The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  The declining health of the sailors moved Stanfield’s captain to make another important change in the working order of the ship. On the Gold Coast, he hired Fante workers, who were “sturdy, animated, laborious, and full of courage”—and accustomed to both the climate and disease environment. “Many of this nation,” wrote Stanfield, “are reared from their childhood, in the European vessels that frequent the coast; they learn their languages, and are practiced in all the habits of seamanship; and more especially all that relate to the business of slaving.” This was common practice. Captains engaged Fante workers after entering into a written agreement with their king and the English governor at Cape Coast Castle or another factory. Stanfield believed that such arrangements were essential to the slave trade: “When the poor sailors fall off [sick], these hardy natives, who have every indulgence the captain can allow them, carry on the business with a vigour and activity, of which the British seamen from their ill usage and scanty fare are incapable.” A motley crew did the work of the ship from the moment it arrived on the African coast until it departed, and occasionally all the way across the Atlantic.

  Once they got to the African coast, the biggest change, in Stanfield’s view, took place in the slave-ship captain. He put the matter this way: “It is unaccountable, but it is certainly true, that the moment a Guinea captain comes in sight of this shore, the Demon cruelty seems to fix his residence within him.” Stanfield made the same point in the poem, allegorically, as the Demon Cruelty dispatched a devil to the ship: “Fly, says the night-born chief, without delay, / To where yon vessel rides the wat’ry way.” Off he flies,

  And to the master turns his stedfast eyes;

  Down, like the lightning’s fury, rushes prone,

  And on his heart erects his bloody throne.

  If the captain seemed barbarous on the outward passage, he was now positively demonic, his heart colonized by cruelty. Stanfield did not lack for concrete examples to illustrate the transformation. He spoke of a visitor aboard his own ship, a Guineaman captain who was legendary for his brutality: he flogged his own sailors for no good reason; he tormented his cabin boy; his “whole delight was in giving pain.”

  In “Proud Benin”

  Most of Stanfield’s pamphlet concerned the experience of the common sailor in the slave trade, but he did offer reflections on Africa, on the traders, and on the enslaved who came aboard the ship, and these thoughts he expanded considerably in his poem. His observations had a firm basis in experience, and not only aboard the ship, for Stanfield lived ashore at one of the slave-trading fortresses in Benin for eight months. His most basic conclusion sharply contradicted the then-prevalent proslavery propaganda about Africa and its peoples: “I never saw a happier race of people than those in the kingdom of BENIN.” These people were “seated in ease and luxury” and engaged in extensive manufacturing, especially of cloth. The slave trade excepted, everything in their society “bore the appearance of friendship, tranquility, and primitive independence.”22

  Stanfield saw the slave trade as a destructive force, and indeed one of the most unusual features of his poem was his effort to understand it from an African perspective. Once the Guineaman arrived on the coast of Africa, the poet’s point of view shifted from the ship to the “primeval forests” and the Niger River, where the continent’s guardian empress surveyed the unfolding scene. Now that the enslaving chain had arrived from Liverpool, Stanfield asked,

  Say, can ye longer brook the savage hand,

  That, with rapacious av’rice, thins the land?

  Can ye restless see the ruthless chain

  Still spread its horrors o’er th’ unpeopled plain?

  Endless war, enslavement, forced migrations across the Atlantic, and fearful free migrations toward the interior had depopulated some areas of the West African coast, as Stanfield could see. The guardian empress watched as the slave traders poured in “savage swarms upon the blood-stain’d shore,” toting “all their store of chains.” The tables had been turned. The Europeans were now the savages, swarming ashore, chains in hand, to bind the peoples of Africa. This required Stanfield to recognize the dual role of the sailor—and presumably himself—who up to this point in the poem has been a victim of the slave trade but now must of necessity appear as a victimizer. He speaks frankly about “the miseries occasioned by European visitors.” He notes that “Europe’s pail sons direct the bar’brous prow, / And bring their stores and instruments of woe.” He identifies the “pallid robbers,” the “traffickers in human blood,” and the “tyrant-whites.” He mentions the “sad purchase”: the “wan traders pay the price of blood.” The sailor shares in the tyranny.

  Soon “av’rice, busting ev’ry tender band, / Sweeps, like a deluge, thro’ the hapless land.” Traders white and black expropriate the Africans, rip them from their families and communities, and attach the telltale chains:

  Our realms, alas! abandon’d to despair,

  Supinely sunk, the slavish shackles wear.

  How did they come to wear the shackles? How did they get caught in the “accursed chain”? Stanfield was convinced that most of the enslaved who came aboard the ship had been kidnapped, taken by “fraud and violence.” They were not “prisoners of war” as advocates of the slave trade had always maintained. In Benin he “made continual inquiries but never heard of any wars.” The enslaved were conveyed to the ships by the likes of the “Joe-men,” led by King Badjeka, a nomadic, independent group of raiders who “pitched their temporary huts where they considered it to be most opportune for their depredations.” They bought no slaves, but they sold multitudes of them to the slavers. Of a man soon to be on board the slaver, the sailor-poet wrote, “The hind returning from his daily care, / Seiz’d in the thicket, feels the ruffian’s snare.”

