by Mac Griswold
Depending on which fort was the first or last stop on the coast for the Seerobbe, or somewhere in between, the slaves that Nathaniel purchased could have languished in the hold for as long as seven months with Africa only a few yards away. Security remained tight until the Seerobbe was eight days out of port on her westward journey, when eyes that still searched the eastern horizon could no longer see the coast. Out at sea, weather permitting, slaves came on the main deck in the morning, eating on the ship’s open deck and taking part in forced exercise, which often meant dancing the dances they knew from home. Dutch slavers bought African drums to accompany these macabre performances.
Water and Food, Life and Death
Statistics vary as to how much water an average person needs per day—that is, when he or she is not battling dysentery (the primary killer on a slave ship) or fever, both of which cause extreme dehydration. Dehydration was aggravated by vomiting, brought on by seasickness and the stench of urine and ordure. In the close confinement of a slave ship’s hold, people sweated continually in temperatures that at times reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Based on figures calculated by the slave trade historian Herbert Klein (and if the Seerobbe carried as many as 150 slaves), about ten tons of water were loaded aboard. Small wonder that, along with the ship’s carpenter, the most important man on board after the captain would have been the cooper. He checked the water casks, making sure they were tight and clean enough to keep the water sweet throughout the voyage.
The captain, healthy crew members, and Nathaniel ate European foods such as biscuit, salt beef, hard cheese, and smoked meat, often served with three pints of wine per day. The captain and Nathaniel got the best and freshest fare. Slave rations of beans, corn, or yams were stirred into a gruel made with water or fish stock and thickened with cornmeal or flour. Occasionally, fresh or salt fish and meat were added. The crew doled out this porridgelike soup twice a day, and water, three times daily. A plantain or an ear of corn sometimes varied the diet, and some enlightened captains administered a daily mouthwash of lime juice or vinegar to ward off scurvy.
Fort Amsterdam was in English hands in 1646 when Nathaniel made his trip to the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Captives from the coastal areas and from the interior were kept in the windowless “trunk,” or dungeon, while they awaited the terrible voyage to the Americas, now known as the Middle Passage.
By Northern European standards, except for the lack of fresh vegetables, this was a fairly healthful diet, not so different from peasants’ standard winter fare. The majority of deaths resulted from common illnesses aggravated by chronic malnutrition in Africa, the arduous journey to the coast, and the rigors of being penned ashore. Diseases of every kind, though mostly gastrointestinal, exploded with epidemic force aboard the slave ships. Even modern medications would be hard-pressed to impose control under similar conditions. If it was windy enough, crews tried to ventilate the hold with a sort of windsock sail that funneled air to the slave deck below. Slave quarters were scraped out and cleansed periodically; Captain Phillips wrote that he had the job done daily, but such attention was rare on other slave ships. Corpses were thrown overboard.
Fort Amsterdam
Today, Elmina and other Ghanaian slave forts such as Cape Coast Castle or the lesser-known Fort Amsterdam bask in the blinding African sunlight. (Fort Amsterdam, where the Seerobbe would have stopped, as it had recently become the British headquarters on the coast, was originally known as Fort Cormantine, after the area, but was renamed by the victorious Dutch in 1665.) The landscape is nondescript: not tropically green but oddly gray, with stunted growth, low hills and swamps, straggling villages, and the occasional roadside stand. From the road near the village of Abanze, a square tower is visible between the tops of the palm trees. This view from African soil is not what Nathaniel would have seen from the Seerobbe. But the stumbling, hungry, frightened men, women, and children roped or chained together saw this tower from afar. Many served as beasts of burden on their last African journey. On their heads and backs they carried heavy payloads: beeswax, pepper, dyewood, elephant tusks, gold.
Today, Fort Amsterdam exists as a partially restored ruin, as impressive as a crusader castle in the Mediterranean, with solid-looking walls and redoubts. The empty window frames of its tallest tower look out over the harbor and fishing beach. This was the first Gold Coast fort with an interior prison. The English constructed it in 1645, the year before the Seerobbe sailed to Africa, so they could house growing numbers of slaves.
