The Slave Ship (10 page)

Most slave ships, especially after 1750, had a number of landsmen on board. These were young, unskilled workers, sometimes from the countryside, sometimes from the city, who signed on to Guineamen when laboring jobs along the waterfront were hard to find, as they often were in peacetime. Their work consisted mainly of guarding the slaves, although they would also be deployed for any variety of unskilled manual labor aboard the ship or ashore. During the course of the voyage, they would learn the ship’s work and after two or three voyages qualify as ordinary seamen. Until then they ranked only above the ship’s boys in the working hierarchy. The boys, usually between the ages of eight and fourteen and one, two, or three in number, were being “bred up to the sea” by serving an apprenticeship, usually to the captain himself. Like Samuel Robinson, they performed odd jobs and were the object of no small amount of horseplay and even cruelty.

A vessel of almost any size could be a slave ship, as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson discovered, to his utter astonishment, in June 1787. He had journeyed from London to Bristol to gather evidence about the slave trade. He was especially interested in the “construction and dimensions” of the ships and the packing of the bodies of would-be plantation workers. Having a few months earlier gone aboard Captain Colley’s
Fly,
a more-or-less typical two-hundred-ton ship that lay at anchor in the Thames, Clarkson had a clear image of the slaver in mind. He was shocked to find at Bristol “two little sloops” that were fitting out for Africa. One was a vessel of only twenty-five tons; its master intended to pick up seventy slaves. The other was even smaller. It measured eleven tons and would take on board a mere thirty slaves. One of Clarkson’s companions explained that vessels of this size sometimes served as tenders, going up and down West African coastal rivers, gathering three or four slaves at a time and delivering them to the big ships anchored off the coast and bound for the New World. But the tiny vessels discovered by Clarkson were said to be slavers in their own right and would transport their own captives to the West Indies.
³⁷

Clarkson did not believe it. He even wondered whether his informants were trying to trick him into making absurd statements about the slave trade that could be easily refuted and thereby “injure the great cause which I had undertaken.” He learned that one of the vessels had been built as “a pleasure-boat for the accommodation of only six persons” on the Severn River and that one if not both were to be sold as pleasure craft after they delivered their slaves in the West Indies. Clarkson decided to measure both vessels and to ask one of his companions to find the builder of the vessels and get his measurements, too. The official information corresponded with Clarkson’s own figures. In the larger vessel of the two, the area where the slaves would be incarcerated measured thirty-one feet in length by ten feet four inches in width, narrowing to five feet at the ends. Each slave, he calculated, would get about three square feet. In the smaller vessel, the slave room was twenty-two feet long, eight feet (tapering to four feet) wide. The height from keel to beam was five feet eight inches, but three feet were taken up by “ballast, cargo, and provisions,” leaving for thirty slaves four square feet each and about two feet eight inches of vertical space. Still incredulous, Clarkson had four persons make separate inquiries to confirm that the vessels really were going to Africa. All four found the original declaration to be true, and indeed Clarkson himself soon confirmed the matter through official documents in the Bristol customshouse.
³⁸

Clarkson would have been even more astonished to learn that the eleven-ton vessel he found was not the smallest on record. A ten-ton vessel called the
Hesketh
sailed from Liverpool to the Windward Coast and carried thirty enslaved people on to St. Kitts in 1761, and vessels of the same size would deliver slaves to Cuba and Brazil in the middle of the nineteenth century. Two eleven-ton vessels, the
Sally
and the
Adventure,
made voyages from Rhode Island to Africa in 1764 and 1770. As Clarkson learned, even the smallest vessel could be a slave ship.
³⁹

