The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Morice was an engaged merchant and shipowner. He made it his business to learn the details of the trade, which he expressed in careful instructions to his team of captains. He explained how trading practices varied from one African port to the next. He knew that staying on the coast too long gathering a cargo risked higher mortality, so he worked out cooperative practices among his ships to evacuate the slaves quickly. He instructed his captains to buy slaves between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, two males to a female, “Good & healthy, and not blind Lame or Blemished.” He no doubt followed the advice of his Jamaican factors about the “Defects to be carefully avoided”:

  Dwarfish, or Gigantick Size wch are equaly disagreeable

  Ugly faces

  Long Tripeish Breasts wch ye Spaniards mortally hate

  Yellowish Skins

  Livid Spots in ye Skin wch turns to an incureable Evil

  Films in ye Eyes

  Loss of Fingers, Toes, or Teeth

  Navells sticking out

  Ruptures wch ye Gambia Slaves are very Subject to

  Bandy legs

  Sharp Shins

  Lunaticks

  Idiots

  Lethargicks 16

  He also explained how the slaves should be fed, how their food should be prepared. He demanded that both sailors and slaves be treated well. He put surgeons and limes (to combat scurvy) on his vessels before it was a common practice to do either. He told his captains to be sure to “get your negroes shaved and made clean to look well and strike a good impression on the Planters and buyers.”

  It is impossible to know precisely how much of Morice’s great wealth in estate, land, ships, stocks, and funds derived from the slave trade, although it is possible to know that whatever the profits, he thought them inadequate to sustain his style of life. He took to defrauding the Bank of England (of approximately £29,000 total; almost $7.5 million in 2007 currency) by making up false bills of foreign exchange and to mismanaging funds of which he was trustee. When Morice died in disgrace on November 16, 1731, he was in a far different situation from those who died aboard the Katherine or any of his other ships. But the death of this fabled slave trader was horrible in its own way. People whispered, “ ’Tis supposed he took Poyson.”

  Merchant Henry Laurens

  In April 1769, Henry Laurens, one of early America’s wealthiest merchants, wrote to Captain Hinson Todd, who was seeking a cargo in Jamaica to carry to Charleston, South Carolina. Laurens was an experienced slave trader and he was worried that Todd was not. He therefore cautioned that if the Jamaica merchant “should Ship Negroes on board your Sloop, be very careful to guard against insurrection. Never put your Life in their power a moment. For a moment is sufficient to deprive you of it & make way for the destruction of all your Men & yet you may treat such Negroes with great Humanity.” It was an odd but revealing statement. Laurens instructed the captain to treat with “great humanity” the very people who would, given a split-second chance, annihilate him and his entire crew. Such were the contradictions Laurens faced, and not he alone. He knew the brutal realities of the slave trade and the resistance it always engendered, and yet he tried to put a human face on the situation. Perhaps he feared that he had scared the captain, who might then overreact and damage his dangerous but valuable property.17

  Laurens had by this time already built a fortune through booming Atlantic commerce, the slave trade in particular. In 1749, at the youthful age of twenty-five, he had formed a mercantile partnership, Austin & Laurens, which expanded to include a new partner, George Appleby, ten years later. More than half of the slaves imported into the American colonies/United States came through Charleston, which served as a distribution point for the entire lower South. His firm played a leading part, and Laurens himself grew knowledgeable about the various African ethnicities who arrived aboard the slave ships. He expressed a strong preference for Gambian and Gold Coast peoples as plantation workers and a decided distaste for Igbo and Angolans. 18

  Like Humphry Morice a generation earlier, Laurens organized the importation of about sixty cargoes of slaves. Unlike Morice, who was usually a sole owner and investor in his voyages, Laurens spread the risk by pooling money through partnerships. He wrote, “The Africa Trade is more liable to such Accidents than any other we know of, so it highly concerns such as become adventurers in that branch to fortify themselves against every disappointment that the trade is incident to.” The trade was hazardous, as he cautioned Captain Todd, but it was also lucrative, “gainful,” or, as he once put it, “the most profitable.” By 1760, Laurens was one of the richest merchants not only in South Carolina but throughout the American colonies.

  Laurens made a conscious decision to withdraw much of his business from the slave trade around 1763, although he remained involved by taking numerous slave cargoes on consignment, as suggested by his letter to Captain Todd. He had lost both a partner and a wealthy backer, which may have limited his ability to hedge the risk. Or perhaps the wealthy merchant simply no longer wished to be an “adventurer.” In any case he turned his attention—and his slave-trade profits—to becoming a planter, a land speculator, and a politician. He accumulated vast tracts of land and over time he acquired six plantations. Two, Broughton Island and New Hope, were in Georgia, and four were in South Carolina: Wambaw, Wrights Savannah, Mount Tacitus, and Mepkin. The last of these, his main residence, was 3,143 acres, on which several hundred slaves produced rice and other commodities for export, which were then shipped thirty miles down the Cooper River to Charleston and from there pumped into the Atlantic economy.

