The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Other labors were more commonly the result of crisis. In the event of a storm or damage to the vessel, African men might be mobilized to work at the pumps. Captain John Rawlinson of the Mary “let the Negroes out of Irons to assist in pumping the Ship” in 1737, as did Captain Charles Harris of the Charles-Town in 1797. In the latter, reported explorer Mungo Park, “It was found necessary, therefore, to take some of the ablest of the Negro men out of irons, and employ them in this labour; in which they were often worked beyond their strength.” Their strength might have been the difference between capsizing and making it to port.12

  In wartime some captains elected to train a portion of the men in the use of knives, swords, pikes, small arms, or cannon in case of an attack by an enemy privateer. Captain Edwards of the snow Seaflower faced a Spanish privateer in 1741 with only six sailors and a boy, but 159 slaves. Rather than surrender, he opened a chest of small arms and “put Firelocks, Pistols, and Cutlasses into the Hands of some of the Negroes,” who “fought so desperately in their Way, shooting, slashing, and throwing Fire into the Privateer, when they attempted twice to board him, that by their Bravery they sav’d the Ship and Cargo,” that “cargo” being themselves! The privateer was obliged to “sheer off ” with no booty and having done little damage. Captain Peter Whitfield Branker testified before the House of Lords that on a voyage of 1779 he trained a large number of slaves every night during the Middle Passage: “I had at least a Hundred and fifty Slaves to work the Guns, Sails, and Small Arms; I had Twenty-two Marines; there were ten Slaves in each Top, that lived there continually, that were exercised to hand the Sails as Top Men in His Majesty’s Ships.”13

  The last comment points toward the most common work of all for boys and men: helping to sail the ship. This, too, was often a matter of necessity. When ten sailors deserted the Mercury in 1803-4, their “places were filled by negro slaves.” More commonly, however, it was not desertion but sickness and death that set the enslaved to work as sailors. When nineteen of the twenty-two crew members of the Thetis fell ill in 1760, they “set sail with the assistance of our own slaves, there being no possibility of working the ship without them,” wrote the ship’s carpenter, who was himself slowly going blind from a “distemper” in his eyes. Many captains declared that they could never have brought their ships to port without the labors of the enslaved.14

  African boys on board the ship worked with the sailors and indeed some were being trained to become sailors. A few were the captain’s privilege slaves, trained to enhance market value. One captain claimed that the boys were “allowed to go aloft, work with the Sailors, and are reckoned upon as a Part of the Ship’s Company.” This was an exaggeration, but it contained a truth confirmed by others. When the slave ship Benson came near his own vessel, the Neptune, in the early 1770s, mate John Ashley Hall “could only see two White men upon her yards handing the sails, the rest were Black boys, Slaves.” Aboard the Eliza in 1805, three “working boys” named Tom, Peter, and Jack not only helped sail the ship, they talked with the other captives and reported what they learned to the crew.15

  Fighting

  Violence lay at the very heart of the slave ship. The gunned ship itself was an instrument of war making and empire building, and of course violence of one kind or another had brought most everyone aboard.

  Moreover, almost everything that happened on the slave ship had the threat or actuality of violence behind it. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the Africans brought together on the slave ship sometimes fought among themselves, especially given the fear, rage, and frustration they all must have felt. The reasons for conflict among Africans were first and foremost circumstantial, related to the brutal conditions of enslavement and incarceration, especially on the hot, crowded, stinking lower deck. But cultural causes can also be discerned in ship- board ruckus.

