The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  Captain James D’Wolf, a member of New England’s most powerful slave-trading family, had just returned to Newport, Rhode Island, after a voyage to the Gold Coast in the Polly, a smallish two-masted slaver. He had gathered 142 Coromantee captives and delivered 121 of them alive to Havana, Cuba. One of his sailors, John Cranston, appeared before a federal grand jury on June 15, 1791, to testify about “a Negro Woman . . . thrown over Board the said Vessel, while living.” Had Captain D’Wolf committed murder?1

  The woman, Cranston stated, was

  taken Sick, which we took to be the small Pox. The Captain orderd her to be put in the Main top for fear she should give it to the others. She was there two Days. The night after being (then 2 Days) the Watch was called at 4 O’Clock then Capt Wolf called us all aft—& says he—if we keep the Slave here—she will give it to the rest—and [I] shall lose the biggest part of my Slaves. Then he asked if we were willing to heave her overboard. We made answer no. We were not willing to do any such thing. Upon that he himself run up the Shrowds, saying she must go overboard & shall go overboard—ordering one Thos. Gorton to go up with him—who went—then he lashed her in a Chair & ty’d a Mask round her Eyes & Mouth & there was a tackle hooked upon the Slings round the Chair when we lowered her down on the larboard side of the Vessel.

  Captain D’Wolf was not only afraid of losing his human property, he was apparently afraid to touch the sick woman, which is why he used a chair to hoist and lower her to the deck. At this point another sailor, Henry Clannen, joined in to help lift her overboard and drop her into the water. As the captain engineered the woman’s death, Cranston and other sailors “went right forward & left them.”2

  Cranston had seen the woman alive in the maintop (high up the mainmast) about two minutes before she was hoisted down to the main deck.

  Q: Did you not hear her speak or make any Noises when she was thrown over—or see her struggle?

  A: No—a Mask was ty’d round her mouth & Eyes that she could not, & it was done to prevent her making any Noise that the other Slaves might not hear, least they should rise.

  Q: Do you recollect to hear the Capt. say any thing after the scene was ended?

  A: All he said was he was sorry he had lost so good a Chair.

  Q: Did any person endeavour to prevent him throwing her [over]board?

  A: No. No further than telling him that they would not have any thing to do with it.

  Cranston concluded by saying that neither he nor the rest of the crew was afraid of the smallpox and that they actually wished for exposure to it, to develop immunity.3

  The port and region buzzed about the scandal. No fewer than five newspapers reported the incident, and a public clamor arose. This was expressed most forcefully in early July when the grand jury indicted Captain James D’Wolf for murder.4

  Yet the wily Captain D’Wolf was a step ahead of his sailors, the abolitionists, and the authorities. He had seen the charges coming and quickly left Newport on another voyage to the Gold Coast. He wanted to let the agitation subside. In October 1794—more than three years after the event in question—he arranged for two other members of the crew of the Polly, Isaac Stockman and Henry Clannen, to give depositions, not in Rhode Island but in St. Eustatius, a slave-trading port in the West Indies.5

  Stockman and Clannen confirmed most of what Cranston had said about the event but emphasized that they had no choice except to do what they did. The woman posed a danger because, had a number of the crew sickened and died, they would have been unable to control their large and unruly cargo of Coromantee captives, as they were “a Nation famed for Insurrection.” These potentially deadly circumstances “compelled them to adopt this disagreeable alternative, being the only one from which, in this Situation, they could obtain the necessary relief.”6

  In any case the “Situation” of the crew of the Polly was one largely of D’Wolf’s making. As shipowner and captain, it had been his decision to maximize profits by taking a small crew and no surgeon. It had been his decision to buy members of “a Nation famed for Insurrection.” He was the one who had signed an insurance policy that would reimburse him only for the death of more than 20 percent of the enslaved, thereby creating a material incentive to kill one, save many, and profit.7

