maintain their health, discipline and punish them—in short, slowly transform them into commodities for the international labor market. This drama also witnessed endlessly creative resistance from those being transported, from hunger strikes to suicide to outright insurrection, but also selective appropriations of culture from the captors, especially language and technical knowledge, as, for example, about the workings of the ship.
A third and simultaneous drama grew from conflict and cooperation among the enslaved themselves as people of different classes, ethnicities, and genders were thrown together down in the horror-filled lower deck of the slave ship. How would this “multitude of black people, of every description chained together” communicate? They found ways to exchange valuable information about all aspects of their predicament, where they were going, and what their fate would be. Amid the brutal imprisonment, terror, and premature death, they managed a creative, life-affirming response: they fashioned new languages, new cultural practices, new bonds, and a nascent community among themselves aboard the ship. They called each other “shipmate,” the equivalent of brother and sister, and thereby inaugurated a “fictive” but very real kinship to replace what had been destroyed by their abduction and enslavement in Africa. Their creativity and resistance made them collectively indestructible, and herein lay the greatest magnificence of the drama.9
The fourth and final drama emerged, not on the ship but in civil society in Britain and America as abolitionists drew one horrifying portrait after another of the Middle Passage for a metropolitan reading public. This drama centered on the image of the slave ship. Thomas Clarkson went down to the docks of Bristol and Liverpool to gather information about the slave trade. But once his antislavery sentiments became known, slave-trading merchants and ship captains shunned him. The young Cambridge-educated gentleman began to interview sailors, who had firsthand experience of the trade, complaints to register, stories to tell. Clarkson gathered this evidence and used it to battle merchants, plantation owners, bankers, and government officials—in short, all who had a vested interest in the slave trade and the larger institution of slavery. The success of the abolitionist movement lay in making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship’s pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature. The “most magnificent drama” had a powerful final act: the shipbuilder’s diagram of the slave ship Brooks, which showed 482 “tight-packed” slaves distributed around the decks of the vessel, eventually helped the movement abolish the slave trade.
The year 1700 was a symbolic beginning of the drama in both Britain and America. Although merchants and sailors had long been involved in the trade, this was the year of the first recorded slaving voyage from Rhode Island, which would be the center of the American slave trade, and from Liverpool, which would be its British center and, by the end of the century, the center of the entire Atlantic trade. At the end of May 1700, the Eliza, Captain John Dunn, set sail from Liverpool for an unspecified destination in Africa and again to Barbados, where he delivered 180 slaves. In August, Nicholas Hilgrove captained the Thomas and John on a voyage from Newport, Rhode Island, to an unspecified destination in Africa and then to Barbados, where he and his sailors unloaded from their small vessel 71 captives. Hundreds of slavers would follow from these ports and from others in the coming century.10
Despite shifts in the numbers of people shipped, as well as their sources and destinations, the slave ship itself changed relatively little between 1700 and 1808. Slaving vessels grew somewhat larger in size over time, and they grew more efficient, employing smaller crews in relation to the number of the enslaved shipped. They certainly grew in number, to handle the greater volume of bodies to be transported. And their atmosphere grew healthier: the death rate, for sailors and for slaves, declined, especially in the late eighteenth century. Yet the essentials of running a slave ship, from the sailing to the stowing, feeding, and exercising of the human cargo, remained roughly the same over time. To put the matter another way, a captain, a sailor, or an African captive who had experienced a slave ship in 1700 would have found most everything familiar a century later.11
What each of them found in the slave ship was a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory. Loaded with cannon and possessed of extraordinary destructive power, the ship’s war-making capacity could be turned against other European vessels, forts, and ports in a traditional war of nations, or it could be turned to and sometimes against non-European vessels and ports in imperial trade or conquest. The slave ship also contained a war within, as the crew (now prison guards) battled slaves (prisoners), the one training its guns on the others, who plotted escape and insurrection. Sailors also “produced” slaves within the ship as factory, doubling their economic value as they moved them from a market on the eastern Atlantic to one on the west and helping to create the labor power that animated a growing world economy in the eighteenth century and after. In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-factory also produced “race.” At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew of sailors, who would, on the coast of Africa, become “white men.” At the beginning of the Middle Passage, captains loaded on board the vessel a multiethnic collection of Africans, who would, in the American port, become “black people” or a “negro race.” The voyage thus transformed those who made it. War making, imprisonment, and the factory production of labor power and race all depended on violence.
