The Slave Ship (37 page)

At the end of the Middle Passage, many captains faced a problem. A two-hundred-ton ship that required a crew of thirty-five to handle 350 enslaved people now would carry a cargo of sugar (or even ballast) back to the home port, requiring only sixteen, perhaps even fewer, if the captain wanted to economize, as he often did. What would happen to the suddenly superfluous crew members? Some had died and some had had their fill of captain and ship and deserted with glee, even at the cost of forfeiting substantial wages. But many seamen wanted to keep their hard-earned money and return to their home port, not least to return to family and community. Slave captains devised a strategy to deal with this surplus of labor.
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Toward the end of the Middle Passage, just as the treatment of the enslaved began to improve (to ready them for market), the captain started driving the crew, or at least a portion of the crew, very hard, in the hope that some of them would desert when they reached port. This was bullying full bore. Not all captains did it, but enough did so that the practice was widely known. No less a person than Lord Rodney, naval war hero, savior of the British Empire, “Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Admiral of the White, and Vice Admiral of England,” testified in Parliament of slavers in 1790, “I believe there have been many instances of harsh treatment in captains of those ships to get rid of their men” in the West Indies.
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This was by design, and indeed merchants sometimes gave explicit instructions to get rid of extra crew before completing the voyage. Miles Barber wrote to Captain James Penny in 1784, “I wish you to ship a few foreign seamen if practicable at St. Kitts or St. Thomas’s, discharging such part of your crew as are disorderly.” He knew that this was illegal, so he advised Penny to tell the mates “not to mention it.” Even if merchants did not mention getting rid of seamen, captains did it routinely. Captain Francis Pope wrote to a Rhode Island merchant named Abraham Redwood in 1740, “I think to keep as few men as Possable for tis to your advantage.” The profits of the voyage expanded by saving on labor expenditure, as even the proslavery Lord Sheffield was forced to admit. But there were other considerations, too. Given the hard usage and explosive tensions of the slave ship, captains might want to get rid of the rebellious or “disorderly.” Another part of the calculation was that a substantial number of sailors, in some cases a majority of the crew, were in such bad health by the time the slaving voyage ended that they could no longer work. They suffered from malaria, ophthalmia (an eye disease), “Guinea worms” (parasites that grew to enormous size, usually in the legs), and ulcers of various kinds, especially the “yaws,” a contagious African skin disease.
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These sailors arrived in the West Indies in a sorry state. In Barbados, seaman Henry Ellison saw “several Guinea seamen in great distress, and in want of the common necessaries of life, with their legs in an ulcerated state, eaten up by the chicres [chiggers], and their toes rotting off, without any person to give them any assistance, or to take them in.” The human landscape along the docks was similar in Jamaica, where seamen were “lying on the wharfs and other places in an ulcerated and helpless state.” They were cankerous from “the knee pan to the ankle, and in such a state, that no ship whatever would receive them.” Some of these men he knew personally. They had been “used in a barbarous manner,” then bilked of their wages. Ellison took them food from his own ship. They were variously known as “wharfingers,” “scow-bankers,” or, when there were no docks, “beach horners.” They sometimes crawled into empty sugar casks on the docks to die.
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These sailors were the equivalent of the “refuse slaves” who were too sick to be sold at full value, but with a difference: “white men,” of course, could not be sold, but, on the other hand, these broken-down sailors had no value to anyone and negative value to the people for whom they had worked for the past many months. They could not be sold but they could be dumped, forced off the ship. Poor, sick sailors would become beggars on the docks of almost every slave-delivery port in the Americas.

This grew into a big enough problem that various colonial and port city governments took action, and several created special hospitals for sailors. At Bridgetown, Barbados, the poorhouse was crowded with slave-ship sailors. They likewise turned up on the beaches and in the harbors of Dominica and Grenada. A report out of Charleston in 1784 noted that “no less than sixty seamen belonging to African ships have been thrown on this city, the greater part of which died, and were buried at the expence of the city.” Jamaica passed legislation as early as 1759—and renewed it long thereafter—dealing with “maimed” and disabled seamen, and it was noted in 1791 that a “very great proportion of those who are in Kingston Hospital are Guineamen.” The abandonment of “lame, ulcerated, and sick seamen” was such “a very great nuisance and expence to the community at Kingston” that the Jamaican legislature passed a law requiring shipmasters to give a security against leaving the disabled ashore.
