The Slave Ship (47 page)

Clarkson initially sought out Quakers and other allies, who would sustain him through the visit. But the people he really wanted to talk to were credible, “respectable” witnesses, merchants and ship captains who knew the slave trade firsthand. But when these people learned his intentions, they shunned him. Passing him on the street, they crossed to the other side, as if, Clarkson recalled, “I had been a wolf, or tiger, or some other dangerous beast of prey.” Shipowners and merchants also forbade anyone in their employ to speak to him. Clarkson was soon “obliged to give up all hope of getting any evidence from this quarter.” He would be forced to turn to the only others who had concrete experience and knowledge: common sailors.
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Clarkson recorded in a personal journal his first encounters with slave-trade sailors. As he crossed the Avon River on July 3, he “saw a Boat painted Africa on her stern.” Clarkson hailed the sailors and asked whether they belonged to the Guineaman
Africa,
to which they answered yes, they did. He then asked if they were not afraid to go to Africa because of the high death rate for sailors. The response revealed a mentality of cosmopolitan fatalism. One man explained, “If it is my Lot to die in Africa, why I must, and if is not, why then I shall not die though I go there. And if it is my Lot to live, why I may as well live there as anywhere else.” The conversation then turned to a slaver called the
Brothers,
lying at Kingroad and ready to sail. It was delayed because Captain Hewlett, “a cruel Rascal,” was having trouble getting a crew. A large group had signed on, gauged the temper of their new commander, and deserted immediately. Clarkson noted this information. He might have also noted that his own education had entered a new phase.
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Clarkson later reflected on the significance of this meeting:

 
With a touch of homoeroticism and his nationalist feeling stirred by these “pillars of the state,” Clarkson would henceforth make sailors and their experience central to the abolition movement. He would increasingly come to rely on them for evidence and information, for the light they could carry into the lower deck of the slave ship.

