The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Newton’s “closer engagements” probably means that he took an African “wife,” maybe more than one. But the situation was transitory. The white man who had grown black soon reverted.

  After he went to work for yet a third slave merchant, he one day in February 1747 encountered a vessel called the Greyhound, whose captain came ashore and asked a startling question: had anyone at this trading post seen a man named John Newton? The captain, it turned out, was yet another friend of Newton’s ubiquitous father. Perhaps in fear of the distant, severe patriarch, Newton did not want to return to Liverpool, but the captain would not be denied. He devised a stratagem, announcing that Newton had just inherited money and must return to England to claim it. This Newton was willing to do, but once aboard the ship he fell back into his oppositional ways, delighting in mischief, inventing new oaths, ridiculing “gospel-history,” and glorying in “impiety and profaneness.” The captain took to calling him Jonah, the source of all problems on the voyage.

  During the homeward passage, Newton “was awaked from a sound sleep by the force of a violent sea, which broke on board us.” Wet and astonished, he heard the cry from above that the ship was sinking. As Newton scrambled up to the main deck, one of his shipmates was swept overboard. The sea had torn away the upper timbers on one side, allowing torrents of water to gush in. The force of the waves splintered casks and carried livestock over the side. Newton and several other crewmen took to the pump, while others bailed with buckets and pails and stuffed their clothes and bedding as plugs into the weeping seams of the ship. Fortunately, the vessel had only a light cargo, beeswax and wood, both lighter than water, but at the moment this seemed no saving grace. Newton pumped furiously and tried to inspire his mates, but discouragement rose with the water in the hold. After several hours Newton went to the captain and said, “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us.” He surprised himself with these words and went back to the pump, where everyone now secured himself with ropes to keep from being washed away. After nine hours of backbreaking work, Newton collapsed into his bed, “uncertain, and almost indifferent, whether I should rise again.” He slowly began to pray; the moment of his religious conversion was at hand. The winds and waves finally abated, and Newton considered his survival to be “an immediate and almost miraculous interposition of Divine Power.” The remaining crew got ashore in Ireland and eventually back to Liverpool, where Newton arrived with no money, no friends, and no prospect of employment, but with a new faith and a resolution never to return to Africa.7

  His resolve would soon be tested. The merchant Joseph Manesty, yet another friend of his father’s, offered him command of a slave ship. Having never made a proper slaving voyage, Newton was reluctant to accept the lucrative offer, thinking that he lacked knowledge and experience. He therefore agreed to go on one voyage as a mate, with Captain Richard Jackson in the Brownlow. Newton kept a journal of the voyage, but, unlike his other personal accounts, it has not survived. Nonetheless it is clear from other evidence that he must have had a trying time. As mate, his main responsibility on the African coast was “to sail from place to place in the long-boat to purchase slaves.” During the rainy season, he spent five or six days at a time in the boat, “without, as we say, a dry thread around me, sleeping or waking.” He saw several sailors poisoned while ashore, “and in my own boat I buried six or seven people with fevers.” More than once he was thrown out of his vessel by the violence of the surf and “brought to land half-dead, (for I could not swim).” Others drowned. Then a major slave insurrection broke out aboard the ship, resulting in significant loss of life, and a large portion of the enslaved died before the ship got to Charleston, South Carolina: 62 of 218 perished, a high mortality rate of 28.4 percent. Newton, however, was apparently undeterred, for after the Brownlow docked in Liverpool on December 1, 1749, he began preparations to assume command of Manesty’s Duke of Argyle, in which he would take his first voyage as a master. He was only twenty-four years old, but he had the sea in his blood and he now had hard-won experience in the slave trade.8