  Laurens turned his economic power into political power. He was elected to office seventeen times, serving in the South Carolina assembly and the Continental Congress, ascending after a short time to the presidency of the latter. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which gave the American colonies their independence, and he was selected to represent South Carolina in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (although he declined to serve). This man who had counseled Captain Todd never to put his life under the power of enslaved Africans owed his wealth, standing, and genteel life to his own decision to keep hundreds, indeed thousands, of lives under his own power, as a planter and a slave-trade merchant.

  “The Greedy Robbers”

  Sharks began to follow slave ships when they reached the Guinea coast. From Senegambia along the Windward, Gold, and Slave coasts, to Kongo and Angola, sailors spotted them when their vessels were anchored or moving slowly, and most clearly in a dead calm.19 What attracted the sharks (as well as other fish) was the human waste, offal, and rubbish that was continually thrown overboard. Like a “greedy robber,” the shark “attends the ships, in expectation of what may drop over-board. A man, who unfortunately falls into the sea at such a time, is sure to perish, without mercy.” Young Samuel Robinson recalled the chill of the voracious predator: “The very sight of him slowly moving round the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.” Sharks were especially dangerous when trade was carried on in boats and canoes, in high surf, between the slavers anchored offshore and the trading forts or villages on land. They swarmed around the smaller craft, occasionally lunging out of the water to bite an oar in half, hoping all the while, as one nervous trader noted, “to see the Bottom of our Canoe turn’d upwards.” Sharks were known as the “dread of sailors.”20

  Sharks became an even greater dread as members of the crew began to die. Captains sometimes made efforts to bury deceased sailors ashore, as, for example, in Bonny, where corpses were interred in shallow graves on a sandy point about a quarter mile from the main trading town. But when the tidal river rose, the current sometimes washed the sand away from the bodies, causing a noxious stench and inviting hungry sharks. On most stretches of the coast, slavers had no burial rights, which resulted in what Silas Told saw happen to the cadaver of a former comrade in the harbor of
São Tomé around 1735: “the first [shark] seized one of his hindquarters, and wrenched it off at the first shake; a second attacked the hind-quarter, and took that away likewise; when a third furiously attacked the remainder of the body, and greedily devoured the whole thereof.” Crews tried to outsmart the sharks by sewing a dead sailor into his hammock or an old canvas sail and enclosing a cannonball to pull the body to the bottom, hopefully uneaten. This strategy often failed, as a sea surgeon noted: “I have seen [sharks] frequently seize a Corpse, as soon as it was committed to the Sea; tearing and devouring that, and the Hammock that shrouded it, without suffering it once to sink, tho’ a great Weight of Ballast in it.”21

  If the shark was the dread of sailors, it was the outright terror of the enslaved. No effort was made to protect or bury the bodies of African captives who died on the slave ships. One commentator after another reiterated what Alexander Falconbridge said of Bonny, where sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard.”22 The Dutch merchant Willem Bosman described a feeding frenzy in which four or five sharks consumed a body without leaving a trace. Late-arriving sharks would attack the others with blows so furious as to “make the sea around to tremble.” The destruction of corpses by sharks was a public spectacle and part of the degradation of enslavement.23

  Sharks followed the slavers all the way across the Atlantic into American ports, as suggested by a notice from Kingston, Jamaica, that appeared in various newspapers in 1785: “The many Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become extremely dangerous, even above town. A very large one was taken on Sunday, along side the Hibberts, Capt. Boyd.” Abolitionists would do much to publicize the terror of sharks in the slave trade, but this evidence comes from a slave society, before the rise of the abolitionist movement. More came from Captain Hugh Crow, who made ten slaving voyages and wrote from personal observation that sharks “have been known to follow vessels across the ocean, that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard.”24

  Slaving captains consciously used sharks to create terror throughout the voyage. They counted on sharks to prevent the desertion of their seamen and the escape of their slaves during the long stays on the coast of Africa required to gather a human “cargo.” Naval officers used the fear of sharks, too. In the late 1780s, an African sailor from Cape Coast, who had been brought to Jamaica by a Liverpool Guineaman and somehow managed to escape slavery and find a berth on a man-of-war, killed a shark that had made it dangerous for sailors to swim or bathe around the vessel. He might have been a hero to his mates, but the commanding officer took a different view. As it happened, that shark had “prevented a number of desertions,” so the African sailor “got a merciless flogging” for killing it. Naval officers were even said to feed sharks to keep them around their vessels.25

  So well known was the conscious use of terror by the slave captain to create social discipline that when Oliver Goldsmith came to write the natural history of sharks in 1774, he drew heavily on the lore of the slave trade. The histories of terrorism and zoology intersected. Goldsmith recounted two instances:

  The master of a Guinea-ship, finding a rage for suicide among his slaves, from a notion the unhappy creatures had, that after death they should be restored again to their families, friends, and country; to convince them at least that some disgrace should attend them here, he immediately ordered one of their dead bodies to be tied by the heels to a rope, and so let down into the sea; and, though it was drawn up again with great swiftness, yet in that short space, the sharks had bit off all but the feet.

