The Slave Ship (3 page)

 
Curiously, many of the poignant tales within the great drama have never been told, and the slave ship itself has been a neglected topic within a rich historical literature on the Atlantic slave trade. Excellent research has been conducted on the origins, timing, scale, flows, and profits of the slave trade, but there exists no broad study of the vessel that made the world-transforming commerce possible. There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization. There exists no analysis of the instrument that facilitated Europe’s “commercial revolution,” its building of plantations and global empires, its development of capitalism, and eventually its industrialization. In short, the slave ship and its social relations have shaped the modern world, but their history remains in many ways unknown.
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Scholarship on the slave ship may be limited, but scholarship on the slave trade is, like the Atlantic, vast and deep. Highlights include Philip Curtin’s landmark study
The African Slave Trade: A Census
(1969); Joseph Miller’s classic
Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830
(1988), which explores the Portuguese slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century; Hugh Thomas’s grand synthesis
The Slave Trade: The Story of the African Slave Trade, 1440-1870
(1999); and Robert Harms’s elegant micro-history of a single voyage of the
Diligent
from France to Whydah to Martinique in 1734-35. The publication of
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database,
compiled, edited, and introduced by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, represents an extraordinary scholarly achievement.
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Other important studies of the slave trade have been literary, by writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, Caryl Phillips, and Manu Herbstein.
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What follows is not a new history of the slave trade. It is, rather, something more modest, an account that uses both the abundant scholarship on the subject and new material to look at the subject from a different vantage, from the decks of a slave ship. Nor is it an exhaustive survey of its subject. A broader history that compares and connects the slave ships of all the Atlantic powers—not only Britain and the American colonies but also Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden—remains to be written. More attention also needs to be trained on the connecting links between, on the eastern Atlantic, African societies and the slave ship and, on the western, the slave ship and plantation societies of the Americas. There is still much to be learned about the “most magnificent drama of the last thousand years of human history.”
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The shift of focus to the slave ship expands the number and variety of actors in the drama and makes the drama itself, from prologue to epilogue, more complex. If heretofore the main actors have been relatively small but powerful groups of merchants, planters, politicians, and abolitionists, now the cast includes captains in their thousands, sailors in their hundreds of thousands, and slaves in their millions. Indeed the enslaved now appear as the first and primary abolitionists as they battle the conditions of enslavement aboard the ships on a daily basis and as they win allies over time among metropolitan activists and dissident sailors, middle-class saints and proletarian sinners. Other important players were African rulers and merchants, as well as workers in England and America, who joined the cause of abolition and indeed turned it into a successful mass movement.
¹⁶

Why a human history? Barry Unsworth captured one of the reasons in his epic novel
Sacred Hunger.
Liverpool merchant William Kemp is talking with his son Erasmus about his slave ship, which, he has just learned by correspondence, has taken on board its human cargo in West Africa and set sail for the New World.

 
Unsworth describes a “violence of abstraction” that has plagued the study of the slave trade from its beginning. It is as if the use of ledgers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables—the merchants’ comforting methods—has rendered abstract, and thereby dehumanized, a reality that must, for moral and political reasons, be understood concretely. An ethnography of the slave ship helps to demonstrate not only the cruel truth of what one group of people (or several) was willing to do to others for money—or, better, capital—but also how they managed in crucial respects to hide the reality and consequences of their actions from themselves and from posterity. Numbers can occlude the pervasive torture and terror, but European, African, and American societies still live with their consequences, the multiple legacies of race, class, and slavery. The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness.
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To conclude on a personal note, this has been a painful book to write, and if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read. There is no way around this, nor should there be. I offer this study with the greatest reverence for those who suffered almost unthinkable violence, terror, and death, in the firm belief that we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism.

CHAPTER 1

Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade

A voyage into this peculiar hell begins with the human seascape, stories of the people whose lives were shaped by the slave trade. Some grew prosperous and powerful, others poor and weak. An overwhelming majority suffered extreme terror, and many died in horrific circumstances. People of all kinds—men, women, and children, black, white, and all shades in between, from Africa, Europe, and the Americas—were swept into the trade’s surreal, swirling vortex. They included, at the bottom, a vast and lowly proletariat, hundreds of thousands of sailors, who, in their tarred breeches, scuttled up and down the ratlines of a slave ship, and millions of slaves, who, in their nakedness, crouched on the lower deck. They included, at the top, a small, high, and mighty Atlantic ruling class of merchants, planters, and political leaders, who, in ruffles and finery, sat in the American Continental Congress and British Parliament. The “most magnificent drama” of human commerce also featured in its dramatis personae pirates and warriors, petty traders and hunger strikers, murderers and visionaries. They were frequently surrounded by sharks.

