What an English Tar Should Be
Stanfield became a sailor, it seems, through an act of rebellion. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1749 or 1750, he was ensconced in studies for the priesthood, apparently in France during the late 1760s, when he underwent a secular awakening. As he described it, “Science first open’d my views.”9 He searched for the joys and beauties of nature and philosophy. He was a man of feeling, a romantic before his time. Young, vigorous, free, and mobile, he went to sea, choosing an occupation that was in almost every way the very antithesis of priest. Among sailors, irreverence, free thought, sensuality, and action trumped piety, doctrine, celibacy, and contemplation. He sailed to many parts of the world, and his experience as a sailor would remain a defining part of his identity for the rest of his life. A fellow actor noted in 1795 that Stanfield “was bred a sailor, and is what an English tar should be, a man of bravery, and that aided by marks of strong genius and good understanding.” At the end of his life, Stanfield wore a sailor’s jersey beneath his waistcoat when his more famous and revealingly named son, the artist Clarkson Stanfield (after abolitionist Thomas Clarkson), painted his portrait.10
Stanfield’s career as an actor seems to have begun in Manchester in 1777, soon after he left the sea. Like many actors of the era, Stanfield was indigent much of the time, as income was modest and intermittent.
Moreover, he would eventually have ten children by two wives to care for, which added to a life of “chronic financial hardship.” Stanfield was nonetheless a man of cheerful disposition. He was known for his spirited intelligence, independent mind, and distinctive looks (he was considered unhandsome in the extreme). The Scottish painter David Roberts, who befriended him in his later life, called him “an enthusiastic warm-hearted Irishman.” Combining the Irish and seafaring backgrounds, he was an entertaining storyteller and a gleeful singer of songs, some of which he wrote himself.11
By the time he took his slaving voyage, Stanfield was already an experienced sailor and a knowledgeable one. He had for several years lived “a seafaring life” and sailed “to almost all parts of Europe, the West Indies and North America.” Along the way and afterward, he talked to other sailors and compared his own experience aboard the Guineaman to theirs. He concluded that the conduct of the officers and the workings of the trade were roughly the same on most voyages. A few sailors found better treatment, a few worse: “I never heard but of one Guinea vessel, in which the usage and conduct were in any degree of moderation.” 12
Stanfield was a common seaman but not a typical one. Compared to other seamen, he was better educated (he knew Latin) and he was apparently better off (he was lodging in a coffeehouse while in Liverpool). But he was not an officer aboard the ship. He did not eat at the captain’s table. By the end of the Atlantic crossing, he had, by force of mortality, become a mate and an unqualified substitute surgeon, but his perspective remained steadfastly that of the common sailor. He was trusted and respected by his brother tars, who asked him to keep track of their “small accounts”—money and expenses—during the voyage, to protect against the chicanery of the captain. On his ship’s muster list, his name appears like the other common tars’, with no special rank or skill alongside.13
Stanfield departed Liverpool for Benin on September 7, 1774, working for Captain David Wilson aboard an old, leaky vessel called the Eagle, which was to be “left on the coast as a floating factory,” a place for slave trading.14 Almost as soon as the vessel arrived, in November 1774, the sailors of the Eagle began to sicken and die, but Stanfield escaped by going inland to “Gatoe [Gato], many miles from the sea, in the heart of the country,” where he resided at a slave-trading fortress for eight months, until late June 1775.15 Eventually a “fresh ship,” the True Blue, arrived. Its captain, John Webster, went ashore to conduct business on behalf of the merchant Samuel Sandys, who owned both vessels. Wilson then took command of the True Blue, hired a new crew of fifteen, including Stanfield, brought aboard a cargo of captives, and set sail for Jamaica. On the Middle Passage more than half (eight) of the crew died. In December, Captain Wilson sold 190 slaves in Jamaica before heading back to Liverpool, where he arrived on April 12, 1776. Stanfield probably helped to unload the ship, as his last day of wages was April 15, 1776. Along with Captain Wilson, carpenter Henry Fousha, and seaman Robert Woodward, he was one of four members of the Eagle who made it back to the port of origin.16
Forging the Chain
For Stanfield the drama of the Guinea voyage began not on the coast of Africa, not even on the slave ship, but rather in the gentlemanly setting of the merchant’s exchange or coffeehouse. It began, in short, with slave traders and their money—the pooling of capital to buy a ship and cargo and to hire a captain and crew. Stanfield saw this as the forging of the first link of a chain that would reach from Liverpool to West Africa to the West Indies, a metaphor that runs throughout his writing:
At length harden’d merchants close combine,
And midnight Council broods the black design;
Strikes the first link of the tremend’ous chain,
Whose motion vibrates thro’ the realms of pain.
