Shipbuilding was an ancient craft, in which highly specialized knowledge was passed down over the centuries through a system of mastery. For most of the eighteenth century, shipwrights still built “by eye,” or from models, which means that there are relatively few surviving scale drawings of the vessels of this era. Shipbuilders used published works, such as William Sutherland’s The Shipbuilder’s Assistant (1711) and Britain’s Glory; or, Ship-Building Unvail’d, being a General Director for Building and Compleating the said Machines (1729), both influential. Other widely read authors included John Hardingham, Mungo Murray, Fredrik Henrik ap Chapman, Marmaduke Stalkartt, William Hutchinson, David Steel, and Thomas Gordon. 30 Shipbuilding was a truly international craft, as shipwrights themselves moved around, much to the worry of governments. More tellingly still, the ships themselves moved around, making for a relatively easy transfer of craft, knowledge, and technology. Shipwrights routinely studied the vessels produced in other nations to assess the state of the art at any given moment. This helped to diffuse a general uniformity of design and production. Slave ships of all European nations were roughly similar in design and construction during the eighteenth century.31
And yet “science” was slowly entering and transforming the craft, as suggested by the entry “naval architecture” in the 1780 edition of William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine and by the formation in 1791 of the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, to gather and disseminate scientific information across national boundaries on a variety of subjects. The society publicized works on subjects ranging from naval affairs and tactics and military defense to physics (fluids and matter) and mathematics (tables). It staged competitions and offered prizes for scientific proposals on how to compute the tonnage of ships, how to strengthen ship-body construction, how to get rid of bilge, how to proportion masts and yards, how to prevent and control fire on ships, how to save a sinking ship. It wanted to encourage thought on “the laws respecting bodies moving through the water with different velocities.” The science also had its graphic manifestation, as the drawing of ships took on more careful proportion and greater perspective, as reflected in the image of the Brooks.32
Captain Anthony Fox: A Slave Ship’s Crew, 1748
An unusual document surviving in the archive of the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol gives a well-rounded view of a slaving crew, the workers who would sail the machine named the Peggy to Africa on August 13, 1748. Captain Anthony Fox drew up “An Account of Men Belonging to the Snow Peggy” (a two-masted vessel), which gives abundant information about himself and his thirty-eight men. They ranged in age from fifteen to forty-two, Captain Fox and two other men being the oldest on board. The average age was twenty-six, and, for the common seaman, the age would have been even lower were we able to exclude the ages of the officers, who were usually older. (For all the information he recorded, Fox did not indicate which jobs the men performed.) Despite their relative youth, almost a third of the crew—twelve of thirty-nine—would come to a premature death on the voyage. Captain Fox also recorded “size,” by which he meant height. Perhaps he was conscious of this because he was the tallest man on board at five feet ten inches. The average was five-six.33
The men on board the Peggy were well traveled. One of the columns in Captain Fox’s account was “where borne” rather than the usual “place of abode.” The crewmen of the Peggy were mainly from the port cities of Britain, but broadly so, from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. A few came from overseas—there were four Swedes on the ship, and others from Holland, Genoa, and Guinea. Captain Fox himself was born in Montserrat. The crew members had sailed on various merchant and naval craft from Britain to Africa, the West Indies, North America, the East Indies, and the Mediterranean, Turkey in particular. Several men had been demobilized after the War of Austrian Succession in 1748. Their previous ships included men-of-war such as the HMS Russell, HMS Devonshire, HMS Torbay, and HMS Launceston. One man had served on the “Salamander Bomb.”
The African sailor John Goodboy had sailed previously on the “Defiance Ship of War.”
Captain Fox also recorded “complexion,” probably in order to identify runaways should he need to do so at some point in the voyage. As it happened, the captain had only two categories for complexion—“browne” and “blacke.” Most people were “browne,” including the captain himself. Those he considered “blacke” included Robert Murray of Scotland, Peter Dunfry of Ireland, Perato Bartholomew of Genoa, and the African John Goodboy.