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Two sailors who were themselves wharfingers described their plight. William Butterworth, who had lacerated his leg in a fall down the hatchway, was discharged by his captain in Kingston. He felt he had been “turned adrift, in a strange country, weak, lame, and possessing but little money!” James Towne found himself in a similar situation: “I was myself left on shore at Charles Town, South Carolina, with two others, without either money or friends. The two died.”
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The sailors had just finished rigging the
Derby
in preparation for its voyage to Angola and Jamaica. Captain Luke Mann had engaged them a month earlier at the rate of thirty shillings per month but informed them now, on August 25, he would pay only twenty shillings, because “there were plenty of hands to be had,” owing to a glut of out-of-work sailors in the harbor. The decision came directly from the owners of the ship, especially, it seems, a local merchant, Thomas Yates. The crewmen of the
Derby
were incensed. They promptly cut down the rigging and left it in a tangled heap on the main deck.
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Someone summoned the constables, who arrested nine sailors, carried them before the magistrates, and threw them into jail. Meanwhile word of the original direct action and the imprisonment swept the waterfront, and soon two or three thousand sailors (the accounts varied) took up handspikes and clubs, the traditional weapons of sailors in mobs, and marched to Old Tower on Water Street to free their brother tars. The sailors broke windows and got into the prison office, where they destroyed documents and records. The jailers capitulated, released eight of the sailors, and desperately hoped the ordeal was over. As the cheering mob carried away the liberated, they realized that they had left one of their comrades behind, so back they went. They found the man and freed him, and likewise a woman who had been jailed for assisting the rioters. The sailors then paraded around the docks until midnight, terrifying some of the local inhabitants as they exulted loudly in their victory. They soon set about unrigging as many ships in the harbor as they could.
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The incident aboard the
Derby
grew from a direct action on the job into a strike and finally an urban insurrection. Saturday and Sunday, August 26 and 27, were quiet, but each night the sailors, prompted by the continuing efforts of merchants to slash wages, crept around the docks cutting rigging, striking sails, and immobilizing the vessels of the dynamic port city. Early Monday morning, sailors went from ship to ship to encourage people to join the work stoppage. Those who refused were forcibly removed, as seaman Thomas Cocket explained: the seamen were “boarding all the vessels and taking out all the People.” The strike had spread, and the normally bustling waterfront went quiet. Meeting later in the day at their headquarters, North Lady’s Walk overlooking the city, the sailors decided to take their wage grievance to the merchants at the Mercantile Exchange, where they would demand redress. They were angry, but they went peacefully, unarmed. They met with no success. As they left the exchange, some of them apparently threatened to return the following day to pull the building down. The merchants took these menacing words to heart. In fear of a second, more violent confrontation, they shuttered and barricaded the exchange. They also recruited and armed military volunteers, some of whom were gentlemen of “superior quality,” and paid another 120 workers to defend the building.
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At noon on Tuesday, August 29, the sailors returned, in larger numbers and a militant mood, “shouting and huzzaing.” They were still willing to negotiate, but again their grievances were not answered. The increasingly nervous local authorities read the Riot Act and demanded that they disperse. The sailors refused and eventually formed themselves into a menacing ring around the exchange. A few protesters began to throw staves and bricks at the windows. Seaman John Fisher smashed the glass of the imposing building with a rake. As the tensions escalated, someone from within the exchange, perhaps merchant Thomas Radcliffe or a member of the dock watch named Thomas Ellis, fired a gun at the protesters. Then followed a roar of shot, after which several seamen fell dead. The “cries and groans of the wounded,” recalled an observer, “were dismal.” The chaos of the scene made it difficult for anyone to know the precise extent of the casualties. As few as two and as many as seven seamen were killed; a minimum of fifteen and as many as forty were wounded. Everyone knew, after the shootings, that the sailors would strike back, so houses were shuttered and plans for self-defense made. The wealthy hid their valuables and sent their children away from home. Slave-trade merchant Thomas Staniforth concealed his silver in a hayloft.
