The Slave Ship (5 page)

Canoed by escorts a quarter mile upriver, Snelgrave found on his arrival the king “sitting on a Stool, under some shady Trees,” with about fifty courtiers and a large troop of warriors nearby. The latter were armed with bows and arrows, swords, and barbed lances. The armed sailors took a guarded position “opposite to them, at the distance of about twenty paces” as Snelgrave presented gifts to a delighted king.

Snelgrave soon noticed “a little Negroe-Child tied by the Leg to a Stake driven in the Ground.” Two African priests stood nearby. The child was “a fine Boy about 18 Months old,” but he was in distress, his body covered with flies and vermin. Agitated, the slave captain asked the king, “What is the reason of the Child’s being tied in that manner?” The king replied that “it was to be sacrificed that night to his God
Egbo,
for his prosperity.” Upset by the answer, Snelgrave quickly ordered one of his sailors “to take the Child from the Ground, in order to preserve him.” As he did so, one of the king’s guards ran at the sailor, brandishing his lance, whereupon Snelgrave stood up and drew a pistol, halting the man in his tracks and sending the king into a fright and the entire gathering into a tumult.

When order was restored, Snelgrave complained to the king about the threatening action of the guard. The king replied that Snelgrave himself “had not done well” in ordering the sailor to seize the child, “it being his Property.” The captain excused himself by explaining that his religion “expressly forbids so horrid a Thing, as the putting of a poor innocent Child to death.” He added the golden rule: “the grand Law of human Nature was, To do to others as we desir’d to be done unto.” The conflict was ultimately resolved not through theology but the cash nexus, as Snelgrave offered to buy the child. He offered “a bunch of sky coloured beads, worth about half a Crown Sterling.” The king accepted the offer. Snelgrave was surprised that the price was so cheap, as traders such as the king were usually “very ready, on any extraordinary occasion, to make their Advantage of us.”

The rest of the meeting consisted of eating and drinking the European food and liquor Snelgrave had brought for the king. African palm wine was also on offer, but Snelgrave refused to drink it, as the wisdom among slave-ship captains was that it could be “artfully poison[ed].” The sailors had no such worries and drank avidly. Upon parting, the king declared himself “well pleased” with the visit, which meant that more slaves would be forthcoming. As the Europeans canoed back to the ship, Snelgrave turned to a member of his crew and said that they “should pitch on some motherly Woman [among the enslaved already on board] to take care of this poor Child.” The sailor answered that “he had already one in his Eye.” The woman “had much Milk in her Breasts.”

As soon as Snelgrave and the sailors came aboard, the very woman they had been discussing saw them with the little boy and ran “with great eagerness, and snatched him from out of the white Man’s Arms that held him.” It was the woman’s own child. Captain Snelgrave had already bought her without realizing the connection. Snelgrave observed, “I think there never was a more moving sight than on this occasion, between the Mother and her little Son.”

The ship’s linguist then told the woman what had happened, that, as Snelgrave wrote, “I had saved her Child from being sacrificed.” The story made its way around the ship, through the more than three hundred captives on board, who soon “expressed their Thankfulness to me, by clapping their Hands, and singing a song in my praise.” Nor did the gratitude end there, as Snelgrave noted: “This affair proved of great service to us, for it gave them a good notion of White Men; so that we had no Mutiny in our Ship, during the whole Voyage.” Snelgrave’s benevolence continued upon arrival in Antigua. As soon as he told the story of child and mother to a Mr. Studely, a slave owner, “he bought the Mother and her Son, and was a kind Master to them.”

William Snelgrave could thus think of Africans as “fierce brutish Cannibals” and think of himself as an ethical, civilized redeemer, a good Christian with qualities that even savages would have to recognize and applaud. He could think of himself as the savior of families as he destroyed them. He could imagine a humane outcome for two as he delivered hundreds to a plantation fate of endless toil and premature death. His justifications in place, he could even invoke the golden rule, which would soon become a central saying of the antislavery movement.