The division of labor on Fox’s Guineaman would have been similar to what prevailed on all eighteenth-century deep-sea sailing ships, with a few special features. A typical slave ship had a captain, a first and second mate, a doctor, a carpenter, a boatswain, a gunner (or armorer), often a cooper (barrel maker), a cook, ten to twelve seamen, a handful of landsmen, and one or two ship’s boys. Larger ships would have a third and even a fourth mate, mates for the doctor and the various skilled workers, especially the carpenter and gunner, and a few more seamen and landsmen. The unusual aspects were the number of mates, the necessity of a doctor, and the number of sailors and landsmen. These additional members of the crew reflected the special dangers of the slave trade, the need for larger numbers of people to guard the slaves and to withstand the mortality of the African coast and Middle Passage. The division of labor allocated responsibilities and structured working relations among the crew, forming a hierarchy of laboring roles and a corresponding scale of wages. A slave ship, like a man-of-war, required a wide variety of skills. It was “too big and unmanageable a machine” to be run by novices.34
The organization of labor on the slave ship began with the captain, the first person hired and the last to be discharged by the shipowner at voyage’s end. He was the representative of the merchant and his capital throughout the voyage. His charge was “to manage the navigation and everything relating to [the ship’s] cargo, voyage, sailors, &c.” He hired the crew, procured the ship’s provisions, oversaw the loading of the original cargo, and conducted all the business of the voyage, from the buying of the slaves in Africa to their sale in the Americas. He saw to the navigation of the vessel, tended the compasses, and gave the working orders. On the smaller ships, he ran one of the two watches. He was the monarch of his wooden world. He possessed near-absolute authority, and he used it however he saw fit to maintain social order aboard the ship.
Most slave ships had at least two mates, because the threat of mortality required that several people be on board who knew navigation. The chief mate was second in command, although much inferior in power to the captain. He commanded a watch and during the alternating time tended to the basic functioning of the ship. He managed the daily routine and set the crew to work. He minded the security of the vessel, making sure that the enslaved were under control. He also oversaw their feeding, exercise, and health. He often took responsibility for “stowing” the captives belowdecks. In those areas of Africa where the trade was carried on in boats, he took charge of one of them, which meant that he often conducted trade, bought slaves, and ferried them back to the ship.
Captain William Snelgrave touched upon most of these responsibilities in “Instructions for a first mate when in the road att Whydah,” written for chief mate John Magnus in 1727. His main concern was security. He advised close control, especially of “ye strong rugged men Slaves.” Check their chains closely; place sentries on guard and have them fire their arms at the evening meal (to prevent “insurrection”); make sure none hijack the ship’s boat or jump overboard. Store the victuals safely and cleanly; boil well the slaves’ “dab-a-dab” (a mash of horsebeans, rice, and corn) to avoid sickness; and give them water three times a day, tobacco once a week, and a dram of corn brandy on a cold morning. Divert them with music and dance in the evenings. He suggested that some of the enslaved be employed to clean between decks and that they get “a dram every day when they do their business well.” If smallpox breaks out among the enslaved, isol
ate the sick person immediately to prevent contagion. If sailors get sick, give them special foods—sugar, butter, oatmeal. He added, “When any Slave dies lett Mr. Willson with some officer be present at the time of committing them to the water: noteing the day of the month and sickness which they died off.” In the event of the death of a sailor, “take an Inventory of what he leaves; and naill the things up in his chest.” The chief mate had many responsibilities, as did, in diminishing proportions, the second, third, and fourth mates after him.35