Fort Amsterdam “had two round and two square bastions … The fourth bastion … which has now disappeared, was hollow and had a grated ventilation hole in the roof (or platform).” Captives were imprisoned inside this tall stone drum, or “trunk,” as the English called such dungeons. In the early years after 1645, British needs were satisfied by local Fanti slave traders, who initially dealt mostly in prisoners of war and convicts from within a fifty-mile range of the coast, although as the trade expanded, it’s not possible to say from how far inland captives journeyed.
Where the hollow bastion crumbled into the Gulf of Guinea there is a sheer drop of some one hundred feet to the beach below. From the battlements the huge white bulk of Cape Coast Castle, about twelve miles away, is visible as a pearl-gray blob on the horizon. Half a dozen forts used to stand between here and there—a reminder of how fiercely contested this slice of coast once was. A fleet of beautiful wooden boats shaped like oversized canoes lies on the beach. As the last of the morning fishermen expertly cut their path through the breakers, the keels of their craft sink onto the sand with a grinding crunch. Nets are laid out to dry, men stretch themselves after their hard work, women walk around with basins of big silver fish on their heads. Life is a pulsing mix of community, tradition, family, skills, music, market, barter, and poverty. These are the men, women, and children whose ancestors were not forced into Atlantic slavery.
Seventeenth-century coastal traders and fort officials described in detail the sections of the Gold Coast they knew. In 1602 the Flemish trader Pieter de Marees, writing at a time when commerce was still confined mainly to gold, ivory, salt, and spices, described the gorgeous, familial Africa he visited in the “Gold Kingdom of Guinea.” Half a century later, the German Wilhelm Müller, based at the Danish fort, Frederiksborg, in the Fetu kingdom just east of Cape Coast Castle in the 1660s, borrowed from de Marees but added his own observations. More broad-minded than most visiting Europeans, the two found much to admire. The “fine, upright men” with “bodies as strong as trees … learn easily, understand quickly and when they see something demonstrated, will copy it as quickly as one could wish.” Handsome women, dignified managers of purse and household, draped themselves in yards of fine textiles, printed Indian calico, and striped African cloth and dressed their hair high and shining with palm oil. The sabers worn by rich men gleamed with gold and seashells, but even a poor man wore yards of coarse linen, a necklace of cowries, a cap of straw, and armbands of copper or iron. De Marees observed that the children were “stout and fat” and could “walk and speak within their first Year, nay … speak and walk much earlier than our children.” Muller wrote that fathers “took their sons with them from boyhood onwards, whenever a public assembly or court-day is held” in order to see how justice was done. Trains of slaves snaked through the coastal towns with loads of goods on their heads from upcountry dealers—but then returned to the locales they had come from. Though many of the mud and wattle houses were humble, their earthen floors were polished to a high shine and the walls painted with red, black, and white patterns. Everyone washed thoroughly—daily (a practice that puzzled Europeans). By night and day, the air reverberated with the sound of bells, royal drums, and roaring elephant horns. The day began with a friendly embrace: “Going out in the morning and meeting one of their friends or acquaintances,” wrote de Marees, “they will take each other in their arms and give each other the first two fingers of the right hand, putting them together and making them click twice or thrice agains
t each other and saying ‘Auzy, Auzy,’ which in their language means ‘Good day.’”
Tammero and Semonie and Oyou, and so many others on Shelter Island who had lost their African names, had left Africa. But how could their Africas ever leave them? They lived a double life, one in memory and the other in their Northern isolation. The remembered world of that “Good day” embodies what they and so many others like them had lost.
