Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Part of what sailors knew was how to resist impressment. This tradition had originated in thirteenth-century England and continued through the Putney Debates and the English Revolution, into the late seventeenth century, with the expansion of the Royal Navy, and on to the eighteenth century and its ever-greater wartime mobilizations. When, after a quarter century’s peace, England declared war against Spain in 1739, sailors battled and often defeated press gangs in every English port. Fists and clubs flew in American ports as well, in Antigua, St. Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica, New York, and New England.4 Admiral Peter Warren warned in 1745 that the sailors of New England were emboldened by a revolutionary heritage: they had, he wrote, “the highest notions of the rights and liberties of Englishmen, and indeed are almost Levellers,” referring to one of the most radical groups of the English Revolution.5

  During the 1740s sailors began to burn the boats in which press gangs came ashore to snatch bodies, cutting their contact with the man-of-war and making “recruitment” harder, if not in some cases impossible. Commander Charles Knowles wrote in 1743 that naval vessels pressing in the Caribbean “have had their Boats haul’d up in the Streets and going to be Burned, & their Captains insulted by 50 Arm’d Men at a time, and obliged to take shelter in some Friends House.” After Captain Abel Smith of the Pembroke Prize had pressed some men near St. Kitts, a mob of seamen “came off in the road and seized the Kings boat, hawled her up . . . and threatned to burn her, if the Captain would not return the Prest Men, which he was obliged to do to save the Boat, & peoples Lives, to the great Dishonour of Kings Authority (especially in Foreign Parts).” These attacks on the property and power of the British state were intimidating: by 1746 the captain of HMS Shirley “dared not set foot on shore for four months for fear of being prosecuted . . . or murdered by the mob for pressing.”6

  The struggle against impressment took a creative turn in 1747, when, according to Thomas Hutchinson, there occurred “a tumult in the Town of Boston equal to any which had preceded it.” The commotion began when fifty sailors, some of them New Englanders, deserted Commander Knowles and HMS Lark. In response, Knowles sent a press gang to sweep the Boston wharves. A mob of three hundred seamen swelled to “several thousand people,” seized officers of the Lark as hostages, beat a deputy sheriff and slapped him into the town’s stocks, surrounded and attacked the provincial council chamber, and posted squads at all piers to keep naval officers from escaping back to their ship. The mob soon faced down Massachusetts Governor William Shirley, reminding him of the murderous violence visited upon sailors by the press gang in 1745 and threatening him with the example of Captain John Porteous, the despised leader of Edinburgh’s City Guard, who after murdering a member of a protesting crowd in 1736 was seized and “hanged upon a sign post.” Governor Shirley beat a hasty retreat to Castle William, where he remained until the riot ran its course. Meanwhile, armed sailors and laborers considered burning a twenty-gun ship being built for His Majesty in a local shipyard, then picked up what they thought was a naval barge, carried it through town, and set it aflame on Boston Common. Commodore Knowles explained their grievance:

  The Act [of 1746] against pressing in the Sugar Islands, filled the Minds of the Common People ashore as well as Sailors in all the Northern Colonies (but more especially in New England) with not only a hatred for the King’s Service but [also] a Spirit of Rebellion each Claiming a Right to the same Indulgence as the Sugar Colonies and declaring they will maintain themselves in it.

  As sailors defended liberty in the name of right, they captured the attention of a young man named Samuel Adams, Jr. Using what his enemies called “serpentine cunning,” and understanding “Human Nature, in low life” very well, Adams watched the motley crew defend itself and then translated its “Spirit of Rebellion” into political discourse. He used the Knowles Riot to formulate a new “ideology of resistance, in which the natural rights of man were used for the first time in the province to justify mob activity.” Adams saw that the mob “embodied the fundamental rights of man against which government itself could be judged,” and he justified violent direct action against oppression. The motley crew’s resistance to slavery produced a breakthrough in revolutionary thought.7

