The Slave Ship (49 page)

Unfortunately for Captain Noble, the muster rolls of the
Brooks
support Trotter’s account of captain-crew relations, for during his three voyages as captain only 13 of 162 men signed on again for another voyage, and most of these were mates (who had special inducements), family members, or apprentices, who had no choice. It would be generous to say that the captain’s memory failed him before the parliamentary committee, but it would be more accurate to say that he lied.
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Trotter went beyond the diagram of the
Brooks
by bringing some of the faceless, supine captives to life through his testimony. He followed Clarkson, bringing oral history to the parliamentary committee. He had talked to the men, women, and children who were taken on board—some in English, some in sign language (“gesture and motion” he called it), and some through interpreters. He explained, “Few Slaves came on board of whom I did not enquire, why they were made Slaves?” Trotter noted two main ethnic groups on board the
Brooks,
who as it happened had a long history of antagonism between them in Africa: coastal Fantes and those he called “Duncos,” who were, in fact, inland Chambas (“Dunco” being a Fante word for “stupid fellow”). Unlike Captain Noble, who urged the black traders “to get him Slaves by any means,” never doubted their authority to sell them, and never inquired how people became slaves, Trotter asked how they came to be on the ship and discovered that most had been kidnapped. They would be described, falsely, as “prisoners of war.” He also learned that separation from family and home led to despair. At night Trotter often heard the slaves make “a howling melancholy kind of noise, something expressive of extreme anguish.” He asked a woman who served as an interpreter to discover its cause. She reported that the visceral cry came when people awoke from dreams of being back at home with loved ones, only to discover themselves belowdecks aboard the ghastly ship.
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The surgeon’s account of the
Brooks
paralleled the abolitionist text that accompanied the image of the ship published a year and a half earlier. The major themes were the treatment of the sailors and, more important, the slaves; how the latter were fettered and stowed in a small space; how they were organized; how they did or did not survive. The parallel is no accident. By the time Trotter took the stand before the House of Commons Select Committee in May 1790, the abolitionist movement had already shaped public discourse about the slave trade by drawing attention to these themes. By a curious twist of fate, the image of the
Brooks
helped to shape the public testimony about what had actually happened on the
Brooks.
Thomas Clarkson and his fellow abolitionists had already distributed the “Plans and Sections of a Slave Ship” throughout Parliament and moreover had worked with William Wilberforce and other MPs to develop a set of questions, based on previous knowledge, to ask Trotter, Noble, and many other witnesses—about stowage and spatial allocation, social routine, and the treatment of both sailors and slaves.

Clarkson always insisted that the power of the image of the
Brooks
lay primarily in its ability to make the viewer identify and sympathize with the “injured Africans” on the lower deck of the ship. The broadside was “designed to give the spectator an idea of the sufferings of the Africans in the Middle Passage, and this so familiarly, that he might instantly pronounce upon the miseries experienced there.” The image would thus agitate and move the viewer to join the debate about the slave trade, as Thomas Cooper hoped, and to do so with a new, more human understanding of what was at stake. In conveying the horrors of transportation, the picture would appeal to the emotions of the observer and seal the issue in his or her memory: “It brought forth the tear of sympathy in behalf of the sufferers, and it fixed their sufferings in his heart.” In so doing, the image became “a language, which was at once intelligible and irresistible.” Clarkson thus anticipated what modern scholars have said about the “iconographic vocabulary” and “visual identity” of the abolitionist movement.
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Clarkson was undoubtedly right in these judgments of effect. After all, he himself passed the broadside from hand to hand, and he talked to a lot of people about it. Because he used the image as an instrument of organization, he needed to know how it moved people and how he could build on the feelings and understandings it engendered. He therefore deserves pride of place as an interpreter of the meaning of the
Brooks.
And yet, all that said and properly acknowledged, Clarkson did not fully explain the power of the image. It had another dimension that Clarkson understood but rarely discussed.

The original title of the Plymouth print was “Plan of an AFRICAN SHIP’S Lower Deck with NEGROES in the proportion of only One to a Ton.” The reference to proportion, to the number of people per ton of the ship’s carrying capacity, referred specifically to the debate surrounding the Dolben Act, or the Slave Carrying Bill, which received royal assent in July 1788, four months before the image of the
Brooks
was created. The debate concerned the profitability of the slave trade. The
Brooks
image and text must be read not only alongside the interviews collected and published in
Substance of the Evidence
but also
An Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as applied to the Slave Trade,
the pamphlet Clarkson was writing when the image of the slave ship was first published.

Clarkson began the pamphlet with statements made by the representatives of the Liverpool slave-trading interest before the House of Commons in 1788. Mr. Piggot, “Counsel for the Merchants of Liverpool,” testified that “one man to one ton . . . will operate as a virtual abolition of the trade.” The other delegates formed a chorus singing the same refrain. Robert Norris added that at one to one “there would be no profit.” Alexander Dalziel argued that the slave trade was already in decline and that any restriction on the numbers of slaves to be carried would “help it on.” James Penny suggested that anything less than two slaves to a ton would make it impossible for the “trade to be carried on with advantage”; one and a half to one or one to one would equal abolition. John Tarleton explained that he was “
authorized by the Merchants of Liverpool
to say that
less than two slaves per ton
(and it perfectly coincides with my opinion) would totally abolish the
African slave trade.
” John Matthews provided a more detailed calculus, estimating profits and losses on a one-hundred-ton ship, at two and a half to one (plus £761.5.6); at two to one (plus £180.3.6); at one and a half to one (minus £206.19.9); and at one to one (minus £590.1.0). The Liverpool delegates had thus opposed regulation, and they had suffered a partial defeat with the passage of the Dolben Act, which set the ratio of slaves to tons at five to three on the first two hundred tons, one to one thereafter. But soon they decided to swim with the tide they could not stem and embraced limited reform and regulation as a way of fending off total abolition.

