The Slave Ship (41 page)

The best description of how communication worked among the enslaved belowdecks was written by seaman William Butterworth, in an account of his voyage aboard the
Hudibras,
from Liverpool to Old Calabar to Barbados and Grenada in 1786-87. Captain Jenkin Evans initially purchased 150 people, among whom, noted Butterworth, were “fourteen different tribes or nations.” It is not clear how many cultural groups were among the final number, the 360 with whom they commenced the Middle Passage, but it is clear that the dominant group on board were the Igbo, as was almost always the case on ships trading on the Bight of Biafra at this time.
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Butterworth demonstrated how communication took place among people who were separated from one another by apartments belowdecks. In the aftermath of a failed insurrection, in which the men slaves on the vessel had risen up “to massacre the ship’s company, and take possession of the vessel,” but had not been supported by the women, angry recriminations were shouted around the ship. Locked below in the forward part of the ship with armed guards pacing above their heads on the main-deck gratings, the men shouted to the women that they were cowards and traitors “in not assisting them to regain their liberty.” The women hollered back that “they thought the plot was discovered, and their plan frustrated.” Earlier, when confronted by the captain, the women had denied knowing anything about the plot, but the midnight conversation now suggested otherwise. The crew on deck heard the entire heated exchange. Some of them would have understood what they heard, likely including Captain Evans, who had made at least two previous voyages to the Bight of Biafra. Any deficiencies of understanding would be overcome by an African boy named Bristol, who understood all languages of the region and acted as the ship’s interpreter.

Undeterred by what the captain and crew might or might not know, some of the men began to organize a second insurrection, again with the women, who seemed determined to give a better account of themselves this time. Correspondence was now carried on “through the medium of the boys; which prevented the necessity of shouting from the two extremities of the ship.” The boys would run back and forth between bulkheads at each end of their apartment, carrying whispered messages from the men to the women and back again. Occasionally someone would break the rule of secrecy and speak aloud, most notably in this instance a powerful woman called “Boatswain Bess,” who was, in Butterworth’s eyes, “an Amazon, in every sense of the word.” She had been appointed “superintendent of her country women” and given sailor’s slops by Captain Evans. The rebel plan now was to break down the bulkheads and force their way up onto the main deck, whereupon Bess and the other women would arm themselves with the cook’s utensils—forks, knives, an ax—and lead the uprising. The plot was extinguished before it could be put into action, with the help of Bristol. The male ringleaders were flogged, while Boatswain Bess and four other women were wrapped up in a wet canvas sail and dropped on deck to “cool off.”

Butterworth also noted other important means of communication, especially among the female slaves with whom he was stationed and whom he observed closely. He noted how one nameless woman was “universally esteemed” among the bondwomen and especially among her own “countrywomen.” She was “an oracle of literature”—an “orator” and a “songstress.” One of her main purposes was to “render more easy the hours of her sisters in exile.” Her cultural background is unknown, although it would appear that she was not Igbo, as Butterworth could not understand her. She was, however, more than successful in addressing a multiethnic audience, as her premature death caused a long and loud outpouring of grief among her fellow female captives.

When this woman spoke or sang, the female slaves of the
Hudibras
arranged themselves on the quarterdeck in circles, “the youngest constituting the innermost circle, and so on, several deep, the most aged always being found outermost.” The singer stood, or rather knelt, at the center of the inner circle, singing “slow airs, of a pathetic nature,” no doubt capturing the sorrows of dispossession and enslavement. Judging from the tone, mood, and emotions on display, Butterworth surmised that “they might be speaking of friends far distant, and of homes now no more.” She also gave orations, some of which, Butterworth believed, were recitations from memory, perhaps epic poetry. These pieces “moved the passions; exciting joy or grief, pleasure or pain, as fancy or inclination led,” depending on the tale and the circumstances. The surrounding women and girls were closely involved in the event through the traditional African pattern of call-and-response. They joined in as “a kind of chorus, at the close of particular sentences.” It was a deeply communal occasion, and an “air of solemnity ran through the whole.” The effect, even on the young Englishman who could not understand the words, was moving: he found, to his surprise, that he “shed tears of involuntary sympathy.” He considered the gatherings of the women to be “melancholy” and thought-provoking.

