Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  The next stage of their journey was just as terrible. For the “Slave Coast” that served the trade—Togo, Dahomey and western Nigeria—was covered with markets, pens, and forts in which they would next be incarcerated, often for several months. Some were held in prisons called barracoons located on the beach. A little further inland, there were markets in which the spectacle of brutalized captives was there for all to see, their skin shining with palm oil and their bodies stripped of everything except neck collars and chains connecting one to the other; while traders and ships’ captains forced open their mouths and inspected their orifices for disease. Many others ended up in forts like Elmina in modern Ghana, founded by the Portuguese. Once purchased, as William Bosman, a factor who worked there, noted, the slaves were numbered and the name of the trader who delivered them was recorded. “In the meanwhile, a burning Iron, with the arms or names of the companies, lyes in the Fire; with which ours are marked on the breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French or others; (which are also marked with their mark) and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse.” The death rate at Elmina was as high as 15 per cent, and when the fort was finally cleaned in 1972, it had accumulated on its floors a foot and a half of debris: a noxious mixture of blood and food waste, shit and sloughed-off skin.

  Its English counterpart was the Cape Coast Castle, also in modern Ghana, which was built in 1674 as the headquarters of the Royal Africa Company and its successor, the company of Merchants Trading to Africa. The slaves there would endure similar treatment. The traders called it a “factory,” but in reality it was a mausoleum where people were buried and were reborn as products. Deprived of everything that defined their lives and made them meaningful—friends and family, homeland and traditions—the captives were reminded that they were no longer people but commodities: things to be used and abused, sold and bartered.

  When the time finally came to depart the African continent, most captives had already been enslaved for several months; and yet the Atlantic voyage—the infamous Middle Passage—was still in front of them. As they were grouped together on the shore, awaiting transportation to the huge and unfamiliar “wooden worlds,” with their imposing sails and masts, one can only imagine the sounds of the slaves’ grief, and the miasma of fear that surrounded them. A terrible end awaited them, of that they were certain. Paul Isert, a surgeon stationed at a Danish slave fort neighbouring Cape Coast Castle, remarked that the slaves didn’t believe the future could possibly “hold anything good in store for them, when the Europeans use such violent measures to secure them.” But there were no concessions made to their feelings, as they were thrown, like so many bolts of cloth, one by one, into the swampy bottom of a canoe, then ferried across the harbour to be manhandled aboard by rough white hands, and tossed onto the deck of the “floating dungeon,” the label which the historian Joseph Miller gave the slave ship. The uplifting and devout names inscribed across their bows—Christ the Redeemer, Blessed, and The Lord Our Saviour—belied the chaos and hell unfolding on board.

  Here, after a cursory examination by a doctor, the slaves who were deemed unfit—often because of temporary illnesses like stomach disorders or fevers—were dispatched back to the coast to die in the market, or they were thrown into the sea. Those who were approved were divided by gender. The women were left sitting on deck, grateful initially for the light and fresh air, only to discover that they were vulnerable once again to the lust of the sailors. To their profound shame, some women were raped there in front of everyone; others were taken to the men’s quarters. Meanwhile, the male slaves were shackled and transported below deck, into a space that the sailors had converted into a prison. Partially loaded ships would then wait in the harbour for anything between two and seven months while the captain accumulated his full complement of slaves.

  The voyage to the New World would take six to ten weeks (though the Portuguese slavers could make the run to Angola in less than five), which meant that for many Africans the voyage was often the shortest of the numerous stages of their journey. But the evil reputation of the Atlantic crossing to the New World was nonetheless deserved: the Middle Passage was truly a voyage of the damned. For the slave ship, like the gas chamber, was a diabolic innovation. Its talismans were “instruments of woe,” such as manacles and neck rings, locks and chains, cat-o’-nine-tails and the speculum oris (designed to prise a slave’s mouth open so he could be force-fed), and its rationale was entirely commercial. Despite the traders’ constant fretting over the “perishability” of their cargo, most slavers believed that the loss of 10 per cent of their “stock” was inevitable, so there was no point in considering their captives’ comfort. They opted therefore to use a system they called “tight packing” (as opposed to “loose packing”) which meant that the slaves were fitted together as closely as “stones in a wall.”

  The ship would have been adapted on the journey over when the sailors worked feverishly attaching netting around the deck to contain the slaves on board and building the wooden slave quarters below. Traditionally this area was around five feet in height, which meant that most of the captives could never stand fully upright. The space was organized to hold the maximum number of slaves possible, allowing them less room to move and turn than a corpse would have in a coffin. When the weather was fair, slaves were brought up onto the main deck to consume their scant meals of beans and rice and to “dance,” a horrible euphemism for the enforced jumping and moving that passed for exercise. But most of the time they were locked in the dark and claustrophobic hold, attached to the decking by irons and ringbolts that were fixed along it at intervals. Trapped in the semi-darkness, stewing in their own filth, their wrists would almost inevitably develop ulcerated sores as their shackles chafed their bodies as they rolled around on the rough wooden planks. Held in such dank, unsanitary and painful conditions the detainees were assailed by illnesses: dysentery, fevers, malnutrition and septicaemia. As the journey progressed the smell, a terrible miasma of excrement, sweat and illness, would only thicken. It was no wonder that the sailors went about with handkerchiefs impregnated with perfume or camphor permanently pressed to their faces. Many claimed that the stench of the slave ship was such that it could be smelled five miles away downwind.

