The Slave Ship (25 page)

Newton incarcerated the enslaved on the lower deck, where they would breathe an almost-unbearable “hot and corrupted air.” At night the captives had trouble making their way through the crowd and the darkness to the “necessary tubs,” where the enslaved relieved themselves. Furious fights broke out between those chained to each other and between one who stepped on another. Sometimes, Newton noted, the tubs themselves turned over, making a horrific situation worse.

Meanwhile the bodies of the enslaved were rubbed raw by their chains and by being rolled around on the rough wooden planks of the lower deck as a result of the incessant tossing of the ship. On any given morning when the weather was good, after the gratings were lifted and the slaves brought up onto the main deck for “airing,” feeding, and “dancing,” Newton and crew might find a dead man shackled to a living one. The dead went over the side of the ship as the living were locked down by a chain reeved through their irons and attached to ringbolts fastened at intervals on the deck. Here they would be fed twice a day, their meals made of horse beans, peas, and rice with a little salt meat mixed in.
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Newton stockpiled food for the long, looming stay on the coast and the Middle Passage. He caught rainwater in barrels during storms and bought additional water at every opportunity. He purchased basket after basket of rice, tons of it, especially when it appeared, in April, that he would soon be leaving the coast. He moved the ship’s furnace to midship to create more room and make it easier to feed his growing “cargo.” He had the sailors clear the slave apartments and scrape them to remove the excrement and dirt. He then smoked the lower deck using “tar, tobacco and brimstone” to disinfect the living quarters and neutralize the stench.
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Before long a new shipboard enemy was discovered: the
Duke of Argyle
was teeming with rats. Newton wrote that “rats have done a great deal of damage [to the sails], we being quite over-run with them.” He had brought cats with him out of Liverpool, but they had died, and now he could not get another one at any price. Newton set men to work mending the damaged sails but discovered that the rats destroyed them faster than they could be repaired. Soon the rats added a new horror to shipboard life: “We have so many on board they are ready to devour every thing.” The ravenous creatures would nibble at the ship’s cables “and actually bite the people when they catch them asleep.”

The management of a disorderly crew remained a challenge. Will Lapworth, one of the sailors who came aboard from the HMS
Surprize
in exchange for Newton’s mutinous four, broke into the stateroom and tapped a keg of brandy, thereby earning from the captain a stint in irons and “a smart dozen” from his cat-o’-nine-tails. Newton also learned that third mate John Hamilton was experienced in the slave trade in an unexpected way: he had “shot a man last trip somewhere below Cape Mount.” The mate had just now taken a boat to the same area to trade, which caused Newton to fear revenge, something for which the natives of the region were known.

Newton exchanged information about sailors with other captains on the coast. He noted haunting news about the
Adlington,
his sister ship, also owned by Mr. Manesty. Its longboat had been “cut off ” by Africans at Rio Sestos, “the mate and 1 more killed.” He appealed to Captain Jasper of the
Prince Henry
“to see if I could get any hands.” (Offered only an unskilled landsman at full wages, he declined.) He learned that Captains Pemberton, Freeman, and Wainwright had lost their yawls to deserting crews. He found it “odd that 3 successive vessels should all bring piratical crews.” He did not pause to consider whether the conditions of work and life for seamen on the coast had anything to do with the oddness.

Even more worrisome than news of resistance by slaves and sailors was their health. The African tropics were deadly to Europeans, as everyone knew, which caused merchants like Manesty and captains like Newton to hire large crews, as they had done for the
Duke of Argyle.
Despite their cold calculations of premature death as they planned the voyage, the dangers of sickness remained a worry, as Newton himself would remark some years later. On most every voyage, the number and physical ability of seamen were declining just as the dangers of the trade were mounting, as more and more of the enslaved were being brought on board.