As the
Africa,
a Bristol Guineaman captained by William Watkins, lay at anchor in Old Calabar River in the late 1760s, its prisoners were busy down in the hold of the vessel, hacking off their chains as quietly as they could. A large number of them managed to get free of the fetters, lift off the gratings, and climb onto the main deck. They sought to get to the gun room aft and the weapons they might use to recover their lost freedom. It was not unusual, explained sailor Henry Ellison, for the enslaved to rise, whether because of a “love of liberty,” “ill treatment,” or “a spirit of vengeance.”
¹¹

The crewmen of the
Africa
were taken entirely by surprise; they seemed to have no idea that an insurrection was afoot, literally beneath their very feet. But just as the mutineers “were forcing open the barricado door,” Ellison and seven of his crewmates, “well armed with pistols and cutlasses,” boarded from a neighboring slave ship, the
Nightingale.
They saw what was happening, mounted the barricado, and fired above the heads of the rebels, hoping to scare them into submission. The shots did not deter them, so the sailors lowered their aim and fired into the mass of insurgents, killing one. The captives made a second attempt to open the barricado door, but the sailors held firm, forcing them to retreat forward, giving chase as they went. As the armed seamen pressed forward, a few of the rebels jumped overboard, some ran below, and others stayed on deck to fight. The sailors fired again and killed two more.

Once the crew had regained control of the situation, Captain Watkins reimposed order. He selected eight of the mutineers “for an example.” They were tied up, and each sailor—the regular crew of the
Africa,
plus the eight from the
Nightingale
—was ordered to take a turn with the whip. The seamen “flogged them until from weariness they could flog no more.” Captain Watkins then turned to an instrument called “the tormentor,” a combination of the cook’s tongs and a surgeon’s instrument for spreading plasters. He had it heated white hot and used it to burn the flesh of the eight rebels. “This operation being over,” Ellison explained, “they were confined and taken below.” Apparently all survived.

Yet the torture was not over. Captain Watkins suspected that one of his own sailors was involved in the plot, that he had “encouraged the slaves to rise.” He accused an unnamed black seaman, the ship’s cook, of assisting the revolt, “of having furnished them with the cooper’s tools, in order that they might knock themselves out of irons.” Ellison doubted this, calling it “supposition only, and without any proof of the fact.”

Captain Watkins nonetheless ordered an iron collar—usually reserved for the most rebellious slaves—fastened around the neck of the black seaman. He then had him “chained to the main mast-head,” where he would remain night and day, indefinitely. He was to be given “only one plantain and one pint of water per day.” His clothes were nothing more than a pair of long trousers, which were little “to shield him from the inclemency of the night.” The shackled seaman remained in the foretop of the ship for three weeks, slowly starving.

When the
Africa
had gathered its full cargo of 310 slaves and the crew prepared to sail away from the Bight of Biafra, Captain Watkins decided that the cook’s punishment should continue, so he made arrangements with Captain Joseph Carter to send him aboard the
Nightingale,
where he was once again chained to the main top and given the same meager allowance of food and water. After ten more days, the black seaman had grown delirious. “Hunger and oppression,” said Ellison, “had reduced him to a skeleton.” For three days he struggled madly to free himself from the fetters, causing the chains to rub “the skin from several parts of his body.” The neck collar “found its way to the bone.” The “unfortunate man,” said Ellison, had become “a most shocking spectacle.” After five weeks in the two vessels, “having experienced inconceivable misery in both, he was relieved by death.” Ellison was one of the sailors charged to throw his body from the foretop into the river. The minimal remains of the black seaman were “immediately devoured by the sharks.”

When Thomas Clarkson visited the slave-trading port of Bristol in July 1787 to gather evidence for the abolitionist movement, he sought the advice of a man named Richard Burges, an attorney opposed to the commerce in human beings. Their conversation turned to the captains of slave ships, which prompted an impatient Burges to howl that all of them deserved “long ago to be hanged”—except one. That one was Captain James Fraser of Bristol, a man who spent twenty years in the slave trade, voyaging five times to Bonny, four times to Angola, and once each to Calabar, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. Nor was Burges the only abolitionist to praise Fraser. Alexander Falconbridge, the physician who penned a searing indictment of the slave trade, sailed with Fraser, knew him well, and said, “I believe him to be one of the best men in the trade.” Clarkson, too, eventually joined in the chorus of praise.
¹²

Captain Fraser ran an orderly ship with a minimum of coercion, or so he claimed when he testified before a parliamentary committee in 1790: “The Angola slaves being very peaceable, it is seldom necessary to confine them in irons; and they are allowed to go down between the decks, and come up on deck, as they find the weather warm or cold.”

