The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Homecoming

  The Barbadian and Shelter Island plantations were in full swing in the late 1660s when Constant left Barbados for England, where he had bought property in the Midlands. Like many another Barbadian planter, he may have been “desirous to suck in some of the sweet air of England.” Despite his Dutch birth and many years in Barbados, Constant considered England his true home. West Indian colonials yearned for cool weather, soft fields of wheat instead of sharp-edged cane, and English country sports and rambles. Having created a living hell for uprooted Africans, such men longed to escape Barbados themselves. In England, they intended to become landed gentlemen, marry off their children well, and transform sugar wealth into the foundations of a family dynasty. Constant would die in Brampton, a small village in Huntingdonshire. His New World venture would end with a carved burial stone inside an obscure English church. He would exchange his family’s merchant mark for a modest escutcheon but never gain knighthood. His most enduring legacies in Barbados would be the system of West Indian slavery he had helped to forge—and the hundreds of Sylvesters listed in the Barbados phone book today who may or may not be his descendants.

  5

  NATHANIEL’S MIDDLE PASSAGE

  To the Coast of Guinea

  After their short stay in Barbados during the summer of 1646, Nathaniel and the Seerobbe set sail for a different cargo: slaves. From the time he had already spent at his brother’s plantation he was well aware what life would offer to the Africans he purchased. “From there [Barbados] this ship went with English orders and crew, and some French crew, to the coast of Guinea,” is how Reijer Evertsen, the steersman, finished his deposition before the West Indies Company about the Sylvesters’ evasion of duties. (“Guinea” loosely described the West African littoral from Ivory Coast eastward to Benin.) The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the magisterial CD-ROM compilation of all such known voyages, does not list the Seerobbe or this trip to “Guinea,” but the adroit Nathaniel may have succeeded in staying under the radar.

  Most slavers traveled south from Europe to Africa, then west to Brazil and the Caribbean, selling their human cargo there and loading up with sugar and other local products before returning to Europe with the help of the Gulf Stream and the trade winds. The stock phrase for this sequence, “the triangular trade,” has the virtue of simplicity, but in fact the ocean was crisscrossed by ships in every direction, making multiple stops and, in the early days before the construction of specialized slave ships, handling gold, ivory, dyewood, hides, beeswax, and spices as well as slaves.

  The Seerobbe had reached Barbados just as a lesser-known ocean current began its annual change of direction. Captain Dircxsz, like all Atlantic World sailors, would have known about the Gulf Stream, which curves up the American coast and then eastward toward Europe as part of the circular North Atlantic Current. The South Equatorial Current, which carried slavers westward from Angola to northern Brazil, defines the northern boundary of the South Atlantic circle. The North Equatorial Countercurrent (NECC), a seasonal phenomenon, slips between the two larger currents and begins to flow eastward across the South Atlantic toward Africa; its flow is strongest from July to September. By steering south from Barbados toward the South American coast, the Seerobbe would have caught the NECC in early August at an opportune moment.

  The Sylvesters’ ship would have arrived off the African coast in time to travel on the 1646 late summer or early fall surge of the eastbound Guinea Current. Slavers coasted past the rocky points and sandy beaches of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, hunting for cargo. The Gold Coast, named for the precious mineral from upcountry mines, was thickly studded with European fortresses, or “castles,” built on land leased from local Africans. With gun ports pointing out to sea, they were originally built as early as the 1450s by the Portuguese to guard against threats to the gold trade from other Europeans. However, whether hunting for gold or slaves, European traders were dependent on their African hosts and landlords who controlled the flow of commodities from the interior. European slavers were reluctant to go inland because they instantly succumbed to African killer diseases such as yellow fever.