Butterworth also showed how information could make its way from one part of the lower deck throughout the entire ship, quickly and explosively. As it happened, Dr. Dickinson, the ship’s surgeon, mentioned (perhaps in jest) to an enslaved woman that after stopping in Barbados they still had a long voyage of two months or more ahead of them—and this after a grueling eight-week Atlantic crossing. The woman was furious that their agonies at sea should be prolonged, and she conveyed both the news and her anger to the other women with whom she was confined belowdecks. Suddenly, wrote Butterworth, “like a train of gunpowder, ignited at one end, it ran through the apartment of the boys, to that of the men, the great magazine of suppressed discontent.” Butterworth heard the “loud murmurs which now ascended from below” and feared a “dreadful explosion.” So did Captain Evans, who promptly summoned Dr. Dickinson as well as male and female captives from belowdecks to a highly visible public meeting. The captain explained to the assembled (and indeed to the whole ship) that what the doctor had said was false, as they would arrive soon in Grenada. He reprimanded the surgeon and forced him to make a public apology, all to keep the social order in the aftermath of the angry murmurs.

As Butterworth made clear, one of the recurrent sounds of a slave ship was song. The sailors sometimes played instruments and sang, but more commonly, day and night, the Africans sang. Some of their singing was forced, but some of it was “of their own accord.” Everyone, it seems, took part. “Men sing their Country Songs,” from and about their native cultures, explained a former slave-ship captain, “and the Boys dance to amuse them.” The leading part in singing aboard the slave ship was by all accounts, including Butterworth’s, played by women.
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Song was an essential means of communication among people who were not meant to communicate. The barricado across the main deck might separate men and women, even prevent them from seeing one another, but it could not block sound or keep them from hearing or conversing with one another. A mate named Janverin, who made four voyages to Africa in the late 1760s and early 1770s, explained in an interview, “They frequently sing, the men and women answering one another, but what is the subject of their songs [I] cannot say.”
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And of course that was the point: singing in African languages permitted among the captives a kind of communication that many of the European captains and crew members could not understand. Singing was also a way of finding one’s kin, fellow villagers, and countrymen and -women, and identifying which cultural groups were on board the ship. It was a way of communicating important information about conditions, treatment, resistance, and events, about where the ship was going. Singing was a means of creating a common base of knowledge and forging a collective identity.

