The sanctions took their time—after all, there was so much money out there in the uninterrupted sea-lanes of the ocean. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, a combination of policing by the Royal Navy and the rigid determination of the Admiralty courts conspired to begin to break the pirates’ grip. By 1725 the menace was ebbing away, and though it was not until 1830 that the very last pirates were hanged at the Execution Dock, the story of piracy in the Atlantic in the later eighteenth century steadily became more fanciful and romantic, and the reality of life on the ocean became more a matter of discipline, regulation, and the rule of law.
The British in particular enjoyed an early edge in suppressing the activity. But there was another evil that was very much more insidiously dreadful than piracy. By chance one of the more famous British piracy trials, and one not conducted at the Admiralty in London but in a corner of West Africa, shed some long-needed light on it. It was a curse of the high seas that was eventually to be among the most severely policed as well, such that in time it was finally abolished. Yet it was an extraordinarily long-lived maritime cargo-carrying phenomenon, the memory of which now scars and shames the world: the unseemly business of the transatlantic slave trade.
The Trial of Black Bart’s Men, as it came to be known, took place in 1722, in the dauntingly magnificent-looking, pure white cliff top building that still stands well to the west of the capital of Ghana: the famous Cape Coast Castle. It was adventurous Swedes who first built a wooden structure here, near a coastal village named Oguaa, as a center for gold, ivory, and lumber trading; it next passed into the hands of another unlikely Scandinavian colonizing power, the Danes; and then in 1664 it was captured by the British, who had an enduring colonial interest in West Africa and held on to the Gold Coast—as Ghana was then called—for the next three hundred years. At the beginning—and at the time of the piracy trial—the Castle became the regional headquarters of the Royal African Company of England, the private British company that was given “for a thousand years” a British government monopoly to trade in slaves over the entire 2,500-mile Atlantic coastline from the Sahara to Cape Town.
Though the monopoly ended in 1750, slavery endured for another sixty years and British colonial rule for another two hundred. The British turned the Castle into the imposing structure that remains today—and it has become sufficiently well known and well restored that it attracts large number of visitors, including many African-Americans who naturally have a particular interest in its story. The American president Barack Obama visited with his family in 2009, to see and experience what remains one of the world’s most poignant physical illustrations of the evils of slavery. The dire reputation of the place is reinforced by its appearance: though Cape Coast Castle is the smallest of the three surviving slaving forts on the Bight of Benin,42 it was designed to be by far the most austere and forbidding. It also has the infamous “door of no return” through which tens of thousands of hapless African men, women, and children were led in chains and shackles onto the ships that then crossed the Atlantic’s infamous Middle Passage, eventually bringing those who survived the rigors of the journey to the overcrowded barracoons of eastern America and the Caribbean.
The trial, in which piracy and slavery overlapped in a way that intrigued the faraway British public, involved one of the Atlantic’s more notorious and commercially successful brigands, Bartholomew Roberts, a Welshman who was better known after his death as Black Bart. He had worked as third mate on a slave ship, the Princess, and in 1719 was lying off the Ghanaian coast when his vessel was attacked by two pirate sloops, captained by Welshmen also. A connection was duly made; Roberts joined one of the pirate crews and over the next three years captured and sacked no fewer than 470 merchant vessels—making him one of the most successful pirates in Atlantic history, and grudgingly admired even by his most implacable enemies.
Cape Coast Castle was seized by the British and used as a central export hub for its West African slave trade. Like other former slave castles, with their infamous dungeons and doors of no return, Cape Coast Castle has become a place of pilgrimage for visiting statesmen, including President Barack Obama in 2009.
His luck ran out while he was careening his ships after a successful raid on a slaving convoy, once again off the Ghanaian coast. A Royal Navy antipiracy patrol, led by HMS Swallow, duped him into battle, and Roberts was fatally wounded in the neck by grapeshot. The 268 men on the three pirate sloops were taken away by the Swallow and her attendant vessels, and sent to the dungeons in Cape Coast Castle to await their sensational trial.
5. HUMANS, OFFERED WHOLESALE
Back in England, the men’s fate drew the most excited comments because among the captives were 187 white men, all alleged pirates, and seventy-seven black Africans, who had all been taken as booty from the captured slave ships. Of the white men, nineteen died of their battle wounds before the trial, fifty-four others were found guilty of piracy and were hanged from the cannons on the castle walls, twenty were sentenced to long prison terms in colonial African jails, and the remaining seventeen were sent back to London, to be detained in prisons there.
The seventy-seven black African slaves, innocent victims of all this mayhem, were not treated with any great leniency. They were returned to the Castle dungeons, were forced to walk once more in shackles and chains back through the door of no return, and were put on yet another slave ship and sent back across the Atlantic for a second time. This time they encountered no pirates and were delivered to the slave markets in the coastal cities, and became fully a part of the still-growing slave population of colonial America. A poetic injustice, if ever there was one.