  Competition for these European footholds in Africa sharpened as the slave trade grew. Prime locations changed hands often, and African slave vendors willingly entered into contracts with rivalrous European buyers. A ship like the Seerobbe would make many stops to fill her holds, buying a few slaves at each place. Although the Dutch then controlled the bulk of the Atlantic trade, Nathaniel found Englishmen trading directly in view of Dutch forts such as Elmina, “the Mine,” the major gold entrepôt, which the Dutch had captured from the Portuguese in 1637. Elmina’s governors reported tersely to the Netherlands that between February 1645 and January 1647 nineteen English ships, most of them belonging to interlopers like the Sylvesters, were anchored offshore and engaged in slaving. Most of these ships could carry about a hundred captives each. The Seerobbe and her captain were Dutch; the crew was English. Aboard as a merchant factor, Nathaniel could take advantage of both his English and Dutch ties. As interlopers, the Sylvesters ran risks, but they also operated outside any effective control by the WIC or English trade organizations.

  Palaver and Preparations

  Aboard the Seerobbe, Captain Sijmon Dircxsz and Nathaniel Sylvester would have waited for lithe African open boats to come alongside and take them ashore to pay their respects and conduct business with local Africans. As it still does today, the reef would have bared its stone teeth when the combers reared up to crash ashore. White slavers, who understood the hazards of piloting their own boats, relied on “the Negro [to] count the seas and know when to paddle safely on or off.” It was the rainy season—probably September or October—so humidity would have reached 95 to 100 percent, but with a daytime temperature of only about 85 degrees Fahrenheit, cooler than in Barbados. First the tricky beach landing, then up into the fort, then step by step up the wide yellow brick treads of the governor’s staircase. After a palaver with the African dignitaries and merchants about current prices, taxes, and duties, Captain Dircxsz would have seen that goods were rowed ashore—textiles, rum, tobacco, and anything else from the Sylvesters’ Barbados warehouse that Africans would accept in exchange for slaves.

  If the seasonal rain cleared off and the sea breeze picked up, the upper terraces of the slave castle would have been pleasant enough for Europeans clad in dark, tight-fitting serge or velvet. Orchards and kitchen plots carpeted the surrounding slopes. The fort gardens held delicious salad crops, cabbages and cauliflowers grown from imported seed, and fruit trees from tropical Asia and America. Fields bulged with starchy crops such as yams, cassava, and maize or guinea corn (Sorghum bicolor). The Seerobbe would have taken on tons of such staples in amounts narrowly calculated to keep slaves alive on the ocean crossing.

  Dinner would have been served between three and four o’clock, the hottest time of day. The hosts most likely entertained Captain Dircxsz and Nathaniel as they did other slavers, with a certain amount of ceremony. Picking up human cargo at Elmina in 1693, Captain Thomas Phillips wrote in his journal of the welcome he received:

  Dinner being over … we were invited … to take a walk, where the Negroes use to dance, about a quarter of a mile from the fort under two or three very large cotton-trees, of which their canoes are made … thro’ which they made a hideous bellowing, another in the mean time beating a hollow piece of brass with a stick; then came Mrs. Rawlisson the [Dutch] factor’s wife, a pretty young Mulatto, with a rich silk cloth about her middle and a silk cap upon her head, flower’d with gold and silver, under which her hair was comb’d out at length, for the mulattos covet to wear it so in imitation of the whites, never curling it up or letting it frizzle as the blacks do; she was accompany’d … with the second’s and doctor’s wives, who were young blacks, about 13 years of age … After the English had saluted them they went to dance by turns, in a ridiculous manner, making antick gestures with their arms, shoulders and heads, their feet having the le
ast share in the action; they began the dance moderately, but as the[y] continu’d it, they by degrees quickened their motion so, that at the latter end they appeared perfectly furious and distracted.

  Phillips is disdainful as he describes the Afro-Dutch society. But he in fact spent a great deal of time talking to himself in his journal about how he could morally participate in the slave trade. A telling phrase in this description is “furious and distracted,” which in seventeenth-century vernacular meant overtaken by an animal frenzy. So, at the conclusion of his moral deliberations, by relying on the innate human ability to dehumanize those he saw as different, Phillips ended by having few qualms about buying or selling anyone he saw as a pagan savage incapable of rational, civilized behavior.