Among a gang of dejected prisoners in a holding pen, facing purchase by a slaver, one man stood out. He was “of a tall, strong Make, and bold, stern aspect.” He saw a group of white men observing the barracoon, with “a design to buy,” he thought. When his fellow captives submitted their bodies for examination by prospective buyers, he expressed contempt. John Leadstine, “Old Cracker,” the head of the slave factory, or shipping point, on Bance Island, Sierra Leone, ordered the man to rise and “stretch out his Limbs.” He refused. For his insolence he got a ferocious whipping with a “cutting
Manatea Strap.
” He took the lashing with fortitude, shrinking little from the blows. An observer noted that he shed “a Tear or two, which he endeavoured to hide as tho’ ashamed of.”
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This tall, strong, defiant man was Captain Tomba, explained Leadstine to the visitors, who were impressed by his courage and eager to know his history, how he had been captured. He had been a headman of a group of villages, probably Baga, around the Rio Nuñez. They opposed the slave trade. Captain Tomba led his fellow villagers in burning huts and killing neighbors who cooperated with Leadstine and other slave traders. Determined to break his resistance, Leadstine in turn organized a midnight expedition to capture this dangerous leader, who killed two of his attackers but was finally taken.

Captain Tomba was eventually purchased by Captain Richard Harding and taken aboard the
Robert
of Bristol. Chained and thrown into the lower deck, he immediately plotted his escape. He combined with “three or four of the stoutest of his Country-men” and an enslaved woman who had freer range about the ship and hence better knowledge of when the plan might be put into action. One night the unnamed woman found only five white men on deck, all asleep. Through the gratings she slipped Captain Tomba a hammer, to pound off the fetters, and “all the Weapons she could find.”

Captain Tomba encouraged the men belowdecks “with the Prospect of Liberty,” but only one and the woman above were willing to join him. When he came upon three sleeping sailors, he killed two of them instantly with “single Strokes upon the Temples.” In killing the third, he made commotion that awoke the two others on watch as well as the rest of the crew, sleeping elsewhere. Captain Harding himself picked up a handspike, flailed at Tomba, knocked him out, and “laid him at length flat upon the Deck.” The crew locked up all three rebels in irons.

When the time came for punishment, Captain Harding weighed “the Stoutness and Worth” of the two male rebels and decided it was in his economic interest to “whip and scarify them only.” He then selected three others only marginally involved in the conspiracy—but also less valuable—and used them to create terror among the rest of the enslaved aboard the vessel. These he sentenced to “cruel Deaths.” He killed one immediately and made the others eat his heart and liver. The woman “he hoisted up by the Thumbs, whipp’d, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died.” Captain Tomba was apparently delivered at Kingston, Jamaica, with 189 other enslaved people and sold at a high price. His subsequent fate is unknown.
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Leadership among the captives arose from belowdecks during the Middle Passage. A sailor aboard the
Nightingale
told the story of a captive woman whose real name is lost to posterity but who came to be known on board the ship as “the boatswain”—because she kept order among her fellow enslaved women, probably with a fierce determination that they should all survive the ordeal of oceanic crossing. She “used to keep them quiet when in the rooms, and when they were on deck likewise.”

One day in early 1769, her own self-constituted authority clashed with that of the ship’s officers. She “disobliged” the second mate, who gave her “a cut or two” with a cat-o’-nine-tails. She flew into a rage at this treatment and fought back, attacking the mate. He in turn pushed her away and lashed her smartly three or four more times. Finding herself overmatched and frustrated that she could not “have her revenge of him,” she instantly “sprung two or three feet on the deck, and dropped down dead.” Her body was thrown overboard about half an hour later, and torn to pieces by sharks.
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The man came aboard the slave ship
Brooks
in late 1783 or early 1784 with his entire family—his wife, two daughters, and mother—all convicted of witchcraft. The man had been a trader, perhaps in slaves; he was from a village called Saltpan, on the Gold Coast. He was probably Fante. He knew English, and even though he apparently disdained to talk to the captain, he spoke to members of the crew and explained how he came to be enslaved. He had quarreled with the village chief, or “caboceer,” who took revenge by accusing him of witchcraft, getting him and his family convicted and sold to the ship. They were now bound for Kingston, Jamaica.
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When the family came on board, noted the physician of the ship, Thomas Trotter, the man “had every symptom of a sullen melancholy.” He was sad, depressed, in shock. The rest of the family exhibited “every sign of affliction.” Despondency, despair, and even “torpid insensibility” were common among the enslaved when they first came aboard a slave ship. The crew would have expected the spirits of the man and his family to improve as time passed and the strange new wooden world grew more familiar.

The man immediately refused all sustenance. From the beginning of his captivity aboard the ship, he simply would not eat. This reaction, too, was commonplace, but he went further. Early one morning, when sailors went below to check on the captives, they found the man a bloody mess. They urgently called the doctor. The man had attempted to cut his own throat and had succeeded in “dividing only the external jugular vein.” He had lost more than a pint of blood. Trotter stitched up the wound and apparently considered force-feeding the man. The throat wound, however, “put it out of our power to use any compulsory means,” which were of course common on slavers. He referred to the
speculum oris,
the long, thin mechanical contraption used to force open unwilling throats to receive gruel and hence sustenance.

The following night the man made a second attempt on his own life. He tore out the sutures and cut his throat on the other side. Summoned to handle a new emergency, Trotter was cleaning up the bloody wound when the man began to talk to him. He declared simply and straightforwardly that “he would never go with white men.” He then “looked wistfully at the skies” and uttered several sentences Trotter could not understand. He had decided for death over slavery.

The young doctor tended to him as best he could and ordered a “diligent search” of the apartment of the enslaved men for the instrument he had used to cut his throat. The sailors found nothing. Looking more closely at the man and finding blood on his fingertips and “ragged edges” around the wound, Trotter concluded that he had ripped open his throat with his own fingernails.