Pagans
Nathaniel and his partners would have felt few misgivings about enslaving Africans. Their first line of argument was that all human beings could be enslaved as prisoners taken in “just wars.” (The English word “slave” has its roots in the Byzantine Greek sklavos, and its identification with servitude dates to eastern European wars of the ninth century, when many Slavs were captured and enslaved.) Captain John Smith was captured in a skirmish with the Tartars and sold as a slave to a Turk in Istanbul in 1602; Nathaniel’s good friend Colonel Lewis Morris had been captured by Barbary corsairs, was imprisoned in Algiers for six months, and may have served time as a galley slave. Pequots conquered in 1637 were sent as slaves to the West Indies; Irish men and women were sent to America and Barbados as slaves during Cromwell’s Irish wars. Planters and colonists like Nathaniel found it easy to say that Africans who arrived in the Americas were presumably first taken prisoner in Africa’s internal wars. That Providence made them available to Nathaniel was a mark of God’s favor.
One of the captive Africans being rowed to a waiting slave ship puts hand to cheek in sorrow, while another leans over the gunwale. Many preferred drowning to leaving their families and native lands. (Detail, Prospect of the Coast from El Mina to Mowri, engraving by Jean Barbot, in Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea [London, 1732])
The second rationale arose from the nature of early modern Christianity. According to seventeenth-century European and American churchmen, all non-Christians got what they deserved, be it slavery now or eternal hellfire later. The neat trick for a Christian slaveholder, who could not enslave a fellow believer, was to prevent the conversion of the pagans he owned. This no longer mattered once colonials, chiefly in North America, tied slavery more pragmatically to skin color. By the 1670s, when some of the enslaved people whom Nathaniel and Grizzell lived alongside had become Christians, they nonetheless remained slaves, as did their children and their children’s children.
The historian Patrick Manning, in his bitter and enlightening Slavery and African Life, refuses to reduce the fraught subject to a simple morality play peopled by a cast of characters divided into innocent Africans pursued by evil Europeans, demonstrating how every African understood that slavery was deeply embedded in family structure, religion, government, war, taxation, and systems of justice. The same rapidly became true on Shelter Island, as it did in every coastal American colony from Maine to Florida and throughout the Caribbean. The larger tragedy was not just the suffering of captives sent overseas, or African nations’ loss of generations of young men and women, but the complicit transatlantic creation of an African world where “people were forced to think of how much they could get for selling a neighbor, or how much they would pay to ransom a loved one,” and where, on both sides of the Atlantic, both sellers and buyers, as Manning puts it, “lubricated and disguised the flow of slaves with a hundred euphemisms, proverbs, equivocations and outright lies.”
For a hard-driving merchant like Nathaniel, physical intimacy with someone he had purchased would have become nearly inevitable at some point—in the barracoons (slave pens), on the beach, or aboard ship. At that moment, another human being stared back at him. From all we know about Nathaniel (a man soon to become a Quaker but one who owned slaves), from Captain Phillips and so many other slave traders’ accounts, we can conclude that whatever moral qualms Nathaniel might have felt were soon dispelled. In 1758, more than a century after the first Africans arrived on Shelter Island, the members of a Philadelphia Quaker meeting, many of whose families owned slaves or had been engaged in the trade, finally reached a consensus about abolition that was based on self-interest: “that no Quaker could keep a slave without risking damnation, since no master could be expected to resist the temptation to exploit the slave.”
6
BEFORE THE WHIRLWIND
Hunting for Grizzell Brinley
At the manor, one of the UMass field school archaeology students carefully brushes off a dusty metal button dug from the front lawn. Four stout tulips and their leaves wreathe the surface in a bold symmetrical design. Much of the gilt has worn off, leaving the brass underneath to turn to verdigris during its centuries underground. In Nathaniel and Grizzell’s day it probably shone on a man’s coat. Back then, buttons did more than fasten a garment. They were also sewn on as ornaments, dispersed in rows or clustered in patterns that signified the bearer’s social rank. As badges, they became insignia of the all-encompassing hierarchy of service. The Duke of Buckingham, King Charles I’s most trusted courtier, wore white and sky-blue satin velvet “sett all over both suite and cloak with Diamonds,” on his trip to Paris to bring home the monarch’s bride, Princess Henrietta Maria of France. Grizzell Sylvester’s father, Thomas Brinley, also the king’s servant, was one of the seven auditors of the royal revenue.