Members of the crew began to die on December 10, soon after the
Duke of Argyle
reached the coast. Edward Lawson expired of a fever and was buried quickly, “being extremely offensive.” A month later a boatload of the crew returned to the ship in poor health after purchasing rice, ivory, camwood, and eleven slaves. One man was already dead and buried ashore, and four others were so sick they had to be rowed back to the ship by the women they had purchased. One soon died of a “nervous fever” as others, including the surgeon and several of the slaves, fell ill. Newton quickly secured the services of a physician from a nearby Guineaman, who came aboard and did what he could, which was nothing. Chief mate John Bridson soon died of what Newton called “the most violent fever I have ever seen.” The few healthy members of the crew did what they could to bury the bodies.

The enslaved began to die on January 9, the first, according to Newton, “a fine woman slave, No. 11,” of a “lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from.” (Dead crew members were called by name and buried, while dead Africans were noted only by the number assigned when they came on board the ship and thrown over the side to the waiting sharks.) Fearing an epidemic, Newton ordered the sailors to scrape the rooms, smoke the ship for two hours, and wash the decks with vinegar. Yet the march of death on the lower deck continued: a “man slave, No. 6”; a boy, “No. 27”; a man, “No. 33,” all died of a flux that “has baffled all our medicines.” As the stay on the coast dragged on and the rainy season threatened, a dozen more fell ill. Numbers 100, 79, and 92 died. The last of these, a young girl, Newton sent ashore to a black trader, not to help her recover but “to free the ship of a nuisance.” Apparently she was not suffering in silence as the captain would have preferred. The
Duke of Argyle
now had “the melancholy appearance of a sickly ship,” and soon things got so bad that Newton was forced to cancel religious services. But by early May the situation had stabilized. Newton wrote, “I believe my trade for this voyage is finished.” Ten days later he would weigh anchor for Antigua, relieved that the most dangerous part of the voyage was over.

Soon after leaving the African coast, Newton may have regretted the decision to buy the slaves who had risen up on the French slaver. On the evening of May 26, a young man who had been “the whole voyage out of irons, first on account of a large ulcer, and since for this seeming good behaviour,” passed a large marlinespike down the gratings to the men slaves, who used it to free themselves from their fetters. This they did quickly and quietly, it “being an instrument that made no noise,” until “near 20 of them had broke their irons.” The men had not been at it long before the intended plot was discovered. Newton noted that a sailor saw the young man pass the marlinespike down below (although why this went unreported for an hour remains a mystery). Newton immediately got all the rebels back into their irons. The following day he “punished 6 of the ringleaders of the insurrection,” but he did not say how he did so. More than likely he whipped with the cat and tortured with the thumbscrews. He also had the carpenter repair the rear bulkhead the rebels had damaged belowdecks.

Newton considered it a “Favour of Providence” that he and his crew survived. “Their plot was exceedingly well laid,” he wrote, “and had they been let alone an hour longer, must have occasioned us a good deal of trouble and damage.” He also felt fortunate about the timing: “I have reason to be thankfull they did not make attempts on the coast when we often had 7 or 8 of our best men out of the ship at a time and the rest busy.” He also knew that the resistance was not over. The slaves “still look very gloomy and sullen and have doubtless mischeif in their heads if they could find an opportunity to vent it.” He hoped that the public punishments (whatever they were) and the firing of arms would, with “Divine Assistance,” allow him and the crew “to fully overawe them now.” In terrorem was the order of the day.

A couple of weeks later, Newton had another scare. It seemed that some of the men slaves “had found means to poison the water in the scuttle casks upon deck.” They had managed to drop one of their “country fetishes” or “talismans” into a cask of water, no doubt with a malevolent curse attached. Newton thought it was meant to “kill all those who drank of it.” His fear turned to derision as he mocked the superstitious pagans. He concluded, “if it please God thay make no worse attempts than to charm us to death, they will not much harm us, but it shews their intentions are not wanting.”

The
Duke of Argyle
suffered several more deaths among sailors and slaves but completed the Middle Passage, arriving in Antigua on July 3, 1751. Newton said nothing in the journal about the sale of the 146 people he had transported alive to the Caribbean. He noted in businesslike fashion that he took on a new cargo and commenced the homeward passage to Liverpool “very full and lumbered.” On the homeward passage, he suffered the death of his friend Dr. Robert Arthur, then a hurricane, which busied the sailors at the pump to keep the ship afloat. He arrived in Liverpool on October 7, 1751. His journal concludes,
“Soli Deo Gloria.”