  Adams thus moved from “the rights of Englishmen” to the broader, more universal idiom of natural rights and the rights of man in 1747, and one likely reason why may be found in the composition of the crowd that instructed him. Adams faced a dilemma: how could he watch a crowd of Africans, Scotsmen, Dutchmen, Irishmen, and Englishmen battle the press gang and then describe them as engaged simply in a struggle for “the rights of Englishmen”? How could he square the apparently traditional Lockean ideas in his Harvard master’s thesis of 1743 with the activities of “Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and other Persons of mean and vile Condition” who led the riot of 1747?8 The diversity of the rebellious subject forced his thought toward a broader justification. Adams would have understood that the riot was, literally, a case of the people fighting for their liberty, for throughout the eighteenth century the crew of a ship was known as “the people,” who once ashore were on their “liberty.”9

  The mass actions of 1747 moved Adams to found a weekly publication called the Independent Advertiser, which expressed a remarkable, even prophetic variety of radical ideas during its brief but vibrant life of less than two years. The paper reported on mutiny and resistance to the press gang. It supported the natural right to self-defense and vigorously defended the ideas and practices of equality, calling, for example, for popular vigilance over the accumulation of wealth and an “Agrarian Law or something like it” (a Digger-like redistribution of land) to support the poor workers of New England. It announced that “the reason of a People’s Slavery, is . . . Ignorance of their own Power.” Perhaps the single most important idea to be found in the Independent Advertiser appeared in January 1748: “All Men are by Nature on a Level; born with an equal Share of Freedom, and endow’d with Capacities nearly alike.” These words reached back exactly a century to the English Revolution and the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, and simultaneously looked forward to the opening words of the Declaration of Independence of 1776.10

  Another connection between 1747 and 1776 appeared in Jonathan Mayhew’s sermon A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, delivered and published in Boston in early 1750. The eminent clergyman delivered his sermon at a time when the riot and its consequences were still on the minds of towns-people, especially the traders and seafaring people who made up his own West Church. By 1748 Mayhew’s preachings were considered heretical enough to get one listener, a young Paul Revere, a whipping by his father for his waywardness. By early 1749 Mayhew was tending toward what some saw as sedition, saying that it was not a sin to transgress an iniquitous law, such as the one that legalized impressment. Mayhew defended regicide in his sermon of January 30, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, which was to him no day of mourning but rather a day for remembering that Britons will not be slaves. Like Adams before him he argued passionately for both civil disobedience and a right to resistance that utilized force; indeed, passive nonresistance, Mayhew claimed, was slavery. Mayhew’s influential defense of the right to revolution could not have been made without the action of the riot and its discussion among Sam Adams and the readers of the Independent Advertiser.11

  The ideas and practices of 1747 were refined and expanded during the 1760s and 1770s, when Jack Tar took part in almost every port-city riot, especially after the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763), when the demobilization of the navy threw thousands out of work. For those who remained at sea, the material conditions (food, wages, discipline) of naval life deteriorated, causing many to desert. The Admiralty responded with terror. In 1764 deserters John Evans, Nicholas Morris, and John Tuffin took seven hundred lashes on the back; Bryant Diggers and William Morris were hanged. Admiral Alexander Colvill admitted that these were, for desertion, “the most severe punishment
s I ever knew to have been inflicted.” Such deadly punishments at sea imparted a desperate intensity to shoreside resistance once the press gang resumed its work.12

  Sailors revived their attack on the king’s naval property. They recaptured pressed men, forced naval captains to make public apology, and successfully resisted efforts in court to convict any member of the mob of wrongdoing. Soon after, another mob of maritime workers in Casco Bay, Maine, seized a press boat, “dragged her into the middle of Town,” and threatened to burn it unless a group of pressed men were freed.13 In Newport in 1765 a mob made up of sailors, youths, and African Americans seized the press tender of HMS Maidstone, carried it to a central location in town, and set it ablaze. As popular antagonism toward the customs service rose in the late 1760s, sailors began to attack its vessels. Thomas Hutchinson wrote that in Boston in 1768, “A boat, belonging to the custom-house, was dragged in triumph through the streets of the town, and burnt on the Common.” Seamen threatened or actually torched other vessels belonging to the king in Wilmington, North Carolina, and in Nevis in 1765, in Newport again in 1769 and 1772, and twice in New York in 1775. Sailors thus warned local leaders not to sign press warrants as they twisted the longest and strongest arm of state power.14