  In an effort to make real for readers the human consequences of the slave trade in Africa, Stanfield included in his poem a life story of an African woman named Abyeda—how she was “torn from all kindred ties” and marched to the ship. It is unknown whether she was real or fictitious or some combination of the two. In any case, by writing about her, Stanfield helped to identify and publicize an emerging theme within the abolitionist movement: the special mistreatments and sufferings of enslaved women aboard the ship.23

  Abyeda has been captured and brought on the slaver when Stanfield recounts her life in idyllic terms. She is a beautiful and “happy maid,” in love with “youthful Quam’no,” who protected her from the “treach’rous Whites” who traded in slaves. On their long-planned wedding day, she was seized:

  In rush the spoilers with detested cry,

  Seize with rapacious force the trembling prey;

  And to the shore the hapless maid convey.

  Quam’no tries to save her but is killed in the struggle. Devastated, Abyeda is carried aboard the ship, where she is chained to the mast and lashed (for what reason Stanfield does not say). As she groans with each stroke of the lash, the other women aboard the ship, her “sad associates,” join in sympathy, and in a variation on traditional African call-and-response, cry out in cadence. Soon, “o’er her wan face the deadly jaundice steals,” and the end finally comes: “Convulsive throbs expel the final breath, / And o’er the fatal close sits ghastly death.” Stanfield’s description suggests a real death, and maybe several, he had seen. 24

  Meanwhile, as the stay on the coast of Africa drags on, the miseries of the crew deepen. Having been off the ship for a time, Stanfield returned to find the second mate “lying on his back on the medicine-chest; his head hanging down over one end of it, his hair sweeping the deck, and clotted with the filth that was collected there.” He soon died, unnoticed. Matters were even more shocking on the poop deck, where several members of the ship’s crew were stretched out “in the last stage of their sickness, without comfort, without refreshment, without attendance. There they lay, straining their weak voices with the most lamentable cries for a little water, and not a soul to afford them the smallest relief.” Stanfield
then “passed a night of misery with them,” after which he was convinced that another night would have meant his doom. One of these deaths may have belonged to his friend (“Russel”), who in the poem developed “sallow skin,” “putrid sores,” “palsied limbs,” and expired amid the “filth and blood.” Russel’s last words concern his beloved, Maria. His body was dumped into a “fluid grave,” “his honour’d corse in awful form dispos’d.”

  Stanfield also attempted to capture what Equiano called the astonishment and terror felt by “each agitated guest” when he or she came aboard the huge, seemingly magical slave ship:

  Torn as his bosom is, still wonder grows,

  As o’er the vast machine the victim goes,

  Wonder, commix’d with anguish, shakes his frame

  At the strange sight his language cannot name.

  For all that meets his eye, above, below,

  Seem but to him the instruments of woe.

  One by one, the captives were “compressive stow’d” in the floating dungeon, immersed in the “putrid smell” and “deadly gloom” of the lower deck. Finally the ship “hoists the sail full, and quits the wasted shore.”

  Middle Passage

  Stanfield and the other survivors from the Eagle now boarded the True Blue, bound for Jamaica, their lower deck packed with “shackled sufferers.” Hence began the notorious Middle Passage, which the sailor-poet strove to describe in its “true colours.” The ship over the next several weeks became an even more macabre chamber of horrors. Stanfield introduced his account by saying, “This horrid portion of the voyage was but one continued scene of barbarity, unremitting labour, mortality, and disease. Flogging, as in the outward passage, was a principal amusement in this.”25

  Captain Wilson was sick during the Middle Passage, but this seemed to Stanfield only to increase his tyranny. In his weakened state, the monarch of the wooden world made the crew carry him around bodily, all the while keeping “trade knives” close at hand to throw at people who incurred his displeasure. One after another member of the crew was cut down. The new second mate died not long after the captain had knocked him to the deck and severely gashed his head. The cook earned the captain’s wrath by burning some dinner meat and was soon “beaten most violently with the spit.” He crawled away and died within a day or two.

  Seamen were also forced to work when sick, sometimes with fatal consequences. The boatswain, who was ill and unable to stand, was propped up on one of the mess-tubs from the lower deck and made to steer the vessel, which, in truth, he was too weak to do. He soon died, and his “body was, as usual, thrown overboard, without any covering but the shirt.” The next day “his corps was discovered floating alongside, and kept close to us for some hours—it was a horrid spectacle, and seemed to give us an idea of the body of a victim calling out to heaven for vengeance on our barbarity!” Another sick sailor crawled out of his hammock and collapsed on the gratings. Describing what he found the following morning, Stanfield wrote, “I shudder at the bare recollection.” The man “was still alive, but covered with blood—the hogs has picked his toes to the bones, and his body was otherwise mangled by them in a manner too shocking to relate.”

