The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  The Return of the Dancing Sailor

  Did the dancing sailor join the Liverpool insurrection? As the “disturbances” began, he was already cursing his betters and vaunting his own independence. It is not hard to imagine him joining with his brother tars to express raw class hatred—through slashed rigging, cannon fire on the exchange, and the trashed finery of the hated slave-trade merchants, lying in the streets. He would have helped to create the modern practice called the “strike,” which was named at this particular historical moment for the militant action of sailors who “struck”—took down—the sails of their vessels. He also would have helped to make one of the biggest municipal uprisings of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic, and one of the only ones in which the crowd used cannon against state and business authority.

  Or did the sailor, alternatively, meet the captain and the surgeon the day after his dancing by fiddle and sign on to the slave ship, the “vast machine”? He would have found on the ship two overlapping and conflicting communities, one vertical, the other horizontal. The first was a corporate community linking the entire crew from the top of the laboring hierarchy to the bottom; it was summed up in the phrase “We’re all in this ship together.” The second was a class community, in which he would have been arrayed alongside other common sailors against the captain and officers (with the junior mates and lesser skilled workers in between, usually leaning to one side or the other). On the outward-bound voyage to Africa, as the captain asserted his distended powers of discipline, the relationship between officers and sailors would be the main line of tension, the primary contradiction in shipboard society.

  When the ship arrived on the African coast and large numbers of enslaved people came on board, everything changed. Now the sailor would oversee the forced dancing of African captives. He worked as a prison guard, holding hundreds of Africans on the ship, against their wills, by violence. Suddenly it mattered little how he had first come aboard or how much he may have hated the captain. Conflicts that had arisen back in port or during the outward voyage began to be eclipsed. A new social cement called fear bonded the entire crew, from captain to cabin boy, whose lives now depended on their unity of vigilance and action, their cooperation against a more numerous and potentially powerful group of captives in their midst. As the sailor and the captain moved closer together, the corporate community grew stronger and the class community weakened, although it did not disappear. Now a deeper antagonism ruled the ship, and with it came a new discipline. It would be called “race.”

  It also mattered little what had been the cultural or ethnic background of the sailor, for he would, on the ship and coast of Africa, become “white,” at least for a time, as the “vast machine” helped to produce racial categories and identities. It was the common practice for everyone involved in the slave trade, whether African or European, to refer to the ship’s crew as the “white men” or the “white people,” even when the crew was motley, a portion of it “colored” and distinctly not white. The sailor’s status as a “white man” guaranteed that he would not be sold in the slave-labor market, and it marked him as someone who could dispense violence and discipline to the enslaved on behalf of the merchant and his capital. One of the lessons of the slave ship, as William Snelgrave pointed out, was that the enslaved must never “make a Disturbance, or offer to strike a white Man”; otherwise, they would be “severely punished,” perhaps executed for it. But such status did not guarantee that the sailor himself would not be the target of violence and discipline from the captain and officers, nor did it guarantee other standards of treatment aboard the ship.82

  The original and primary contradiction on the ship, between captain and crew, became, on the coast of Africa and through the Middle Passage, secondary. And even though sailors began to get the “wages of whiteness,” they nonetheless had their complaints about the new situation. They complained bitterly—and, it must be stressed, self-servingly and dishonestly—that the enslaved were treated better on board the ship than they were. They complained about shelter: when the African captives came aboard, they had nowhere to sleep. They complained about health care: a sailor from the slave ship Albion came aboard HMS Adventure on the Windward Coast in 1788-89 and announced that the Guineaman’s “surgeon neglected the sick seamen, alledging that he was only paid for attending the Slaves.” They complained loudest about food: the slaves ate better than they did. Their provisions were fresher and more plentiful, but, according to Samuel Robinson, should the sailor “be found snatching a handful of the slaves mess when dealing it out, he would be severely punished.” One seaman complained that sailors were sometimes “obliged to beg victuals of the slaves.” The so-called free workers were treated worse than the slaves, in whom both the merchant and captain had a much greater vested interest as valuable property. Sailors also discovered that “white skin privilege,” such as it was, could be reversed, even on the Middle Passage, when toward the end of the voyage they became expendable, surplus labor. Sailors were abused, dumped, left to fend for themselves, often in a sickly state. Class came back with a vengeance.83