The doctor’s difficult job was to keep the crew and the slaves alive from one side of the Atlantic to the other. He assisted in the purchase of slaves, carefully inspecting each one for signs of sickness or debility, knowing that the healthy would have the best chance of surviving the stay on the African coast and the Middle Passage and of fetching the highest prices in America. Once the slaves had come aboard, the doctor tended to them daily, attempted to answer their complaints, diagnosed illnesses, and prescribed medications. He also treated the crew, who themselves suffered a host of maladies once they crossed the pathogenic barrier reef into West Africa. Early in the eighteenth century, only the larger ships carried a doctor, and the smaller, faster American slave ships, most of them out of Rhode Island, rarely carried one throughout the century, taking instead a “recipe book” for medicines to be used by the captain. After the passage of the Dolben Act, or Slave Carrying Bill, of 1788, all British slave ships were required to have a doctor on board, and the doctor himself was required to keep records of sickness and death on the voyage.36
The carpenter, an important specialist in the wooden world, was responsible for the structural soundness of the ship and its various parts. He checked the hull regularly, forcing oakum and wooden plugs into the seams of planks to keep the vessel tight. He also repaired the masts, yards, and machinery. He gave the slave ship several of its distinctive characteristics. During the outward passage, he built the barricado on the main deck and the bulkheads and platforms on the lower deck, effectively transforming a generic merchant ship into a slaver. He paid special attention to the longboat and the yawl, especially when they were important to trade, as on the Windward Coast. The carpenter had learned his craft through apprenticeship and sometimes trained a mate on the ship.
The lesser officers and skilled workers included the boatswain, gunner, cooper, and cook. The boatswain, like the mate, was something of a foreman. He was responsible for the rigging, kept up the cables and anchors, and on some vessels took charge of the female slaves. The gunner, or armorer, was responsible for the firearms, the ammunition, and the artillery, as well as the locks and chains. He was crucial to an era in which trade itself was regarded by many as a form of warfare and to a vessel that was in effect a floating prison. The cooper built and repaired the casks and hogsheads in which many commodities (especially sugar and tobacco) were shipped and preserved, as well as food and especially water; he might also perform other woodworking tasks. On the slave ship as on other vessels, the cook was sometimes an older seaman who had seen better times and was now unable to go aloft or perform heavy physical labor. Or he might, alternatively, be an African-American, with the “black cook” emerging in the eighteenth century as a familiar figure on ships of all kinds, including slavers. His job was an arduous one, for he had to feed up to three or four hundred people twice a day. According to the crew and probably to the enslaved (if we had any evidence of their view), the cook would not have been considered a “skilled” worker.
The common seaman was a person trained to sail a ship—to “hand, reef, and steer,” as the old phrase had it. He knew how to climb up and down the ratlines, how to set the sails, how to knot and splice the lines, and how to steer the ship. By 1700, seafaring labor was roughly the same everywhere. Sailors circulated from ship to ship and found the tasks performed and the skills required by each to be essentially the same. An “able seaman” knew how to do the work of the ship in all aspects. Slavers also had on board, at lower wages, “ordinary seamen,” usually younger and less-experienced men who were still learning the mysteries of a dangerous occupation. The sailor on a slave ship was also a prison guard. He spent a lot of time supervising and guarding the enslaved as they washed, ate, danced, and sat on the main deck. This was the ship’s reproductive or domestic labor.
Most slave ships, especially after 1750, had a number of landsmen on board. These were young, unskilled workers, sometimes from the countryside, sometimes from the city, who signed on to Guineamen when laboring jobs along the waterfront were hard to find, as they often were in peacetime. Their work consisted mainly of guarding the slaves, although they would also be deployed for any variety of unskilled manual labor aboard the ship or ashore. During the course of the voyage, they would learn the ship’s work and after two or three voyages qualify as ordinary seamen. Until then they ranked only above the ship’s boys in the working hierarchy. The boys, usually between the ages of eight and fourteen and one, two, or three in number, were being “bred up to the sea” by serving an apprenticeship, usually to the captain himself. Like Samuel Robinson, they performed odd jobs and were the object of no small amount of horseplay and even cruelty.