  First Voyage, 1750-51

  Having made an arrangement with Mr. Manesty and begun to secure a cargo, Newton hired his crew. He wrote a list of their names but said little about them as individuals. He did, however, provide something of a collective portrait. He wrote that a few of them had, like himself, been “bred to it young” but added that “as of late years people in creditable life have too much disdain’d bringing up their Children this way.” Most of his sailors were therefore not young men of respectable backgrounds who were learning the trade in order eventually to rise to a position of authority. They were rather what Newton called “the refuse and dregs of the Nation,” the poor and the dispossessed. Many of them of them were jailbirds and runaways of various kinds, from the army, navy, workshops, or parents. Others were down on their luck, “already ruin’d by some untimely vice,” not least alcoholism. A few may have been landsmen who had no experience at sea. Almost none of them had “good principles.” If any of the better sort signed on, Newton ruefully noted, they were driven away by the degenerate company they were forced to keep aboard the slave ship. Controlling such a rough crew would occupy a great deal of the captain’s time and thought.9

  Newton hired twenty-nine men and boys to fill specific roles aboard the Duke of Argyle: a surgeon, three mates, a boatswain, carpenter, gunner, cooper, tailor, steward, and cook; eleven “able seamen,” three less-skilled “ordinary seamen,” and three boys, or apprentices. Newton also hired a fiddler, for entertainment, no doubt, but also to exercise the slaves in what was euphemistically called “dancing.”

  At noon on August 11, 1750, Newton gave the order to cast off, whereupon the Duke of Argyle began its voyage from Liverpool to the Windward Coast of Africa and from there to Antigua in the West Indies. The vessel was a snow (or snauw), meaning a two-masted vessel, of modest size at a hundred tons, with ten mounted cannon and a sizable crew of thirty. The vessel was old, built in 1729; this was apparently only its second adventure as a Guineaman. Merchant Manesty intended that Newton should buy and carry a large cargo for the smallish ship—250 slaves, or 2.5 to a ton. Knowing this, Newton would have immediately calculated crew size: with thirty sailors he would have nearly a one-to-eight ratio, crew to enslaved, which he would have considered favorable, better than the usual one to ten.10

  During the outward passage, which would last ten weeks, the Duke of Argyle would be transformed into a proper slaver as the carpenter, gunner, and boatswain readied the essential technologies of control. Newton noted on September 25: “Carpenter begun to raise the gratings of the women’s room.” He also marked off the various rooms and commenced to build the bulkheads to separate them, enclosing the apartments to hold men, women, and boys. He constructed a washroom for the women near the main chains, then built platforms on the lower deck, extending six feet from each side of the ship to the interior, in each apartment. The space between decks on Newton’s ship was about five feet, so the headroom for the enslaved above and below the platform would have been roughly two feet four inches. Newton noted on November 19, probably with some relief (because slaves had already begun to come on board), that “the carpenter has finished the barricado.”

  Meanwhile the gunner was busy preparing the ship’s firepower, making cartridges for the carriage and swivel guns. He also cleaned and loaded the small arms, checking each one to be sure it worked properly. A few had to be condemned, “being absolutely good for nothing, the worst I ever saw in my life,” complained Newton. The boatswain, for his part, attached the netting to prevent escape or suicide by the enslaved. On December 7 the carpenter and gunner joined forces: “This day fixed 4 swivel blunderbusses in the barricado, which with the 2 carriage guns we put upon the main deck, and will, I hope, be sufficient to intimidate the slaves from any thoughts of an insurrection.” These guns were elevated in order to fire down on any who dared to rebel.11

  Newton encountered his first major disciplinary problem w
ith the crew on October 24, when he returned from visiting Captain Ellis aboard the Halifax to discover that the boatswain had, in his absence, “behaved very turbulently,” abusing several other members of the crew, all of which was “to the hindrance of the ship’s business.” Newton promptly clapped the man “in irons, in terrorem, being apprehensive he might occasion disturbance, when we got the slaves on board.”

  Newton thus expressed for the first time a worry about the spread of resistance. Three days later the boatswain had had enough. “Upon his submission and promise of amendment,” Newton let him out of his confinement. This was but the first of actions to be taken in terrorem.