  In the late 1760s sailors linked movements in England and America by engaging in revolts that combined workers’ riots over wages and hours with protests about electoral politics (“Wilkes and Liberty,” in which the London mob supported John Wilkes, the journalist and ruling-class renegade, in his battles with King and Parliament). The sailors of London, the world’s largest port, played leading roles in both movements and in 1768 struck (took down) the sails of their vessels, crippling the commerce of the empire’s leading city and adding the strike to the armory of resistance. Seamen’s strikes would subsequently appear on both sides of the Atlantic with increasing frequency, as would struggles over maritime wages, especially after the reorganization of British customs in 1764, when officials began to seize the nonmonetary wages of seamen, the “venture” or goods they shipped on their own account, freight free, in the hold of each ship.15 In leading the general strike of 1768, sailors drew upon traditions of hydrarchy to advance a proletarian idea of liberty. One writer, looking back on the uprising, explained: “Their ideas of liberty are the entering into [of] illegal combinations.” Such combinations were “a many headed monster which every one should oppose, because every one’s property is endangered by it; nay, the riches, strength, and glory of this kingdom must ever be insecure whilst this evil remains unchecked.”16

  Sailors also continued the struggle against impressment, battling the press gangs in the streets of London in 1770 (during the war against Spain) and 1776 (during the war against the American colonies, not a popular cause among sailors). “Nauticus” observed the clashes between seamen and the navy in London in the early 1770s and wrote The Rights of the Sailors Vindicated, in which he compared the sailor’s life to slavery and defended the right to self-defense. He echoed the Putney Debates more than a century earlier when he imagined a sailor asking a magistrate, “I, who am as free-born as yourself, should devote my life and liberty for so trifling a consideration, purely that such wretches as you may enjoy your possessions in safety?” Like Sam Adams, Nauticus went beyond the rights of Englishmen, pitting the rights of private property against common rights and the “natural rights of an innocent subject.” John Wilkes also began to argue for the right to resist impressment in 1772.17

  The motley crew helped to create an abolitionist movement in London in the mid-1760s by setting in motion the eccentric but zealous Granville Sharp, who became one of slavery’s most implacable foes. The key moment was a meeting in 1765 in a queue at a London medical clinic between the obscure, flinty clerk and musician, Sharp, and a teenager named Jonathan Strong, formerly a slave in Barbados who had been pummeled by his master into a crippled, swollen, nearly blind indigent. Sharp and his brother, a surgeon, nurtured him back to health, but two years later his former master imprisoned and sold him. To prevent such inhumanity, the African sailor Olaudah Equiano pushed Sharp to study the law and the writ of habeas corpus, the most powerful legacy of the “free-born Englishman,” because it prohibited imprisonment or confinement without due process of law and trial by jury, and thus might be employed against impressment and slavery alike. Sharp believed that the law should be no respecter of persons and concluded in 1769 that “the common law and custom of England . . . is always favourable to liberty and freedom of man.” He was especially moved by the struggles of black sailors on the waterfront; he used habeas to defend several who struggled to resist reenslavement, often by the press gang. Sharp won a lasting victory in his legal defense of James Somerset in 1772, which limited the ability of slaveowners to possess and exploit their human property in England. Habeas corpus, however, was suspended in 1777, although not without opposition. Meanwhile, the police magistrate, John Fielding, founded the “Bow Street Runners,” an urban metropolitan parallel to the notorious slave “padrollers” of the southern plantations. He paid close attention to the motley crew in London and observed their westward circulation back to Caribbean insurrections.18

