Recaptured Africans
Page 20
Coercion persisted even in the medical care supervised by physician agents. The ACS charged the physicians they contracted to “give constant and earnest attention” for the “health and comfort” of recaptive passengers.73 Reflecting common racial assumptions, however, these white southern doctors tended to expect their African patients to be ignorant, intransigent, and duplicitous.74 William Young began his duties on the Castilian by asserting that the Africans “will not take doses without compulsion.” The ship’s nurse George reportedly carried out Young’s conviction in the Castilian’s hospital with a rope whip. When a “juvenile” refused to swallow the paregoric Young had prescribed for his “belly ache,” the doctor by his own account threatened to summon George and his rope to force the issue.75 Likewise when a headman’s wife fell ill, McCalla remarked that he and Grymes “had a rich time making her take a dose of Castor oil.”76 Confidence in Western medicine, compounded by a language gulf, led the ships’ doctors to force treatments on African patients. Young people without strength to refuse may have been particular targets of such treatments. William Young, for example, reported the eye surgery he performed on a “terribly scared” young girl, who endured the procedure “held upon the carpenter’s bench” that served as makeshift operating table.77 In such cases, the doctors may well have viewed themselves as merely doing their jobs, while recaptives would have experienced alien medical procedures as resembling other forms of violence imposed on their enslaved and recaptive bodies.
The harsh nature of maritime discipline aboard recaptive vessels further linked the Liberian voyages and past middle passages. The Niagara’s log indicates that Captain Chauncey regularly held public courts-martial for sailors and issued sentences of solitary confinement in double irons as well as bread-and-water diets for infractions among the enlisted men.78 Amidst frequent notices of death and burial, the Niagara’s log said little about discipline of African passengers, but near the end of the voyage an officer briefly noted, “Confined two female Africans in single irons for fighting.”79 We will return to the conflict between these two women below, but for now, the entry raises the question of what it meant for these unnamed African women to find themselves incarcerated and chained around wrists or ankles. On the Castilian, Young noted with indignation the treatment of six “fellows,” some of whom were either too young or too emaciated to fit the shackles placed on their wrists. For the act of stealing bread from other passengers, the Castilian’s captain ordered the young men chained to the mast overnight on the open deck and then “lashed with a cowhide” that raised “thick welts” and drew blood.80 Several other recaptive boys or young men, accused of stealing biscuits and other personal items, were forced to scrub the deck under a “freely applied” cat-o’-nine-tails wielded by the headman Francisco.81
Furthermore, recaptive women and youths may have been particular targets of arbitrary violence, both because of their physical vulnerability and because recaptive men were appointed to “overseer” roles. Young noted that crewmembers and Francisco used both the cat-o’-nine-tails and the cowhide whip frequently and randomly on African passengers, whether for failing to follow orders or simply for making too much noise.82 On one occasion, Young had to clean and suture a badly infected cut on Bimba, a male recaptive who had been hit in the mouth by the ship’s mate.83 Notably, no ship log, journal, or physician’s report directly mentioned incidents of sexual assault. However, shortly after Bimba’s injury, a woman whom Young called “Ghost” was admitted to the hospital and died shortly thereafter with an infected eye wound caused by a rope’s blow to her head.84 Deaths and injuries resulting from arbitrary violence highlighted the political dimensions of survival in which the racialized norms of physical coercion could prove as deadly as the slave ship’s diseases.
Young’s and McCalla’s daily records provide some sense of how, even among white agents charged with recaptives’ well-being, an environment of casual racial disdain set the tenor of daily shipboard relations between white American and recaptive African passengers. With some exceptions, white agents and crew amused themselves at the African passengers’ expense, laughing at their eating manners and, in one case, encouraging them to scramble for biscuits thrown onto the ship’s deck. The “greedy, animal like manner” of the Africans, wrote U.S. agent John McCalla, “was disgusting to behold.”85 Agents and crew of the Castilian joined in bestowing nicknames that mocked attributes of individual men and women. They dubbed a talkative young man “Parson” and the woman who received the fatal blow from a rope whip “Ghost” because she wore a long white shift. Some of these names reflected sexual overtones and sailors’ scrutiny of the bodies of recaptive woman. For example, the Castilian’s crew renamed “Eta” as “Great Briton” and called another recaptive woman “Snowball” for her dark complexion. Young also noted the christening of “Topsey, a mischievous looking wench.”86 Even before the trip, Young had privately expressed his belief that recaptives would be better off enslaved in the United States. Echoing New York marshal Rynders’s feelings for the William R. Kibby boys, Young summed up the general disdain for recaptive passengers as the Castilian neared the Liberian coastline: “Nearly every one is sick of the business who has been brought into contact with the niggers.”87 Even Grymes and Lindsly, who wrote eloquently about the voyage’s traumatic impact, also described African passengers as lacking entirely in “moral sense” and found the men in particular to be “mostly lazy and seemingly good for nothing.”88 The Liberian-bound ships, like the slave ships of Marcus Rediker’s analysis, “produced ‘race,’” with direct results for daily shipboard life.89
TABLE 2 Recaptive Death and Survival in Circuits of Slave Trade Suppression, 1858 and 1860
*Thirteen Wildfire shipmates from the Key West hospital did not board the Castilian, sailing later instead with the South Shore. In this table, they are included in the 355 recaptives listed for the South Shore.
