The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  The passage to the coast resumed. Equiano was carried and sold hither and yon, eventually to a wealthy merchant in the beautiful city of Tinmah, which was likely in the Niger delta. Here he tasted coconuts and sugarcane for the first time and also observed money he called “core” (akori). He befriended the son of a neighboring wealthy widow, a boy about his own age, and the woman bought him from the merchant. He was now treated so well that he forgot he was a slave. He ate at the master’s table, was served by other slaves, and played with bows and arrows and other boys “as I had been used to do at home.” Over the next two months, he slowly connected to his new family “and was beginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget by degrees my misfortunes.” He was rudely awakened early one morning and rushed out of the house and back onto the road toward the seacoast. He had the “fresh sorrow” of a new dispossession.

  To this point almost all of the peoples Equiano had met in his journey were culturally familiar to him. They had roughly the same “manners, customs, and language”; they were, or would become in time, Igbo. But he finally arrived in a place where the cultural familiarity vanished. Indeed he was shocked by the culture of the coastal Ibibio, who, he observed, were not circumcised, did not wash as he was accustomed to do, used European pots and weapons, and “fought with their fists amongst themselves.” The women of the group he considered immodest, as they “ate, and drank, and slept, with their men.” They ornamented themselves with strange scars and filed their teeth sharp. Most startling, they made no proper sacrifices or offerings to the gods.

  When Equiano came to the banks of a large river, possibly the Bonny, his astonishment grew. Canoes were everywhere, and the people seemed to live on them with “household utensils and provisions of all kinds.” The boy had never seen such a large body of water, much less people who lived and worked in this way. His amazement turned to fear when he was put into a canoe by his captors and paddled along the river, around and through the swamps and mangrove forests. Every night they dragged their canoes ashore, built fires, set up tents or small houses, cooked a meal, and slept, arising the next morning and eating again before getting back into the canoes and continuing down-river. He noted how easy the people were, swimming and diving in the water. The travels resumed, now by land and again by water, through “different countries, and various nations.” Six or seven months after he had been kidnapped, “I arrived at the sea coast” and likely the big, bustling slave-trading port of Bonny.

  On the Magical Ship

  The slave ship that inspired horrified awe in Equiano when he first arrived on the coast was a snow, probably between sixty and seventy feet long, with a mainmast of about sixty feet and a main topmast of thirty. The Ogden, with eight cannon and a crew of thirty-two, was riding at anchor and “waiting for its cargo,” of which the boy himself, he suddenly realized, would be a part.12 The African traders would have carried him to the vessel by canoe and brought him, and probably several others, up the side of the vessel by a rope ladder, over the rail, and onto the main deck. Here Equiano saw the terrifying sailors, whose language “was very different from any I had ever heard.” He saw the copper boiling pot and the melancholy captives, and, fearing cannibalism, he fainted. The black traders who had brought him on board revived him and tried to cheer him up, “but all in vain.” He asked if the horrible-looking white men would eat him; they answered no. Then a member of the crew brought Equiano a shot of liquor to revive his spirits, but the small boy was afraid of him and would not take it. One of the black traders took it and gave it to him. He drank it, but it had the opposite effect from what the sailor intended. Having never tasted anything like it, the boy fell “into the greatest consternation.” Soon things got even worse. Once the black traders were paid off, they left the ship, and Equiano despaired at their departure: “I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore.” After experiencing the stench of the lower deck and a flogging for refusing food, he longed to trade places with “the meanest slave in my own country.” Finally he wished in utter despair “for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.”13

  The slave trade always brought together unusual agglomerations of people and to some extent leveled the cultural differences among them. Equiano did not immediately find his “own countrymen,” and indeed he had to search for them. In addition to the Igbo, those most likely to have been aboard were Nupe, Igala, Idoma, Tiv, and Agatu, from north of Equiano’s own village; the Ijo from the southwest; and from the east a whole host: Ibibio, Anang, Efik (all Efik speakers), Ododop, Ekoi, Eajagham, Ekrikuk, Umon, and Enyong. Many of these people would have been multilingual, and quite a few, maybe most, would likely have spoken or understood Igbo, which was important to trade throughout the region, on the coast and in the interior. Some would have spoken pidgin languages, English, and perhaps a few words of Portuguese. Communication would be complicated aboard the snow, but many means were available.14

  On the slave ship, Equiano and many others began to discover that they were Igbo. In Equiano’s village and indeed throughout the interior, the term “Igbo” was not a term of self-understanding or identity. Rather, according to the famous Nigerian/Igbo writer Chinua Achebe, “Igbo” was originally “a word of abuse; they were the ‘other’ people, down in the bush.” “Igbo” was an insult, a designation that someone was an outsider to the village. Equiano himself suggested this contemptuous meaning when he called the Aro “Oye-Eboe.” But on the slave ship, everyone was outside the village, and broader similarities suddenly began to outweigh local differences. Cultural commonalities, especially language, would obviously be crucial to cooperation and community. Igbo, like other African ethnicities, was in many ways a product of the slave trade. In other words, ethnogenesis was happening on the ship.15