  Other aspects of the situation were decidedly not of D’Wolf’s making, and these suggest the imminent demise of the slave ship as an organizing institution of Atlantic capitalism. A first line of force emanated from the Gold Coast. The captain and crew of the Polly feared the Coromantee captives because these very people had a long history of leading revolts—on slave ships and in the slave societies of the New World. (A generation earlier they had led Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, one of the Atlantic’s bloodiest slave uprisings.) Another line stretched from abolitionist circles in Britain and America to the ship. In the aftermath of the Zong incident, when Captain Luke Collingwood in 1781 commanded his sailors to throw 122 captives overboard, opponents of the slave trade raised the cry of murder and insisted that slave-ship captains did not have the right to kill African captives with impunity. John Cranston’s brave appearance before the grand jury—during the peak years of abolitionist agitation, 1788-92—suggests that the ideas of the abolitionist movement were now gaining currency among sailors, the people on whom the slave trade depended. Here, on the Polly, and in the Rhode Island courtroom in 1790-91, was the embryonic alliance that would in time destroy the slave trade: rebellious Africans and dissident sailors, in league with middle-class metropolitan antislavery activists. They combined to change the Atlantic field of force and to limit the power of the slave-ship captain.8

  They were not yet strong enough: Captain D’Wolf beat the murder charges. The testimony of Stockman and Clannen helped, as did a ruling by a judge in St. Thomas in April 1795 that D’Wolf was innocent of the murder charges—this at a hearing in which there was no one present to testify against him. Just as important was the immense power of his family, several members of which would have been working behind the scenes. For years after the grand jury returned its murder charge, the marshal of Bristol, Rhode Island, population 1,406, seemed to have a lot of trouble finding James D’Wolf—a prominent member of an eminent and highly visible family—in order to arrest him. Surely he did not try very hard, and after five years he stopped trying altogether. The American charges were never formally dropped, but the issue itself was. The powerful D’Wolf clan had triumphed.9

  The fates of the three principal actors in the drama underline the divergent experiences of the slave trade. John Cranston disappeared into the waterfront. The enslaved woman, whose name is forever lost, drowned, no doubt struggling against the lashings that bound her to the chair of which Captain D’Wolf was so fond. Her Coromantee shipmates were delivered in Havana, Cuba, in early 1791. They likely spent their numbered days cultivating sugar, which, the abolitionist movement was busy explaining, was made with blood. Some of them may have ended up on one of the three plantations Captain D’Wolf eventually bought on the island. They would have carried on their tradition of resistance.10

  Captain James D’Wolf prospered in the heart of darkness, gathering immense riches in the slave trade. He financed and profited from another twenty-five voyages as sole or primary merchant and shipowner, and he also invested in numerous other voyages, usually in partnership with his brother John. He became not only the wealthiest member of the elite D’Wolf family but the wealthiest man in the state, if not the entire region. From his riches—denounced by an abolitionist as “the gains of oppression”—he built Mount Hope, one of the most sumptuous mansions in all of New England. He eventually became a United States senator.11

  The “Most Magnificent Drama” Revisited

  By the time Great Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade in 1807-8, what had the slave ship wrought? It had already carried 9 million people out of Africa to the New World. (Another 3 million were yet to come.) British and American slave ships alone had carried 3 million during the long eighteen
th century. The human costs of the traffic were staggering: around 5 million died in Africa, on the ships, and in the first year of labor in the New World. For the period 1700-1808, some 500,000 perished on the way to the ships, another 400,000 on board, and yet another quarter million or so not long after the ships docked. By the time of abolition, roughly 3.3 million slaves were working in the Atlantic “plantation complex,” for American, British, Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish masters. Approximately 1.2 million of these labored in the United States, another 700,000 in the British Caribbean colonies. Their production was staggering. In 1807 alone, Britain imported for domestic consumption 297.9 million pounds of sugar and 3.77 million gallons of rum, all of it slave-produced, as well as 16.4 million pounds of tobacco and 72.74 million pounds of cotton, almost all of it slave-produced. In 1810 the enslaved population of the United States produced 93 million pounds of cotton and most of 84 million pounds of tobacco; they were themselves, as property, worth $316 million. Robin Blackburn has estimated that by 1800 the slave-based production of the New World “had cost the slaves 2,500,000,000 hours of toil” and sold for “a gross sum that could not have been much less than £35,000,000,” or 3.3 billion 2007 dollars.12