The
Brooks
image was not simply a critique of the slave trade but equally a critique of the supposedly more humane regulated slave trade. The diagram showed not the 609 slaves the ship had most recently carried from Africa to America but the smaller, more civilized number of 482. Like Clarkson’s pamphlet, it showed that even regulation was horrific. Many, Clarkson noted, looked at the plate and “considered the regulation itself as perfect barbarism.”
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The concept of “barbarism” is a key to understanding the hidden meaning of the
Brooks.
Matthew Carey called the image “a striking illustration of the barbarity of the slave trade.” The bishop of Chartres thought the
Brooks
made all tales about the barbarism of the slave trade believable. Many of these tales had come from sailors who described their own treatment as barbaric. After hearing them Clarkson concluded that the commerce in human flesh was barbarous from beginning to end. Abolition alone could “destroy forever the sources of barbarity” in the slave trade. Who were the agents of this violent, cruel barbarism? Or, to put the same question another way, who imagined this horrific ship? Who designed it? Who thought of stowing people this way aboard it? The
Brooks
brought forth not only “the tear of sympathy” but the shock of moral astonishment.
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The power of these questions increased as the image of the
Brooks
evolved. As the symbol of the supplicant slave of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade disappeared from the Plymouth broadside, as the reference to “fellow creatures” dropped from the accompanying text, as the text itself and even the headings were reduced and eventually removed, many people who viewed the
Brooks
would not have known that they were looking at abolitionist propaganda. They would have assumed that it was the work of a naval architect in the pay of a slave-trade merchant. The ambiguity was most useful to the abolitionist movement, for it allowed them to demonize their enemies. Who was the barbarian after all? It certainly was not the Africans, nor was it the sailors, who despite their technical know-how appeared as secondary victims of the slave trade.

The practical agent of violence, cruelty, torture, and terror was the slave-ship captain, as sailors repeatedly told Clarkson. In
An Essay on Comparative Efficiency,
he called the slave captain “the most despicable character on earth.” Captain Clement Noble might claim that he did not “know the space” of his own ship, that he “never measured it, or made any calculation of what room [the slaves] had,” but he certainly knew how to stow hundreds of bodies in a tight space, as the diagram of the
Brooks
made clear. He did it in a less orderly way, perhaps using experience rather than scientific knowledge, but he did it, with violence and profit. He was, according to Thomas Trotter, a practitioner of “barbarity.”
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There was a bigger, more violent barbarian above the captain’s head; this was his employer, the merchant, with whom Clarkson was engaged in mortal combat. He addressed
An Essay on the Comparative Efficiency
to all sections of the public except the “slave merchants,” who had, after all, tried to kill him. Here was the hidden agent behind the
Brooks,
the creator of the instrument of torture. He was the one who imagined and built the ship, he was the ultimate architect of the social order, he was the organizer of the commerce and the one who profited by the barbarism.
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The merchant’s violence was twofold, practical and conceptual. Both were essential to how the slave ship worked as a machine to produce the commodity “slave” for a global labor market. A violence of enslavement and a violence of abstraction developed together and reinforced each other. As more and more bodies were captured, enslaved, transported, and exploited, merchants learned to calculate short- and long-term labor needs and to gauge and regulate the transnational flow of labor power in and through slave ships, plantations, markets, and an entire system of Atlantic capitalism.
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The genius of the image of the
Brooks
was to illustrate—and critique—both kinds of violence, imbuing both with a sinister industrial quality. The image had what a Scottish abolitionist described as a “rigorous oeconomy” in which “no place capable of holding a single person, from one end of the vessel to the other, is left unoccupied.” It suggests the carefully designed mass production of bodies and a deliberate, systematic annihilation of individual identity. It depicted the violence and terror of the ship and at the same time it captured the brutal logic and cold, rational mentality of the merchant’s business—the process by which human beings were reduced to property, by which labor was made into a thing, a commodity, shorn of all ethical considerations. In a troubled era of transition from a moral to a political conception of economy, the
Brooks
represented a nightmarish outcome of the process. Here was the new, modern economic system in all its horrifying nakedness, capitalism without a loincloth, as Walter Rodney noted. Not for nothing was the
Brooks
called “a capital ship.” It was itself a concentration of capital, and it was the bearer of capitalist assumptions and practices about the world and the way it ought to be.
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The violent reduction of human beings to property entailed not only social death but physical death, which was also manufactured on the slave ship—even though merchants and captains tried to preserve the lives of their slaves in order to sell them in the Americas and the lives of their sailors for the sake of labor and security. Even so, merchants built death into the social planning of each and every voyage. Slaves and sailors would die, but these were simply neutral empirical facts of business life. Latter-day military thinkers would call these deaths “collateral damage”; to merchants and captains they were “wastage” of cargo and labor. It was not accidental, scholars have noted, that the
Brooks
was shaped like a coffin.
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The most radical abolitionists construed these deaths as murder. Throwing 122 living people off the main deck of the
Zong
was clearly murder, and abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp denounced it as such. But what about the people who were whipped to death after a failed bid for freedom? What about the ones who died simply because they found themselves in deadly circumstances? Perhaps this was “social murder.” Numerous critics of the slave trade, from Ottobah Cugoano to J. Philmore, had no doubts: this slave trade was calculated murder. On every voyage, merchants and captains like Joseph Brooks Jr. and Captain Clement Noble confronted these issues concretely and made “diabolical calculations,” about violence, terror, and death. Their murderous logic and practice of killing by “calculated inches” were exposed to public view by the “plans and sections of a slave ship,” the
Brooks.
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