The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  By the end of the year, Newton had reestablished shipboard order and confidence in his own command. On December 31 he noted in his spiritual journal his gratitude for good health and a “Chearful mind.” Taking stock of the past on New Year’s Day, he remembered his offenses against God, which were too many to be listed, and his blessings—health, friends, the goodwill of his employer, and his wife. Finally he recounted his deliverances. He “was particularly preserv’d from unseen evil, by the timely discovery of the plot my people were engag’d in, & afterwards of another amongst the Slaves.” He wanted not only to note these but to have them “imprinted in my heart.” That way “they may be always ready to excite my gratitude in times of safety, & to keep up my spirits & dependence when other dangers seem to threaten.” He had “an easy and contented mind,” but he knew it would not last. The dangers surrounding him were too great. 25

  On the afternoon of January 31, William Cooney, the informer against his fellow sailors, “seduced a slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck.” The woman who was raped, known only as Number 83, was pregnant. Newton put Cooney in irons, noting in his journal, “I hope this has been the first affair of the kind on board and I am determined to keep them quiet if possible.” It is not clear what he meant by “keep them quiet.” Did he mean that he wanted to keep these kinds of events quiet? Did he mean that he wanted to keep predatory seamen like Cooney quiet? Or did he mean that he anticipated loud protest from the enslaved once they learned what had happened? Newton’s concluding conversation suggested his concern for property: “If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child.”

  Soon after this event, Newton had a strange and disturbing dream. He was stung by a scorpion and was then given “oyl” by a stranger to ease the pain. The unknown person told him that the dream was “predictive of something that would happen shortly” but that Newton should not be afraid, as he would suffer no harm. What did the dream mean? Who was the scorpion, what was the sting, and who was the helpful healer? Was it the sailors, the mutiny, and the informer William Cooney? Was it the slaves, the plotted insurrection, and the boys who snitched? The captain decided that the sting came from a wealthy black slave trader named Bryan who had accused Newton of “laying with one of his women when he was on shoar.” Newton now feared going ashore to conduct business, as he would find himself “amongst a mercenary enraged crew and who have poyson always in readiness where they dare not use more open methods of revenge.” Newton drew up a declaration of his innocence in the presence of another captain, his mate, and his surgeon, and sent it to the trader on shore. He then sold his longboat for four tons of rice and sailed away.

  Newton had spent a protracted eight and a half months on the coast gathering a human cargo. He had been plagued once again by sickness, though he was not as assiduous as on the first voyage about recording deaths. Perhaps he was getting used to them, or perhaps he did not want to leave a written record of mortality that his employer might inspect. In any case he felt he had done better trading than most captains who were then on the coast, and his fortunes improved with the health and mood of the enslaved men. Having for months been “continually alarmed with their almost desperate attempts to make insurrections upon us,” and knowing that “when most quiet they were always watching for opportunity,” Newton noticed that their disposition, even their “tempers,” seemed to change. They began to behave “more like children in one family, than slaves in irons and chains and are really upon all accounts more observant, obliging and considerate than our white people.” Newton was pleased, but not enough to alter his vigilant routine. He and his crew continued to guard them “as custom and prudence suggest,” and he quoted the Bible to stress his own vulnerability: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” This was true for any ship, he suggested, “and it is more observably true of a Guineaman.”

  As the African neared St. Kitts, Newton had the sailors prepare the human commodities for sale: they “shaved the slaves’ fore heads.” He feared that the market would be bad and that another passage, perhaps to Jamaica or Virginia, would be required. Noting his long stay on the coast and the longer-than-normal Middle Passage, he wrote on June 3, “we have had the men slaves so long on board that their patience is just worn out, and I am certain they would drop fast had we another passage to make.” As it happened, his worries were misplaced since he sold his entire cargo of 167 men, women, and children at St. Kitts. After a routine homeward passage, Newton arrived in Liverpool on August 29, 1752.