  As W. E. B. DuBois noted, the slave trade was the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history”—“the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell,” a place of torment and suffering. It was certainly so for the murdered, masked woman and for her Coromantee shipmates, who, with the millions, were torn from their native land, transported across the Atlantic, and forced to work, to produce wealth, in “Eldorado,” for others. DuBois referred, of course, to the entire experience of slavery, but he knew that the slave ship was a special circle of the inferno. So did captains like James D’Wolf and Richard Jackson, who turned their ships into floating hells and used terror to control everyone aboard, sailors and slaves, or “white slaves” and “black slaves,” as one captain called them: there was not, in his view, “a shade of difference between them, save in their respective complexions.” The instruments in the task were masks, chairs, and tackle, the cat-o’-nine-tails, thumbscrews, the speculum oris, cutlasses, pistols, swivel guns, and sharks. The ship itself was in many respects a diabolical machine, one big tool of torture.13

  The drama, however, was larger than what happened on the ship, as DuBois—and D’Wolf—knew well. The slave ship was a linchpin of a rapidly growing Atlantic system of capital and labor. It linked workers free, unfree, and everywhere in between, in capitalist and noncapitalist societies on several continents. The voyage of the slaver originated in the ports of Britain and America, where merchants pooled their money, built or bought a vessel, and set a transnational train of people and events in motion. These included, in their home ports, investors, bankers, clerks, and insurance underwriters. Government officials, from customs officers to the Board of Trade to legislatures, played regulating roles small and large. In assembling the ship’s various and expensive cargo to be traded on the coast of Africa, merchant-capitalists mobilized the energies of manufacturers and workers in Britain, America, Europe, the Caribbean, and India to produce textiles, metalwares, guns, rum, and other items. In building the ship, the merchant-capitalist called upon the shipwright and a small army of artisans, from wood-workers to sailmakers. Strong-backed dockworkers helped to load the cargo into the hold of the vessel, and of course a captain and crew would sail it around the Atlantic.

  On the coast of Africa, the captain worked as the representative of merchant capital, conducting business with other merchants, some of them European, who ran the forts and factories, more of them African, who controlled the trade and mobilized their own officials, fee takers, and regulators, local and state, according to region. Like their British and American counterparts, African merchants coordinated workers of various kinds in their own spheres of influence: direct producers of “nonslave” commodities; captors of “slaves”—armies, raiders, and kidnappers (distinguished by the scale of their slave-capturing operations); and finally canoe-men and other workers on the waterfront, who cooperated directly with the slave-ship captains and sailors in getting the merchandise, human and otherwise, aboard the ship. A significant number of Africans would become sailors on the slavers, for shorter or longer periods of time.

  After the slave ship completed the Middle Passage and arrived in an American port, the original British and American merchant-capitalists now used a new set of contacts to make the sale, and realize the profits, of the human cargo. Receiving merchants, under the oversight of colonial officials, took charge of transactions, connecting the slave-ship captain and crew, through local dockworkers black and white, to the labor-hungry planters who bought the captives. After the sale, slave-produced commodities from local plantations would often (ideally) be purchased by the captain and loaded onto the ship as a cargo for the homeward passage. Through these far-flung connections, merchants used the slave ship to create and coordinate a primary circuit of Atlantic capitalism, which was as lucrative for some as it was terror-filled and deadly for others.