He ascribed the hard, conspiratorial impulse to the “insatiate thirst of av’rice” and a host of secondary causes: fancy, vice, intemperance, folly, and pride. He insisted, from the beginning, on the causal relationship between the greed of the few in the port city and the manifold misery of the many around the Atlantic.17
Stanfield saw that the merchants’ capital set labor of many kinds in motion, that workers on the Liverpool waterfront hammered new links of the chain into place: “The sounding anvil shakes the distant main, / Forging with pond’rous strokes th’ accursed chain.” As the ship was repaired and serviced and the trading cargo gathered amid the tumult, the merchant, captain, and officers searched for a group of “Neptune’s sons” to sail the ship to Africa. “Nothing is more difficult,” wrote Stanfield, “than to procure a sufficient number of hands for a Guinea voyage.”
James Stanfield knew sailors. He had lived and worked among them for years, so he knew their ways of thinking and acting, their ideas and customs, their characteristics good, bad, and quirky. He knew that they did not like the slave trade. He also knew that many of them were “jolly” and often “heedless,” given to dancing, drinking, and carousing along the waterfront, especially if they had recently returned to port from long voyages and their many privations. With money in their pockets, they were the “Lords of Six Weeks” and often less. They crowded the waterfront taverns, spending their hard-earned wages lavishly and often recklessly amid wild merriment. This reflected the “unsuspecting, thoughtless, dissipated propensity that marks the character of an English sailor.” Stanfield also knew that Guinea merchants and ship captains saw in these riotous scenes their opportunity to get sailors aboard their vessels. He illuminated the methods of the employers and the workings of the waterfront labor market for the slave trade. His retelling carries a lantern from the dingy waterfront tavern to the city jail to the Guineaman anchored offshore.
Whenever a slaver was fitting out, Stanfield explained, merchants and their captains, clerks, and crimps (unscrupulous labor agents) prowled the streets of Liverpool “without intermission.” They relentlessly hurried one sailor after another into taverns whose proprietors were under their influence and where sailors found music, prostitutes, and drink. Stanfield himself had been “dragged into houses three times” as he tried to walk down a single street. Once inside, the hustle began, with professions of sympathy and friendship and endless offers of rum or gin. The goal was to drive the sailors to intoxication and debt, both of which were essential means of manning a slave ship.
Many a drunken sailor—perhaps Stanfield himself—signed “articles of agreement,” a wage contract, with a Guinea merchant or captain after a long, rakish binge. Many who did so were young and inexperienced, but some were old hands who should have known better. Stanfield declared, “I have known many seamen, who fancied themselves cu
nning enough to evade these practices, go with the crimps to some of their houses, boasting that they would cheat the Merchant out of a night’s merriment, and firmly resolved to oppose every artifice that could be offered.” But, once drunk, they “signed articles with the very men, whose purposes they were aware of, and have been plunged into a situation, of which they had known the horrors.” It was a dangerous game. Sailors who played and lost often paid with their lives.
As the festivities carried on deep into the night and the following morning, the landlord drew strokes on the wall with chalk to indicate a sailor’s rising debt: “Four chalks for one shilling” was the saying in Liverpool. As the sailors got drunker, the accounting got more creative, and soon the debts, real and fictitious, multiplied. Those who had refused to sign articles now faced a different situation. The landlord would offer inebriated, indebted sailors a deal. If they would agree to go on board a slaver, they could use their advance pay to settle their debts. If the sailors refused the deal, the landlord would call the constable and have them committed to jail. Stanfield captured this process in verse: the merchants, he wrote,
With specious arts subdue th’ unwary mind,
Then close their web, and fast their victims bind.