  The noisome conditions of the lower deck caused an endless number of fights, especially at night when the prisoners were locked below without guards. Most fights were occasioned by the efforts of the captives to get through the mass of bodies to the necessary tubs to relieve themselves. The fighting was worst in the men’s apartment, not only because men were more apt to fight but because they were manacled and shackled, which made getting to the tubs more difficult. In 1790 a member of the House of Commons committee investigating the slave trade asked Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, “Have you known instances of quarrels between Slaves who have been shackled together?” He answered, “It is frequently the case, I believe, in all Slave ships.” And so it was. Among the men belowdecks, there were “continual quarrels.”16

  Any man who had to answer the call of nature had to coordinate the trip with his partner, who might not wish to be disturbed, and this in itself could cause a fight. If the partner proved willing, two people then tried to make their way through the multitude of bodies, all the while negotiating the rolling motions of the ship. Inevitably one person stepped or fell on another, who, “disturbed by the shock, took umbrage at it” and hit the “accidental offender.” Then someone else struck back to defend the person who had been hit. The escalation of the clash in such crowded circumstances was rapid, and soon the incident had grown into what seaman William Butterworth called a “battle.”17

  These difficulties pale, however, when compared to what happened when sickness—especially dysentery or any other malady that produced diarrhea—swept through the lower deck. Suddenly the afflicted could not always get to the tubs in time, or in some instances they were simply too weak to make the effort, especially if the tubs were at a distance. When the sick “ease[d] themselves” where they lay, furious disturbances broke out. This, and indeed the entire filthy condition of the lower deck, was a special torment to West Africans, who were known to pride themselves on personal cleanliness. Fighting was therefore chronic.18

  Another aspect of fighting was cultural, and here each ship captain faced a dilemma. Captain James Bowen observed that when “Men of different Nations” were shackled together, they would frequently “quarrel and fight.” Rather than coordinate movement, one man “would drag the other after him,” causing a row. Some captains said they would not link men who could not understand each other’s language. But this was dangerous. Should a captain chain men together who were from the same nation and thereby risk cooperation and hence conspiracy, or should he shackle men of different nations and risk fighting, disorder, and injury? Bowen opted to reduce the fighting, or so he claimed, but other captains may have chosen differently.19

  The Fante and the Chamba, both from the Gold Coast, were a case in point in the late eighteenth century. The coastal Fante had long been major slave-trading partners of the British, but even so, some of their people ended up as slaves aboard the ships when convicted of a crime. The Chamba (sometimes mistakenly called the Dunco), a more rural people from the interior, were convinced that they ended up on the ships because of the machinations of the man-stealing Fante: “they consider these people as the authors of their misfortunes,” wrote a slave-ship captain, “and the chief instruments used in removing them from their country.” When these two groups were on the same ship, they fought bitterly. Indeed when the Fante rose up in rebellion, as they often did, the Chamba, “as if to be revenged on them, always assisted the crews in suppressing these mutinies, and keeping them in subjection.” The Fante, in other words, were bigger enemies than the European crew; if they wanted something, the Chamba wanted the opposite.20

  Sometimes the fighting among the enslaved resulted in serious injury, disability, even death. At mealtime aboard the Florida in 1714, the enslaved “were much given to fighting, & biting one another, & some of their bites prov’d mortal.” Something similar must have happened on the Sandown, as Captain Samuel Gamble noted in his log for April 4, 1794: “At 6 PM the Doctor Amputated a Mans finger that was begun to mortify, having been bit by another Slave. at 5 PM he Departed this Life, No 10.” A captain trading at New Calabar wrote of the “cruel and bloody” temper of the slaves he had
purchased there. They were “always quarrelling, biting, and fighting, and sometimes choking and murdering one another, without any mercy, as happened to several aboard our ship.” Some captains seemed to think they had on board a chaotic and gruesome war of each against all.21

  Most of the fighting went on belowdecks, but it did occasionally break out on the main deck, when, for example, because of a prolonged Middle Passage or an inability to purchase adequate provisions in Africa, everyone on board had been put to short allowance of victuals. In this situation hungry people fought over food, thereby permitting slave captains to brag that they humanely protected the weak captives from the strong. Enslaved women were also known to fight over the beads they had been given in order to make ornaments during their daytime hours on the main deck. Younger captives sometimes taunted the older ones: “it is not unusual for the Boy Slaves, who are brought on Board, to insult the Men, who, being in Irons, cannot easily pursue and punish them for it.”22