Some members of the crew, however, knew the languages in which people sang, or they got someone to translate either the general or specific meaning of the lyrics. Cases in point were two sea surgeons who made voyages in the late 1780s—one to Gabon, the other to Bonny. They described forced singing, which could vary considerably in tone and message. With African drums beating and the cat-o’-nine-tails cracking around their bodies, the enslaved were required to sing specific lyrics:
“Messe, Messe, Mackaride”
—that is, “Good Living or Messing well among White men.” The enslaved, explained one of the physicians with sarcasm, were thus required to “praise us for suffering them to live so well.” On the other vessel, the enslaved sang songs not of praise but of protest: “
Madda! Madda! Yiera! Yiera! Bemini! Bemini! Madda! Aufera!
” These lyrics meant that “they were all sick, and by and by they should be no more.” This surgeon added that “they also sung songs expressive of their fears of being beat, of their want of victuals, particularly the want of their native food, and of their never returning to their own country.”
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Not all songs were protests, however, as singing could serve several different purposes. The enslaved aboard the
Anne,
anchored off Old Calabar in 1713, sang a song of praise to Captain William Snelgrave after he had saved the child of a woman on board from sacrifice by a local African king. Those aboard the
Hudibras
sang “songs of joy” after their restive “murmuring” had forced an apology and clarification from the captain about the length and destination of their voyage. The singing apparently continued into the night, expressing their hopes for life in “Makarahrah country.” Vice Admiral Richard Edwards of the Royal Navy noted something similar: on slave ships arriving in West Indian ports, “the Negroes usually appeared chearful and singing—That you are apprized of the Arrival of a Guineaman by the Dancing and Singing of the Negroes on Board.” What they had to be cheerful about, the vice admiral did not say.
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Happy songs seem to have been exceptions. More commonly, belowdecks at night, whenever captives, especially women, were on their own, they sang songs of “lamentation,” or so they were called by one observer after another. These were sad, mournful songs about loss—about dispossession, enslavement, alienation—often accompanied by collective tears. “Some of the women used to sing very sweetly, and in a plaintive tone, when left to themselves,” recalled John Riland. They sang of having been taken away from their family, friends, countrymen; their songs were “melancholy lamentations of their exile from their native country.” Thomas Clarkson noted the singing of women who slowly went insane while chained to a mast on the main deck of a Guineaman: “In their songs they call upon their lost Relations and Friends, they bid adieu to their Country, they recount the Luxuriance of their native soil, and the happy Days they have spent there. At other Times they neither sing nor speak, but are melancholy and low, and pour forth their Grief in repeated Torrents of Tears. At other Times they dance, shriek, become furious. Such are the dreadful scenes, which one is obliged to behold in the dreary Caverns of a Slave-Vessel.”
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One aspect of these songs was the active recalling of history, in the style of the griot. Seaman David Henderson heard songs about “the History of their Sufferings, and the Wretchedness of their Situation.” Dr. James Arnold also heard the women singing “the History of their Lives, and their separation from their Friends and Country.” He went on to note that these songs of resistance were well understood by Captain Joseph Williams, who found them “very disagreeable.” He had the women flogged in “a terrible Manner” for daring to remember through song; often their wounds took two to three weeks to heal. The struggle for memory by these women was an effort to retain historical identity in a situation of utter social upheaval. It was a central element of an active and growing culture of opposition aboard the ship.
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If the common experiences of expropriation and enslavement, including the violent, densely communal regimentation of the slave ship, created the potential for community among African prisoners, and if social practices—working, communicating, and singing—helped to realize it, nothing was more important to the collective project of creating group identity than resistance. This was in itself a new language, a language of action employed every time people refused food, jumped over the side of the ship, or rose up in insurrection. It was a universal language, which everyone understood regardless of cultural background, even if they chose not to speak it actively themselves. Every act of resistance, small or large, rejected enslavement and social death as it embraced creativity and a different future. Each refusal bound people together, in ever-deeper ways, in a common struggle.
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The Atlantic slave trade was, in many senses, a four-hundred-year hunger strike. From the beginning of the waterborne human commerce in the early fifteenth century to its end in the late nineteenth century, enslaved Africans routinely refused to eat the food given to them. When some of the enslaved came on board the ship, they fell into a “fixed melancholy,” a depression in which they responded to nothing their captors said or demanded, including instructions to eat. Others got sick and were unable to eat even if they had wanted to. And yet even among some of the depressed and the sick, and among a much larger group who was neither, the refusal to eat was a conscious choice, which served several important purposes among the enslaved. Because the captain’s main charge from the merchant was to deliver as many live, healthy African bodies as possible to a New World port, anyone who refused sustenance, for any reason whatsoever, endangered profits and subverted authority. Refusing to eat was therefore first and foremost an act of resistance, which in turn inspired other acts of resistance. Second, it proved to be a tactic of negotiation. Mistreatment could trigger a hunger strike. Third, it helped to create a shipboard culture of resistance, a “we” against a “they.” Among the messages of the hunger strike were these: we will not be property; we will not be labor power; we will not let you eat us alive.