Thomas Clarkson: The Variety of Slaving Vessels, 1787
A vessel of almost any size could be a slave ship, as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson discovered, to his utter astonishment, in June 1787. He had journeyed from London to Bristol to gather evidence about the slave trade. He was especially interested in the “construction and dimensions” of the ships and the packing of the bodies of would-be plantation workers. Having a few months earlier gone aboard Captain Colley’s Fly, a more-or-less typical two-hundred-ton ship that lay at anchor in the Thames, Clarkson had a clear image of the slaver in mind. He was shocked to find at Bristol “two little sloops” that were fitting out for Africa. One was a vessel of only twenty-five tons; its master intended to pick up seventy slaves. The other was even smaller. It measured eleven tons and would take on board a mere thirty slaves. One of Clarkson’s companions explained that vessels of this size sometimes served as tenders, going up and down West African coastal rivers, gathering three or four slaves at a time and delivering them to the big ships anchored off the coast and bound for the New World. But the tiny vessels discovered by Clarkson were said to be slavers in their own right and would transport their own captives to the West Indies.37
Clarkson did not believe it. He even wondered whether his informants were trying to trick him into making absurd statements about the slave trade that could be easily refuted and thereby “injure the great cause which I had undertaken.” He learned that one of the vessels had been built as “a pleasure-boat for the accommodation of only six persons” on the Severn River and that one if not both were to be sold as pleasure craft after they delivered their slaves in the West Indies. Clarkson decided to measure both vessels and to ask one of his companions to find the builder of the vessels and get his measurements, too. The official information corresponded with Clarkson’s own figures. In the larger vessel of the two, the area where the slaves would be incarcerated measured thirty-one feet in length by ten feet four inches in width, narrowing to five feet at the ends. Each slave, he calculated, would get about three square feet. In the smaller vessel, the slave room was twenty-two feet long, eight feet (tapering to four feet) wide. The height from keel to beam was five feet eight inches, but three feet were taken up by “ballast, cargo, and provisions,” leaving for thirty slaves four square feet each and about two feet eight inches of vertical space. Still incredulous, Clarkson had four persons make separate inquiries to confirm that the vessels really were going to Africa. All four found the original declaration to be true, and indeed Clarkson himself soon confirmed the matter through official documents in the Bristol customshouse.38
Clarkson would have been even more astonished to learn that the eleven-ton vessel he found was not the smallest on record. A ten-ton vessel called the Hesketh sailed from Liverpool to the Windward Coast and carried thirty ens
laved people on to St. Kitts in 1761, and vessels of the same size would deliver slaves to Cuba and Brazil in the middle of the nineteenth century. Two eleven-ton vessels, the Sally and the Adventure, made voyages from Rhode Island to Africa in 1764 and 1770. As Clarkson learned, even the smallest vessel could be a slave ship.39
At the other end of the spectrum was the Parr, a 566-ton behemoth built by shipwright John Wright in Liverpool in 1797 and named for owners Thomas and John Parr, members of an eminent local slave-trading family. This was a square-sterned, double-decked ship, 127 feet long on deck and 32 feet broad, with three masts, quarter galleries, and a woman’s figurehead on the prow. The ship was heavily armed, boasting twenty eighteen-pounders and twelve eighteen- pounder carronnades. A contemporary noted, “She is looked upon by judges to be a very beautiful vessel and the largest employed out of this port in the African trade for which she was designed.” Built to accommodate seven hundred slaves and requiring a crew of one hundred sailors, the Parr proved to be not only the largest Liverpool slaver but the largest of the entire British Atlantic. Still, it came to a bad and sudden end not long after Wright and his gang of fellow shipyard workers launched it. In a trade infamous for human catastrophe, the Parr suffered one of the greatest of them all: in 1798, on her first voyage, to the Bight of Biafra, Bonny in particular, after Captain David Christian had reached the coast and taken on board about two hundred slaves, the ship exploded, killing everyone on board. The cause of the blast is unknown.40
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