  A week later Newton found, to his dismay, that a boatload of his sailors did not return from the Banana Islands to the Duke of Argyle as they were supposed to have done but rather went on board a French schooner and got drunk. They then went ashore to fight and got stuck there because the ebb tide was strong and they were too inebriated to pull their oars properly. Newton was forced to send a boatload of sober sailors after them. The captain therefore “gave two of my gentlemen a good caning and put one (William Lees) in irons, both for his behaviour in the boat and likewise being very troublesome last night, refusing to keep his watch and threatening the boatswain.” Lees got saucy and swore he would not serve Newton. He would rather remain in chains all the way to Antigua. After three days stapled to the deck, he changed his mind. He petitioned the captain for release and promised better behavior. Newton accepted his offer, but the drama with this unruly sailor was far from over.

  As the Duke of Argyle prepared to depart from the Banana Islands, Lees tried to desert by hiding himself ashore. Newton eventually found him, drunk and belligerent again, and was forced to pay some of the local natives a gallon of brandy to secure him in irons and carry him aboard the ship. When a group of African traders came aboard the slaver a few days later, Lees saw among them one who had helped to capture him, so he picked up a carpenter’s maul and swung it viciously at the man’s head, narrowly missing and instead grazing his breast. Newton was forced to give the man a laced hat in apology. He cuffed Lees and chained him to the deck again, adding for good measure his insolent and aptly named comrades Tom Creed and Tom True. Newton ended up putting these three and another mutinous sailor, Owen Cavanagh, aboard HMS Surprize, taking four sailors from the naval ship in return.

  The purchasing of slaves soon began. Because the Windward Coast had no fortresses where large numbers of slaves were held pending arrival of the slave ships, Newton used his own ship as a factory, bringing black traders on board as he dispatched his boat and yawl to fetch “cargo” from the shore. He got word early that his work would not be easy. On October 23 he met with Captain Duncan of the Cornwall, who had been on the coast for six months and had managed to buy only fifty slaves.

  The hurry and bustle of the trade commenced as the boats and canoes began their endless coming and going, to and from the Duke of Argyle. Shoreside traders made large fires in the night to signal their desire to come aboard. Newton received dignitaries such as the king of Charra and Prince William Ansah Setarakoo, who, returning to the Gold Coast from a visit to England, spent an evening with the captain. It was all “very much to my satisfaction,” Newton wrote, he “being master of a great deal of solid sense and a politeness of behaviour I seldom meet with in any of our own complexion hereabouts.” Most visitors were traders with anglicized names, such as Samuel Skinner, “Yellow Will,” or, most important of all, the mulatto merchant Henry Tucker, who would be feted as he spent nights on board and given large quantities of “iron bars” (a main trade currency) on credit in exchange for the promise of slaves to be delivered in the future. On one occasion, when he gave Tucker a large part of his trading cargo, Newton lamented, “I cannot properly call this lending him money, for I am, rather, obliged to him to take it.” The main advantage in dealing with Tucker, compared to all of the others, Newton thought, was his honesty. He noted, “I believe them to be all villains to a man except him.” Newton felt a keen dependency on these men, was forced to humor them, and he resented it. He wrote on March 27, “Our slow purchase and pressing season reduces me to court those whose behaviour I have reason to resent and despise.” He also thought longer stays on the coast meant higher mortality, so he was frustrated when forced to “do business (if I do any) just as it suits the humour and convenience of the people on shoar who are seldom in a hurry.” He added an exclamation: “Patience!”

