The Slave Ship (30 page)

Many slave-ship captains adopted a domineering style of shipboard leadership that can be summed up in a word: “bully.” They swaggered, they blustered, they hectored, they bullied. One of the best examples of the type was the legendary Thomas “Bully” Roberts, who captained nine voyages out of Liverpool between 1750 and 1768. According to “Dicky Sam,” a Liverpool writer who used documents and local folklore to write a history in 1884 of his city’s slave trade, Roberts was a “born bully.” It was “part of his nature.” But whatever he may have been at birth and by nature, he was made more brutal by the slave trade, all of whose captains were “fearless, bold, and hard-hearted.” The nineteenth century would come up with the word “bucko” to describe this kind of style. A bucko captain or mate was a hard-driving man who always went far beyond the usual requirements of shipboard discipline. This, too, was by design.
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One of the chief ways the captain established his power was by bullying the crew either in whole or, more commonly, in part. Some captains decided early in the voyage for a raw display of power: they ordered all men (except the officers) to come on deck with their sea chests. They then smashed, staved, and burned the chests, usually on the pretense of looking for a stolen item but more usefully to make a symbolic assertion of control over all aspects of the sailors’ lives.
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Captains would also choose a marginal member of the crew for bullying, using that person as a medium to intimidate the crew as a whole. This was usually a ship’s boy, a cook, or a black sailor.
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If bullying sometimes led to murder (or suicide), it also led on occasion to the brutal murder of the captain in return, as, for example, Captain John Connor, who was slain by his crew in 1788. His conduct had been marked by continuous “barbarous severity.”
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Even when an individual was not singled out for bullying, violent discipline was usually the order of the day on Guinea ships. The most important “instrument of correction” was the cat-o’-nine-tails, which easily became an instrument of torture. Sea surgeon Alexander Falconbridge described it as “a handle or stem, made of a rope three inches and a half in circumference, and about eighteen inches in length, at one of which are fastened nine branches, or tails, composed of log-line, with three or more knots upon each branch.” The cat was employed during the course of daily work and social routine, for minor infractions and indiscipline, and in moments of spectacular punishment, on both sailors and slaves. (Some captains were reluctant to whip sailors in view of the slaves, while others did it deliberately, indeed occasionally ordered a slave to lash a sailor.) Some officers grew so attached to the cat that they slept with it. The purpose of the nine tails and the three knots on each (some had wire interwoven) was to lacerate the skin of the victim. But the cat was not the only tool of discipline. The ship was full of items that could be used by a captain or mate as a weapon at any moment: fishgigs, knives, forks, belaying pins, marlinespikes, and pump bolts. Captains also did not hesitate to clap mutinous seamen into irons and in extreme cases even to lock them into iron collars, usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves. The captain used an entire technology of terror to control the crew.
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Some captains asserted a different kind of power when they put the crew to what they called “short allowance” on the way to the African coast or during the Middle Passage. The rationale for this was that adverse sailing conditions might lengthen the voyage, provisions might be hard to replace, and it was therefore necessary to conserve. Or a captain might simply announce that he had not hired the men to “fatten them up.” Sailors resented this bitterly, thinking that the captain pinched their provisions to save on costs and hence to pad profits for himself and the owners. Food for sailors was not high in quality to begin with, and of course it deteriorated over the course of the voyage. Beef in brine melted away, and biscuit became so infested with vermin that it moved by itself. Water was a special source of conflict, especially when the vessel was in the tropics. Numerous slave-ship captains used a bizarre custom to limit its consumption. In the maintop they put a barrel of water and a gun barrel, which was the designated drinking instrument. Sailors were forced to climb all the way up to take a single drink.
