The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Each of the major lines of recruitment, among women, boys, and cultural groups, contained within them potential divisions. Numerous were the times when either the men or the women rose up in insurrection, unsupported by the other, which of course made it much easier for the crew to put down the uprising. The men, for example, did not act when the women attacked Captain Bowen of the Wasp in 1785, while the women did not rise up with the men on the Hudibras in 1786. Boys were known to pass not only hard-edged tools to the enslaved men but also information to the crew about designs afoot belowdecks. And if certain African groups were inclined to rebellion, it did not necessarily follow that their militant ways were agreeable to others on the ship. The Ibibio and Igbo were called “mortal enemies,” the Chamba despised the Fante, and, during the middle of an insurrection in late 1752, Igbo and Coromantee insurgents began to fight each other. It is not always clear in any given case whether the divisions arose from previous history, inadequate communication and preparation, or the desirability of insurrection as a goal.60

  Uprisings required familiarity with the ship; hence one of the things that people whispered about was what they knew of the hold, the lower deck, the main deck, the captain’s cabin, the gun room, and how they should therefore proceed based on this knowledge. They found that they needed three specific kinds of knowledge about Europeans and their technologies, and that these were related to three distinct phases of an uprising: how to get out of the chains, how to find and use weapons against the crew, and how to sail the ship if they were successful. Insurrections tended to break down and suffer defeat at one of these moments in the process.

  The iron technology of manacles, shackles, and chains was largely effective for its purpose, as its continued use, for centuries, on the enslaved and on all kinds of other prisoners, makes perfectly clear. But it is also clear that male captives on the lower deck regularly found ways to get out of these fetters. Sometimes the irons fit too loosely, and the enslaved could, with lubrication and effort, simply squirm out of them. In other cases they used nails, picks, slivers of wood, and other instruments to pick the locks, or a hard-edged tool of some kind (saw, adze, knife, hammer, chisel, hatchet, or ax, likely passed below by one of the women or boys) to cut or break through the iron. An additional challenge was to use the tools quietly so as not to be discovered in the process of breaking free. Once the chains were off, the rebels had to get through the fortified gratings, which were always locked overnight. Surprise at the morning opening frequently represented the best opportunity, unless someone could trick a member of the crew to open the gratings at night.61

  The next step was to unleash the explosive energy from belowdecks, the sounds of which were, to a terrified crew member, “an uncommon uproar” and “several dreadful shrieks,” perhaps “from a sailor being killed.” African war cries would pierce the morning quiet. Striking with speed, surprise, force, and fury was important, because it could shock the crew into running for the longboat in an effort to escape the insurrection. Meanwhile hand-to-hand combat engulfed the forward part of the ship, and if a substantial number of the enslaved managed to get out of their irons, they would have had a decided numerical advantage over the sailors assigned to guard them. The sailors, however, had cutlasses, and the insurgents had no weapons other than what they could pick up from the deck, such as belaying pins, staves, perhaps an oar or two. If the women had risen in coordination with the men, fighting would have broken out in the aft part of the ship, behind the barricado, where they would have had access to better implements, such as fishgigs and the cook’s hatchet. Most insurrectionists found themselves in the situation of one group who had burst onto a moonlit deck at midnight: “They had no fire arms, and no weapons, except the loose articles which they could pick up on the deck.”62

  As all hands rushed on deck to quell the uprising, they picked up pistols and muskets and took their positions at the barricado, firing through the peepholes at the men. They also manned the swivel guns at the top of the barricado, which allowed them to sweep the deck with shot. This was a decisive moment. If the enslaved had any hope of victory, they had to breach the barricado, not least to get into the gun room, which was located as far from the men’s section as possible, in the stern of the vessel, near the captain’s cabin, where crew members would be around to guard it. Many insurrectionists therefore tried to crash through the small door of the barricado or scale its wall, which ranged from eight to twelve feet high, with spikes at the top. If they managed to get through or over, if they could fight their way to the gun room and break it open, and if they knew how to use European firearms (as many African men with military experience did), they might have an outcome like the enslaved aboard the ship Ann in 1750: “the Negroes got to the Powder and Arms, and about 3 o’Clock in the Morning, rose upon the Whites; and after wounding all of them very much, except two who hid themselves: they run the Vessel ashore a little to the Southward of Cape Lopez, and made their Escape.”63

