The Slave Ship (19 page)

Believing as he did in the power of supernatural spirits to rule the natural world, Equiano was especially frightened when the waves around him began to churn and run high. He thought that “the Ruler of the seas was angry, and I expected to be offered up to appease him.” Later, at dusk one evening, members of the crew spotted some grampuses near the ship. Equiano thought they were the spirits of the seas and that he might be sacrificed to them. During the latter stages of the passage, his mind was filled with agony. He appeared before the captain “crying and trembling.” At last, after thirteen weeks, the sailors of the
Industrious Bee
sighted land. “Every heart on board seemed gladdened on our reaching the shore,” recalled Equiano, “and none more than mine.” The terror of the slave ship had persisted from the original Middle Passage until Equiano finally left his third vessel in Falmouth, England.

Equiano understood the passage from expropriation in Africa to exploitation in America. Millions like himself and his sister fell “victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer.” He went through a jarring series of separations. What remains to be emphasized is how he responded to his dispossession, how he cooperated with and connected to others. The process began on the internal passage in Africa from village to seacoast, and it continued on the slave ships, on the coast and in his long, segmented Middle Passage.
²⁵

During his grueling trek to the coast, Equiano remained attached for part of the way to his sister, the last link to his family and village. He twice joined African families, first that of the chieftain-blacksmith for a month, then that of the wealthy widow and her son in Tinmah for two months. On the way to each and again after he was sold, he apparently formed no meaningful ties with the numerous African traders with whom he traveled, nor with any other enslaved people besides his sister. Indeed how could he while being endlessly bought and sold along the route? He was radically individualized as a commodity, a slave.

Still he was not yet culturally alienated, as he remained part of an Igbo speech community on the way to the coast. He noted that “a great many days journey” after his kidnapping, he found the “same language” being spoken among the people around him. The same was true in Tinmah. In fact, he explained that “from the time I left my own nation I always found somebody that understood me till I came to the sea coast.” There were variations in dialects, which he found he easily learned. He added that on his way to the coast, “I acquired two or three different tongues.” Even though Equiano suffered “the violence of the African trader,” he emphasized that his treatment during the passage to the coast was not cruel. He felt compelled to explain to his readers, “in honour of those sable destroyers of human rights, that I never met with any ill treatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them, when necessary, to keep them from running away.”

Entry into the astonishing, terrifying slave ship meant, in Equiano’s case as in many others, a traumatic transition from African to European control. This was the moment of his most extreme alienation, and the height of his death wish, which would come and go but remain with him for a long while. The ship seems to have induced a stark, polar, racialized way of thinking and understanding. The seamen appeared to the young Equiano as evil spirits and horrible-looking “white people.” More tellingly, the African traders who brought him aboard the ship were “black people,” with whom, suddenly, he had newly discovered sympathies. It was they who tried to comfort him when he fainted on the main deck, and it was they who represented the only surviving link to his home. When they left the ship, they “left me abandoned to despair,” without a means of “returning to my native country.” At the point of no return, he wished for the familiarity and comfort of African slavery, as he identified with “black people.” At least they would not eat him.

For the rest of his time on the ship, Equiano employed the monolithic category “white people,” which was, in his mind, more or less synonymous with mysterious and oppressive terror. The conversations he recorded with his countrymen concerned the strange “white people,” where they came from, why he did not know of them, did they have women, and what this thing was that they arrived on, the ship. Most of his observations about the crew referred to disciplinary violence, usually flogging and suicide prevention. The most common word he used to describe them was “cruel.” Equiano never mentioned the captain of the slave ship, nor did he mention any officers, and indeed he showed a consciousness of hierarchy or division among the crew on only one occasion—when the white sailor was beaten with a rope, died, and was unceremoniously thrown overboard “like a brute,” or animal.

There were, however, a few moments in the narrative where relations with the Europeans were not marked by violence and cruelty. He notes the offer of liquor by a sailor, to cheer his spirits (even though the result was greater agitation). On another occasion sailors from a different slave ship came aboard his own: “Several of the strangers also shook hands with us black people, and made motions with their hands, signifying I suppose we were to go to their country; but we did not understand them.” Another sailor indulged his curiosity about the quadrant. It was, however, not until Equiano got on board the nonslaver
Industrious Bee
that his monolithic view of the “white people” began to break down. His early impressions were very much at odds with the radical, antiracializing phrase from the Bible he used to introduce his book, that all people were “of one blood.”