At length with debts fictitious charge their case,
And make a dungeon stare them in the face.
Some sailors took the deal and went on board the ship; others took the dungeon. But when they got there, they discovered that “from that place, no other vessel will engage him; ships in every other employ find seamen willing to offer their services: and the Captains of these have a natural objection to what they call jail-birds.” The sailor was
Shut now from comfort, agoniz’d with grief,
Hopeless alike of justice, or relief—
Only one portal opes the gloomy road;
One dire condition bursts the drear abode.
Slav’ry’s dark genius heaves the iron door,
And, grinning ghastly, points to Guinea’s shore—
As the wretch left the prison gate, wrote Stanfield, he felt “with horror his approaching fate.” The wily merchant had attached the chain to his leg.
By hook and by crook, a variety of people were lured aboard the ships. Some were drunk and indebted, forced to exchange a landed dungeon for a floating one. These included “restless youth” and those of “unwary mind,” as well as those who thought they could outwit the crimp and ended up outwitting themselves. “Some few,” wrote Stanfield, “the voluntary woe embrace.” Some of these were smarting from “false friends”; some were fleeing “undeserv’d disgrace”; some were no doubt in trouble with the law. Others had suffered misfortune of one kind or another, were “weary of griefs no patience can endure.” Some had lost at love and were “of hopeless passion torn.” Stanfield exemplified this last in the poem by a friend he called Russel, a “harmless spirit—gentlest of thy kind, / Was ne’er to savage cruelty inclin’d.” To the slave ship he was “by the winds and fiercer passions blown.” Headed to the tropics, he now “tries the ardours of the flaming zone.” Slave-trade sailors were similar to those who sailed in other trades, but were perhaps a little more naive, down and out, and desperate. Stanfield gave clues as to his own motivations in the poem “Written on the Coast of Africa in 1776” (actually 1775). He refers to his “rash youth,” his “youthful ardours,” how “I rush’d on the shore with the throng.” These might refer to actions that put him in a crimp’s snare. But at the same time he suggests a positive interest in Africa: the “rich scenr’y,” the “beauty of Nature,” and an interest in “observation.” He sought “stores intellectual” and “treasures of wisdom” in “these far-favour’d regions of day!”18
A crew of thirty-two had come aboard the Eagle, and the time to sail had arrived. Friends and family members of some of the sailors gathered on the dock to say good-bye. The occasion was supposed to be festive, but, as Stanfield wrote, “The bending deck receives the parting crowd; / And shades of sorrow ev’ry face o’ercloud.” Not all of the sailors had someone to see them off. Those who had been taken from the jail would have had no opportunity to explain where they were going. But even those who had an opportunity, thought Stanfield, had not “sent their friends the smallest account of their destination.” Some were apparently ashamed of making a Guinea voyage and did not want anyone to know about it. In any case the time for parting had arrived. From those on shore, “Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divides.” The sailors answered and “Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.”
Once at sea, the sailors turned their attention to the ship and its work:
Firm in their stations, ply th’ obedient crowd,
Trim the directing lines, and strain the shroud;
Tug at the beating sheets with sinew’d force,
And give the vast machine its steady course.
The “vast machine” was now under way toward the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, and despite the shenanigans and mistreatments that made it all possible, the ship was at this moment a thing of beauty, with new sails and fresh paint, with colors flying and banners streaming in the sea breeze, all of which, to Stanfield, concealed a deeper malaise:
See o’er the glossy wave the vessel skim,
In swelling garments proud, and neatest trim,
Glitt’ring in streamers, deck’d in painted guile
Cov’ring the latent bane with spacious smile,
In shining colours, splendidly array’d,
Assume the honours of an honest trade,
And hide, beneath a prostituted glare,
Thy poison’d purpose, and th’ insidious snare.