  Most of the manglings were man-made, and indeed the captain seemed to take a special delight in observing them. Because of his debility, he ordered anyone to be flogged tied to his bedpost so he could see the victims face-to-face, “enjoying their agonizing screams, while their flesh was lacerated without mercy: this was a frequent and a favourite mode of punishment.” The captain’s violence now had a broader object, the crew and the enslaved, who in Stanfield’s view were trapped in the same system of terror.

  Pallid or black—the free or fetter’d band,

  Fall undistinguish’d by his ruffian hand.

  Nor age’s awe, nor sex’s softness charm;

  Nor law, nor feeling, stop his blood-steep’d arm.

  This was true for both sailors and slaves: “Flogging, that favourite exercise, was in continual use with the poor Negroes as well as the seamen.” It operated without regard to race, age, gender, law, or humanity.

  Like many sailors, Stanfield thought that the slaves were in certain respects better off than the crew. At least the captain had an economic incentive to feed them and keep them alive during the Middle Passage. He wrote, “The slaves, with regard to attention paid to their health and diet, claim, from the purpose of the voyage, a condition superior to the seamen.” But he was quick to qualify the statement: “when the capricious and irascible passions of their general tyrant were once set afloat, I never could see any difference in the cruelty of their treatment.” He also argued against the standard proslavery refrain that “interest” would cause the captain to treat the “cargo” well. The “internal passions, that seem to be nourished in the very vitals of this employ, bid defiance to every power of controul.” The Demon Cruelty routinely battered and bested rational concerns.

  The ship was now full of its “sad freight.” Stanfield offered a powerful view of the enslaved jammed belowdecks at night:

  Pack’d in close misery, the reeking crowd,

  Sweltering in chains, pollute the hot abode.

  In painful rows with studious art comprest,

  Smoking they lie, and breathe the humid pest:

  Moisten’d with gore, on the hard platform ground,

  The bare-rub’d joint soon bursts the painful bound;

  Sinks in the obdurate plank with racking force,

  And ploughs,—dire talk, its agonizing course!

  Stanfield was conscious of the sounds of the slave ship—the “long groan,” “strain of anguish,” cries, death songs, “shrieks of woe and howlings of despair!” All in this instance were heard in the midnight hour. Sickness was a big part of the experience. Breathing “infected air” amid “green contagion,” the fevered lie “strew’d o’er the filthy deck.” Stanfield followed abolitionist surgeon Alexander Falconbridge in saying that the slave ship was “like a slaughterhouse. Blood, filth, misery, and disease.”

  Stanfield noted individual responses among the enslaved to this grim reality, which ranged from sad defeat to fiery indignation:

  Look at yon wretch (a melancholy case!)

  Grief in his eye, despair upon his face;

  His fellow—see—from orbs of blood-shot ire

  On his pale tyrants dart the indignant fire!

  Stanfield chronicled another horror of the Middle Passage, the opening, in the morning, of the grates and the emergence of the enslaved from sixteen hours of darkness belowdecks. Stanfield imagined the aperture as a “noisome cave,” even a monster’s mouth: from belowdecks the “rank maw, belched up in morbid steam, / The hot mist thickens in a side-long beam.” In “fetter’d pairs” the “drooping crowd” emerged. He described two men in particular who were “close united by the fest’ring chain.” They had to be lifted up from below. One had died overnight; one was still living. Once unshackled, the dead man would be “to the sea consign’d”; the corpse the “briny monsters seize with savage force.” Sharks, Stanfield understood, were part of the ship’s terror.

  The daily routine began, and “a joyless meal the tyrant-whites prepare.” For those who refused to eat, “stripe follows stripe, in boundless, brutal rage.” The pain of the whip caused some to faint. For those who were lashed and still refused to eat, the dreaded speculum oris was brought on deck:

  Then: See the vile engines in the hateful cause

  Are plied relentless in the straining jaws

  The wrenching instruments with barbarous force

  Shew the detested food th’ unwilling course.

  Two women, who were among “the finest slaves on the ship,” watched the violence and took rebellious action. They poignantly folded themselves in each other’s arms and “plunged over the poop of the vessel into the sea.” As they drowned, the other women “cried out in a most affecting manner, and many of them were preparing to follow their companions.” They were locked belowdecks immediate
ly to prevent mass suicide.

  Stanfield recalled a night when the slaves on the lower deck were already “packed together to a degree of pain” and then required to make room for another boatload of captives brought on board. This resulted in “much noise” as the quarters grew even more cramped. In the women’s room, one of the new captives threw over one of the mess-tubs. The next morning she was tied to the captain’s bedpost, “with her face close to his,” and ordered to be whipped. When the “unwilling executioner” (whether a sailor or slave, Stanfield does not say) took pity on the woman and did not whip her as hard as the captain commanded, he in turn was tied up and given a “violent lashing.” Soon after, the flogging of the woman resumed. Stanfield, who had inherited the medicine chest after the death of the doctor even though he was not qualified for the practice, dressed her wounds.