  One of the few surviving accounts of these fateful voyages told from the perspective of the slave is the one that is left to us by Olaudah Equiano, whose chronicle of his capture in Africa and subseqent years as a slave in the Americas and England would later provide such a potent weapon for the abolitionist movement. Although it was written in the middle of the eighteenth century, Equiano’s story provides us with an insight into the experience of the millions of others who had gone before him and would come after.

  Born in central Nigeria in 1745, Equiano was eleven years old when he was captured by African raiders, bundled into a sack and taken away from his village. Sold and resold, travelling by land and river, it would be almost seven months before he arrived at the coast, “all the while oppressed and weighed down by grief at the loss of family and friends.” The first sight of the ship that would transport him away from his homeland filled him “with astonishment which was soon converted into terror.” Ferried to the vessel by canoe and bundled aboard by the African traders who had last purchased him, he was immediately grappled aboard by the crew members: “white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair.” He was then deposited on the main deck, where he sighted a huge copper boiling pot and then nearby “a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.” Fearing that he had fallen into the hands of cannibals, the child was “overpowered with horror and anguish” and promptly fainted.

  What made matters worse was the ubiquitous violence of life on a slave ship. When he could not eat the boy was flogged. He also witnessed the fate of a number of slaves who managed to jump off the ship; they were revived and then brutally whipped as an examp
le to the others for preferring “death to slavery.” And on one occasion he witnessed the ship’s captain whip one of his sailors so severely that he eventually died. The shock that the whites could treat one of their own people “in such a brutal fashion” made the young Equiano fear his captors even more.

  But it was the account of the horrors of life below deck that would later mobilize the British population against the slave trade. When he was taken down to his quarters, the stench was so terrible that he was immediately sick. Confined below in the semi-darkness, in the extreme heat, with little light and ventilation, illness was inevitable, and when his companions began to expire, their corpses were not removed immediately, so the living were forced to share their space with the decaying dead.

  In this “hollow world,” the only glimpse of light in the endless darkness was provided by Equiano’s fellow slaves. Over time these people from their different parts of the African continent found ways to communicate with each other and eventually developed a strong camaraderie. The women mothered the sick and orphaned boy and his companions allayed his fear that he was going to be eaten by his captors, instead reassuring him that he was to be “carried to these white people’s country to work for them.” This news fortified the boy somewhat, and he managed to survive the long sea crossing, while all around him his fellow captives continued to expire.

  When they were not dying, the slaves were fighting: for they resisted their captivity fiercely, evading the nets to leap overboard, organizing rebellions, and fighting with the seamen. Although the sailors were free to move about the ship, in many ways they too were damned men. From the earliest days of slaving “Guineamen,” as the slave ships were known, were shunned by many seamen because of the length of the voyages, the high mortality on board, and distaste for “the trade.” Thus many of the crew were reluctant recruits who had been inveigled aboard by “crimps.” These unscrupulous labour agents worked hand in hand with tavern keepers to ply the men with drink and whores until they were hopelessly in debt. The poor victims were then forced to either “sign articles” or face a debtors’ prison. Inevitably these resentful and depressed recruits did not make the most conscientious employees and were famous for their hostility to the hard work and fearful conditions of life on a slaver. It was no wonder that the state licensed ships’ captains to use corporal punishment to maintain “subordination and regularity”; or that the commander, intimidated by both his crew and his cargo, often resorted to the most draconian discipline. Thus everyone aboard a slave ship seemed to be in a perpetual state of war with each other, and extensive casualties were suffered on all sides.

  The African coasts were often referred to as a “white man’s grave,” but on board ship things were even worse, as sailors died almost as readily as the slaves, and a ship’s captain who survived four African journeys counted himself extremely fortunate. As the historian Joseph Miller has said, the Middle Passage was a “way of death.” But, of course, it was the cargo that died most extravagantly, from infection, flogging or despair. The terrible mortality rate would continue when they arrived in the New World, where they would die of overwork in the cane fields, of malnutrition in the quarters, of brutality, trauma and disease everywhere. What made matters worse was that these deaths were not always intentional or even malicious. Slaves were not even significant enough for this: a direct campaign of hate. Instead the captives, whom traders dubbed “the commodity that dies with ease,” perished because they did not matter. The indifference of those involved in the trade meant that they were unwilling to invest any thought, money or care in keeping the slaves alive, and the mass loss of life was regarded merely as the inevitable wastage associated with the transatlantic commerce in the “black gold.”

  6

  Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.