  Once again Newton had not lived up to his owner’s hopes, although he had done better than on the previous voyage. He had taken on board only 207 slaves rather than the 250 he was supposed to take, and his mortality rate was higher than on the first voyage. He lost 40 slaves, 19.3 percent of the total. He did better with the sailors, only one of whom (of twenty-seven) died. But this did not save Mr. Manesty any money. The four who deserted and the three he discharged early did save money, as he did not have to pay their wages back to Liverpool. Once again Newton complained that the slave trade on the Windward Coast was “so overdone.”

  Third Voyage, 1753-54

  After a quick turnaround of only eight weeks, Newton departed Liverpool on October 23, 1753, on his third voyage as captain of a slaver. Mr. Manesty retained him to command the African, to sail once again to the Windward Coast and St. Kitts. Newton hired a few more sailors this voyage, thirty in all, as he had done on his first voyage, probably in memory of the sickness and threatened insurrection of the slaves. The division of labor remained the same, with one exception. Newton took on a friend, an old salt named Job Lewis, who, down on his luck, went as “Volunteer and Captain’s Commander.” Four crew members reenlisted from the previous voyage: chief mate Alexander Welsh, second mate James Billinge, and apprentices Robert Cropper and Jonathan Ireland. The first two had incentives, and the second two probably had no choice. It is revealing that none of the common sailors signed on again. Maybe it was the mandatory religious services. 26

  Once again Newton kept an ordered and methodical schedule, rising early, walking the deck, reading two or three chapters of the Bible, taking his breakfast. On Sundays he held a devotional service for the crew at 11:00 A.M. He took tea at 4:00 P.M., followed by another “scripture lesson” and a walk. In between he attended to business, although his various writings make it clear that he was becoming steadily less interested in worldly affairs, more interested in his godly calling. He wrote more about his spiritual life, less about the daily transactions of the ship. Still, he remained optimistic about business. Early in the voyage, he noted, “we are all in good health and good spirits” and expressed his hope for a quick passage. He arrived on the African coast without a major incident, natural or man-made, on December 3, 1753.

  Newton had to dispense discipline to the crew on several occasions, none of them as serious as the near mutiny he suffered on the previous voyage. On December 21 he found himself in a ticklish situation with the carpenter, who on the one hand had behaved mutinously, refused orders from other officers while Newton was off the ship, even “grossly abused” the second mate, but who on the other hand had not yet finished building the utterly necessary barricado. Newton gave him two dozen stripes with the cat but added, “I could not afford to put him in irons.” Two days later he noted, “Carpenter at work on the barricado.” Later in the stay on the coast, Newton had to deal with desertion. A member of his crew named Manuel Antonio, a Portuguese sailor who had shipped out of Liverpool, ran away when the boat on which he was working stopped at Cachugo. He had alleged ill usage, but every officer swore (perhaps less than truthfully) that “he never was struck by any one.” Newton believed he deserted because he had been noticed while “stealing some knives and tobacco out of the boat.”27

  Soon after he arrived on the coast, Newton got the local news: the Racehorse had been “cut off,” the Adventure was “totally lost” to ins
urrection, and the Greyhound had three members of its crew killed at Kittam. Trade was slow, and the “villainy” of the traders was great. Newton quickly grew weary of the “noise, heat, smoke, and business” of the trade. He clashed with Job Lewis, whose profane ways undermined his own hoped-for Christian influence among the crew. He apparently worried about attacks from both within the vessel and without, so he made a practical alliance with Captain Jackson, likely the man with whom he had sailed as mate. Newton also began to worry about “dirty money matters”—whether this voyage would be yet another failure. He wrote to his wife, Mary, to console himself: “Perhaps we may not be rich—no matter. We are rich in Love.” Such reasoning would not impress Mr. Manesty.28