  Dying

  Sickness and death were central to the African experience aboard the slave ship. Despite the efforts of merchants, captains, and surgeons, all of whom had a direct material interest in the health and survival of their captives, illness and mortality plagued slave ships even as the percentage of deaths declined over the course of the eighteenth century. Some captives arrived at the ships in a poor state of health, because of inadequate nutrition and the harsh, harmful conditions of their enslavement and march to the coast. Those from the Gold Coast seemed to be healthiest and therefore suffered lower mortality aboard the ships, while those from the Bights of Benin and Biafra died in significantly greater numbers. Yet even comparatively healthy voyages, in which only 5 to 7 percent of the enslaved died, were in many ways traumatic, for death on a ship, a small, crowded, intimate place, was always highly visible and poignant. Uncontrollable, catastrophic epidemics erupted from time to time, which is why the slave ship was called a “marine lazar house” and a “floating bier.” The famous rendition of the slave ship Brooks, it has been remarked, resembled a huge coffin with hundreds of bodies arranged neatly inside. The thin, ghostly cries wafted from belowdecks endlessly: “Yarra! Yarra!” (We are sick) or “Kickeraboo! Kickeraboo!” (We are dying).23

  A “sickly ship,” everyone agreed, was a horror beyond imagination. The ill lay on bare planks, without bedding, as friction caused by the rolling motion of the ship rubbed away the skin from their hips, elbows, and shoulders. A man belowdecks sometimes awoke in the morning and found himself shackled to a corpse. Most ships did not have room for a “hospital,” and even if one did, the demand for it might quickly exceed its capacity. Louis Asa-Asa noted that many sick people on his ship got no medical attention. Some would not have wanted it in any case. Captain James Fraser wrote that Africans were “naturally averse to taking medicines,” by which he meant Western medicines. Probably the most famous image of a sickly ship was provided by Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, who wrote about his visits to a lower deck ravaged by fluxes and fevers: “the deck was covered with blood and mucous, and approached nearer to the resemblance of a slaughter-house than any thing I can compare it to, [and] the stench and foul air were likewise intolerable.”24

  Surgeons’ journals kept between 1788 and 1797 (and submitted to the House of Lords) revealed the main causes of death, which were, as described, variously precise, fuzzy, and revealing. The greatest killer was dysentery (bacillary and amebic), which was called at the time the “flux” or “bloody flux.” The second leading cause of death was a generic listing, “fever,” noted by doctors in several types: “nervous” or “hectic,” “pleuratic,” “intermittent,” “inflammatory,” “putrid,” and “malignant.” These fevers included malaria (the deadly Plasmodium falciparum, as well as the debilitating P. vivax and P. ovale) and yellow fever, even though many West Africans had partial immunities to these diseases. Other, less frequent causes of death were measles, smallpox, and influenza, although any of them could devastate a ship at any time.25 Scurvy was better understood as a vitamin C deficiency as the eighteenth century progressed, but it did strike with deadly force now and again against those ships whose captains did not or could not stock up on fresh provisions and citrus fruits. Yet another cause of mortality was dehydration, always a deadly danger in the tropics, on the infernal lower deck of a ship with a limited water supply. More occasional causes of death included depression (“fixed melancholy”), infection (“mortification”), stroke (“apoplexy”), heart attack (“decay of the muscular functions of the Hart”), and, to a lesser extent, parasites (“worms”) and skin disease (yaws). Less precise causes appeared in the journals as “inflammation,” “convulsions,” and “delirium.” Finally, social (as opposed to medical) causes of death included “the sulks,” “jump’d overboard,” “choked himself,” and “insurrection.” Most ships experienced several of these maladies, and a few combined the deadliest kinds. The Comte du Nord in 1784 suffered a lethal combination of dysentery, measles, and scurvy, which for a while killed 6 to 7 captives per day, 136 deaths altogether. The last word on cause of death belongs not to a doctor but rather the abolitionist J. Philmore. Some people, he suggested, died of a “broken heart.”26