  —ALBERT MEMI

  BARBADOS WAS IMPORTANT not because it was the first society with slaves, but because it was the first slave society in the British Americas: that is, it was the first society that was entirely organized around its slave system and, as such, it would become the model for the plantation system throughout the Americas. As Hilary Beckles has argued, the island’s economic structure was totally based on the labour of enslaved Africans. Its political structure as well as its system of governance was organized around the control and management of an enslaved majority, while the moral, ethical and ideological values of the society were entirely developed and shaped to reproduce the system of slavery.

  The process of becoming a “slave society” had begun back in the 1630s, when the then governor, Henry Hawley, had tried to clarify the length of time a slave should serve; but it wasn’t until the population explosion of the late 1650s that detailed regulation of the enslaved became a necessity. The result was the 1661 Act “For the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.” The historian Richard Dunn has described this as “the most important surviving piece of legislation in the English islands during the seventeenth century because it was the first comprehensive attempt to create a slave law with which to govern the island.” It thus provided both a means for policing the enslaved population and a rationale for instituting special laws. As such it was copied in the rest of the British Americas. It justified its provisions with racial denigration, declaring blacks to be “a heathenish, brutish, uncertain and dangerous kind of people.” And since it asserted that the lawmakers “could find in the body of English law … no tract to guide us where to walk nor any rule set as how to govern such slaves,” the colonists felt free to both revive old laws and create new ones that they believed were “absolutely needful for the public safety.”

  The management of slave societies was, as this Act indicated, no simple matter. The African captives vigorously and persistently resisted their enslaved condition, so the country’s stability rested upon an elaborate system of repression maintained not by consensus but by coercion and cruelty. Drafted by the local slave holders and ratified in the mother country by a government that stood to profit from the trade, the laws were then passed in the colonies by elected assemblies dominated by elite slave owners, and enforced on individual plantations by drivers, overseers and planters and in the wider society by a well-financed militia, urban constables and garrisoned soldiers.

  The implications of the slave laws evolved in the British Americas were in stark contrast to some of the other legal frameworks that evolved in the region. The French Code Noir, whose sixty-plus articles were drawn up by King Louis XIV in 1685, guaranteed a slave’s right to life and social identity (however poorly this was protected), while the Spanish Siete Partidas, which the historian Franklin Knight described as a “liberal Code,” recognized and accepted the “personality of the slave” and held aloft “the idea of liberty.” No such humane ideas were encoded in the laws of the English territories, where the priority was the protection of the planters’ property rights and their safety.

  The Barbados slave code of 1661 was supplemented over time, with new provisions being added in an ad hoc fashion, often in response to infractions by the black population. In 1676, the year after a slave revolt, an Act was passed which included new capital offences that placed additional restrictions on the movement of enslaved peoples, put strict limits on hiring them out and controlled their involvement in petty trading in places like markets and in their practice of artisan trades like carpentry.

  The 1688 Act “For the Governing of Negroes” was also a response to an earlier revolt in which black slaves and Irish white servants had joined forces. The Act’s fateful preamble begins:

  Whereas the Plantations and Estates of this Island cannot be fully managed … without the labour and service of great number of Negroes and other slaves and inasmuch as [they] … are of a barbarous, wild and savage nature, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws, Customes and Practices of our Nation: It therefore becoming absolutely necessary, that such other Constitutio
ns, Laws and Orders, should be in this Island framed and enacted for the good regulating or ordering of them, as may both restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined.

  The Act charged every planter with searching the slave cabins on his property weekly and burning any drums or horns, which could be used to call them together; while every fortnight the quarters were also to be searched for fugitives, weapons and stolen goods. No enslaved person could leave the plantation on which he or she lived without a ticket from a white person in authority, specifying the time for his or her return. Any person found without one was to be whipped. Armed posses could be raised to hunt down blacks who had absconded; so the sound and sight of a pack of men and hounds in search of runaways was as familiar in the Caribbean as it was in the American South.

  Four years later another conspiracy provoked another rash of Barbadian laws. The death penalty was revived for some categories of runaway slaves. Prohibitions against slaves obtaining strong drink were put in place because “many enormities were committed” and “mischief hatched and contrived” under its influence. Those slaves willing to inform on slave rebellions were rewarded with freedom and even relocation.

  As well as establishing an elaborate framework of punishment to control slave behaviour, the Barbados slave laws clarified some important ideological issues. One of these was the status of the slave vis-à-vis that of the indentured servant. Slaves were classified in law as “chattels” or property, meaning that they could be bought and sold, leased or used as collateral. White servants, on the other hand, were only property during the length of their indenture. When it was completed, their rights as human beings were reinstated. And though the behaviour of indentured servants was carefully controlled during the period of their contract, they were also allowed many privileges that were denied their black counterparts. Their food rations, clothing allowances and overall treatment were better. Legally, too, they were better protected. If they were charged with a crime they were entitled to trial before a jury, while the slaves were judged by the planters. Blacks who threatened, assaulted or stole from a white person faced extreme penalties: whipping, the loss of a hand, the loss of an ear; while an indentured servant who killed a slave was potentially merely subject to a fine, like the rest of the white population.