  The sailor was a third party between two much bigger, heavier dancers: the merchant, his capital, and his class on the one hand and the African captive, her labor power, and her class-in-the-making on the other. In fighting to maintain a middle position and to limit his own exploitation in a dangerous line of work, the sailor resisted wage cuts, as in Liverpool in 1775, but he did not strike against the slave trade. He struck for a better wage deal within it. Such was the hard limit of his radicalism, his practice of solidarity.84 His contradictory position was expressed in a drunken, perhaps insane, and utterly tragic manner aboard a slave ship that arrived from the coast of Guinea, at North America, in 1763. A sailor, “being in Liquor, stript off his Cloaths, and divided them among the Slaves; then taking up a Negro Boy in his Arms, said, He would have a Servant of his own; and leaping with him into the River, they were both drowned.”85

  CHAPTER 9

  From Captives to Shipmates

  The man refused to eat. He had been sick, reduced to a “mere skeleton.” He had apparently made a decision to die. Captain Timothy Tucker was outraged, and probably fearful that his example might spread to the other two hundred-plus captives aboard his ship, the Loyal George, as it made its way across the Atlantic to Barbados in the year 1727. The captain turned to his black cabin boy, Robin, and commanded him to fetch his whip. This was no cat-o’-nine-tails but rather something much bigger, a horsewhip. He tied up the man and lashed him: “from his neck to his ancles, there was nothing to be seen but bloody wounds,” said Silas Told, an apprentice seaman and crew member who recounted the story years later. All the while the man made no resistance and said nothing, which incensed the captain, who now threatened him in his own language: “he would tickeravoo him,” that is, kill him, to which the man answered, “Adomma,” so be it.1

  The captain then left the man “in shocking agonies” to take his dinner on the quarterdeck, eating “like a hog,” thought Told. After he had finished his meal, Captain Tucker was ready to resume the punishment. This time he called another ship’s boy, John Lad, to bring him two loaded pistols from his cabin. Captain Tucker and John Lad then walked forward on the main deck, approaching the nameless hunger striker, who was sitting with his back against the larboard gunnel of the ship. With a “malicious and virulent grin,” Tucker pointed a pistol at the man and repeated that he would kill him if he did not eat. The man answered simply, as before, “Adomma.” The captain put the barrel of the pistol to the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The man “instantly clapped his hands to his head, the one behind, the other before,” and stared the captain directly in the face. Blood gushed from the wound, like the “tapping [of] a cask,” but he did not fall. The captain, infuriated, cursed, turned to the cabin boy, and screamed, “This will not kill him,” so he clapped the other pistol to the man’s ear and fired again. To the utter amazement of Told and surely everyone else who looked on
, “nor did he drop, even then!” Finally the captain ordered John Lad to shoot the man through the heart, whereupon “he then dropt down dead.”

  In consequence of this “uncommon murder,” the rest of the male captives rose in vengeful wrath “upon the ship’s company with full purpose to slay us all.” The crew scrambled to retreat behind the barricado. Once there they took up their positions at the swivel guns, raking the main deck with shot and sending the rebels flying in all directions. Some of the men dove belowdecks seeking cover, while others jumped overboard. As soon as the crew had regained control of the main deck, they took to the boats to save the men in the water but were able to rescue only one or two from the “violence of the sea” and the men’s own concerted efforts to drown themselves. A large but unknown number perished. Thus did an individual act of resistance spark a collective revolt and one form of resistance give rise to another. The refusal to eat had led to a kind of martyrdom, to an insurrection, and, once that failed, to mass suicide.2