Sources: Young Ship Log; McCalla Journal; reel 177B, folder Letters Rec’d “Liberated Africans,” ACSR; Letters Received from John Seys, reel 10, RSI; John Seys, Certificate of Receipt of Liberated Africans, reel 3, RSI; Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 223–54.
The compound impact of physical suffering, fear, and violence overwhelmed some recaptives’ desire to survive. After a month at sea, a fifteen-year-old girl attempted to throw herself over the Castilian’s rail, despite the efforts of her companions to pull her back. The distraught young woman, noted Young, had been “punished for some misdemeanor” and had become “violently excited.” Nor was hers an isolated act, for Young recorded “two or three others” who also attempted to jump overboard.90 On the Star of the Union, one man, described by Grymes as “partially insane,” jumped into the sea overnight.91 Others died a slower death. Refusal to eat, vacant stares, “listlessness and apathy”—signs of what biomedical diagnoses might now characterize as deep depression, malnutrition, or even dehydration—took hold of some of the passengers. Some deaths occurred even in cases when Grymes could detect “few signs of disease.” He sadly concluded, “Never did I see a race of people have so little hold on life—they did not fear death.”92 In the face of his own inability to intervene, Grymes fell back on his worldview of racial difference, attributing death to an apparent inherent African fatalism. Seen from the perspective of some recaptive forced migrants, however, the Liberian voyages may have carried them further into a world too exhausting and disorienting to be endured.93
TABLE 3 Percentage Mortality on Slave Ships, in U.S. Camps, and on Transport Ships to Liberia
Note: Percentage mortality is based on the total number of recaptives alive at the beginning of each phase of forced migration.
Sources: Young Ship Log; McCalla Journal; reel 177B, folder Letters Rec’d “Liberated Africans,” ACSR; Letters Received from John Seys, reel 10, RSI; John Seys, Certificate of Receipt of Liberated Africans, reel 3, RSI; Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 223–54.
Death punctuated the rhythms of d
aily life on recaptive Liberian passages. However calculated, the losses were appalling. With 34 percent mortality—the highest of all four Liberian voyages—the South Shore lost more than a third of its young passengers on the journey from Key West. The Niagara and Castilian shipmates both lost approximately a quarter of their company. Even Star of the Union shipmates, who arrived at Key West in better health than other recaptives, suffered 12 percent mortality before reaching Liberia (see Tables 2 and 3). On all four journeys, the daily mortality rate rose when recaptives moved from federal camps on land to the second sea voyage (see Table 4). As Young worried in his private journal, “If we do not soon reach Cape Mount there will be but few left to deliver to the resident Agent at that place.”94 Acknowledging this devastating mortality deepens our awareness of the resourcefulness and resilience required by recaptive children and adults to struggle for survival and social connection. In the face of severe obstacles, social relations continued to evolve, influenced by the age and gender distribution as well as the diverse origins of distinct shipmate groups.
TABLE 4 Daily Mortality Rates by Phase of Voyages
Mortality rate = (deaths per number embarked/voyage length in days) × 1000
Note: Length in days is given in parentheses.
Sources: Young Ship Log; McCalla Journal; reel 177B, folder Letters Rec’d “Liberated Africans,” ACSR; Letters Received from John Seys, reel 10, RSI; John Seys, Certificate of Receipt of Liberated Africans, reel 3, RSI; Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 223–54.
The “Politics of Survival” in Adult and Child Recaptive Journeys
Given the dire nature of recaptive journeys, Vincent Brown’s concept of a “politics of survival” directs our attention to the ways in which slave ship captives sought to “withstand the encroachment of oblivion and to make social meaning from the threat of anomie.”95 Separated from the crew and government agents by a gulf of language and racial ideology and confronting daily sea burials of their companions, slave ship survivors built an interior world of relationships within the ships’ confines. To do this required several acts of reclamation, beginning with reclaiming the meaning of death and continuing on to reclaiming the spaces of the ship and even the bodies of surviving recaptives. More so than children who had not yet come of age before their transatlantic enslavement, adults possessed a greater repertoire of social knowledge and cultural practices with which to engage in these acts of reclamation. Yet even adults had to improvise from the immediate environment, sometimes repurposing ship stores in the effort to make survival mean more than avoiding death. Without any attempt to minimize the traumatic consequences of death and repeated displacement, the remainder of this chapter turns to the reconstitution of social life for children and adult recaptives under the tight constraints of the Liberia passages of 1858 and 1860.