Clarkson soon met his first informant, John Dean, a black sailor whose mutilated back was gruesome evidence of his torture while working aboard a slaver. He met an Irish publican named Thompson who between midnight and 3:00 A.M. led him up and down Marsh Street and into the sailors’ dives, which were full of “music, dancing, rioting, drunkenness, and profane swearing.” He met seamen who were lame, blind, ulcerated, and fevered. He learned of the murder of William Lines by the chief mate of the
Thomas.
He tracked down crew members and gathered enough evidence to have the mate arrested and charged at the Mayor’s Court, where he got nothing but “savage looks” from the “slave-merchants” in attendance. Such open hostility scared Bristol’s middle-class opponents of slavery, who were “fearful of coming forward in an open manner.” Sailors, however, flocked to the abolitionist to describe their “different scenes of barbarity.” Clarkson had finally found those “who had been personally acquainted with the horrors of the slave trade.”
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Clarkson heard that the slave ship
Alfred
had just returned to port with a man named Thomas, who had suffered severe injury at the hands of Captain Edward Robe. After a long search, he found Thomas in a boardinghouse, in bad shape. His legs and body were wrapped in flannel as a comfort to his wounds. Delirious, Thomas could not figure out who Clarkson was. He grew frightened and agitated by the stranger’s presence. Was he a lawyer? He repeatedly asked, Clarkson wrote, “if I was come with an Intent to take Captain Robe’s Part.” Was he come to kill him? Clarkson “answered no, [and said] that I was come to take his [part] & punish Captain Robe.” Thomas could not understand—perhaps because he was in such a disordered state, perhaps because he could not imagine a gentleman taking his side. Unable to interview the man, Clarkson pieced together what he could from his shipmates. Robe had beaten Thomas so often that he tried to commit suicide by leaping over-board into shark-infested waters. Saved by his mates, he was then chained by the captain to the deck, where the beatings continued. Thomas died a short time after the visit, but the image of the abused, deranged surgeon’s mate haunted Clarkson “day and night.” Such encounters created “a fire of indignation within me.”
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Liverpool—the home of Joseph Brooks Jr. and the
Brooks
—would prove even rougher, as one might expect of a port that had four times as many slave ships as Bristol. When word got out that a man who sought to abolish the slave trade—and hence destroy the “glory” of the city—was in town and could moreover be found dining in public each night at the King’s Arms, curious people turned up to see and converse with him. These were mostly slave merchants and captains. They engaged Clarkson in spirited debate, which rapidly degenerated into insults and threats. Clarkson was happy to have at his side the abolitionist Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, “an athletic and resolute-looking man” who had made four slaving voyages and could add muscle to the argument in more ways than one. Whenever Clarkson went out at night, Falconbridge went with him, always “well armed.” Anonymous letters threatened death if Clarkson did not leave town immediately. Not only did he refuse to leave, he refused to change lodgings, as this would betray “an unmanly fear of my visitors” and reflect badly on the cause.
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Most of Liverpool’s slave-trading merchants and captains now began to shun Clarkson, and the ones who did not shun him tried to kill him. One stormy afternoon a gang of eight or nine men (two or three of whom he had seen at the King’s Arms) tried to throw him off a pier-head. He was undeterred, or rather more determined than ever. Clarkson soon gathered what he thought was enough evidence to prosecute the merchant, the captain, and the mate responsible for the murder of a seaman named Peter Green, but his friends in Liverpool panicked at the prospect, swearing that he would be “torn to pieces, and the house where I lodged burnt down.” The abolitionist Dr. James Currie criticized Clarkson for preferring the testimony of the “lowest class of seamen” over that of virtuous citizens. The problem was, “respectable” people who opposed slavery, like Currie, lived in terror of the powerful slave merchants and would not speak out. The same had been true in Bristol.
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Meanwhile, word of Clarkson’s presence and purposes spread along the waterfront, and sailors began to show up in twos and threes at the King’s Arms to tell their tales of brutal mistreatment. Clarkson wrote, “though no one else would come near me, to give me any information about the trade, these [seamen] were always forward to speak to me, and to tell me their grievances, if it were only with the hope of being able to get redress.” In the end Clarkson helped the sailors bring prosecutions in nine cases in Bristol and Liverpool. None of them came to court, but Clarkson managed in each and every instance to win monetary settlements for the abused seamen or their families. He made these small victories possible by keeping nineteen witnesses, all sailors, at his own expense in order to make sure the evidence for conviction would be at hand, rather than on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Based on the violence done to sailors, he concluded that the slave trade was “but one barbarous system from the beginning to the end.”
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Writing about himself in the third person, Clarkson summed up his experience with the sailors in Bristol and Liverpool: “A certain person, totally unconnected with the law, had no less than sixty-three applications made to him in three months, to obtain redress for such seamen, as had experienced the fury of the officers of their respective ships.” All but two had labored on slave ships. Clarkson was affected not only by the tales but by the physical condition of the tellers. Explaining in the preface of the pamphlet the evidence he had gathered among John Dean and the other sailors, he wrote, “I have also had
ocular demonstration,
as far as a sight of their mangled bodies will be admitted as a proof.”
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Almost everything Clarkson would do in the abolitionist movement in the coming years was shaped by his dealings with these sailors. The knowledge he gained from and about them loomed large in
An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade,
published in July 1788, and
An Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as applied to the Slave Trade,
which appeared in April 1789. But perhaps most important in this regard was a collection of twenty-two interviews with seafaring people, entitled
The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave-Trade Collected in the Course of a Tour Made in the Autumn of the Year 1788,
published in April 1789, the very moment when the London committee was also preparing the “Plan and Sections of the Slave Ship,” both of which were then distributed to all MPs in advance of the vote on the slave trade scheduled to take place on May 11. Sixteen of the people interviewed had worked in the slave trade, and the other six had observed it at close range, most of them on African tours of duty in the Royal Navy. Half of those who had worked on slavers did so at the lowest level of the ship’s hierarchy, as “foremastmen” (common seamen) or “boys” (apprentices). Two had been captains in the trade, and six had been mates or skilled workers (although three of these had risen from the lower ranks).
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It is instructive to view the image and text of the
Brooks
alongside the sailors’ interviews, for here, in grim detail, was the information for which Clarkson had been dispatched by the London committee in June 1787. Sailor after sailor had explained to him the arrangement of decks on a slave ship—the hold, the lower deck, the main deck; how male slaves were chained together; how the enslaved were stowed belowdecks; how they were fed, guarded, and forced to “dance” for exercise; how sickness, disease, and high mortality were the lot of both slave and sailor. Sailors told Clarkson that the slave trade was not a “nursery” for sailors, as its advocates insisted, but rather a cemetery. It is of first importance that almost every single fact to be found in the text accompanying the image of the
Brooks
can be found in the interviews Clarkson conducted with sailors in the period immediately before the broadside was conceived, published, and circulated.
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There was cruel irony in the emergence of the sailor as an object of sympathy within the growing abolitionist movement. Sailors perpetrated many of the horrors of the trade. To be sure, Clarkson and the members of the London committee also stressed the plight of the “injur’d Africans,” but they were not gathering
their
stories of the slave ship and the Middle Passage, as they might easily have done in London, Liverpool, and Bristol at this time. The slaves’ experience was, after all, the most profound history from below (literally, from belowdecks), and indeed it would seem that Olaudah Equiano understood very well both the exclusion and the consequent need for an African voice when he published his influential autobiography,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
(1789)
.
By emphasizing the dismal lot of sailors, Clarkson and his fellow abolitionists were wagering that the British government and public would respond to an appeal based on race and nation. Still, it was a risky bet, for the use of lowly sailors as sources did not pass without vicious class ridicule. When seaman Isaac Parker was introduced during the House of Commons hearings in March 1790, an observer wrote that the “whole Committee was in a laugh.” The proslavery members then taunted William Wilberforce, abolition’s leader in Parliament, “will you bring your ship-keepers, ship-sweepers, and deck cleaners in competition with our admirals and men of honor? It is now high time to close your evidence, indeed!” Undaunted and speaking in short, simple sentences, Parker described, among other things, the flogging, torture, and death by Captain Thomas Marshall of the enslaved child who would not eat aboard the
Black Joke
in 1764. Like dozens of other seamen, Parker spoke truth to power; his detailed testimony damned the trade in ways that abstract moral denunciation could never have done.
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Thomas Clarkson, a young and somewhat naive middle-class, Cambridge-educated minister, came face-to-face with the class struggle that raged on the ships and along the waterfront in the slave-trading ports. He joined it, fearlessly, on the side of the sailors. By doing so he gained credibility among seamen and knowledge that would be invaluable to the abolitionist movement. He found the deserters, the cripples, the rebels, the dropouts, the guilty of conscience—in short, the dissidents who knew the slave trade from the inside and had chilling stories to tell about it. He would use these stories to make the trade, which to most people was an abstract and distant proposition, into something concrete, human, and immediate. The
Brooks
was thus one triumph among many for Clarkson’s radical investigative journalism along the waterfront. With great and far-reaching agitational effect, he had brought into the movement what he called “first-rate nautical knowledge.” It was a foundational achievement.
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