  Equiano soon noticed the systematic use of terror aboard the slaver. The whites “looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty” as occurred regularly aboard the ship. The “poor Africans” who dared to resist, who refused to eat or tried to jump overboard, were whipped and cut. Equiano himself was lashed several times for rejecting food. He also noted that the terror was not confined to the enslaved. One day while he and others were on the main deck, the captain had a white sailor “flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.” It was no accident that this was a public event. The use of violence against the crew multiplied the terror: “This made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner.”

  One of the most valuable parts of Equiano’s account of his time on the slave ship is his summary of conversations that took place on the lower deck. As a child and as someone who came from many miles inland, he was among the least knowledgeable on board about the Europeans and their ways. Continuing the struggle to communicate among a group of people from a variety of cultures, he searched for and found people of “his own nation” among “the poor chained men.” Because of his fears of cannibalism, his most urgent question was, “what was to be done with us?” Some of the men slaves “gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them.” This answer gave Equiano comfort, as he explained: “if it were no worse than working, my situation was not so desperate.”

  Still, the fears about the savage Europeans lingered and brought forth new questions. Equiano asked the men “if these people had no country, but lived in this hollow place,” the ship? The answer was, “they did not, but came from a distant one.” Still puzzled, the young boy asked, “how comes it in all our country we never heard of them?” It was because they “lived so very far off.” Where were their women, Equiano then demanded; “had they any like themselves?” They replied, they did, but “they were left behind.”

  Then came questions about the ship
itself, the source of astonishment and terror. Still dazzled by what he had seen, Equiano asked how the vessel could go. Here the men ran out of certain answers but showed that they had been studying the ship in an effort to understand it: “They told me they could not tell; but that there were cloths put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked in order to stop the vessel.” Equiano declared, “I was exceedingly amazed at this account, and really thought they were spirits.” The wonder caused by the ship intensified when one day upon deck Equiano saw a vessel bearing toward them under full sail. He and everyone else who saw it stood amazed, “the more so as the vessel appeared larger by approaching nearer.” When the approaching ship eventually dropped anchor, “I and my countrymen who saw it were lost in astonishment to observe the vessel stop; and were now convinced it was done by magic.”

  Middle Passage

  Equiano’s Middle Passage proved to be a pageant of cruelty, degradation, and death.16 It began, crucially, with all of the enslaved locked belowdecks “so that we could not see how they managed the vessel.” Many of the things he complained about while the vessel was anchored on the coast suddenly worsened. Now that everyone was confined together belowdecks, the apartments were “so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself.” The enslaved were spooned together in close quarters, each with about as much room as a corpse in a coffin. The “galling of the chains” rubbed raw the soft flesh of wrists, ankles, and necks. The enslaved suffered extreme heat and poor ventilation, “copious perspirations,” and seasickness. The stench, which was already “loathsome,” became “absolutely pestilential” as the sweat, the vomit, the blood, and the “necessary tubs” full of excrement “almost suffocated us.” The shrieks of the terrified mingled in cacophony with the groans of the dying. 17

  Kept belowdecks, probably because of bad weather, for days at a time, Equiano watched as his shipmates expired, “thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.” The ship was filling up with the troubled spirits of the deceased, whom the living could neither bury properly nor provide with offerings. Conditions had “carried off many,” most of them probably by the “bloody flux,” or dysentery. The Bight of Biafra had one of the highest mortality rates of any slaving area, and the eight months it took the Ogden to gather its enslaved “cargo” only made matters worse. Equiano himself soon grew sick and expected to die. Indeed his death wish returned as he hoped “to put an end to my miseries.” Of the dead thrown over-board, he mused, “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.” Equiano considered those who had committed suicide by jumping overboard to be still alive, happy and free, and apparently still in touch with people on the ship.18

  Against the horror and the death wish stood stubborn, resistant life. Equiano continued to communicate with his fellow enslaved for the sake of survival. This he owed in part to enslaved women, who may or may not have been Igbo, and who washed him and showed maternal care for him. Because he was a child, he went unfettered, and because he was sickly, he was kept “almost continually on deck,” where he witnessed an increasingly fierce dialectic of discipline and resistance. The crew grew more cruel as the enslaved resolved to use whatever means available to them to fight back. Equiano saw several of his hungry countrymen take some fish to eat and then get flogged viciously for it. Not long after, on a day “when we had a smooth sea, and moderate wind,” he witnessed at close range three captives break from the crew, jump over the side of the ship, elude the nettings, and splash into the water below. The crew snapped into action, putting everyone belowdecks to prevent the attempted suicide from escalating (as Equiano was convinced it would have done), then lowered the boat to recover those who had gone overboard. There “was such a noise and confusion amongst the people of the ship as I never heard before.” Despite the crew’s efforts, two of the rebels successfully completed their self-destruction by drowning. The third was recaptured, brought back on deck, and whipped ferociously for “attempting to prefer death to slavery.” Equiano thus noted a culture of resistance forming among the enslaved.