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Wednesday morning a thousand seamen took to the streets sporting red ribbons on their hats. They broke into gunsmith shops and warehouses, taking three hundred muskets from one, gunpowder from another, blunderbusses and pistols from a third. But even these weapons were too little to serve their design, so they commandeered horses, led them to the dockside, and used them to drag ship’s cannon on a cart up the hill to the exchange.
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Soon the “clattering of swords and cannon” filled the city’s cobblestone streets. Sailors marched en masse behind George Oliver, who carried the “bloody flag,” signifying to one and all that the sailors would neither take nor give quarter. This would be a fight to the death. By noon they had set up their cannon in strategic locations on Dale Street and Castle Street so they could attack the exchange from north and south. They then spent “the greatest part of the day” bombarding the building with cannon-balls and gunshot. “Aim at the goose!” was the cry. The enraged sailors trained their cannon and muskets on the carved stone “liver bird,” symbol of the all-powerful Corporation of Liverpool and indeed the city itself. They pulverized it. The concussion of their fire was such that there was “scarce a whole pane of glass in the neighbourhood.” The steady bombardment resulted in something of a siege and eventually, according to one reporter, the deaths of four more people.
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As shot rained down on the center of business, privilege, and power, terror gripped the city. Merchants stood on the street corners observing the battle “with fear painted in their faces.” One man wrote with surprising candor, “I am a coward its true, but I think this would have alarmed any one.” The city’s rulers recognized their own inability to defend the city against the rage of the sailors, so they called for help. Two gentlemen hurried to Manchester to explain that unless a military force arrived quickly, “Liverpool would be laid in ashes and every inhabitant murdered.” This was an exaggeration, of course, meant to get Lord Pembroke’s Royal Regiment of Dragoons moving. As the rulers gathered their defenses, the sailors expanded their struggles in new directions. During the late afternoon, some went door-to-door, terrifying propertied inhabitants as they “requested” money, sometimes at gunpoint, to be used to bury those who had been murdered at the exchange. Others organized companies to march, in formation, with drums rolling and flags flying, to the homes of specially targeted slave-trade merchants. An eyewitness said that they “marched there under a Ships ensign or fflag and a great Number of Sailors carried with them such Arms as Blunderbusses, muskets & other Arms & Weapons.”
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The first merchant they went after was Thomas Radcliffe, who was believed to have fired the first shot at them the day before. He lived in Frog Lane, Whitechapel, northeast of the exchange. When the sailors arrived, a group of them went inside and began throwing Radcliffe’s property out into the streets. According to an eyewitness, they brought out expensive furniture and splintered it. They removed cabinets with drawers full of fine-fabric clothes, which they “tore in pieces.” They destroyed fine china and parchment documents. They threw out “feather-beds, pillows, &c, ripped them open and scattered the feathers in the air.” They discovered, to their surprise, that the gentleman had filled the beds of the servants not with feathers but the chaff of wheat, an insult the lower orders of Liverpool would not soon forget. Not everything was destroyed, however, for women in the mob, called the “whores” of the sailors, carried some items away.
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Next they went to Rainford Gardens and the home of William James, one of the most powerful African merchants who at one point had twenty-nine ships in the slave trade. James somehow got advance notice of the crowd’s intentions and was able to remove valuables to a country home and even to fortify the house against the assault, but to no avail. A sailor broke the shutters, smashed a window, and yelled to the crowd, “Here goes. Let’s break the house down.” Joseph Black and other members of the mob trained guns on the building in case anyone was home and cared to offer resistance. Into the house went the seamen, and out came furniture (beds, chairs, desks), bedding, clothes, pewter goods, china, and silver spoons. Once again the prerogatives of money were dishonored and thrown about in the streets. Damages ran to £1,000 ($177,000 in 2007 dollars) or more. The rioters also made two discoveries—a cellar stocked with wine and rum, which they most emphatically did not destroy, and, inside a grandfather clock, a “little negro boy,” who had gone there to hide. He was apparently unharmed.
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