After many voyages and stalwart service to the Atlantic economy, the slave ship finally hit stormy seas. The opponents of the slave trade launched an intensive transatlantic agitation and finally forced the slavers to stop sailing—or at least, after new laws were passed by the British and American governments in 1807 and 1808 respectively, to stop sailing legally. The traffic continued illegally for many years, but a decisive moment in human history had been reached. Abolition, coupled with its profound coeval event, the Haitian Revolution, marked the beginning of the end of slavery.
Curiously, many of the poignant tales within the great drama have never been told, and the slave ship itself has been a neglected topic within a rich historical literature on the Atlantic slave trade. Excellent research has been conducted on the origins, timing, scale, flows, and profits of the slave trade, but there exists no broad study of the vessel that made the
world-transforming commerce possible. There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization. There exists no analysis of the instrument that facilitated Europe’s “commercial revolution,” its building of plantations and global empires, its development of capitalism, and eventually its industrialization. In short, the slave ship and its social relations have shaped the modern world, but their history remains in many ways unknown. 12
Scholarship on the slave ship may be limited, but scholarship on the slave trade is, like the Atlantic, vast and deep. Highlights include Philip Curtin’s landmark study The African Slave Trade: A Census (1969); Joseph Miller’s classic Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (1988), which explores the Portuguese slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century; Hugh Thomas’s grand synthesis The Slave Trade: The Story of the African Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (1999); and Robert Harms’s elegant micro-history of a single voyage of the Diligent from France to Whydah to Martinique in 1734-35. The publication of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database, compiled, edited, and introduced by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, represents an extraordinary scholarly achievement.13 Other important studies of the slave trade have been literary, by writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, Caryl Phillips, and Manu Herbstein.14
What follows is not a new history of the slave trade. It is, rather, something more modest, an account that uses both the abundant scholarship on the subject and new material to look at the subject from a different vantage, from the decks of a slave ship. Nor is it an exhaustive survey of its subject. A broader history that compares and connects the slave ships of all the Atlantic powers—not only Britain and the American colonies but also Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden—remains to be written. More attention also needs to be trained on the connecting links between, on the eastern Atlantic, African societies and the slave ship and, on the western, the slave ship and plantation societies of the Americas. There is still much to be learned about the “most magnificent drama of the last thousand years of human history.” 15
The shift of focus to the slave ship expands the number and variety of actors in the drama and makes the drama itself, from prologue to epilogue, more complex. If heretofore the main actors have been relatively small but powerful groups of merchants, planters, politicians, and abolitionists, now the cast includes captains in their thousands, sailors in their hundreds of thousands, and slaves in their millions. Indeed the enslaved now appear as the first and primary abolitionists as they battle the conditions of enslavement aboard the ships on a daily basis and as they win allies over time among metropolitan activists and dissident sailors, middle-class saints and proletarian sinners. Other important players were African rulers and merchants, as well as workers in England and America, who joined the cause of abolition and indeed turned it into a successful mass movement.16
Why a human history? Barry Unsworth captured one of the reasons in his epic novel Sacred Hunger. Liverpool merchant William Kemp is talking with his son Erasmus about his slave ship, which, he has just learned by correspondence, has taken on board its human cargo in West Africa and set sail for the New World.
In that quiet room, with its oak wainscotting and Turkey carpet, its shelves of ledgers and almanacks, it would have been difficult for those two to form any true picture of the ship’s circumstances or the nature of trading on the Guinea coast, even if they had been inclined to try. Difficult, and in any case superfluous. To function efficiently—to function at all—we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statements of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavour and lawful profit. And we have maps. 17
Unsworth describes a “violence of abstraction” that has plagued the study of the slave trade from its beginning. It is as if the use of ledgers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables—the merchants’ comforting methods—has rendered abstract, and thereby dehumanized, a reality that must, for moral and political reasons, be understood concretely. An ethnography of the slave ship helps to demonstrate not only the cruel truth of what one group of people (or several) was willing to do to others for money—or, better, capital—but also how they managed in crucial respects to hide the reality and consequences of their actions from themselves and from posterity. Numbers can occlude the pervasive torture and terror, but European, African, and American societies still live with their consequences, the multiple legacies of race, class, and slavery. The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness.18
To conclude on a personal note, this has been a painful book to write, and if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read. There is no way around this, nor should there be. I offer this study with the greatest reverence for those who suffered almost unthinkable violence, terror, and death, in the firm belief that we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism.
