The Slave Ship (11 page)

Soon after the captain had secured his “living cargo” on the African coast, he informed Riland that now he would see that “a slave-ship was a very different thing from what it had been represented.” He referred to the abolitionist propaganda that had changed public opinion in England and abroad. Against all that he would show his passenger “the slaves rejoicing in their happy state.” To illustrate the point, he approached the enslaved women on board and said a few words, “to which they replied with three cheers and a loud laugh.” He then went forward on the main deck and “spoke the same words to the men, who made the same reply.” Turning triumphantly to Riland, the captain said, “Now, are you not convinced that Mr. Wilberforce has conceived very improperly of slave-ships?” He referred to the parliamentary leader who had trumpeted the horrors of slave transportation. Riland was not convinced. But he was intrigued, and he was eager to learn whether the captain might be telling the truth. He therefore observed closely “the economy of this slave ship.”
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In describing a medium-size vessel, apparently a bark or ship of approximately 140 tons, Riland began with the lower deck, the quarters where 240 enslaved people (170 males, 70 females) were incarcerated for sixteen hours a day and sometimes longer. Riland saw the vessel’s dungeonlike qualities. The men, shackled together two by two at the wrists and ankles and roughly 140 in number, were stowed immediately below the main deck in an apartment that extended from the mainmast all the way forward. The distance between the lower deck and the beams above was four and a half feet, so most men would not have been able to stand up straight. Riland did not mention platforms, which were routinely built on the lower deck of slavers, from the edge of the ship inward about six feet, to increase the number of slaves to be carried. The vessel was probably stowed to its maximum number of slaves according to the Dolben Act of 1788, which permitted slave ships to carry five slaves per three tons of carrying capacity.

On the main deck above, a large wooden grating covered the entrance to the men’s quarters, the open latticework designed to permit a “sufficiency of air” to enter. For the same purpose, two or three small scuttles, holes for admitting air, had been cut in the side of the vessel, although these were not always open. At the rear of the apartment was a “very strong bulk-head,” constructed by the ship’s carpenter in a way that would not obstruct the circulation of air through the lower deck. Still, Riland considered ventilation to be poor down below, which meant that men were subjected to a “most impure and stifling atmosphere.” Worse, they had too little room: the space allotted was “far too small, either for comfort or health.” Riland saw that the men, when brought up from below, looked “quite livid and ghastly as well as gloomy and dejected.” Having been kept in darkness for many hours on end, they would emerge each morning blinking hard against the sunlight.
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The midsection of the lower deck, from near the mainmast back to the mizzenmast, was the women’s apartment, for the
Liberty,
unlike most slavers, did not have a separate area for boys. To separate the men and women, therefore, a space of about ten feet was left between the men’s and women’s quarters as a passageway for the crew to get into the hold, where they stowed trading goods, naval stores, and provisions (food and water, probably in oversize “Guinea casks”). Fore and aft, the women’s room was enclosed by sturdy bulkheads. The women, most of whom were not in irons, had more room and freedom of movement than the men, as only about forty-five of them slept here. The grating lay, boxlike, about three feet above the main deck and “admitted a good deal of air,” thought Riland. Those down below might have begged to differ.
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Two additional apartments were created beneath the quarterdeck, which was raised about seven feet above the main deck and extended to the stern of the vessel. The aftermost of these was the cabin, where hung the cots of the captain and Riland himself. But even these two most privileged people shared their sleeping space as every night twenty-five little African girls gathered to sleep beneath them. The captain warned his cabinmate that “the smell would be unpleasant for a few days,” but reassured him that “when we got into the trade winds it would no longer be perceived.” Riland’s gentlemanly sensibilities apparently never recovered, for he later wrote, “During the night I hung over a crowd of slaves huddled together on the floor, whose stench at times was almost beyond endurance.”