Hunting for Grizzell’s childhood, I visit her London parish of St. James Clerkenwell, where Thomas and his wife, Anne Wase, produced most of their brood of twelve children. Today, a chaste eighteenth-century church replaces the hulking medieval structure Grizzell knew, which had originally belonged to an Augustinian nunnery before Henry VIII dissolved the Roman Catholic monasteries in England in 1536. The Brinleys brought their infants to St. James to be baptized, perhaps by walking up the hill through Jerusalem Passage from their house on St. John’s Lane.
I walk away from the church and slip down into the dense shade of a fortresslike gate built in 1504 for the priory of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, a crusader military order. Beyond the arch, narrow St. John’s Lane, once the main entrance to the priory, feels like a private road. In the early nineteenth century, Albion Place was cut through the center of what had been the Brinleys’ property, and the house where Grizzell was born in 1636. But nearby streets still preserve the shape of the ancient neighborhood and record the names of a few residents from Grizzell’s day. When St. John’s became crown property after the Dissolution, courtiers and well-heeled city folk colonized the Hospitallers’ palatial buildings and grounds. The area resembled an aristocratic club when the Brinleys moved there in 1629: the inner precinct north of St. John’s Gate boasted ten titled households.
Though its surface has been tarnished and eroded by the manor’s acid soil, this chased and gilded button still gleams as it once did on a high-style seventeenth-century garment.
William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, cultivated, extravagant, and eccentric, exemplified those grander neighbors. A romantic landscape gardener ahead of his time, he planted amid the crumbling arches of a Gothic cloister. The author of court masques (and Ben Jonson’s greatest supporter after the king), he was also a master of fencing and horsemanship, a patron of the sciences, and above all a passionate musician (he owned four harpsichords, an organ, and twenty-two stringed instruments). In 1641, five-year-old Grizzell might have seen—and heard—the glittering pageantry of his daughter’s wedding at St. James Clerkenwell as the bridal party made their way to and from Newcastle House. But Grizzell also would have glimpsed a rougher London close-up: the stain of “the Fleet,” the notorious debtors’ prison, spread up to the bottom of St. John’s Lane below her house. Tumbledown tenements there provided a dangerous rookery for criminals and prostitutes. Taverns lined the streets, while a little farther south the open space of Smithfield hosted a huge livestock market and public executions.
“A Dwelling House … Several Coach-Houses and Stables, & the Residue as a Garden”
The noble Berkeley family lived next door to Grizzell. An engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, who recorded much of London i
n the 1660s before the Great Fire, shows Berkeley House as a three-story brick edifice with Jacobean gables and ornate chimneys. Documentary evidence for Grizzell’s adjacent house and garden is sketchy, but there is enough to suggest the establishment was sizable, although it was not designed to be impressive. On a map of 1676 the Berkeleys’ front courtyard is shown flanked by imposing brick wings, while Grizzell’s house, less than half the size, stood modestly end-on to the lane. Outbuildings and stable yards that her family shared with the Berkeleys were clustered between the two houses. When the property was sold as a teardown in 1685, the 115-by-279-foot plot accommodated “a Dwelling house … with several coach-houses and stables, & the residue as a garden to the said late house.” The house was probably brick, two or three stories tall, and, like its grander neighbor, had gabled roofs and towering brick chimneystacks.
Pass through the arch of St. John’s Gate (as depicted by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1661) and turn right into the second house in St. John’s Lane: there, behind the gables of Berkeley House (at right), Grizzell Brinley spent the first eleven years of her life.
Results of excavations of both the Berkeley and Brinley sites published in 2004 by the Museum of London Archaeology Services revealed underground cesspits reached by chutes from indoor privies, which allowed the diggers to learn much about what people ate, tossed, or mislaid. The Berkeleys and the Brinleys ate very well: archaeologists have unearthed the bones of fallow deer (game reserved for royalty and peers) and swans, along with the remnants of common cattle, sheep, pigs, cod, whiting, herring, and plaice.