And though many thinkers at the time recognized this, and though a tide of common opinion was beginning to turn, at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was still enormous official and intellectual support for the trade, in England and elsewhere. The better read of the slave traders were content to note that two thousand years before no less a figure than Aristotle had written of mankind that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” And even though some critics pointed out that the trade required that “one treat men of one’s own tribe as no more than animals,” still both the Church and the state accepted slavery as part and parcel of human behavior, part of the natural order of things. As an example: John Newton, an eighteenth-century clergymen of considerable piety—and talent: he composed, among other well-known pieces, the hymn “Amazing Grace”—was a slaver of some prominence and found no difficulty coming to terms with the fact that, as the Dictionary of National Biography has it, he was “praying above deck while his human cargo was in abject misery below.” Thus cleansed of any moral ambiguity, slaving could be an exceptionally profitable business.
Beatings and torture were familiar practice on the Middle Passage slave ships. Even though the teenage girl shown being hanged and beaten in this famous cartoon subsequently died of her injuries, John Kimber, the notorious Bristol-based slaver charged with her murder, escaped conviction and mounted a lifelong campaign against his accuser, the abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Eleven million Africans were carried westward across the Atlantic between the middle of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. Three million of them were carried in British ships, owned by slave traders based in Liverpool, Bristol, London, and such smaller west coast ports as Lancaster and Whitehaven. (The comparable French slaving ports were Honfleur, Le Havre, and the biggest, Nantes.) The entire British establishment—from the royal family to the Church of England—won dividends from the business. And even beyond the rarefied world of an aristocracy who risked money to back the slavers, everyone else in Britain who used such mundane products as sugar, tobacco, or rum benefited from the slave trade as well. It was not just a singular evil: it was a singularly pervasive evil.
The so-called triangular trade was arranged so that goods were taken from Britain to the African ports or slave castles, like that at Cape C
oast;43 slaves from these ports were then shipped across the infamous Middle Passage to the American slave depots; and then, once the vessel had been emptied and cleansed, New World cargoes went from there back to Britain.
And so, in small vessels called snows, in barques and brigs or in three-masted square-rigged vessels that, somewhat oddly to modern ears, were formally known as ships, the slave-ship captains set off fully laden, from England. Their orders were quite simply to proceed to West African ports and, using the cargoes they had shipped with them from England as barter, according to their standing orders “to procure as many good merchantable slaves as you can.” With most of their crewmen pressed into service through the work of crimping gangs who found drunken and persuadable young seamen in the shoreside inns, the ships set sail filled to the gunwales with Africa-bound trade goods. They took such marketable items as muskets, felt hats, iron knives, brass casks, gunpowder, cotton, and gun flints, and on one ship, the Pilgrim, which left Bristol in 1790, the somewhat more bizarre inventory of “1 trunk East India goods, 4 chests bugles, 12 cases calicoes, 2 puncheons rum and 15 dozen bottles wine.” Hugh Crow, a successful (albeit one-eyed) slaver from the Isle of Man, always made a point of first calling in at Rotterdam and Jersey to buy extra spirits (more cheaply than he could in England) to use as trade goods for the African slave merchants, who liked nothing better than a drink.
Most vessels took what the French called la petite route south, sailing via the Canary and the Cape Verde islands before turning inland along the now-east-trending African coast. They first bartered their goods, usually for some rather prosaic set of objects—iron bars, brass bars, swatches of cloth—that had become a crude currency for the buying of slaves. The prices in this currency—the iron bars looked rather like stair rods—remained fairly constant for years: a male slave bought on the Senegal River in the mid-eighteenth century fetched seventy bars; a woman, somewhat more costly despite being offered “with a bad mouth,” went for sixty-three bars, another for “the excessive price of 86 bars,” according to the famous journal kept by the Reverend Newton. (For purpose of comparison, a two-pound bag of gunpowder went for one bar.)
And then, armed with wagonloads of such bars or swatches, the British captains went either to the slave castles, which were run by the Royal African Company, and bought officially sanctioned and price-regulated slaves, or else threw aside convention and visited the more competitive (and in later years, more commercially successful) upriver slave markets, where they bought a clutch of such black-skinned humans, either men, women, or young boys, who seemed most suitable for work on the far side of the ocean.
Whether these unfortunates came from the rivers, or through the doors of no return found in the Gold Coast castles and the other slave factories, they were first marshaled roughly onto the waiting boat. Next they were branded—often with the initials “DY” for the Duke of York—and shackled into pairs, the left wrist and ankle of one to the right wrist and ankle of the next. They were then taken belowdecks in the storage areas, where, it was hoped, they would survive the crossing—a hope born not of compassion, but of commerce.