The situation was similar in the other, adjacent room, which opened up onto the main deck. Here slept the surgeon and first mate, who also shared the space: beneath them each night lay twenty-nine boys. Other spaces on the main deck were reserved for the sick, especially those with dysentery, who were “kept separate from the others.” Sick men were placed in the longboat, which had a tarpaulin thrown over it as an awning; sick women went under the half deck. Very little room was left for the sailors, who hung their hammocks under the longboat, near the sick, hoping that the awning would protect them from the elements, especially nightly dews on the African coast.

Riland emphasized another feature that was literally central to the social organization of the main deck—the barricado, a strong wooden barrier ten feet high that bisected the ship near the mainmast and extended about two feet over each side of the vessel. This structure, built to turn any vessel into a slaver, separated the bonded men from the women and served as a defensive barrier behind which the crew could retreat (to the women’s side) in moments of slave insurrection, but it was also a military installation of sorts from which the crew guarded and controlled the enslaved people on board. Built into the barricade, noted Riland, was a small door, through which might pass only one person at a time, slowly. Whenever the men slaves were on the main deck, two armed sentinels protected the door while “four more were placed, with loaded blunderbusses in their hands, on top of the barricade, above the head of the slaves: and two cannons, loaded with small shot, were pointed toward the main-deck through holes cut in the barricade to receive them.” The threat of insurrection was ever present. The captain assured a nervous Riland that he “kept such a guard on the slaves as would baffle all their efforts, should they attempt to rise.” They had already tried once while on the coast of Africa and failed. When the slaves were brought above, the main deck became a closely guarded prison yard.

Riland noted the ship’s longboat, where the sick men slaves were isolated, but he did not explain its significance to the ship and its business. This strong vessel, up to thirty feet in length, with a mast and often a swivel cannon, could be sailed or rowed and was capable of carrying a sizable burden. It could even be used to tow the ship when becalmed. Slavers also usually carried a second small craft called a yawl, which had a sail but was more commonly rowed by four to six sailors. These two vessels were critical to a slave ship, as almost all trading on the African coast was done at anchor, requiring an endless traffic back and forth to the shore, carrying manufactured goods in one direction and the enslaved in the other (in African canoes as well). Both boats usually had shallow hulls for easy beaching and for stability when carrying valuable cargo.
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Other features of the slave ship, on which Riland did not remark, were nonetheless important. The gun room, usually near the captain’s cabin (as far away as possible from the apartment of the enslaved men), would have been presided over by the vessel’s gunner and closely guarded. Special large iron or copper boilers would have been part of the cook’s domain in the galley, so he could prepare food for some 270 people, both the enslaved and the crew. Netting, a fencelike assemblage of ropes, would be stretched by the crew around the ship to prevent slaves from jumping overboard.
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Because slave ships like the
Liberty
spent long periods of time on the coast of Africa gathering their human cargoes, they usually had another special feature, that is, copper-sheathed hulls, to protect them against boring tropical worms, or molluscs, a prime example of which was
Teredo navalis,
the shipworm. By 1800, copper sheathing was common, even though it was a relatively recent technical development. Early in the eighteenth century, the hulls of vessels bound to tropical waters were sheathed, usually with an extra layer of deal board, about half an inch in thickness, tacked to the hull (as Manesty had ordered). Beginning in 1761, the British Royal Navy, which patrolled regularly in the tropics, experimented in copper sheathing, with success. Within a few years, slavers were being sheathed, although experimentation continued, and by the 1780s the practice had become common, especially on larger vessels.
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The 350-ton
Triumph,
formerly a slaver called the
Nelly,
was built in Liverpool and announced for sale by auction in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1809 as “coppered to the bends” and “copper fastened.”
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In the last quarter century of the slave trade, from 1783 to 1808, one of the features most commonly emphasized in the sale of any given slave ship was its copper bottom.
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By the time the
Liberty
sailed in 1801, some of the larger slave ships used windsails to enhance ventilation and improve the health of the enslaved belowdecks. The windsail was a funnel tube, made of canvas and open at the top, hooped at various descending sections, and attached to the hatches to “convey a stream of fresh air downward into the lower apartments of a ship.” The windsail had been devised for use on men-of-war, to preserve the health of the sailors, and had now been applied to the slave trade, although inconsistently. One observer noted a few years earlier that only one in twenty slavers had windsails, and the
Liberty
was almost certainly among the vast majority without.
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Riland also noted the chains used to bind the men slaves aboard the
Liberty,
and here he touched upon another essential part of a prison ship: the hardware of bondage. These would have included manacles and shackles, neck irons, chains of various kinds, and perhaps a branding iron. Many slave ships carried thumbscrews, a medieval instrument of torture in which the thumbs of a rebellious slave would be inserted into a viselike contraption and slowly crushed, sometimes to force a confession. A sale on board the slave ship
John
announced by the
Connecticut Centinel
on August 2, 1804, featured “300 pair of well made Shackles” and “150 Iron Collars together with a number of Ring-Bolts Chains &c. In suitable order for the confinement of slaves.”
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These distinctive characteristics made Guineamen easy to identify after a catastrophe, when, for example, a brig without masts was “driven ashore upon a reef ” in Grand Caicos in the Bahama Islands in 1790. It was known to be “an old Guineaman, from the number of handcuffs found in her.”
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A few years later, in 1800, Captain Dalton of the
Mary-Ann
found another ghost ship on the coast of Florida. It was a large vessel lying on its side, without sails, full of water, with no crew members in sight. It turned out to be the
Greyhound,
of Port-land, Maine, recognizable to the captain as a slaver “by the gratings fore and aft.” John Riland suffered no such disaster, but he was well aware that he had boarded a peculiar sort of machine. Its capacity to incarcerate and transport African bodies had helped to bring into existence a new Atlantic world of labor, plantations, trade, empire, and capitalism.
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CHAPTER 3