  As the fighting raged on, the rebels would act on previous planning. What would they do about the crew? For the most part, they had a straightforward answer: they would kill them. Such would appear to have been the choice on an unnamed vessel out of Bristol when, in 1732, the enslaved “rose and destroyed the whole Crew, cutting off the Captain’s Head, Legs and Arms.” This issue was complicated, however, by another one—that is, whether the Africans had any among them who knew how to sail the ship. The absence of such knowledge was always considered by Europeans to be one of their greatest bulwarks against insurrection once the ship was out at sea, as John Atkins remarked in 1735: “it is commonly imagined, the Negroes Ignorance of Navigation will always be a Safeguard.” Some insurrectionaries therefore made it a point to keep several crew members alive, to assist with navigation and sailing the ship back to Africa.64

  Insurrections aboard slave ships usually had one of three outcomes. The first of these was exemplified in 1729 aboard the Clare galley. Only ten leagues out to sea off the Gold Coast, the enslaved “rose and making themselves Masters of the Gunpowder and Fire Arms” drove the captain and crew into the longboat to escape their wrath and then took control of the ship. It is not clear whether the successful rebels sailed the vessel or simply let it drift toward the shore, but in any case they made landfall and their escape to freedom not far from Cape Coast Castle. An even more dramatic uprising occurred off the Windward Coast in 1749. The enslaved picked the locks of their shackles, grabbed large billets of wood off the deck, fought the crew, and after two hours overpowered them, forcing them to retreat to the captain’s cabin and lock themselves inside. The following day, as the captives ripped open the quarterdeck, five members of the crew jumped over-board in an attempt to escape but discovered the hard way that some of the Africans knew how to use firearms; they were shot and killed in the water. The successful insurrectionists then ordered the rest of the crew to surrender, threatening to blow up the powder room if they refused. The vessel soon ran aground, and, before leaving, the victors plundered it. Some of them went ashore, not in the nakedness required on the ship but now clad in the clothes of the crew.65

  Sometimes an insurrection resulted in the mutual destruction of the contending sides. Such would appear to have been the case aboard a “ghost ship,” discovered adrift in the Atlantic in 1785 by another vessel. The unnamed slave schooner had sailed about a year earlier with a Newport, Rhode Island, crew to the coast of Africa. Now it had no sails and no crew, only fifteen Africans on board, and they were in “very emaciated and wretched condition.” It was supposed by those who found them that they had “been long at sea.” It was also supposed that the enslaved had waged an insurrection on board, “had rose and murdered the Captain and crew,” and that during or after the uprising “many of the Blacks must have died.” Perhaps no one knew how to sail the vessel and they slowly starved to death.66

  By far the most common outcome of shipboard rebellion was defeat, which always featured torture, torment, and terror in its afterma
th. Those who had played a leading role in the insurrection would be made examples to the rest. They would be variously flogged, pricked, cut, razored, stretched, broken, unlimbed, and beheaded, all according to the overheated imagination of the slave-ship captain. The war would continue through these savage punishments, the insurgents refusing to cry out when they were whipped or going to their deaths calmly, as the Coromantee notoriously did, despising “punishment, even death it self.” Sometimes the body parts of the defeated would be distributed among the remaining captives, throughout the ship, as a reminder of what happened to those who dared to rise up. It was proven again and again that the slave ship was a well-organized fortress for the control of human beings. It was, by design, extremely difficult for its prisoners to take it over and sail to freedom.67