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Another important aspect of the captain’s control of the internal economy lay in selling personal items such as “slops” (frocks, trousers, jackets, caps), knives, tobacco, brandy, and rum to the crew while at sea, usually at inflated prices. This, too, occasioned resentment among sailors, because high prices cut deeply into their wages. At the end of a long, dangerous voyage, some seamen had no pay owed to them, and a few made what they called a “Bristol voyage,” returning to the home port owing the captain more for items purchased at sea than he owed them in wages. This in turn created a kind of debt peonage, which gave the captain ready labor for the next slaving voyage.
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As soon as the slaver reached the coast of Africa, the captain became even more of a merchant, buying and selling cargo with both European and African traders on the African coast. Knowledge and experience were required for both the “fort trade” and the “boat trade” but were especially valuable in the latter and indeed in any direct trade with Africans. Slave-ship captains who had previously traded in a particular area and with specific individuals had a big advantage. Throughout the eighteenth century, captains could find interpreters on almost any part of the coast, and of course many African traders spoke pidgin or creole English. Yet a captain who knew one or more African languages had greater trading options. This gave an advantage to those who had been “bred up” in the slave trade and thereby learned African languages early in life. Hugh Crow started later but made numerous voyages, as sailor, mate, and captain, to the Bight of Biafra, and he prided himself on being able to speak Igbo. Crow’s ebullient personality seems to have made him something of a favorite among the traders he dealt with, or so he sought to suggest in his memoir.

Establishing authority within trading relations was no easy matter, and occasionally slave-ship captains resorted to the superior force of the fearsome gunned ship they commanded. In those areas where the Guineamen could anchor close to shore, a captain might fire a cannon or two toward the trading village to “encourage” the local merchants to bring more slaves to market or to offer them at lower prices. Seaman Henry Ellison testified before Parliament that in the 1760s he saw seven or eight slave-ship captains in concert fire “red hot shot” upon a trading town on the Gambia River, setting several houses aflame in an effort to get traders to lower prices. In June 1793 something similar happened in Cameroon, when Captain James McGauley fired a cannon at a black trader’s canoe, killing one and sending a message that the man was to sell slaves to no other ships until he, McGauley, had his full complement. Yet it must be emphasized that these were unusual cases. Most captains carefully cultivated their relationships with African traders, especially if they aspired to trade beyond a single voyage. Commerce depended largely on trust and consent.
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To inaugurate the trade, the captain ordered his sailors to hoist from belowdecks a varied and expensive cargo of manufactured goods, which would then be exchanged for a human cargo. As the main deck of the ship became a marketplace, the captain then assumed the role of “big man,” trading as equals with another “big man,” sometimes a local “king,” to whom he paid duties. To both the paramount political leader and to lesser traders, he also gave
dashee
or
comey
to encourage them to bring slaves to the ship. He served food and liquor and often invited some of the more important merchants to sleep aboard the vessel. A complex, drawn-out process of deal making followed, which would slowly fill the lower deck with enslaved people to be shipped to the Americas. The captain’s work as a business agent was described in astonishing detail in a document produced by William Jenkins of the
Molly
in 1759-60 during a voyage to Bonny.
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Jenkins first recorded the items his owners had stowed on board the ship before it left Bristol and which now appeared on the deck of the
Molly
for sale. The cargo consisted of firearms and ammunition, textiles, metals and metalwares, alcohol, and other manufactured goods such as caps and beads (arrangoes). The largest part of the cargo were muskets (six hundred), blunderbusses, flints, and gunpowder. Then, in order of decreasing value, an array of cloths, produced in England and India, such as nicanees, romauls, and chelloes; iron bars and copper rods, knives and iron pots; and a few miscellaneous items. Captain Jenkins also had on board “1885 Galls of Brandy in Casks” as well as bottles and numerous smaller casks called “caggs.”
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The most remarkable thing about the document Jenkins kept was his careful recording of his business dealings with African merchants, beginning with the king of Bonny, to whom he paid trading duties and fees for wood and water. Jenkins recorded the traders each and every one by name. He gave
dashee
to “Lord York,” “Black Tom,” “Cudjoe,” “Parlement Gentleman,” “Gallows,” and seventy-five others who clustered in two main networks, one associated with the king and another with the big merchant John Mendoss. But of the eighty who got
dashee,
fifty-eight never brought the
Molly
a single slave. One of the largest notations was, “The King of Bonny: Trust,” followed by a variety of items to be given in exchange for slaves on a future voyage. Jenkins clearly intended to build and sustain working relationships.