  Scenes like this played out on one slave ship after another. They epitomized a deep dialectic of discipline and resistance—on the one hand, extreme violence enacted by the captain against an enslaved individual, with an expectation that the resulting terror would help him to rule the others, and, in response from the enslaved, extreme opposition to that violence and terror, individually and in the end collectively. Beneath the response, however, is a question: how did a multiethnic mass of several hundred Africans, thrown together in a slave ship, learn to act collectively? From the time they were first brought aboard the ship, they were socialized into a new order, one designed to objectify, discipline, and individualize the laboring body through violence, medical inspection, numbering, chaining, “stowing” belowdecks, and various social routines, from eating and “dancing” to working. Meanwhile the captives communicated among themselves and fought back, individually and collectively, which meant that each ship contained within it a process of culture stripping from above and an oppositional process of culture creation from below. In the shadow of death, the millions who made the great Atlantic passage in a slave ship forged new forms of life—new language, new means of expression, new resistance, and a new sense of community. Herein lay the maritime origins of cultures that were at once African-American and Pan-African, creative and hence indestructible.3

  Boarding the Ship

  Depending on the ship’s location in Africa and how the trade was organized locally, some of the enslaved who came aboard would have been inspected by the physician and captain (or mate) on shore, while others would be examined as they stood for the first time on the main deck of the vessel. The physical condition of the captives varied widely, according to how they had been enslaved, how far they had traveled, and under what conditions. Some were sick, some were wounded, some were emaciated, some were still in shock or had begun to slip into “melancholy.” Still, they had to be in reasonable, or at least recuperable, condition, or the slave traders would not buy them.

  The process of stripping began, under threat of violence from both the black traders and the white, with clothes. It soon extended to name, identity, and to some extent culture, or so the new captors hoped. Various merchants and captains gave the official reason for removing clothes: to “preserve their health”—that is, to reduce the likelihood of vermin and disease. Some of the women, when stripped, immediately squatted to hide their genitals. (Some unknown number of ship captains gave women a small square of fabric to wear around their waists.) Perhaps just as important—although this reason for removing clothes was rarely mentioned—captains did not want the enslaved to have any place on their person where they might hide a weapon of any kind.4

  The mental state of the captives varied considerably. A twenty-seven-year-old woman who had apparently traveled hundreds of miles to get to the coast eyed the members of the ship’s crew with the “greatest astonishment.” She had never seen white people before and was brimming over with curiosity. Slave trader John Matthews described a man of even “bolder constitution” who looked at “the white man with amazement, but without fear.” He carefully examined the white man’s skin, then his own, the white man’s hair, then his own, “and frequently burst into laughter at the contrast, and, to him no doubt, [the] uncouth appearance of the white man.” On the other hand, Matthews also noted that a much greater number came aboard in abject terror, in “a state of torpid insensibility” in which they remained for some time. These people thought that “the white man buys him either to offer him as a sacrifice to his God, or to devour him as food.”5

  Cannibalism was one of the idioms through which the war called the slave trade was waged. Europeans had long justified the trade, and slavery more broadly, by saying that Africans were savage man-eaters, who must be civilized by exposure to the more “advanced” life and thought of Christian Europe. Many Africans were equally sure that the strange pale men in the houses with wings were the cannibals, eager to eat their flesh and drink their blood. This belief was apparently strengthened as some African elites used the slave trade to discipline their own slaves: “the Masters or Priests hold out as a general Doctrine to their Slaves, that the Europeans will kill and eat them, if they behave so ill as they do to their respective Masters, by which Means the Slaves are kept in better Order, and in great Fear of being sold to the Europeans.” In any case a huge number of people, like Equiano, arrived at the ship in morbid fear of being eaten alive. The belief was more common in some regions of Africa than others: people from the interior were more likely to believe it than were people from the coast; the Igbo more likely than the Akan. The fear of being eaten would prove to be a powerful motive to resistance of all kinds, from hunger strike to suicide to insurrection.6