The process of dispossession and reconnection was reflected in Equiano’s use—and nonuse—of personal names as he tried to make his way in a world of nameless strangers. In recounting his history starting at the moment he was taken from his home until after he arrived in Virginia, a trek by land and water that lasted sixteen months, he names no one, neither African nor European, thereby emphasizing his own lonely and total alienation. He does not mention even the names of his father, mother, or sister. This was not accidental, for he also showed an awareness of naming as an act of power. Just as the loss of a name was part of the culture stripping of dispossession, the assignment of a new name could be an act of aggression and domination. It was on the slave ship that his given name, Olaudah Equiano, was taken from him and lost until he reclaimed it thirty-five years later. He wrote, “on board the African snow I was called Michael.” On the next vessel, the sloop to Virginia, he was named again, this time Jacob. Finally, aboard the
Industrious Bee,
his new master, Captain Pascal, gave him a fourth name, Gustavus Vassa. Equiano recalled, with some pride, that he “refused to be called so, and told him as well as I could that I would be called Jacob.” (Why he preferred this name, he does not say.) But Captain Pascal insisted on the new name, to which the young boy “refused to answer.” The resistance, Equiano wrote, “gained me many a cuff; so at length I submitted.” He thus lost his original name to violence and gained a new one in the same way.
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Equiano saw that his fellow enslaved—the “multitude of black people, of every description chained together”—were themselves a motley crew of different classes, ethnicities, and genders who had been jumbled together aboard the slave ship. He saw the struggle to communicate and to be understood, for the sake of survival. For Equiano this began with the black traders who had brought him aboard the ship. He then found his “own countrymen” in the men’s apartment on the lower deck. He also discovered Igbo speakers, indeed “Africans of all languages,” in Barbados, sent by the slave owners to pacify the newly arrived “salt water negroes” as they were called. Equiano lamented the loss of his countrymen and fellow Igbo speakers during his voyage to Virginia; there was “no one to talk to me.” But at the same time, he communicated with people who did not speak his own original language. He noted that he was able to talk with someone “from a distant part of Africa,” and he noted also his own acquisition of English, learned mostly from sailors aboard his various ships. This, too, would have helped his communication with other Africans, especially those from coastal regions. Additionally, Equiano witnessed the formation of a new language—of resistance manifested in action, as, for example, when the three slaves defied the crew and jumped over the side of the ship. This, too, could contribute to a sense of solidarity and a community aboard the slave ship.

Out of the fragile bonds grew a new kinship among people who called themselves “shipmates.”
²⁷
Although Equiano does not use the word, he did articulate clearly its basic bonding principle. And he did so in a rather surprising way, referring not to a fellow African but rather to his American shipmate Richard Baker, a teenager like himself with whom he grew very close. They lived together in cramped quarters, sharing the intimate difficulties of life in a ship: “he and I have gone through many sufferings together on shipboard; and we have many nights lain in each other’s bosoms when we were in great distress.” It was precisely so for the hundreds on board each slave ship.

In this way dispossessed Africans formed themselves into informal mutual-aid societies, in some cases even “nations,” on the lower deck of a slave ship. Like his many “countrymen,” Equiano would slowly come to understand a new meaning of the Igbo proverb
Igwe bu ke
—“Multitude is strength.”
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CHAPTER 5

James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon

Few people in the eighteenth century were better equipped to capture the drama of the slave trade than was James Field Stanfield. He had made a slaving voyage, and a gruesome one it was, from Liverpool to Benin and Jamaica and back during the years 1774-76, and he had lived for eight months at a slave-trading factory in the interior of the Slave Coast. An educated man, he was a writer who would over the course of his lifetime acquire something of a literary reputation. And he was, perhaps most tellingly, an actor, a strolling player, whose work in the theater probed the triumphs and tragedies of humanity. So in the late 1780s, when Stanfield, encouraged by a nascent abolitionist movement, decided to write about the horrors of the slave trade, he had a unique combination of talents and experience at hand.
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Stanfield was one of the earliest to write a first-person exposé of the slave trade. His
Observations on a Guinea Voyage, in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Clarkson
was published by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London in May 1788.
²
Later that year the pamphlet was serialized in seven installments and published in America, appearing in the
Providence Gazette and Country Journal,
placed there, no doubt, by local abolitionists.
³
The following year Stanfield drew on his experience of the slave ship again, writing
The Guinea Voyage, A Poem in Three Books
.
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In 1795 he published a shorter poem, without a formal title, under the inscription “Written on the Coast of Africa in the year 1776,” in the
Freemason’s Magazine, or General Complete Library
.
⁵
Taken together, these works represent a dramatic rendering of his experience aboard the slave ship. The decks were a stage, and the theater was the Atlantic for the “performance of a Guinea voyage.”
⁶
A reviewer in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1789 noted that
The Guinea Voyage
was, like the previous
Observations,
an “addition to the stage machinery of the abolition of the slave trade.”
⁷
The metaphor was apt.

Stanfield was also the first to write about the slave trade from the perspective of the common sailor. This he himself considered to be of the first importance. He was angry that an “impenetrable veil . . . has been thrown over this traffic for such a number of years” and that important information has “been withheld from the publick eye by every effort that interest, ingenuity, and influence, could devise.” With bitter sarcasm he asked:

 
No, Stanfield answered, those with a material interest in the trade could never be trusted to tell the truth about it. The only person who could “give the truth in plain, unbiassed information” was the common sailor, who, like the others, knew the slave trade firsthand. The problem was, there were “few meagre survivors” to tell the tale, as many sailors on slaving voyages were lost to death and desertion. Stanfield would thus take it upon himself to represent the dead and the missing as he wrote his accounts, which were organized and narrated to “connect the whole round of a GUINEA VOYAGE,” to tell the dramatic truths of the slave trade and the experience of the common sailor within it. Among the dozens who wrote poems about the commerce in human flesh, he was one of only a handful who had actually traveled through what he called “the dark mazes of th’
inhuman Trade.
” Stanfield’s descriptions of the ship and the trade were among the very best ever written by a working sailor.
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