CHAPTER 1
Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade
A voyage into this peculiar hell begins with the human seascape, stories of the people whose lives were shaped by the slave trade. Some grew prosperous and powerful, others poor and weak. An overwhelming majority suffered extreme terror, and many died in horrific circumstances. People of all kinds—men, women, and children, black, white, and all shades in between, from Africa, Europe, and the Americas—were swept into the trade’s surreal, swirling vortex. They included, at the bottom, a vast and lowly proletariat, hundreds of thousands of sailors, who, in their tarred breeches, scuttled up and down the ratlines of a slave ship, and millions of slaves, who, in their nakedness, crouched on the lower deck. They included, at the top, a small, high, and mighty Atlantic ruling class of merchants, planters, and political leaders, who, in ruffles and finery, sat in the American Continental Congress and British Parliament. The “most magnificent drama” of human commerce also featured in its dramatis personae pirates and warriors, petty traders and hunger strikers, murderers and visionaries. They were frequently surrounded by sharks.
Captain Tomba
Among a gang of dejected prisoners in a holding pen, facing purchase by a slaver, one man stood out. He was “of a tall, strong Make, and bold, stern aspect.” He saw a group of white men observing the barracoon, with “a design to buy,” he thought. When his fellow captives submitted their bodies for examination by prospective buyers, he expressed contempt. John Leadstine, “Old Cracker,” the head of the slave factory, or shipping point, on Bance Island, Sierra Leone, ordered the man to rise and “stretch out his Limbs.” He refused. For his insolence he got a ferocious whipping with a “cutting Manatea Strap.” He took the lashing with fortitude, shrinking little from the blows. An observer noted that he shed “a Tear or two, which he endeavoured to hide as tho’ ashamed of.”1
This tall, strong, defiant man was Captain Tomba, explained Leadstine to the visitors, who were impressed by his courage and eager to know his history, how he had been captured. He had been a headman of a group of villages, probably Baga, around the Rio Nuñez. They opposed the slave trade. Captain Tomba led his fellow villagers in burning huts and killing neighbors who cooperated with Leadstine and other slave traders. Determined to break his resistance, Leadstine in turn organized a midnight expedition to capture this dangerous leader, who killed two of his attackers but was finally taken.
Captain Tomba was eventually purchased by Captain Richard Harding and taken aboard the Robert of Bristol. Chained and thrown into the lower deck, he immediately plotted his escape. He combined with “three or four of the stoutest of his Country-men” and an enslaved woman who had freer range about the ship and he
nce better knowledge of when the plan might be put into action. One night the unnamed woman found only five white men on deck, all asleep. Through the gratings she slipped Captain Tomba a hammer, to pound off the fetters, and “all the Weapons she could find.”
Captain Tomba encouraged the men belowdecks “with the Prospect of Liberty,” but only one and the woman above were willing to join him. When he came upon three sleeping sailors, he killed two of them instantly with “single Strokes upon the Temples.” In killing the third, he made commotion that awoke the two others on watch as well as the rest of the crew, sleeping elsewhere. Captain Harding himself picked up a handspike, flailed at Tomba, knocked him out, and “laid him at length flat upon the Deck.” The crew locked up all three rebels in irons.
When the time came for punishment, Captain Harding weighed “the Stoutness and Worth” of the two male rebels and decided it was in his economic interest to “whip and scarify them only.” He then selected three others only marginally involved in the conspiracy—but also less valuable—and used them to create terror among the rest of the enslaved aboard the vessel. These he sentenced to “cruel Deaths.” He killed one immediately and made the others eat his heart and liver. The woman “he hoisted up by the Thumbs, whipp’d, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died.” Captain Tomba was apparently delivered at Kingston, Jamaica, with 189 other enslaved people and sold at a high price. His subsequent fate is unknown.2
“The Boatswain”
Leadership among the captives arose from belowdecks during the Middle Passage. A sailor aboard the Nightingale told the story of a captive woman whose real name is lost to posterity but who came to be known on board the ship as “the boatswain”—because she kept order among her fellow enslaved women, probably with a fierce determination that they should all survive the ordeal of oceanic crossing. She “used to keep them quiet when in the rooms, and when they were on deck likewise.”
The Slave Ship Page 2