DEATH AND MOURNING
The crisis of alienated death and burial followed recaptive shipmates from government camps to Liberian transports. Recaptives had little control over conditions of burial at sea. On the sixth night after weighing anchor from Key West, for example, McCalla watched as crewmembers bound a woman’s body in white muslin weighted with coal and threw the body into the sea. The white bundle bobbed for some time on the moonlit swell, then the ship surged forward and left the corpse behind.96 On the Niagara, the Echo shipmates’ dead received formal naval rites before being tipped off a plank through one of the ship’s gun ports. In fact, Frank Leslie’s illustrations of such burial scenes, drawn by a correspondent on board, depict no recaptive companions in attendance, only uniformed officers and sailors.97 Although Anglo-American sea burials had their own protocol and protective rituals, they offered little comfort to recaptive shipmates.98 Some burials on the Liberian transports lacked any sense of ceremony. When recaptives died while the Niagara stopped to refuel with coal in the Cape Verde Islands, crewmembers rowed a small boat out to deeper waters before heaving a dead body overboard.99 Far from ancestral soil and horrifically oblivious to the imperatives of the deceased, these unmarked interments at sea threatened an irreparable spiritual breach for recaptive survivors clinging to an ever diminishing shipmate community.100
In the face of great odds, however, some managed to fashion observances that transcended the perfunctory ritual of sea burial. A week into the Castilian’s voyage, a sixteen-year-old girl was found dead at the bottom of the steps leading down from the forehatch. Only thirty minutes before the discovery, she had been on deck in good health with her companions. In the face of this sudden and unexplained tragedy, Young noted, “some of the other women appeared much distressed by her death, tho’ the majority were—as they have been in every other instance—entirely unmoved.” He then recorded how the headwoman Bomba “dressed the body of this woman in the clothes she had on,” reserving one piece of her clothing to tear into thin strips. “All who could obtain pieces rolled them into cords and tied them about their wrists,” continued Young. After the brief ceremony, “a gloom rested upon the women during the remainder of the evening, and they did not indulge their usual songs.”101 In one sense, the women’s ceremony hints at how recaptive transport passages differed from the tight control and oversight on slave ships, for few such records of African funerary practices on the middle passage exist.102 Even more importantly, however, the women’s collective response illuminates how recaptives’ politics of survival began by confronting the meaning of death itself. The recaptive women’s collective act reclaimed their companion from an anonymous death at sea by recognizing her relationship to the West Central African world of ancestors.
Under Bomba’s leadership, the women transformed the calico clothing donated by a Key West women’s benevolent society into the materials for rites of recognition and protection. On the surface, the cords fashioned from the perished woman’s clothing might be read as an act of remembrance in the Anglo-American tradition of keepsakes from the deceased.103 If the young woman’s recaptive companions merely sought to keep their sister shipmate’s memory alive, that in itself powerfully refuted the anonymity of saltwater burial. Yet the collective knotting of wrist cords resonated more deeply with West Central African ideas about the potency of the passage from the world of the living to the mirrored “otherworld” of the dead.104 A bad death in already terrible circumstances, the young woman’s unexpected demise may have required the kind of protection that came from ritual mourning. Central African scholar Wyatt MacGaffey describes twentieth-century Congolese funerary rites in which relatives of the deceased “wear white headbands to protect them from unwelcome visitations, such as seeing the dead in dreams.”105 Furthermore, MacGaffey, Suzanne Blier, and other scholars of West and West Central Africa have unpacked the dense network of associations between the tying of cord and the binding, containment, and activation of powerful interventions by ancestors and nature spirits.106 Without more specific evidence of Bomba’s origins and intentions, such associations remain only suggestive. Yet Bomba’s preparation of the girl’s body and the tearing and tying of wrist cords clearly had shared meaning to shipmates assembled on the Castilian’s deck. Situated within a long history of African bodies tossed anonymously into the Atlantic, the women’s actions acquire enormous significance as an example of how recaptives improvised from available materials to insist upon a shared understanding of death.
Bomba’s leadership in moments of crisis also raises the question of how certain adult recaptives acquired authority within shipmate age and gender hierarchies. Bomba’s shipmate, the 22-year-old Francisco, parlayed his linguistic skills and exposure to Luandan colonial society into a position as “headman” that continued from the Key West Depot on to the Castilian’s voyage. In contrast, Bomba, an adult woman—perhaps one of the few women between ages 30 and 40 aboard—became visible in Young’s journal as a leader among female recaptives.107 A detailed roster from the Castilian revealed that close to 52 percent of surviving recaptives had estimated ages of 14 years or younger (see fig. 5.2). Male recaptives especially sk
ewed toward the very young; a quarter of all males were 10 years or younger, compared with only 16 percent of all females. Boys and young men would thus have dominated the passenger deck of the Castilian, with women and girls comprising roughly a quarter of all recaptives. Put differently, women and young people 14 years and younger comprised two-thirds of the Castilian’s survivors. It is possible that beyond the authority of her age as an adult woman, the deference shown to Bomba may have derived from ritual initiation that invested her with knowledge in preparing the bodies of the dead and attending pregnant women in distress.108 Historian James Sweet has argued that enslaved Africans torn from their homes and kin gravitated toward those with “specialized knowledge that was situationally useful,” thus crafting new forms of belonging.109 Bomba’s authority at the thresholds between life and death suggests how adult women traveling among recaptive youth could become valuable figures of mediation and protection.110
FIGURE 5.2 Age and Gender Distribution of Castilian Shipmates. Source: American Colonization Society Records, Series 1.E.