  The main cause of slave revolts was slavery. And indeed Africans themselves offered their own explanations aboard the ship that proved the observation true. Seaman James Towne, who knew the primary trading language of the Windward Coast “nearly as well as English,” conversed with the enslaved and learned their grievances. Asked by an MP in 1791 whether he had ever known them to attempt an insurrection on board a slave ship, he said that he had. He was then asked, “Did you ever inquire into the causes of such insurrections?” He replied, “I have. The reasons that were given me were, ‘What business had we to make Slaves of them, and carry them away from their own country? That they had wives and children, and wanted to be with them.’ ” Other considerations that made insurrection more likely on any given ship were, for some, proximity to shore (worries about navigation once the vessel was out to sea) and poor health or lax vigilance among the crew. The captives’ previous experience in Africa of warfare in the expansion of slaving operations would add to the likelihood of insurrection.68

  The historian David Richardson has shown that insurrections aboard slave ships materially affected the conduct of the trade. They caused losses, raised shipping costs, and created disincentives for investors, as a writer in the Boston News-Letter recognized in 1731: “What with the Negroes rising, and other Disappointment, in the late Voyages thither [Gold Coast], have occasioned a great Reducement in our Merchants Gains.” Richardson estimates that as many as one in ten vessels experienced an insurrection, that the average number of deaths per insurrection was roughly twenty-five, and that, all told, one hundred thousand valuable captives died as a result. Insurrections also generated other economic effects (higher costs, lower demand) that “significantly reduced the shipments of slaves” to America—by a million over the full history of the slave trade, by six hundred thousand in the period from 1698 to 1807.69

  Insurrections also affected the reading public, as newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic endlessly chronicled the bloody uprisings of the enslaved. Alongside and sometimes within this coverage, opponents of the slave trade also gave voice to the struggles from the lower deck, noting the “desperate resolution, and astonishing heroism” displayed by the enslaved. They often insisted that the prisoners were trying to recapture their “lost liberty,” their natural right. Moreover, when public debate about the slave trade exploded in Britain and the United States after 1787, abolitionists repeatedly used the resistance of the enslaved to disprove everything the slave-trading interest said about the decency of conditions and treatment aboard the ships. If slave ships were what merchants and captains said they were, why would anyone starve him- or herself to death, throw him- or herself over the side of the vessel, or rise up against long odds and suffer likely death in insurrection? 70

  Thomas Clarkson wrote of the “Scenes of the brightest Heroism [that] happen repeatedly in the Holds or on the Decks of the Slave-Vessels.” So great and noble were these acts that the “Authors of them often eclipse by the Splendour of their Actions the celebrated Character both of Greece and Rome.” He continued:

  But how different is the Fate of the one and of the other. The Actions of the former are considered as so many Acts of Baseness, and are punished with Torture or with Death, while those of the latter have been honoured with publick Rewards. The Actions of the former again are industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a trace, if possible, may be found, while those of the latter have been industriously recorded as Examples for future Times.71

  Clarkson was right about the heroism, the torture, the death, and about the endless glorification of the history of Greece and Rome, but he was wrong about the legacy of the rebels. The effect of insurrection was probably greatest upon the enslaved aboard the ship, and this despite their various degrees of participation in the project. Those who refused to accept slavery initiated a struggle that would go on for hundreds of years. As martyrs they would enter the folklore and long memory of those on the lower deck, the waterfront, and the slave plantation. The rebels would be remembered, and the struggle would continue.72

  Going Home to Guinea

  The experience of death, and the impulse to all forms of resistance, was linked to a broadly held West African spiritual belief. From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the time of abolition, most captives seem to have believed that in death they returned to their native land. This allowed them to “meet their fate with a fortitude and indifference truely their own.” The belief seems to have been especially prominent among peoples from the Bight of Biafra, but it was also present among those of Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. It persisted long after the Middle Passage. Among people of African descent in North America and the West Indies, funerals often featured rejoicing, even rapture, because the deceased was “going home to Guinea.”73