African Paths to the Middle Passage

In late 1794, about a hundred miles up the Rio Pongas from the Windward Coast, two bands of hunters from rival Gola and Ibau kingdoms ventured into disputed territory in pursuit of game. An Ibau man speared the animal, or so one of his countrymen later insisted, but the Gola claimed the prize as rightfully their own. A fray ensued, in which a Gola man was killed and several Ibau severely wounded. The Gola took flight, and the Ibau brought the game home in triumph. But soon the outraged king of Gola raised an army and invaded the nearest Ibau lands, destroying a couple of villages and taking prisoners whom he promptly sold as slaves. Dizzy with success, he pressed on to his enemy’s capital, Quappa, hoping to subjugate the entire kingdom. After several furious battles and at last a tactical miscalculation that allowed his warriors to be trapped, the king retreated and escaped but lost seven hundred of his best fighters to the Ibau. Once the captives were safely bound and confined, the king of the Ibau sent word down the rivers to the coast that he wished to trade with the “Sea Countries.” He found a taker when the slave ship
Charleston
arrived on the coast. Captain James Connolly sent Joseph Hawkins with an African guide through the dense forest to purchase one hundred Gola warriors and march them to the coast.
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Meanwhile the “greatest warriors” of the Gola lay naked in their place of confinement, “bound indiscriminately together by the hands and legs, the cords being fastened to the ground by stakes.” When Hawkins arrived, he was instructed by the king of the Ibau to select the ones he wanted. A troop of Ibau warriors would drive the coffle to the sea. They secured the prisoners to poles in rows, four feet apart, each with a wicker bandage around the neck, elbows pinioned back. As they commenced their march to the waterside, the countenances of the Gola prisoners turned to “sullen melancholy.” They stopped, turned around, and looked back, their “eyes flowing with tears.”
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After an uneventful six-day march, the coffle came to the river’s edge and to a momentous transition—from land to water, from African to European ownership, from one technology of control to another. Waiting for them with iron manacles and shackles were the sailors of the
Charleston,
who had come upriver in a small shallop, then rowed two boats to the riverbank to take the prisoners. The prisoners’ prospects for escape seemed to be at an end, all hopes dashed. The captives began to wail. The “change from the cordage to iron fetters,” wrote Hawkins, “rent their hopes and hearts together.”