They were, as a result, “cheerful” on board. He added that he treated the Bonny and Calabar slaves differently, as they were more “vicious” and inclined to insurrection. But here, too, he was moderate by the standards of the day: “As soon as the ship is out of sight of land I usually took away their handcuffs, and soon after their leg-irons—I never had the Slaves in irons during Middle Passage, not even from the Gold and Windward Coast, excepting a few offenders, that were troublesome in the ship, and endeavouring to persuade the Slaves to destroy the White Men.” He always provided the enslaved with clean apartments, exercise, and “frequent amusements peculiar to their own country.” He offered abundant food to which they were accustomed in their native land. For those who refused to eat, Fraser explained, “I have always used persuasions—force is always ineffectual.” The slaves who sickened got a special hospital berth, and “the surgeons always had orders, as well as free leave, to give them any thing that was in the ship.”

Perhaps the most unusual statement he made to the parliamentary committee was the following: “we generally appoint the most humane and best disposed of the ship’s company to attend to the Slaves, and serve their provisions.” He would not tolerate abuse: “I have, with my own hands, punished sailors for maltreating the negroes.” It followed logically from these practices that mortality for sailors and slaves on his ships was modest (with one exception of an epidemic). He insisted that he always treated his sailors with “humanity and tenderness.” He cited as proof of this their reenlistment on subsequent voyages, some three or four times as he recalled. Indeed Falconbridge sailed with him on three voyages.
¹³

Falconbridge contradicted Fraser’s testimony in several key respects: he thought a greater proportion of the enslaved were kidnapped than Fraser was willing to admit and that Fraser himself would buy the kidnapped without asking questions. The material conditions on the ship were worse than the captain suggested, and the enslaved were not cheerful or peaceful, as proved by numerous suicides. He added, however, that Captain Fraser “always recommended to the planters never to part relations or friends.” And Fraser did as he said regarding the crew: he treated them “exceedingly well; he always allowed them a dram in the morning, and grog in the evening; when any of them were sick, he always sent them victuals from his own table, and inquired every day after their health.”

Robert Norris was a man of many talents. He was an experienced and successful Liverpool slave-ship captain who made enough money to retire from the sea and carry on as a successful merchant in the slave trade. He was also a writer, a polemicist on behalf of the slave trade, and something of a historian. In 1788 he wrote and published anonymously
A Short Account of the African Slave Trade, Collected from Local Knowledge.
The following year he produced a history of a region of West Africa based on his personal knowledge:
Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, King of Dahomy, an Inland Country of Guiney.
In the latter he bemoaned the existence of so little historical writing about Africa, then offered his own explanation: “the stupidity of the natives is an insuperable barrier against the inquirer’s information.” Norris represented the Liverpool interest in the parliamentary hearings held between 1788 and 1791. He was one of the slave trade’s very best public defenders.
¹⁴

As the first to testify before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons in June 1788, Norris described the Middle Passage in detail. The slaves had good living quarters belowdecks, he explained, which sailors cleaned thoroughly and regularly. Air ports and windsails ventilated their apartments and admitted “a free Circulation of fresh Air.” The enslaved had more than enough room. They slept on “clean boards,” which were more wholesome than “Beds or Hammacks.” They ate plentiful, high-quality food. The men and boys played musical instruments, danced, and sang, while the women and girls “amuse[d] themselves with arranging fanciful Ornaments for their Persons with Beads, which they are plentifully supplied with.” The slaves were given the “Luxuries of Pipes and Tobacco” and occasionally even a dram of brandy, especially when the weather was cold. Such good treatment, explained Norris, was in the captain’s self-interest, as he stood to make a 6 percent commission over and above his salary on the slaves delivered healthy and alive on the western side of the Atlantic. Norris explained to the members of Parliament that “Interest” and “Humanity” were perfectly united in the slave trade.