  Early in the eighteenth century, an unnamed observer noted of those dying aboard his ship, “Their opinion is that when they dye, they go to their own country, which made some of them refuse to eat their victuals. Striving to pine themselves, as [the most ex]peditious way to return home.” A woman of Old Calabar who starved herself to death aboard a slaver in the 1760s said to other women captives the night before she died that “she was going to her friends.” Late in the century, Joseph Hawkins wrote that after death the Ibau “must return to their own country, and remain forever free of care or pain.” Abolitionists knew of the belief in the transmigration of souls, as explained by Thomas Clarkson: “It is an opinion, which the Africans universally entertain, that, as soon as death shall release them from the hands of their oppressors, they shall immediately be wafted back to their native plains, there to exist again, to enjoy the sight of their beloved countrymen, and to spend the whole of their new existence in scenes of tranquility and delight: and so powerfully does this notion operate upon them, as to drive them frequently to the horrid extremity of putting a period to their lives.” When someone died, the other Africans said that “he has gone to his happy country.”74

  A European observer who talked to various captives aboard his ship noted that among the majority this belief was “so gross as to allow them to inhabit the same country with the same bodies.” Some even thought they would go back to life just as it was before, even to inhabit their “old dwellings.” Others (denominated the “more intelligent” Africans) thought they would return to “a portion of this vast continent which alive they can never know.” In an “African paradise,” they would enjoy the joys and luxuries of life with none of its fears. The Islamic slaves on board the slave ship referred to the “law . . . which is to be the inheritance of all true Musselmen!” But they seemed to have a difference of opinion about who would accompany them into the afterlife, whether they would “carry their old wives along with them” or “blew eyed virgins.” According to the man who collected the lore, the anthropological foray led nowhere: “Their opinion of this matter however must be acknowledged to be so dark and unintelligible as scarce to deserve our attention.”75

  Slave-trade merchants and ship captains begged to differ. They gave the belief a great deal of attention, in contemplation and action. They not only hooked up the nettings to prevent suicides and readied the implements of forced feeding, the
y also resorted to studied terror. Since many Africans believed that they would return to their native land in their own bodies, captains terrorized the dead body, and all who would look upon it, as a “preventative.” One captain brought all the enslaved onto the main deck to witness as the carpenter cut off the head of the first slave who died, throwing the body overboard and “intimating to them, that if they were determined to go back to their own country, they should go back without their heads.” He repeated the grisly ritual with each subsequent death. Captain William Snelgrave had the same idea. After decapitating a man who had been executed for leading an insurrection, he explained, “This last part was done to let our Negroes see that all who offended thus, should be served in the same manner, For many of the Blacks believe, that if they are put to death and not dismembred, they shall return again to their own Country, after they are thrown overboard.” Hugh Crow knew that the belief often led to “the utter annihilation of the culprit.” To the many roles played by the slave-ship captain in the burgeoning capitalist economy of the Atlantic must be added another: terrorist.76

  The determination to “go home to Guinea” also suggests that the goal of an insurrection was not always the capture of the ship. The objective on many occasions was collective suicide, as Thomas Clarkson explained: the captives often “determine to rise upon the crew, hoping by those means to find that death which they have wished for, and indulging a Hope at the same time, that they shall find it at the Expence of some of the Lives of their Oppressors.” Given this objective, a much larger number of insurrections must be counted as successful from the point of view of those who made them. In death and spiritual return, insurgents reversed their expropriation, enslavement, and exile.77

  Bonding

  The violence of expropriation and enslavement shattered the structures of kinship that had ordered the lives of almost all who had been forced aboard the slave ship. As deep, disruptive, and disorienting as this was, the enslaved did not suffer it passively. They did everything they could to preserve whatever may have survived of these kin relations, and, just as important, they set about building new ones, on the ship if not earlier, in the coffles, “slave-holes,” factories, and fortresses along their way to the ship. Olaudah Equiano developed new connections to his “countrymen,” a word that could refer to his fellow Igbo or to all the African people with whom he found himself sharing the ship. What anthropologists have called “fictive kinship” was actually an endlessly reproduced series of miniature mutual-aid societies that were formed on the lower deck of the slave ship. The kindred would call themselves “shipmates.”