Normally slave merchants were allowed—for there was regulation—to carry some two slaves for every ton of the ship’s burthen, later raised slightly to five slaves for every three tons up to 207 tons, and one slave per ton thereafter. A 500-ton ship was permitted to carry more than 360 slaves—and for reasons of commercial efficiency these beings were stacked like so much tightly packed lumber, lying on shelves with no more than thirty inches of headroom. Even in calm water and cool days, the conditions were intolerable; when it was hot and the waters rough—which was common on the eight-week voyage—they were insufferable. The sanitary conditions were execrable. Privacy was nonexistent. Security was everything: the men were closely watched and guarded, and any attempt at insurrection or mutiny was put down with terrible force. The slaves were fed two meals a day—yams, rice, barley, corn, and ship’s biscuit boiled up together into an unattractive mess—and to guard against scurvy (for the contracts with the American and Caribbean slave importers specified that the slaves be delivered in good physical condition) they were made to wash their mouths with lime juice or vinegar. They were also made to “dance”—being brought up on deck to be exercised, jumping rhythmically on the deck to the extent that their shackles allowed, crew members armed with whips standing nearby to make sure everyone moved with equal energy and kept their muscles in tone.
The ferocity of the slave masters is legendary—men were brutalized, women sexually assaulted, sick slaves thrown overboard (as long as they were covered by the ship’s insurance policy). One passage will serve to illustrate the piteous conditions under which the human freight had to live, and on all too many occasions, die. It comes from evidence given to a British House of Commons committee by a crewmen named Isaac Parker of the Liverpool slave brig Black Joke, and of his commander, a certain Captain Thomas Marshall. There were ninety slaves aboard this fifty-six-ton ship, all collected from a castle in Gambia and headed for South Carolina.
What were the circumstances of this child’s ill-treatment? The child took sulk and would not eat . . . the captain took the child up in his hand, and flogged it with the cat. Do you remember anything more about this child? Yes; the child had swelled feet; the captain desired the cook to put on some water to heat to see if he could abate the swelling, and it was done. He then ordered the child’s feet to be put into the water, and the cook putting his finger into the water said, “Sir, it is too hot.” The captain said, “Damn it, never mind it, put the feet in,” and so doing the skin and nails came off, and he got some sweet oil and cloths and wrapped them round the feet in order to take the fire out of them; and I myself bathed the feet with oil, and wrapped cloths around; and laying the child on the quarter deck in the afternoon at mess time, I gave the child some victuals, but it would not eat; the captain took the child up again, and flogged it, and said, “Damn you, I will make you eat,” and so he continued in that way for four or five days at mess time, when the child would not eat, and flogged it, and he tied a log of mango, eighteen or twenty inches long, and about twelve or thirteen pound weight, to the child by a string around its neck. The last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, “Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be the death of you;” and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarter deck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand, and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand, and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.
Whether or not Parker was telling the entire truth we shall never know. All that is certain is that this account is to be found in official British parliamentary papers for the year 1790,44 and that the child in question was said by Parker to have been indecently young, little more than an infant.
Some fifty days after leaving West Africa, the American coast came into view, and the second leg of the triangular voyage of what the French called le trafic Négrier was over. Most of the slaves had already been spoken for under contract, and the master’s orders had him head for a seasoning camp at certain island distribution centers—in Barbados, say, or Jamaica—or to one of the mainland slave ports, such Norfolk or Charleston. Perhaps the master would be fortunate and the American slave factor would manage both to clear the holds of their human cargo—to buy the merchandise in bulk and wholesale, and sell them individually at retail prices at a market later on—and then to arrange for other freight to be carried home on the empty ship. Maybe there would be an auction, held either aboard the vessel or on the quayside below.
Or perhaps
the slaves would be subject to the final indignity of their passage—the so-called slave scramble. The waiting merchants would have been told that each of the Africans aboard could be had for a certain price; and at a given signal, usually the stroke of a drum, they would all rush board the ship, and like the crazed mob at a department store sale would feverishly make their selections from among the terrified men and women who, still in the shackles, had been herded up onto the quarterdeck. Families would inevitably be broken up, with one merchant demanding the man, another the female partner, still others the children.
And then the ship would be off again, its decks fully cleansed with vinegar and lye, the shelves on which close-packed black humanity had been crammed for the previous weeks now jammed solid with tobacco or furs or the manufactured products of the settlements. Some weeks later the Head of Kinsale would be sighted off the port bow, and a day or so beyond that, the lighthouses off the Mersey, or the Avon, and the long trick would at last be over. There were wives and children to be seen once again, lanes to be walked and churches to attend, and the matter of the black cargo—morally vexing to some, but merely routinely unpleasant to others—could be safely shelved in the very back of the mind, until the next journey.
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