  The slave ship had not only delivered millions of people to slavery, it had prepared them for it. Literal preparations included readying the bodies for sale by the crew: shaving and cutting the hair of the men, using caustics to hide sores, dying gray hair black, and rubbing down torsos with palm oil. Preparations also included subjection to the discipline of enslavement. Captives experienced the “white master” and his unchecked power and terror, as well as that of his “overseers,” the mate, boatswain, or sailor. They experienced the use of violence to hold together a social order in which they outnumbered their captors by ten to one or more. They ate communally and lived in extreme barracklike circumstances. They did not yet work in the backbreaking, soul-killing ways of the plantation, but labor many of them did, from domestic toil to forced sex work, from pumping the ship to setting the sails. It must also be noted that in preparing the captives for slavery, the experience of the slave ship also helped to prepare them to resist slavery. They developed new methods of survival and mutual aid—novel means of communication and solidarities among a multiethnic mass. They gathered new knowledge, of the ship, of the “white men,” of one another as shipmates. Perhaps most important, the ship witnessed the beginnings of a culture of resistance, the subversive practices of negotiation and insurrection.

  Reconciliation from Below

  As John Cranston testified before the Rhode Island grand jury, many of his “brother tars,” the very people who had helped to build the fortunes of Captain D’Wolf and his class, found themselves in a different situation after slaving voyages. Those called “wharfingers,” “scowbankers,” and “beach horners”—sick, broken-down seamen all, forced by captains off the slave ships—haunted the docks and harbors of almost all American ports, from the Chesapeake to Charleston, to Kingston, Jamaica, and Bridgetown, Barbados. They had no work, because no one would hire them for fear of infection. They had no money, because they had been bilked of their wages. They had no food and shelter, because they had no money. They drifted around the waterfront, sleeping under the balconies of houses, under the cranes used to hoist cargo in and out of the ships, in the odd unlocked shed, inside empty sugar casks—anywhere they could find to protect themselves from the elements.

  They were nightmarish in appearance. Some had the bruises, blotches, and bloody gums of scurvy. Some had burning ulcers caused by Guinea worms, which grew up to four feet long and festered beneath the skin of the lower legs and feet. Some had the shakes and sweats of malaria. Some had grotesquely swollen limbs and rotting toes. Some were blind, victims of a parasite (Onchocerca volvulus) spread by blackflies in fast-flowing West African rivers. Some had a starved and beaten appearance, courtesy of their captain. They had “cadaverous looks,” and indeed many were near death. The more able ones “begg[ed] a mouthful of victuals from other
seamen.” One well-traveled sea captain called them “the most miserable objects I ever met with in any country in my life.” These “refuse” sailors of the slave trade depended on charity. Healthier “brother sailors” brought them food and tried to care for them, but their own means were limited.14

  There was another source, perhaps unexpected, of assistance. An officer in the Royal Navy, a Mr. Thompson, noted that some of these pathetic sailors died, but “upon others the negroes have taken compassion, and carried them into their huts, where he has often seen them so ill, as to be almost at the point of death.” Other observers in other places noticed the same pattern. “Some of them,” explained Mr. James, “are taken in by the negroe women, out of compassion, and are healed in time.” Seaman Henry Ellison noted that the wharfingers had trouble finding a place to stay dry, “except that a negro was now and then kind enough to take them into his hut.” The people who took them in would have known exactly who they were, recognizing the specifically West African maladies from which they suffered, and perhaps how to treat them. Some likely knew the sailors personally.15

  The compassion did not end with the giving of food, shelter, and nursing. It extended into the afterlife. When the sailors died—“in the greatest misery, of hunger and disease”—they were “buried out of charity, by the same people,” said Mr. James. In Kingston, Ellison had seen “negroes carrying their dead bodies to Spring Path to be interred.” Another naval officer, Ninian Jeffreys, who was “attending a negro holiday at Spring Path, which is the cemetery of the negroes, has often seen the bodies of these wharfingers brought there, and interred in an adjoining spot.”16

  What was the meaning of this compassion and charity? Is it possible that those who had survived the slave ship as prisoners knew precisely how horrible the experience had been for everyone aboard and that, moved by such knowledge, they could show sympathy and pity to those who had been their prison guards? Might the term “shipmate” have been generous and bighearted enough to allow the oppressed to show humanity to the very people who had presided over their enslavement aboard the slave ship?17