At the other end of the spectrum was the
Parr,
a 566-ton behemoth built by shipwright John Wright in Liverpool in 1797 and named for owners Thomas and John Parr, members of an eminent local slave-trading family. This was a square-sterned, double-decked ship, 127 feet long on deck and 32 feet broad, with three masts, quarter galleries, and a woman’s figurehead on the prow. The ship was heavily armed, boasting twenty eighteen-pounders and twelve eighteen- pounder carronnades. A contemporary noted, “She is looked upon by judges to be a very beautiful vessel and the largest employed out of this port in the African trade for which she was designed.” Built to accommodate seven hundred slaves and requiring a crew of one hundred sailors, the
Parr
proved to be not only the largest Liverpool slaver but the largest of the entire British Atlantic. Still, it came to a bad and sudden end not long after Wright and his gang of fellow shipyard workers launched it. In a trade infamous for human catastrophe, the
Parr
suffered one of the greatest of them all: in 1798, on her first voyage, to the Bight of Biafra, Bonny in particular, after Captain David Christian had reached the coast and taken on board about two hundred slaves, the ship exploded, killing everyone on board. The cause of the blast is unknown.
⁴⁰

If the diminutive eleven-ton sloop Clarkson found represented one end of the spectrum and the massive
Parr
the other, what were the most typical vessels in terms of design and size? Slave traders in Britain and America most commonly employed the sloop, schooner, brig, brigantine, snow, bark, and ship (which was both a specific type and a generic label for all vessels). Guineamen tended to be middling in size and carrying capacity: they were smaller than ships employed in the East and West Indies trades, about the same size as those that sailed to the Mediterranean, and larger than the craft involved in Northern European and coastal commerce. Like vessels in almost all trades in the eighteenth century they tended to increase in size over time, although this trend was more apparent in Bristol, London, and especially Liverpool than in the New World. American slave-ship merchants and captains preferred smaller vessels, especially sloops and schooners, which required smaller crews and carried smaller cargoes of enslaved Africans, who could be gathered more quickly on shorter stays on the African coast. British merchants preferred somewhat larger vessels, which required more logistical coordination but also promised greater profits while sharing some of the advantages of the smaller American vessels. Vessels built for one port might not work for others, as Liverpool slave-trade merchants made clear in 1774 when they said of the American slaver the
Deborah,
“though she was constructed in the usual manner for the Trade from Rhode Island to Africa,” presumably to carry rum, “she would by no means suit for the Trade from Liverpool. ”
⁴¹

The smallest vessel Clarkson saw was a sloop, which was not uncommon in the slave trade, especially out of American ports. The sloop usually ranged from 25 to 75 tons, had a single mast, fore-and-aft rigging, and a mainsail attached “to the mast on its foremost edge, and to a long boom below; by which it is occasionally shifted to either quarter.” It was fast in the water and easily maneuvered, with shallow draft and light displacement. It required a modest crew of five to ten. An example of this kind of vessel appeared in the
Newport Mercury
(Rhode Island) on January 7, 1765. Offered for sale was “a SLOOP of about 50 Tons, compleatly fitted for a Guineaman, with all her Tackle. Likewise a few Negro Boys.”
⁴²
Captain William Shearer provided a more detailed description after his sloop the
Nancy
was seized by a mutinous crew on the river Gambia in April 1753. Built in Connecticut only nine months earlier and measuring 70 tons, the
Nancy
was square-sterned and deep-waisted, had six air ports cut into each side, carried four small cannon, and was steered by a wheel. Most of the exterior had been painted black. The stern was yellow, matching the curtains in the cabin and a small frieze nearby. Another frieze was painted the color of pearl, while the area around the ports and the roundhouse were streaked with vermilion. Captain Shearer added that the vessel “has no Register or Custom House Papers relating to the Cargo,” perhaps because the crew had destroyed them. His final comment was that the
Nancy
“is an exceeding good going Vessel, and sails extremely well both upon a Wind and large.”
⁴³

Two-masted vessels were common in the slave trade. The schooner, which emerged from American shipyards in the early eighteenth century, was exemplified by the
Betsey,
sold at public auction at Crafts North Wharf, Charleston, South Carolina, in 1796. It was described as “a good double decked vessel, well calculated for a Guineaman, about 90 tons burthen, and may be sent to sea immediately, being in good order.” The brigantine, or brig, and the snow (snauw), which had the same hull form but different rigging, were especially popular in the slave trade, largely because of their intermediate size. They ranged from 30 to 150 tons, with the average slaver running to about 100 tons. Vessels of this size often had more actual deck and aerial space per ton than larger ones, as pointed out by Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, M.D., in 1797.
⁴⁴