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Most of the purchases were small as traders brought 1, 2, or 3 slaves on board at a time, as was typical on almost all areas of the Guinea coast. Only three sellers provided more than 20 altogether; another six brought more than 10, and these only a few at a time. The leading provider was Jemmy Sharp, who visited the ship seven times and sold 28 slaves. Of those who did bring slaves, twenty-four got
dashee,
while twenty-five did not. But the ones who received
dashee
produced 216 slaves, more than three-quarters of the 286 Jenkins would eventually purchase. Among those who sold slaves, all but fifteen came and sold more than once; altogether this group accounted for 267 slaves, 93.3 percent of the total. The
Molly
’s most frequent visitor was a man named Tillebo, who came aboard eleven times to sell slaves. All told, Captain Jenkins conducted 160 transactions to purchase slaves, which allowed him to “slave” his ship more quickly than usual, in only three months. He ended up with a cargo of 125 men, 114 women, 21 boys, and 26 girls. Clearly the contacts were worth the investment, as the captain had transacted his trade successfully. New challenges awaited the captain now that 286 restive African prisoners were aboard his ship.

Slave-ship captains also established relations with one another, especially over the several months while they were buying slaves on the coast of Africa. Here, at various shipping points, they met repeatedly, taking turns to dine in twos or threes or more on their various ships or with African traders ashore, overcoming their command isolation and sharing useful knowledge and information. William Smith, a surveyor for the Royal African Company, noted that captains and officers of the slave ships in and around the Gambia River in 1726 were “visiting each other daily.” The same was true wherever the ships congregated. Even though they were competing with one another—to conduct their trade quickly and advantageously, to get a full cargo of slaves, and to sail expeditiously for the New World—they recognized and acted on their common interests.
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John Newton visited and communicated with other captains regularly, exchanging useful information of all kinds, about the state of trade, the availability and price of slaves, the news of danger and disaster. He asked one captain to take his mutinous sailors and rebellious slaves, another to lend his surgeon. He engaged in “raillery” with his peers, much of it apparently sexual banter. The others teased Newton for his slavish devotion to a single woman, his wife, Mary; he countered by saying that “some of them are mere slaves to a hundred,” some no doubt women they bought on the coast. Slave-ship captains resorted with familiar ease to the idiom of their industry.

Some of the information the captains exchanged could be a matter of life or death. They talked repeatedly of disasters—slave ships “cut off” by local Africans, bloody insurrections, seamen gone missing, explosions, and shipwrecks. Captain Street suggested the importance of such concourse when he reported from Rio Pongas on the Windward Coast in 1807: he listed thirteen slave ships and when they would be “slaved” and leave the coast; he noted that their captains were having a hard time buying rice, which they needed to feed the slaves during their Middle Passages; he described how two vessels had been damaged by a countertide at a local slave-trading factory. He also noted an attempted murder and mutiny against Captain McBride aboard the
Hind,
the same ship’s high mortality, and a mass runaway of sailors from the
Byam.
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Mostly the captains talked about business at their meetings—the availability and prices of slaves perhaps above all else, but also their relationships with black traders (who could be trusted and who could not) and what kinds of goods such traders were eager to buy. They might also share resources, lend skilled labor (a carpenter or a surgeon), supplies (medicines), food, or trade goods as long as such sharing would not damage the interests of the merchants and shipowners for whom they worked. Pride of place in these meetings would belong to the captain who knew the region best. Seaman William Butterworth described a custom in which the “oldest” captain in the gathered group (meaning the most experienced) would lead the vessels up the Calabar River to the canoe house to trade.
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