  One part of Equiano’s own strategy of resistance was to learn all he could from the sailors about how the ship worked. This would, in the long run, prove to be his own path to liberation, since he would work as a sailor, collect his wages, and buy his freedom at age twenty-four. He described himself as one of the people on board who was “most active,” which in eighteenth-century maritime parlance meant most vigorous in doing the work of the ship. As he watched the sailors toil, he grew fascinated and at the same time mystified by their use of the quadrant: “I had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant.” The sailors noted the bright boy’s curiosity, and one of them decided one day to gratify it. He let Equiano peer through the lens. “This heightened my wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.” It was another world, a seafaring society unto itself, and it had a magic that could be learned. Equiano had made a beginning.19

  Barbados

  Yet another world soon appeared on the horizon. Upon sighting land, the crew “gave a great shout” and made “many signs of joy.” But Equiano and the rest of the captives did not share in the excitement. They did not know what to think. Before them lay Barbados, epicenter of the historic sugar revolution, crown jewel of the British colonial system, and one of the most fully realized—and therefore most brutal—slave societies to be found anywhere in the world. The plantations of the small island would be the destination of most of the captives aboard the ship.20

  As the snow came to anchor in the busy harbor of Bridgetown, nestling among a forest of ship masts, a new set of fears gripped Equiano and his fellows of the lower deck. In the darkness of night, strange new people came aboard, and all the enslaved were herded up to the main deck for inspection. Merchants and planters, prospective buyers of the enslaved, began immediately to examine Equiano and his shipmates carefully. “They also made us jump,” Equiano recalled, “and pointed to the land, signifying we were to go there.” They organized the captives into “separate parcels” for sale.

  All the while Equiano and apparently others “thought by this we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us.” Soon everyone was put back belowdecks, but new horror had taken root, as Equiano explained: “there was much dread and trembling among us, and nothing but bitter cries to be heard all the night from these apprehensions.” How long the cries went on is not clear, but eventually the white visitors responded by summoning “some old slaves from the land to pacify us.” These veterans of Barbados plantation society “told us we were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people.” The tactic seemed to work: “This report eased us much; and sure enough, soon after we were landed, there came to us Africans of all languages.”

  Presently Equiano and the others were taken ashore, to the “merchant’s yard,” as he called it, a place where “we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age,” which would have seemed odd after experiencing the gender and age separations of the ship. Despite the harrowing uncertainty of the new situation, the sights of Bridgetown filled Equiano with fresh wonder. He noticed that the houses were built high, with stories, unlike any he had known in Africa. “I was still more astonished,” he noted, “on seeing people on horseback. I did not know what this could mean; and indeed I thought these people were full of nothing but magical arts.”21 Other shipmates, however, were not surprised. Some “fellow prisoners” from a distant part of Africa, no doubt the northern savanna, observed that the horses “were the same kind they had in their country.” This was confirmed by others, who added tha
t their own horses were “larger than those I then saw.”22

  A few days later came the sale, by “scramble.” The merchants arrayed the human commodities in the yard, then sounded a signal, the beating of a drum, whereupon buyers frantically rushed in to pick those they wanted to purchase. The “noise and clamour” of the moment terrified the Africans and made them think that the greedy buyers would be the agents of their doom. Some still feared cannibalism. The fear was justified, as most of those purchased would indeed be eaten alive—by the deadly work of making sugar in Barbados.

  A third separation was now at hand, which illuminates the connections made on the ship while anchored on the coast of Africa and during its Middle Passage. Equiano noted that at this moment, without scruple, “relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again.” He recalled the sad fate of several brothers who had been confined together in the men’s apartment of his vessel, who were now sold in separate lots to different masters. He wrote that “it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting.” Husbands were separated from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters.

  Yet it was not only blood kin who shrieked and grieved at the prospect of separation. It was “dearest friends and relations,” people who had already been separated once from their kindred, who had now mingled “their sufferings and sorrows” aboard the ship. Some of these people had been together on the ship for as long as eight months before the Middle Passage. They had cheered each other amid the “gloom of slavery.” They had what Equiano called “the small comfort of being together,” crying together, resisting together, trying to survive together. The new community that had been formed aboard the ship was being ripped asunder as the captives would all be forced to go “different ways.” Equiano noted with deep sadness that “every tender feeling” that had developed aboard the ship would now be sacrificed to avarice, luxury, and the “lust of gain.”23