  A second case was even more gruesome. Another captain facing a “rage for suicide” seized upon a woman “as a proper example to the rest.” He ordered the woman tied with a rope under her armpits and lowered into the water: “When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.” Other slave-ship captains practiced a kind of sporting terror, using human remains to troll for sharks: “Our way to entice them was by Towing overboard a dead Negro, which they would follow till they had eaten him up.”26

  CHAPTER 2

  The Evolution of the Slave Ship

  Thomas Gordon introduced his book Principles of Naval Architecture (1784) with a sweeping statement: “As a Ship is undoubtedly the no-blest, and one of the most useful machines that ever was invented, every attempt to improve it becomes a matter of importance, and merits the consideration of mankind.” He captured, as a naval architect should, the tall ship’s combination of grandeur and utility as he suggested the importance of its technical refinement and specialization. He noted that the progress of naval architecture could not be confined to this or that nation but belonged properly to all of mankind, whom the ship had helped to connect around the globe. Perhaps most important, he saw the ship as a machine, one of the most useful ever invented. He knew, of course, that the European deep-sea sailing ship—of which the slave ship was a variant—had helped to transform the world from the era of Christopher Columbus to his own time. It was the historic vessel for the emergence of capitalism, a new and unprecedented social and economic system that remade large parts of the world beginning in the late sixteenth century. It was also the material setting, the stage, for the enactment of the high human drama of the slave trade.1

  The origins and genesis of the slave ship as a world-changing machine go back to the late fifteenth century, when the Portuguese made their historic voyages to the west coast of Africa, where they bought gold, ivory, and human beings. These early “explorations” marked the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. They were made possible by a new evolution of the sailing ship, the full-rigged, three-masted carrack, the forerunner of the vessels that would eventually carry Europeans to all parts of the earth, then carry millions of Europeans and Africans to the New World, and finally earn Thomas Gordon’s admiration. 2

  As Carlo Cipolla explained in his classic work Guns, Sails, and Empires , the ruling classes of Western European states were able to conquer the world between 1400 and 1700 because of two distinct and soon powerfully combined technological developments. First, English craftsmen forged cast-iron cannon, which were rapidly disseminated to military forces all around Europe. Second, the deep-sea sailing “round ship” of Northern Europe slowly eclipsed the oared “long ship,” or galley, of the Mediterranean. European leaders with maritime ambitions had their shipwrights cut ports into the hulls of these rugged, seaworthy ships for huge, heavy cannon. Naval warfare changed as they added sails and guns and replaced oarsmen and warriors with smaller, more efficient crews. They substituted sail power for human energy and thereby created a machine that harnessed unparalleled mobility, speed, and destructive power. Thus when the full-rigged ship equipped with muzzle-loading cannon showed up on the coasts of Africa, Asia, and America, it was by all accounts a marvel if not a terror. The noise of the cannon alone was terrifying. Indeed it was enough, one empire builder explained, to induce non-Europeans to worship Jesus Christ.3

  European rulers would use this revolutionary technology, this new maritime machine, to sail, explore, and master the high seas in order to trade, to fight, to seize new lands, to plunder, and to build empires. In so doing they battled each other as fiercely as they battled peoples outside Europe. Thanks in large part to the carrack, the galleon, and finally the full-rigged, three-masted, cannon-carrying ship, they established a new capitalist order. They rapidly became masters of the planet, a point that was not lost on the African king Holiday of Bonny, who explained to slave-ship captain Hugh Crow, “God make you sabby book and make big ship.”4

  The ship was
thus central to a profound, interrelated set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism: the seizure of new lands, the expropriation of millions of people and their redeployment in growing market-oriented sectors of the economy; the mining of gold and silver, the cultivating of tobacco and sugar; the concomitant rise of long-distance commerce; and finally a planned accumulation of wealth and capital beyond anything the world had ever witnessed. Slowly, fitfully, unevenly, but with undoubted power, a world market and an international capitalist system emerged. Each phase of the process, from exploration to settlement to production to trade and the construction of a new economic order, required massive fleets of ships and their capacity to transport both expropriated laborers and the new commodities. The Guineaman was a linchpin of the system.

  The specific importance of the slave ship was bound up with the other foundational institution of modern slavery, the plantation, a form of economic organization that began in the medieval Mediterranean, spread to the eastern Atlantic islands (the Azores, Madeiras, Canaries, and Cape Verde), and emerged in revolutionary form in the New World, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America during the seventeenth century.5 The spread of sugar production in the 1650s unleashed a monstrous hunger for labor power. For the next two centuries, ship after ship disgorged its human cargo, originally in many places European indentured servants and then vastly larger numbers of African slaves, who were purchased by planters, assembled in large units of production, and forced, under close and violent supervision, to mass-produce commodities for the world market. Indeed, as C. L. R. James wrote of laborers in San Domingue (modern Haiti), “working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time.” By 1713 the slave plantation had emerged as “the most distinctive product of European capitalism, colonialism, and maritime power.”6