Transit: Philadelphia and New York
The earliest versions of the Brooks produced in Philadelphia and New York followed the Plymouth model in image and text. The first of these was published by Mathew Carey in American Museum in May 1789 and subsequently in a print run of twenty-five hundred copies as a broadside. Carey repositioned both image and text, putting the Brooks at the top of an oblong page, placing the original headline above the image and “Remarks on the Slave Trade” below it. He shrank the size of the whole to roughly thirteen by sixteen inches (thirty-three by forty centimeters), probably because it was published in a magazine. The New York printer Samuel Wood combined the Philadelphia text and the Plymouth layout. His version was larger than Carey’s at roughly nineteen by twenty-four inches (forty-eight by sixty centimeters), though smaller than the original from Plymouth.10
The American printers made three major changes to the text, two by subtraction, one by addition, which distinguished—and radicalized—their variants of the broadside. First, Carey removed the kneeling slave and cut in its entirety the paragraph explaining how the campaign against the slave trade did not imply the emancipation of the slaves and how it would not damage but rather enhance private property. He then added a new paragraph at the beginning of the text to make clear that this was the work of the “Pennsylvania society for promoting the ABOLITION of slavery.” The broadside would now be used to attack slavery itself.
The new paragraph also sought to strengthen the viewer’s identification with the “unhappy Africans” aboard the Brooks: “Here is presented to our view, one of the most horrid spectacles—a number of
The Brooks, Philadelphia edition
human creatures, packed, side by side, almost like herrings in a barrel, and reduced nearly to the state of being buried alive, with just air enough to preserve a degree of life sufficient to make them sensible of all the horrors of their situation.” Transoceanic travel was rough enough, as Carey himself would have known from his forced migration from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1784, but these “forlorn wretches” in the picture suffered something vastly worse, cramped, as they were, in close quarters, unable to sit up or turn over, and suffering from seasickness and disease. Of the image of the ship, Carey wrote, “we do not recollect to have met with a more striking illustration of the barbarity of the slave trade.”11
The Brooks, London edition
An “Improved” Image: London
In The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808), Thomas Clarkson wrote of the image of the Brooks, “The committee at Plymouth had been the first to suggest the idea; but that in London had now improved it.” The improvement took the form of dramatic change and expansion—of both image and text—in a broadside now entitled, more concisely, “Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship,” which would eventually evolve into the more famous “Description of a Slave Ship.” All alterations made in London reflected a deeper and more practical understanding of how slave ships looked and worked, which is to say that they reflected the knowledge of Clarkson himself, who likely oversaw the drawings and certainly wrote the new text. He demonstrated a more empirical and scientific approach to the Brooks in all respects. The declared goal was to be objective—that is, to present “facts” about a slave ship that could not be disputed “by those concerned in it.”12
The single view of the lower deck of the Brooks in the Plymouth illustration was now replaced by seven views—a side sectional (or “longitudinal”) view of the entire vessel; two top-down views of the lower deck, one showing the arrangement of bodies on the deck planks and another on the platforms two and a half feet higher; two similar views of the half deck toward the stern of the vessel; and two transverse views showing the vertical configuration of decks and platforms. The amount of text below the images doubled, from two columns of twelve hundred words to four columns of twenty-four hundred words. The broadside as a whole remained large—roughly twenty by thirty inches (fifty by seventy-one centimeters)—and the views of the ship took up more space, about two-thirds of the whole. The Brooks now contained 482 men, women, boys, and girls, as allowed by the Dolben Act. Each one was carefully stowed in the appropriate apartment. 13
The new images of the Brooks were shaped by a specific moment and process of transformation. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shipbuilding in England was moving from craft to modern industry. The shipwright’s art and mystery were being interrogated and “improved” by those who followed the new laws of science. The London committee’s plan and sections of the Brooks were, as the cultural critic Marcus Wood has pointed out, rendered in the “enlightened” style. They were drawn in a way associated, for example, with the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, which was formed around the same time to organize international cooperation, for the public good, on the new science of shipbuilding.14
The empirical and scientific approach was also evident in the expanded text, the first half of which concerned the practical question of stowing human bodies aboard the Brooks. Captain Parrey’s report on the ship was conveyed in precise detail: the text included his twenty-five measurements of length, breadth, and height on the seven sectional views; tonnage (297 nominal, 320 measured); number of seamen recently employed (45); number of slaves recently carried (609), broken down by category: men (351), women (127), boys (90), girls (41). The amount of space for an individual of each category is specified, followed by a calculation of how many people can be stowed in each specific part of the vessel, comparing hypothetical to actual numbers. Then follows a detailed discussion of deck height and “headroom,” in which it is shown that beams (carlings) and the platforms themselves reduced vertical space to two feet six inches, too little to allow an adult to sit up. It is emphasized that the diagram presents a bare minimum of crowding, as it features only 482 slaves rather than the 609 the Brooks actually carried, and it does not allow space in each apartment for the “poopoo tubs” or the “stanchions to support the platforms and decks.” It also allowed more space per slave than had been allowed in practice, according to the observations of both Parrey and various Liverpool delegates who testified before the House of Commons. It was therefore a graphic understatement.15