  Like other seventeenth-century Europeans, Phillips would also have looked to the Bible. According to the Old Testament, Ham was cursed by his father, Noah, for gossiping about the sight of Noah naked and drunk in his tent. For this (and for other unspecified trespasses, perhaps sexual ones), the descendants of his son Canaan were to be slaves forever. One version has it that Ham’s name meant “dark” or “black,” an explanation that traders like Phillips may have used to justify their purchase of Africans.

  While Dircxsz and Nathaniel were dining or haggling, the Seerobbe’s carpenter would have refitted the hold, building bulkheads to divide the space into two main compartments. One compartment, forward of the mainmast, was for men and boys; the other, aft, for women and children. Pregnant women, and maybe the sick, were confined separately. Only a few grated hatches and portholes lit and ventilated the dark hold. Dirczsz’s windowed, comparatively spacious cabin sat above the slave deck; Nathaniel may have shared it with him. The crew slept in bunks built into odd corners if they were lucky, or in hammocks slung behind the slave quarters or even on the open deck in longboats, or in gangways, if the vessel was crowded.

  The Seerobbe was not a small vessel for her day: Dutch records describe her as about eighty to ninety feet long with a beam, or width, of perhaps twenty to twenty-five feet—roughly the same size as present-day fishing boats off Shelter Island. The hold measured about ten to twelve feet deep at its lowest point. Casks of food and drinking water filled the bottom level of the hold as well as parts of the main ’tween deck fore and aft of the space for slaves. Any expansion of that space meant losing room for essential supplies.

  In the 1640s many slavers carried mixed shipments of goods as well as people, and they did not modify their ships to carry a full load of captives. But a vessel like the Seerobbe, if the interior was rebuilt especially to carry human cargo, could have loaded between one hundred and two hundred slaves, in addition to the officers and crew (the general rule of thumb being ten to fifteen slaves per crewman). Twenty or so cannon—to ward off pirates—were carried aboard.

  A slave hold was only five feet high, maximum. The central space served as an alley, with only enough headroom to crouch, or at best to walk with knees deeply bent. Horizontal “shelves” that doubled the size of slave accommodation ran along both sides of the hull for the full length of the compartment. These ledges had about as much headroom as bunks. With a width of about eighteen inches allotted to each prone body, people crawled or were shoved into these spaces at night, the men constantly chained. In foul weather, all would lie below or creep hunched over, day and night.

  A Pocket History

  When Nathaniel dropped anchor at Elmina, he was participating in an ancient international trade. African and Arab merchants and rulers had been buying and selling slaves north across the Sahara and east up the Indian Ocean for more than six centuries. The Atlantic slave trade began slowly, shortly after the discovery of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. But until the second half of the sixteenth century, indigenous Americans seemed the more logical slave workforce for Central and South America. Only after newly introduced diseases killed off millions of American Indians did European colonizers turn to Africa for replacements.

  Like other New England Indians, the Manhansetts, even if they were not contractually enslaved, were impressed by the Sylvesters into labor arrangements roughly similar to Spanish and Portuguese encomienda or agricultural vassalage practices in the Southwest. Indian slavery in New England grew out of the original European (and Indian) thinking of war prisoners as slaves, the fruits of a “just war.” New York passed legislation in 1679 against Indian slavery, but many Indians continued to be listed as chattel in wills and probates as late as 1796. Over time, as Indian power and status declined on Shelter Island, the Manhansetts who had possessed the power to insist that Nathaniel must purchase the island from them in 1653 had become “his Indians” by 1675. Marriages (not recognized by whites) between enslaved Africans and nominally free Manhansetts or other local Indians further complicated the standing of many who were raised as Indians. In 1684, a boy variously described as “Indian” and “negro,” meaning he was the son of an African or creole and a native, was seized as chattel from Nathaniel and Grizzell’s eldest son, Giles, in payment for taxes levied by Suffolk County authorities. With tribal systems of law and justice subordinate to English colonial law and generally ignored, virtually no one defended Indians against chattel slavery until the early nineteenth century.

  Within Africa, in various countries and in many different periods, prisoners of war and criminals were sold into slavery, as were people designated as sacrificial offerings to gods or oracles. Debtors turned over members of their families to satisfy liens. Tax payments could take the form of human property. Unprotected agricultural villages were often raided in wars, or on the pretext of war, and in times of famine, the young, old, and weak were sometimes sold by their own starving kin.