  Perhaps the most infamous symbols of control aboard the slave ship were the manacles, shackles, neck rings, and chains that made up the hardware of bondage. Many of the enslaved were already constrained when they came aboard the ship, especially the so-called stout men (physically strong adults), but moving from African cordage or vine to the iron technology of the Europeans evoked a special horror. Manacles took several forms, from handcuffs to rounded clamps. Leg shackles, also known as bilboes, consisted of a straight iron rod, on which were slid two U-shaped metal loops. The rod had a finished end, large and flattened, and a slotted end with a lock or, more commonly, a hammered ring, through which a chain might be reeved when two captives came on deck. The most punishing constraint was reserved for the most rebellious slaves, whose necks were locked into large iron collars, which made it even more difficult to move, lie down, or rest. The point was to limit movement and control potential resistance.

  The general rule was, all men manacled and shackled at the wrist and leg, women and children left unconstrained. But captains did vary in their uses of fetters. Some apparently always chained certain groups of Africans (Fante, Ibibio) but not others (Chamba, Angola), who were considered unlikely to rise up. The Asante might be chained, depending on how and why they ended up on the ship. Several captains swore that they let even the men out of chains once they had left the African coast, although equally experienced captains did not believe it. Some captains used only manacles or shackles, not both. One captain said he let men out of chains once they seemed to be “reconciled” to their fate on board the ship. Women who proved rebellious were also fettered, and quickly.7

  The iron constraints excoriated the flesh. Even minimal movement could be painful. Trying to get oneself and a partner through a mass of bodies on the lower deck to the necessary tubs could be excruciating, and the forced “dancing” on the main deck for exercise could be torture.

  In the late 1780s, the youthful John Riland befriended (in England) an old African named Caesar, who still bore the scars of the fetters he wore on the slave ship. The skin on his ankles was “seamed and rugged,” not least because he had been chained to a man whose language he did not understand, which made it difficult for them to coordinate their movements. When his partner sickened a
nd convulsed with starts and twitches, the movements against the metal lacerated both men. The experience of wearing these fetters, Caesar explained to Riland, would never be forgotten: “the iron entered into our souls!”8

  Early in the history of the slave trade, Europeans took control of slave bodies by branding them, burning symbols of European ownership into the flesh, usually on the shoulder, upper chest, or thigh. Branding was most common when the purchasing trader was the representative of a large chartered company such as the Royal African Company or the South Sea Company. Some merchants also required captains to brand their privilege slaves to hold them accountable for the loss in case of mortality. But the practice of branding seems to have diminished over time. By the early 1800s, it was rarely mentioned.9

  Other, more “rational” means arose in order to transform human beings into property. Gaining strength throughout the eighteenth century was an accounting system that operated aboard each ship to reduce all captives to the deadened anonymity of numbers. Each person who was purchased was assigned a number, and sometimes a new name. But a numbering system was more pervasive and functional, for both captains and surgeons, who routinely referred in their logs and journals to the death of man “No. 33,” a boy “No. 27,” a woman “No. 11,” or a girl “No. 92.” According to the official records of the voyage, each slave was a nameless entry in a bookkeeping system. Captains numbered the living as they came aboard; surgeons numbered the dead as they flung them overboard.10

  Working

  A significant number of the enslaved worked aboard the vessel, at a wide variety of tasks central to the shipboard economy. Probably the most common work was “domestic” in the broad sense, part of the necessary daily reproductive labors of the ship. A substantial number of women seem to have been involved in food preparation. They performed what were likely familiar duties: they cleaned rice, pounded yams, and ground corn. Women also worked as cooks, in place of or in some instances alongside the ship’s cook, to prepare food for the hundreds on board. Occasionally an enslaved woman (considered trustworthy) might cook the higher-quality food to be served to the captain’s table. Other Africans, men and women, washed and cleaned the decks and scraped and sanitized the slave apartments. Some found a niche in the shipboard economy washing and mending the clothes of the crew. They often got “pay” for these tasks—a dram of brandy, tobacco, or extra food.11