The second half of the London text moves from the social organization of shipboard space (and away from an explicit discussion of the Brooks) to the experience of the enslaved aboard the ship, encouraging direct identification with the sufferings of “our fellow-creatures,” whose bodies were bruised and skins rubbed raw by the friction of chains and bare boards with the rolling of the ship. Brief description is given to the routines of daily life aboard the ship (feeding, “airing,” and “dancing”) and to sickness and death. Mortality is discussed using both statistics and the eyewitness testimony of Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, who vividly describes the horrors of life belowdecks, especially during outbreaks of sickness that made ships’ decks look like a “slaughterhouse.” “It is not in the power of the human imagination,” explained Falconbridge, “to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”16
The final column turned to conditions for the sailors. They had no room for their bedding on the overcrowded slavers; they suffered from the effluvia wafting up from belowdecks; and they grew sick and died in great numbers, thereby making the slave trade not a nursery but “constantly and regularly a grave for our seamen.” The London text, like those reproduced in Philadelphia and New York, cut out the paragraph about the protection of “private property,” but it retained the final sentence urging viewers of the broadside to take action to abolish the evil slave trade.17
“First-Rate Nautical Knowledge”
In June 1787, less than a month after the London abolition committee had been formed, Clarkson and his fellow members found themselves in a bind. They had resolved to abolish the slave trade, but they did not know much about it. Clarkson had written an M.A. thesis on slavery at Cambridge,
but its sources were limited and it was not enough to educate either the public or members of Parliament, whose already-rumored hearings “could not proceed without evidence.” The committee resolved on June 12 that Clarkson should go to Bristol, Liverpool, and elsewhere to “collect Information on the Subject of the Slave Trade.”18
Clarkson devised a strategy for gathering evidence. He would act the part of historian, a social historian at that. He would go to the merchants’ halls and the customs houses of Bristol and Liverpool, where he would immerse himself in historical records such as ship muster rolls, from which he would compute mortality rates. He would gather the names of twenty thousand sailors to see what became of them. He would collect documents such as articles of agreement, wage contracts both printed and unprinted, through which to explore the conditions of seafaring employment. Most important, he would search the waterfront for people to interview. He took an approach based on oral history, which would, unexpectedly, become a history from below.
Clarkson began his tour of the ports on June 25, 1787; he journeyed first to Bristol. He suffered a moment of despair on entering the city, when he suddenly realized what he was up against. He feared the power of the wealthy, self-interested people he knew he would have to challenge. He anticipated persecution as he attempted to gather evidence. He even dared to wonder “whether I should ever get out of it alive.” Some of his fellow activists in London must have wondered the same thing, for over the next few weeks they wrote their friends in Bristol to ask whether Clarkson was still among the living.19
Clarkson initially sought out Quakers and other allies, who would sustain him through the visit. But the people he really wanted to talk to were credible, “respectable” witnesses, merchants and ship captains who knew the slave trade firsthand. But when these people learned his intentions, they shunned him. Passing him on the street, they crossed to the other side, as if, Clarkson recalled, “I had been a wolf, or tiger, or some other dangerous beast of prey.” Shipowners and merchants also forbade anyone in their employ to speak to him. Clarkson was soon “obliged to give up all hope of getting any evidence from this quarter.” He would be forced to turn to the only others who had concrete experience and knowledge: common sailors.20
Clarkson recorded in a personal journal his first encounters with slave-trade sailors. As he crossed the Avon River on July 3, he “saw a Boat painted Africa on her stern.” Clarkson hailed the sailors and asked whether they belonged to the Guineaman Africa, to which they answered yes, they did. He then asked if they were not afraid to go to Africa because of the high death rate for sailors. The response revealed a mentality of cosmopolitan fatalism. One man explained, “If it is my Lot to die in Africa, why I must, and if is not, why then I shall not die though I go there. And if it is my Lot to live, why I may as well live there as anywhere else.” The conversation then turned to a slaver called the Brothers, lying at Kingroad and ready to sail. It was delayed because Captain Hewlett, “a cruel Rascal,” was having trouble getting a crew. A large group had signed on, gauged the temper of their new commander, and deserted immediately. Clarkson noted this information. He might have also noted that his own education had entered a new phase.21
Clarkson later reflected on the significance of this meeting:
I cannot describe my feeling in seeing those poor Fellows belonging to the Africa. They were seven in Number—all of them young, about 22 or 23, and very robust—they were all Seamen; and I think the finest fellows I ever beheld—I am sure no one can describe my feelings when I considered that some of them were devoted [doomed], and whatever might be their spirits now, would never see their native Home more. I considered also how much the glory of the British Flag was diminishing by the destruction of such Noble Fellows, who appeared so strong, robust, and hardy, and at the same so spirited, as to enable us to bid defiance to the Marine of our enemies the French.
With a touch of homoeroticism and his nationalist feeling stirred by these “pillars of the state,” Clarkson would henceforth make sailors and their experience central to the abolition movement. He would increasingly come to rely on them for evidence and information, for the light they could carry into the lower deck of the slave ship.