According to William Falconer, the compiler of one of the greatest maritime dictionaries of the eighteenth century, the ship was “the first rank of vessels which are navigated on the ocean.” It was the largest of the vessels employed in the slave trade, combining good speed and spacious carrying capacity. It had three masts, each of which carried a lower mast, a topmast, and likely a topgallant mast. As a man-of-war, the ship was something of a “moveable fortress or citadel,” carrying batteries of cannon and possessing huge destructive power. As a merchant ship, it was more variable in size, ranging from 100 tons up to a few at 500 tons or more, like the
Parr,
and capable of carrying seven hundred to eight hundred slaves. The average slave ship was the size of the first one Clarkson had seen, 200 tons like the
Fly.
Not far from typical was the
Eliza,
which was to be sold at public auction at the Carolina Coffee House in Charleston on May 7, 1800. Lying at Goyer’s wharf, with “all her appurtenances,” for any prospective buyer to see was the copper-bottomed ship of 230 tons, “fitted for carrying 12 guns, a remarkable fast sailer, well adapted for the West India or African trade, exceedingly well sound in stores, and may be sent to sea at an easy expense.”
⁴⁵

As the slave trade grew and changed over the years, the Guineaman evolved. Most slavers were typical sailing ships of their time, and most of them were not built specifically for the trade. Vessels of many sizes and types remained involved in the trade for the full duration of the period from 1700 to 1808, but a more specialized slaving vessel did emerge, especially from the shipyards of Liverpool, after 1750. It was larger and had more special features: air ports, copper bottoms, more room between decks. The ship underwent further modification in the late 1780s, as a result of pressures created by the abolitionist movement and the passage of reform legislation in Parliament to improve the health and treatment of both sailors and slaves. The slave ship, as Malachy Postlethwayt, Joseph Manesty, Abraham Fox, and Thomas Clarkson all from their varying vantage points knew, was one of the most important technologies of the day.

John Riland read the letter from his father with rising horror. The year was 1801, and it was time for the young man to return to the family plantation in Jamaica after his studies at Christ Church, Oxford. His father gave him precise instructions: he would journey from Oxford to Liverpool, where he would take a berth as a passenger aboard a slave ship. From there he would sail to the Windward Coast of Africa, observe the purchase and loading of a “living cargo” of slaves, and travel with them across the Atlantic to Port Royal, Jamaica. Young Riland had been exposed to antislavery ideas and now had serious misgivings about the commerce in human flesh; he had, he noted, no desire to be “imprisoned in a floating lazar-house, with a crowd of diseased and wretched slaves.” He took comfort from a classmate’s comment that recent abolitionist accounts of the Middle Passage and the slave ship had been “villainously exaggerated.”
⁴⁶

It so happened that the senior Riland, like the son, had begun to entertain doubts about slavery. His Christian conscience apparently told him that the young man who would inherit the family estate should see firsthand what the slave trade was all about. The dutiful son did as the patriarch commanded. He went to Liverpool and sailed as a privileged passenger with a “Captain Y——” aboard his ship, the
Liberty.
Riland used the experience to write one of the most detailed accounts of a slave ship ever penned.
⁴⁷

When Riland stepped aboard the vessel he would take to Africa and across the Atlantic, the captain apparently knew that he was no friend of the slave trade. The man in charge of the wooden world was determined, therefore, to present the ship and its practices in the best possible light. He tried, wrote Riland, to “soften the revolting circumstances which he saw would develop themselves on our landing [in Africa]; during also our stay on the coast, and in our subsequent voyage to Jamaica.” He referred to the purchase of more than two hundred captives, the close crowding, the inevitable sickness and death. The captain also undertook to educate his young passenger. He sat with him night after night in the captain’s cabin (where Riland slept and ate), conversing with him by the dim light of swaying lamps, explaining patiently how “the children of Ham” benefited by being sent to American plantations such as the one the senior Riland owned.