  Newton determined once again to find advantage in disaster. On December 30 he bought the Racehorse, presumably from the Susu people who had taken and probably plundered it. It was a small vessel at forty-five tons, but it had new copper sheathing on its hull. Newton paid the modest sum of £130 and put his friend Job Lewis aboard as captain. The vessel had to be refitted, which took about three weeks. A major setback took place on February 21, when Captain Lewis died. Newton distributed his clothes to his officers and promoted to command chief mate Alexander Welsh. Newton hoped that the purchase of the Racehorse would serve Mr. Manesty’s interest, but the plan was, at bottom, self-serving: he would send several of his seamen aboard and depart the coast of Africa early, after only four months, with a small cargo of only eighty-seven slaves, cutting short the dangerous stay on the coast, limiting his mortality, and leaving the Racehorse to gather the rest of the slaves. 29

  On April 8, 1754, the day after the African departed the coast of Africa, Newton reflected on the news and lore that circulated among captains, then on his own situation: “This has been a fatal season to many persons upon the coast. I think I never heard of so many dead, lost, or destroyed, in one year. But I have been kept in perfect health, and have Buried neither White, nor Black.” (He regarded Lewis as a death on a separate ship and therefore not his responsibility.) Yet ten days later, early in the Middle Passage, he found that he had spoken too soon. Newton himself fell ill of a violent, debilitating fever. Racked by high temperature and sore eyes, he thought he was going to die. He was terrified at the prospect of perishing “in the midst of this pathless ocean, at a distance from every friend,” but he nonetheless decided to “prepare for eternity.” He prayed and wrote a farewell letter to Mary.

  It turned out that Newton had not caught the “most dangerous species” of fever and did not suffer the pain and delirium he had seen so often in sailor and slave. He languished for eight to ten days and felt “rather faint and weak” for almost another month once the fever had passed, even after the ship had arrived in St. Kitts on May 21. One reason the recovery took so long, Newton thought, was that he had generously distributed his stock (food and drink) “among the sick seamen, before I was taken ill myself.”

  After an uneventful passage from St. Kitts, Newton arrived in Liverpool on August 7, 1754. His third voyage had proved the quickest, and in many ways the easiest he made, but it is impossible to know if it was successful in economic terms. Newton certainly had his doubts. Having made three consecutive voyages of uncertain profitability in a row, he appealed to a different measure of success. He had managed, he proudly announced, “an African voyage performed without any disaster.” He went around from church to church in Liverpool to return thanks for their blessings, noting everywhere that he had lost neither sailor nor slave. “This was much noticed and spoken of in the town,” he explained, “and I believe it is the first instance of its kind.” He considered it, of course, to be a sign of “divine Providence.”30

  Whether doubtful, proud, or both, Newton was rehired by Mr. Manesty and soon took command of a new slave ship, the Bee. He was within two days of sailing when his career and life took a sudden and unexpected turn. As he wrote later, “it pleased God to stop me by illness.” Newton suffered an apoplectic stroke, a “violent fit, which threatened immediate death, and left me no signs of life, but breathing, for about an hour.” On the advice of physicians, he resigned command of the ship and left the slave trade altogether—not by his own choice, it must be noted. He eventually got a job as the tide surveyor of Liverpool. It would be years before he wrote a critical word about the slave trade, and it would be more than three decades before he would declare himself against it.

  Lost and Found

  John Newton considered his role as a slave-ship captain to be a godly calling. He was, he wrote, “upon the whole satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me.” Occasionally, he prayed “that the Lord, in his own time, would be pleased to fix me in a more humane calling, and, if it might be, place me where I might have more frequent converse with his people and ordinances, and be freed from those long separations from home which very often were hard to bear.” Yet among his misgivings the inhumane work of the slave ship ranked as only one of three reasons to prefer a different calling. Writing to David Jennings from the coast of Sierra Leone in August 1752, Newton noted that he once was lost, “a deprav’d unhappy apostate,” but now, as Christian master of a slave ship, he was “found.” It is a cruel twist on the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” which Newton would write twenty-one years later, in 1773.31