Clarkson soon met his first informant, John Dean, a black sailor whose mutilated back was gruesome evidence of his torture while working aboard a slaver. He met an Irish publican named Thompson who between midnight and 3:00 A.M. led him up and down Marsh Street and into the sailors’ dives, which were full of “music, dancing, rioting, drunkenness, and profane swearing.” He met seamen who were lame, blind, ulcerated, and fevered. He learned of the murder of William Lines by the chief mate of the Thomas. He tracked down crew members and gathered enough evidence to have the mate arrested and charged at the Mayor’s Court, where he got nothing but “savage looks” from the “slave-merchants” in attendance. Such open hostility scared Bristol’s middle-class opponents of slavery, who were “fearful of coming forward in an open manner.” Sailors, however, flocked to the abolitionist to describe their “different scenes of barbarity.” Clarkson had finally found those “who had been personally acquainted with the horrors of the slave trade.”22
Clarkson heard that the slave ship Alfred had just returned to port with a man named Thomas, who had suffered severe injury at the hands of Captain Edward Robe. After a long search, he found Thomas in a boardinghouse, in bad shape. His legs and body were wrapped in flannel as a comfort to his wounds. Delirious, Thomas could not figure out who Clarkson was. He grew frightened and agitated by the stranger’s presence. Was he a lawyer? He repeatedly asked, Clarkson wrote, “if I was come with an Intent to take Captain Robe’s Part.” Was he come to kill him? Clarkson “answered no, [and said] that I was come to take his [part] & punish Captain Robe.” Thomas could not understand—perhaps because he was in such a disordered state, perhaps because he could not imagine a gentleman taking his side. Unable to interview the man, Clarkson pieced together what he could from his shipmates. Robe had beaten Thomas so often that he tried to commit suicide by leaping over-board into shark-infested waters. Saved by his mates, he was then chained by the captain to the deck, where the beatings continued. Thomas died a short time after the visit, but the image of the abused, deranged surgeon’s mate haunted Clarkson “day and night.” Such encounters created “a fire of indignation within me.”23
Liverpool—the home of Joseph Brooks Jr. and the Brooks—would prove even rougher, as one might expect of a port that had four times as many slave ships as Bristol. When word got out that a man who sought to abolish the slave trade—and hence destroy the “glory” of the city—was in town and could moreover be found dining in public each night at the King’s Arms, curious people turned up to see and converse with him. These were mostly slave merchants and captains. They engaged Clarkson in spirited debate, which rapidly degenerated into insults and threats. Clarkson was happy to have at his side the abolitionist Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, “an athletic and resolute-looking man” who had made four slaving voyages and could add muscle to the argument in more ways than one. Whenever Clarkson went out at night, Falconbridge went with him, always “well armed.” Anonymous letters threatened death if Clarkson did not leave town immediately. Not only did he refuse to leave, he refused to change lodgings, as this would betray “an unmanly fear of my visitors” and reflect badly on the cause.24
Most of Liverpool’s slave-trading merchants and captains now began to shun Clarkson, and the ones who did not shun him tried to kill him. One stormy afternoon a gang of eight or nine men (two or three of whom he had seen at the King’s Arms) tried to throw him off a pier-head. He was undeterred, or rather more determined than ever. Clarkson soon gathered what he thought was enough evidence to prosecute the merchant, the captain, and the mate responsible for the murder of a seaman named Peter Green, but his friends in Liverpool panicked at the prospect, swearing that he would be “torn to pieces, and the house where I lodged burnt down.” The abolitionist Dr. James Currie criticized Clark
son for preferring the testimony of the “lowest class of seamen” over that of virtuous citizens. The problem was, “respectable” people who opposed slavery, like Currie, lived in terror of the powerful slave merchants and would not speak out. The same had been true in Bristol.25
Meanwhile, word of Clarkson’s presence and purposes spread along the waterfront, and sailors began to show up in twos and threes at the King’s Arms to tell their tales of brutal mistreatment. Clarkson wrote, “though no one else would come near me, to give me any information about the trade, these [seamen] were always forward to speak to me, and to tell me their grievances, if it were only with the hope of being able to get redress.” In the end Clarkson helped the sailors bring prosecutions in nine cases in Bristol and Liverpool. None of them came to court, but Clarkson managed in each and every instance to win monetary settlements for the abused seamen or their families. He made these small victories possible by keeping nineteen witnesses, all sailors, at his own expense in order to make sure the evidence for conviction would be at hand, rather than on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Based on the violence done to sailors, he concluded that the slave trade was “but one barbarous system from the beginning to the end.”26
Writing about himself in the third person, Clarkson summed up his experience with the sailors in Bristol and Liverpool: “A certain person, totally unconnected with the law, had no less than sixty-three applications made to him in three months, to obtain redress for such seamen, as had experienced the fury of the officers of their respective ships.” All but two had labored on slave ships. Clarkson was affected not only by the tales but by the physical condition of the tellers. Explaining in the preface of the pamphlet the evidence he had gathered among John Dean and the other sailors, he wrote, “I have also had ocular demonstration, as far as a sight of their mangled bodies will be admitted as a proof.”27
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