  Sailors and the dockside proletariat attacked slavery from another angle in 1775, when they went on strike in Liverpool, as three thousand men, women, and children assembled to protest a reduction in wages. When the authorities fired upon the crowd, killing several, the strike exploded into open insurrection. Sailors “hoisted the red flag,” dragged ships’ guns to the center of the city, and bombarded the mercantile exchange, leaving “scarce a whole pane of glass in the neighborhood.” They also trashed the property of several rich slave-trading merchants. One observer of the strife in Liverpool wrote, “I could not help thinking we had Boston here, and I fear this is only the beginning of our sorrows.”19

  There was a literal truth to the observation that Boston, the “Metropolis of Sedition,” had popped up in English ports on the eve of the American Revolution. An anonymous eyewitness noted that multiethnic American sailors “were among the most active in the late tumults” of London in 1768. They were “wretches of a mongrel descent,” the “immediate sons of Jamaica, or African Blacks by Asiatic Mulatoes.” When such seamen chanted “No Wilkes, No King!” during the river strike of 1768, they displayed the independent revolutionary spirit that informed their actions ocean-wide. An escaped indentured servant named James Aitken, better known as “Jack the Painter,” took part in the Boston Tea Party, then returned to England to wage revolutionary arson in 1775 against the king’s ships and shipyards, for which he was captured and hanged. The mobility of sailors and other maritime veterans ensured that both the experience and the ideas of opposition carried fast. If the artisans and gentlemen of the American Sons of Liberty saw their struggle as but “one episode in a worldwide struggle between liberty and despotism,” sailors, who had a much broader experience of both despotism and the world, saw their own as part of a long Atlantic struggle between slavery and freedom.20

  Slaves

  A new wave of struggle against slavery was inaugurated in Jamaica in 1760 by Tacky’s Revolt, which was, according to sugar planter and historian Edward Long, “more formidable than any hitherto known in the West Indies.” The revolt began, significantly, on Easter, in St. Mary’s parish and spread like cane fire to involve thousands island-wide. The rebels were not motivated by Christianity (Jamaican Baptism and Methodism lay in the future, and the Moravian mission, established in 1754, was tiny) but rather by the mysterious Akan religion, which, despite prohibition since 1696, stressed spirit possession, access to supernatural powers, and a lively presence of the dead. Practitioners, or obeahmen, conferred immortal powers upon the freedom fighters, who shaved their heads to signify solidarity.21 Their idea was to seize the forts and arms, and destroy the mills. One of the leaders, Aponga (a.k.a. Wager) had been a sailor aboard HMS Wager and may have witnessed the battles between the press gang and the mob of sailors in Boston in 1745. In Kingston a
female slave, Cubah, was dubbed the Queen. The main leader, “Tacky” (whose name meant chief in Akan), was said to catch bullets in his hand and hurl them back at the slavemasters. The rebellion raged for several months, until a military force, including the Scott’s Hall maroons, was organized by land and sea against the rebels. Tacky was captured and decapitated, his head exhibited on a pole in Spanish Town. When his head was recaptured by night, Edward Long admitted that “such exercises in frightfulness proved of doubtful value.” Guerrilla fighting continued for a year. The carnage was among the greatest yet witnessed in a slave revolt: as many sixty whites killed and five hundred of the enslaved killed in battle, dead of suicide when their cause became hopeless, or executed. Accompanying the terror was legislation and policing, tighter control of meetings, registration of free blacks, permanent fortification in each parish, and the death penalty for those who practiced obeah.22

  “A Sailor and His Hammock” (National Maritime Museum)

  Control was reestablished in Jamaica but apparently with little help from the merchant seamen who found themselves in Jamaica when the revolt broke out and who were quickly herded into the local militias to help put down the uprising. Thomas Thistlewood explained that as sailors wandered from one plantation to another, the grog and silver spoons of the terrified sugar planters seemed to disappear. Edward Long claimed that in the middle of the revolt a captured leader of the slave rebels told a Jewish militia guard: “As for the sailors, you see they do not oppose us, they care not who is in possession of the country, Black or White, it is the same to them.” The rebel was convinced that after the revolution, the sailors would “bring us things from t’other side the sea, and be glad to take our goods in payment.”23