  One can only guess at the meanings Africans attached to this endlessly repeated catastrophic death and the cavalier dumping of bodies over the rail of the ship, often to sharks waiting below. But we can perhaps understand something of its cultural magnitude by realizing that many peoples from West African societies believed that sickness and death were caused by malevolent spirits. An observer who knew the Windward Coast well noted that death was always thought to be the handiwork of “some malicious enemy.” Nicholas Owen, who had lived for years in Sierra Leone, believed that Africans in that region “never think that any sickness comes but by a witch or devil.” It is not hard to imagine who the malicious enemy aboard the slave ship would be, but the conclusions to be drawn from the identification remain elusive. Added to this would have been the violation of almost all West African cultural precepts about how death was to be handled in ritual fashion—how a person was to be buried, with what kinds of accoutrements, and how the spirit was to be sent to the next world. Not that the multiethnic Africans would have necessarily agreed about these things; the point is that their enslavement and incarceration precluded customary grieving and closure. Even though the ship’s physician did what he could to keep the enslaved alive, there can be no doubt but that sickness and death were central to the experience of terror aboard the slave ship.27

  Building Babel

  West Africa is one of the world’s richest linguistic zones, and it has long been known that the peoples who came aboard the slave ships brought scores of languages with them. European and American slave traders were conscious of this, and indeed they saw in it an advantage. Richard Simson expressed this clearly in his late-seventeenth-century ship’s log: “The means used by those who trade to Guinea, to keep the Negros quiet, is to choose them from severall parts of ye Country, of different Languages; so that they find they cannot act joyntly, when they are not in a Capacity of Consulting with one an other, and this they can not doe, in soe farr as they understand not one an other.” Royal African Company surveyor William Smith expressed the same idea. The languages of the Senegambia region were “so many and so different,” he wrote, “that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.” By taking some “of every Sort on board [the slave ship], there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel.” This, he noted, “is no small Happiness to the Europeans.” Conversely, traders worried about cooperation and rebellion when they had too many people on a slaver who were “of one Town and Language.”28

  It is true that any given slave ship had several African cultures and languages aboard and that intelligibility could be an issue among the enslaved. Captain William Snelgrave was convinced that captives from the Windward Coast on board the Elizabeth had not been involved in an insurrectio
n because they “did not understand a word” of the language of its Gold Coast organizers. The extreme case of unintelligibility came with the appearance of someone on board with whom no one else could converse. This happened rarely, but when it did, the consequences could be tragic, as explained by Dr. Ecroyde Claxton: “there was one man who spoke a language that was unknown to any one of them, which made his condition truly lamentable, and made him always look very much dejected—this I believe produced a state of insanity.” 29

  Recent scholarship, however, has begun to emphasize the multilingualism and mutual intelligibility of West Africans to one another, at least within certain large cultural regions, and to suggest that linguistic divisions aboard the slave ships were less extreme than once thought. It now appears that means of communication had been worked out over time and broad distances through the process of trade, especially along West Africa’s coastline and on its many large rivers and hydrographic systems that extended deeply into the interior of the continent. Especially important in inter-African communication was what one observer called “maritime tongues.”30

  Some of the maritime tongues were pidgins, formed to permit trade between speakers of different languages. In West Africa, English- and Portuguese-based pidgins were most commonly used. Others were African languages, such as Manding, Fante, and Igbo, which served the same purpose. According to Captain James Rigby, all coastal peoples who lived and labored from Cape Mount to Cape Palmas on the Windward Coast, a distance of about 250 miles, understood one another. Thomas Thompson, a missionary who lived on the Gold Coast, noted the small, “parish-sized” linguistic zones but also noted the existence of seafaring languages that connected people over broad distances, for example, the 300 miles from Cape Apollonia to the river Volta. Sierra Leoneans in the 1790s spoke a lingua franca, but they also spoke “English, French, Dutch, or Portuguese with tolerable fluency.” Captain William McIntosh discovered in the 1770s that the enslaved he purchased at Galam, who had originated in the interior of Senegal, “perfectly understood the language of those slaves I purchased on the Gold Coast.” Both groups had apparently come from so far inland as to have mutually intelligible languages.31