The result of the voyage, to both owner and captain, was failure. Newton could count almost a quarter of his crew members dead (seven of thirty), and about one in six of the enslaved (28 of 164). The latter figure would no doubt have been larger had Newton been able to take on board the 250 slaves Mr. Manesty had wanted. The main goal of a slaver, Newton later explained, was “to be full.” His was not, and the difference between the intended and actual cargo was a main reason the voyage was not profitable. Newton’s career as a slave-ship captain was off to a shaky start.
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John Newton first saw the
African,
his new vessel, “upon the sticks,” meaning in the stocks of Fisher’s dockyard in Liverpool as it was being built. He held himself back during the festivities when the ship was launched, thinking that a more serious frame of mind was called for. Newton’s life had taken a deeper religious turn in the months between his first and second voyages, and he began to keep a spiritual diary, for three purposes: to “bring myself a deep sense of my past sins and follies”; to “enlarge my mind”; and to “compose my heart to a perfect peace & charity with all mankind.” Fearful that he had been backsliding, he vowed to pray twice a day, to study the Bible, to observe the Sabbath to the fullest, to be an example to others, and to be “a good soldier under the banner of Jesus Christ.” Conscious of his previous failure and now fearing “ruin,” he prayed earnestly for the success of the voyage.
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The
African
left Liverpool on June 30, 1752. Like the
Duke of Argyle,
the new vessel was a snow of modest carrying capacity, a hundred tons. Mr. Manesty was apparently prospering in the slave trade despite Newton’s less-than-profitable voyage. Once again the shipowner instructed the captain to pick up 250 slaves on the Windward Coast (Sierra Leone, Rio Nuñez, Cape Mesurado, Cape Pal) and to carry them this time to St. Kitts. The crew would be a little smaller at twenty-seven, but with the same division of labor. Only two members of the crew, steward Joseph Fellowes and apprentice Robert Cropper, reenlisted from the previous voyage.
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Except for a violent thunderstorm that shook the
African
on November 11 and stunned a couple of sailors with lightning, the outward passage was quiet and uneventful, Newton apparently paying more attention to his studies of the Bible, Latin, French, classics, and mathematics than to the business of the ship, which would prove to be a mistake. He wrote regularly and at length in his spiritual diary and carefully ordered his daily routine for devotional study, exercise, and rest. He thought life at sea was good for “an awakened mind,” especially if one can “restrain gross irregularities in others.” He wrote on Thursday, August 13, that he had arrived in Sierra Leone “with every body well, having not met with the least accident, & hardly the least inconvenience upon the passage.” He called his vessel a “peaceful kingdom.”
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Newton soon took a special interest in restraining the “gross irregularities” of his sailors, which is to say he became concerned with reforming their characters and saving their souls. He considered the “thoughtless ignorant & too often hardned condition of most Sailors,” their debauchery, profaneness, and insensibility, and the many dangers they faced, especially in African voyages. He noted that “prosperous adventures” like the slave trade often cost many lives and souls. He decided to hold mandatory prayers twice each Sunday and to demand a rigorous observance of the holy day. His seamen, however, apparently did not welcome his ministry, for nowhere in his writings does the devout captain suggest that he got anywhere with any of them.
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“Gross irregularities” not only continued, they worsened. As the captain engaged in his devotional exercises, several of his sailors were organizing a mutiny against him. So much for Christian fellowship. On November 15, seaman William Cooney informed the captain that Richard Swain had attempted to get him to sign a round-robin, a seditious paper through which sailors swore each other to loyalty and secrecy in subversive action, in this case, it seems, to seize the ship and turn pirate. Newton was astonished: “I thought myself very secure from any danger of this kind, as every body has behaved very quiet the whole voyage and I do not remember the least complaint or grievance.” Had he been too disengaged, too inattentive to the murmurings of the crew? Newton suddenly found himself in “ticklish times.” He and the loyal part of the crew had to be continually “upon our guard against the slaves and the round robin gentlemen.” It made matters worse that, as Newton explained, “I am not yet able to find out who are or are not in the gang.”
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