  The trade itself was suffused with tension; indeed it took place within what Newton called a “warlike peace.” He continued, “We trade under arms; and they are furnished with long knives.” Previous depredations made African traders wary, retaliations were common, and fraud was the order of the day on both sides. Newton may have been surprised when he accused a black trader of malpractice and got an indignant reply: “What! Do you think I am a white man?”12

  Newton began to purchase his cargo, selectively at first as instructed by Mr. Manesty. He was shown seven people on Bance Island, but he took only three. He was offered a woman slave, “who I refused being long breasted.” He soon rejected two more “fallen breasted women” and four more slaves he considered too old. But he soon saw the truth of Captain Duncan’s experience. Trade was slow and prices were high. No slave ships lay at anchor from Sierra Leone south to Mana, “the whole country [being] in a flame of war.” The war would eventually produce slaves, but it was not producing any at the moment. Newton was therefore forced to buy what he considered lower “quality.” On January 7, 1751, he bought a woman “tho she had a very bad mouth.” He began, with misgivings, to buy more children. Newton wrote little in his journal about how these people had come to be enslaved, but later in life he noted that some were prisoners of war, some were convicts, some were born slaves in Africa and had been sold, and some had simply been kidnapped. He was convinced that most of them had come great distances from the interior of the Windward Coast. Perhaps their bodies bore the marks of hard travel.

  In early March an eerie opportunity presented itself. Newton was offered for purchase a surprisingly large number of prime slaves. He immediately—and rightly—suspected that these were the people who had recently risen up and “cut off” a French slaver not far away, killed the captain and crew, and escaped, only to be retaken by coastal traders and now resold. Would he take violent rebels aboard his own ship? Would he capitalize on the misfortunes of another slave captain? He would. Newton bought two large lots, including “the principals in taking the vessel.” He was “sorry to reflect I owe it to another’s misfortune, they being all the Frenchman’s slaves.” Yet he was “obliged to dissemble at present and say little” or else “hurt my own business without any advantage to the sufferers.” He resolved to take as many of the slaves as he could get. Newton later took comfort in learning from Henry Tucker that the French captain was still alive; Tucker had redeemed him from local captors. Still, six members of the crew had been murdered and three more driven overboard. Newton now had the experience of an almost-successful insurrection aboard his vessel.

  The work of guarding the ever-growing slave population aboard the ship became more important than ever, but so did the daily acts of buying and storing provisions, feeding the enslaved, and cleaning their quarters. Early on in the process of purchasing slaves, on December 18, Newton noted, “Having now 12 men slaves on board [out of 36] began this day with chains and sentrys.” The slaves were brought on board as “enemies.” Newton and crew assumed that they would do whatever they could to escape their bondage and regain their freedom. The men slaves would therefore be chained in the usual way, by twos, and armed guards would routinely pace the decks. Newton also initiated the regular firing of the small arms, often during mealtime when everyone was on deck, explicitly for the sake of intimidation and terror. The guns would then be cleaned and reloaded, readied for the next scheduled firing, or worse. Nettings were repaired to prevent escape, the barricado was respiked at the top, and the slave quart
ers were regularly searched for weapons. On the evening of May 6, wrote the captain, “The people found 2 knives and a bag of small stones in the men’s room.” The male captives were sullen, and many would remain so throughout the voyage. The “scorching days and damp foggy nights” were filling with tension. 13

  Newton incarcerated the enslaved on the lower deck, where they would breathe an almost-unbearable “hot and corrupted air.” At night the captives had trouble making their way through the crowd and the darkness to the “necessary tubs,” where the enslaved relieved themselves. Furious fights broke out between those chained to each other and between one who stepped on another. Sometimes, Newton noted, the tubs themselves turned over, making a horrific situation worse.

  Meanwhile the bodies of the enslaved were rubbed raw by their chains and by being rolled around on the rough wooden planks of the lower deck as a result of the incessant tossing of the ship. On any given morning when the weather was good, after the gratings were lifted and the slaves brought up onto the main deck for “airing,” feeding, and “dancing,” Newton and crew might find a dead man shackled to a living one. The dead went over the side of the ship as the living were locked down by a chain reeved through their irons and attached to ringbolts fastened at intervals on the deck. Here they would be fed twice a day, their meals made of horse beans, peas, and rice with a little salt meat mixed in.14