Savage Rigour
The voyage began normally enough, thought Stanfield: “the usage of the seamen is moderate, and their allowance of provisions sufficient: in short, the conduct of the Captain and officers appears like that which is the continual practice in every other employ.” Stanfield had sailed in several trades and could make the comparison. But he noticed a subtle change once the ship had sailed beyond the sight of land, to a place where “there is no moral possibility of desertion, or application for justice.” The captain and officers began to talk of flogging. No one was actually flogged, because, Stanfield believed, the old ship was leaky and might have to put in at Lisbon for repairs. This had a moderating effect on the officers.19
Once it became clear that repairs in port would not be necessary, and once the ship was well south of Lisbon, everything changed. The sailors were soon put to short allowance of food and water. “A quart of water in the torrid zone!” protested Stanfield, and this while eating salt provisions and performing heavy physical labor from morning to night. Sailors were reduced to licking droplets of their own sweat. When Stanfield discovered that dew collected atop the ship’s hen coops overnight, he sucked up the moisture every morning until others found his “delicious secret.” Some men were so thirsty they drank their entire daily portion of water as soon as they got it and remained in a state of “raging thirst” for the next twenty-four hours. All the while the captain had abundant wine, beer, and water.
One reason for the scarcity of water, Stanfield explained, was “the vessel’s being stowed so full of goods for the trade, that room for necessaries is made but a secondary consideration.” It was a classic case of profits over people. Every “corner and cranny [of the ship] is crammed with articles of traffic; to this consideration is bent every exertion of labour and ingenuity; and the healths and lives of the seamen, as of no value, have but little weight in the estimation.” What Stanfield called the “avaricious accumulation of cargo” also meant that the sailors had no room to sling their hammocks and bedding. They were forced to “lie rough,” on chests and cables. When they got to the tropics, they slept upon deck, exposed to “the malignity of the heavy and unwholesome dews.”
Then came the beatings, floggings, and torture. They began not far from the Canary Islands. Stanfield overheard the following “barbarous charge” give
n by the captain to the other officers: “You are now in a Guinea ship—no seaman, though you speak harshly, must dare to give you a saucy answer—that is out of the question; but if they LOOK to displease you, knock them down.” The violence soon “spread like a contagion.” Stanfield recounted one instance of cruelty practiced against the ship’s cooper, “a most harmless, hard-working, worthy creature.” He answered the mate in a humorous way and was knocked down for it. As he tried to crawl to the captain’s cabin to complain, he was knocked down a second, third, and fourth time, until “some of the sailors rushed between [him and the mate], and hurried him away.” The smallest error in work brought forth a lashing, and occasionally three sailors at once were bound together to the shrouds. After the floggings the officers sometimes literally added salt to the wound—they applied a briny solution called “pickle” to the deep, dark red furrows made by the cat-o’-nine tails, the infamous whip. The violence was inflicted without remorse and “without fear of being answerable for the abuse of authority.” As the voyage went on, Stanfield wrote, “the dark pow’r / Of savage rigour ripens ev’ry hour.”20
The Demon Cruelty
Arrival on the African coast signaled another set of transformations chronicled by Stanfield—in the ship, the crew, the captain, and the African societies with whom the trade was carried out. The ship itself was physically altered as the sailors “built house” on the main deck, constructing a thatched-roof awning from the stem of the ship to near the mainmast to protect all on board from the tropical sun and to provide security against escape of the ever-growing number of purchased slaves. Building house required the sailors to work in the water on the riverside, bare-chested and exposed to the burning sun, cutting wood and bamboo with which to make the awning: “They are immersed up to the waist in mud and slime; pestered by snakes, worms, and venomous reptiles; tormented by muskitoes, and a thousand assailing insects; their feet slip from under them at every stroke, and their relentless officers do not allow a moment’s intermission from the painful task.” Stanfield thought that this work contributed to the high mortality of the sailors, but so in his opinion did the awning itself, which, with the various bulkheads built belowdecks to separate the slaves, obstructed the proper circulation of air through the ship and damaged the health of everyone on board.21
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