  Newton’s Christianity played a double role in his life aboard the slave ship. On the one hand, it served a prophylactic screen against recognition of the inhuman things he was actually doing. He could sit in his captain’s cabin vowing to do “good to my fellow creatures” as he gave orders to guarantee their killing enslavement. On the other hand, his Christianity limited, but did not eliminate, the cruelty so common to slave ships. He admonished himself to remember his own experience as a sailor harshly punished aboard the Harwich and as a slave much abused on Plantain Island. He exhorted himself not to be cruel to the sailors who had organized a mutiny against his command on the second voyage. He brought a limited Christian paternalism to his dealings with sailors, but apparently not to his dealings with slaves. And even though Newton was probably less cruel than most eighteenth-century slave-ship captains, he nonetheless faced mutiny by his sailors and insurrection by his slaves. He responded with chains, whips, and thumbscrews—in short, with terror. 32

  As Newton sat in the captain’s cabin writing by candlelight to his wife on July 13, 1753, he looked back over his life, particularly his own enslavement in 1745 by a trader on Plantain Island, where he lay “in an abject state of servitude and sickness.” He had come a long way in eight short years. He was now married, a man of some property and standing, and a proud Christian. He explained that God “brought me, as I must say, out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; from slavery and famine on the coast of Africa to my present situation.” His situation, at that very moment, was to share a small wooden world with eighty-seven men, women, and children whom he was carrying through the Middle Passage into ever deeper bondage. Newton may have escaped Egypt, but he now worked for Pharaoh. He was blind to the parallel. 33

  CHAPTER 7

  The Captain’s Own Hell

  Family, friends, and loved ones gathered on the docks at Liverpool to say good-bye to the men aboard the slave ship Brownlow, including chief mate John Newton, as they set sail for the Windward Coast of Africa in early 1748. Liverpool’s slave trade was booming, offering both opportunities and dangers to its denizens. “Farewells” were literal hopes. Merchants and captains sometimes posted notices of impending voyages in places of worship on a Sunday morning, asking congregations to mention the name of each person on board the ship as they prayed for a safe and successful voyage. Everyone therefore understood that the wave of the hand from the dock might be the final communication with any given member of the crew, from captain to cabin boy. Death at sea was “no respecter of persons” and could strike at any time, especially in the Guinea trade, by accident, disease, or human will. Such departures for long and perilous voyages always had an emotional charge
.1

  Captain Richard Jackson stood upon the quarterdeck of the Brownlow, apparently unaffected by the collective feeling of the occasion. He was, however, keenly conscious that deep changes were afoot the moment the ship pushed off from the pier. He and his men were taking leave of landed society for an extended period, a year or more, sailing to places where social institutions such as family, church, community, and government had little reach. “With a suitable expression of countenance,” Newton recalled years later, and perhaps with disdain for the religious overtones of the occasion, Captain Jackson took leave of the people standing on the pier, and muttered to himself, “Now, I have a Hell of my own!”

  Captains wielded such power because they occupied a strategic position in the rapidly expanding international capitalist economy. Their power derived from maritime custom, but also from law and social geography. The state licensed the captain to use corporal punishment to maintain “subordination and regularity” among his crew as he linked the markets of the world. Resistance to his authority could be construed in court as mutiny or insurrection, both punishable by hanging. The geographic isolation of the ship, far from the governing institutions of society, was both a source of and a justification for the captain’s swollen powers.2

  The captain of a slave ship, like Richard Jackson, was the most powerful example of this general type. Like other captains, he was something of a craftsman—a highly skilled, experienced master of a sophisticated machine. He possessed technical knowledge about the working of the ship, natural knowledge—of winds, tides, and currents, of lands, seas, and sky—and social knowledge about how to deal with a wide variety of people. He worked as a multicultural merchant in far-flung markets. He acted as a boss, a coordinator of a heterogeneous and often refractory crew of wage laborers. He served as a warden, jailer, and slave master to transport hundreds of prisoners from one continent, across a vast body of water, to another. To succeed in these many roles, the captain had to be able to “carry a command”—of himself, a ship, a vast sum of property, his workers, and his captives.3