  African slavery clearly differed from New World plantation slavery, however. Black Africans bought and sold each other, but African slavery was not a matter of color, as it became in America. In many parts of Africa, the children of free fathers and enslaved mothers often won acceptance as legal members of their fathers’ families. In North America, this happened only during the earliest days of slavery, and rarely. Slave labor in Africa—domestic tasks or craft production in shops rather than work in the fields—involved many more women and children than men. Slaves in Africa never comprised as large a proportion of the population as in the American South. I have to wonder what chances the first African Shelter Islanders—people like Tammero or Semonie or Oyou, who are mentioned by name in Nathaniel’s 1680 will—might have hoped for in their own lives as slaves in America, and in those of their children, given the cultural expectations they brought with them from their native lands.

  All of the mechanisms that existed in Africa were adaptable to the toxic transformation of the Atlantic trade. When the Seerobbe arrived in 1646, the Gold Coast market was tipping toward slaves as the principal export because the demand for sugar and sugar profits in Europe had stimulated interest in cheap African labor. Before the abolition of slavery in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, an estimated 12.5 million African people had been transported across the Atlantic.

  The People

  What sort of captives came aboard the Seerobbe? European traders and planters touted the superior strength and endurance of “Coromantees,” or Cormantines, from the Gold Coast area around Fort Amsterdam, a British fort active between 1631 and 1665. African sellers and European buyers agreed that captives from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin also withstood the Middle Passage better than other Africans. Later in the century, it became regular practice for ship captains to purchase “Gold Coast guardians” to police their other captives aboard ship, which it appears they reliably did. But no matter what nationality or ratio of male to female slaves West Indian planters might request, their preferences had little to do with what they got. Customers were dependent on African sellers and African conditions. African traders preferred to keep women to sell on the domestic market, so most Atlantic exports were men. Strong young people, no matter where they came from, sold at a premium.


  Whether he landed at Elmina or elsewhere, a European ship’s captain, physician, or merchant factor, such as Nathaniel, personally scrutinized the merchandise on offer. “Eyes met eyes as buyers studied corneas for signs of fever and jaundice. Teeth, gums and tongue were checked, muscles probed, skin inspected. The classic marks of good health were ‘a glossy sleekness of unblemished skin, clear eyes, red tongue, open chest [and] small belly.’”

  The same African canoes that brought Nathaniel and Captain Dircxsz ashore would have loaded up with roped or fettered captives to carry them through the surf to open water. Willem Bosman, a Dutchman who spent fourteen years (1688–1702) on the Gold Coast and rose to be chief factor at Elmina, described how, as slaves were prepared for transport, African sellers would “strip them of all that they have on their backs, so that they come aboard stark naked, as well women as men.”

  Captives would have been transferred from the canoes into the Seerobbe’s longboat, which held more people and was manned by English crew, and from there up into the ship, some ten feet above water level. Any inexperienced sailor who has climbed from a dinghy or a launch into a larger vessel knows this tense moment, when the two boats plunge and yaw, sometimes touching each other and sometimes feet apart. At just the right second, the boarding party must willingly abandon the safety of the dinghy to grab for the slippery boarding ladder.

  The people being transferred would not have been willing. As the Seerobbe’s English crew briefly unroped or unchained them, the Africans would have seen a last chance to escape. In his journal, Captain Phillips wrote, “The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship, into the sea, and kept [themselves] underwater till they were drowned.”

  Once on board, the men, though not the women and children, were shackled together with leg irons, two by two, and forced into the hold. The Capuchin priest Father Denis de Carli, aboard a Portuguese slaver making a trip from the Congo in 1666, wrote: “It was a pitiful sight to behold how all those people were [stowed]. The men were standing in the hold, flattened one to another with stakes, for fear they should rise and kill the Whites. The women were between the decks, and those that were with child in the great cabbin, the children in the steeradge and pres’d together liked herrings in a barrel, which caus’d an intolerable heat and stench.”